Reading Abstract Expressionism 9780300185720

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Abstract Expressionism: Changing Methodologies for Interpreting Meaning
The 1940s: Mythologizing the Movement
Excerpt from Letter to His Sister Vartoosh, 1942
Excerpt from "Art in New York"
Excerpts from "The Modern Painter's World"
A Questionnaire
Thesis, 1946
Application for a Guggenheim Fellowship
The Ideographic Picture
The Sublime Is Now
My Painting
The Romantics Were Prompted
Excerpts from System and Dialectics of Art
Excerpt from "The Realm of Art: A New Platform; 'Globalism' Pops into View"
Excerpt from "Whither Goes Abstract and Surrealist Art?"
A Problem for Critics
Editorial Preface
The Intrasubjectives
The 1950s ESTABLISHING AUTHORITY
Excerpts from Artists'Sessions at Studio 35
David Smith Makes a Sculpture
Statement
de Kooning Paints a Picture
Artist's Statement
The Legacy of Jackson Pollock
In the Galleries: Franz Kline
The American Action Painters
"American-Type" Painting
Excerpt from "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art"
International Reaction to Alfred H. Barr Jr., 'The New American Painting"
The 1960s: Consolidating the Canon
The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism
We Interview Lee Krasner
The Abstract Sublime
Excerpt from American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists
The Biomorphic '40s
Jackson Pollock
Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta, Conducted in Minneapolis in December 1966
Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: An Interview with Robert Motherwell Conducted in New York in January 1967
The 1970s EMERGING CONTEXTS AND CLOSER READINGS
Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery
Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism
Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic
Excerpt from "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," Parts
Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the "Ingres Revival" in America
Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still
The 1980s READING NEW SIGNIFICATIONS
The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the "Vital Center"
James Joyce and the First Generation New York School
The Market for Abstract Expressionism: The Time Lag Between Critical and Commercial Acceptance
The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea of Redemption in the Abstract Sublime
The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism
The 1990s RE(DE)FINING ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism
"Introduction," "AbstractExpressionism and Afro-American Marginalisation," and "Dissent During the McCarthy Period"
Modern Man Discourse and the New York School
In Defense of Abstract Expressionism
Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting
"Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated": Aspects of Clyfford Still's Earlier Work
Excerpt from "Water and Lipstick: De Kooning in Transition"
Barnett Newman' s Stripe Paintings and Kabbalah : A Jewish Take
Arcadian Nightmares: The Evolution of David Smith and Dorothy Dehner's Work at Bolton Landing
The Crisis of the Easel Picture
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Reading Abstract Expressionism

Reading Abstract Edited and with an Introduction by Ellen G. Landau

Expressionism Yale University Press

New Haven &: London

ContexadCrique

Published with the generous support of grants from the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University and the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. Copyright © 2005 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Barbara Williams and set in Monotype Bulmer and Univers types by BW&A Books, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Thomson Shore Color insert by Thames Printing Company Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reading abstract expressionism : context and critique / edited and with an introduction by Ellen G. Landau. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-10613-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Abstract expressionism—United States—Sources. 2. Art, American—2Oth century—Sources. I. Landau, Ellen G. N6512.5.A25R43 2005 7og'.04f052—dc22 2004061583 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

¡x

Preface

Introduction

1

Abstract Expressionism: Changing Methodologies for Interpreting Meaning

The 1940s: Mythologizing the Movement ARTISTS' STATEMENTS

125 125 129 132 133 135 135 137 139 140

Arshile Gorky, Excerpt from Letter to His Sister Vartoosh, 1942 Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, Excerpt from "Art in New York," 1943 Robert Motherwell, Excerpts from "The Modern Painter's World," 1944 Jackson Pollock, "A Questionnaire," 1944 Norman Lewis, "Thesis, 1946" Jackson Pollock, Application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1947 Barnett Newman, "The Ideographic Picture," 1947 Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now," 1948 Jackson Pollock, "My Painting," 1947-1948 Mark Rothko, "The Romantics Were Prompted," 1947-1948

CRITICAL REACTION

142 146 150 152 153 154

John Graham, Excerpts from System and Dialectics of Art, 1937 Edward Alden Jewell, Excerpt from "The Realm of Art: A New Platform; 'Globalism' Pops into View," 1943 Maude Riley, Excerpt from "Whither Goes Abstract and Surrealist Art?" 1944 Howard Putzel, "A Problem for Critics," 1945 Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, "Editorial Preface," 1947-1948 Samuel M. Kootz and Harold Rosenberg, The Intrasubjectives, 1949

The 1950s: Establishing Authority ABOUT THE ARTISTS

159 165 171 172 180 181 188

Robert Goodnough, éd., Excerpts from Artists' Sessions at Studio 35,1950 Elaine de Kooning, "David Smith Makes a Sculpture," 1951 Clyfford Still, "Statement," 1952 Thomas B. Hess, "de Kooning Paints a Picture," 1953 Louise Bourgeois, "Artist's Statement," 1954 Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy ofjackson Pollock," 1958 Martica Sawin, "In the Galleries: Franz Kline," 1958

CRITICAL REACTION

189 198 215 220

Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," 1952 Clement Greenberg, " American-Type' Painting," 1955 Meyer Schapiro, Excerpt from "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art," 1957 International Reaction to Alfred H. Barr Jr., "The New American Painting" 220 Mercedes Molleda, Revista (Barcelona), 1958 221 L. D. H., La Libre Belgique (Brussels), 1958 221 Unsigned, Le Phare (Brussels), 1958 222 Will Grohmann, Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), 1958

The 1960s: Consolidating the Canon

229 236 239 245 250 256 263

276

vi

P. G. Pavia, "The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism," 1960 Louise Elliott Rago, "We Interview Lee Krasner," 1960 Robert Rosenblum, "The Abstract Sublime," 1961 H. H. Arnason, Excerpt from American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists, 1961 Lawrence Alloway, "The Biomorphic '405," 1965 Michael Fried, "Jackson Pollock," 1965 Sidney Simon, "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta, Conducted in Minneapolis in December 1966," 1967 Sidney Simon, "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: An Interview with Robert Motherwell Conducted in New York in January 1967," 1967

Contents

The 1970s: Emerging Contexts and Closer Readings

293 313 324 338 346 361

Judith Wolfe, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery," 1972 Lawrence Alloway, "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism,"

1973 Robert C. Hobbs, "Robert MotherwelPs Elegies to the Spanish Republic" 1976 (revised 2004) David Shapiro and Cécile Shapiro, Excerpt from "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," Part3,1977 Melvin P. Lader, "Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the 'Ingres Revival' in America" 1978 Donald B. Kuspit, "Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still," 1978

The 1980s: Reading New Significations

383

399 415 422

442

Serge Guilbaut, "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the 'Vital Center,'" 1980 Evan R. Firestone, "James Joyce and the First Generation New York School," 1982 A. Deirdre Robson, "The Market for Abstract Expressionism: The Time Lag Between Critical and Commercial Acceptance," 1985 W.Jackson Rushing, "The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea of Redemption in the Abstract Sublime," 1988 Ann Gibson, "The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism," 1989

The 1990s: Re(de)fining Abstract Expressionism CONTEXTUAL STUDIES

489 510

527 535 560

Stephen Polcari, "Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism," 1990 David Craven, "Introduction," "Abstract Expressionism and AfroAmerican Marginalisation," and "Dissent During the McCarthy Period,"

1991 Michael Leja, "Modern Man Discourse and the New York School," 1993 T. J. Clark, "In Defense of Abstract Expressionism," 1999 Lisa Saltzman, "Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting," 1998

Contents

vii

CLOSER (RE)READINGS

580 594 615

645

Matthew Baigell, "Barnett Newman's Stripe Paintings and Kabbalah: A Jewish Take," 1994 Joan M. Marter, "Arcadian Nightmares: The Evolution of David Smith and Dorothy Dehner's Work at Bolton Landing," 1995 (revised 2002) Rosalind E. Krauss, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," 1999

665 707

Selected Bibliography Index

625

viii

David Anfam, " 'Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated': Aspects of Clyfford Still's Earlier Work," 1993 Richard Shiff, Excerpt from "Water and Lipstick: De Kooning in Transition," 1994

Contents

Preface This book came about as a result of my own pedagogical needs. Each time I taught a graduate seminar on Abstract Expressionism at Case Western Reserve University during the past several decades, I deplored the lack of a comprehensive overview of the varied and extensive discourse that has surrounded this important twentieth-century movement from its inception to the present. Having an explanatory key with readings and a selected bibliography, it seemed to me, would be extremely beneficial for students and scholars at all levels. I mentioned this problem to numerous colleagues teaching at public as well as private colleges and universities and found widespread agreement that the existing anthologies of Abstract Expressionist writings were out of date, too slanted toward a specific viewpoint, or did not incorporate substantively useful methodological explanation. My first thought was to collect into one volume a selection of essays and articles published since 1990, the year that David Shapiro and Cécile Shapiro's Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record and Clifford Ross's Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics both appeared. After much discussion with peers and editors, I came to the conclusion that, in order to show in depth the more recent revisionist approaches to Abstract Expressionism, it makes greater sense to have access in the same volume to primary source material and preceding critique as well. Although recent scholars have increasingly challenged the canonical view of who and what Abstract Expressionism represents, reconfiguring our understanding of the movement in a variety of exciting postmodern directions, the newer contextual interpretations depend for their full meaning on statements made by the artists, criticism written during the heyday of the movement (especially by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg), and the work of intervening art historians and authors. I came to realize that not only art history professors and students but also cultural historians, curators, art ix

dealers, and collectors could gain a more sophisticated perspective from an inclusive, updated source book that summarizes and annotates a half-century of explanation and (often heated) rhetoric. Once I began to survey the existing literature (I consulted more than four hundred catalogue essays, articles, and books on Abstract Expressionist art), I further concluded that providing a general introduction and then summarizing and annotating republished texts—the typical format for a book of readings or an anthology—would not accomplish this goal at the level I desired. Instead, relying on my years of experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students how to "read" art and to understand traditional art historical methodologies and the application of newer theories to the analysis of artworks, I set out to assemble a detailed historiography that explains the major critical approaches to Abstract Expressionism and its ongoing post-history. It has not been my intention, as in an Art Bulletin book review, for example, to make value judgments about right or wrong interpretations; rather, I have tried to present the major arguments about Abstract Expressionism that have appeared in each decade and to connect preceding and subsequent critique, comparing and contrasting methodologies and conclusions from the point of view of content. Differing directions are explained, but I have not added my own qualitative assessments. Also, although this is not intended to be a book about the development of Abstract Expressionist art in and of itself —rather, an examination of trends in writing about the critics, art, and artists —the introductory essay, read in tandem with the sources reprinted in the anthology, does constitute another take on the aesthetic history of the movement: one seen through a lens that is more discursive than visual. Several dissertations have been written with this charge (none during the past fifteen years), and some recent authors have included historiographie sections in larger studies; this book applies a more inclusive focus to supplement and supplant existing endeavors. Some may disagree with what appears to be a continuing emphasis on "the usual suspects" associated with the New York School, but as a chronicler of the literature on the movement, I have analyzed the major players authenticated as such by prior writers whose commentary I explicate. Because I established my own expertise primarily by writing about Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner (and also because so many of the central arguments have been played out in the arena of Pollock studies), I have used my extensive knowledge of the literature on these two artists as a touchstone for analysis of arguments connected to the careers of their colleagues. Expanding the canon has x

Preface

been an agenda shared by many scholars beginning in the 19905, and much attention is devoted to that topic in appropriate divisions of the introduction and anthology. The decision to leave out or downplay such important artists as Hans Hofmann, William Baziotes, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, and Ad Reinhardt, for example, was a difficult one, but space considerations precluded exhaustive treatment of every artist associated with the New York School. One of my key goals for this book was not merely to duplicate text selections already in print in other sourcebooks, and I have endeavored to provide access to many readings not readily available elsewhere. A representative sampling of key texts appropriate for discussion in a history of directions in Abstract Expressionist criticism constitutes the anthology. Material added or revised by the original authors for the present work is enclosed in square brackets. Texts reprinted in the anthology are compared and contrasted with other related sources and placed in a wider, more comprehensive context in the historiographie essay. With the help of a Smithsonian American Art Museum Short-Term Visiting Fellowship in 2001,1 searched through Abstract Expressionist artists' papers, scrapbooks, and other sources in the Archives of American Art and, wherever possible, I have included reference to documentary materials unearthed in that process. Another key goal of this volume is to provide an up-to-date bibliography that augments source lists published in such venues as Michael Auping's 1987 catalogue Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments. The bibliography is organized by decade for ease of consultation in conjunction with information provided in the introductory essay, the endnotes, and the chronological anthology divisions. Although I had no doubt of its ultimate usefulness, what I expected might be a straightforward, fairly dry project turned out to be a rewarding scholarly experience. Though I already knew quite a bit about the topic, I learned an enormous amount by immersing myself in the wide-ranging literature about Abstract Expressionism and trying to make sense of the discoveries, discussions, theories, and controversies, then classifying them so as to develop a coherent pattern for subsequent study. It is my hope that the explanations provided here will be useful for further expansion of the varied aesthetic, critical, and contextual directions already taken. I acknowledge and thank numerous individuals and institutions without whom this book would not have been possible. I thank John Bassett, Sam Savin, and Sandra Russ, former deans and interim deans of the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, for their appreciation and supPreface

xi

port, moral as well as financial. I am particularly grateful for course release time to work on this project and subvention for the permissions and illustrations provided by the college to Yale University Press. Additional subvention for color plates was provided by the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts, and I thank its board of directors. I appreciate the encouragement from Henry Adams and David Carrier, colleagues in my department who read this manuscript in draft and made helpful suggestions (as did the anonymous peer reviewers secured by Yale). Many thanks are due to Judy Metro, who supported my proposal and initiated the process of its acceptance by Yale University Press, and especially to Patricia Fidler, who, undaunted by my unexpected expansion of the original project, convinced her colleagues of its merits and then helped me see it through to completion in a vastly amplified format. Jane Zanichkowsky has been a helpful and demanding copy editor, and John Long has worked tirelessly to secure complicated rights and permissions for essays and illustrations; I thank both for their heroic efforts in making this book a reality. I also appreciate the attention to details contributed by associate editor Michelle Komie and production manager Mary Mayer and the superior design abilities of Barbara Williams. While writing, I frequently thought about all I learned from the late Phyllis Freeman, editor of my two previous books. I thank Virginia Mecklenburg of the Smithsonian American Art Museum for sponsoring my short-term fellowship, the staff at the SAAM library and Archives of American Art for facilitating my research there, and staff in the New York AAA office, which I also visited during preparation of this text. The efforts of Ann Abid and Lou Adrean of the Ingalls Library at the Cleveland Museum of Art and of Arlene Sievers at Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western Reserve remain vitally important to my ability to research and write. For ongoing access to Pollock and Krasner material, I thank Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center; I also thank Joan Banach of the Dedalus Foundation for allowing access to some hard-to-get Motherwell sources. Staff support at Case Western Reserve University for which I am eternally grateful includes the super good humor and organizational abilities of the Department of Art History and Art Assistant Debby Tenenbaum (especially important during the initial research stages of this project, when I was also serving as department chair) and the hours devoted to locating, ordering from OhioLink, and photocopying newspaper and magazine articles, catalogue essays, and books put in by my research assistants Amy Reed Frederick, Siobhán Conaty, and Michael R. Weil Jr. I thank Michael in particular for his xu

Preface

cheerfulness in face of the tedium of fact-checking the endnotes and helping compile source information for the bibliography. With his assistance, I was able to configure the endnotes to provide an extra layer of useful information. I also thank Frank W. Spicer III and Margaret Otzel for help in creating the index. The final stages of this book were completed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was appointed the Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro Member for 2003-2004.1 appreciate assistance provided by staff at the IAS and Princeton libraries. I am very grateful to Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro for their wide-ranging philanthropy to the arts and for their support of scholarship through a generous grant to foster art historical research at the IAS, and I especially wish to acknowledge the late Kirk Varnedoe, who encouraged and endorsed my application for IAS membership. I should mention that numerous colleagues advocated my undertaking this kind of book and gave me good advice as I was preparing it. Over the past several decades, many have made important contributions to Abstract Expressionist studies, a relatively small field in which most scholars know (or at least know of) each other. I approached with some trepidation the daunting task of writing objectively about the scholarship of peers and friends, and I hope that I have done justice to explaining their contributions. Last, but definitely not least, I credit my family: my parents Ida and Joe Gross, who believed in me from the start and invested in my education; my husband Howard, who, in many ways, has made it possible for me to pursue my intellectual interests and who loves me for who I am (as I love him); and my children, Jay and Julie, who likewise provide the emotional nourishment in my life that makes creative achievement possible.

Preface

xiii

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Reading Abstract Expressionism

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Plate i. Willem de Kooning, Woman 1,1950-52. Oil on canvas, 75 7/8 x 58 in. (192.7 x 147.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2004 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York

Plate 2. Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51. Oil on canvas, 953/8 x 213 */4 in. (242.3 x 542.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. © 2004 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York

Plate 3. Adolph Gottlieb, Thrust, 1959. Oil on canvas, 108 x 90 in. (274.5 x 228.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1959. Photograph by Malcolm Varón, Photograph © 1987 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Plate 4. Jackson Pollock, Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943. Oil on canvas, 42 x 40 in. (106.7 x 101.6 cm). Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. © 2004 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / CNAC / MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York

Plate 5. Robert Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943. Gouache and oil (with collage elements including wrapping paper and rice paper) on cardboard, 28 x 357/s in. (71.1 x 91.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art / Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Plate 6. Arshile Gorky, The Plow and the Song, 1947. Graphite, charcoal, crayon, pastel, and oil, 477/s x 593/s in. (122 x 150.3 cm). National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Avalon Foundation. Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Plate 7. Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1949. Oil on canvas, 8i3/8 x 663/8 in. (206.7 x 168.6 cm). National Gallery of Art, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2004 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Plate 8. Dorothy Dehner, Mirage, Bolton Landing, 1949. Watercolor on paper, 18 l/4 x 23 in. (46.4 x 58.4 cm). Courtesy of Kraushaar Galleries and Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts

Fig. i. Nina Leen, The Irascibles, 1950. Gelatin silver print. © Time Inc.

Fig. 2. William A. Baziotes, Night Mirror, 1947. Oil on canvas, 48 7/i6 x 59 «/l6 in. (123 x 151.8 cm). Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III (Blanchette Hooker, class of 1931)

Fig. 3. Franz Kline, New York, К Т., 1953. Oil on canvas, 79 x 50 уя in. (200.6 x 128.3 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Gift of Seymour H. Knox,Jr., 1956. © 2004 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fig. 4. Hans Namuth, Lee Krasner Watching Jacbon Pollock Paint, 1950. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate

Fig. 5. Dan Budnik, Primo Piano 3,1963. © Dan Budnik / Woodfin Camp & Associates

n

Fig. 6. Mark Rothko, Number 18,1948-49. Oil on canvas, 67 /i6 x 55 чд6 ¿ n> (17фбхЧ1 д cm). Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Gift of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III (Blanchette Hooker, class of 1931). © 2004 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fig. 7. Hans Namuth, Barnett Newman and Betty Parsons, 1952. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate

Fig. 8. Mark Rothko, The Syrian Bull, 1943. Oil and graphite on canvas, 39 3/s X 2713/16 in. (100 x 71 cm). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH. Gift of Annalee Newman in honor of Ellen H.Johnson, 1991. © 2004 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fig. 9. Adolph Gottlieb, A Ikahest of Paracelsus, 1945. Oil and egg tempera on canvas, 60 x 44 in. (152.4 x 111.76 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tompkins Collection. Photograph © 2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York

Fig. 12. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross, First Station, 1958. Magna on canvas, 77 7 /8x6o 1 /2Ín. (197.8 x 153.7 cm). National Gallery of Art, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection. Image © 2004 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2004 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

(facing) Fig. 10. Clyfford Still, щб-Н (Italian Red and Black), 1946. Oil on canvas, 78 г/4 x 683/8 in. (198.8 x 173.7 cm)- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Vincent Melzac Collection through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program (facing) Fig. 11. Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number30), 1950. Enamel on canvas, 105 x 207 in. (266.7 x 525.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. George A. Hearn Fund, 1957. © 2004 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fig. 13. Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34, 1953-54. Oil on canvas, 80 x 100 in. (203.2 x 254 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1961. Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Fig. 14. View of David Smith Zig sculptures. Art © Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Fig. 15. Lee Krasner, Untitled (Little Image), 1949. Oil on composition board, 48 x 37 in. (121.9 x 94 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Alfonso A. Ossorio. © 2004 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York

Fig. 16. John Graham, Apotheosis, 1955-57- Oil, pencil, and stumping on ivory paper, 49 l/s x 35 ya in. (124.7 X 9°-2 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, The Lindy and Edwin Bergman Collection. © The Art Institute of Chicago

Fig. 17. Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, ca. 1926. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in. (152.4 x 127 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha Gorky in memory of their father. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fig. 18. Louise Bourgeois, Quarantania, 1947-53. Bronze, painted white with blue and black, 80 */2 x 27 x 27 in. (204.4 x 68.5 x 68.5 cm). Collection of the Artist, courtesy of Cheim & Read, New York. Photograph by Christopher Burke

(above) Fig. 19. Jackson Pollock, Portrait and a Dream, 1953. Oil on canvas, 58 y2 x 1343/4 in. (148.6x342.3 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Algur H. Meadows and the Meadows Foundation, Incorporated. ©2004 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Fig. 20. Clyfford Still, Untitled (formerly SelfPortrait), 1945. Oil on canvas, 70 7/8 x 42 in. (180 x 106.7 cm)- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Peggy Guggenheim. © Estate of Clyfford Still

(top) Fig. 21. David Smith, Royal Bird, 1947-48. Steel, bronze, and stainless steel, 22l/s x 5913/i6 x 8 */2 in. (56.2 x 152.1 x 21.6 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1952. Art © Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Fig. 22. Dorothy Dehner, Country Living (Bird of Peace), 1946. Ink on paper, 111/4 x 15 x/4 in. (29.6 x 38.7 cm). Courtesy of Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts

Fig. 23. Hans Namuth, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, 1953. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate (facing) Fig. 24. Norman W. Lewis, Mumbo Jumbo, 1950. Oil on canvas, 50 ya x 26 % in. (128.3 x 66.7 cm). The Estate of Reginald Lewis, Courtesy of landor Fine Arts, Newark, New Jersey. Photograph by Frank Stewart

Fig. 25. Willem de Kooning, Black Friday, 1948. Enamel and oil on pressed wood panel, 49 74 x 39 x 23/4 in. (125 x 99 x 7 cm). Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of H. Gates Lloyd, Class of 1923, and Mrs. Lloyd in honor of the Class of 1923. © 2004 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Bruce White, © 1996 Photo: Trustees of Princeton University

Fig. 26. Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963-67. Cor-ten steel, 26 ft. (7.9 m). The Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas. © 2004 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Fig. 27. Lee Krasner, The Eye Is the First Circle, 1960. Oil on canvas, Q23/4 x 1917/8 in. (235.6 x 487.4 cm). Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York. © 2004 The PollockKrasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

introduction

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM: Changing Methodologies for Interpreting Meaning

Anthologizing Abstract Expressionism

Despite continuing references in the scholarly and the popular press to the lasting artistic and cultural relevance of Abstract Expressionism, no comprehensive collection of essays related to this movement has been published since David and Cécile Shapiro's Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record and Clifford Ross's Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics appeared in 1990. Francis Frascina's Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (second edition) and Pepe Karmel's Jackson Pollock: New Approaches are the only anthologies with any direct relation to art of the New York School produced after 1995. Each is a specialized endeavor that does not aim to reflect the complete range of recent critical opinion. Karmel's New Approaches, published in conjunction with a 1998 Pollock retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), compiles statements and essays about the artist widely considered to be Abstract Expressionism's paradigmatic practitioner.1 Whereas the title of Frascina's revised anthology (originally published in 1985) likewise signals Pollock's preeminence, the essays in it do not merely analyze and react to the work of one artist. In fact, none are devoted to Pollock's work per se; rather, Frascina re-presents a series of texts in which "critical debates on Pollock's legacy" center around "the social history of art." With the addition of affiliated contemporary commentary, Frascina further underscores this original purpose in the book's latest version.2 The newer essays that Frascina added in 2000 extend certain "issues, debates, and relationships" instigated in the 19705 and early 19805 that are still being "fought over."3 As he acknowledges, quite a bit has happened in the decade and a half that separates his two editions to alter the direction of art history as practiced in the United States and Britain; the pretexts and contexts

by means of which Abstract Expressionism can be examined have been enlarged accordingly. By virtue of having been assigned in countless university classes, the readings in Frascina's book have achieved their own canonical status.4 Professors teaching about this movement might also assign entries from either the Shapiros' or Ross's anthology or else direct their students to more encyclopedic modern art compendiums in which Abstract Expressionism is presented as an example of American artistic achievement (albeit a critically important one) at the mid-point of the twentieth century. Beginning with Barbara Rose's Readings in American Art Since igoo: A Documentary Survey and Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (which both appeared in 1968), representative excerpts from the writing of key critics and artist's statements, mostly by the painters included in Nina Leen's 1952 photograph in Life magazine titled "The Irascibles" (fig. i), have been readily available to aid curators, students, and scholars in examining the formal and technical characteristics, goals, themes, history, intellectual concerns, and theoretical apparatus underpinning Abstract Expressionism.5 Because Rose's book was issued as a companion to one of the first surveys of modern American art, she included only a brief introduction to clarify Abstract Expressionism's putative status as the "art of this century." Rose borrowed this phrase, which she used as a chapter title, from Peggy Guggenheim's famous Manhattan gallery, whose 1942-1947 exhibition schedule featured (in many cases for the first time) figures associated with the still-nascent movement. Showing them alongside more established Cubists and Surrealists, Rose explains, Guggenheim significantly elevated the stature of relative unknowns whose styles had begun to subsume European modernist innovations into a new American mix. Chipp also focuses on the way "the 'emergence' of modern art in America followed corresponding European movements . . . with great impetus and with reverberations that carried away many of the stagnant conventions and ideals that had restrained it." Like Rose, he takes a celebratory position emphasizing the way, with Abstract Expressionism, American art finally "extricated itself from a debilitating provincialism" and "prepared to join the mainstream of Western painting."6 Whereas Chipp included Abstract Expressionist statements and critique in a section he called "Contemporary Art: The Autonomy of the Work of Art," for the more recent compendium Art in Theory, igoo-iggo Charles Harrison and Paul Wood used many of the same entries but classified them under

2

Introduction

"the individual and the social," a significantly different rubric. The opposing nature of these two sets of categorizations reflects in a nutshell the redirection of two decades of thinking about the aims and accomplishments of Abstract Expressionism, while also revealing the Marxist slant on mid-century American cultural developments favored in England, where the latter authors teach. Recognizing patterns of meaning already associated with these texts and mapping a more particularized matrix for understanding them, Harrison and Wood make the following observation: "[A] s the American experience itself became quintessentially 'modern,' the art that resulted had few of the trappings of the narrowly national and was able to aspire, both with some success and some legitimacy, to international standing. The relations of the provincial and the cosmopolitan are clearly fraught, and their resolution will be bound up with social and political priorities, not least in respect of the implication of the aesthetic in the social. Be that as it may, such a perception seems to have animated the ambition of the artists themselves." Only when "the inner and the mythical were made to coincide as expressive resources with which to face a modern world otherwise beyond description," they explain, could the (seemingly) depoliticized American prioritizing of individualism—rooted in the unconscious and the idea of "art itself as a solitary act"—trump the (somewhat paradoxically tradition-bound) European drive toward aesthetic innovation.7 Authors of a groundbreaking essay from the 19705 aimed at exposing some of the "social and political priorities" to which Harrison and Wood refer, David and Cécile Shapiro made a surprisingly short-sighted pronouncement in their 1990 preface to Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record. Because "the responses to Abstract Expressionism when it was fresh and evolving have been written," they suggest, "the major critical works are all in."8 But the final entry in the Shapiros' anthology, Ann Gibson's "Abstract Expressionism's Evasion of Language," reprinted from the summer 1988 issue of Art Journal, signaled that a broader frame of reference, affording the movement an exciting new afterlife, was already under way. The special number of Art Journal in which Gibson's text first appeared was assembled from a panel that she and Stephen Polcari co-chaired at the 1986 annual meeting of the College Art Association. Its appearance roughly coincided with the first big Abstract Expressionist museum show in twenty years, organized in Buffalo, New York. In a substantial catalogue accompanying the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's exhibition, "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments," curator Michael Auping also provided a compen-

Introduction

3

dium of revised ideas. In addition to publishing an up-to-date chronology listing and annotating relevant exhibitions, important artists' and critic's statements, and "Abstract Expressionist events" (who meets whom, who joins what gallery, who adopts what new method when, and so on), as well as an extensive bibliography for each artist on view in order to demonstrate the extent to which the movement remained "one of the more dynamic subjects of interest for art historians," Auping commissioned new essays from an international roster of well-known authorities and from up-and-coming younger scholars.9 His view that works by major practitioners of the movement's first generation "are by no means so distant from us that they can be considered a closed historical episode" contrasts with the Shapiros' conclusion that, as a vital artistic movement, Abstract Expressionism had "come and gone." Writing that "our analysis of the types of content suggested in Abstract Expressionist paintings, and their place in the context of modern art is, in fact, still formative," Auping, like Gibson and Polcari, judges that "the legacy of Abstract Expressionism remains a subject of considerable debate."10 Not only has the interpretive history of the New York School reflected "the dialectical sweep of [its] sources," but the intensity of the debates surrounding it has not been generated solely by the art. As Auping points out, the "multidirectional character of the remarks and writings of the artists," added to the differing agendas of reviewers and historians whose reputations were built in conjunction with its rise, has produced a "rather knotted history of interpretations [that] has not choked our desire toward further speculation and investigation."11 In other words, in a fairly unique manner, the rhetoric concerning Abstract Expressionism has both actuated and perpetuated its distinctive cultural relevance. Questioning of the validity of basic issues and rethinking of accepted assumptions continued to accelerate long after the heyday of the movement had passed. One of the assumptions frequently referenced in explanations of Abstract Expressionism was the main topic of Gibson's essay in the Shapiros' book of readings. She argues that the artists' seeming reluctance to explain their own creations became a primary factor in fostering the "battleground" mentality of disputation about the meaning and merits of their work.12 Prior to any further assessment of the writing generated by and concerning Abstract Expressionism, it is useful to examine carefully the pros and cons associated with this position.

4

Introduction

The 1940s: Mythologizing the Movement

As Gibson clarifies in Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (the published form of her 1984 dissertation), the first "anthologies" associated with the movement were produced by its practitioners and earliest critical proponents. In particular, the contents of Iconograph, The New Iconograph, The Tiger's Eye,13 Instead, and especially Possibilities—all short-lived specialty publications issued between 1946 and 1949—firmly established the themes, assumptions, intellectual ambience, and contextual parameters that were of interest to a specific group of New York artists and writers during and immediately after World War II. (Gibson also includes Modern Artists in America, which appeared in 1951.) Most prominently featured in these little magazines were shared expressions of a heroic belief in the centrality of the individual unconscious and the concomitant desire, in the words of the painter Robert Motherwell, to originate a "style whose characteristics derived from immediate spontaneous decisions" rather than "reliance on learned procedures."14 Motherwell's assertion reflects his and his colleagues' reconceptualizing of art as a nonprogrammatic mode of action and discovery. During the 19405, the most important artists' statements and other critical writings related to the development of Abstract Expressionism were located in these avant-garde periodicals, although some of what are now considered indispensable primary source documents did appear in wider-circulation publications, as in the case of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb's 1943 defense of their style, sent to the New York Times, or Pollock's Arts and Architecture magazine interview, published a year later.15 Though often purposely vague, taken as a group, these texts clarify that there were certain mutually accepted issues and intentions. Looking back at them now, we can discern, for instance, that the European philosophical model of existentialism, nuanced by American pragmatism and Jung's promotion of the generative role of primitivism and myth, guided a distinct cadre of young New York-based artists to an aesthetic that valorized emotion, authenticity, and risk. Pollock, for example, writes in Possibilities that "when I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through."16 Such statements indicate a belief that technical refinement and recognizable content would only impede expressive potential. The drive to merge Cubist and Surrealist innovations, generally noted as one of Abstract ExpressionIntroduction

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ism's primary characteristics, thus registers as having been motivated in no small part by a seemingly contradictory desire: to use distinctly personal means (automatism and improvisation) as a way to attain "universal" meanings. Exactly what these meanings were, many—although not all—of the artists declined to fully explain.17 As Gibson makes clear, a number of the Abstract Expressionists, endorsing a concept advanced by Jung, were disposed to link universality and unintelligibility as "twin indicators of artistic integrity."18 Verbal demonstration of communal concerns throughout the little magazines notwithstanding, a certain kind of ambiguity (the refusal to provide distinct interpretive clues) became central to the ongoing elaboration of movement "mythology." (ClyfFord Still's 1952 statement for the Museum of Modern Art catalogue 15 Americans is a case in point.) Moreover, the evasiveness of so many of Abstract Expressionism's practitioners when it came to defining precisely their stylistic and thematic ambitions (Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell, whose extensive collected writings have been published, are the most obvious exceptions)19 opened the way for other spokesmen with their own agendas—most notably the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg—to step into the breach. For example, on its initial page the editors oí Possibilities (Rosenberg and Motherwell) assert, "This is a magazine of artists and writers who 'practice' in their work their own experience without seeking to transcend it in academic, group or political formulas."20 By way of illustration, in the journal's very first entry the artist William Baziotes (fig. 2) alleges his intention not to have any intention, writing, "I cannot evolve any concrete theory about painting. What happens on the canvas is unpredictable and surprising to me." Immediately following Baziotes's declaration, Rosenberg proceeds to interpret a motivation that underpins (and legitimates) this avoidance of theory: "Inspired by a concentration upon that which is either absent or scarcely able to make itself noticed, Baziotes becomes the vehicle of singular movements toward him from the world stirred at a point in its depths. These movements put will and intellect to rest."21 To differing degrees, evident in a variety of catalogue statements and other writings such as those in Possibilities, a significant contingent of the developing Abstract Expressionist artists appeared averse to defining their motives too precisely. Motherwell's grand philosophical pronouncements that art's function is to produce "the felt expression of modern reality" and that "painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself,"22 Pollock's formulas "Experience of our age in terms of painting—not an illustration of—(but the 6

Introduction

equivalent)" and "Painting is self-discovery ... every good artist paints what he is,"23 and Rothko and Gottlieb's epic definition of art as "an adventure into an unknown world explored by those willing to take the risks"24 are about as specific in terms of articulating intentionality as the majority were willing to get.25 Moreover, as Lawrence Alloway has observed, when the Abstract Expressionists did choose to speak about inspiration, their utterances and aphorisms often tilted toward the messianic. Alloway cites Clyfford Still's "Let no man under-value the implications of this work or its power for life;—or for death, if it is misused" as an example of this, but numerous other statements by Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, and Barnett Newman in particular could just as easily illustrate the identical point.26 Note also that these same artists were generally disinclined (as appears painfully obvious in the "Studio 35" discussion sessions transcribed in 1950) either to give a name to what they were doing or even to conceive of themselves as a definable group.27 But, here again, from the very start there were others— not only critics writing for both the art press and the popular press but curators and art dealers as well—willing to assume the task of demarcation. As early as 1945, the New Yorker's art reviewer, Robert M. Coates (who is generally credited with first use of the term "Abstract Expressionist" in its now accepted context), observed, "A new school of painting is developing in this country. It is small as yet, no bigger than a baby's fist, but it is noticeable if you get around to the galleries much."28 The previous year Sidney Janis had produced an exhibition and book attempting to summarize the situation without giving it a new name. Indeed, the eclecticism of Janis's "Abstract and Surrealist Art in America," an ambitious survey mounted at the Mortimer Brandt Galleries, and his admittedly arbitrary binary arrangement of artists in the accompanying text, served to demonstrate the insufficiency of existing categorizations.29 As one critic reviewing the show noted, the "forty-yearold" stylistic terms Janis retained "are Cinderella slippers and there's no use pretending they fit all of the new generation."30 That same year, Peggy Guggenheim's former assistant Howard Putzel, now operating his own gallery, staged an exhibition controversially titled "A Problem for Critics." Putzel tentatively styled the burgeoning tendency in New York art "a new metamorphosism," while challenging others to come up with alternative designations. Although rejecting Putzel's cumbersome title and the largely biomorphic pedigree he advanced for its practitioners, in his appraisal of "A Problem for Critics" Clement Greenberg confirmed that there were certain shared stylistic characteristics among the Americans included in Introduction

7

the show. Agreeing that "there is no question that Mr. Putzel has hold of something here," Greenberg wrote in June 1944: "Until recently abstract painting in this country and elsewhere was governed by the structural or formal or 'physical' preoccupations that are supposed to exhaust the intentions of cubism and its inheritors. Now there has come a swing back toward 'poetry' and 'imagination,' the signs of which are the return of elements of representation, smudged contour lines, and the third dimension. Images, no longer locked to the surface in flat profile, reappear against indeterminate, atmospheric depths. Exhibited emotions give the spectator something to hang his interest on." Although some of the best painters in PutzePs show, Greenberg observed, did accept elements of Surrealism (an influence he himself considered retardataire), for the most part they "advance their art by painterly means without relaxing the concentration and high impassiveness of true modern style."31 While others continued to propose names and definitions for these emerging trends during this period ("globalism" was New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell's somewhat condescending suggestion),32 the most percipient in terms of directions for future Abstract Expressionist discourse were advanced in association with a fall 1949 group show mounted at the Samuel Kootz Gallery.33 Citing the existentialist philosopher José Ortega y Gassett as his inspiration, Kootz designated Motherwell, Pollock, Baziotes, Gorky, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Morris Graves, Ad Reinhardt, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Mark Tobey as a new group of intrasubjectives. Kootz began his remarks with a quotation from Ortega's recently published The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature: "The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing simplicity. First things are painted; then sensations; finally ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then on the subjective; finally on the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points on a straight line."34 Most important to Kootz was his perception that the intrasubjective artist "creates from an internal world rather than an external one." Reflecting John Dewey's idea of "art as experience"35 and providing an early rehearsal for his seminal 1952 essay "The American Action Painters," Harold Rosenberg, in additional comments on the show, elaborated on this point. "The modern painter," Rosenberg concludes in his brief text for the brochure for The Intrasubjectives, "is not inspired by anything visible, but only by something he hasn't seen yet In short, he begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents."36 8

Introduction

In a longer set of remarks written two years earlier for a Paris exhibit that included, among others, Gottlieb, Baziotes, and Motherwell, Rosenberg had taken greater pains to counter Greenberg's emphasis on providing a European stylistic lineage for the developing Abstract Expressionists. "They are not a school," he writes in a statement for the Galerie Maeght reprinted in Possibilities. "They have no common aim, not even the common tension that comes from rejecting the validity of the same art-history." Although he did not disagree with Greenberg that young Americans such as these "have appropriated modern painting," this has only been for the exploratory purpose of abetting an "individual sensual, psychic and intellectual effort to live actively in the present."37 These alternate interpretive positions presented by Greenberg and Rosenberg, already evident in the formative years of the movement, articulated a basic polarity that would continue to influence significantly both Abstract Expressionist artistic practice and the greater elaboration of contexts for its reception throughout the following decades. The 1950s: Establishing Authority

Drawing on by-now-standard rhetoric, in her fall 1958 review of a solo exhibition by the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline, Martica Sawin described "motion, the force that brings light out of dark and substance out of void," as the essence of Kline's style of painting (fig. 3). In her judgment of Kline's achievements Sawin decisively downplayed the "heroism" of undecidability, which seemingly had held such high currency in art criticism of the previous decade. (Motherwell and Rosenberg expressed its core when they wrote in Possibilities that "the question of what will emerge is left open. One functions in an attitude of expectancy. As Juan Gris stated: you are lost the instant you know what the result will be.") Sawin's much more confident assertion that "when Franz Kline draws his brush across the canvas, the gesture is automatically associated with authority" offered a different take on "heroic" achievement, one that had become increasingly commonplace in the igsos.38 By the time Sawin wrote her review, fifteen years had passed since Gottlieb and Rothko's combative assertion to Jewell that "it is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way—not his way," and Kline, like many other major artists by now associated with the nexus of ideas underpinning Abstract Expressionism, could clearly be identified by an instantly recognizable "signature" style (in his case, large, slashing calligraphic black forms on a white background). As Dore Ashton has pointed out, the introduction of Introduction

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Nietzschean concepts into existentialist discourse in New York in the late 19405 is only one of several factors that helped stimulate the desire to cultivate recognizable artistic personae. For many of the Abstract Expressionists-to-be, the license that ideas such as those of Nietzsche provided to "reinterpret" their doubt as "the consequence of self-confidence" led to a quest for greater mastery.39 Without question, commentaries on their work written in the 19505, such as Sawin's, began to reflect and applaud this trajectory. Most often mentioned as representing (perhaps initiating) this trend in criticism is Dorothy Seiberling's "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" Published in August 1949 in Life magazine, its title is a reference to the "steady drum roll" of accolades bestowed on Pollock by Greenberg in his capacity as "high-brow" art critic for The Nation.40 Juxtaposing a somewhat facetious text41 that quotes glibly from a statement by Pollock in Possibilities ("When I'm in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing") with Arnold Newman's now-iconic portrait of the artist in the guise of a glowering rebel in jeans, Life introduced the average American to an undeniable artistic phenomenon. For the art cognoscenti, the more worshipful tone of "Pollock Paints a Picture," written in 1951 by Robert Goodnough, a younger Abstract Expressionist artist on the New York scene, provided support for the increasingly popular argument that "the private drama of the Abstract Expressionist canvas" could also embody wider relevance. A selection of Hans Namuth's extraordinary photographs, taken as Pollock created one of his classic poured paintings (fig. 4), illustrated Goodnough's Art News essay. Exposing the emancipated dimensions of Pollock's new painting technique, which were without precedent, these provided visual documentation for the venerable teacher Hans Hofmann's assertion that "in this country, it should be understood that modern art is the symbol of our democracy."42 (Hofmann, who had escaped to the United States from Nazi Germany, seemed to possess impeccable credentials for making a statement of this nature.) Also increasingly emphasized in the early 19505 were the myriad ways in which this simultaneously private and public production was being enacted in the "sacred precinct" of the Abstract Expressionist studio, by now seen as the locus (as Caroline A.Jones has fully analyzed) of both struggle and prestige.43 Goodnough explained to his Art News readers, for example, that "to enter Pollock's studio is to enter another world, a place where the intensity of the artist's mind and feelings are given full play," and he focused the rest of his article on showing how "a Pollock painting is not born easily."44 After Pollock's untimely death in a car crash five years later, Allan Kaprow—another 10

Introduction

artist writing in Art News, the journal most clearly predisposed to applaud Abstract Expressionism—attempted to define his importance to the next generation. In terming Pollock "the embodiment of our ambition for absolute liberation," Kaprow, a founder of the Happenings movement, expressed a sentiment shared by many of his peers: "To grasp a Pollock's impact properly, one must be something of an acrobat, constantly vacillating between an identification with the hands and body that flung the paint and stood 'in' the canvas, and allowing the markings to entangle and assault one into submitting to their permanent and objective character. This is indeed far from the idea of a 'complete' painting." By "complete," Kaprow seems to mean European. As he explains, because the artist, the spectator, and the outer world are so "interchangeably involved," a potent combination of extreme individuality and selflessness indicating "a larger frame of psychological reference"45 is promoted in Pollock's most innovative "signature" works. In February 1950, a new variation on the popular "Paints a Picture" series, which had begun nine years earlier with Henri Matisse, appeared in the pages of Art News. Here, Elaine de Kooning, also a young artist-critic, was given the opportunity to showcase the sculptor David Smith's authenticity as a threedimensional equivalent of painters such as Pollock. Not surprisingly, she presents Smith's "authority" as likewise tied both to Romantic isolation and to innovative methods of industry. (Pollock created his allover poured and dripped canvases in a barn on rural Long Island; in 1940 Smith relocated his Brooklyn studio, "The Terminal Iron Works," to Bolton Landing in the Adirondack Mountains.) In "David Smith Makes a Sculpture" Elaine de Kooning situates her subject as yet another representation of a new, muscular brand of American genius "on guard against intellectualism and virtuosity" (fig. 5). An image of power infused by pragmatism, which quotes the artist directly, initiates her argument: "Hot-forging a piece of metal with a trip-hammer, flamecutting with an acetylene torch or welding his forms together, David Smith says, 'the change from one machine to another means no more than changing brushes to a painter or chisels to a carver.... Michelangelo spoke about the noise and the marble dust in our profession, but I finish the day looking more like a grease-ball than a miller.' "46 Thus, while Smith conclusively claimed his heritage in the great traditions of Western art, it is equally clear that he also accepted (even flaunted) his outsider status. Borrowing words written by Louis Finkelstein in a related context, one could say that Smith's attitude and the techniques he developed to express it reveal "insight into the nature of American culture: that it is inherIntroduction

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ited from Europe but must work in a different way." Rather than retaining a focus on making precious objects like his predecessors and prototypes, and akin not only to Pollock but also to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Elaine's husband Willem (about whom Finkelstein was actually writing), what Smith was creating was not simply an aesthetic object but an artistic "situation." Finkelstein employed that very term, writing, moreover, that "not only the content of the picture [or, in Smith's case, sculpture], but the observer as well is invited to participate in the drama."47 Meyer Schapiro summed up the radicality of the relationship thus set up between Abstract Expressionist artwork and spectator when he wrote in 1957 that presently the "work of art is an ordered world of its own kind, in which we are aware, at every point, of its becoming."48 As indicated by responses to an Art News inquiry directed in the following year to a dozen artists, ranging from the venerated abstractionist Stuart Davis to newcomer Robert Rauschenberg (and including Goodnough, Reinhardt, and Willem de Kooning), the conundrum "Is today's artist with or against the past?" continued to underline Abstract Expressionist criticism throughout its second decade. In his response, the Dutch-born de Kooning quipped, "The idea that art can come from nowhere is typically American—I call it 'painting made out of John Brown's body'—like Frank Lloyd Wright, and you can quote me." Reinhardt, sometimes (then and now) ambiguously categorized with the Abstract Expressionists, took pains to deplore the "I-don't-knowwhere-I'm-going, I-don't-know-where-I-am, I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing, or I-don't-know-when-I'm-done-kind-of-attitude" associated with the movement. "At one time," Reinhardt commented, "such attitudes meant a reaction. But it soon became a gimmick—talking about or against or for the past."49 These glib replies diverged somewhat from answers given by some of the same artists and their closest colleagues to a related topic, "What abstract art means to me," published in the spring of 1951 in the Museum of Modern Art Bulletin. In his reaction to MoMA's query, Motherwell offered a prototypical characterization of recent abstraction (that is, Abstract Expressionism) as "a fundamentally romantic response to modern life—rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable."50 Although here (as elsewhere) declaring, "Personally, I do not need a movement," Willem de Kooning nevertheless proceeded to voice opinions about styles and movements that affected him, ranging from Mesopotamian figures to Cubism, Futurism, Neo-Constructivism, and Dada. Such ideas formed the empirical basis for William C. Seitz's 1955 Prince12

Introduction

ton University dissertation, "Abstract Expressionist Painting in America: An Interpretation Based on the Work and Thought of Six Key Figures," the first to be written on this style. Although unpublished until the 19808, Seitz's thesis circulated in dog-eared copies, and its central tenets were repeated in shorter printed articles that he also authored in the 19505. Seitz emphasized Abstract Expressionism as a quintessential representation of the "Zeitgeist" of postwar America, while affirming that its increasing stature also emanated from the myriad ways in which it constituted a "present phase in the broad history of modern style."51 In a two-part 1958 essay, "The New York School—Then and Now," William Rubin, in opposition to the chauvinistic desire of some to argue the "virgin birth" of Abstract Expressionism, foreshadowed ideas that he would elaborate during the 19605 in his influential six-part series, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition."52 Writing "Then and Now" for the cosmopolitan audience of Art International, Rubin counteracted the Art Newsfostered idea that the movement's visual language embodied an "essentially inimitable American jargon," stressing instead its Parisian roots. Most of the articles that likely aroused Rubin's disapprobation (in particular, ten installments of the "Paints a Picture" series, featuring first- and second-generation Abstract Expressionists) were commissioned for Art New s by editor Thomas B. Hess, a close associate of Harold Rosenberg.53 In the estimation of the sculptor Philip Pavia, a founding member of The Club, another important Abstract Expressionist meeting place for exchange of ideas,54 Hess's 1951 Abstract Painting—Background and American Phase was "the first substantial book on abstract painting in New York, and in the eyes of the artists easily a prime mover of the Fifties." In this text Hess "was not entirely optimistic," Pavia comments in 1960 in It Is (the last of the Abstract Expressionist little magazines), "but he sought an idea that would tie together all the variegated personalities of the then young abstract art, and thus would free aesthetics from personalities."55 The highly influential "Paints a Picture" series, of course, as well as other feature articles that Hess subsequently ran, including Kaprow's "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" and Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters," effectively reversed the program Pavia describes, bestowing the status of "art stars" on Pollock and de Kooning in particular. Hess's own articles in Art News stressed the bohemian nature of the New York School enterprise ("Only nineteenth-century Paris has been as tough on its artists as our equally smug civilization," he wrote in 1950), delineating the "primary distinction between the innovating personalities in American abstract art and the relative newcomers" as based on how the former "decided Introduction

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to make (or were forced to make) their break from Europe."56 A strong supporter of the preeminence of de Kooning, Hess penned the latter's 1953 "Paints a Picture" article, second only to Pollock's in its influence. A somewhat lyrical delineation of the stages of Woman /—the work most strongly identified with de Kooning's artistic personality (plate i)—this essay provided the basis for a monograph on de Kooning that Hess subsequently published in George Braziller's "Great American Artists" series; it came out in 1959, the same year as poet-curator Frank O'Hara's volume about Pollock in the Braziller series.57 In "De Kooning Paints a Picture," Hess writes that Woman (not yet numbered) "appears inevitable, like a myth that needed but a quick name to become universally applicable." But (echoing Goodnough's treatment of Pollock) Hess explains, "Like any myth, its emergence was long, difficult and (to use one of the artist's favorite adjectives) mysterious." Comparing the two years it took for de Kooning to realize this spontaneous and impulsive-looking work to "a voyage ... one of those Romantic ventures which so attracted poets," Hess concludes that the artist's "exploration for a constantly elusive vision; the solution to a problem that was continually being set in new ways" was actually far more "relevant" than the work he produced.58 In essence, de Kooning's first canvas in the Woman series is presented by Hess as an explicit case study of Rosenberg's reconceptualization of gestural Abstract Expressionism into the more experientially based category dubbed "Action Painting." In April 1951, eighteen months before Rosenberg's article "The American Action Painters" appeared, Hess had boasted that, although the pictures of de Kooning "have an air of authority-in-crisis," the artist's personal solution to that problem involved "making the crisis itself the hero of the painting."59 Rosenberg's manifesto-like essay, summarizing the exaltation of crisis promoted in his own earlier writings (which by now had become even more familiar because of similar pronouncements by other critics including Hess and Finkelstein), appeared in Art News in December 1952. It became an instant lightning rod for heated discussion in artists' studios and gathering places, particularly in and around Manhattan's Tenth Street, the downtown address Rosenberg identified two years later as both "locale and metaphor" for the "new" American art.60 As already noted, in his 1947 Galerie Maeght statement, reprinted in Possibilities, Rosenberg hailed painting that aspired "not to a conscious philosophical or social ideal, but to what is basically an individual, sensual, psychic and intellectual effort to live actively in the present." In making this statement, he referenced both his admiration for the nineteenth-century French poet14

Introduction

critic Charles Baudelaire's well-known dictum "One must be of one's own time" and an increasingly felt impulse to reject his own radical Jewish Trotskyite beliefs of the 19305. This rejection was tied to feelings of regret about how American art of the Depression and early war years, much of it beholden to government financing, had too frequently been created in the service of politics.61 Using one of his favorite buzzwords, Rosenberg clarified his current position in "The American Action Painters" when describing general characteristics of the (never explicitly named) American artists whose change of approach he now applauded. Their type is not a young painter but a re-born one. The man may be over forty, the painter around seven. The diagonal of a grand crisis separates him from his personal and artistic past. Many of the painters were "Marxists" (WPA unions, artists' congresses); they had been trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism)—it amounts to the same thing. The big moment came when it was decided to paint... just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, esthetic, moral. [...] The American vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville's Ishmael took to the sea.62 Providing an archetypal American pedigree for his artist-heroes by comparing them with the doubt-ridden protagonist of Moby-Dick, Rosenberg further explained that the action painter is heir to both the pioneer and the immigrant, New World identities for which continual self-redefinition is a primary requirement. (Elsewhere, he hailed the unconventional fighting methods of American Coonskinners who prevailed during the Revolutionary War over General Braddock's tradition-bound Redcoats, and in 1961 he would analogize Jackson Pollock with Daniel Boone.)63 Like the lawyer he had trained to be, Rosenberg advanced his arguments in "The American Action Painters" passionately and rhetorically, operating within a matrix defined by the Marxist dialectical polemics honed during his earlier years writing for Partisan Review. Completely eschewing formalist analysis—not one specific work of art is described or cited—Rosenberg discounted style and valorized process. The most frequently quoted statement of his essay summarizes this thesis: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What Introduction

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was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." Subsequently, in what appears to be another jab at Greenberg's formalism, Rosenberg repeats, "Call this painting 'abstract' or 'Expressionist' or 'Abstract-Expressionist,' what counts is its special motive for extinguishing the object," maintaining that form, color, composition and drawing are nothing more than "auxiliaries" easily discarded: "The apples weren't brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting."64 Finally, referring to critical activity, Rosenberg reasons, "if the picture is an a c t . . . its value must be found apart from art." Those who want to write about the new painting, he states, should recognize this assumption and become connoisseurs of "gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked" as opposed to connoisseurs of quality. By connecting a painting that is an act with the biography of the artist, its metaphysical (as opposed to merely aesthetic) substance can be discerned. He writes, "With traditional esthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is . . . the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation." In what is probably his most disputatious statement, he concludes that, when creating Action Paintings, the vanguard artist succeeds in breaking down "every distinction between art and life."65 Although most readers (including Pollock himself, as well as Greenberg)66 assumed Pollock to be the prototypical American Action Painter, Rosenberg later claimed that he had been creating a hybrid of de Kooning (his favored artist), Pollock, and Kline. Pollock's increasing association—which only intensified after his death—with the alienation and the improvisational, performative spontaneity of 19503 Beat culture, in which art and life were deemed inseparable, served to strengthen his connection. Indeed, "the Beat credo of the individual, of self-discovery and realization as a metaphor for implicit truth"67 was visually confirmed by Namuth's films and photos of Pollock at work and received theoretical affirmation in "The American Action Painters," one particular line of which, "The discipline of the Open Road of risk ... leads to the farther side of the object and the outer spaces of the consciousness," with its echoes of Ginsberg and Kerouac, was much admired by the Beats. At the same time, the approach Rosenberg promoted was reviled in more conservative circles. The drama critic Robert Brustein, for example, excoriated Action Painting as yet another example of the lack of discipline championed by Beat poets and musicians, as well as by such adepts of method

16

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acting as Marlon Brando and James Dean; all, Brustein lamented in 1956, were dangerous examples of "the cult of unthink."68 The first widely publicized international assessment of Pollock, written in 1950 by the young Italian critic Bruno Alfieri and excerpted for an American audience in Time magazine, predated Brustein's contempt. Issued in conjunction with Pollock's recent inclusion in the twenty-fifth Venice Biennale and with the more comprehensive July-August 1950 Venetian showing of works by Pollock owned by Peggy Guggenheim, Alfieri's laundry list of faults attained a certain currency. The most notorious section of his review (which Pollock hotly contested in a telegram to Time magazine) read as follows: In any case it is easy to detect the following things in all of [Pollock's] paintings: - chaos - absolute lack of harmony - complete lack of structural organization - total absence of technique, however rudimentary - once again, chaos.69 Many of the Pollock works on view that summer in Italy dated to 1947, the year Guggenheim left New York for retirement abroad. Greenberg, in his review of Pollock's final solo exhibition at her gallery, Art of This Century, had advanced a quite different opinion of the same early drip paintings. Unperturbed by the "absence of assignable definition" in Pollock's recent style, Greenberg proclaimed that the young painter he so admired "has gone beyond the stage where he needs to make his poetry explicit in ideographs," a conclusion that also ran counter to Rosenberg's developing thesis about Action Painting. "As is the case with almost all post-cubist painting of any real originality," Greenberg intoned, "it is the tension inherent in the constructed, re-created flatness of the surface that produces [Pollock's] strength."70 The following year Greenberg assessed de Kooning's "magnificent first show" at Egan Gallery through the lens of related criteriajudging the latter's "insistence on a smooth, thin surface" as a "concomitant of his desire for purity, for an art that makes demands only on the optical imagination."71 When appraising the two Abstract Expressionists whose influence dominated the 19505, Greenberg continually countered his rival's (over)valuation of crisis, risk, action, and process, foregrounding instead the "high art" qualities of flatness, opticality, and purity that he believed to be more truly representative of avant-garde thinking.72

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The 1960s: Consolidating the Canon In a 1965 article in Arts Magazine, the critic Max Kozloff, referring to the oppositional attitudes of Greenberg and Rosenberg on the merits of Abstract Expressionism, made the following astute observation: "Some of the polemics which arose, as much with us now as then, have to do with the work of art as self-expression, and as vehicle of historical consciousness; the nature of aesthetic crisis and moral content in art; and finally, overarchingly, the function and identity of criticism itself. It is a tribute to the New York School that it enormously heightened the relevance of all these questions."73 Kozloff s attempt to assess the reception of the movement, the first to be published, followed by five years the art historian Robert Goldwater's "reflections" on two decades' worth of New York School art. In the Belgian journal Quadrum, Goldwater observes of Abstract Expressionist art: It has had time to change and develop, to evolve and alter and expand, to spread and succeed, to attract followers and nourish imitators. It has lived a history, germinated a mythology and produced a hagiology; it has descended to a second, and now a third artistic generation. This history, whose superficial aspects are those of other twentieth century styles, has in many ways contradicted the image of the New York School—the image it has had of itself, and even more the image the exegetes have given to the public—and so has presented it with peculiar and poignant problems. One of the results has been that recently, coincident with its notoriety, and in the midst of multiplying adepts, its old masters have begun to declare that it is not, nor indeed ever was, a school, perhaps not even a movement, and certainly not a style.74 Giving an abbreviated history of developments in Abstract Expressionism, Goldwater further deplores the "unfortunate emphasis" of Rosenberg's term "Action Painting" as an oversimplification that fails to distinguish between artist and subject (and indeed insists that they are identical). He is willing to admit that, "since the [New York School] artist identified with his work, intention and result were fused, and he who questioned the work, in however humble a fashion, was taken to be doubting the man." Goldwater, writing for a foreign readership, points out that criticism in the United States and especially abroad often seemed to overemphasize "the 'unfinished' character of this art." Both points were demonstrated, for example, in Alfieri's 1950 criticism of Pollock. Reviews of "The New American Painting," an exhibition circulated in 1958-1959 by the International Council of the Museum of Modern 18

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Art to eight major European cities, further highlighted (as one Milanese critic wrote) "the charge of violence and of personal fury which each of these paintings conveys." A Brussels newspaper termed works on view by Gottlieb, Kline, de Kooning, Motherwell, Newman, Gorky, Pollock, and ten others, mere "formless scribblings." Another continental reviewer, although labeling American Abstract Expressionism "an esthetic terrifying for its excess .. . frenetic and hallucinatory," nevertheless admitted that "our own abstract painters, all the 'informal' European artists, seem pygmies before the disturbing power of these unchained giants."75 Branding these and other verdicts from afar a "parade of busted clichés and demoralized preconceptions" by journalists "under the impression the pictures were painted by Wyatt Earp and Al Capone and Bix Beiderbeck [sic]" —and suggesting that many of the critics did not bother to see the show—the Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth judged European critique of "The New American Painting" as having more to do with politics than art.76 (Alfred H. Barr Jr., who prepared the exhibition's introduction, probably encouraged this line of thinking with his red-flag statement that the American artists on view "are not politically engagés even though their paintings have been praised and condemned as symbolic demonstrations of freedom in a world in which freedom connotes a political attitude.")77 Debate about exactly how free of outside influence these cocky New Yorkers actually were was a thread connecting many assessments of the exhibition, both good and bad. Greenberg had already proposed an answer focusing on aesthetic innovation in "The European View of American Art," published in late 1950: "The kind of art that Pollock, de Kooning, and Gorky present does not so much break with the Cubist and post-Cubist past as extend it in an unforeseen way, as does all art that embodies a new 'vision.'"78 Annette Michelson, writing from Paris at the end of that decade, noted local dismay about Greenberg's yet more boastful claim, reworded in a headline for the French weekly Arts, that "American painting was ten years ahead of what was being done in Paris." (She called it "an archreactionary paper's Machiavellian way of giving both Mr. Greenberg and the entire 'New York School' enough rope to hang themselves with.")79 In any case, in London and in the United States, more and more attention was being paid to such pronouncements from Greenberg's pen. By 1965, when Kozloffs essay on Abstract Expressionist criticism appeared, Greenberg's preeminence was well established in English-speaking • &fi countries. The rise in Greenberg's reputation in the 19603 (as Rosenberg's began to Introduction

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wane) was based in no small part on the publication in 1961 of Art and Culture: Critical Essays, a compendium of Greenberg's most important reviews, some newly revised to read more theoretically.81 These texts include "AvantGarde and Kitsch" (1939), in which Greenberg had first pronounced what constitutes "high art," and " 'American-Type' Painting," a 1955 essay in which he countered Rosenberg's existentialist adulation of the "late Cubist" gestural painters by promoting the color-field Abstract Expressionists, particularly Newman, Rothko, and Still, as a source of fresher aesthetic innovation. Greenberg firmly believed that, in comparison with works by these artists, the facile "Tenth Street touch" seemed tiresomely academic and solipsistic.82 In his strongly positive review of Art and Culture, the conservative commentator Hilton Kramer lauded Clement Greenberg as a writer who, "unlike Mr. Harold Rosenberg, for example ... has never been tempted to make rhetoric do the work of analysis." Pointing out that Greenberg's "critical intelligence was formed in the crucible of Marxian dialectics," Kramer observes that, long after he had eschewed the illusions and commitments of Marxist ideology, Greenberg's habits as a writer and intellectual attitudes continued to be based on the more salutary aspects of this education. "Foremost among these," he points out, "was the assumption that criticaljudgments, if they are to carry the authority and force of something more than a merely personal taste, must be made in the name of history." As Kramer explains, in Greenberg's teleological (and Eurocentric) analyses, "the impersonal process of history appears in the guise of an inner artistic logic, which has its own immutable laws of development and to which works of art must conform if they are not to end up on the historical ash heap."83 Increasingly opposed to the impurity fostered by the "expressionist" aspects of art of the New York School (a change in direction from the days when he had learned from Hofmann and championed Pollock),84 Greenberg was using "painterly" as a pejorative term by the time Art and Culture appeared.85 He now advocated for the redemptive influence of works by artists (most notably Newman, Rothko, and Still) for whom the art historian and curator H. H. Arnason, in organizing a 1961 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, coined the term "Abstract Imagists." In their art, formal means and content (not a synonym for "subject" in Greenberg's mind) are more indelibly fused. Against the openness and emotion that bastardized the "neoBaroque" aspects of Abstract Expressionist style, and opposed to the "vulgar" literary slant he ascribed to Surrealist influence, Greenberg militated

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more stridently during the 19603 for a return to Apollonian classical standards like those of High Cubism.86 In "Complaints of an Art Critic" (1967) Greenberg would write, "You cannot legitimately want or hope for anything from art except quality, and you cannot lay down conditions for quality. However and wherever it turns up, you have to accept it."87 But his own brand of criticism had been prescriptive from the start, and this tendency increased in the context of his contest with Rosenberg over who had the better formula for understanding the art of the New York School. Upping the ante in their dispute, in the introductory section of " 'American-Type' Painting," Greenberg had observed, "There is good and bad in abstract expressionism, and once one can tell the difference he discovers that the good owes its realization to a severer discipline." This set the stage for his assertion in the same 1955 essay that Barnett Newman (born in 1905) "has replaced Pollock as the enfant terrible of abstract expressionism."88 Three years before publishing "'American-Type' Painting," despite the virtually unanimous critical rejection of Newman's first two solo exhibitions at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Greenberg had already declared him "a very important and original artist," one who "has little to do with Mondrian, even if his pictures do consist of only one or two (sometimes more) rectilinear and parallel bands of color against a flat field." Newman "took a chance," Greenberg concludes in "Feeling Is All" (1952), "and has suffered for it in terms of recognition."89 In " 'American-Type' Painting," he placed Newman in a larger evolutionary matrix with Clyfford Still ("perhaps the most original of all painters under fifty-five, if not the best") and Mark Rothko, praising all of them as artists who had learned not only from Cubism but from the "unity and power" of the late Impressionism of Monet. In their works, "color breathes from the canvas with an enveloping effect" (fig. 6). This outcome is achieved by suppressing value contrasts and favoring warm hues, a tactic that also helps emphasize the flatness of their paintings; and, as Greenberg clarifies in his penultimate paragraph, such testing of "the limits of the inherited forms and genres, and of the medium itself" ("self-critical awareness of being in the mainstream of modern art," as opposed to existential self-discovery) is the true hallmark of "advanced art—which is the same thing as ambitious art today."90 During the 19505, when Action Painting (by foregrounding "signs of the artist's active presence") had set the standard for excellence, Newman's paintings "appeared empty and meaningless, the antithesis of the prevailing aesthetic."91 Numerous reviewers, Phyllis Rosenzweig notes, panned the paint-

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ings included in Newman's first two Betty Parsons Gallery exhibitions (fig. 7), using arch phrases such as "subtle to the vanishing point" and accusing him of perpetrating "an intellectual game."92 By 1956, Meyer Schapiro felt a need to explain that, although "beside the restless complexity of Pollock or de Kooning" works by artists such as Newman and Rothko might seem "inert and bare," despite their obvious stylistic dissimilarities, the gestural and color field painters did share certain goals. "Each," he wrote, "seeks an absolute in which a receptive viewer can lose himself, the one in compulsive movement, the other in an all-pervading, as if internalized, sensation of a dominant color. ... The result in both is a painted world with a powerful immediate impact."93 Although Arnason's 1961 exhibition "American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists" was organized around the idea that "a single all-encompassing label for painting whose essence is the expression of the individual" must be rejected, it was his stated curatorial judgment that the influence of the "Imagist" wing appeared to be "continually increasing."94 In his introduction to American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists, Arnason explains that he chose the latter term as "a gloss and criticism" of the former. It is a fact that from the late Forties to the present day certain painters, loosely grouped with the Abstract Expressionists, have ... been concerned through extreme simplification of their canvases—frequently to the dominant assertion of a single overpowering element—in presenting an all-encompassing presence. This "presence" could be described as an "image" in the sense of an abstract symbol rather than as a reflection or imitation of anything in nature. The paintings of Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, and frequently Still and Motherwell, all very different, all have in common this sense of symbolic content achieved through dramatic statement of isolated and highly simplified elements.95 Recognizing that the labels "Expressionist" and "Imagist" are "arbitrary and in some degree interchangeable," Arnason specifically references the painters' own statements about their goals and aspirations. In particular, although without crediting them, Arnason repeats in his description of the Imagists quoted above parameters first put forth by Gottlieb and Rothko in their 1943 letter (edited by Newman) to the New York Times. One of their most important claims is that "it is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as a good painting about 22

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nothing."96 This claim specifically contradicted Greenberg's art-for-art's-sake approach. This declaration is the last and most aggressive of five major points of autonomy made by Gottlieb and Rothko that New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell quoted in his art column of June 13. ("To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks" and "It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way—not his way," previously cited, were points one and three.) In point four Gottlieb and Rothko describe their style in terms that would seem to endorse Greenberg's predilection for medium purity (a notion already introduced in his 1940 essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon"). The two men declare: "We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth." Professing "spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art" (a general explanation of their motivations for The Rape of Persephone and The Syrian Bull [fig. 8], mythologically titled paintings Jewell had professed not to understand), however, they also assert that "the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." They thus admit to an emotional and symbolic (as well as Romantic and Surrealist-influenced) impulse for reductiveness that directly contradicted Greenberg's Lessing-inspired paradigm for abstraction, the "pure form" of music. In "The Ideographic Picture," his essay for an exhibition held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947, Barnett Newman openly declared that he and his friends, "although working in what is known as the abstract style," were "not abstract painters."97 Nevertheless, by 1965 Greenberg was citing pictures by Still, Rothko, and Gottlieb, and especially Newman's geometric-looking stripe (or "zip") paintings, as achievements that provided a "more advanced" pedigree for a new artistic trend he termed "Post-Painterly Abstraction." (In the works of artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, Greenberg's new favorites, the sloppiness, mannered design, and accentuation of value contrasts characterizing the despised "Tenth Street touch" were, he said, replaced by a more progressive "self-critical" emphasis on hue, physical openness of design, linear clarity, and the integrity of the picture plane.)98 This assertion involved a willful eradication on Greenberg's part of the metaphoric and metaphysical intentions for painting that Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, and Still consistently had claimed throughout the two previous decades. (The title of Newman's most famous canvas, Vir Heroicus Sublimis Introduction

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[Man, Heroic and Sublime, 1950-51, plate 2] encapsulates this shared moral impetus and signals that Newman's anarchist political ideals also played a key role in his artistic motivations.) Indeed, Greenberg's congratulatory statement in "Feeling Is All" (1952) that Newman's works "constitute, moreover, the first kind of painting I have seen that accommodates itself stylistically to the demand of modern interior architecture for flat, clear surfaces and strictly parallel divisions" (in " 'American-Type' Painting" he wrote of Still, Newman, and Rothko that "in effect their art asserts decorative elements and ideas in a pictorial context") contradicts every word Newman ever uttered about the theoretical and philosophical values he attached to artistic creativity." The most succinct expression of Newman's credo, his 1947 remarks for The Ideographic Picture, illustrates this point. After presenting dictionary and encyclopedia definitions for the terms "ideograph" and "ideographic," Newman follows with an unequivocal rejection of decor ativeness and purity as goals of (masculine) abstraction: The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene; nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design. The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers, the pleasant play of nonobjective pattern to the women basket weavers. To him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal "abstraction" of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudoscientific truths.100 Other authors writing in the 19605 took a less blinkered, more historically aware look at the artists' own priorities than Greenberg ever did. These included, for example, Lawrence Alloway ("The Biomorphic Forties"), John Bernard Myers ("The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School"), and Sidney Simon, who published extensive interviews in Art International titled "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943," with Motherwell, Peter Busa (a colleague of Pollock), and Roberto Matta Echaurren, the Chilean Surrealist who had befriended and tutored all three. In 1965, in Artforum, Alloway detailed the emergence of psychosexually oriented biomorphic imagery during the early days of Abstract Expressionism, highlighting 24

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the works of New York-based artists, most prominently Baziotes, Pollock, Gorky, Rothko, and Gottlieb (fig. 9). Alloway styled their preference for creating analogues of human form and other organisms in the early forties as "the result of a cluster of ideas about nature, automatism, mythology, and the unconscious."101 Two years earlier he had written about the American Sublime, a topic already addressed in 1961 by the art historian Robert Rosenblum. Unlike Greenberg, both Alloway and Rosenblum analyzed the mature works of the Abstract Imagists (also including Pollock) from the perspective of their own statements. Rosenblum, adopting a term used by many of these artists, explained best how the Sublime, an aesthetic category originating with Longinus that was especially popular with Romantic painters and poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "suddenly acquires fresh relevance in the face of the most astonishing summits of pictorial heresy attained in America in the last fifteen years." Describing the Sublime (with characteristics considered opposite in form to the Beautiful) as "a flexible semantic container for ... experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness, and divinity," Rosenblum compares Rothko's lightly brushed hovering rectangles of color (plate 7), for example, with famous Romantic landscape paintings by Friedrich and Turner. In assessing Newman's master visual statement of this concept—referencing the artist's definitive written commentary on the subject, "The Sublime Is Now" —Rosenblum adopts the artist's own hyperbolic mystical tone: In its all-embracing width (114 1/2 inches), Newman's VirHeroicus Sublimis puts us before a void as terrifying, if exhilarating, as the arctic emptiness of the tundra; and in its passionate reduction of pictorial means to a single hue (warm red) and a single kind of structural division (vertical) for some 144 square feet, it likewise achieves a simplicity as heroic and sublime as the protagonist of its title. Yet again, as with Still, Rothko, and Pollock, such a rudimentary vocabulary creates bafflingly complex results. Thus the single hue is varied by an extremely wide range of light values; and these unexpected mutations occur at intervals that thoroughly elude any rational system. Like the other three masters of the Abstract Sublime, Newman bravely abandons the securities of familiar pictorial geometries in favor of the risks of untested pictorial intuitions; and like them, he produces awesomely simple mysteries that evoke the primeval movement of creation.102 Although forced to admit that Clyfford Still's vertical compositions, reminiscent of flames and geological fissures (fig. 10), "were the first abstract picIntroduction

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tures [he] ever saw that contained almost no allusion to Cubism," Greenberg continually insisted, against visual and spoken evidence left by the artist, that Pollock's art "turns out, in fact, to have an almost completely Cubist basis."103 By contrast, Rosenblum contended that all four masters of the Abstract Sublime decisively rejected the classical bent of the Cubist tradition. Seen from the autobiographical point of view of Action Painting, Pollock's intricately layered allover poured paintings (for example, fig. 11) did not meet Alloway's stipulation that the physiognomic expression of the Abstract Expressionist Sublime be achieved by compounding "maximum area with minimum diversity." Rosenblum reconciled this discrepancy by describing how Pollock's "gyrating labyrinths re-create in the metaphorical language of abstraction the superhuman turbulence depicted more literally" by nineteenth-century European and American landscapists. Furthermore, since "like the awesome vistas of telescope and microscope, his pictures leave us dazzled before the imponderables of galaxy and atom,"104 Pollock, like Rothko and Newman, could be lauded for updating these Romantic metaphors in terms of the twentieth century. Although Greenberg essentially lost interest in him when he returned to disturbing figurative imagery using black enamel stained into unprimed canvas, after Pollock's death a critical rethinking of the classic poured paintings began to form. Not surprisingly, Greenberg now crafted his praise of these compositions to fit the self-definitive blueprint he espoused more strongly than ever. This schematic was given a new title, "Modernist Painting," in 1965. In an essay printed in Art and Literature that spring, Greenberg gave his fullest explanation to date of how, to qualify for Modernist purity, "each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself." He confirmed once more that "the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of the medium," stressing that, considered as such, Modernism represents continuity, not rupture, with great art of past centuries.105 By 1958, only two years after Pollock's fatal accident, Greenberg had already found a way to reconcile Pollock's more tonal gestural style with the primacy of flatness valued by his newly endorsed color field artists. In comparing certain of Pollock's key effects to Byzantine mosaics, Greenberg gave the suppression of value that he deemed critical to Modernist painting a crucial art historical precedent: Neither Byzantine nor modernist art has rested with the mere dismantling of sculptural illusion. Byzantine painting and mosaic moved from the beginning toward a vision of full color in which the role of light-and-dark contrast was 26

Introduction

radically diminished. In Gauguin and in Late Impressionism, something similar had already begun to happen, and now, after Cubism, American painters like Newman, Rothko and Still seem almost to polemicize against value contrasts. They attempt to expel every reminiscence of sculptural illusion by creating a counterillusion of light alone—a counterillusion which consists in the projection of an indeterminate surface of warm and luminous color in front of the actual painted surface. Pollock, in his middle period, worked toward the same effect, and perhaps achieved it more unmistakably with his aluminum paint and interlaced threads of light and dark pigment. This new kind of modernist picture, like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic, comes forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator with its radiance.106 Greenberg's likening of this phenomenon to "optical mirage"107 opened the way for Pollock's work to be presented as an even more definitive prototype for Post-Painterly Abstraction in an essay prepared by one of his talented Harvard University graduate students, Michael Fried. The section about Pollock in Three American Painters—Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella, written by Fried to accompany an exhibition he organized in 1965 at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, was reprinted for a wider audience in Artforum. In it, Fried consciously downplays action and process, specifically rejecting "the tendency of art writers such as Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess to regard Pollock as a kind of natural existentialist." Instead, following lines of thought developed by Greenberg, Fried promotes "a nexus of formal issues" deemed central to both Pollock's art and the most advanced Modernist painting. Disagreeing with Greenberg's ascription of an Analytical Cubist basis to the classic allover poured canvases, Fried wanted instead to credit Pollock with the creation of homogenous optical fields, addressed to eyesight alone. Pollock achieved this, Fried claims, by aggressively purging line of its figurative character: in works such as the Museum of Modern Art's Number lA, 1948, line "is entirely transparent both to the non-illusionistic space it inhabits but does not structure and to the pulses of something like pure, disembodied energy that seem to move without resistance through them." The result is "a new kind of space—if it still makes sense to call it space—in which conditions of seeing prevail rather than one in which objects exist, flat shapes are juxtaposed or physical events transpire."108 Fried reconciles Pollock's eventual (albeit equivocal) return to figuration by lauding a small group of transitional paintings in which cut-out sections allow imagery to be perceived as absence, and he pegs the future potential of Pollock's staining method as a harbinger of the direction of contemporary Introduction

27

work. The Hegelian inevitability built into Modernism by critical adherents such as Greenberg and Fried sent auto(bio)graphic interpretations of Pollock's work into a near-total eclipse during the mid-to-late 19603.109 Indeed, by 1973, the curator Kenworth Moffett could write, without blinking an eye, that "both Olitski's sprayings and Pollock's drippings are relatively impersonal applications."110 Pollock's fortunes continued to rise during the 19605 as a result of the historian-critic William Rubin's six articles in Artforum on the subject of Jackson Pollock and the modern tradition. Acknowledging and correcting Greenberg's judgments, Rubin decisively links the varied aspects of Pollock's production not only with Cubist but also Impressionist and Surrealist precedents. The exchange of letters in that journal between Rubin and Francis V. O'Connor (author of the first monographic dissertation study of an Abstract Expressionist painter, "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock, 1912-1943"), a huge retrospective (for which O'Connor provided a detailed documentary chronology) held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967, and newly published interviews with the artist's widow, Lee Krasner, also helped revive and restyle Pollock's importance.111 The preeminence of Newman and David Smith in this decade was likewise confirmed by major exhibitions, at the Guggenheim and the Fogg, respectively. Unlike his two colleagues (both deceased by the time of their shows), Newman's The Stations of the Cross: Lama Sabachtani, was not a full retrospective but a close look at a group of stylistically and thematically related paintings created between 1958 and 1966, the year of the exhibit. In the catalogue, Lawrence Alloway analogized the achievements of the by-now recognized leaders of two ostensibly diametric directions in Abstract Expressionist painting. First pointing out that "Newman's Stations [fig. 12] were arrived at through a process of self-recognition," Alloway writes: This method of learning from the initial stage of the work is parallel to the kind of responsiveness that Jackson Pollock revealed in single paintings. He would make a mark and then develop or oppose it by other marks until he reached a point at which he had exhausted the work's cues to him to act further. Newman has demonstrated the possibility of such awareness operating not in terms of visual judgment and touch within one painting, but as a source of structure for a series.112 Alloway notes that the production of a thematic series might seem an unexpected development in Newman's work, but this tactic is presented as be28

Introduction

ing inseparable from Newman's continuing interest in promoting metaphysical (in this case, hybrid Jewish-Christian) iconographie meanings. Jane Harrison Cone, another of Greenberg's students, registered no such surprise at Smith's seriality in the essay she wrote for "David Smith 1906-1965: A Retrospective Exhibition," which traveled from Harvard to the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in igGy.113 Whereas the subjective signature styles of the Abstract Expressionists sometimes incorporated or resembled the production of visually related works (Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic [fig. 13] are examples of the former, and Gottlieb's Thrust [plate 3] might represent the latter tendency), all of the younger painters favored by Greenberg and his followers in the 19605 provided concrete evidence of an objectively analytical internal dialogue by systematically working out their formal problems in a serial for mat.114 By 1947, mentioning him with Pollock as "the only other American artist of our time who produced an art capable of withstanding the test of international scrutiny," Greenberg had declared David Smith not only "the best sculptor this country has produced" but "already one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century anywhere" (his emphasis). Nonetheless, almost ten years later, Greenberg was still making excuses for Smith's "inability or unwillingness to exercise self-criticism."115 By the time of his unfortunate death at age fifty-eight, (like Pollock, in a road accident), this deficiency was seemingly erased. Cone, in fact, credits Smith's "taking a single idea or theme and developing it by means of a series of closely related sculptures" as fundamental to his working method, although, at the cost of formal coherence, he might be working in two or three quite distinct sculptural styles at once.116 Furthermore, Smith had openly declared that he did not recognize aesthetic divisions between the goals of his early career as a painter and his "sculpture-work," writing in 1960, "My sculpture grew from painting. My analogy and reference is with color. Flash reference and afterimage vision is historied in painting. I chew the fat with painters." In his last interview, given to Katherine Kuh, Smith described his overlapping Zig (from "ziggurat"), Tank Totem, and Agrícola works as "continuous parts of my concept," rather than variations on a theme.117 The fact that Smith often "crossed the state line from Bolton Landing over to Vermont to visit the painter Kenneth Noland" was pointed out by Robert Motherwell in a laudatory "personal appreciation" published in Studio International after his close friend's passing.118 One of the illustrations for Motherwell's article is a dramatic outdoor close-up "cubistically" framed by shooting through several of Smith's brightly colIntroduction

29

ored, predominantly circular, flat cut-out Zigs made of painted sheet metal (fig. 14). Closely approximating the look of Noland's "post-painterly" targets, this photograph underscores Smith's position as a Greenbergian archetype whose artistic contributions spanned three generations.119 The 1970s: Emerging Contexts and Closer Readings

In her influential survey American Art Since 1900, first published in 1967 and revised and expanded in 1975, Barbara Rose included the following "epitaph for an avant-garde": If the end of a style may be marked by the moment when no young painters of the first rank choose to work within it, then 1960 constitutes such a date for Abstract Expressionism. The physical destruction of the original neighborhood in which it flourished—the tearing down of Tenth Street, the closing of the original Cedar Bar, and the dissolution of the Club—were only the external events that paralleled a general shift in sensibility within the art world. In the sixties, the remaining members of the first generation would continue their development, and gifted members of the second generation would make significant contributions. However, Abstract Expressionism as a style would not serve as a point of departure, but as an established tradition, as the new Academy—perhaps the first Academy worthy of the name in the history of American art—to be attacked in terms of its own limitations and contradictions.120 Like Arnason's "Abstract Expressionists and Imagists," a show held earlier in the decade, Maurice Tuchman's "New York School: The First Generation," mounted in Los Angeles in 1965, and in particular Henry Geldzahler's "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," a blockbuster hit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art four years later, also provided significant opportunities for critics—and artists—to weigh in on the continued pertinence (or lack of same) of the movement. At the time of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show and before Rose's pronouncement that 1960 marked the movement's terminus, Greenberg had proposed a slightly later date for the "sudden collapse, market-wise and publicity-wise, of Abstract Expressionism as a collective manifestation." Noting the impact on Abstract Expressionism's viability of the instantaneous success of Pop Art in the spring of 1962, he (not unexpectedly) preferred to attribute its diminishing importance to the superior efforts of post-painterly abstraction.121 Irritated by the Los Angeles County Museum project, Barnett Newman 30

Introduction

complained in Art News that "the 'New York School,' I find, exists only in California. It is curious that the only shows so titled have taken place there." He further deplored what he took to be Tuchman's implication in organizing this show, namely, that Abstract Expressionism was now just another historical installment. While admitting that "it is only natural that those who are trying to put the label on the bottle will also try to put the cork in, too," Newman insisted that the story of Abstract Expressionism, which was "still continuing," had not yet adequately been told.122 Quoting Rosenberg's equivocal assertion in "The American Action Painters" that "what makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement," a few years later Gregory Battcock slyly referenced the Pop artists' obsession with food in order to belittle not only the Met's exhibition but the central philosophical premises of Abstract Expressionism as well. In "Reevaluating Abstract Expressionism," Battcock observes somewhat meanly: "Letters in art are letters," wrote Ad Reinhardt. Other Abstract Expressionists referred to their paintings as: "it is." Today we are much more likely to say, "Lettuce in art is lettuce." Instead of "it is" we are more likely to ask: "So what?" Battcock, whose Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology had been published the previous year, terms Abstract Expressionism "an art style of extravagance, waste, emptiness." Although he notes that it provides exquisite sensual stimulation, he nonetheless comes to a contemptuous conclusion: "According to today's needs, definitions, expectations and questions, [the movement] appears to have been a big to-do about very little indeed."123 Battcock's opinion ran directly counter to Geldzahler's assertion that both "national pride and international acclaim recognize that something magnificent has happened" in New York art produced since World War II.124 Intended to confirm proclamations beginning as early as 1947 that New York had replaced Paris as the epicenter of vanguard art, Geldzahler's exhibition also provided an opportunity to see how Abstract Expressionism seeded current developments. Its optimistic tone paved the way for an even more resounding affirmation implicit in the title of Irving Sandler's full-length 1970 study, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. Sandler's book, the first attempt by an art historian to provide a definitive historical account of the movement that had so recently put America on the art world map, clearly aimed at laying to rest any lingering charges of aesthetic parochialism on this side of the Atlantic. Its frontispiece (repeated on the outIntroduction

31

side back cover), a reproduction of "The Irascibles" (fig. i), reintroduced the cast of characters who had achieved this remarkable feat. Referring to the so-called Irascibles incident, Adolph Gottlieb, one of its organizers, told Andrew Hudson in 1968 that "there's a certain myth about [the Abstract Expressionists'] being a group." But, Gottlieb pointed out, actually "the one and only time we acted as a group" was a protest. "Otherwise, there was no sense of solidarity."125 Documenting what В. Н. Friedman has termed "a split second in art history," the picture of the Irascibles, shot by Life magazine staff photographer Nina Leen in November 1950, was thrust into even greater prominence by Sandier. In it, a "monumental" posed group of fourteen male artists (the major living Abstract Expressionists and others from the second tier) and an equally well-dressed female painter, Hedda Sterne, stare somberly into Leen's camera. Readers of the January 15,1951, issue of Life learned that these individuals, with four additional painters and ten sculptors, had signed a joint letter the previous May. This petition (drafted by Gottlieb) objected to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's inattention to "advanced painting" in organizing a "monster national exhibition" purporting to survey contemporary trends in art.126 (Barnett Newman, who hand-delivered a copy of the letter to the New York Times, had solicited the signatures; unbeknownst to him at that time, his choices were to play a decisive role in eventual delineation of the Abstract Expressionist canon.)127 Like William Seitz, whose dissertation was still not yet published, Sandier had the advantage of being personally acquainted with many of the artists whose pictures and styles he set out to explicate. And both authors, as their reviewers pointed out, perhaps fell into the understandable trap of taking at face value what the artists said about their intentions and their works. Focusing on the "heroic years" 1942-1952, Sandier chose to take the middle road in his interpretation of the goals and achievements of the movement, stating, for example, that "there was not one 'truth' but many, each determined by the vantage point from which an artist viewed developments."128 After describing "a common aesthetic evolution" that involved primarily the Great Depression, the WPA, World War II, and the influences of Picasso and Surrealism, as well as delineating an early shared interest in Jungian myth, existentialism and biomorphism, in organizing the rest of his book Sandier basically retained Arnason's Expressionist and Imagist categories. He preferred, however, the synonyms "gestural and color-field painting," denominations generated from the editorializing of Rosenberg and Greenberg, respectively. In his 1961 Guggenheim essay, Arnason had explained that he was inten32

Introductio n

tionally using the term "Imagists" as "a gloss and criticism of the phrase 'Abstract Expressionists.' "129 As noted, he also made it clear that he believed that artists who fit the Imagist category should be considered the most progressive. By contrast, almost a decade later, while professing greater neutrality, "for all his reasonableness and his posture of art-historical distance and respectability, Sandier ends by coming out clearly in favor of the expressionist, 'content' side of the debate."130 Kenworth Moffett (who made that assessment) and Patrick McCaughey, another contemporary reviewer, both judged this a purposeful strategy on Sandler's part to "correct the errors of the present critical climate," still dominated by the formalism of Greenberg and his admirers. Thus, individuals highlighted in The Triumph of American Painting were selected to provide "specific instances" of a shared propensity for epic subjective themes.131 Indeed, the fact that Baziotes, Motherwell, Newman, Rothko, and the sculptor David Hare chose to call the art school they operated at 35 East Eighth Street in 1948-1949 "The Subjects of the Artists" was highlighted by Alloway in Artforum in 1974, provided the title of an Abstract Expressionist show held at the downtown branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, and was the topic of a diatribe directed at Greenberg, "Against a Newer Laocoon," published in Arts Magazine a year later by Barbara Cavalière and Robert Hobbs (two of the Whitney Downtown show's organizers). Immediately afterward, the school's name was adopted by E. A. Carmean Jr. as the subtitle for "American Art at Mid-Century," an influential exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.132 In all of these sources, comments by Pollock ("I'm very representational some of the time and a little all of the time. But when you're working out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge"), Gottlieb ("The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images"), and Rothko ("We seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than their graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our own experience"),133 among others, were utilized to prove that the Abstract Expressionists' "compelling desire" was "to communicate significant and evocative ideas in an abstract format."134 The Whitney Downtown's "Subjects of the Artists" exhibition concentrated on the years 1941-1947, before each of the major Abstract Expressionist painters developed a signature style. Its curators (who, like Cavalière and Hobbs, were all graduate students in the Whitney Independent Study ProIntroduction

33

gram) stated their belief that it would be a mistake to consider the early-to mid 19405 as merely a transition or prelude to "full-blown" artistic maturity for the New York School pioneers. This revisionist view—counter to the positions of both Rosenberg and Greenberg—was widely promulgated in the 1970s, forming the basis not only of thesis and dissertation topics for a new crop of scholars working on Abstract Expressionism and its commentators135 but also prompting reassessments by venerable critics such as Dore Ashton. Ashton's The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (1972) exposed a more synoptic social, political, and intellectual context for this crucial developmental period. The principal and most contentious venue in the 19705 for testing the validity of Greenberg's proscription of content as a major ingredient of aesthetic innovation was "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years," the Whitney's larger follow-up exhibition, со-organized in 1978 with the Herbert F.Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.136 Training an eye on what had often been dismissed as a mere interim phase in order to "deepen interpretive understanding" of the movement as a whole, Robert Hobbs, by this time working with Gail Levin, gathered together paintings created in New York between 1935 and 1949, some well known, many obscure. Most were by the recognized innovators of Abstract Expressionism, with the significant addition of Lee Krasner, previously considered (for example, in "We Interview Lee Krasner," published in School Arts in 1960) to be more important in her role as the widow of Jackson Pollock than as an artist in her own right. Krasner's paintings in the Little Image series of 1946-1950 (fig. 15), on view in the exhibition, were remarked on by critics as disparate in their approaches as Roberta Smith and Hilton Kramer as "a big surprise" and "a revelation."137 After a retrospective at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1968 that occasioned renewed interest in her work by a number of British and American (particularly feminist) critics, the 19705 became a crucial decade for the rehabilitation of Krasner's reputation.138 Although not present in the photograph of the Irascibles (Newman did not request her signature),139 Krasner's inclusion with the men in "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years" was perhaps inevitable in light of the Whitney's prior validation of her career with a solo exhibition. "Lee Krasner: Large Paintings," organized in 1973 by Marcia Tucker, and Krasner's well-received Pace Gallery showing four years later of authoritative new collages reusing powerful drawings she had done much earlier at Hans Hofmann's art school,140 provided undeniable proof of her ongoing artistic viability. 34

Introductio n

One of the key premises of "Formative Years" was tying the theoretical and aesthetic interests of the nascent Abstract Expressionists in the late 19308 and early 19405 to a more expansive set of sources than Cubism, sources ranging from cave art to Mexican muralism, American Indian pictographs, and sand paintings, and highlighting the contributions of Surrealism. William Rubin had already demonstrated the extent of Pollock's formal and thematic links to earlier modernism, especially to Picasso, Miró, and the late Monet (although, to O'Connor's consternation, Rubin scanted the also considerable importance of Pollock's teacher, the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton).141 Sandier and Ashton broadened the sphere of these and other influences to a larger group of New York painters.142 In particular, Hobbs and Levin now drew attention to the impact of a substantial number of influential works by Wassily Kandinsky on view during the 19405 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (then called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting) and to the catalytic role played by another Russian, the cosmopolitan artist and entrepreneur Ivan Dabrowsky, known as John Graham in New York in the 19305 and 19405. In his writings Sandier had already introduced the fact that Graham was an important mentor to many of the Abstract Expressionists, and the annotated republication in 1971 by Marcia Epstein Allentuck of Graham's highly idiosyncratic 1937 aesthetic primer System and Dialectics of Art was followed by numerous additional studies of Graham as an artist and theoretician whose ideas and eccentric style (fig. 16) had a critical impact on Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Krasner, Rothko, and Smith.143 Graham's perspicacious observations about the metamorphic power of primitive artifacts and their influence on European modern art,144 the fact of his having exhibited in the late 19203 in Paris (where he knew personally such Surrealists as Paul Éluard and André Breton), and his sale of African and Oceanic sculpture out of a Greenwich Avenue studio-gallery called "The Primitive Arts" greatly excited his acolytes. Also critical to the scene was Graham's organization of "French and American Painting," a show held in early 1942 at the New York design firm McMillen Inc., where new works by Pollock, Krasner, and de Kooning were hung in the company of such luminaries as Picasso and Braque. Graham's passionate advocacy of Marxist and Jungian psychological motivations for art, risk, and the development of "automatic écriture" (defined as personal technique, a combination of training and improvisation) were now considered crucial and clarifying for the development of Abstract Expressionism. Speaking of Hobbs and Levin's curatorial choices for "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years," one reviewer pointed out, "The most frequent Introduction

35

complaint has been that the paintings are weak, derivative, ugly. Instead of revealing themselves as budding giants (shades of Hercules wrestling with lion cubs), the Abstract Expressionists come off as mortals after all, struggling painfully for self-definition."145 Hobbs's introductory essay, "Early Abstract Expressionism: A Concern with the Unknown Within," set up the premise that many of the artists subscribed to Graham's belief that "the purpose of art in particular is to re-establish a lost contact with the unconscious ... and to keep and develop this contact in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind."146 Their paintings might appear weak because motifs at this time were more important as "signposts" marking an inward journey, and aesthetic quality (as defined and prized by Greenberg) was not yet the foremost consideration. Hobbs asserts that the most critical model these artists adopted in their quest for self-knowledge was psychic automatism, a stream-of-consciousness strategy borrowed from Surrealism, a style of art Greenberg intensely disliked. In this context, it was evident that another heretofore underappreciated figure, the Chilean painter Roberto Matta Echaurren, also required greater recognition as an inspiration and stimulation for an important nucleus of future Abstract Expressionists. In "An Aspect of Automatism," the final segment of his series of essays titled "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition," William Rubin mentioned Matta in passing, comparing his Psychological Morphologies with the pourings of the British painter Gordon Onslow-Ford, sometimes advanced as putative prototypes for Pollock's mature style. This installment was published in Artforum in May 1967, one month before Art International ran two interviews conducted by Sidney Simon, under the shared title "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School: 1939-1943." In these, Simon questioned Motherwell, Pollock's close friend Peter Busa, and Matta about the study sessions held in the fall and winter of 1942-1943 at the latter's studio on Ninth Street and attended by all four, as well as Baziotes and Gerome Kamrowski. The purpose of these meetings was to show each other work, discuss ideas, participate in projects to expand their various automatic abilities, and to create, as Busa described it, a "travelogue of the unconscious." This practice was ultimately intended to lead to a group exhibition that would "show up" the older, more established Surrealists, many of whom, having escaped Hitler, were temporarily residing in New York147 As Motherwell recalled, he and his buddies "worked more directly and violently, and ultimately on a much larger scale physically than the Surrealists ever had"; Matta's sessions, he asserted, were "the germ, historically, of what later came to be called Abstract Expres36

Introduction

sionism." Motherwell provided Simon with the following summation of U.S. connections to European modernist art: "What, in my opinion, happened in American painting after the war had its origins in automatism that was assimilated to the particular New York situation—that is, the Surrealist tone and literary qualities were dropped, and the doodle transformed into something plastic, mysterious, and sublime. No Parisian is a sublime painter, nor a monumental one, not even Miró."148 Otherwise, much of both conversations with Simon highlighted recollections about Pollock. Indeed, as Roberta Smith remarked in her review, that the "Formative Years" exhibition was "dominated by Jackson Pollock's ferocious talent was a confirmation of what we know, but even so, the degree and variety of that domination was a surprise."149 Whereas Newman's impact had seemed more commanding in the formalist sixties, by the time of the Whitney exhibition new arguments swirling around the issue of Abstract Expressionist subjectivity thrust Pollock firmly back into the limelight. (Because many of Newman's early works were destroyed, he played only a minor role in "The Formative Years") The publication between 1972 and 1978 of a full-scale biography of Pollock, a memoir of his final years, and a four-volume catalogue raisonné of his complete oeuvre (the first for an Abstract Expressionist painter) disclosed a great deal of new visual and documentary information useful for reanalyzing his contributions.150 A new controversy began when, against the wishes of his widow Lee Krasner, a cache of eighty-three drawings created by Pollock in 1939-1940 as an aid to sessions with his Jungian therapist Joseph Henderson was acquired by the Maxwell Galleries in San Francisco. The psychoanalyst C. L. Wysuph organized these sketches into a traveling exhibition that stopped at the Whitney in the fall of 1970. Two years later, Judith Wolfe and David Freke published virtually concurrent articles describing Pollock's most important pre-1947 works (for example, plate 4) as constituting a specifically self-therapeutic Jungian search for individuation.151 An even more precisely Jungian reading of Pollock's early imagery, which extended to his subsequent development of the allover style and poured technique, was advanced by Elizabeth Langhorne in her doctoral thesis, the major points of which are summarized in "Jackson Pollock's ''The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle? " part of a 1979 special Pollock issue of Arts Magazine.1^ William Rubin's historical-formalist protest against this type of explication (considered by many a broad-scale attack) was first delivered at a symposium organized by Langhorne titled "Abstract Expressionism: Idea and Symbol," held at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in October of that year. The Introduction

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full text of Rubin's lecture appeared in Art in America over the next two months under the title "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism."153 In brief, he dismissed as mere speculation Pollock's capability or intention of using Jung's ideas as either an intellectual or a visual source for archetypal imagery dredged from the unconscious. Rubin furthermore rejected any implications that figurative imagery lay "veiled" or buried underneath the artist's most abstract poured paintings and suggested alternative sources, especially in Picasso, for effects that prompted the younger scholars' Jungian interpretations.154 Despite slightly differing analyses of the psychological meanings of Pollock's iconography, Freke, Wolfe, and Langhorne basically agreed that the artist's anxieties (many of them sexual) were tied to what Jung termed a negative anima complex, or fear of the "Terrible Mother." Pollock's problems with his mother Stella were well documented in letters and interviews quoted in his biography and published in full in the extensive chronology prepared for his catalogue raisonné by Francis V. O'Connor. By the mid-1970s, psychoanalytical explanations of Motherwell's art likewise based on facts about his life—including the seemingly dysfunctional relationship the young Robert had with his mother and father—were also being developed. In his 1975 dissertation dissecting Motherwell's patent concern with death in his paintings and a more concise catalogue essay written for the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf, Hobbs established that a biographical approach is also essential to uncovering the meaning of Motherwell's creative urge, explaining how such personal factors are especially evidenced in the artist's signature series, The Elegies to the Spanish Republic.155 Hobbs relates castration imagery detectable in key early works by Motherwell, such as Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943; plate 5), to the painter's charged relationship with a father who did not want his son to pursue an artistic career. Jonathan Fineberg, establishing that the initial version of the standard format for the Elegies was painted by Motherwell about the time his first wife left him, construes Motherwell's later admission that he was incapable of love as reflecting the residue of his mother's neglect of her child's emotional needs, as well as the artist's repressed oedipal feelings. That the black ovoid forms that predominate in the Elegies are readable as bull's cojones—ап association promoted by Hobbs—prompts Fineberg to interpret the depressive mood of these pictures (the prototype for which was influenced by a Garcia Lorca poem describing the death of a bullfighter) as signaling a combination of castration anxiety and anger about maternal abandonment.156 38

Introductio n

In other close readings of Abstract Expressionist iconography produced during the 19705, Harry Rand saw Gorky's The Calendars (1946) as also encoding private family imagery, though more abstractly than the two versions of his well-known early masterpiece The Artist and His Mother (1926-1929), works based on a photograph from his sad childhood (fig. 17). Rand points out that Gottlieb and Pollock also created psychologically meaningful family portraits in the 19305, symbolic implications from which carried into works of their Abstract Expressionist periods. Gorky's tragic death by suicide in 1948, just as the movement was becoming solidified (his note ambiguously read "Goodbye my Loveds"), prompted a new call for clarification of his ideological and artistic "bridge" status in regard to the parallel careers of certain colleagues, in particular, Graham and de Kooning. In keeping with an important tenet of American Action Painting ("A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist"), Harold Rosenberg, in an evocative monograph of 1962, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, had already typified Gorky's aesthetic "crisis" in urgent autobiographical terms.157 In it Rosenberg tells how Gorky, born Vosdanik Manoog Adoian in 1904 in Van, Armenia, moved to the United States in 1920, adopting the (also fictitious) last name of a famous Russian writer. Gorky then embarked on a search for artistic style by taking on the personal characteristics of exemplars he admired as a way to build confidence in his own identity. Remarking that, for Gorky, "imitation was a learning to be, as well as a learning to do," Rosenberg cast his hero's unashamed early emulation of such famous painters as Cézanne, Miró, and Picasso as a series of "psychic partnerships" necessary to advance into artistic maturity.158 In addition to Rosenberg and Rand's studies, Eliza Rathbone's essay in American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist, which centered on Gorky's enigmatic 1946 mixed-media painting The Plow and the Song, in the National Gallery of Art's collection (plate 6), provided a model for interpreting his highly evocative later imagery on a similarly experiential basis.159 Following Rosenberg's monograph and the publication in the mid-1970s of Robert ReifTs 1961 dissertation, the important friendship between Gorky, Graham, and de Kooning became a subject ripe for increased exploration by critics and art historians. New information about their aesthetic give-andtake (and the advent of feminism, which produced widely read books on the plight of the woman in the 19505 such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch) also led to revisionist views of de Kooning's Woman series of 1950-1953. In Introduction

39

1972 Thomas Hess updated his discussion of these works by superimposing an anthropological context. He situated de Kooning's still-controversial canvases at the intersection of three sociological developments that converged at the time of their making: growing recognition by women of the need to reconfigure their role in American society in the aftermath of World War II, the popularity of the pin-up cutie ("a docile and manipulatable godlet") as a way to assuage resultant male anxieties, and Abstract Expressionism configured— primarily by Greenberg and his followers—as a high-art alternative to massmarketed kitsch.16° In fact, Hess proposed that we consider de Kooning's "discordant-threatening, passionate" Women as "violent intellectual and emotional criticism, in visual form, of the contemporaneous situation of the American woman."161 Over the space of a few years, Hess, Lader, Carmean, and Sally Yard all placed new emphasis on de Kooning's admittedly eclectic prototypes, ranging from Sumerian sculptures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Rembrandt, Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Picasso's later Surrealistinspired Synthetic Cubist nudes. John Graham's cross-eyed Two Sisters (1940) and a Camel cigarettes "T-zone" ad clipped from Time magazine were also cited as influential. It was synthesizing these sources—rather than working his way through them like Gorky—that allowed de Kooning to "follow [his] desires" and create psychologically charged images that read as alternately hilarious and ferocious.162 Carmean's essay for American Art at Mid-Century further underscored de Kooning's artistic use of the Woman theme for the revelation of personality. Not unexpectedly, the only sculptor included in Carmean and Rathbone's 1978 National Gallery exhibition was David Smith. During the late 19605, summarizing critical regard for sculpture of the previous decade, Wayne Anderson drew attention to the fact that, whereas Greenberg had noticed in 1949 that "the number of promising young sculptors in this country was proportionally much larger than that of young painters," by 1956 he had "canceled out all the Americans except Smith, with the criticism that the rest had succumbed to artiness and fanciful improvisation."163 According to Anderson, aside from Smith, sculptors at work during the most critical period of Abstract Expressionist innovation never developed a clear counterpart in quality or style to the "fairly well-defined" achievements of the painters. Despite Smith's interest in biomorphism and use of direct-metal techniques shared by others including Theodore Roszak, Peter Grippe, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, and Ibram Lassaw, as a group their three-dimensional works exhib40

Introduction

ited few if any definable themes or signs of belonging to a stylistic category. Although he had not been included in Sandler's book, which was limited to painting, Smith's avowed identification with his painter friends and the similarity of his expressed motivations to theirs (a fact reiterated by the publication of his preparatory notes for "David Smith Makes a Sculpture" and a major retrospective of his two and three-dimensional works at the Guggenheim) justified Smith's inclusion in the National Gallery's undertaking. In his introduction to the catalogue for "American Art at Mid-Century," Carmean explains that the choice of artists and works for this show was based on the issue of concentration. Either a series centering on a particular theme was represented (the case with Gorky, de Kooning, Motherwell, and Newman) or "the results of an exceptionally focused period in the artist's work" were revealed (the case with Smith, Rothko, and Pollock). "We found it necessary," Carmean writes, "in examining only a small segment of an artist's work—here thirteen out of Smith's total oeuvre of 676 works of sculpture, for example—to use a process akin to connoisseurship."164 The depth of the National Gallery of Art's study of Smith's hieratic, classically themed works of 1962 (cleverly crafted from pieces of abandoned machinery in Voltri, Italy, for the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds) was made possible by Rosalind Krauss's recently published catalogue raisonné of Smith.165 As many authors were also doing with Pollock (whose own complete catalogue of works appeared one year after Smith's), Krauss was interested in interrogating the myths associated with Smith's artistic persona. Earlier, in Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith, Krauss had observed: "A Colossus astride the scrap pile of heavy industry, Smith was pictured as the artist-welder who could bend steel to the dictates of his individual will. He was a Titan. He was Vulcan. He was whatever mythological personage journalists could find to announce the newness, the vitality, and most of all, the independence of postwar American art."166 Whereas Smith was sometimes contemptuous of such portrayals, Krauss points out that in other instances (again, not unlike Pollock) he encouraged their elaboration. By refusing to explicate specific meanings for individual series or pieces, spouting all-encompassing romantic exhortations and proclamations, and "choosing to make public only certain details of his life" (especially those emphasizing personal struggle), Smith elaborated a consciously mythic stance. When these strategies are connected to his "narrowly repetitive set of images," the overarching idea that his work was his identity seems an apt conclusion. Note also, not unlike Krasner, Smith's former wife, the printIntroduction

41

maker and sculptor Dorothy Dehner, had begun by the mid-1970s to help historians fill in the gaps left by his purposeful evasions. Dehner's testimony provided additional evidence that expressing his "resentments and passions" was basic to the development of Smith's aggressively modernist vocabulary.167 In discussing Abstract Expressionist sculptors, apparently Greenberg, Anderson, and Carmean did not consider including the work of Louise Bourgeois, though Bourgeois (who also produced artwork in two and three dimensions during the 19405 and 19503) shared a number of formal and thematic concerns with the canonical Abstract Expressionists. Bourgeois exhibited with many of them, most notably in 1945 in "Personal Statement: Painting Prophecy 1950," organized by David Porter in Washington, DC. For this show, Porter chose artists whom he believed to demonstrate "personal symbolism" and "evidence of an unique blending o f . . . Romantic and Abstract Painting."168 Like Pollock and others, Bourgeois made prints at Stanley William Hayter's New York Atelier 17, and she participated in the Studio 35 panel discussions moderated by Motherwell in April 1950, the transcripts of which, edited by Robert Goodnough, were published in Modern Artists in America.169 Frequently mislabeled a Surrealist because of her French nationality (she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved from Paris to New York in 1938), like her Abstract Expressionist peers and colleagues, Bourgeois was stimulated during the war years by the Europeans in exile in Manhattan. As Deborah Wye has clarified, however, ultimately Bourgeois would choose a differently focused aspect of their influence to explore: Through emphasis on the technique of automatism, most New York School painters moved in the direction of a pure abstraction involving large format, allover composition, atmospheric fields, and sublime and mystical content. Bourgeois, in contrast, moved toward a greater psychological literalness through representational work of a symbolic nature In effect, Surrealism encouraged her to tap the complex texture of her personal life as a source for art.170 Whereas Bourgeois has herself explained that "people misunderstood my work. I am not a surrealist, I am an existentialist," her focused examination of "the existential situation of woman in modern western society" (frequently productive of depression and alienation) and the subjective emphasis she placed on the interconnectedness of childhood memories, female eroticism, trauma, and aggression separated her trajectory and reputation from those of 42

Introduction

male colleagues such as Smith.171 Drawing equally on primitivism (a field in which her husband was expert), Bourgeois (fig. 18) was more attracted to its fetishistic possibilities than to the abstract formalism of primitive art that so stimulated Barnett Newman. While admitting the primacy of subject matter to its most original innovators, many essays written in the 19705, especially those accompanying "American Art at Mid-Century," the biggest Abstract Expressionist event of the decade, continued to exhibit a formalist bent for identifying historic sources and discussing artistic parallels, thus correcting Greenberg but not letting go of all of his values. Around the same time, other authors began to express a stronger critique of Greenberg's concept of a disinterested avant-garde while also addressing the implications of comments made by Rosenberg in regard to the relation of artists in the movement to political circumstances coinciding with their development of mastery. What it meant to make advanced art, these writers suggested, did not remain the same from the Depression throughout World War II and the subsequent cold war era. Those who adopted this more historical-materialist approach (many hailing from the United Kingdom) generally considered that Greenberg (an ardent Marxist turned Stalinhater) was wrong in asserting the complete independence of art from politics by the Abstract Expressionists. They often employed as their straw man a provocative statement made by Greenberg in a memoir first published in 1957: "Abstract art was the main issue among the painters I knew in the late thirties. Radical politics was on many people's mind, but for these particular artists Social Realism was as dead as the American Scene. (Though that is not all, by far, that there was to politics in those years: some day it will have to be told how 'anti-Stalinism,' which started out more or less as 'Trotskyism,' turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.)" Also ripe for reappraisal was Rosenberg's 1952 assertion in Art News that "the [American Action Painter's] refusal of Value did not take the form of condemnation or defiance of society, as it did after World War I. It was diffident. The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world."172 Five years earlier than that, in Possibilities, Rosenberg and Motherwell had expressed the reluctance of advanced American artists, in the aftermath of World War II, to allow themselves to be pressured into the kind of emphasis on political engagement that characterized (and weakened aesthetically) both 19303 Social Realism and early to mid-i940s propaganda for the war effort. They were, however, less rigid than Greenberg, who came to reject all Introduction

43

motivations for creativity that were extrinsic to formal considerations. In their joint editorial statement for Possibilities, published in the winter of 19471948, Rosenberg and Motherwell left the situation a bit more fluid: Naturally the deadly political situation exerts an enormous pressure. The temptation is to conclude that organized social thinking is "more serious" than the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms which that experience has made possible. Political commitment in our time means logically—no art, no literature. A great many people, however, find it possible to hang around in the space between art and political action. If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon him he must perhaps have the extremist faith in sheer possibility.173 Motherwell had made prior directed observations about the issue of artistic alienation when, for instance, he wrote in "The Modern Painter's World," published in DYNin 1944, "Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art, when it aspires to be a social science. The role of the individual is too great." He added that the modern artist has "no vital connection to society save that of the opposition"114 His connected assertion in the same text that "modern art is related to the problem of the modern individual's freedom" was cited by Max Kozloff, who wrote the first of seven major articles and one book published by various authors between 1973 and 1983 on the subject of Abstract Expressionism's "misrepresentation" in previous art history and criticism as apolitical painting. Kozloff and Serge Guilbaut (whose 1978 UCLA dissertation, written under the direction of T. J. Clark, was published as How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War) took to task the "self-congratulatory mood" of previous books such as Irving Sandler's The Triumph of American Painting. Kozloff and Guilbaut pointed out that adherence to Greenberg's taste for purity seemingly kept Sandier from recognizing the wide-ranging implications of statements by Motherwell and other Abstract Expressionist artists (another good example is Newman's "What About Isolationist Art?" of IQ4¿)175 that indicated a larger engagement with the world. For example, Guilbaut's interpretation of Gottlieb and Rothko's 1943 letter to the New York Times (which prompted Jewell to mock them as "globalists") reorients its impetus from a manifesto of aesthetic principles to a Trotskyite "action" of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors' Cultural Committee.176 44

Introduction

Guilbaut focuses his "social study of Abstract Expressionism" on reevaluating New York School artists' prime motivations for creativity during the period from 1946 to 1951, which he characterizes as a "silent interval" sandwiched between the more overtly political Depression and cold war eras. By contrast, Kozloff, Eva Cockcroft, Jane de Hart Mathews, William Hauptman, John Tagg, and David and Cécile Shapiro wrote essays in the 19703 that examined varying implications of a heretofore surprisingly underanalyzed historical fact: that the triumph of American art "occurred during the same period as burgeoning claims of American world hegemony" in the aftermath of this country's critical role in securing an Allied victory. All agreed that "a detailed knowledge of the history of the Cold War is crucial for understanding our subject and decisive for the analysis of the movement's artistic style."177 Most of these authors built on or contested points introduced by the others. Cockcroft, for instance, took issue with a remark by Kozloff: "That [the Abstract Expressionists] heroicized their tasks in a way suggestive of American Cold War rhetoric was a coincidence that must surely have gone unnoticed by rulers and ruled alike."178 She demonstrated that this was no coincidence given the role played by the Rockefellers in grooming several secretaries of state and in running the Museum of Modern Art, whose international art programs supported CIA policy. Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s catalogue for "The New American Painting," which traveled in Europe in 1958-1959 and his earlier article "Is American Art Communistic?"179 are described as influential apologias for the politically useful concept that American artists' freedom to be abstract provided a necessary counterbalance to the tight control over artistic style (limited to Realism) exerted by the likes of Hitler and Stalin. Mathews points out the irony of the ascendancy of this view of Abstract Expressionism as reinforcing the nationalistic goals of the United States in light of the attempted congressional repression (on nativist grounds) of nontraditional art and an allied condemnation of the leftist sympathies of modern artists. These were orchestrated, respectively, by Michigan Republican George Dondero and rabid anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy during the late 19405 and early 19505. The Shapiros, Guilbaut (who is French-Canadian), and later the British art historians Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock have been more directly critical of Greenberg's position in this drama.180 In particular, the non-American writers perceive Greenberg's defection from radical socialism to promotion of radical purity as having played into the hands of U.S. capitalist-imperialists, and details exposed in Annette Cox's Art-as-Politics: The Abstract ExpressionIntroduction

45

ist Avant-Garde and Society seemed to confirm Greenberg's critical route to McCarthyist leanings. By the time he wrote his introduction to Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1986), Irving Sandier felt compelled to defend Barr against charges by these "Neo-Marxists" that he had been a principal architect of the conversion of authoritarian Greenbergian Modernism into a Cold War "complaisant accessory."181 Uncovering the "concealed" motivators of New York School success became a prime impetus for more than a decade's worth of revisionist art history. The 1980s: Reading New Significations

In his 1973 overview of the movement for a popular-market book on the concepts of modern art, Charles Harrison suggests, "One wants to establish a view of Abstract Expressionism which is broadly heuristic rather than dogmatic."182 This mandate was not to be fulfilled during the 19705. Responding to the continued proliferation of disparaging comments, in particular those made by the British reviewer Peter Fuller, in 1980 Donald Kuspit suggested how new directions might still be possible for Abstract Expressionist critique: Despite the air of an arbitrary diatribe verging on the preposterous— confirmed by Fuller's gross ignorance of the American scene, his possession of the worst of clichés about it—Fuller does restore an earlier sense of Abstract Expressionism as a controversial art. This is valuable, for it puts the art sufficiently in doubt for us to feel compelled to renew our faith in it. Perhaps more is at stake than had been previously assumed, in a dimension previously unexplored yet signaled by the art.183 Subscribing to a Marxist view still recognizably popular in the United Kingdom, Fuller was indeed long on criticism and short on praise for what, as Kuspit points out, he termed the American Abstract Expressionists' descent into a "dubious fantasy world of ineffectual feeling." He did acknowledge that Motherwell, at least, managed to transcend petty subjectivity and achieve "a new way of expressing an individual response to history." As Hilton Kramer pointed out, MotherwelPs Elegies to the Spanish Republic apparently represent "the only explicitly political avowal to be found in the entire history of Abstract Expressionist painting."184 Interest in MotherwelPs more social bent continued in the work of younger art historians during the 19805, most notably Robert Mattison and Bradford Collins. Mattison's in-depth study of the artist's development and especially of MotherwelPs fascination with "images of power and vulnerability" as seen 46

Introduction

in Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, The Emperor of China, and The Homely Protestant (smaller-scale works of the early 19405) demonstrated anew the thematic and stylistic inevitability of his signature series, the Elegies.1^ Exploring the ramifications of the artist's somewhat cryptic statement that "the Spanish Elegies are not 'political,' but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot," Collins considers the more than 150 paintings that Motherwell had created on this theme by 1984 as allegories of his ethical consciousness. He points to the contradictions inherent in Motherwell's Guernica-inspired use of "modern art as a vehicle for public discourse" since the "format and subject matter attempt to keep alive a tradition which the subject, on a metaphoric level, claims is dead."186 Although the artist's desire to see himself as Picasso's rightful heir is counted as inherently futile, Motherwell, in Collins's judgment, maintained his integrity via through a valiant attempt to synthesize formalist and expressionist motivations. Other authors of the 19805 who were interested in Motherwell include Jack Flam and Dore Ashton, both of whom pointed to the modernist terms by means of which he manipulated traditionally symbolic artistic language, particularly the language of color. That Motherwell's work "shuttles back and forth between two moods: the darkly monstrous in which mythic undertones reside, and the brightly ecstatic, which confirms the vicissitudes of material daily life,"187 and that these polarities were expressed by either a restriction to black and white or the Matissean exuberance of sensual, fully saturated ochres, blues, and reds, was deemed by Ashton and Flam to be a manifestation of the artist's singular attraction to allusive nineteenth-century French poetry. Motherwell's extensive verbal commentary on the associations and materiality of color (telling Bryan Robertson, "I think of color as a thing, not an abstraction"),188 juxtaposed with quotations from his admired literary, artistic and philosophical sources, formed the basis for an influential 1980 solo exhibition. As early as Lawrence Alloway's trail-blazing essay "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism" (1973), fresh interest in significant connotations of color as a perceptive phenomenon began to replace praise for the purely syntactical properties of hue represented by Fried's notion of opticality. Five years later, Kuspit invoked Ernst Cassirer's concept of "symbolic pregnance," defined as "the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents," in a philosophical study of color field paintings by Rothko and Still.189 Like Alloway, Kuspit comes to radically different concluIntroduction

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sions about their pictures than did those (such as the artist-critic Walter Darby Bannard) who continued to adhere to Greenberg and Fried's more reductive and "aestheticizing" form of analysis. Kuspit locates Rothko's and Still's production of metaphysical meaning by abstraction (a declared intent typically ignored by the formalists) in their evident oscillation between "contradictory impulses" of the sensual and the spiritual as denoted in ambiguities of form and color. He concludes that "the sensation of suspension—of indeterminate hovering—generates the momentum of Rothko-Still pictures, and is the source of their lovely incomprehensible and esoteric implications." In general, it is Kuspit's view that "the best Abstract-Expressionist painting never resolves itself"; the more open the situation, the greater the suggestive quality.190 Alloway's argument that color associations were critical signifiers of content for the first generation, especially for color field practitioners, increasingly interested scholars writing throughout the 19805. Eschewing "a programmatic or consistent use of color symbolism," such authors as Evan Firestone, Ann Gibson, and Claude Cernuschi—in addition to Kuspit—explored how and why a number of painters in the mid-i940s began calling on color to bear the primary burden of conveying specific inner experience (representing, in Rothko's words, the "basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom").191 Firestone marshaled a wide variety of early and later statements as evidence, including a 1959 avowal by Still ("I never wanted color to be color; I never wanted texture or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse into a living spirit") and an admission by Motherwell (who had been grouped with the color field painters by Arnason and Sandier) that "my Spanish Elegies are also free association; black is death, anxiety; white is life, éclat."192 In accord with his other explorations of the New York School (elsewhere he analyzes the artists' attraction to stylistic and thematic suggestions in the writings of Herman Melville and James Joyce),193 Firestone attributes a strong component of their desire to use color to communicate significant content to the Abstract Expressionists' admiration for European literary and philosophical prototypes (in particular, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche). This did not align with Alloway's appraisal of Newman's 1948 comment that "here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it" and Still's (somewhat more paranoid) 1952 statement that "the fog has been thickened, not lifted, by those who, out of weakness or for positions of power, looked back to the Old World for means to extend their authority in this newer land."194 In "Residual Sign Systems," 48

Introduction

Alloway identified in remarks such as these a typology of binary contrasts including "dedication (America) and exhaustion (Europe), vitality and elegance, honesty and learning" that pointed to an ethical connection between American creativity and primitivist energy.195 Gibson continued this argument, asserting that the color field artists' stated intention of including philosophical and psychological content in works whose structure privileged color instead of form implies "a substantial connection" to the concept of regression. She borrowed this "two-pronged" notion, which involves "the idea of going back in either personal time (to infancy or further) [or] that of going back in cultural time (to a more primitive societal state)" from The Apocalyptic Vision (1979), a book about Franz Marc by Frederick Levine. Under the influence of Graham's System and Dialectics of Art, Gibson points out, Newman, Gottlieb, Still, and Rothko came to believe that "color was best suited to undertake the role of generating an intuitive, primal union of self and environment." She establishes the centrality to these artists of connections made by John Graham between primitive culture and creative potential originating in the collective unconscious.196 By the time Gibson wrote her article, Stephen Polcari had already published his investigation of the intellectual roots of Mark Rothko, in which the Jungian archetypal components of this artist's early 19405 biomorphic reconfigurations of primordial nature figure prominently. After expressing "kinship with primitive and archaic art" in the letter that he and Gottlieb sent in the summer of 1943 to the New York Times, Rothko, on a radio show the following fall, expounded on their idea (also shared with Newman) that identification "with the primeval and atavistic" had to be redescribed "through our own experience."197 As Polcari firmly established and Jeffrey Weiss detailed further, for the color field painters this experience included formal study, or at least informal interest in anthropology and science, and reflected the residual effects of wartime fears and trepidations, especially about the atomic bomb.198 In addition to a survey of primitivist tendencies and imagery in Abstract Expressionism written by Kirk Varnedoe for the Museum of Modern Art's controversial show " Trimitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern,"199 1985 saw the publication of W.Jackson Rushing's "Ritual and Myth: Native American Art and Abstract Expressionism" in "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985," an exhibition spearheaded by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum. In "Ritual and Myth" Rushing postulates explicit prototypes in Indian tribes of the Northwest Coast and elsewhere and details fully a nexus of Introduction

49

Native American mythic sources for both color-field and gestural Abstract Expressionists, especially Pollock. These sources include Jung, Graham, the Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen (in exile in Mexico), and the December 1943 Amerindian issue of Paalen's influential magazine DYN, as well as exhibitions held in New York in the 19405 at the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Rushing also highlights Newman's curatorial efforts for the Betty Parsons Gallery, especially "Northwest Coast Indian Painting" (1946) and "The Ideographic Picture" (1947). Newman's essay for the latter has already been cited as a crucial document for identifying the goals of Abstract Imagism, especially the attainment of Sublimity. This topic was explored further by Michael Zakian and by Auping in an essay on Newman's continuing influence included in "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments."200 Two years later Rushing published a probing study of the impact of Northwest Coast tribal art on Newman based on a lecture that Rushing presented in the 1986 College Art Association panel that reconsidered meaning in Abstract Expressionism. In this study he explains how the highly intellectual artist's attraction to theories of Nietzsche (on Apollonian-Dionysian duality), Jung (on the rejuvenating powers of myth), and the art historian Wilhelm Worringer (on abstraction and empathy) coalesced to create an attitude toward pictorial content that considers "tragedy as the artistic redemption of chaos." Others writing in the 19805, including the British critic David Sylvester the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, renewed attention (first paid by Hess and Rosenberg) to the possibility that sources for Newman's mature paintings were also rooted in his Jewish background.201 On the basis of Gershom Scholem's discussion of the esoteric ideas of Rabbi Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-century mystic from Tsfat (located in present-day northern Israel), in 1971 Hess postulated that there was a basis in the Kabbalah for Newman's vertical stripe "imagery." According to Matthew Baigell, Hess described Newman as having "captured on the pictorial surface the very moment of creation that Rabbi Luria described—the moment of the first ray of the light of creation, before matter, and therefore space, became differentiated." Read thus, Newman's Onement I, his first "zip," or stripe, painting, is "a complex symbol, in the purest sense, of Genesis itself."202 This understanding provided a basis for Hess's humanistic (as opposed to Christian theological) interpretation of Newman's Stations of the Cross. During the 19808 Anna C. Chave similarly proposed the presence of innately religious "imagery" in Rothko's apparently non-objective signature 50

Introduction

paintings, which were composed of lightly brushed hovering rectangles of color (see plate 7). In Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, Chave argued that the canvases Rothko painted after 1949 "keep alluding to received pictorial codes, even as he set about effacing them." In 1952 he commented that "abstract art never interested me; I always painted realistically. My present paintings are realistic." This predates a similar assertion that Pollock made not long before his death in 1956.203 Rejecting what was regularly being written about him, Rothko told another critic in the 19505, "You might as well get one thing straight. Pm not an abstractionist . . . Pm not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else."204 What he was interested in, according to Chave, was intensifying expression of universally meaningful subjects—such as birth and death—by providing visual analogues to the pictorial conventions of sacred imagery. To provide a typical example of how this was done, Chave compared the blurry shapes in Rothko's Number rj (1947) with those of a characteristic Renaissance Madonna ana Child by Giovanni Bellini and his workshop. She found similar "oblique and nearly effaced" parallels between other Rothko compositions and traditional Christian depictions of the entombment and the pietà. Notwithstanding the fact that he was born Marcus Rothkowitz to a Russian Jewish family, Chave considered Rothko to be a religious man without a doctrine; his fundamentally pessimistic outlook, which eventually led to suicide, certainly ran counter to Judaism's primary injunction to "choose life."205 Whereas Chave shifts Rosenblum's suggestion that Rothko's works update the mysticism invested in landscapes by nineteenth-century Romantic painters to the implication of traces of a more figurative religious vocabulary, Claude Cernuschi, although agreeing that there is subjective content in Rothko's signature canvases, rejected the notion of a relation of the artist's forms to any fixed symbols or conventions. Rather, Cernuschi likened Rothko's private visual grammar to the arbitrary nature of the sign as delineated in Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics.™ According to Saussure, unlike the way a symbol works to evoke recognition, the association of a linguistic sign with a specific object is abstract and therefore acquires meaning by repetition, not imitation. Cernuschi postulated that the sacred nature of the pictorial dramas that Rothko desired to re-create was achieved solely by tonal and positional manipulations that take on their own signification, not by oblique references to traditional renderings of subjects of a religious nature. The type of semiotic interpretation that Cernuschi advanced for understanding Rothko was broadened to encompass additional painters207 and Introduction

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ancillary points made by Saussure, С. S. Peirce, Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and other structuralist linguists and anthropologists in Ann Gibson's essay for "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments," organized by Auping. Her text, she explains, was written specifically to demonstrate that "an old tool (rhetoric) may be adapted to a new purpose (looking at the ways in which subject matter and form are related in Abstract Expressionism)."208 Gibson documents the successive employment by a variety of artists in the 19405 and 19503 of the rhetorical devices of symbol, metaphor, icon, mystic oxymoron, and narrative allegory. She explains that although not every artist used each of these devices, in one way or another references to these diverse literary tropes were critical to the Abstract Expressionist elaboration of content by abstract means. Rothko, for example, refused certain aspects of the latter two (or rejected them outright) but capitalized on implications of all of the others. Gibson details the way meaning in Abstract Imagist works such as Rothko's can be understood more fully by applying visually the linguistic categories established by C. S. Peirce; especially critical is his differentiation between symbol and icon. Symbols refer by virtue of social agreement, whereas icons are linked to the thing represented by "exhibiting that thing." According to Gibson "So defined, Peirce's metaphoric icon is most similar to Newman's 'living thing'—a conception of painting in which the work of art embodies in various ways that to which it refers, rather than merely standing for it in absentia." A sign, of course, is recognized as iconic only by viewer agreement. Thus, by the time Rothko arrived at his "multiforms" (transitional between the earlier explicitly biomorphic imagery and his mature style), his paintings "could be said to collapse the traditional dichotomy between sensual experience and representation" (fig 6). Rothko achieved this synthesis by moving past forms that alluded, however obliquely, either to the Jungian "sea of the unconscious" or to traditional religious subject matter and creating instead "forms that seemed themselves to float and refract light rather than to refer to things that do." Gibson clarifies this idea: "As Peirce's definition indicates, real iconic status is only achieved when the distinction between the real and the copy, the signifier and the signified, coalesces in the viewer's mind. In other words, when one can no longer distinguish between the art and what it means, when the art is what it means, then it is iconic."209 In her discussion of Newman's masterwork VirHeroicus Sublimis, Gibson highlights the ambiguity of the figure-ground relation (which metaphorizes void and solid) as indicative of the artist's adoption of the mystic oxymoron in 52

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order to create meaning. Thus, one way Newman achieved the Sublime was deliberately to construct his paintings so that they could only be understood in contradictory ways, reversing the regularity and limits imposed by the classical category of the Beautiful. Likewise, Gibson describes how Rothko appreciated the suggestiveness of irony, which involves saying less than one means, or even its opposite. She sees de Kooning, Krasner, and Motherwell— all of whom used the recycling techniques of collage with great distinction— as applying the intertextuality characteristic of allegory, which "redeems the past for the present," in order to elaborate Abstract Expressionist content. Pollock's return to figuration in the 19505 is described as replacing his earlier "progression away from ways of referring in which the sensory properties of the art look like (are mimetically, or metonymically related to) those of the referent" with "qualities that functioned like those of a model outside the work."210 By 1953, when he created his painting titled Portrait and a Dream, in which a "not sober" self-portrait is juxtaposed with a savage and erotic confrontation that reprises his earlier Moon Woman fixation,211 Pollock was integrating metonymy and metaphor in the allegorical sense (fig. 19). Another essay commissioned by Auping for "Critical Developments" also investigates the signature works of Pollock from a semiotic point of view. The authority of these 1947-1950 canvases had recently been confirmed once again in a hugely influential retrospective held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Richard ShifPs "Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism" suggests that we re-view the marks made by gestural Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock as "markings," taking them more " 'literally' as actual physical imprints or impressions." In order to do this, a "nuanced theoretical vocabulary" is again required; especially important is an understanding of the difference between Peirce's icon and index. "An iconic sign," Shift0points out, "works by resemblance; it shares some discernible quality with its object," whereas "an indexical sign works by causal connection; it refers to its own origin by 'representing' or indicating the physical process that brought it into being."212 Iconicity (one image resembling another) is therefore the opposite of indexicality, a matter of performance rather than appearance. After a short discussion of the coexistence of iconicity and indexicality in de Kooning's Woman series, Shiff describes Pollock as the "ultimate painting performer," an interpretation encouraged by the more than five hundred black and white still photographs taken by Hans Namuth of the artist in the process of painting such classic poured pictures as Autumn Rhythm. Visitors to the Introduction

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1982 Pompidou exhibition were assaulted by gigantic blow-ups of some of these in which Pollock, under the spell of his creativity, seems to move around his canvas like a matador or dancer, wholly engaged in an intense dialogue with the drips and spatters he is making. "It was great drama," Namuth said of his first glimpse of Jackson Pollock in the studio: "the flame of explosion when the paint hit the canvas; the dancelike movement; the eyes tormented before knowing where to strike next; the tension, then the explosion again. My hands were trembling."213 Barbara Rose's 1978 publication in France of L'Atelier de Jackson Pollock reproduced a larger number of Namuth's photos than any previous text. In a two-part article appearing in the March 1979 issue of Arts Magazine, Rose suggested that Namuth's use of high-speed film and the style of motion photography common for stalking wild animals "capture Pollock's spontaneity in images that freeze the artist's frenzied movements into a blur of urgency," arguing further that these characteristics had "attached themselves as additional meanings to his works to a degree that they began to color the perception of his paintings."214 Shiff points to what is obvious in Namuth's images: that "Pollock's manner of tracing a line from above, which resembled that of the Indian painters, transferred his gesture from hand to body"; as a result, the artist's poured pictures obviously index his successive movements through space.215 (Newman's use of masking tape, pulled off the canvas to create his "zips," is cited as another example of how one of Abstract Expressionism's major practitioners "performed an appearance.") Furthermore, Shiff establishes that in works by artists influenced by Pollock—such as Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who imitated Pollock's drips in papier-mache—the markings of Pollock's indexicality were subsequently converted (often employing parody or irony) into recognizable iconic signs. The idea that Pollock and Newman opened up new ways of thinking for their followers (rather than, as in de Kooning's case, merely providing an example to imitate for gestural painters of the 19505) provided a categorical impetus to réévaluation of Abstract Expressionism during the 1980s.216 Numerous book-length studies of Pollock's art appeared at about this time,217 the most notorious of which, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, advanced interconnected theories that the innovative techniques of "Jack the Dripper" had been inspired by watching his father urinate on a rock and that Pollock's personal and artistic anxieties were caused by latent homosexual tendencies. Elizabeth Langhorne further elaborated her Jungian theories, and Kuspit, as well as Francis V. 54

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O'Connor, weighed in with their own psychoanalytic interpretations. O'Connor's exhibition "Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings 1951-53," held at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1980, zeroed in on the undervalued period of Pollock's return to more recognizable images dredged from his unconscious. These he "drew" (the artist's own word) with black enamel on unprimed canvas, either by pouring directly from a can, letting paint drip off a loaded brush, or squirting with a basting syringe (as seen in Portrait and a Dream). O'Connor considers the psychosexual implications of these (ejaculatory) methods as well as "the archetypal fact of Pollock's birth trauma: choked by the cord and, according to his mother, born 'as black as a stove.'"218 Carmean provided an alternate explanation of this series, connecting the drawings in black enamel on canvas to a little-known architectural collaboration between Pollock and the sculptor Tony Smith, the design for a never-built Catholic church destined for somewhere on Long Island. Carmean's opinion that these works also reference traditional Christian iconography was hotly contested by Rosalind Krauss.219 Two other notable exhibitions, one held at the beginning of the decade in East Hampton and Manhattan and the other mounted in 1989 at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, focused on the fact that, all the while he was creating his prototypical works, Pollock's wife Lee Krasner had been trying, with varied success, to have an important painting career of her own. Barbara Rose, in a show seen at Guild Hall and the Grey Art Center at New York University in 1981, promoted the idea that Pollock's and Krasner's was "a working relationship," in which each contributed to the other's progress (although Krasner had apparently suppressed this information because it did not square with the accepted view of Pollock). Rose augmented this thesis in her catalogue for Krasner's first retrospective in the United States, which traveled from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to three additional venues, culminating in a joint presentation in 1985 in Brooklyn and Manhattan.220 In two articles based on my dissertation, which examined Krasner's career up to Pollock's death, and in "Lee Krasner—Jackson Pollock: Künstlerpaare— Kimstlerfreunde," the first joint showing of their work in Europe, a somewhat more complicated view of their interaction emerged. Based on interviews with Krasner and other artists, critics, dealers, and friends who knew them as a couple, another picture develops, one that reveals "a charged web of dependence and autonomy."221 As already established, most critical to Krasner's inclusion with the firstgeneration male pioneers were canvases of the 1946-1949 series she called her Introduction

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Little Images. Using a paint tube top or a stiff brush, or pouring from a small can of enamel, to create these Krasner worked on a flat surface as Pollock did, but on a table top, not on the floor. She, too, designed allover compositions with no focal point; however, because none was larger than three feet on any side, there was no question of walking around or into these paintings as Pollock had begun to do. Whereas, as Seitz, Eugene C. Goossen, and others have established, the impact and quite often the "heroic" contextual meanings attached to the New York School have relied to a significant degree on a shared tendency to work on oversized canvases, a 1989 traveling exhibition organized by Jeffrey Wechsler demonstrated that Krasner was not the only artist for whom Abstract Expressionism also had "other dimensions." Moreover, Wechsler's enterprise was one of the first group shows to challenge the usual roster of participants.222 Discussions with Irving Sandier and Sam Hunter that were published in the catalogue centered largely on the need to redefine the movement as a "coherent stylistic entity" with broader stylistic boundaries and a larger cast of characters than those included in prior books and exhibitions. Paul Schimmel's 1986 show "The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism," provided an interesting, slightly different look at an even wider selection of earlier works associated with the budding Abstract Expressionists, including some of their colleagues who had not so far made the final cut. This show, which started out at the Newport Harbor Museum in California and made appearances at the Walker Art Center and the Whitney, presented a range of works on paper from 1938 to 1948 by both Americans and European exiles in New York in order to demonstrate the extensive and catalytic effect of borrowings and transformations of European vocabulary and technique.223 The urge to provide an overview of Abstract Expressionist innovation and to expand its cultural breadth produced, all within a few years of each other, Auping's "Critical Developments," Gibson and Polcari's session at the College Art Association and the related issue of Art Journal, the anthologies edited by Clifford Ross and David and Cécile Shapiro, and Frascina's compendium Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. At intervals throughout the early 19803, Donald Kuspit, editor of the UMI Research Press series "Studies in the Fine Arts: Art Theory," fostered publication of three doctoral dissertations that focused on articulating the polarities inherent in Abstract Expressionist criticism. In these, Annette Cox, Stewart Buettner, and Stephen

56

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Foster expanded material (primarily on Greenberg and Rosenberg) that Phyllis Rosenzweig had surveyed in "The Fifties: Aspects of Criticism in New York," an essay that accompanied a 1980 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden exhibition. Two years after Rosenzweig's summary was published, a differently motivated investigation of Greenberg's partisanship appeared in a special issue of the magazine Critical Inquiry. The British art historian T. J. Clark, now teaching in the United States, had employed that magazine's subtitle, The Politics of Interpretation, in a symposium paper sponsored by the University of Chicago's Center for Continuing Education. Clark's socially based reconsideration of "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art" was followed by Michael Fried's verbal response. Both were reproduced in Critical Inquiry, and Frascina added Clark's subsequent 1983 rejoinder to Fried in Pollock and After. As might be expected, Clark declared up front that he was primarily interested in "pressing home a Marxist reading of texts which situate themselves within the Marxist tradition." At issue were Greenberg's 1939 and 1940 essays "AvantGarde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Laocoon," in which, as we have seen, key arguments were introduced that would later be amplified when Greenberg discussed works by artists associated with Abstract Expressionism. In each of these early articles, Greenberg declared the thrust of the avantgarde to be a causal reaction to bourgeois materialism and the "leveling down of culture" that occurred during the rise of late capitalism. Clark interpreted the formal logic of Greenberg's resultant call for purity as bound up with "practices of negation" (re)presented by the extreme valorization of flatness in Greenberg's recipe for Modernism. Clark did not agree with Greenberg's vehement belief that "art can substitute itself for the values capitalism has made valueless."224 In his rebuttal, Fried challenged Clark on the basis that he had fallen prey to "certain erroneous assumptions" about Modernism expounded by Greenberg; despite Fried's belief that Greenberg should be considered "the foremost critic of new painting and sculpture of our time," he claims the right to advance his own "alternative conception of the modernist enterprise." Fried takes Clark to task for never discussing specific instances of the so-called negation that Modernist art represents and for his refusal "to accept the proposition that with the advent of modernism art becomes or is revealed to be c a provider of value in its own right.'" Modernism, Fried avers, does not discard the essential in order to reflect "the incoherence and contradictoriness of

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modem capitalist society" because, optimistically "establishing his work's nontrivial identity as painting," the Modernist artist is first and foremost interested in art, not in social critique.225 In "Abstract Expressionism: 'New and Improved,'" his 1988 Art Journal editorial statement, Stephen Polcari disagreed with both Clark and Fried; he and his co-editor decided to question such an exchange of "new myths for old" in "redefining Abstract Expressionism." Polcari's assertion that the movement "is a historical product of a unique moment" dismisses Fried's self-sufficiency theory, but he is equally unconvinced by any "critical scheme [that] presents Abstract Expressionism as responding to and participating in the political, critical, and economic events of the late 19305 through 19503." In Polcari's estimation, clinging to, maintaining, even (like Clark) continuing to argue about "fundamentally flawed" interpretations first formulated by Greenberg and Rosenberg decades earlier manifests naïveté and arrested critical development. "An art as rich as Abstract Expressionism, which at times aspires to the layered complexity and content of Joyce, cannot be reduced by its alleged 'Imperialist' supporters or its opponents to either a formalist search for flatness or a vehicle for political sloganeering." Polcari asserts that a "responsible, informed sociopolitical history of the movement" had not yet been written.226 The 1990s: Re(de)fining Abstract Expressionism

What avenues did Polcari and Gibson's call for reassessment propose in order to provide fresh directions for Abstract Expressionist criticism that would not result in a mere placement of new wine in old bottles? Gibson, recognizing that all interpretations eventually, in turn, become fodder for additional revisions, acknowledges, "In calling this issue of Art Journal 'New Myths for Old,' Stephen Polcari and I recall Claude Lévi-Strauss's comment on his own The Raw and the Cooked: 'this book on myths is itself a kind of myth.'"227 Both editors advocated for a more synthetic approach that would incorporate to a greater degree newer tendencies in art history that so far "have only nibbled at Abstract Expressionism." In her more generally focused review of the field essay, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art," contemporaneously published in the Art Bulletin, Wanda Corn proposed that the key to innovative hermeneutics might simply depend on "what questions you ask."228 Beginning in the early 19905, the nature and substance of questions about Abstract Expressionism took a number of turns that, building on Polcari's recipe and Gibson's prophecy, involved re(de)fining interactions, both contextual and artistic. 58

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The final decade of the twentieth century began with the appearance of a number of serious monographs intent on assessing the movement anew. The first of these were produced between 1990 and 1993 by David Anfam, Polcari, and Michael Leja (whose doctoral work on Abstract Expressionism had first been introduced in Auping's Critical Developments).229 Nineteen ninety-three also saw the publication of David Thistlewood's American Abstract Expressionism, produced to accompany the Tate Gallery Liverpool exhibition "Myth-Making: Abstract Expressionist Painting from the United States," as well as Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties, an entry in Yale University Press's Modern Art Practices and Debates series, produced in conjunction with London's Open University. Jonathan Harris's chapter in the latter, "Modernism and Culture in the USA, 1930-1960," included an extensive analysis of Abstract Expressionism and the politics of criticism. In 1990 Anfam, a British expert on Clyfford Still who would subsequently edit Mark Rothko's catalogue raisonné, was charged with presenting Abstract Expressionism to a lay audience (his book is one of Thames & Hudson's "World of Art" paperback surveys). Anfam first rehearses various prior accounts of the movement, ranging from the popular and satirical (including Tom Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word and Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post cover for January 13,1962, Abstract and Concrete: The Connoisseur, which depicts an elderly gentleman with umbrella and hat staring in wonder at a Pollock drip painting) to Greenberg's Modernism and Guilbaut's polemics. Anfam concludes: "Our problem now seems less that these various accounts ring true or false than that they remain too exclusive for art and artists who above all strove to be all-inclusive. Few artistic phenomena this century push us further towards Coleridge's quixotic wish for "one central perspective point" where all the fragments of truth will knot together. Few also elude it so consistently"230 Anfam not only chooses to include David Smith with the painters because of shared formative influences and themes but he also adds the photographer Aaron Siskind, whose pictures of urban city walls often resemble the black-and-white gestural compositions of Kline. At prominent points throughout his text, Anfam expounds his belief (which puts a somewhat different spin on Seitz's primary thesis) that "a traumatic Zeitgeist is discerned easily enough in Abstract Expressionism's daemonic figures and fractured forms." The "sombre ritualistic atmosphere, unsparing surfaces, and exacerbated drawing" produced by its major practitioners result in "a more brutal aesthetic norm than the spiritual and sometimes Utopian abstraction" of European precursors.231 Introduction

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In a separate study of Clyfford Still's early career published in Burlington Magazine, Anfam sees this pessimism and darkness of vision as exemplified in Still's statement that his paintings of the mid-i94Os ( just beginning to take on their mature form) were "of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated" (fig. 20).232 Writing for the Tate Liverpool catalogue, Anfam emphasizes that such narrative tendencies coexisted with the iconic throughout Abstract Expressionism, an aporia that significantly problematizes any attempt to establish clear-cut boundaries for discussing it as a style. As he describes it, a "potent desire to embody meaning while riven by the sense of its undoing" was a prime creative motivation not only for Still but for a significant number of the Abstract Expressionists.233 In "Of War, Demons, and Negation," a lengthy review article for the fall 1993 issue of the British journal Art History, Anfam weighed in with his opinion of recent books about Pollock, a new edited volume by Guilbaut, Ross's and the Shapiros' anthologies, and Polcari's Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. Because it has been so well researched, Anfam observes, Abstract Expressionism "is not a field likely to be transformed in the near future by any sudden abundance of new facts," and the outcome of this situation has been the escalation of subsidiary issues. Moreover, he notes, as a consequence of critical or scholarly ambition and other reputational concerns, writing with the notion that "the Authorized Version of Abstract Expressionism is the story that, ipso facto, exposes the fictiveness of its rivals" has been prevalent since the movement's beginnings. Polcar i is deemed by Anfam to have "leapt boldly" past such problems as Naifeh and Smith's overdetermined interpretations of Pollock's compositions angled to prove that "they represent (psychological) alter egos."234 Anfam shares with Polcari a distinct attraction to the oeuvres of Rothko and Still, as well as to the identification of a crisis mentality as being significantly formative not only for these two artists but also for the larger group. In earlier essays on the intellectual roots of Rothko and Still's paintings, Polcari introduced major themes that he would elaborate and apply more comprehensively in his 1991 monograph. These include the convictions that art history must encompass a close study of the ideas that underpin visual forms, that a core of (Jungian) mythical themes (birth, death, and regeneration) remained vital throughout the Abstract Expressionist movement, and that the most seminal of its practitioners were "children of their time." Polcari restated his opposition to accepting the versions of the story propagated by

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Greenberg and Rosenberg and remained skeptical of the highly politicized Cold War interpretations still being generated in Britain.235 In their stead, Polcari applies a perspective that encompasses both greater attention to interdisciplinary cultural parallels with figures such as the modernist dance pioneer Martha Graham and a more synthesizing analysis of Abstract Expressionist art as a reaction to the overall cultural climate of the interwar years and the World War II era. (Its artists, he states, were seeking a secular form of spiritual "redemption through modern form and thought") "Flying Tigers: Painting and Sculpture in New York, 1939-1946," organized in 1985 by Kermit Champa and his students at Brown University, was the only prior study to bracket out for such intense scrutiny the impact on the movement of the "cosmic struggle" over the fate of civilization represented by World War II.236 Abstract Expressionism, Polcari contends, "constitutes a sacred and profane allegorical epic, a biblical and ritual drama and romance for the modern age."237 Michael Leja took an equally ambitious approach in his book-length study Refraining Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1Q4OS, but his arguments are based on a narrower set of premises grounded in Foucauldian and Althusserian theory.238 Another doctoral student of Clark's, Leja favors historical context and, following his professor, takes a more socially premised (although not strictly Marxist) point of view. It is Leja's stated intent to examine the bourgeois roots and effects of the individualism for which Abstract Expressionist painting stands as symbolic and to expose its fictive, somewhat less than fully triumphant nature. Although he devotes the first part to the formation of the New York avant-garde and in another section concentrates on the "mythmakers" (Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman, and Still), Pollock is Leja's primary protagonist. In his most important chapter, "Narcissus in Chaos: Subjectivity, Ideology, Modern Man and Woman," Leja wraps up his major themes by means of analysis of the reception of Pollock's signature works as an essential case study. Popular culture, especially the "middle-brow" variety (which Greenberg abhorred), plays a much greater role in Leja's speculations than original ideas propagated by intellectuals, thinkers, and writers of the 1930s, 19305, and 19405, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, James Frazer, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Ruth Benedict, and Joseph Campbell, all important to the '"propaedeutics" explained by Polcari. Instead, Leja locates the erosion of the self as a centered subject in the polarities exposed by "Modern

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Man" literature, a pop psychology genre of the same era. (Pollock and Krasner owned a prime example, Harvey Fergusson's Modern Man: His Belief and Behavior of 1936.) Leja also examines another reflection of this discourse in Hollywood's fixation with "vestiges of barbarism" as seen in contemporaneous masterpieces of the film noir genre. These influences and parallels allow for a more anxious and irrational interpretation of reverberations of primitivism and unconscious instinct on the collective psyche of the Abstract Expressionist generation.239 He clinches his argument by comparing contemporaneous descriptions of the effects of Pollock's allover paintings to the staple metaphor of the individual being drawn into a web, vortex, or labyrinth not of his own making so common in film noir and "Modern Man" literature.240 Thus, Pollock was not the isolated "naïve poet" or Romantic genius so many critics and art historians, in one way or another, have had such a stake in promoting; his neuroses (expressed in paint) were, rather, a symptom of the postatomic era.241 In an important subsection titled "Gender and Subjectivity," Leja acknowledges that his primary thesis—the way in which Abstract Expressionist painting correlated with the "Modern Man" master narrative of the 19405 and early 19503—incorporates and perhaps instantiates gender bias. Averring that the movement's aura of masculinity was "a crucial component of cold war U.S. national identity, differentiating the nation politically and culturally from a Europe portrayed as weakened and effeminate,"242 Leja judges this masculinist thrust as having discouraged women from attempting to align themselves with it.243 Ann Gibson, in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, published a few years later, advances a more extreme proposition—that the movement's model for supposedly universal subjectivity was actually white, heterosexual, and male—arguing that its distinguishing aspects, as represented stylistically in works by its key practitioners, were subtly (and sometimes quite clearly) gendered masculine. Whereas Leja acknowledges that the "heroic" model of Americanism that the Abstract Expressionist painters helped shape in the 19405 "seems not to have been easily extended to women," Gibson posits that a significant number of women artists who attempted to show their works during this period should be credited with a different kind of heroism, one forged in the face of male discrimination.244 As Gibson did in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, two complementary exhibitions, "Art of This Century: The Women" (shown at the PollockKrasner House and Study Center in East Hampton and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice) and "Women and Abstract Expressionism: 62

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Painting and Sculpture, 1945-1959," organized by Joan Marter for the Sidney Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in New York City, also exposed the 19405 tendency to separate art made by women into a noncompetitive category, calling attention to the less-than-credible criteria frequently used for women artists whose work did garner consideration.245 Marter, a feminist art historian intent on reexamining circumstances that inhibited success for women in the early to mid-twentieth century, points out that most of the Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors of the first and second generations who were presented in her exhibition were either dismissed by critics as derivative of the men, praised for their comeliness rather than their talent, or damned with faint, gender-biased praise.246 Krasner, of course, is an archetype for several aspects of this "profoundly social predicament."247 In "Lee Krasner as L. K.," first published in 1989 and incorporated into Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe (1997), Anne M. Wagner details Peggy Guggenheim's lack of interest (actually disdain) for Krasner's artistic talents and quotes from reviews that either accused Krasner of "tidying up" her husband's paintings or minimized the works in her first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery by describing them as " 'quiet,' 'discreet,' 'harmonious,' 'restrained and pacific,' 'majestic and thoughtful,' 'quietly innocuous,' 'sweetly cultivated,' and, yes, 'worked out with feminine acuteness.'"248 Like Leja and Gibson, Wagner draws on theory in her analysis of Krasner's dilemma. Much of the chapter called "Krasner's Fictions" in Three Artists (Three Women) is devoted to defining Krasner's "scripted" role as Pollock's ideal viewer, using the ideas of Paul de Man as a template.249 Some of Wagner's arguments about Pollock and Krasner also appeared in a compendium of essays about literary and artistic couples of the twentieth century, Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. The interpersonal and interaesthetic dynamic of another Abstract Expressionist duo not included in that anthology, David Smith and Dorothy Dehner (plate 8), has become a focus for Marter's scholarly attention. Her 1995 lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, "Arcadian Nightmares: The Evolution of David Smith and Dorothy Dehner's Work at Bolton Landing"250 revealed that Smith's celebrated World War II imagery (his Medals for Dishonor [1939-1940], Jurassic Bird [1946], and Royal Bird [1947-1948], in particular) exhibited images and symbols being explored simultaneously by Dehner in prints and drawings (figs. 21-22).251 Moreover, some of these themes of violence, sexual aggression, and victimization had personal immediacy for Dehner, as they did for Introduction

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Bourgeois. As Motherwell pointed out in his eulogy in Art International, Bolton Landing, where Smith and Dehner lived together until their divorce in 1952, "was not an especially comfortable place, especially for women." (When Dehner visited there in 1958 after Smith's second marriage had also dissolved, he referred to his sculptures, dispersed throughout the fields, as "girls" who would never run away.)252 Marter exposes the extent to which the competitiveness and sometimes the physical volatility of the couple's complex relationship (unlike Krasner, Dehner modeled for her husband) became a source of artistic expresson for each. In Reframing Abstract Expressionism, Leja analyzes the psychodynamic potential of a 1953 photograph taken by Hans Namuth of Willem de Kooning posing in his studio with his wife Elaine (fig. 23). Flanking an early state of one of the more belligerent paintings in his Woman series, Elaine is seated in the middle ground on a stool, and Willem stands with arms folded in the foreground. Leja's discussion of this image illuminates how neatly it "juxtaposes the two kinds of female presence that occupied the [masculinist] space of Abstract Expressionism."253 Carol Duncan's "The MoMA's Hot Mamas," published in 1989, had ventured a related though more broadly conceived opinion that placement in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art of de Kooning's Woman I and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, two of recent art history's most important female images, served to guide the viewer's perception of modernist artistic achievement as a males-only enterprise. In particular, de Kooning's Woman I, "a big, bad mama—vulgar, sexual, and dangerous," hanging at the threshold to MoMA's presentation of the Abstract Expressionists' collective breakthrough to "pure, abstract, nonreferential transcendence," seemed to catalyze the virile "triumph of art and a self-creating spirit."254 In making his comparisons to film noir, Leja points out that de Kooning's Women interconnect comedy and tragedy in a way not dissimilar to Hollywood movies of this type. Kent Minturn has since shown that de Kooning was indeed an ardent fan who admitted to being inspired by the cinema and sometimes referred to his figures as "big city dames," a moniker used by hardboiled, misogynistic film noir characters.255 As Minturn points out, by 1955 Seitz had already recognized parallels between de Kooning's Women and sexy Hollywood femmes fatales with their "devious smiles and protruding breasts": "De Kooning's heroine is not wife, mother, or even mistress but darling of the bar stool and barber-shop magazine, ideal of a million cinema-going males, the indulgent strumpet, a carnal product of wish fulfillment and commercial-

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ism, frightening in her orgiastic gaiety. Excoriated with blood reds and ugly slashes of charcoal, her effect is unprecedented."256 Of course, as Hess recognized in calling de Kooning's iconic Women "ferociously idolic mother-goddesses,"257 such matriarchal prototypes (the kind that caused so much patriarchal anxiety in the 19405 and 19505) reflected prehistoric, biblical, and mythological sources as well (e.g., Eve, Clytemnestra). As detailed by David Cateforis, with the exception of Greenberg, who steadfastly critiqued these canvases in a Late Cubist formal context, "many of their initial viewers already perceived their meanings in highly gendered terms."258 This reference was reinforced by the artist's suggestion in 1956 that "maybe I was painting the woman in me."259 Fiona Barber proposes, however, that there may be other ways of reading de Kooning's Women than Carol Duncan's (and Griselda Pollock's) negative assessment of their emphasis on mouths, spread legs, and genitalia as complicit with the terms of pornography.260 (De Kooning famously pronounced flesh to be "the reason why oil paint was invented.")261 Perhaps, however, the "marginality to feminism" of de Kooning's admittedly "convulsive" paintings is not so absolute.262 Instead of seeing the Women as "tropes of aggressive male sexuality," Barber suggests that Judith Butler's concept of the performative, which implies "a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning,"263 might be applied to reinterpret them: "A painting such as Woman I thus becomes the site of a gender identity that is enacted rather than pregiven, one whose active construction by feminist spectators has been given stability through the existing terms of feminist art history."264 Views such as Butler's that gender is socially constructed and performed rather than biologically innate, a perspective that obtained great urgency in the 19803, also affected scholars studying Jackson Pollock. When Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner organized "The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation" at MIT's List Visual Arts Center in 1995, Perchuk pronounced "certain processes of masculine display" to be at the core of Pollock's creative urge. Perchuk suggested that a masculine form of the syndrome of "womanliness as masquerade" (that is, role-playing for purposes of overcompensation), identified by the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, was "an irreducible component of [Pollock's signature] works' acceptance by the culture during the social and political era in which they were produced and later canonized."265 He points out that, five years earlier, T. J. Clark had already made explicit certain connections that were basic to this point of view: "For the drip paintings are clearly implicated in a whole informing metaphorics

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of masculinity: the very concepts that seem immediately to apply to them— space, scale, action, trace, energy, 'organic intensity,' 'being in the painting,' being 'One'—are all, among other things, operators of sexual difference."266 As we have seen, both ejaculatory and urinary interpretations of Pollock's urge to paint (the latter seemingly reinforced by his having relieved himself in front of guests in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace) have been rife.267 Overdoing physicality, taking risks, and perpetrating violence are taken to authenticate manliness in the same way that the display of glamour and passive behaviors fulfills socially scripted womanhood. What Amelia Jones designates the "Pollockian performative" refers to a set of athletic behaviors seemingly documented in Namuth's films and photographs (which play down the meditative phase of Pollock's artistic process) and underlined by their extensive "captioning" by Goodnough, as well as being supported by the macho bullfight metaphor at the heart of Rosenberg's concept of Action Painting (the canvas as arena). Whether or not Pollock actually was Rosenberg's model American Action Painter, Amelia Jones sees him as the primary exemplar of "a profound philosophical shift in conceptions of artistic subjectivity (and subjectivity itself)" that prefigured the postmodern.268 Not only did his indexical privileging of process lead to the Happenings of Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, and others, but as Jones explains, "the author-function" Pollock (not the "individual" Pollock)269 can also be seen as the progenitor of an entirely new performative genre beginning in the 1970s. His working methods provided a prototype for body art—developed over the course of that decade by male and female artists ranging from Vito Acconci to Hannah Wilke—that continues to be efficacious for artists today. (Its ongoing fecundity is seen, for example, in the works produced in the 19805 and 19903 by Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney.) Body artists, Jones points out, "perform rather than suppress the dislocation of the subject, and this, indeed, could be said to be what constitutes 'postmodernism.' " They demonstrate "the awareness of the impossibility of determining meaning or identity in any final way and of the contingency of the subject (here the artist as well as the interpreter) on the particularities of the interpretive exchange."270 In contrast to a prior generation of critics who, despite prodigious evidence of his troubled (or even emasculated) self-image, promoted the myth of Pollock as a virile creative genius, many recent male writers, including Leja, Perchuk, and Peter Wollen, have exposed a different Pollock, one who better emblematizes postwar masculine impotence.271 Along associated lines, some 66

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feminist art historians, most notably Anna Chave and Lisa Saltzman, have drawn attention to the fact that Pollock not only spurted and dripped pigment in a series of "explosions" on his canvas, but he also allowed it to bleed and stain. (And, both authors explain, Pollock felt the need to defend this aspect of his technique: he plaintively told one interviewer that he could "control the flow of the paint.") Pollock's witting or unwitting appropriation of this index of femininity, as well as other strategies and configurations "coded as 'female'" (most prominently a decentered allover field) are read by Chave as potentially promoting, or at least participating in, a "critique of phallocentrism."272 Certainly, as Saltzman points out, Pollock's staining inspired women artists such as Helen Frankenthaler (who, in turn, influenced men such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland) to develop the techniques that enabled "Post-Painterly" flatness.273 Greenberg never would have admitted such extra-artistic criteria into his advancement of the qualitative superiority of Post-Painterly Abstraction in the 19605. He also would not have been likely to accept another theory, advanced by former acolyte Rosalind Krauss, that Pollock's true originality was based on an urge toward desublimation.274 In her 1993 book The Optical Unconscious, Krauss signaled her intent to challenge Greenberg's position: [Namuth's] photographs had placed [Pollock] on the road, like Kerouac, clenching his face into the tight fist of beat refusal, making an art of violence, of "howl." Clem's mission was to lift him above those picturesjust as it was to lift the paintings Pollock made from off the ground where he'd made them, and onto the wall. Because it was only on the wall that they joined themselves to tradition, to culture, to convention. It was in that location and at that angle to gravity that they became "painting."275 According to Krauss, whereas the strokes made by other action painters— such as de Kooning and Kline—register the pull of gravity, because he used gravity as a tool (much as he used a paintbrush or a turkey baster), Pollock's strokes instead index "the prone position of the canvas in relation to the artist who had worked above it." Rather than one of marking transcendence, his was therefore a more violent process of bassesse, or lowering, "going beneath the figure into the terrain of formlessness."276 Krauss demonstrates this conclusion largely by studying the works of later artists (particularly Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol, ) who understood and revealed not only "the importance of horizontalization" in Pollock's work but also the abject erotics inherent in its base materiality. Their productions oppose the high Introduction

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value placed on Pollock's "optical shimmer" by Greenberg and Fried, a quality that ostensibly motivated the Post-Painterly Abstractionists. To back up her interpretation, Krauss cites Freud's gender-biased praise in Civilization and Its Discontents of primal man's ability to put out a fire with his stream of urine (a feat no woman could perform)277 as a préfiguration of visual cultural achievement defined as sexual sublimation. (Thus Warhol's "piss" and Oxidation paintings of 1961 and 1976-1977 make explicit what was only implicit in Pollock's classic poured canvases.) Krauss's philosophical criticism of Pollock has also referenced the critic René Ricard's definition of mimetic rivalry. She uses Ricard's concept to explain the artist's so-called veiling of the figure as a motivating factor in his de-privileging of the vertical. The Surrealist writings of Georges Bataille provided Krauss with the doctrine of bassesse, which "sought to vanquish the fetishizing (or ontologizing) of matter" by idealists obsessed with ideal form.278 The 1996 exhibition that Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois organized for the Centre Georges Pompidou produced their handbook Formless: A User's Guide, which fully clarified these concepts and explained their sources.279 Krauss's belief in Pollock's bassesse led her to reject outright the primary conclusions drawn by Pepe Karmel in his essay for the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective. Based on physical evidence discovered by conservators and on "digitized composites built up out of Hans Namuth's complete inventory of still and cinematic photography,"280 Karmel identified—even in some of Pollock's most classic abstractions, such as Autumn Rhythm—an initial laying-in of stick figures, hidden by subsequent pourings but later reiterated in finishing touches. This prompted Karmel to reemphasize the value of draftsmanship for Pollock, despite the fact that in these classic allover compositions he appears to have replaced traditional iconography with "an arrangement of signs."281 Krauss objects to such overreliance on drawing and representational form as defining characteristics of Pollock's authorial singularity. Study of Pollock has for some time provided a segue into issues of race, leading to a critique by some art historians of the absence of artists of color from the typical roster of Abstract Expressionist innovators. In 1979 Andrew Kagan remarked on the commensurability of Pollock's painting methods with jazz (a kind of music the artist loved), which is, of course, an "invention primarily of black Americans."282 Kagan cited an early comparison of Pollock and jazz as a "not-quite-accurate but highly prophetic analogy." In 1945 the newspaper critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote perceptively: "The flare and spat68

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ter and fury of [Pollock's] paintings are emotional rather than formal, and like the best jazz, one feels that much of it is the result of inspired improvisation rather than conscious planning."283 Appraising the disproportionate dependence of white high culture on black popular culture and diversions, Kagan conjectured that the perceived correspondence between Pollock and jazz helped promote his acceptance in Europe as an archetype of the New World "noble savage." In The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (1998), Daniel Belgrad gives this subject a more exhaustive treatment, describing the myriad ways in which freedom of individual expression in African American music provided a trope for the "painterly dialogue" at the root of gestural Abstract Expressionism. Moreover, Belgrad explains, "The social significance of spontaneity can be appreciated only if this aesthetic practice is understood as a crucial site of cultural work: that is, as a set of activities and texts engaged in the struggle over meanings and values within American society." This countercultural stance, Belgrad argues, was "actively confrontational" toward "the dominant ethnocentrism" of postwar life in the United States.284 In 1989, for "Abstract Expressionism: Other Dimensions," Jeffrey Wechsler had expanded that rubric to include forty-three artists; four were women, but none were African American.285 Four years later, however, the Tate Gallery Liverpool's "Myth-Making: Abstract Expressionist Paintings from the United States," included two works, Mumbo Jumbo (1950, fig. 24) and Klu Klux (1963, a late date for this context), by Norman Lewis, an African American artist. An essay by Gibson on Lewis's career and work was featured in the companion catalogue, American Abstract Expressionism. Gibson further argued that Lewis deserved recognition for working along Abstract Expressionist lines in an Artforum article, "Recasting the Canon: Norman Lewis and Jackson Pollock," as well as in the catalogue for a Lewis retrospective mounted at the Kenkelaba Gallery.286 In all of these venues Gibson developed points that she would augment in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. Not limited to featuring overlooked female artists of the 19405 and 19505, Gibson's 1997 book also reclaims for Abstract Expressionism male African Americans and homosexuals of various racial backgrounds. Artists such as Lewis and Alfonso Ossorio (a gay man born in the Philippines) were also marginalized by what Gibson deems a too-limiting "criterion of originality" that worked to keep the official roster artificially small. As she explains, with very few exceptions (most notably de Kooning), those then and now considered to be Abstract Expressionists believed abstraction and mimesis to be mutually Introduction

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exclusive. Only works that showed the former tendency, as Greenberg put it, could qualify as "major art," a prejudice that worked against inclusion in the movement's pantheon of ethnic as well as sexual minorities whose interests did not stimulate the creation of works that qualified as "pure." Gibson argues throughout Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics that the conflation of freedom and individuality with masculinity (of straight, white, European descent)—identified by abstraction—precluded serious consideration for artists who preferred métonymie or narrative specificity, intimate size, decorative style, sensuality, stylistic variation, and private or socially based emotional content. (All of these characteristics are typified as feminine or subcultural in sensibility.) Further, in the 19405 and 19505, when women and black artists (such as Lewis, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Roy DeCarava, Beauford Delaney, Ronald Joseph, Rose Piper, Hale Woodruff, and Thelma Johnson Streat) disregarded their own inclinations, they were accused of being derivative, whereas, when de Kooning, Pollock, and other white colleagues adopted or metaphorized sexuality and primitiveness, they were lauded for expanding their universality.287 Mixing or alternating between abstraction and representation—a common practice of many of the artists Gibson discusses —was a strategy derided as denoting a lack of conviction. But she reads this tactic another way, reconfiguring it more positively as representative of an "infrapolitics of resistance," that is, as evidence of a cultural act that contains meanings not read as criticism by the dominant class but understood as such by those in subordinated groups.288 The culmination of Gibson's work on Lewis was a solo exhibition, "Norman Lewis: Black Paintings 1946-1977," со-organized for the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1998. Additional essays by Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Lowery Stokes Sims, and David Craven finally conferred on Lewis the art historical recognition that had eluded him during his lifetime. Craven's essay frames Lewis's importance in the context of his "longtime activism on behalf of social justice and other progressive causes," restyling his oeuvre as a postcolonial critique of "imperial representation, language, and ideological control."289 Instead of comparing him with Pollock, as Gibson had done, Craven describes Lewis as carrying on an "interimage" dialogue, in works such as Klu Klux, with de Kooning's "commanding black paintings," especially Black Friday (fig. 25) and Light in August (1948; the latter title refers to a famous novel about racial repression in the South by William Faulkner). Craven sees the example of Norman Lewis as a challenge to the Eu-

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rocentrism that underpins Leja's assumptions about the validity of Modern Man discourse for Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-iggos Leja chose to explore further one very specific ramification of the identity problems he categorized in Refraining Abstract Expressionism. Writing for Critical Inquiry, Leja examined Barnett Newman's "eccentric handling of gendered metaphors," highlighting the artist's response to accusations of "patriarchal masculinity" leveled at him by a former student. Hubert Crehan, who (punningly) mistranslated Vir Heroicus Sublimis as "Heroic Man Erect," wrote in 1959 in Art News: "Newman believes in a masculine environment, and he gets this idea across in his paintings It is a proud and inflexible archaic, male sensibility that Newman expresses, lifted from the Old Testament. But we live in another world, really, one certainly that is in need of the phallic charge, although the new man [clearly another pun], I imagine, will be aware that we should have more music with the dancing. It takes two to tango." Newman's "misguided" rebuttal concluded, "Some day Mr. Crehan may learn that no matter how many it takes to tango, it takes only one real man to create a work of art."290 According to Leja, the rebuttal demonstrates that a better understanding of the "conceptions and metaphors of gender identity operative among a particular interpretive community in postWorld War II New York ... may shed some light on the failure of Newman's work with critics."291 (As we recall, Greenberg resuscitated Newman's reputation in the 19605 for reasons that largely ran counter to the artist's intentions.) In essence, Leja posits that Newman's disavowal of any conflict between his anima and his animus (female and male sides of the individuated self), which both Pollock and de Kooning more or less admitted as having motivated the creation of some of their best works, belied a certain lack of resonance with the contemporary situation. Newman's continuing fascination with the authority of God as Creator, delineated in the book of Genesis and reified in his monumental 1963-1964 architectural sculpture Broken Obelisk (fig. 26), betrayed his underlying reactionary masculinism.292 The shared predilection of Rosenberg and Hess to interpret Newman's art in relation to the first book of the Old Testament (and in terms of Jewish mysticism) has already been discussed, and mention has also been made of Rosenberg's elevation of immigrants (such as Rothko)293 and the sons of immigrants (such as Newman) to the status of American pioneers. Gibson, among others, has noticed that "it might be argued that canonical Abstract Expressionism's resistance to naturalistic imagery stems from the large proportion of

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Jews in its ranks." She also broaches the fact that its major critical supporters —Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Schapiro—were Jewish as well.294 In Art-asPolitics, Annette Cox not only placed a great deal of importance on Greenberg and Rosenberg's early years as Trotskyites, but she also featured their extensive stints writing for Jewish magazines. As Louis Kaplan has since pointed out, Greenberg freely acknowledged in 1944 that "the reflection in my writing of the Jewish heritage ... though it may be passive and unconscious, is certainly not haphazard. I believe that a quality of Jewishness is present in every word I write." Kaplan argues that it is possible to "reframe the problematic of modernist self-criticism in Greenberg's repression or displacement of Jewish subjectivity" and that, although he makes no mention of their shared ethnic heritage in his 1962 essay "After Abstract Expressionism," it is no accident that Newman and Rothko are the artists on whom he "centered his analysis of the self-critical tendency of modernist painting."295 Indeed, Theodoros Stamos (another of the Irascibles) once remarked to Irving Sandier about Newman and Rothko: "I've always thought of them as the Lions of Judea. [Rothko's] pictures are heraldic in that sense.... When I say the pictures are like the Lion of Judea, well, he is the Lion of Judea. He is these pictures."296 Employing strategies borrowed from cultural studies (especially diaspora studies), a substantial group of art historians in the 19905 began to rethink the accomplishments of mid-to-late twentieth-century American artists and critics from the vantage point of Jewish ethnicity.297 Milton Brown, in Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, igoo-ig45, the catalogue for a 1991 exhibition held at the Jewish Museum, acknowledged that, although many (for example, Adolph Gottlieb) believed that art should "transcend any racial, ethnic, religious or national boundaries,"298 Rothko and Newman present a more complex situation; Brown eventually concludes, however, that "their Jewish connections are tenuous at best."299 Brown relates with skepticism Werner Haftmann's 1971 reading of Rothko's "stacked, large planes of color" as "visual symbols for the drapery which refuses to reveal the hidden God or for the temple curtain before the ark." According to Haftmann, Rothko undertook in his signature paintings "the erection of that tent which the Jews, a nomadic people, raised around their ark in order to establish a space for the Holy in which there existed only the void and the word."300 Alternatively, Matthew Baigell has suggested that the Abstract Imagists (all were Jewish except for ClyfFord Still) emphasized tragedy, terror, and brutality in their writings (as seen, for example, in the wording of Rothko and Gottlieb's 1943 letter to the New York Times] because they were 72

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deeply affected by leaking news about the Holocaust.301 This trauma may have had an impact on their art as well; it is BaigelPs opinion that "the large rectangular forms Rothko used in his mature works are rather derived in some measure from the large open graves that he saw only in photographs after the end of the war."302 (Baigell reads earlier paintings of Rothko's with entombment themes as indicating knowledge of Jewish burial practices, which the artist combined with Christian iconography "in the same way that Chagall interpreted Crucifixions for his own purposes.") Thus Newman's stripe compositions, in which the artist seemingly arrogates for himself the primal creative gesture of God—a prohibition in Judaism—may actually have been motivated by anger about the senseless murder of six million. Along related lines, Lee Krasner has also been reinterpreted through the lens of her ethnicity. In 1973, Whitney curator Marcia Tucker commented insightfully that Krasner's most hieroglyphic Little Images, as well as a series of dramatically explosive gestural compositions she made after Pollock's death (fig. 27), seem to have been generated from right to left as if the artist were writing Hebrew (which she learned to do as a child).303 Robert Hobbs, in his catalogue essay for Krasner's second major U.S. retrospective, which traveled around the country from 1999 through 2001, posited additional Jewish meanings for Krasner's art. Highlighting her Orthodox upbringing and her friendships—well before she knew Pollock—with Greenberg and especially Rosenberg, Hobbs situates the former Lena/Lenore Krassner as a "responsive member of the New York Jewish intelligentsia in a pre- and post-Holocaust world."304 Kuspit's demonstration of the importance of Rosenberg's Jewishness for the core concept of "The American Action Painters" ("Rosenberg," Kuspit points out, "argued that anxiety about identity is 'the most serious theme'—indeed, the 'ultimate metaphysical theme'—in both Jewish life and modern art")305 may help explain the meaning of Krasner's most pugnacious taunt to posterity: "My art is so biographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it."306 Like Rosenberg and Greenberg, Krasner was an active Trotskyist during the Depression. The dialectical methodology she internalized as a result of immersion in radical politics, which exerted a strong impact on the way she made art for the rest of her life, is emphasized in both her catalogue raisonné and in Hobbs's account of her developmental impulses. The fact that politics also had a formative influence on Gorky, but to a very different end, became another topic for contextual scholarship in the iggos. Peter Balakian, in a review of "Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years," organized by Michael Introduction

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Auping for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, states that he is perplexed by the exhibition's relative lack of attention to "the event which most profoundly shaped Gorky's life." This was the Armenian genocide, a wholesale policy of racial persecution and extermination by the Ottoman Turks in 19151918 that prefigured the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. As Gorky wrote to his sister after their emigration to America: We are but a slice of our homeland's soul, tossed afar from it by foul storms. Vartoosh, dear, I dream of it always and it is as if some ancient Armenian essence within me moves my hand to create so far from our homeland the shapes of nature we loved in the gardens, wheatfields and orchards of the Adoian family in Khorkom. Our beautiful Armenia which we lost and which I shall repossess in my art I shall resurrect Armenia with my brush for 307 all the world to see. According to Balakian, although scholars have cited Gorky's traumatic childhood experiences (especially in close readings of the two versions of his painted composition The Artist and His Mother, fig. 17), none have fully explored the ethnic implications of his subsequent paintings. Documentation of Gorky's Armenian heritage published by his nephew Karlen Mooradian is useful, but difficult to read, too personally involved, and not artistically savvy. Most authors who quote Gorky's letters use them for purely nostalgic purposes without detailing their genocidal context, thus failing to explain the critical import of the artist's exile mentality and its profound effect on his imagery, even in works that seem primarily abstract. Gorky himself recognized the hybridity of his art and the influence on it of both Eastern and Western sources (combining, for example, Toros Roslin with Picasso and Surrealism). As Balakian points out, "Before discourse about decolonization and culture was popular, Gorky instinctively understood the issue of cultural imperialism."308 Gorky most emphatically did not create politicized paintings (deeming Social Realism "poor art for poor people"), but his works were politically motivated nevertheless. Although the Abstract Expressionists relinquished the (leftist) political and social incentives that had seemed compelling in the 19305, the idea that their art still had political and social implications (for the Left and the Right) has become an accepted, although highly contested, interpretive given during the past several decades. For example, Fred Orton concluded in 1992: "If action painting had any meaning, it was about revolutionary political agency arising from the contradictions of capitalism, the reality of which could not be totally 74

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excluded if the prospect of radical change was to be kept open . . . sometime . . . somewhere. . . . Action painting was the sign that the possibility of revolution was not totally closed down, that the dynamic of revolution was still there. Action painting was that, or it was nothing."309 Another viewpoint, differing somewhat from that of Orton and authors who share his critique of the movement as complicit with Truman-era hegemony, is represented in works published in the 19903 by David Craven and Nancy Jachec, both of whom produced substantive articles leading to book-length studies by the end of the decade.310 In the updated introduction to newer texts added to his 2000 edition of Pollock and After, Frascina characterizes Jachec's ideas as responses to Craven's readings. Craven's thoughts, for the most part, run directly counter to those of Guilbaut, Cockcroft, and Leja.311 Examining whether exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting held abroad were actually successful in promoting American imperialism, Craven demonstrates that this was definitely not the case in Latin America. Many Marxist painters in Nicaragua and Cuba, for example, imitated Pollock and Motherwell because their works seemed to demonstrate a path to political and artistic insurgency, not collusion with hegemonic ideology. Latin American intellectuals, moreover, were deeply offended by the "paternalistic" theses of Guilbaut and his cohorts. Craven aims to prove that the Abstract Expressionists never really abandoned their political and social idealism— they simply expressed it in an "alternative modernist" form. In order to accomplish this, he marshals verbal and documentary evidence of earlier and later political convictions (against American military intervention in other countries and in favor of civil rights in the 19603) on the part of a number of the movement's major participants. That the Federal Bureau of Investigation considered Rothko, Gottlieb, Krasner, Motherwell, Reinhardt, and Lewis "un-American" enough to maintain files on them helps Craven underline this point. Throughout his text, Craven posits the values promoted by Meyer Schapiro in 1957 in "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art"—rather than those espoused by Greenberg and Rosenberg—as touchstones for the retention of political engagement in whatever form (Marxist, socialist, anarchist) individual Abstract Expressionist artists felt most comfortable with. Jachec, on the other hand, "argues that American avant-garde painting was promoted by the United States government, not because of its affinities with American values, but rather because of its radical character, which it hoped would appeal to a Western European populace perceived by the State Department as Introduction

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inclined toward socialism."312 Jachec, who was trained and teaches in England, places greater emphasis than Craven on European existentialist philosophy as a stimulant to American artistic anarchism. In order to prove his points, Craven employs statements of intent by the artists to a more significant degree than writers such as Cockcroft and Guilbaut. Particularly useful for Craven's purposes are remarks made by Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman, which he uses as epigraphs. Resonating with the convictions of Schapiro, with whom he had studied at Columbia, Motherwell noted in 1950: "The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.... But I think that the art of the School of New York, like a great deal of modern art that is called 'art for art's sake,' has social implications. These might be summarized under the general notion of protest."313 In 1962, Newman recalled in an interview for Art in America magazine: "Almost fifteen years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer still goes."314 Craven's primary interpretation of these and other sociopolitical motivations expressed by Motherwell, Newman, and their colleagues leads to his assertion (based on one of Schapiro's cardinal tenets) that the Abstract Expressionist artists "intended their 'automatic' hand-made works to be a commentary on the dehumanizing developments intrinsic to the Age of Automation."315 Craven agrees with Schapiro's judgment that the movement was simultaneously a form of labor and a new visual language, each aspect of which must be "seen in relation to human self-realization and in light of a dialogical aesthetics necessitating viewer engagement." Accordingly, the essence of Abstract Expressionist art is "romantic anticapitalism."316 An observation by Schapiro that is celebrated by Craven—that modern paintings "may be regarded as means of affirming the individual in opposition to contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working and doing"— is also used by Caroline A. Jones in Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996) to justify one of her major assertions.317 In early sections of this book, Jones analyzes the congruence of such notions of American individualism with the powerful nineteenth-century topos of the "solitary individual artist in a semi-sacred studio space." She shows that (as seen, for example, in the films and photographs of Namuth and the Art News "Paints a Picture" series) this definition of genius was still revered in the Ab76

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stract Expressionist period. The remainder of her text details radical changes that occurred in the 19605 when business or factorylike working conditions were adopted by Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Earth artist Robert Smithson. Calling on a variety of theoretical positions popularized since Schapiro wrote of "the great importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation" (most prominently, Foucault's ideas about authorship), Jones investigates the ideological connotations of indexicality in paintings produced by Pollock and his associates. One result of her study is the reaffirmation of Schapiro's claim that the traditionally revered triangular metonymy adhering between the (male) artist, his brushstroke, and his studio was a salient factor linking Abstract Expressionism with concepts of American liberty. As Bradford Collins reemphasized at the start of the decade, the Abstract Expressionists are often considered "the last of the genuine Bohemian artists,"318 despite the fact that (as shown by Deirdre Robson),319 by 1960 many were selling their works for substantial amounts of money. Illustrations in Life magazine and other such popular culture sources exhibit how, by the mid-tolate 19505, Abstract Expressionist art had become a status item in the homes of wealthy collectors (especially the nouveau riche). Following the poor record of sales in the 19405 and early 19505 by the dealers Samuel Kootz, Peggy Guggenheim, Howard Putzel and Betty Parsons, market success for the New York School (perhaps spurred by Pollock's dramatic death in 1956), gradually became more assured. The value of these works also increased because of major museum purchases and aggressive handling by newly sophisticated Manhattan galleries such as Sidney Janis and Leo Castelli. As Collins demonstrates, however, "Indifference to success and popular opinion was an essential element of the popular caricature [of the Abstract Expressionists as bohemians]. Crass concerns belonged to enemies of honest art, to artists who would pander to popular taste and expectations."320 An intent to boycott capitalist culture (denigrated by Greenberg as engendering kitsch) has certainly been considered one of the "ethical foundations" of the movement's avant-garde role as a progressive "corrective force."321 But can holding on to such attitudes still be advocated half a century after the heyday of the movement? In the summer of 1994, T. J. Clark assayed a summary and "defense" of Abstract Expressionism seen in this light. Significantly, Clark chose to air his conclusions in October, a journal subtitled "Art/Theory/ Criticism/Politics," founded in 1976 "as a forum for the presentation and theIntroduction

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oretical elaboration of cultural work" by a group of critics including Rosalind Krauss.322 He began this essay, essentially a list of propositions, with the following statement: We have come a certain way from Abstract Expressionism, and the question of how we should understand our relationship to it gets to be interesting again. Awe at its triumphs is long gone; but so is laughter at its cheap philosophy, or distaste for its heavy breathing, or boredom with its sublimity, or resentment at the part it played in the Cold War. Not that any of these feelings have gone away or ever should, but that it begins to be clear that none of them—not even the sum of them—amounts to an attitude to the painting in question. They are what artists and critics once had because they did not have an attitude—because something stood in the way of their making Abstract Expressionism a thing of the past.323 Clark concludes that "our failure to see Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still as ending something, or our lack of a story of what it is they were ending [constitutes] considerably more than a crisis in art criticism or art history," and then proceeds to mount an exoneration that will render them "usable" by precipitating closure. In the form in which it appeared in October and the revised version of this argument published in Farewell to an Idea: Excerpts in the History of Modernism, Clark essentially mounts a Marxist critique of popular semiotic views of Abstract Expressionism in which he features a term fraught with controversy in its application to this movement. Semiological interpretations, he avers, while purporting to signify endlessly, are actually "frozen in the triumph of their prearranged moments of vision." He offers his most pointedly anti-Greenbergian judgment so far: "I think we might come to describe Abstract Expressionist paintings better if we took them above all to be vulgar" Clark goes one better than Krauss in his desire "to do something more transgressive" than merely reference Bataille's informe. He states: "It is an advantage to the term Vulgar'... that discursively it points two ways—to the object itself, to some abjectness or absurdity in its very make-up, some telltale blemish, some atrociously visual quality that the object will never stop betraying however hard it tries, and to the object's existence in a particular social world, for a set of tastes and styles of individuality that have still to be defined, but are somehow there, in the word even before it is deployed."324 Individuality, the personal, social, and political condition (and meretricious petty bourgeois goal)325 that Abstract Expressionist art is generally taken 78

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to signify, because it is, in reality, a contingent rather than a transcendent state —and therefore a dangerous falsehood—certainly also qualifies it as "vulgar." (Clark uses its "drive toward emptiness, endlessness, the nonhuman and the inorganic" and especially what he calls its "incessant courting of Death" to demonstrate this point.) Vulgarity, Clark admits, "is gendered, of course," as well as class-structured; using it as a template for mapping meaning, this movement's worship of male creative genius reconfigures as mere homosociality. More important, in another reversal of value, kitsch now exemplifies "exaltation."326 Thus conceived, Abstract Expressionism's hegemonic aesthetic relation to European forbears and contemporaries, and its claim to particularity, agency, and mastery, as well as its universality and sublimity, still requires re(de)finition. Conclusion How exactly can the field of Abstract Expressionist studies be characterized at the start of a new millennium? Packed with controversies, propagandizing, and polemics, both the context and the critique of this undeniably meaningful American artistic phenomenon have continued to gain in breadth and depth for more than half a century. Following and sometimes initiating interpretive trends with wide repercussions for scholarship in numerous humanistic disciplines, the ongoing reception of Abstract Expressionist art provides a fascinating case study in shifting American and European cultural • • • .9 7 priorities. Reputations continue to be made by scholars and curators who advance new or substantially altered interpretations of the achievements of varied personae who played pioneering roles in the "heroic years" of the Abstract Expressionist drama.328 (Another study could be written examining contextual and critical reaction to works by talented artists of the second generation.) A supplement to Pollock's 1978 catalogue raisonné of complete works was issued the same year Krasner's appeared (1995); a complete catalogue of Rothko's works on canvas was published in 1994, Newman's in 2004, and a project to prepare a catalogue of Motherwell's paintings and collages has been launched to complement the compendia of his prints published in 1984 and 2003.329 In the decade between 1994 and 2004, numerous important exhibitions of first-generation New York School painters were mounted in the United States and abroad. In addition to those already noted, these include Pollock (Museum of Modern Art, 1998; Musei Civici, Venice, 2002); Krasner (Independent Curators, 1999); Norman Lewis (Studio Museum in Harlem, 1998); and de Introduction

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Kooning (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2002; Institut Valencia d'Art Modern/Fundación "la Caixa," Madrid, 2002). In addition, major shows highlighting the oeuvres of Motherwell (Miriam and Ira D.Wallach Gallery, Columbia University, 1997); Rothko (National Gallery of Art, 1998; Fundado Juan Miró, Barcelona, 2000; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2001); Still (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2001); Gottlieb (Fundación Juan March, Madrid and IVAM, Valencia, 2001; Jewish Museum, 2002); Newman (Stedelijk, 2001; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002); Hofmann (Naples Museum of Art, 2003) and Gorky (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003) were organized during the same time frame.330 Indeed, as noted by the art historian Patricia Mainardi, exhibits of Abstract Expressionist painting are coming close to matching French Impressionist shows in popularity. Mainardi points to the shared ability of both movements to reference "oft-told" tales that appeal to the leisure-seeking gallery visitor: Museum studies, it would seem, prefer Impressionist shows to everything else, but I have come to think that the attraction is as much to the story the exhibition tells as to the paintings that compose it. The unprecedented success of the MoMA's recent Jackson Pollock show suggests to me that Abstract Expressionism shares some of the same myths and legends constituting the morality tale repeated by most Impressionist exhibitions. [...] One of the basic tales of modernism is that of the bohemian artist who, scorned by philistines, was obliged to live in poverty, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous critics, but who worked hard and persevered, true to his (rarely to her) unique vision. After his death this impoverished artist was recognized as a transcendent genius, his once-scorned works now commanding fabulous prices. Now that American Abstract Expressionism has been reformulated as a morality tale along the lines of the American success story, we are witnessing its newfound success with the general public, in the past always notoriously hostile to abstract art.331 Does this largely monographic recent exhibition and publishing record, we might ask, signal a disturbing resurgence of traditional (and hagiographie) approaches, in spite of so much intervening discourse that worked to discredit conservative, clichéd and canonizing avenues of interpretation? Whatever popularized interpretations docent tours and museum wall labels might continue to promote, a careful perusal of essays included in recent catalogues and texts of current books on Abstract Expressionist painters indicates that 80

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iconological and more theoretically ambitious forms of decoding and analysis (interdisciplinary, psychological, gender- and class-based, ethnic, semiotic, deconstructive, and so on) are now regularly incorporated into these types of studies. No longer are style, technique, influence, iconography, and standards of "quality" the only—or necessarily the primary—considerations of most monographic writing about the Abstract Expressionists. Less hierarchical and more speculative readings, which often compete, intermix freely with conventional explanations of form, motive, and signification, although they are not as popular with the average museum visitor. The clarification of basic issues—including the patent fact that the "unwanted title" Abstract Expressionism presents an oxymoron—continues to be nuanced by archival discoveries, the application of innovative semantic fields, and the benefit of greater hindsight, among other possibilities. Its builtin curatorial and institutional biases notwithstanding, the Whitney Museum of American Art's huge two-part 1999-2000 exhibition "The American Century," for which Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture provided a crucial mid-point fulcrum, allowed fresh opportunities for comparative visual analysis that will likely affect future scholarship. The purpose of the present essay is to erect a clear interpretive framework for the statements, articles, and essays by and about the first-generation Abstract Expressionists included in the anthology that follows. Continuing study of the hypotheses of key commentators and further analysis of frequently referenced texts is meant to illuminate and keep open—not close down— ongoing debate. I am mindful, and hope readers of this book will be as well, of the implications of a revealing comment made by Robert Motherwell, one of whose many roles included serving as editor of "Documents of Modern Art," published by Wittenborn & Schultz from 1944 to 1951. (He produced the first ten compilations in that consequential series.) When asked to contribute brief remarks for the spring 1959 issue of It Is, Motherwell hearkened back to Possibilities, another notable editorial stint, as he acknowledged the dangers inherent in allowing one's ideas to appear in print: "12 years ago Harold Rosenberg and I got Baziotes, Pollock, and Rothko to make short statements for our magazine—all admirable statements, but they in turn must have got fed up over the years with the constant republication of their few paragraphs by the museum-machine and the art-book factory. No one wants to be imprisoned in a few sentences, even his own."332 Of course, it should by now be quite clear, even the most up-to-date contextual approaches still depend on these self-same resources from the 19405 and 19505 as central eviIntroduction

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dence, to which then can be added the inferences, deductions, and denotations made by a host of additional authors writing about Abstract Expressionism during intervening decades. In order to strengthen the possibility of ascertaining and highlighting cumulative discursive interactions, the statements, reviews, and essays republished in the remainder of this volume are sorted thematically and chronologically. Readings in a particular section amplify previous entries, compare and contrast, or provide a related approach to similar material by a different set of artists, historians, and critics. This mapping of alternative frameworks for understanding is operative within each section and across the entire compilation. By looking first at the discussion in each division of the introductory essay, then turning to the primary and secondary sources arranged in similarly demarcated anthology sections, readers may clarify their comprehension of competing trends in the explanation of Abstract Expressionism's development and ongoing impact. Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique charts written responses to the first-generation Abstract Expressionists' accomplishments and the changing cultural relevance of this movement across the span of five turbulent decades. Understanding with greater precision how Abstract Expressionism has already been analyzed and (re)configured provides a matrix for continuing assessment of the national and international repercussions of this very American achievement. It is hoped that new opportunities for challenge and revision will result as scholars, students, and curators digest this information. Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes: AB: The Art Bulletin AF: Artforum AM: Arts Magazine AN: Art News NYT: New York Times PR: Partisan Review TN: The Nation i. Karmel 1999!), 262-79. This anthology includes the full text of nine papers presented at a January 1999 symposium in New York City and was issued as one of two companion volumes (see also Karmel 1999a) to the retrospective's awardwinning catalogue, Varnedoe and Karmel 1998. Chave 1993 is the only text writ82

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

ten after 1979 included in Karmel I999b. Another recent anthology of writings about Pollock is Harrison 2000, which includes interviews, letters and other primary source documents, personal responses by friends, critics, and other artists to Pollock the man and his art, and creative responses by subsequent painters, authors, photographers, and others. New authors included in Frascina 2000 are David Craven, Fred Orton, A. Deirdre Robson, Michael Kimmelman, Ann Gibson, Anna C. Chave, Michael Leja, and Rosalind Krauss. The quotation is found in Frascina 1985,13. Frascina 2000, 4. The issues to which he refers include, most prominently, Marxist interrogation of the "institutionalized Modernist narrative" initiated in the 19305 by the critic Clement Greenberg and arguments about the interrelation of avant-garde art, culture, and politics in the McCarthy era that postulate Abstract Expressionism's purpose or appropriation as a weapon in the cold war. All are discussed below in the text. This is particularly true of the arguments by T. J. Clark and Michael Fried for and against the approach of Greenberg, discussed below. Some of the same authors whom Frascina added to his second edition and one identical essay (Fred Orton's "Action, Revolution and Painting") were also included in Thistlewood 1993, issued in conjunction with the Tate Gallery Liverpool exhibition "MythMaking: Abstract Expressionist Painting from the United States." This catalogue features arguments on postwar American painting primarily formulated by British academics. As a source for revisionist approaches that reconfigure understanding of the movement, Thistlewood 1993 is circumscribed by its limited distribution and the editor's concern that "adjustments to the field of Abstract Expressionism's meaning and interpretation that would inevitably arisefrom this particular exhibition should be explicit" (8; italics his). Many readings gathered in Rose 1975 and Chipp 1968 are selections first collected in Tuchman 1965. Tuchman's choice of thirty-three excerpted artists' statements and edited critical commentary constitutes the earliest significant attempt at a survey of the movement's defining ideas using primary source material. More current updates to Rose and Chipp are Harrison and Wood 1993 (updated to 2000 in 2002) and Hills 2001. Hills's abbreviated historiography discusses Sandier 1970 (citing the critique of it in MofFett 1972), Ashton 1973, Rosenzweig 1980, and Guilbaut 1983. Hills terms the latter "the first full revisionist history of the period." See below for further analysis of these sources. See Chipp 1968,502; Rose 1975,130. Harrison and Wood 1993,549-50. See Shapiro and Shapiro 1977; Shapiro and Shapiro 1990, preface, xi. The artists included in "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments," on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery from 19 September to 29 November 1987, were William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, WilIntroduction

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lem de Kooning, Lee Krasner (the only woman), Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Mark Tobey, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Beryl Wright's chronology in Auping 1987 expands a similar effort in Rosenzweig 1980, 35-45. Other authors included in Auping 1987 are Lawrence Alloway, Donald Kuspit, Richard Shiff, Marcelin Pleynet, and David Sylvester, as well as Ann Gibson and Michael Leja, younger scholars who had recently written dissertations on Abstract Expressionist topics. 10. Auping 1987, introduction, 11. Auping's choices for the exhibition may not have lived up to the ideals expressed his preface. InAF%6 (December H)87):122, the critic John Yau commented that, while assembling the works on view, Auping "had a wonderful opportunity to provide an alternative to currently accepted readings, but, sad to say, he played it safe instead." Yau considers the exhibition and catalogue content (too much focus on Newman) skewed in favor of providing a pedigree for the 19603 direction defined by Clement Greenberg as "PostPainterly Abstraction." He complains that Auping's "historicist elaboration of formalism's codifications concentrates on field painting and thus continues the notion that Abstract Expressionism's principal accomplishment was an empiric understanding of the surface of the picture plane." Alternatively, the conservative critic Jed Perl praised the exhibition but termed Auping's catalogue "insufferably chi-chi." See Perl's "Pollock and Company," New Criterion 6 (November 1987): 27-3311. Auping 1987,11-12. 12. Auping (1987,12) employs the term "battleground," borrowed from Kramer 1985. 13. For more extensive analysis of the importance of this periodical, see Franks 2002, the catalogue to an exhibition held at the Yale University Art Gallery. 14. Motherwell, quoted in Gibson 1984,93. 15. This letter by Gottlieb and Rothko (edited by Newman) is embedded in Jewell I943b, x9. For analysis of this letter and its impact, see Clearwater 1984, 23-25; Barnes 1993,2-13. See also Pollock 1944,14. 16. Pollock 1947-48,79. 17. For a summary of the pros and cons of the "evasion of language" argument, see Cernuschi 1997,15-16. 18. Gibson (1984,347), citing ideas found in Carl G.Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1933). 19. O'Neill 1990; Terenzio 1992. In "Willem de Kooning: The Artist as Artwriter" (Carrier 2002,32) the following question is posed: "Imagine a ghastly catastrophe in which all Abstract Expressionist paintings, and all illustrations of them, are destroyed, but the writings of the artists themselves and their champions survive. What might future historians infer about this American period style?" Motherwell and Newman would be among the few whose reputations would still be intact in such a situation, according to Carrier. He proposes that de Kooning's 84

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written commentaries also constitute a corollary discourse that enriches the understanding of his paintings. 20. Mother well and Rosenberg 1947-48,1. 21. Baziotes 1947-48, 2; Rosenberg 1947-48, 2. See also Rothko 1947-48, 84, where the artist states, "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers.. .. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance." For discussion and analysis of Possibilities i (the only number ever published), see Gibson 1984, 66-81; Gibson 1990,33-40; Hobbs 1979; Barnier 2000. Pierre Chareau (architecture) and John Cage (music) were coeditors of Possibilities with Rosenberg (writing) and Motherwell (art). In an interview with Gibson on 13 April 1982, Motherwell explained "What we tried to do in Possibilities ... was not theoretical; we wanted to present the evidence: very factual descriptions presenting the thing—without theory." Quoted in Gibson 1984,68 (italics hers). 22. Motherwell i944a, 9-14, reproduced in Christian Kloyber, éd., Wolfgang Paalen's DYN: The Complete Reprint (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 2000): n.p., and excerpted in Terenzio 1992,27-34. 23. The first is an undated handwritten notation found in Pollock's papers after his death. Francis V. O'Connor has attributed this entry to ca. 1950 in O'Connor and Thaw 1978, vol. 4,253, doc. 89 (emphasis in original). The second is quoted in Rodman 1957, 82. For a reconsideration of the possible meanings of the latter statement, see Landau 2OO2a, 73-90. 24. See Gottlieb, Rothko [and Newman], 1943 letter to NTT embedded in Jewell I943b,x9. 25. For a wide sampling of expressions of this reluctance to explain their works, see Gibson 1984; Gibson к)88а. She adds, as well as Jung's theory, mentioned above, the Abstract Expressionists' loathing of the formulas for making art prescribed by fascist regimes; their distaste for Surrealism's literary bent; Greenberg's proscription of the borrowing by one art form of aspects associated with another; parallels with the tenet of New Criticism known as the "heresy of paraphrase"; and the example of aversion to interpretation inherent in Russian formalism and existentialist philosophy. 26. Alloway, "Artists as Writers, Part One: Inside Information*," AF12 (March 1974): 30-35, quoting a statement first published in Paintings by Clyfford Still 1959. According to Alloway, "The emergence of Abstract Expressionism was [verbally] documented from the beginning, though informally, by its originators." For another "messianic" example, see Hofmann's pronouncement that "the life-giving zeal in a work of art is deeply embedded in its qualitative substance. The spirit in a work is synonymous with its quality. The Real in art never dies, because its nature is predominantly spiritual" (found in Hofmann 1948, reprinted in Ross !99°5 85) or, in the final paragraph of Newman 1948, the artist's proclamation Introductio n

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that "we are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 4life,' we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings" (italics his); reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990, 352-8 and O'Neill 1990, 170-3 . 27. Goodnough 1950,9-22, reprinted in Gibson 1990,314-44. 28. Coates, "The Art Galleries," New Yorker, 28 May 1945, 68. Coates's first use of the term "abstract Expressionist" (variously capitalized) was in a review of Hans Hofmann's exhibition at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery appearing in the New Yorker, 30 March 1946, 83-84. In the latter, Coates wrote of Hofmann that "he is certainly one of the most uncompromising representatives of what some people call the spatter-and-daub school of painting and I, more politely, have christened abstract Expressionism." Earlier, Coates had commented, "There's a style of painting gaining ground in this country which is neither Abstract nor Surrealist, though it has suggestions of both, while the way the paint is applied—usually in a pretty free-swinging, spattery fashion, with only vague hints of subject matteris suggestive of methods of Expressionism. I feel some new name will have to be coined for it, but at the moment I can't think of any." See his "The Art Galleries, Assorted Moderns," New Yorker, 3 December 1944, 51. For an overview of such early reactions to Abstract Expressionism in the art press and the popular press, see Halasz 1983, pts. 1-2. 29. See Janis 1944, 89. The chapter titled "American Surrealist Painters," in which he places Mark Tobey, Fanny Hillsmith, William Baziotes, Janet Sobel, Loren Maclver, Morris Graves, Boris Margo, Jimmy Ernst, Gerome Kamrowski, Dorothea Tanning, David Hare, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, and Robert Motherwell, among others, concludes: "Though abstraction and surrealism are considered counter movements in twentieth-century painting, there is in certain painters a fusion of elements from each. American painters particularly have a strong inclination to develop interchanging ideas which may fit into either tradition, though there are purists in both categories who adhere to basic premises and moreover insist that it is impossible to do otherwise. Apparently the schism between the factions is not as insurmountable as their members believe. That abstract painters are able to bridge the gap to surrealism is indicated.... It is also true that the opposite takes place. Motherwell, formerly a member of the surrealist circle, still retains surrealist ideas while approaching pure abstraction. Artists who embrace both directions have for a precedent the work of Picasso." Janis's book appears to be the first in which quotations by artists now associated with Abstract Expressionism are appended to illustrations of their works. In it, Pollock makes his now-famous statement about his painting The She-Wolf of 1943: "She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my

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part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it" (112). 30. R[iley] 1944, 8,31. Maude Riley observes that newcomers on view, such as Pollock and Rothko, instead "seem to have found something of their own and will perhaps be the start of a third party of which modern art stands compellingly in need." As noted above, both are designated "American Surrealists" by Janis, whereas Motherwell, de Kooning, Hofmann, and Leonore Krassner ( later known as Lee Krasner) are listed as "American Abstractionists." 31. Greenberg 1945, reprinted in O'Brian K)86b, 28-30. Putzel had stated in his catalogue brochure that the "real forerunners" of this "new metamorphosism" were Arp and Miró. Greenberg points out that James Johnson Sweeney of MoMA had referred to this art in the winter issue of PR as "an expressionist direction." In later definitions Greenberg will bracket out the impact of Surrealist influence acknowledged here. PutzePs show included works by Masson, Miró, Arp, Hofmann, Pollock, Picasso, Gottlieb, Gorky, Matta, Rothko, Tamayo, Poussette-Dart, Lee Krasner, and Charles Seliger. For more on Putzel and A Problem for Critics, see Lader 1982. 32. Jewell 1943C, 6x. In answer to Gottlieb and Rothko's written response to his criticism of works that they had submitted to the exhibition by the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors Inc. at Wildenstein's, Jewell wrote, "Personally I don't believe that any vital new movement has been started at all." Regarding Gottlieb and Rothko's paintings and statements, the critic lamented, "these reliably kindle, I fear, no such distinguished hope. There isn't enough that is 'new' in them; and there is too much that is obscure and contradictory and involved and irrelevant to our present purpose as a nation." 33. Earlier, Kootz had complained of the dearth of innovation in American painting: "I probably have haunted the galleries during the past decade as much as have the critics, because of my anxiety to see new talent, intelligent invention. My report is sad. I have not discovered one bright white hope. I have not seen a painter veer from his established course. I have not seen one attempt to experiment, to realize a new method of painting. Isn't there a new way to reveal your ideas, American painters? Isn't it time right now to check whether what you're saying is régurgitation, or tired acceptance, or the same smooth railroad track?" Quoted in Edward Alden Jewell, "The Problem of Seeing," NTT, ю August 1941, sec. 9, 7. A few years later, Kootz commented that the future is "something we could only determine if we knew the ultimate potential for Abstraction and Expressionism. These are the two great movements after Cézanne, and from them have come our most important living artists." See Kootz 1943,60. 34. Ortega y Gassett, "On Point of View in Fine Arts," PR 16 (August 1949): 822-36, from The Dehumanization of Art, published in English by Princeton University

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Press in 1948. Quoted in Kootz and Rosenberg 1949, n.p. A copy of this exhibition brochure is in the MoMA library. 35. For the importance to Abstract Expressionism of the aesthetic theories of John Dewey's Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Blach, 1934), see Buettner 1981, 58-62, and Buettner's "John Dewey and the Visual Arts in America," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (Summer 1975): 383-91. 36. Kootz and Rosenberg 1949, n.p.; italics Rosenberg's. According to Kootz, the intrasubjective "makes no attempt to chronicle the American scene, exploit momentary political struggles, or stimulate nostalgia through familiar objects; he deals instead with inward emotions and experiences. Dramatically personal, each painting contains a part of the artist's self." 37. Rosenberg 1947, reprinted in Possibilities, 75. The other three painters were Romare Bearden, Byron Browne, and Carl Holty, none of whom today would likely be considered an Abstract Expressionist. 38. Sfawin] 1958,57-8. In his review of the 1960 Venice Biennale, termed "a vindication of the New American Painting," Sidney Tillim noted that some Italians call Kline "a modern Caravaggio" who, "observed away from the pressures of New York[,] ... appears a tower of stylistic authenticity." See Tillim's "Report on the Venice Biennale," AM 35 (October 1960): 28. For their statement in Possibilities, see Motherwell and Rosenberg 1947-1948, i. 39. See Nicolas Galas, "The Essence of Tragedy," Tiger's Eye 3 (March 1948): 112-14, reprinted in Gibson 1984, 143-45. Galas pointed out that "the individual who has extreme self-confidence and great will power can rise above others." See Ashton 1973,187-88, for the impact of this essay, especially on Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman. 40. The title of the Life piece undoubtedly refers to Greenberg's 1948 comment in TN( reprinted in O'Brian igSGb, 202): "It is indeed a mark of Pollock's powerful originality that he should present problems in judgment that must await the digestion of each new phase of his development before they can be solved. Since Marin—with whom Pollock will in time be able to compete for recognition as the greatest American painter of the twentieth century—no other American artist has presented such a case." In other reviews from the late forties, Greenberg used additional superlatives to back up his claim that Pollock was not only the best painter of his generation but "one of the major painters of our time." These are collected in Karmel 19993 as well as in O'Brian igSob. Karmel (19993, 63) notes that "Greenberg's steady drumroll of praise" had earned Pollock the attention of Time magazine as early as 1947. For additional discussion of Pollock's media attention, see Landau 1989,11-22; Corlett 1987. 41. For example, one photo caption reads "Pollock drools enamel paint." A different interpretation of this Life article is presented in Collins 1991. 42. Quoted in Ellsworth 1949, 45. Hofmann also explains that "it is the privilege of 88

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a democracy like ours that it expects the artist to be, through his art, the personification of its fundamental principles in being the highest example of spiritual freedom." C.Jones (1996), cites "the private drama of the Abstract Expressionist canvas." 43. C.Jones 1996,35. 44. Goodnough 1951, reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 74-8. Goodnough also wrote "Kline Paints a Picture," which appeared in AN m December 1952. 45. Kaprow 1958,24-26,55-56. 46. E. de Kooning 1951,38, reprinted in E. de Kooning 1994,103-8, her ellipsis. The notes for "David Smith Makes a Sculpture," written by the artist to provide general background material for de Kooning's article, were later published in AN. See Smith 1969,46-48,56. 47. Finkelstein 1950, 203, 205. As Finkelstein comments, "There is something distinctly American in this insistence upon art as organic synthesis, in the rejection of all discipline save that of the experience itself. The New World has always meant expanding horizons, fullness and freedom of opportunity and the throwing off of old conventions" (206). See Finkelstein 1956 for his coining of the term "Abstract Impressionism" to describe mid-1950s works by New York School artists such as Jack Tworkov and Philip Guston. 48. Schapiro, "Recent Abstract Painting," reprinted in Modern Art igth and 2oth Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 218; Ross 1990, 258-68. Originally published as "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art" (Schapiro 1957). For a more complete discussion of Schapiro's point of view toward Abstract Expressionism, especially his argument that abstraction "cannot be arbitrarily divorced from an historical or sociopolitical context," see Cernuschi 1997; Craven 1999. 49. Hess, éd., "Is Today's Artist with or Against the Past?" 1958,27,28. 50. "What Abstract Art Means to Me" 1951,7 (de Kooning's quotation), 12 (Motherwell's quotation). 51. Seitz's dissertation was finally published as Abstract Expressionist Painting in America in 1983 by the National Gallery of Art and Harvard University Press as one in a series of Ailsa Mellon Bruce Studies in American Art. Some of the core ideas of Seitz 1983 were summarized earlier in articles such as Seitz 1953. Following Nietzsche, Seitz (1983) translates Zeitgeist as "a constellation of ideas which seems to be in the atmosphere" (2). 52. See W. Rubin 1958. Rubin's "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition" was published in six different issues of AF(February-May 1967); it is reprinted in its entirety (without illustrations) in Karmel 1999a, 118-75. 53. The painters featured were Hofmann in February 1950, Pollock in May 1951, Kline in December 1952, de Kooning in March 1953, Larry Rivers in January 1954, Fairfield Porter in January 1954, Ad Reinhardt in the summer issue for 1956, Introduction

89

Jane Freilicher in November 1956, Joan Mitchell in November 1957, and Nell Blaine in May 1959. As noted, "David Smith Makes a Sculpture" appeared in September 1951. 54. For more information on The Club, which lasted from 1949 to 1962, see Sandier 1965^ Pavia reminisced about his role in founding The Club in Kay Larson, "The Art Was Abstract, the Memories Are Concrete," NTT, 15 December 2002, Arts and Leisure section, 50-51. An earlier, more short-lived forum, The Subjects of the Artists School (1948-1949), is discussed in Cavalière and Hobbs 1977,

no. 55. This assessment is found in Pavia 1960, 8-9. (Pavia started It Is magazine in 1955.) See Hess 1951,94, where it is written that "There is no 'New York School' of the 19505, for the action of the background is that it releases, instead of imposing. ... The place is where things meet and happen, where each is on his own. ... Despite the efforts of certain promoters, ambitious for some coup d'état, there is no leadership. There is work being done." 56. For the first quotation see Hess i95ob, 23. In this article, Hess adds rather romantically, "Rickety stairs and cold water flats are not figures of speech; they exist, in the deepest Sartre sense, as do all the grey discomfort, bleakness and economic insecurity that go with them." The second quotation is found in Hess, "Inside Nature ? AN 56 (February 1958): 59. 57. Alloway (i975a, 46) characterizes Hess's book on de Kooning as a "tight web of documentation and poeticized gossip." 58. Hess 1953, 30-31. Here Hess compares de Kooning to a Procrustes who "does not know the dimensions of his bed," stating that the artist "needs such doubt to keep off-balance." For an even more floridly Romantic 19503 interpretation of Woman I, see Leo Steinberg, "Month in Review," AM 30 (November 1955): 46-47. Evoking Walter Pater's overripe description of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Steinberg states that Woman I is "at once more old and young than the beauty whose appeal is to our waking taste. She is the fluid, touch-determined image of the newly born; the remembered flesh that yielded at all points to the lover; the succubus that lies too heavy on the drifting consciousness of sleep." 59. Hess, "4 Stars for the Spring Season: De Kooning,'M^50 (April 1951): 24,52. 60. Rosenberg 1958. In an essay m AN Annual, "Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art," Rosenberg described Tenth Street metaphorically, terming it "a trading post of ideas and the latest moves in art." He wrote, "On Tenth Street, the individual prevails against the band, and it is to him that art there owes its inspiration and its vocabulary. . . . The artist thus finds it necessary to exist on the edge of the edge if he is to avoid being swept by collective currents. For this purpose Tenth Street is ideal: it is all edge." Reprinted in Rosenberg, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 100-109. 90

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61. For Rosenberg's political background, see Cox 1982; Herbert 1984-85; Herbert 1985. For the critic's admiration of Baudelaire (as well as Valéry and Dostoyevsky), see Ashton 1980. 62. Rosenberg 1952,23,48. Emphasis has been added to the word "crisis," but Rosenberg himself capitalized "paint." 63. See "Parable of American Painting," in Rosenberg 1959, 13-22, and his "The Search for Jackson Pollock," AN 59 (February 1961): 35. See Cox 1982 and Ashton 1980 for further discussion of the Coonskinners/Redcoats binary. In "Tenth Street" (1958) Rosenberg pointed out how "the new American 'abstract' art, the first to appear here without a foreign return address, constituted, interestingly enough, the first art movement in the United States in which immigrants and the sons and daughters of immigrants have been leaders in creating and disseminating a style." Rosenberg went on to list forty-seven denizens of Tenth Street who fit into that category, including Gorky, de Kooning, Hofmann, Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman, Baziotes, and Philip Guston. Reprinted in Discovering the Present, 101-2. 64. Rosenberg 1952, 22-23. For more on Rosenberg's training and early partisan criticism, see Elaine O'Brien, "The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of Love and Combat" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York Graduate Center, 1997). 65. Rosenberg 1952, 22-23. Although his comment about breaking distinctions between art and life had an important effect on Happenings artists such as Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg, many Abstract Expressionist painters disagreed violently with its premise. For one example, see the copy of "The American Action Painters" found in Lee Krasner's papers, now owned by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Krasner had been very close to Rosenberg in the 19303 (she and Igor Pantuhoff, her romantic interest before she married Pollock, lived for a time with Rosenberg and his wife May Natalie Tabak, and it was Krasner who first introduced Rosenberg and Greenberg). Nevertheless, Krasner strongly pooh-poohed most of the essay's major points. Her marginalia indicate that she (and Pollock as well?) considered the title Action Painter to be "insidious." She also noted that "original work exists; it does not demonstrate what it is about to become" (her emphasis). 66. As Greenberg would assert publicly in "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name" (Greenberg K)62b), his primary riposte to Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters," Pollock believed that Rosenberg based his ideas for this essay on a conversation the two of them had on the train from Manhattan to East Hampton. This idea was perpetuated in the writings of Barbara Rose, В. Н. Friedman, Bryan Robertson, and others. Rosenberg, however, maintained adamantly that his American Action Painter was a conflation of de Kooning, Pollock, and Kline. O'Brian I993b, 138 reprints the version of Greenberg's essay that originally apIntroductio n

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peared in Encounter (London) 19 (December 1962): 67-71. See Winkenweider 1998,101, n. 29, for references to sources where (in Winkenweider's terminology) "this falsehood" is repeated. 67. Lisa Phillips, "Beat Culture: America Revisioned," in Beat Culture and the New America, ig^o-ig6^ (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Flammarion, Paris, 1996), 39. Kenneth Rexroth explains in "Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation," New World Writing No. и (New York: New American Library, 1957) that "a poem by Dylan Thomas, a saxophone solo by Charles Parker, a painting by Jackson Pollock—these are pure confabulations as ends in themselves" (28-41). For further discussion of the resonance of Pollock's paintings and Rosenberg's 1952 essay "American Action Painters" for the Beats see Landau 1989,18-21,239-40; Lhamon 1990; Belgrad 1998. 68. Brustein 1956,134-35. See also "The Wild Ones" 1956, 70-71, where Pollock is termed pejoratively "Jack the Dripper." 69. For recent reinterpretation of these remarks in a more positive light, see Alfieri, "The Pollock Exhibition," in Maroni and Bigatti 2002, 9-20; Landau 2002a, 73-90. Pollock's 11 December 1950 telegram response, which begins "NO CHAOS DAMN IT," appeared as a letter to the editor of Time in response to the American news magazine's 20 November 1950 excerpt of Alfieri 1950. The latter text was also published in its entirety in the Museo Correr's catalogue for the late-summer exhibition of Guggenheim's Pollock collection. All of these primary texts are reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 68-71. 70. Greenberg, "Art," TN, 1 February 1947, 137-39; reprinted in O'Brian ig86b, 122-25, and Karmel 19993,56-57. 71. Greenberg, "Review of an Exhibition of De Kooning," TJV466, 24 April 1948, 448, reprinted in O'Brian K)86b, 229. 72. As those who have written about Greenberg have already established, his development of these criteria date to his earliest essays about art, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," PR 6 (Fall 1939): 34-49, and "Towards a Newer Laocoon," PR 7 ( JulyAug. 1940): 296-310. Both have been widely reprinted since then. See, e.g., O'Brian 19863,5-38. 73. KozlofTK)65b, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,139-51. 74. Goldwater 1960, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,126-38. 75. For Goldwater's comments see Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,34. Some of these international reviews are reprinted in ibid., 101-8; a larger number appear in Ross 1990, 279-95, and there is a complete listing in Tuchman 1965, 249-50. Those quoted here are, respectively, Mario Valsecchi, in // Giorno, Milan, 10 June 1958; unsigned, Le Phare, Brussels, 14 December 1958; and L. D. H., La Libre Belgique, Brussels, 12 December 1958. Like the critic for Libre Belgique, Bruno Alfieri (who had criticized Pollock as chaotic) admitted at the end of his 1950 UArte

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Moderna review that, "compared to Pollock, Picasso, poor Pablo Picasso, the little gentleman who [for] a few decades [has] trouble[d] the sleep of his colleagues with the everlasting nightmare of his destructive undertakings, becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past." It is probably this judgment to which Pollock referred when he complained to Time magazine, "THINK YOU LEFT OUT MOST EXCITING PART OF MR. ALFiERi's PIECE." The review and the response are both reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 68-71. 76. Rexroth 1959,30-33. See Heron 1956,15, for a critique of John Berger's negative review of Abstract Expressionism as "a full expression of suicidal despair." Heron comments that "this is Marxist criticism at its most hysterical." 77. Barr 1959, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,95-100. 78. Greenberg 1950, reprinted in O'Brian 1993a, 62. 79. Michelson, "Paris," ^M30 (June 1959): 17. 80. In order to counter the growing preeminence of Greenberg, Rosenberg continued to defend his critical model in numerous venues during the early 19608. These include most prominently Rosenberg 1960 and "Action Painting: Crisis and Distortion," in Rosenberg 1966,38-47. Referring pejoratively to Greenberg in the latter as "a tipster on masterpieces, current and future," Rosenberg complained that, in his rival's "burlesque of art history, artists vanish, and paintings spring from one another with the help of no other generating principle than whatever 'law of development' the critic happens to have on hand" (43). 81. For more on this, see Halasz 1983, pt. 3,85. Additional information about Greenberg's critical career may be found in Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (New York: Scribner, 1997). 82. See Greenberg K)62b for criticism of Sir Herbert Read's phenomenological reading. This resulted in a 1963 exchange of letters between these two critics in Encounter magazine. These are reprinted in O'Brian K)93b, 135-44. 83. Kramer 1962, 60-63. For extensive discussion of Greenberg's early association with PR and his subsequent rejection of Marxism and Stalinism, see Herbert 1985, Cox 1982. The latter makes a case for Greenberg's 1945-1957 affiliation with the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary as critical in shaping his antiSoviet attitude in the cold war period. Cox points out that, significantly, none of Greenberg's many essays on political topics was chosen for inclusion in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Greenberg 1961). 84. For the influence of Hofmann on Greenberg, see the critic's 1957 memoir, "The Late Thirties in New York" (1960 revised version) in Greenberg 1962,230-38, as well as Kozloff 1965^ Lee Krasner was responsible not only for introducing Greenberg to Rosenberg; she also introduced him to both Hofmann and Pollock. The fact that Hofmann had spent the critical years 1904-1914 in Paris and knew Matisse, Braque, Picasso, and Delaunay must have been impressive to

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Greenberg, who admitted that the public lecture series given by Hofmann in the winter of 1938-39 was an eye-opening experience. For more on Hofmann's French-based aesthetic, see Landau 1976. 85. See Kroll 1962. Kroll cites Greenberg's "Louis and Noland," Art International 4 (May 1960): 27-8, in which Greenberg denigrates the "loose-brush, drybristled, scumbled, and lathered surfaces of the de Kooning and Kline school, with its Cubist hangover" and the "circle of virtuosity which began with that school." "Louis and Noland" is reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 94-99. 86. All of the characteristics of Abstract Expressionism that Greenberg abhorred are adulated in Friedman 1954, 12-13. Here Friedman writes, "Never before has a large group of artists (except the surrealists) so emphasized and, indeed, overemphasized the irrational (the 'unpredictable,' 'surprising,' 'intuitive,' 'phantom,' 'revelation.' And no group (except the dadaists . . .) has so attacked 'memory,' 'geometry,' 'the world,' 'most people,' 'dogma,' 'authority,' 'tradition.' " For a comparison of the "Wôlfflinian cast" of Friedman's ideas with Greenberg's view of history, see Foster 1980,75-76. Foster notes Friedman's use of "inordinate" as an adjective to define Abstract Expressionism's key techniques and effects. 87. Greenberg, "Complaints of an Art Critic," reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 265-72. 88. Greenberg's " 'American-Type' Painting" originally appeared in PR 22 (Spring 1955), 179-96, but was substantially revised for Art and Culture (Greenberg 1961, 208-29), according to O'Brian 1993a, 235. It has been widely reprinted in, e.g., Ross 1990,235-53, and is also included in this volume. 89. Greenberg 1952, reprinted in O'Brian 19933,99-106. 90. Greenberg 1955. For discussion, see Kozloff 1965, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,143. 91. Schapiro 1956,146-47; Rosenzweig 1980,12. 92. Rosenzweig 1980,12. The two reviews cited are Belle Krasne, "The Bar Vertical on Fields Horizontal," Art Digest 25 (i May I95i):i6, and Judith Kaye Reed, "Newman's Flat Areas," Art Digest 24 (i February 1950): 16. 93. Schapiro 1956,146-4794. "Foreword: On Art and Terminology," in Arnason 1961,13. 95. Arnason, introduction to ibid., 24. 96. Gottlieb and Rothko, quoted in Jewell I943b, xg. As already noted, their letter was written in response to Jewell 19433. Although Newman helped write or edited their letter, because he did not exhibit in that show and Jewell therefore did not mention his art derisively, it was not appropriate for Newman to со-sign. In "The Plasmic Image," a multipart essay of 1945 published in O'Neill 1990, 138-55, Newman accuses Jewell of trying to "belittle" his friends' art by labeling it "globalism." 97. Gottlieb and Rothko, quoted in Jewell I943b, x9; Newman I947b, reprinted in

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98. 99. mo. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108.

109.

Shapiro and Shapiro 1990; Ross 1990; Harrison and Wood 1993; Hills 2001; O'Neill 1990. Cited in the same context in Cavalière and Hobbs 1977,110-17. Greenberg, essay for Post Painterly Abstraction (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964); reprinted in O'Brian i993b, 192-97. O'Brian i993a, 104,232. Reprinted in O'Neill 1990,108. Alloway 19б5а, reprinted in Alloway 1975,20. Rosenblum 1961, reprinted in Ross 1990, 273-78. In Rosenblum 1975, the author expanded these arguments. In "The Sublime Is Now" (Newman 1948), once again opposing Greenbergian aesthetic criteria, Newman decisively rejected art historical inevitability, the "fetish of quality," and the structures of beauty associated with Platonic conceptions of judgment. Newman wrote that "the image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history." Greenberg 1955, reprinted in O'Brian 1993a, 228; Greenberg K)62b, reprinted in O'Brian i993b, 141. Alloway К)6за, reprinted in Alloway 1975,31-41; Rosenblum 1961, reprinted in Ross 1990,276. Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 85-94.1 follow the orthographic designation set out by Charles Harrison in "Modernism," in Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard ShifT (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147. Harrison capitalizes Modernism to refer to the art critical theories of Greenberg and Michael Fried. If an author has not capitalized the term within a quotation, I do not correct it, however. "Byzantine Parallels," in Greenberg I96ia, 167-70. In " 'American-Type' Painting" Greenberg had commented, "In some of the huge 'sprinkled' pictures [Pollock] did in 1950 and showed in 1951, value contrasts are pulverized as it were, spread over the canvas like dusty vapor (the result was two of the best pictures he ever painted)." Reprinted in O'Brian 1993a, 233. For discussion of Greenberg's concept of "optical mirage" as he applied it to Pollock, see Krauss 1993,246; this section is reprinted in Frascina 2000,361-63. Fried 1965, 14-17, reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 97-103. Rosenzweig (1980, 23) points out that "Pollock Paints a Picture" (Goodnough 1951) opened the door for both Greenberg and Fried by stressing the artist's use of aluminum paint as a device "tending to hold other colors on the same plane as the canvas" (41). Fried's organization of "Three American Painters—Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella" (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965) and his subsequent focus on Stella as the prime exemplar of Modernism complemented

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Greenberg's stint as advisor for the French &, Company gallery in Manhattan from 1959 to 1960. These activities lent even more authority to their theoretical positions. Greenberg's French &, Company job, as well as his curatorial activities at such other institutions as Bennington College and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, for example, provided another important avenue to promote the artists he favored, such as Newman, Louis, Noland, and Olitski. no. Kenworth Moffett, Jules Olistki (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 13, quoted in Rosenzweig 1980, 27-28. A few years later, the Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd would pronounce that "Pollock created the large scale, wholeness and simplicity that have become common to almost all good work." See Judd 1967, in.

112. 113.

114.

115.

34See Rubin 1967 (reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 118-75); O'Connor 1964 (excerpted from O'Connor 1965); O'Connor 1967. Influential interviews that Krasner gave in the 19608 (mostly in conjunction with the MoMA show) include Glaser 1967; du Plessix and Gray 1967 (which also includes reminiscences about Pollock by Tony Smith, Betty Parsons, and Alfonso Ossorio); and Friedman 1969. These interviews are reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 25-48. Alloway 1966, reprinted in Alloway I975b, 42-51. For Greenberg's relationship with the students in his 1961-1963 Harvard University graduate seminar, see Reise 1968, parts 1-2. Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, and Jane Harrison Cone were in this class. Barbara Rose, whose husband at the time, the painter Frank Stella, was a close friend of Fried's, was also strongly influenced by Greenberg's Wolfflinian approach. Irving Sandier, in American Art of the ig6os (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1988), labels seriality a major attribute of the sensibility of the sixties (73-76). (Numerous journal articles described this widespread tendency. See, e.g., Mel Bochner, "Serial Art Systems: Solipsism," AM 41 (Summer 1967): 39-43; Jack Burnham, "Systems Esthetics," AF43 (September 1968): 30-35. See Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of David Smith, David Hare and Mirko," 7^164,19 April 1947,459-60, and Greenberg 1947 (both reprinted in O'Brian K)86b, 140,166-67); see also Greenberg 1956-57 (reprinted in O'Brian a

*993 5 275-79 and slightly revised in Greenberg 1961,203-7). 116. Cone 1966, 1-2. She cites Greenberg's comment in "David Smith (1956-57)" that Smith "is one of these artists on the order of Balzac who not only can afford their mistakes, but even need them." (See O'Brian 1993a, 275-79.) By 1964 Greenberg declared that Smith's "radical unevenness" had become "almost entirely a thing of the past." See Greenberg K)64b, reprinted in Art International 8 (May 1964): 34-37; O'Brian 199зЬ, 188-92. 117. See Smith I952b; Smith 1960, 44 (for the quotation); Kuh 1962, 219-34. On Smith's working in series, Greenberg commented in 1964, "And as the pieces in each series multiplied, they became less abrupt as variations, more nuanced. 96

Introductio n

118. 119.

120. 121. 122.

123.

124. 125. 126.

But the nuancing, instead of making Smith's manner more involuted or ambiguous, only made it more logical and direct." Reprinted in O'Brian I993b, i8g. Motherwell 1966,66. See, e.g., Greenberg's description of Smith's Untitled (24 April 1965) in "David Smith: Comments on His Latest Works," reprinted in O'Brian K)93b, 226-27: "This is one example, a very late work, in which the vein of his flat painted ('mural') sculpture crosses that of his Zig series. As in a Synthetic Cubist painting, the flat 'picture' plane is jolted into what seem two planes of different depth, only to have its 'integrity' reasserted. This is done, as much pictorially as sculpturally, by the inflections of the dividing ridge of steel, which cuts into and collects space on top of and outside the 'picture' plane. Both the pictorial and the sculptural seem here to transcend themselves in a new kind of unified medium." Rose 1975,179-80.1 borrow the phrase "epitaph for an avant-garde" from Ferren 1958. Rose seems to reference Sandier 1959 in her assessment. Greenberg 1965, reprinted in O'Brian i993b, 215. Newman 1965,39, 55. For a related view of Abstract Expressionism's putative demise, see T[homas] В. Н [ess], "Editorial: The Many Deaths of American Art," AN59 (October 1960): 25. Battcock 1969-1970, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,152-56. In reviewing the earlier "American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists" exhibition at the Guggenheim, Sidney Tillim made many of the same points. For instance, Tillim wrote that "Mr. Arnason revealed Abstract Expressionism as having arrived at the pinnacle of decadence and ennui." See his "Month in Review," AM36 (December 1961): 42-43. During the sixties, some of AAFs regular writers were apparently attempting to provide a corrective to the boosterism found in AN in the previous decade. Geldzahler 1969,15. Gottlieb, quoted in Friedman 1978, 96, from an unpublished interview with Andrew Hudson. See also Collins 1991,294-99. This petition garnered a huge amount of publicity. In addition to the Life article, "Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show," 15 January 1951,34, other national coverage included Weldon Kees, "Art," TN170,3 June 1950,556-57; "The Revolt of the Pelicans," Time, 5 June 1950,54; "The Metropolitan Goes Native," Cue, ю June 1950,22,45-46; and "Blind justice: Jury appointed for first national exhibition to be held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in December; with text of open letter signed by twenty-eight artists," AN 49 (Summer 1950): 15, reprinted in Ross 1990, 226-27. Local coverage included "The Irascible Eighteen," New York Herald Tribune, 23 May 1950; "18 Painters Boycott Metropolitan; Charge 'Hostility to Advanced Art,' " NTT, 22 May 1950; "18 U.S. Artists Boycott Contest of Metropolitan," New York Herald Tribune, 22 May 1950; "18 Artists Vow to Boycott 'Met' Exhibit," New York World-Telegram Introductio n

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and Sun, 22 May 1950. Many of these clippings are pasted into a scrapbook in the William and Ethel Baziotes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 127. Friedman (1978,102) states that "no group photograph of the Abstract Expressionists has been as widely reproduced as Leen's," and it has been used countless additional times since he made this statement. 128. Sandier 1970,2-3. 129. Arnason 1961,13,24. 130. Moffett 1972,313-14. 131. McCaughey 1971,71-72. At that time, McCaughey (like Moffett) was a formalist along Greenbergian lines. As such, he complained that Sandier's position "dilates too readily into a series of dubious equations (subject matter equals content, content equals meaning, meaning equals significance)." It is McCaughey's view that "the abstract expressionists removed the subject matter of painting from the area of the discoursable and the discoverable into the area of the strictly optical experience." Another perspective is represented in Harrison 1973, 9. Harrison admires the way "Irving Sandler's recently published study of Abstract Expressionism has done much to readjust the overall picture in terms of substantiated history and original documentation," thus providing welcome "material for alternative hypotheses." 132. See Alloway, "Artists as Writers," 31; Whitney Independent Study Program 1975; Cavalière and Hobbs 1977,110-17; Car mean and Rathbone, 1978. 133. For Pollock's quotation, see Rodman 1957, 82; Gottlieb's "Statement, 1947" appeared in "The Ides of Art," Tiger's Eye i (December 1947): 43, reprinted in Ross 1990, 52; Rothko is quoted from the typescript of "The Portrait and the Modern Artist," an "Art in New York" program for radio station WNYC broadcast on 13 October 1943,1-3 (reprinted in Tuchman 1965,139, as well as Alloway and MacNaughton 1981). All are also republished in Whitney Independent Study Program 1975. 134. Cavalière and Hobbs 1977, no. 135. Dissertations on Abstract Expressionist criticism written in the 19703 include Cox's Art-as-Politics, completed and published in 1977; Buettner's American Art Theory 1945-1970, completed in 1977 and published in 1981; and Foster's The Critics of Abstract Expressionism, completed in 1973 and published in 1980. Dissertations on Abstract Expressionist art and artists in process or completed during the seventies and early eighties include Gail Levin (influence of Kandinsky), Melvin P. Lader (Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery), Gladys Kashdin (Abstract Expressionist art and ideas), Ann Eden Gibson (Abstract Expressionist little magazines), Robert C. Hobbs (Motherwell), Robert Mattison (Motherwell),Janet T. Anderson (Motherwell), Mona Hadler (Baziotes), Ellen G. Landau (Krasner), Mary R. Davis (Gottlieb), Cynthia Goodman (Hof98

Introduction

136.

137.

138.

139.

140.

141. 142.

mann), Diane Newbury (Hofmann), Elizabeth Langhorne (Pollock), Matthew Rohn (Pollock), Harry F. Gaugh (Kline), Benjamin G. Paskus (Newman), David M. Quick (Newman), Beverly June Wayne (Reinhardt), Robert Fulton Porter (Rothko), James Ward (Rothko), Anna C. Chave (Rothko), Catherine Olivier (Tobey), Frederic J. Hoffman (Tobey), Edward R. Kelly (Tobey), Jeanne Chenault (Tomlin), and Harry Rand (Gorky). Robert ReifPs dissertation on Gorky was completed in 1961. For more details about these doctoral studies, many of which formed the basis for subsequently published books, see "Artists' Bibliographies and Selected Exhibitions" in Auping 1987,274-95. Cavalière (1979) explains how the 1975 Whitney Downtown exhibition, "Subjects of the Artists: New York Painting, 1941-1947," provided the genesis of "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years." See Roberta Smith, " 'Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years' at the Whitney," Art in America 67 (May-June 1979): 134; Hilton Kramer, "Art: Elegiac Works of Lee Krasner," NTT, 9 February 1979, C25- For discussion of the impact of this exhibition on Krasner's career, see "Forming Krasner's Identity," in Landau 1995,10. A few paintings by Krasner had also been included in the Whitney Downtown's earlier show, "Subjects of the Artists." Prominent critics writing about Krasner in the late 19605 and 19705 included Lawrence Campbell, Emily Wasserman, Cindy Nemser, Bryan Robertson, Eleanor Munro, Marcia Tucker, and Barbara Rose. See Landau 1995, 21-22, for a complete list of articles and catalogue essays by these authors. Rose 1977,100, n. 2, tells how Krasner "still smarts when she tells the story of Barnett Newman calling to invite Pollock to join the protest of the 'irascible eighteen' against the Metropolitan Museum. Krasner answered the phone; Newman asked to speak with Pollock and did not invite her to join, although she had been active in all of the various artists' protest activities in the thirties." Krasner's absence from Leen's photograph is widely considered as having been highly detrimental to her acceptance as a pioneer Abstract Expressionist. Friedman 1978 cites other artists who were not in the photograph who also probably should have been. Hofmann's role as a teacher to several first-generation and many second-generation Abstract Expressionists, and especially his famous "push-pull" method, took on renewed importance in studies of the 19705. See Rosenberg 1970; Sandier 1973; Goodman 1979. See O'Connor 1965, 366-68, 372; the exchange of letters between Rubin and O'Connor in AFz (June 1964): 4-5; Polcari I979b; Roskill 1979. Some of the numerous other sources from the late 19605 and the 19705 on these topics include Alloway 1968; Kagan 1975; Cavalière 1977; Wechsler 19773, I977b; Hadler 1977; Polcari 19793; D. Rubin 1979; Laurance P. Hurlburt, "The Siqueiros Experimental Workshop: New York, 1936," Art Journal 35 (Spring Introduction

99

143.

144. 145.

146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151.

152.

153.

154.

100

1976): 237-46. A high percentage of these articles appeared in AM during the period when it was edited by the late Richard Martin. Martin offered many younger scholars of Abstract Expressionism a chance to publish their ideas in the 19705 and 19805. See Allentuck 1971, preceded by Sandier 1968. After Allentuck's reprint, numerous book reviews and additional articles on Graham were published, including Kokkinen 1976, Herrera 1976, and Carl Goldstein, "John Graham during the 19205: His Introduction to Modernism," JJÍ 51 (March 1977): 98-99. See not only Graham's System and Dialectics (Graham 1939), but also his article "Primitive Art and Picasso" (Graham 1937). Ellen Schwartz, "The Birth of Abstract Expressionism," AN 78 (January 1979): 75. For an even more critical review, see Geoffrey Dorfman, " 'Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,' Whitney Museum of American Art," AFij (December 1978): 61-63. Dorfman decries the paintings on view as having "the look of a few surviving artifacts of a curatorial dig." Quoted in Allentuck 1971, 95. Cited in Hobbs and Levin 1978, 13; Graham's emphasis is retained. See Simon K)67a, K)67b. Busa's quoted remark was made to Melvin P. Lader in an unpublished interview, Minneapolis, 26 May 1976.1 am grateful to Lader for providing access to this transcript. See Landau 1989,94-99 and D. Rubin 1979, 103-9 for further discussion of these joint artistic sessions. Quoted in Simon 1967^ 22-23. Smith, " 'Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,' " 134. These are Friedman 1972; Kligman 1974; and O'Connor and Thaw 1979. Pollock's 1956 statement, "We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time," quoted in Rodman 1957, 82, was used as primary evidence. See Langhorne 1977; Langhorne 1979 (reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 202-19). For Krasner's lawsuit and other details of the Jungian interpretation controversy, see Cernuschi I992b. See Gordon 1980 for a discussion of the major points of the so-called Jungian critics of Pollock, as well as W. Rubin 1979 for arguments against them. Rubin's articles on the limits of psychological criticism of Pollock are reprinted (without illustrations) in Karmel 1999a, 220-61. In light of the findings of conservators who examined the paintings in MoMA's 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, some of Rubin's assertions about Pollock's rejection of figuration in the allover pictures require correction. See James Coddington, "No Chaos Damn It," and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, "Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue," in Karmel 1999^ 101-20. See Landau 2002a for further discussion as to how Rubin's thesis requires revision since the conservators' discovery of physical evidence of buried figuration. Karmel uses new digital

Introduction

155.

156. 157. 158.

159.

160. 161. 162.

163.

164. 165.

methods to demonstrate this in "Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth" (Karmel 1998), 87-137. See Hobbs 1975. A copy is in the library of the Dedalus Foundation, New York. A concise version of the arguments made in this dissertation is presented in Hobbs 1976,29-34, reprinted below. See Fineberg 1978. Motherwell admitted his problems returning affection in an interview with Fineberg, 5 November 1976. Rosenberg 1952,23. See Rand 1976 and Rand 1977,114-15. Rosenberg K)62b, 50,34. Articles published in the 19603 and books published in 1978 and 1980 by Karlen Mooradian, Gorky's nephew, established many pertinent biographical details. See Auping 1987, 274, for information on these sources. Foster (1976) observes that, because "his art was somewhat uncongenial" to their respective theses, the differing treatment of Gorky by Rosenberg and Greenberg presents an interesting comparison. As Foster points out, "Unlike Greenberg, who thought Gorky was good but not important, Rosenberg viewed Gorky as a great innovator" (61). Eliza Rathbone, "Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song" in Carmean and Rathbone 1978, 58-90. These ideas were elaborated in Rand 1980. See also Lader 1984. Hess 1972, p. 232. For the friendship of Gorky, Graham, and de Kooning see Reiff 1977; Rose 1976; Lader 1978. Hess 1972,223-27. Lader 1978, 95-97; E. A. Carmean Jr., "Willem de Kooning: The Women" in Carmean and Rathbone 1978,154-83; Yard 1978. Yard quotes the artist speaking about his Women in an interview with David Sylvester (excerpted in Hess 1968,149): "I look at them now [ten years later] and they seem vociferous and ferocious. I think it had to do with the idea of the idol, the oracle, and above all the hilariousness of it." In that same interview (De Kooning 1963), the artist explained, "So I fear that I have to follow my desires" (Hess, 1968,148), cited in Carmean and Rrthbone 1978,157. Anderson 1967,60. The other sculptors Greenberg named as promising in "The New Sculpture" (reprinted in O'Brian K)86b, 313-19) were Theodore Roszak, David Hare, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, Richard Lippold, Peter Grippe, Burgoyne Diller, Adeline Kent, Ibram Lassaw, and Isamu Noguchi. In 1984 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized an important exhibition on Abstract Expressionist sculpture titled "The Third Dimension: Sculpture of the New York School" (Phillips 1984). E. A. Carmean Jr., introduction to in Carmean and Rathbone 1978,16. Krauss 1977. This catalogue raisonné and Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Krauss I97ib) were based on the author's 1969 Harvard University dissertation, "The Sculpture of David Smith." Introduction

101

166. Krauss igyib, 6-7,44. 167. See, e.g., Dehner 1977-78. The oeuvre of Dehner, who was married to Smith from 1927 to 1952, is thoroughly explored in Marter 1980-81 and Marter 1993. (See Marter 1984 and below in the text and the anthology for Marter's discussion of the ramifications for both Dehner and Smith of their personal and artistic relationship.) Marter has also written articles and catalogue essays on Theodore Roszak, the only other male Abstract Expressionist sculptor whose reputation comes close to that of Smith. See "Theodore Roszak's Early Constructions: The Machine as Creator of Fantastic and Ideal Forms," АЛ/54 (November 1979): 110-13; Theodore Roszak: The Drawings (New York: Drawing Society, 1992). 168. Quoted in Wye 1982,16. In the introduction to this catalogue, William Rubin comments that "Louise Bourgeois is a loner of another order, whose bona fides goes back four decades to a period when maintaining a wholly individual profile in the face of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, David Smith et alia involved an immense force of artistic and personal character" (ii). 169. For Bourgeois's participation on this panel, see Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father, Reconstruction of the Father; Writings and Interviews ^23-1997, edited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obst (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Paris: Editions Violette, 1998), 64. 170. Wye 1982,17. See Gibson 1997,125-27, for further discussion of Bourgeois's relation to Surrealism and the Abstract Expressionists. In a 1969 interview with William Rubin published in Bernadac and Obst, Louise Bourgeois, 83, Bourgeois disavows any connection to male Abstract Expressionist sculptors: Q: Danny Robbins sees you "not related to the New York milieu." Do you not feel an affinity to the work done in the 405 and early 505 by Ferber, Lipton, Roszak and others who were exploring themes of eclosión and organic growth, often in a context of biomorphism distantly derived from Surrealism? A: I do not feel any affinity with the sculptors you name. 171. Bourgeois is quoted in Terrie Sultan, "Redefining the Terms of Engagement," in Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory; Works 1982-1993 (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1994), 28. For analysis of Bourgeois's brand of feminist existentialism, especially as it relates to understanding her 19403 sculptural series Personnages, see Helfenstein 2002,10-32 (quotation is at 10). 172. "The Late Thirties in New York," in Greenberg 1961,230, published in an earlier form as "New York Painting Only Yesterday," AN 56 (Summer 1956): 58, 84-86 (reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 19-25). This quotation was used as an epigraph in Shapiro and Shapiro 1977 (reprinted in Frascina 1985 and Frascina 2000) and in Guilbaut 1983,17. For Rosenberg's statement see Rosenberg 1952, 48. 173. Reprinted in Rose 1975,129-30; Gibson 1990,239-40. In Terenzio 1992,45-46, 102

Introduction

this text is also republished. Terenzio asserts that "MotherwelPs discarded drafts for the preface reveal that he had intended quite a different approach, which he must have relinquished to Rosenberg's persuasion." 174. MotherwelPs "The Modern Painter's World" was initially given as a lecture at Mt. Holyoke College on 10 August 1944. It is reproduced in Kloyber, Wolfgang Paalen's DYN(emphasis MotherwelPs) and excerpted in Terenzio 1992,27-35, and Hills 2001,164-68. 175. Newman's "What About Isolationist Art?" (1942) was unpublished until it appeared in Hess 1971, 35-36. It is reprinted in Ross 1990, 121-25 and O'Neill 1990, 20-29. In this polemical essay Newman paralleled the isolationism of regionalist and American Scene art with Hitlerism, labeling both examples of "vicious nationalism." Elsewhere, in a related statement made in 1943 (for a catalogue to the first group show of American Modern artists at the Riverside Museum), Newman decried the fact that "art in America is still the plaything of politicians." Quoted in Guilbaut 1983,69. 176. Guilbaut 1983, 72-79. He also discusses MotherwelPs "The Modern Painter's World" at 79-81. 177. Ibid., 11. A good overview of the main points of the cold war argument is given in Cernuschi 1997, 37-40. For the original articles, see Shapiro and Shapiro 1970; Kozloff 1973; Hauptman 1974; Cockcroft 1974; Mathews 1976; Tagg 1976; Guilbaut 1980. All but Hauptman and Tagg are reprinted in Frascina 2000. Frascina notes that AF provided a publication opportunity for many of these authors. 178. Cockcroft, in Frascina 1985,126 (quotation is at ill). Especially important are parallels between the high value that Abstract Expressionist artists placed on creative risk and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's cold war policy of political "brinkmanship" during Truman's presidency. 179. Barr, "Is Modern Art Communistic?," NYTMagazine, 14 December 1952, 2223,28-30. See text below for discussion of "The New American Painting." 180. See especially Orton and Pollock 1981, reprinted in Frascina 1985, Frascina 2000, and Orton and Pollock 1996. 181. Irving Sandier, introduction to Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 42-45. Additional criticism of Guilbaut and his cohorts is found in Kramer 1985. (I borrow the phrase "complacent accessory" from Kramer.) Other interesting reviews of Guilbaut's book that go into greater detail about the pros and cons of the argument that Abstract Expressionism can be considered a weapon of the cold war include Buchloh 1984; Craven 1985; Thomas Lawson, "How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War," AF zz (Summer 1984): 83; and Patricia Hills, "Book Review" Archives of* American ArtJournal 30, nos. 1-4 (1990): 84-87. Craven also reviews Seitz 1983 and Cox 1982. Introduction

103

182. Harrison 1973, pt. i, 9; this essay was originally commissioned for Anthony Richardson and Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art (London: Penguin Books, 1973). 183. Kuspit 1980, reprinted in The Critic as Artist: The Intentionality of Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 171-81. Kuspit was responding to Fuller

1979184. Kuspit 1980,173; Kramer 1985, 2. But, this series (according to Kramer) "can hardly be regarded as any sort of assertion of Cold War ideology. On the contrary, [the Elegies to the Spanish Republic] pay homage to one of the most unquestioned anti-fascist pieties of the liberal Left." Although the title of de Kooning's Light in August (1948) refers to a novel by Faulkner with a political theme (see text below), it is unclear that the artist had a political motivation when painting this canvas. The 19605 works of Norman Lewis, also mentioned below, react to civil rights issues, but they postdate Abstract Expressionism's heyday. 185. Mattison 1987 (a revised version of the author's 1986 Princeton University doctoral dissertation). See also Mattison 1982,1985. 186. Quoted in Motherwell 1963, n.p. Cited in Collins 1984,95 (for Spanish Elegies), 96 (for modern art). 187. Ashton and Flam 1983,33. 188. Motherwell, in Bryan Robertson, Addenda to personal interview with the artist, 1965, n.p.; transcript in the collection of the Dedalus Foundation, New York. Quoted in Terenzio, 1980,36. A frequently cited example is Motherwell's observation in "Beyond the Aesthetic," Design 47 (1946): 14-15: "The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist no matter how one shifts its physical contexts. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps, and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red or its relations, and it would be useless as an artistic element." Motherwell was probably the most highly educated Abstract Expressionist. He earned a BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and studied at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University from 1937 to 1938 and at Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro in 1939. He spoke fluent French and, unlike his American colleagues, could converse with the Surrealist emigres in New York during World War II. 189. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), quoted in Kuspit 1978a, 120. Kuspit's arguments were influenced by the phenomenology of the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 190. Kuspit 19783,121,123. See, e.g., Bannard 1971. Gibson (1981) discusses the limitations of Greenberg's "critique of the color-field painters' work as essays in reduction," as does Alloway (1973, 38). Gibson cites Fried, William Rubin, and

104

Introduction

191. 192.

193. 194.

195.

196. 197.

198. 199.

200.

201.

202.

Bannard as continuing the formalist line of assignment; Alloway cites Eugene C. Goossen. Rothko 1946, n.p., cited by Firestone 1981,140. Still, letter to Gordon Smith, director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, i January 1959, published in Paintings of Clyfford Still 1959; cited in Firestone 1981. The entire letter is reprinted in Chipp 1968, 574-76. Motherwell's comment, which is frequently quoted, was made to Margaret Paul. See Motherwell 1963, reprinted in Terenzio 1980,10. Firestone 1980,1982. See Newman's statement in "The Ides of Art, 6 Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art?," Tiger's Eye 6 (1948): 51-53 and in Still 1952, 21-22. Both are cited in Alloway 1973. I borrow this characterization (not stipulated by Alloway) from Kuspit 1977,35. Kuspit writes that, in general, "Still thinks of art as value-laden rather than factoriented." Gibson 1981,144-45, !52. Rothko is quoted from the transcript of a joint broadcast with Gottlieb on the radio station WNYC, 13 October 1943. See Polcari 1979,126. The entire transcript is reprinted in Alloway 1981, appendix B. For details, see Weiss 1983. For some idea of the huge controversy generated by this show (conceptualized by William Rubin), see Arthur C. Danto, "Defective Affinities," TJV239, i December 1984,590-92; Hal Foster, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks," October 34 (Fall 1985): 45-70, reprinted in Hal Foster, Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 181-208; Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: " Trimitivism' in 20th Century Art' at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984," AF 2,3 (November 1984): 55. Varnedoe's essay, "Abstract Expressionism," is found in the MoMA exhibition catalogue, 2:615-59, and his response to critics, "On the Claims and Critics of the Trimitivism' Show," appeared in Art in America 73 (May 1985): 11-13, l5-> ^ 19,21. Zakian (19883,33) details "problems with this standard notion of sublimity as it relates to the facts of Newman's art and writing." Zakian avers that "Rosenblum and his followers erred by misunderstanding the nature of metaphysics" and objects to Auping's unquestioning acceptance of the standard interpretation found in "Beyond the Sublime," included in Auping 1987,146-66. Rushing 1988,187,193. See David Sylvester, "The Ugly Duckling," in Auping 1987,137-45; Jean-François Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," AF 22 (April 1984): 36-43; Hess 1971,73; Rosenberg 1978,79. Baigell 1994,34; Hess 1971,56. Baigell provides a more complete discussion of

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105

Newman's putative sources in Kabbalah. He considers that Newman (a secular Jew), as well as Hess and Rosenberg, misread Hasidic religious exaltation by equating it with personal fulfillment. Hess refers to Gershon G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1946), 260-76. Baigell also postulates the importance of writings by Sartre and Martin Buber for Newman's universalizing desire to "make cathedrals ... out of ourselves." 203. Chave igSga, 3. The Rothko quotation is from William C. Seitz's notes from an interview with Rothko, William C. Seitz Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Quoted in ibid., 25. Rodman (1957,82) states that Pollock declared in 1956, "I don't care for 'abstract expressionism' . . . and it's certainly not 'non-objective' and not 'non-representational' either. I'm very representational some of the time and a little all of the time. . . . Painting is selfdiscovery. ... Every good artist paints what he is." 204. Quoted in Rodman 1957,93, and included in Chave H)89a, 25. 205. Przyblyski (1994, 550) comments on Chave's thesis in her review of Leja 1993. According to Przyblyski, Chave's version of Rothko's mature style, seen as a "palimpsest of traces" ("of Surrealist automatism, archaic symbolism, tribal art, Nietzschean conceptions of tragedy and Utopian dreams of the timeless" as well as Renaissance religious iconography), though more focused on close readings of individual works, is ultimately less innovative than Leja's re-conception of Pollock's modernist subjectivity. Chave I989b is an abbreviated version of the main points of Chave KjSga. 206. Cernuschi 1986 refers to Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated by W. Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). Arguments about Rothko in Cernuschi 1986 were expanded in Cernuschi 1997. 207. For example, Gottlieb, whose gridlike pictographs of the early forties, which often featured runelike symbols in compartments, lent themselves to structuralist and semiotic reexaminations. See, e.g., Rand 1977,121-22; Berger 1981,138. 208. Gibson 1987,65. 209. Ibid., 75-76,78. 210. Ibid., 71 (her italics). 211. For further explication of the psychological meanings of this work, see Landau 1989,217-18. 212. Shiff 1987, 98, based on definitions provided by Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, edited by Charles Harshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burke, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958-60), 2:143-44,156-73. 213. Namuth, "Jackson Pollock," in Portfolio: The Annual of the Graphic Arts (Cincinnati, 1951),; reprinted in Rose K)8ob, 9-20. Namuth's essay was also included in Rose's original French edition, U Atelier de Jackson Pollock (Paris: Macula/Pierre Brochet, 1978), as were commentaries by Rosalind Krauss, "Reading Photographs as Texts," and Francis V. O'Connor, "The Photographs of 106

Introduction

Jackson Pollock as Art Historical Documentation." Additional material was added by Rose to the English version, including her own "Hans Namuth's Photographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth: Parts 1-2," originally published in AM (Rose 1979). Rose K)8ob is reviewed in Orton and Pollock 1996,165-76. 214. Rose 1979,112. 215. Shiff 1987,112-13. 216. For treatments of Newman's influence that appeared in the 19805, see, e.g., Gibson K)88c, 15; Auping, "Beyond the Sublime" in Auping 1987. For Pollock, see Rose 1979,114-15; Landau 1989, 240-44. A recent comprehensive treatment is Kirk Varnedoe's "Comet: Jackson Pollock's Life and Work," in Varnedoe and Karmel 1998, 67-71. According to Helen Frankenthaler, "with de Kooning you could assimilate and copy... Pollock instead opened up what one's own inventiveness could take off from. Given one's own talent and curiosity, one could explore, originate, discover from Pollock as one might, say, from Picasso or Gorky or Kandinsky." See Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), 30. For more on de Kooning's impact on the second generation, see Kozloff 1964; Sandier 1978. 217. Monographs include Frank 1983; Rohn 1987 (a revision of the author's 1984 University of Michigan dissertation, which analyzes Pollock's poured paintings from the point of view of Rudolf Arnheim's gestalt perceptual psychology); Landau 1989. Cernuschi 1993 followed closely behind. Biographies written in the 19808 include Potter 1985; Solomon 1987; Naifeh and Smith 1989. 218. O'Connor 1980, 9. For a description of Pollock's difficult birth, see O'Connor and Thaw 1979,4:203. For her elaboration of Jungian theories, see Langhorne 1989. In Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121-35, Donald Kuspit offers "An Alternate Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Jackson Pollock's Psychoanalytic Drawings." 219. See Carmean K)82a; Krauss 1982. 220. Rose 1981, reviewed by Grace Glueck as "Scenes from a Marriage: Krasner and Pollock," AN 80 (December 1981): 57-61. See also Rose 1983 for the catalogue for the Krasner retrospective; Landau 1984 is a review of this exhibition. 221. See Landau K)8ia, igSib; Kuthy and Landau 1989,71-92. Landau 2OO2b is a revised and updated version of the latter published in English. Its subtitle, "The Erotics of Influence," is borrowed from David Shapiro, "Art as Collaboration: Toward a Theory of Pluralist Aesthetics 1950-1980," in Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century, edited by Cynthia Jaffe McCabe (Washington DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1984), 55. 222. See Wechsler 1989,61-64; Goossen 1958a. 223. Of the twenty-two artists represented in "The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism; Works on Paper 1938-1948," shown at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1986, seven were not American. A dozen were Introduction

107

among those included in Wechsler's exhibition—which had a total of forty-three different artists, probably the largest number ever assembled under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism. None of these were so-called second-generation artists such as Norman Bluhm, Al Leslie, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler. Another exhibition at the same venue, "Action/Precision: The New Direction in New York (1955-1960)," organized by Schimmel in 1984, addressed the innovations of that group. Almost a decade after "The Interpretive Link," two books about Surrealism's impact on the New York School, Tashjian 1995 and Sawin 1995, were published. The respective contributions of these two studies are reviewed in Jachec 1998. 224. For the original three essays, see T. J. Clark, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art"' Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark," Critical Inquiry 9 (September 1982): 139-56, 217-34. Clark's rejoinder, "Arguments about Modernism: A Reply to Michael Fried," was first published in W. J. T. Mitchell, The Politics of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 239-48. All are reprinted in Frascina 1985, 47-88; Frascina 2000, 60109. Frascina also republishes Greenberg's 1939 "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in both editions. For the quotations, see Clark, "Greenberg's Theory," in Frascina 1985,49,55,59 (italics his). 225. See Fried, "How Modernism Works," in Frascina 1985,65-71. 226. Polcari (igSSd, 176-77). The author also provides a very specific critique of the Marxist approach to Abstract Expressionism: "In short, this vein of Late Marxist writing depends on faulty premises; specious associations; perpetuations of original critical misunderstandings; simplistic, political recontextualizations and entrapments; quotations out of context; factual errors; dismissal of the personal, cultural and intellectual concerns; sweeping abstractions and generalizations; and willful ignorance of intentions, subjects, forms and imagery of the artists" (177). 227. Gibson K)88b, 171. 228. Wanda Corn, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art"AB 20 (June К)88):199. Corn cites a democratizing rebellion "against elitism and the restrictiveness of a canon that privileged male artists and high art masterpieces" as initiating new approaches in the 19608 and 19705, stating that "many were pushed towards their revisionist stance by the radical critique of art history itself, which questioned a discipline that focused so exclusively on art considered innovative and aesthetically superior." She explains that techniques borrowed from other disciplines became particularly useful for the framing of new questions in art history. See also Donald Kuspit, "Conflicting Logics: Twentieth Century Studies at the Crossroads,"^ 69 (March 1987): 117-32. 229. See Anfam 1990; Leja 1993. Leja's "The Formation of an Avant-Garde in New

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Introductio n

York," in Auping 1987,13-33, became a chapter of the latter. Both were based on Leja's 1988 Harvard University dissertation. 230. Anfam 1990,12. 231. Ibid., 20. 232. Still, quoted in Rothko 1946 and cited in Anfam 1993с, 265, an article based on the author's 1984 University of London dissertation. 233. Anfam I993b. In another exhibition mounted in the same year, a larger survey of American art shown in the United Kingdom and Germany, Anfam also served as coordinating editor of the catalogue. In his essay for the latter (Anfam K)93a), Abstract Expressionism is described as running its course between a play of extremes in which "spectacle, extravagance and force" are "held in check, deferred and given correctives." When "strong narrative impulses (flowing from Regionalism, American Scene painting and 19303 murals) were short-circuited . . . the results are oddly fabulated pictures" (88, Anfam's italics). This show, "American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1913-1993," was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and stopped at the MartinGropius-Bau in Berlin. 234. Anfam 1993d, 479-85, especially 480, 482. The Pollock books reviewed are Naifeh and Smith 1989, Landau 1989, and Doss 1991. Anfam also discusses Guilbaut 1990, Ross 1990, and Shapiro and Shapiro 1990. Additional analysis of Clark 1990 (published in Guilbaut 1990) is found in Jonathan Harris, "Alterity, Metaphor, and Formation: Around the Edges of a Paradigm," Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 2 (1991): 88-95. 235. Newer essays in Thistlewood 1993 provided evidence that this approach continued to flourish in the United Kingdom. Harris 1993 includes a good summary of the British Marxist position. 236. See Champa and others 1985. Nancy R. Versaci, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue for "Flying Tigers," explains that the image and spirit evoked by the Flying Tigers (an elite group of American flyers who helped defend Burma and Southeast China against the Japanese) "not only captured the essence of America's reaction to the war; it is also an apt metaphor for the response of certain American artists to the turmoil and dislocation of the I93o's and 1940's"

(4-13).

237. Polcari 1991,368. See also Polcari 1995a. 238. Lengthy reviews of Leja 1993 that analyze his arguments in detail include Anfam I994b, Przyblyski 1994, and Hobbs 1994. Przyblyski remarks that Leja's book might be read "almost as a pre-text to such revisionist histories as Serge Guilbaut's" (549). For basic summaries of the theoretical positions of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, see William Innés Homer, The Language of Contemporary Criticism Clarified (Madison, CT: Soundview Press, 1999), 38-41,

85-87.

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239- Leja (1993,329), summarizes: "The selves they generally discovered were not ravishing unities but rather, on one hand, conflicted Neanderthals harboring frightening, unfathomable, and primitive impulses, and on the other, puny and impotent victims of nature and fate." 240. Additional discussion of this topic, which follows Leja's lead and provides more specific details of cinema history, can be found in Minturn 1999. Minturn points out that "there is little evidence which suggests that film noir filmmakers and Abstract Expressionist painters communicated with each other directly" (277). He provides a list of thirteen films noir made between 1944 and 1950 in which the protagonist or one of the main characters is a painter (297). 241. Many of the artist's own statements could be used to back up this point. In addition to "Experience of our age in terms of painting," previously cited, Pollock's comment to William Wright in late 1950 ("It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture") underscores Leja's thesis. See Karmel 1999a, 20, for a reprint of this interview, made for broadcast on radio station WERI, Westerly, Rhode Island, in 1951. This text has been widely republished since appearing in the documentary chronology that O'Connor created for MoMA's 1967 Pollock retrospective. 242. Leja 1993,256. 243. Both Hobbs (1994) and Przyblyski (1994) comment that Leja's argument is weakest in regard to analysis of the work of women associated with Abstract Expressionism. Hobbs points out that, "rather than seeing such artists as Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Grace Hartigan as critics of the dominant ideology by virtue of their marginalized status, [Leja] regards them as victims" (107). Przyblyski mentions that "subjectivity, masculine or feminine, is a more complex, contradictory, and cobbled-together construct than Leja's representations of Modern Man would lead us to believe" (551). 244. Leja illustrates only two efforts by women: an Indian Space painting by Gertrude Barrer and a 1954 work by Elaine de Kooning. He frequently quotes Krasner's many published remarks about her husband, but her own role in Abstract Expressionism's development is not treated. Some of the comments I make in this section were made previously in a review of Gibson 1997 in Woman's Art Journal 20 (Spring-Summer 1999): 59-61. 245. Guggenheim organized two exhibitions limited to women artists at Art of This Century, one in 1943 and one in 1945, details of which are presented in Conaty 1997,15-24. Conaty discusses the question of marginalization represented by this all-female concept. (Krasner, for example, refused to submit works to Guggenheim's women's art shows.) Whereas women artists played a relatively large role in the WPA and in Depression-era groups such as the American Abstract Artists, and although two of the most important dealers to handle the Abstract 110

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Expressionists in the forties were female (Guggenheim and Betty Parsons), many of the gains women made in the 19305 and early forties vanished in face of New York's suddenly more ambitious, market-oriented, and male-dominated community. For more on this situation, see Ellen G. Landau, "Tough Choices: Becoming a Woman Artist, 1900-1970," in Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, igjo-85, edited by Randy Rosen and Catherine C. Brawer (New York: Abbeville, 1989), 30-36. 246. See Marter 1997. Marter's Baruch exhibition and Conaty's "Art of This Century: The Women" are both reviewed by Amy Winter in Woman's Art Journal 20 (Spring-Summer 1999): 61-63. The former show featured works by Krasner, Dehner, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Joan Mitchell, Betty Parsons, and Ethel Schwabacher. 247. Wagner 1996,9. Another example is Louise Bourgeois. 248. Wagner 1989 presents discussion of the demeaning language frequently employed in reviews of Krasner's work. Wagner lists the reviews from which these words were taken (57, n. 13). See also "Krasner's Fictions," in Wagner 1996, especially 126,165. Gretchen Munson, in "Man and Wife," ^./¥48 (Oct. 1949): 45, famously wrote, "There is a tendency among some of these wives [shown with their husbands in Sidney Janis's current exhibition "Artists: Man and Wife"] to 'tidy up' their husband's styles. Lee Krasner (Mrs. Jackson Pollock) takes her husband's paints and enamels and changes his unrestrained, sweeping lines into neat little squares and triangles." See "Forming Krasner's Identity" and "Remarks, CR 252-55" in Landau, 1995,10-16,123, for further analysis of reviews of Krasner's debut exhibition at Betty Parsons. 249. Wagner 1996,167-68. In order to turn fulfilling Pollock's needs to her own advantage, Krasner, according to Wagner, engaged in prosopopoeia, "apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity conferring upon it the power of speech," a concept borrowed from Paul de Man. Wagner proposes that, like a ventriloquist, Krasner contrived an alter ego to speak as an artist, not simply a wife. She describes Krasner as chastening and rendering antirhetorical Pollock's signature technique. Chave 1993 covers similar ground, but Wagner reads Krasner's marks as challenging difference, rather than as disempowering and inarticulate. See my review of Wagner 1996, Л? 79 (December 1997): 11-14 for further discussion of her primary thesis. 250. This lecture, published here for the first time, was given as the Case Western Reserve University Department of Art History and Art Annual Harvey Buchanan Lecture in Art, in conjunction with an exhibition, "Dorothy Dehner: Drawings, Prints, Sculpture," held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11 July-5 November 1995. See also Marter 1984; Marter 1993. 251. Neither Krauss I97ib nor Lubar 1984 mentions Dehner's imagery as either parallel to Smith's or influential for Smith's conceptions of works such as Jurassic Introductio n

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Bird. Wilkin (2000, 13) stipulates direct connections between Smith's sculptures and the paintings of male friends such as Gottlieb, Noland, and Motherwell, but Wilkin also does not reference Dehner, except as a source of information about Smith's Medals for Dishonor (27). All of these authors point out Smith's European prototypes including, most prominently, Picasso, González, and Giacometti. 252. Marter, "Arcadian Nightmares," citing an interview with Dehner, New York City, 6 December 1979. 253. Leja 1993,254-56. He also observes that "the bepedestaled Hedda Sterne in the famous Irascibles photo published in Life in 1951 has become perhaps the best symbol of the marginal presence women have been accorded in Abstract Expressionism" (256). For a somewhat sensationalized version of the de Koonings' unusual relationship, see Hall 1993. Craven (1999) disagrees with Leja's conclusions about gender and Abstract Expressionism (115-23). 254. Duncan 1989, reprinted in Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 189-207. Yard (1991) reads de Kooning's Black Friday (1948) as a direct response to Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon. 255. See Leja 1993, и, 317 n. 183; Minturn 1999,285-88. 256. Seitz 1983,126. Powell (1990) notes that the artist placed collages of advertisements for two films (Alexander the Great and World Without End) in his painting Easter Monday (1950). 257. Hess 1965,37. Sylvester (1995, 223) reiterates de Kooning's admission that this painting and those in the series that followed "had to do with the female painted through all the ages, all those idols." In the same interview with Sylvester (reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,225-28) de Kooning referred to the hilariousness of "the idea of the idol and the oracle." Minturn (1999, 28586) interprets this as de Kooning's poking fun at the "pompous transcendental rhetoric about their 'spiritual kinship with primitive art' " in early statements by Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman. 258. Cateforis, "Willem de Kooning's 'Women' of the 19505: A Critical History of Their Reception and Interpretation," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1991. A typical consideration of de Kooning's women as femmes fatales is Robert Rosenblum, "The Fatal Women of Picasso and de Kooning," AN 84 (October 1985): 98-103. See Cornelia H. Butler, "The Woman Problem: On the Contemporaneity of de Kooning's Women," in Butler and Schimmel 2002,180-91, for additional analysis of critical reactions to de Kooning's Women. 259. Quoted by Barber 1997,14. See Sylvester 1995, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,227. 260. Barber 1997,14. In addition to Duncan 1985, see Griselda Pollock, "Killing Men

112

Introductio n

and Dying Women: A Woman's Touch in the Cold Zone of American Painting," in Orton and Pollock 1992,219-94. For a complete discussion of de Kooning's use of this posture and his attraction to the metaphor "a woman has two mouths, one is the sex," see ShifT 1994,38-50. The artist made the latter remark to Bibeb in "Willem de Kooning: Ik vind dat allés een mond moet hebben en ik zet de mond waar ik wil," Vrij Nederland (Amsterdam), 5 October 1968. See Shiff 1994,63,67, nn. 1,45. 261. W. de Kooning 1951, 85-67. See David Sylvester, "Flesh Was the Reason," in Prather 1994,15-31, for discussion of this conceit. 262. Nochlin (1998, ill) comments, "I am not sure I can agree with any single evaluation of the 'Woman' series from the viewpoint of 'positive' or 'negative' gender representation. There is too much ambivalence here. And what, precisely, constitutes 'positive' or 'negative' when a cultural concept like 'woman' (in general) is at stake?" 263. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, 1990), 139. 264. Barber 1997,18. Another possible model suggested by Barber is Mary Russo's concept of the female carnivalesque as presented in The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Russo draws on concepts proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin. See Bakhtin's "Carnival and Carnivalesque," in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 250-60. 265. Perchuk 1995,32. In the same catalogue, Harry Brod explains (in "Masculinity as Masquerade," 13-19) exactly how this concept can be extrapolated from Joan Riviere's "Womanliness as Masquerade," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (1929): 303-13. 266. Clark 1990,229, cited in Perchuk 1995,32. 267. For this incident, see Peggy Guggenheim's Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe, 1979), 296. Perchuk (1995,32) also cites the fact that Pollock's teacher Thomas Hart Benton and the conservative critic Thomas Craven (Benton's friend) both accused him of making the drip paintings "by ingesting paint and then pissing on the canvas" (as described in Naifeh and Smith 1989,631). 268. A.Jones 1998,55. 269. Ibid., 57. Referencing Foucault and Roland Barthes, Jones describes the "author-function" Pollock as "a 'plurality of egos' put into play by the cultural text, a 'function of discourse.' " For precise definition of the term "author-function," see Foucault's "What Is an Author?," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124,130.

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270. A.Jones 1998,58 (her italics). 271. Another interesting treatment of Pollock's masculinity is Peter Wollen, "Mánnerkunst: Siqueiros and Pollock," in Harten 1995,2:55-72. 272. Chave 1993, reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 268-74. See Pollock's interview with Wright (Karmel 19993,22) for the artist's remark about being able to control the flow of paint. Chave cites many other examples of Pollock's usage of this "female" term. 273. Saltzman (1998) points out that, whereas male artists were often praised by critics for reconfiguring feminine aspects and strategies with their "superior skill," Frankenthaler's "menstrual painterly fluids came to signify the trace of an involuntary bodily function" (12). Another comparison between Pollock and Frankenthaler that takes into consideration similar gender issues but draws a different conclusion is Anne M. Wagner, "Pollock's Nature, Frankenthaler's Culture," in Karmel I999b, 181-200. 274. Krauss's split with her mentor began in the 19708 when she expressed disapproval of the decision to strip color from some of David Smith's sculptures by the executors of Smith's estate: Motherwell, the lawyer Ira Lowe, and Greenberg. (See Krauss 1974.) Her own subsequent criticism replaces a reliance on Greenbergian formalism with structuralist and poststructuralist approaches allied to the ideas of Saussure, Barthes, and Derrida. For discussion of Krauss's changing theoretical positions, see Kuspit, "Conflicting Logics," 126-28; David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). Siegel (1999, 163-67) delineates Krauss's approach to interpreting Pollock. 275. Krauss 1993,244. 276. Ibid., 276,284 (her italics). 277. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 40-41. This was first published in 1930. See Perchuk 1995,36-37, for additional discussion. 278. In addition to Bataille's Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, edited and translated by Allan Stoeckl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), Krauss's concepts draw on ideas in Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, translated by Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), first published 1980. Bataille, a French theorist, philosopher, and novelist associated with the Surrealist movement, was drawn to the power of eroticism, especially pornography and the obscene. For more on his ideas, see Peter Tracey Connor, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Bataille: A Critical Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997). 279. Krauss referenced Ricard in a lecture presented in 1992 at Princeton University in conjunction with the Princeton Art Museum's showing of the exhibition "Jack114

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son Pollock: 'Psychoanalytic' Drawings," organized by Cernuschi. See also Bois and Krauss 1997,28-29,93-ЮЗ280. Krauss, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," first published in Karmel I999b, 155-80. Other essays printed in Karmel I999b by the conservators Coddington and Mancusi-Ungaro, 101-20, present and interpret findings of x-radiographic and other physical examinations of Pollock's poured paintings that may contradict Krauss's position. 281. Karmel 1998,87-137. 282. Kagan (1979, 96-99) cites Krasner's recollection that Pollock "would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records—not just for days—day and night, day and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the roof! Jazz? He thought it was the only other creative thing happening in this country" (quoted in Friedman 1972, 88). The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in The Springs, East Hampton, New York, retains many of Pollock's original 78 rpm and 33 1/3 rpm LP jazz recordings. 283. Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 August 1945, reprinted in O'Connor 1967,38. 284. Belgrad 1998,1-2. See also Lhamon 1990 for the mainstreaming of black American culture in the fifties. 285. The women were Krasner, Ethel Schwabacher, Sonia Sekula, and Janet Sobel. Battcock (1969-1970,48) took Geldzahler to task for not including women and African Americans in the show "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Henry Geldzahler offered no apology for the artist who has rejected the demands made upon him by a crumbling society. Instead, he emphasizes it and concentrates on just those artists who were most arrogant and abusive to their social reality. That is why there is no Marisol, or Nevelson, nor any black artists' work. He has spotlighted the decadence, glamour, romanticism, poetry and arrogance of the Abstract Expressionists, which is at once exhilarating and frightening" (his italics). 286. Gibson (1992, 68) comments that "Lewis's absence as a subject, in Althusser's sense, from the roster of the Abstract Expressionists is both revealing and disturbing because of the morphological and conceptual similarities of his work to Abstract Expressionism and also because of his close association with the artists of the school." She points out that Lewis frequented The Club and the Cedar Bar and (like Bourgeois) attended the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35 in 1950. His works were shown at Marian Willard's avant-garde gallery. For more details, see Gibson 1989. Witkovsky (1985) makes similar points about Romare Bearden, comparing his works with Motherwell and Hofmann, rather than Pollock. 287. Gibson (1997, 76) describes this paradoxical situation in theoretical terms: "What distinguished the use of signs of ethnicities and sexualities that were not Introductio n

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288.

289. 290.

291.

292.

293. 294.

295.

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Caucasian and not heterosexual and male was precisely the binarity it established between their 'modern' abstraction and that of other cultures and genders, and the position of control in which it placed the modern. To incorporate what was not-self was to master it and at the same time claim its attributes." Using tools of domesticity (the way Louise Nevelson sometimes employed a scissors to make sculpture, for instance) is another example of the "critique of mastery" Gibson recognizes in those who worked outside canonical Abstract Expressionist practice. Alerting viewers to the ways in which gender and race are codified in abstraction by exaggerating stereotypes (for example, Bourgeois), dissembling their identities by changing their names (Krasner), creolizing (Lewis), performing in front of their paintings (Streat), and other subversive tactics, Gibson redefines Abstract Expressionism's "others" as actively at work to "destabilize and resist" what they were apparently trying to accommodate. She valorizes such transgressions, reading them more positively as representative of self-aware parody and deliberate play on the white male notion of authenticity. Craven 1998, quoting the definition of post-colonialism in Bill Ashcroft and others, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7. Crehan 1959,12, cited in Leja 1995, 559. David Kaufmann has suggested that Crehan's comments may also have been subtly anti-Semitic. I am grateful to Kaufmann for sharing this assessment with me. Newman's rebuttal appeared in a letter to the editor, AN58 (June 1959), 6, cited in Leja 1995,560. Leja 1995,560. As W.Jackson Rushing remarks in "Decade of Decision," a review of Strick 1994 published in Art Journal 54 (Spring 1995): 88-91, Newman was "a fastidious micromanager of the critical/public reception of his work" (88). This became even more evident on publication of the artist's selected writings (O'Neill 1990). See Polcari 1994 for more on this work and its meanings. Bois 1990 includes discussion of Newman's obsession with the thematics of origin in the book of Genesis. See Breslin I993b, 45-46, for Rothko's reaction to "transplantation to a land where he never felt entirely at home." Gibson 1997,95. The list of Jewish art historians and critics associated with the rise and criticism of Abstract Expressionism could be expanded to include Hess, Seitz, Sandier, Friedman, Rose, W. Rubin, Kozloff, Kuspit, Baigell, Rosenblum, the Shapiros, and many others in the following generation of scholars. Greenberg, "Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews," Contemporary Jewish Record 6 (February 1944): 32-33, reprinted in O'Brian 19863,176-79. This comment is cited by Louis Kaplan, "Refraining the Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg's 'Modernist Painting' in Light of Jewish Identity," in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History,

Introduction

296. 297.

298.

299.

300. 301.

302.

edited by Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 180-99. Other works about the ways Greenberg's Jewishness affected his criticism include Margaret Olin, "C [lenient] Hardesh [Greenberg] and Company: Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity," in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: Jewish Museum and Rutgers University Press, 1996), 39-59; Bradford R. Collins, "Le pessimisme politique et 'la haine de soi' juive: Les origines de l'esthétique puriste de Greenberg," Les cahiers du musée national de l'art moderne 45-46 (Fall-Winter 1993): 61-84; and Thierry de Duve, Clément Greenberg Between the Lines (Paris: Dis Voir, 1996), 39-46. Sandier, interview with Stamos, 6 August 1988, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Cited in Gibson 1997,123 (italics his). These include most notably Kuspit, Baigell, Saltzman, Kaplan, Soussloff, Olin, Kleeblatt, Nochlin, Carol Zemel, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, and Milly Heyd. See, e.g., the essays collected in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, edited by Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), as well as those in SousslofF, Jewish Identity. Gottlieb, quoted in Milton Brown, "An Explosion of Creativity: Jews and American Art in the Twentieth Century," in Painting a Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, igoo-ig45, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan Chevlowe (New York: Jewish Museum in association with Indiana University Press, 1991), 67. Whereas Brown (ibid.) describes Rothko and Newman >as deracinated, Baigell adopts Homi K. Bhabha's concept of "cultural hybridity" to characterize their relation to their Jewishness. See Baigell 2002, 99; Bhabha, "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art/Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 71-88. Haftmann 1971, cited by Avram Kampf in Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), 201. David Anfam has noted that the NYT of 13 June 1943 in which Gottlieb and Rothko's letter was included (see Jewell 194зЬ) also printed a letter to the editor in which the chief of the German Labor Front wrote, "The Jews are the chosen race, all right—but for extermination purposes only" (cited in Baigell 2002, 114). Baigell points out that Newman, in a 1945 essay called "Surrealism and the War" (unpublished except in O'Neill 1990, 94-96), makes it clear that he had seen horrific photographs of the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps. Baigell (2002,102) mentions that James E. B. Breslin, the artist's biographer, has proven that Rothko exaggerated his claim to have experienced pogroms in Introductio n

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303. 304. 305.

306. 307.

308. 309.

310.

311. 312.

313.

314. 315.

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Latvia as a child and seen such mass graves. See Breslin iggga, 326. The latter interprets Rothko's "weightless, softly edged rectangles [which] lift off the canvas and advance towards the viewer" as re-creating "the tensions, the play between separation and absorption of early psychic life." Rothko's " 'presences,' " he claims, "evoke the maternalbody" See Breslin i993b,49 (italics his). Tucker 1973,16. Hobbs 1999,29. Kuspit, "Meyer Schapiro's Jewish Unconscious," in Soussloff, Jewish Identity, 200. Kuspit cites Rosenberg, "Is There a Jewish Art?," in Discovering the Present, 230. Quoted in Nemser 1975,9. See Landau 1995,10-16 for additional discussion of Krasner's identity problems (although not from a Jewish point of view). Quoted in Balakian 1996, 59. Balakian (60) also quotes a letter from Gorky to his sister dated 24 November 1940, cited in Auping 1995,80: "As Armenians of Van ... [w]e lived and experienced it. The blood of our people at the hands of the Turks, the massacres Our death march, our relatives and dearest friends dying... before our eyes. The loss of our homes, the destruction of our country by the Turks, Mother's starvation in my arms. Vartoosh dear, my heart sinks now in even discussing it." Balakian 1996,65. See Orton 1991 for an opinion of "The American Action Painters" as "a text situated in and inscribed by a particular Marxist tradition, by the mutation and modification of New York Marxism related to the C. P. U.S. A., by the setbacks of the late 19308, and by the espousal of international Trotskyism with its notion of agency and the freedom of art." Orton 1991 is reprinted in Orton and Pollock 1996,177-203; Frascina 2000,261-87. Craven 1999; Jachec 2000. Portions of Craven's book were previously published in AH (Craven 1990), in Oxford Art Journal (Craven 1991), and in Thistle wood 1993. Two review articles that summarize and assess Craven's main points are Cernuschi 1999C and Jachec 1999-2000. Jachec 2000, abstract page. A summary version of her main thesis, which "reexamines the relationship between a flourishing artistic movement of the 19403 and 19505 and the concomitant 'new liberalism' as defined and supported by the new left," is found in Jachec 1991. Motherwell, "The New York School," lecture given at the Mid-Western Conference of the College Art Association, University of Louisville, 27 October 1950. Published in Terenzio 1992,77-78 and quoted in Craven 1999,8. Newman 1962,16, quoted in Craven 1999,151. Ibid., 151. See also Craven 1990, in which Abstract Expressionism is discussed in the context of automatism and the "Age of Automation." Cernuschi (1999,

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316. 317. 318.

319.

320. 321. 322.

323. 324.

39) presents the opposing position: that automatism was not all that pertinent to Newman's creativity. Craven 1999,134,136. Schapiro 1957,38-39, cited in ibid., 133 and in C.Jones 1996,10-11. Collins 1991,283. As noted, Collins endeavors to prove that the popular press of the fifties was not as actively hostile to these artists as most art historians have maintained. See Robson 1988,1985; the latter is reprinted in the anthology and in Frascina 2000, 288-93. Both are based on Robson's doctoral thesis, "The Market for Modern Art in New York, 1940-1960," University College, London (later published as Robson 1995). Collins 1991,303. Ibid., 307, quoting Gaugh 1986,28-30. Unsigned introduction to October: The First Decade, 1976-1986, edited by Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Copjec (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), ix. Clark i994b, 23. This twenty-five page set of propositions is reconfigured to read as continuous text in Clark 1999,371-403 (reprinted in the anthology). Clark I994b, 28. The other quotations cited are found on pp. 25-27, italics his. Interestingly, some of the most noted Abstract Expressionist artists used this term in both its positive and negative connotations in early statements. For instance, in his response to the question of "what abstract art means to me," posed in MoMA Bulletin 1951, de Kooning comments, "I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity" (7). Another example is David Smith's explanation: "From the philosophic-aesthetic point of view, at the time of creation the contemporary work of art is a vulgarization. By vulgar I mean the Oxford definition 'offending against refinement of good taste.'" See Smith 1954a,

98.

325. Clark writes in a Marxist vein, "Abstract Expressionism, I want to say, is the style of a certain petty bourgeoisie's aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cultural power. It is the art of that moment when the petty bourgeoisie thinks it can speak (and its masters allow it to speak) the aristocrat's claim to individuality. Vulgarity is the form of that aspiration" (Clark I994b, 36). 326. For further discussion and appraisal of Clark's concept of vulgarity, see Siegel 1999,186-92; Bernstein 1996; Harris 2000; and Cornelia Butler's essay in Butler and Schimmel 2002,186-87. Bernstein explores further Clark's reference to Ador no's theory of the "disenchantment of art." 327. For example, in Dijkstra 2003,261-62, American Abstract Expressionism (which rendered obsolete the more socially oriented Expressionism of the prior two decades) is praised as "exhilarating, adventurous, and innovative" precisely because it was "just the ticket for those who wanted to turn art into big business." Introduction

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Dijkstra further notes that "as today's CEOs know better than anyone, the best merchandise consists of material without any intrinsic meaning: 'useless' merchandise you've made people want to have because it will make them feel superior to others." He maintains that "abstraction, as a 'high art' form whose 'inherent worth' could be clearly defined and controlled (as opposed to the fickle variables of taste that ruled representational art)," proved to be "extremely well suited" to the needs of corporate executives of the 19505, despite the public's continuing preference for more understandable styles. Dijkstra concludes, "In abstraction, then, American corporations found an effective antidote to the rather embarrassing social focus of the art of the figurative expressionists." 328. Dissertations about first-generation Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors completed in the 19905 include Susan Cooperrider (de Kooning), David Cateforis (de Kooning), Gregory Gilbert (Motherwell), Andrea Pappas (Rothko), Joanne Kuebler (Poussette-Dart), Leesa Fanning (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, and the body), Steven Zucker (parallels with Hannah Arendt), Graeme Cornwell (printmaking), Douglas Dreishpoon (Roszak), Lori Verderame (Lipton), Valerie Livingston (Ferber), Patrick Frank (San Francisco Abstract Expressionism), Susan Landauer (San Francisco Abstract Expressionism including Still [published as Landauer 1996]), and Patrick Negri (Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and religion). 329. See O'Connor 1995; Landau i995b; Anfam 1998; Terenzio and Belknap 1984; Engberg 2003. Graham 1991 is a catalogue raisonné of de Kooning's prints. Major biographies of Pollock and Rothko were also published around this time (see n. 217). 330. Either the organizing institution or institutions or the first venue of a traveling exhibition have been cited. Other Abstract Expressionist solo exhibitions in the 19905 include most prominently Pollock (Stàdtisches Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 1995; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997); Motherwell (Intercultura, Mexico City, 1991), Smith (Independent Curators, Inc., 1996; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1996; North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998); Still (Albright-Knox Art Gallery and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, traveling in Europe, 1992), Kline (Menu Collection, 1994; Fundació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona, 1994), Gottlieb (Phillips Collection, 1994), Gorky (Sala de Exposiciones de la Fundación Caja de Pensiones and Whitechapel Gallery, 1990; Art Museum, Princeton University, 1994; Modern Museum of Fort Worth, 1995); Dehner (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1995); Kline (Fundado Antoni Tapies, 1994); de Kooning (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1993; National Gallery of Art, 1994; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center, 1995); Rothko (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994), and Newman (PaceWildenstein, 1994).

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331. Patricia Mainardi, "Repetition and Novelty: Exhibitions Tell Tales," in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, edited by Charles W. Haxthausen (Williamstown: Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2002), 82-83. 332. Motherwell 1959,10. On the other hand, as Barnett Newman wrote in Tiger's Eye 2 (December 1947): 42-46, "An artist paints so that he will have something to look at; at times he must write so that he will have something to read."

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The 1940s MYTHOLOGIZING THE MOVEMENT

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ARSHILE GORKY

Excerpt from Letter to His Sister Vartoosh, 1942

Beloveds, the stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. And as the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my most private perceptions through art, my view of the world. In trying to prove by the ordinary and the known, I create an inner infinity. I prove within the confines of the finite to create an infinity. SOURCE: Diane Waldman, Arshile Gorky, 1904-1948: A Retrospective (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 44. Copyright © 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ADOLPH GOTTLIEB AND MARK ROTHKO

Excerpt from "Art in New York"

GOTTLIEB: We would like to begin by reading part of a letter that has just come to us: "The portrait has always been linked in my mind with a picture of a person. I was therefore surprised to see your paintings of mythological characters with their abstract rendition, in a portrait show, and would therefore be very much interested in your answers to the following— ..." Now, the questions that this correspondent asks are so typical and at the same time so crucial that we feel that in answering them we shall not only help a good many people who may be puzzled by our specific work but we shall best make clear our attitude as modern artists concerning the problem of the portrait, which happens to be the subject of today's talk. We shall therefore read the four questions and attempt to answer them as adequately as we can in the short time we have. Here they are: 1. Why do you consider these pictures to be portraits? 2. Why do you as modern artists use mythological characters? 3. Are not these pictures really abstract paintings with literary titles?

SOURCE: Radio script for WNYC, October 13,1943, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York: Abrams, 1990), 210-12. Copyright © 2003 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 125

4- Are you not denying modern art when you put so much emphasis on subject matter? Now, Mr. Rothko, would you like to tackle the first question? Why do you consider these pictures to be portraits? ROTHKO: The word portrait cannot possibly have the same meaning for us that it had for past generations. The modern artist has, in varying degrees, detached himself from appearance in nature, and therefore, a great many of the old words which have been retained as nomenclature in art have lost their old meaning. The still life of Braque and the landscapes of Durcat have no more relationship to the conventional still life and landscape than the double images of Picasso have to the traditional portrait. New Times! New Ideas! New Methods! Even before the days of the camera there was a definite distinction between portraits which served as historical or family memorials and portraits that were works of art. Rembrandt knew the difference; for, once he insisted upon painting works of art, he lost all his patrons. Sargent, on the other hand, never succeeded in creating either a work of art or in losing a patron— for obvious reasons. There is, however, a profound reason for the persistence of the word portrait because the real essence of the great portraiture of all time is the artist's eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions—in short the human drama. That Rembrandt expressed it by posing a sitter is irrelevant. We do not know the sitter but we are intensely aware of the drama. The Archaic Greeks, on the other hand, used as their models the inner visions which they had of their gods. And in our day, our visions are the fulfillment of our own needs. It must be noted that the great painters of the figure had this in common. Their portraits resemble each other far more than they recall the peculiarities of a particular model. In a sense they have painted one character in all their works. This is equally true of Rembrandt, the Greeks' Olympics or Modigliani, to pick someone closer to our own time. The Romans, on the other hand, whose portraits are facsimiles of appearance, never approached art at all. What is indicated here is that the artist's real model is an ideal which embraces all of human drama rather than the appearance of a particular individual. Today the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man's existence is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of as126

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cribing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man's experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea. GOTTLIEB: That last point cannot be overemphasized. Now, I'll take the second question and relieve you for a moment. The question reads "Why do you as modern artists use mythological characters?" I think that anyone who looks carefully at my portrait of Oedipus, or at Mr. Rothko's Leda, will see that this is not mythology out of Bulfmch. The implications here have direct application to life, and if the presentation seems strange, one could without exaggeration make a similar comment on the life of our time. What seems odd to me is that our subject matter should be questioned, since there is so much precedent for it. Everyone knows that Grecian myths were frequently used by such diverse painters as Rubens, Titian, Veronese and Velasquez, as well as by Renoir and Picasso more recently. It may be said that these fabulous tales and fantastic legends are unintelligible and meaningless today, except to an anthropologist or student of myths. By the same token the use of any subject matter which is not perfectly explicit either in past or contemporary art might be considered obscure. Obviously this is not the case since the artistically literate person has no difficulty in grasping the meaning of Chinese, Egyptian, African, Eskimo, Early Christian, Archaic Greek or even Pre-historic art, even though he has but a slight acquaintance with religious or superstitious beliefs of any of these peoples. The reason for this is simply that all genuine art forms utilize images that can be readily apprehended by anyone acquainted with the global language of art. That is why we use images that are directly communicable to all who accept art as the language of the spirit, but which appear as private symbols to those who wish to be provided with information or commentary. And now, Mr. Rothko, you may take the next question. Are not these pictures really abstract paintings with literary titles? ROTHKO: Neither Mr. Gottlieb's painting nor mine should be considered abstract paintings. It is not their intention either to create or to emphasize a formal color-space arrangement. They depart from natural representation only to intensify the expression of the subject implied in the title—not to dilute or efface it. If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's primitive 1940s

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fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail but never in substance, be they Greek, Aztec, Icelandic, or Egyptian. And modern psychology finds them persisting still in our dreams, our vernacular, and our art, for all the changes in the outward conditions of life. Our presentation of these myths, however, must be in our own terms, which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves—more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than their graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our own experience. Those who think that the world of today is more gentle and graceful than the primeval and predatory passions from which these myths spring, are either not aware of reality or do not wish to see it in art. The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not through the remembrance of the beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life. And now, Mr. Gottlieb, will you take the final question? Are you not denying modern art when you put so much emphasis on subject matter? GOTTLIEB: It is true that modern art has severely limited subject matter in order to exploit the technical aspects of painting. This has been done with great brilliance by a number of painters, but it is generally felt today that this emphasis on the mechanics of picture-making has been carried far enough. The surrealists have asserted their belief in the subject matter, but to us it is not enough to illustrate dreams. While modern art got its first impetus through discovering the forms of primitive art, we feel that its true significance lies not merely in formal arrangements, but in the spiritual meaning underlying all archaic works. That these demonic and brutal images fascinate us today is not because they are exotic, nor do they make us nostalgic for a past which seems enchanting because of its remoteness. On the contrary, it is the immediacy of their images that draws us irresistibly to the fancies, the superstitions, the fables of savages and the strange beliefs that were so vividly articulated by primitive man. If we profess a kinship to the art of primitive men, it is because the feelings they expressed have a particular pertinence today. In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of color and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the imme-

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diate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life. That these feelings are being experienced by many people throughout the world today is an unfortunate fact, and to us an art that glosses over or evades these feelings is superficial or meaningless. That is why we insist on subject matter, a subject matter that embraces these feelings and permits them to be expressed.

ROBERT MQTHERWELL

Excerpts from "The Modern Painter's World"

[.. .] The function of the artist is to express reality as felt. In saying this, we must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the "body-and-mind" as a whole to the events of reality. It is the whole man who feels in artistic experience as when we say with Plato: "The man has a pain in his finger" (The Republic, 462 D), and not, "The finger has a pain." I have taken this example from Bosanquet, who goes on to say: "When a cbody-and-mind' is, as a whole, in any experience, that is the chief feature . . . of what we mean by feeling. Think of him as he sings, or loves, or fights. When he is as one, I believe it is always through feeling...." (Three Lectures on Aesthetic). The function of the modern artist is by definition the felt expression of modern reality. This implies that reality changes to some degree. This implication is the realization that history is "real," or, to reverse the proposition, that reality has a historical character. Perhaps Hegel was the first fully to feel this. With Marx this notion is coupled with the feeling of how material reality is.... It is because reality has a historical character that we feel the need for new art. The past has bequeathed us great works of art; if they were wholly satisfying, we should not need new ones. From this past art, we accept what persists qua eternally valuable, as when we reject the specific religious values

SOURCE: DYN(November 1944), 9-14. Motherwell text copyright © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

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of Egyptian or Christian art, and accept with gratitude their form. Other values in this past art we do not want. To say this is to recognize that works of art are by nature pluralistic: they contain more than one class of values. It is the eternal values that we accept in past art. By eternal values are meant those which, humanly speaking, persist in reality in any space-time, like those of aesthetic form, or the confronting of death. Not all values are eternal. Some values are historical—if you like, social, as when now artists especially value personal liberty because they do not find positive liberties in the concrete character of the modern state. It is the values of our own epoch which we cannot find in past art. This is the origin of our desire for new art. In our case, for modern art. ... The remoteness of modern art is not merely a question of language, of the increasing "abstractness" of modern art. Abstractness, it is true, exists, as the result of a long, specialized internal development in modern artistic structure. But the crisis is the modern artist's rejection, almost in toto, of the values of the bourgeois world. In this world modern artists form a kind oí spiritual underground.

Empty of all save fugitive relations with other men, there are increased demands on the individual's own ego for the content of experience. We say that the individual withdraws into himself. Rather, he must draw from himself. If the external world does not provide experience's content, the ego must. The ego can draw from itself in two ways: the ego can be the subject of its own expression, in which case the painter's personality is the principal meaning expressed; otherwise the ego can socialize itself—i.e., become mature and objectified—through formalization.

The surrealist position is far more contradictory. They have been the most radical, romantic defenders of the individual ego. Yet part of their programme involves its destruction. Where the abstractionists would reduce the content of the superego to the aesthetic, not even the aesthetic has value for the surrealists. It serves merely as a weapon of the middle class. Authority from the external world is rejected altogether. This is the dada strand in the fabric of surrealism. With the content of the superego gone, the surrealists are driven to the animal drives of the id. From hence the surrealists' admiration for men

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who have shattered the social content of the superego, for Lautréamont and the Marquis de Sade, for children and the insane. This is the sadistic strand. It is from this direction that surrealism tends to become predominantly sexual. Yet it is plainly impossible for cultivated men to live on the plane of animal drives. It is therefore a pseudo-solution to the problem posed by the decadence of the middle class. A second major tendency of surrealism is to renounce the conscious ego altogether, to abandon the social and the biological, the superego and the id. One retreats into the unconscious. The paradox is that the retreat into the unconscious is in a sense the desire to maintain a "pure ego." Everything in the conscious world is held to be contaminating, as when the hero in search of the fabulous princess, in the Celtic fairy tale, must never permit himself to be touched, whether by a leaf, an insect, or anything from the external world, as he flies through the forests on his magic horse. If he were touched by the world, his quest would immediately come to a disastrous end. Even when the hero arrives at the princess's castle, he must jump from his flying horse through a window without touching the windowframe. He does in the end reach the princess, and after resting with her seven days and nights, wherein she never opens her eyes, she gives birth to a young god. The surrealist conception of the journey into the unconscious is of some such hero's task. Automatism is the dark forest through which the path runs. The fundamental criticism of automatism is that the unconscious cannot be directed, that it presents none of the possible choices which, when taken, constitute any expression's form. To give oneself over completely to the unconscious is to become a slave. But here it must be asserted at once that plastic automatism though perhaps not verbal automatism—as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miró, and Picasso —is actually very little a question of the unconscious. It is much more a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth century's greatest formal inventions

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JACKSON POLLOCK

A Questionnaire

Where were y ou born? Cody, Wyoming, in January, 1912. My ancestors were Scotch and Irish. Have y ou traveled any? I've knocked around some in California, some in Arizona. Never been to Europe. Would you like to go abroad? No. I don't see why the problems of modern painting can't be solved as well here as elsewhere. Where did y ou study? At the Art Students League, here in New York. I began when I was seventeen. Studied with Benton, at the League, for two years. How did y our study with Thomas Benton affect y our work, which differs so radically from his? My work with Benton was important as something against which to react very strongly, later on; in this, it was better to have worked with him than with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong opposition. At the same time, Benton introduced me to Renaissance art. Why do y ou prefer living here in New York to y our native West? Living is keener, more demanding, more intense and expansive in New York than in the West; the stimulating influences are more numerous and rewarding. At the same time, I have a definite feeling for the West: the vast horizontality of the land, for instance; here only the Atlantic ocean gives you that. Has being a Westerner affected y our work? I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painter's approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their color is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art. Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures.

SOURCE: Arts & Architecture (February 1944), 14. Copyright © 2003 The PollockKrasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 132

That wasn't intentional; it probably was the result of early memories and enthusiasms. Do y ou consider technique to be important in art? Yes and no. Craftsmanship is essential to the artist. He needs it just as he needs brushes, pigments, and a surface to paint on. Do y ou find it important that many famous modern European artists are living in this country? Yes. I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end. (The only American master who interests me is Ryder.) Thus the fact that good European moderns are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. This idea interests me more than these specific painters do, for the two artists I admire most, Picasso and Miró, are still abroad. Do y ou think there can be a purely American art? The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the 'thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.

NORMAN LEWIS

Thesis, 1946

During the past fourteen years, I have devoted the major part of my attention and as much time as finances made possible to becoming a painter. For about the last eight of these years, I have been concerned not only with my own creative and technical development but with the limitations which every

SOURCE: "Norman Lewis: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction" (Kenhelabh Gallery, 1989).

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American Negro who is desirous of a broad kind of development must face— namely, the limitations which come under the names "African Idiom," "Negro Idiom" or "Social Painting." I have been concerned therefore with greater freedom for the individual to be publicly first an artist (assuming merit) and incidentally, a Negro. For the attainment of such a condition, I believe that it is within the Negro artist himself that the greatest possibilities exist since the excellence of his work will be the most effective blow against stereotype and the most irrefutable proof of the artificiality of stereotype in general. Believing this as well as desiring a degree of artistic excellence for myself as an individual, I have tried to maintain at least enough curiosity to keep my work moving in new directions and I have seen it pass almost automatically from careless reproduction and then strictly social art to a kind of painting which involves discovery and knowledge of new trends. I, in the process, grew from an over-emphasis on tradition and then propaganda to develop a whole new concept from myself as a painter. This concept treats art not as reproduction or as convenient but entirely secondary medium for propaganda but as the production of experiences which combine intellectual and emotional activities in a way that may conceivably add not only to the pleasure of the viewer and the satisfaction of the artist but to a universal knowledge of aesthetics and the creative faculty which I feel exists for one form of expression or another in all men. In this sense, art comes to have a life of its own; to be evidence of the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic level of men in a specific era; to be always changing and going towards greater understanding of human beings; to enrich living for everyone. It comes to be an activity of discovery in that it seeks to find hitherto ignored or unknown combinations of forms, colors, and textures and even psychological phenomena, and perhaps to cause new types of experience in the artist as well as the viewer. Above all, it breaks away from its stagnation in too much tradition and establishes new traditions to be broken away from by coming generations of artists, thus contributing to the rise of cultural and general development. In view of this concept of art and the function of the artist, it is my desire to work not only for myself as an artist but for broader understanding as a teacher, in a manner as free from public pressures and faddish demands as possible and with an understanding of cultures other than my own. Thus, I am particularly interested at this time in working for at least a year in Europe, hoping that this may do much towards achievement not only of my own aims, but for the increased awareness towards the Negro artist and among Negro artists themselves. 134

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JACKSON POLLOCK

Application for a Guggenheim Fellowship

I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and mural. I have set a precedent in this genre in a large painting for Miss Peggy Guggenheim which was installed in her house and was later shown in the "Large-Scale Paintings" show at the Museum of Modern Art. It is at present on loan at Yale University. I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural. I believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely.

SOURCE: Copyright © 2003 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

BARNETT NEWMAN

The Ideographic Picture

IDEOGRAPH

A character, symbol or figure which suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name.

IDEOGRAPHIC

Representing ideas directly and not through the medium of their names; applied specifically to that mode of writing which by means of symbols, figures or hieroglyphics suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name. —Century Dictionary

IDEOGRAPH

A symbol or character painted, written or inscribed, representing ideas. —Encyclopaedia Britannica

SOURCE: Betty Parsons Gallery, January 20-February 8,1947. Copyright © 2004 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 135

The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest Coast Indian scene; nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the living world for the meaningless materialism of design. The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of nonobjective pattern, to the women basket weavers. To him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal "abstraction" of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudoscientific truths. The basis of an aesthetic art is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist's problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist destruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, nor the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery —of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else. Spontaneous, and emerging from several points, there has arisen during the war years a new force in American painting that is the modern counterpart of the primitive art impulse. As early as 1942, Mr. Edward Alden Jewell was the first publicly to report it. Since then, various critics and dealers have tried to label it, to describe it. It is now time for the artist himself, by showing the dictionary, to make clear the community of intention that motivates him and his colleagues. For here is a group of artists who are not abstract painters, although working in what is known as the abstract style. Mrs. Betty Parsons has organized a representative showing of this work around the artists in her gallery who are its exponents. That all of them are associated with her gallery is not without significance.

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BARNETT NEWMAN

The Sublime Is Now

The invention of beauty by the Greeks, that is, their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies. Man's natural desire in the arts to express his relation to the Absolute became identified and confused with the absolutisms of perfect creations—with the fetish of quality—so that the European artist has been continually involved in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity. The confusion can be seen sharply in Longinus, who despite his knowledge of non-Grecian art, could not extricate himself from his platonic attitudes concerning beauty, from the problem of value, so that to him the feeling of exaltation became synonymous with the perfect statement—an objective rhetoric. But the confusion continued on in Kant, with his theory of transcendent perception, that the phenomenon is more than phenomenon; and with Hegel, who built a theory of beauty, in which the sublime is at the bottom of a structure of kinds of beauty} thus creating a range of hierarchies in a set of relationships to reality that is completely formal. (Only Edmund Burke insisted on a separation. Even though it is an unsophisticated and primitive one, it is a clear one and it would be interesting to know how closely the Surrealists were influenced by it. To me Burke reads like a Surrealist manual.) The confusion in philosophy is but the reflection of the struggle that makes up the history of the plastic arts. To us today there is no doubt that Greek art is an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in perfect form, that exaltation is the same as ideal sensibility, in contrast, for example, with the Gothic or Baroque, in which the sublime consists of a desire to destroy form; where form can be formless. The climax in this struggle between beauty and the sublime can best be examined inside the Renaissance and the reaction later against the Renaissance that is known as modern art. In the Renaissance the revival of the ideals of Greek beauty set the artists the task of rephrasing an accepted Christ legend in terms of absolute beauty as against the original Gothic ecstacy over the legend's evocation of the Absolute. And the Renaissance artists dressed up the traditional ecstacy in an even older tradition—that of eloquent nudity or rich

SOURCE: Tiger's Eye i, no. 6 (December 1948), 51-53. Copyright © 2004 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 137

velvet. It was no idle quip that moved Michelangelo to call himself a sculptor rather than a painter, for he knew that only in his sculpture could the desire for the grand statement of Christian sublimity be reached. He could despise with good reason the beauty-cults who felt the Christ drama on a stage of rich velvets and brocades and beautifully textured flesh tints. Michelangelo knew that the meaning of the Greek humanities for his time involved making Christ —the man, into Christ—who is God; that his plastic problem was neither the medieval one, to make a cathedral, nor the Greek one, to make a man like a god, but to make a cathedral out of a man. In doing so he set a standard for sublimity that the painting of his time could not reach. Instead, painting continued on its merry quest for a voluptuous art until in modern times, the Impressionists, disgusted with its inadequacy, began the movement to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the Impressionist insistence on a surface of ugly strokes. The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty. However, in discarding Renaissance notions of beauty, and without an adequate substitute for a sublime message, the Impressionists were compelled to preoccupy themselves, in their struggle, with the culture values of their plastic history so that instead of evoking a new way of experiencing life they were able only to make a transfer of values. By glorifying their own way of living, they were caught in the problem of what is really beautiful and could only make a restatement of their position on the general question of beauty; just as later the Cubists, by their Dada gestures of substituting a sheet of newspaper and sandpaper for both the velvet surfaces of the Renaissance and the Impressionists, made a similar transfer of values instead of creating a new vision, and succeeded only in elevating the sheet of paper. So strong is the grip of the rhetoric of exaltation as an attitude in the large context of the European culture pattern that the elements of sublimity in the revolution we know as modern art, exist in its effort and energy to escape the pattern rather than in the realization of a new experience. Picasso's effort may be sublime but there is no doubt that his work is a preoccupation with the question of what is the nature of beauty. Even Mondrian, in his attempt to destroy the Renaissance picture by his insistence on pure subject matter, succeeded only in raising the white plane and the right angle into a realm of sublimity, where the sublime paradoxically becomes an absolute of perfect sensations. The geometry (perfection) swallowed up his metaphysics (his exaltation). The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to this blind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether dis138

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torted or pure) and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal of beauty, whether that plasticity be a romantic active surface, or a classic stable one). In other words, modern art, caught without a sublime content, was incapable of creating a new sublime image, and unable to move away from the Renaissance imagery of figures and objects except by distortion or by denying it completely for an empty world of geometric formalisms—apure rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships became enmeshed in a struggle over the nature of beauty; whether beauty was in nature or could be found without nature. I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it. The question that now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art? We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the absolute props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.

JACKSON POLLOCK

My Painting

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added. SOURCE: Possibilities i (1947-1948), 79. Copyright © 2003 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 139

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

MARK ROTHKO

The Romantics Were Prompted

The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realise that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artist to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation. Freed from a false sense of security and community, the artist can abandon his plastic bankbook, just as he has abandoned other forms of security. Both the sense of community and security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible. I think of my pictures as dramas: the shapes in the pictures are the performers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures without shame. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. It is at the moment of completion that in a flash of recognition, they are seen to have the quantity and function which was intended. Ideas and plans that existed in the mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in which they occur. The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the cubist program. The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is

SOURCE: Possibilities i (1947-48), 84. Copyright © 2003 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 140

faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need. On shapes: - They are unique elements in a unique situation. - They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion. - They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world. - They have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms. The presentation of this drama in the familiar world was never possible, unless everyday acts belonged to a ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm. Even the archaic artist, who had an uncanny virtuosity, found it necessary to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods. The difference is that, since the archaic artist was living in a more practical society than ours, the urgency for transcendent experience was understood, and given an official status. As a consequence the human figure and other elements from the familiar world could be combined with, or participate as a whole in the enactment of the excesses which characterize this improbable hierarchy. With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment. Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama: art's most profound moments express this frustration. When they were abandoned as untenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy. It became fond of the dark, and enveloped its objects in the nostalgic intimations of a half-lit world. For me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human figure—alone in a moment of utter immobility. But the solitary figure could not raise its limbs in a single gesture that might indicate its concern with the fact of mortality and an insatiable appetite for ubiquitous experience in face of this fact. Nor could the solitude be overcome. It could gather on beaches and streets and in parks only through coin1940s

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cidence, and, with its companions, form a tableau vivant of human incommunicability. I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It really is a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again.

JOHN GRAHAM

Excerpts from System and Dialectics of Art

Art opens access to the unconscious mind, science opens access to the conscious mind. Preface

Art is the force which led humanity through the ages of darkness—automatically, and through the ages of space—by inference. In the history of humanity subjects and problems in numberless fields have been thoroughly investigated and solved. [Such are: geometry and Roman Law which have finally and exhaustively formulated certain phenomena once and for all. The subject of art, however, has never been exhaustively investigated, formulated and systematized, either by writers or artists.] There have been pages written on art—inspired, beautiful and otherwise but all have been either fragmentary, amateurish or sentimental. The state of confusion that exists among the artists and writers in general, regarding such fundamental terms as art, work of art, form, style, method, etc., is no longer tolerable. This is an attempt: to define questions of art exhaustively; to term them specifically; to formulate a dialectic method in art—a method of plastic, logical argumentation; to unite questions of art into a coordinated system. It is called a System because it intends: (a) to provide a related terminology in art; (b) to divide the history of art according to social-economic periods; (c) to provide for the classification of works of art and periods of art based on

SOURCE: John Graham's System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Marcia Epstein Allentuck (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Copyright ©John D. Graham Papers, Archives of American Art / Smithsonian Institution [reel 4043, frames 68-75]. 142

space-consciousness; (d) to provide tangible bases for the evaluation of works of art and periods of art. It is called Dialectics because it intends to provide the methods of logical argumentation in the domain of art. New York—Paris, 1дз6-1дз6 1. What Is Art?

Art is essentially a process. A process of what? A process of abstracting. What kind of a process? A creative process of abstracting. A writer abstracts his thoughts and experiences on a white sheet of paper, a musician abstract the same phenomena into sounds and a painter abstracts three-dimensional phenomena on a two-dimensional plane. The manifestation of art consists of two elements: SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

(A) Creation is the subjective element and has only two sources: (a) thought (conscious and unconscious), (b) emotion. The conscious mind is the clearing house for one's instincts. Instincts report impressions to the conscious mind by way of the senses. Thought is the generator and emotion is the medium of transmission. (B) Space is the objective element and is the basis of all the arts—music, painting, dancing, strategy, boxing or poetry. In music the domination of space is achieved by space-binding sounds, in dancing by space-binding gestures, in painting by space-binding form, in strategy by space-binding moves. A master boxer anticipates every blow from any direction and evades it by a hair's breadth because he contains in his mind, in himself, the exact evaluation of the space he operates in. He commands this space and this ability gives him a superiority over his adversary. As a process—art is a creative operation of abstracting. As material evidence—art is a consolidated accumulation of monuments to a given civilization. Art in particular is a systematic confession of personality. Art in general is a social manifestation. 2. What is abstraction ?

Abstraction is the evaluation of form perfectly understood. Objectively abstracting is the transposition (transmutation) of the phenomenon observed into simpler, clearer, more evocative and organically final terms. Subjectively 1940s

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abstracting is an ability to evaluate events observed into a new and synthetic order. Since every art manifestation is essentially an abstraction (even photography is a mechanical abstraction of three-dimensional events on the twodimensional plane), since the very nature of art rests on abstracting, then it is only logical to pursue the course of abstracting fearlessly to its logical end instead of evading it under the disguise of charm or of being "true to nature" or "true to life." Art has nothing to do with representation, impersonation, interpretation, decoration, compromise, character, caricature or psychological problems. It contains psychological problems but deals with them in terms of form and not subject matter. In theatre good acting operates within the measurable space and in form. Good acting develops not within the play but without the play, parallel or at an angle to it. Thus great acting differs radically from the impersonative, interpretative acting and mimicry. 3. What is the value of abstraction and what are the methods?

Abstraction reveals the thing as such and regardless of its conventional associations; abstract art teaches humanity to think in a detached way; abstraction as a figure of speech opens the unconscious mind and allows the truth to emerge, it opens new vistas of speculation; it teaches that the old habitual moorings can safely be abandoned and new, saner and more general bases sought after. Methods of abstraction: (a) Disassociation of form and color observed and reassociation of the same on new, more significant terms. (b) Isolation by a powerful gesture of a portion of space or a phenomenon; study of the same, and drawing of furthest possible conclusions. 4. What is the purpose of art?

The purpose of art in general is to reveal the truth and to reveal the given object or event; to establish a link between humanity and the unknown; to create new values; to put humanity face to face with a new event, a new marvel. The business of art is not to portray life or nature or their aspects (there are other agencies that do it better, such as photography, book-keeping, etc.), but by using nature as a point of departure draw pertinent conclusions, create new values which will eventually enlighten people on the subject of pure truth. 144

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The purpose of art in particular is to re-establish a lost contact with the unconscious (actively by producing works of art), with the primordial racial past, and to keep and develop this contact in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind. Conscious mind is incapable of creating; it is only a clearing house for the powers of the unconscious. The abstract purpose of art is to arrest the eternal motion and thus establish personal contact with static eternity. The concrete purpose of art is to lift repressions (and not to impose them).

6. What is a work of art?

A work of art is a phenomenon or event only as far as it is perceived by human consciousness. A work of art is a creative, significant and unique expression of one's point of view. A work of art is a problem posed and solved. A work of art is an organism, itfunctions. A work of art must satisfy these characteristics: (a) it must have a point of view—conscious or unconscious; (b) it must be materialized—expressed; (c) it must be creative—produce a new value; (d) it must be significant, have a message to humanity as a result of a certain ideology—message deliberate or not deliberate, great or small; (e) it must be unique, it cannot be produced in series, even the artist himself cannot duplicate his work of art; (f ) it must be an organism and to be an organism it must function. That which lacks any of the above mentioned characteristics is not a work of art. 7. How is a work of art produced?

A work of art is produced by going through the stages of (a) analysis or penetration; (b) discovery or revelation; (c) organization.

12. What is the origin of art?

The origin of art lies in human longing for enigma, for the miraculous, for expansion, for social communication (appetitus socialtatis), for continuity and consequently—life eternal. This longing for perpetuity engenders artist's desire to arrest the eternal motion. Our unconscious mind contains the record of all our past experiences— 1940s

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individual and racial, from the first cell germination to the present day. Human beings lost to a great extent or never possessed the access to the wisdom stored in the unconscious. The unconscious mind is the power house, the creative agent. The conscious mind is the clearing house or a controlling agent. In the past certain individuals (people called them geniuses, messiahs and saints) had a greater than average access to the unconscious. Art offers an almost unlimited access to one's unconscious. However the only way to approach the powers of the unconscious is through our emotions and instincts. In this way art differs from craft—the first is based on the powers of the unconscious, the second is based on the powers of the conscious mind. Thus art is the best medium for humanity to get in touch with the sources of its power.

15. How is a great work of art recognized?

A great work of art is always affirmative and never merely suggestive. It is always implicit and not explicit. The great art is always ceremonial. The great art is terrifying, sometimes monstrous and repellent, but always beautiful. When the gods speak, the figure is stupendous and frightful.

EDWARD ALDEN JEWELL

Excerpt from "The Realm of Art: A New Platform; 'Globalism' Pops into View"

Last Sunday in this place there appeared some comment on the third annual exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, which remains current at Wildenstein's through June 26. In the course of that article it was mentioned that one of the artist-members of the federation had promised a statement calculated to disperse befuddlement (which I had freely confessed) over certain paintings. Circumstances have developed most fortunately. I am in receipt not only

SOURCE: New York Times, June 13,1943. (Note: Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko's letter to Jewell is embedded in this text.) Copyright © 1943 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission. 146

of the statement referred to but likewise of a statement from another artistmember of the federation. Furthermore, it proved possible to secure photographs of the three paintings in the show that had seemed to me most in need of some sort of clarification. They are herewith reproduced, so that the reader may conveniently refer to them as we proceed. All this is being done in an effort to be helpful all round. There are the artists, whose work should be approached objectively—in so far as objectivity can be compassed within the realm of human frailty. And there is the public, which, I am sure, wants always to be open-minded and to understand if it can what the artists have tried to express. "Globalism"

This much by way of preface. But I think before we become absorbed in the artists' statements it may be well to refer again to the platform upon which the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors rests its crusade against the enslavement of narrow "nationalism." Two pivotal excerpts from that platform or covenant were quoted here last week, one of which I should like to borrow once more, wishing, as the phrase has it, to leave no stone unturned. The federation asserts: In the last analysis the quality of a civilization is largely judged and understood through its art. It follows that to understand one's own time one must experience the art of one's own time. Since no man can remain untouched by the present world upheaval, it is inevitable that values in every field of human endeavor will be affected. As a nation we are now being forced to outgrow our narrow political isolationism. Now that America is recognized as the center where art and artists of all the world meet, it is time for us to accept cultural values on a truly global plane. With respect to the foregoing I again agree that it is quite right that we should try to become global in our thinking. And if the art that has baffled me is to be accepted as in line with that effort, then I don't see why, taking Mr. Rothko's "Syrian Bull" by the horns, we shouldn't term the new movement that seems to be afoot "Globalism." It may be esteemed at least as apt as such tags as "Fauvism," "Cubism" and "Futurism"—more apt, in fact, than "Futurism," which tells us nothing about the "simultaneity" of the art the Italian modernists were producing back around 1911, whereas "Globalism" might take in pretty much everything under the sun. It is therefore with confidence, with pride rather than wistfulness, that I 1940s

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submit Globalism as a name for the new art that is being cradled right here in our midst. This I feel to be a historic moment, even though the statements to which we now come have left me, I confess, in as dense a mood of befuddlement as ever. Entente Cordiale The first statement at hand is jointly signed by Adolph Gottlieb and Marcus Rothko; and, while dealing in part with general esthetic and critical issues, it bears specific reference to the paintings by these two artists, which are reproduced. Here is the preamble: To the artist the workings of the critical mind is one of life's mysteries. That is why, we suppose, the artist's complaint that he is misunderstood, especially by the critic, has become a noisy commonplace. It is therefore an event when the worm turns and the critic quietly, yet publicly, confesses his "befuddlement," that he is "nonplused" before our pictures at the federation show. We salute this honest, we might say cordial, reaction toward our "obscure" paintings, for in other critical quarters we seem to have created a bedlam of hysteria. And we appreciate the gracious opportunity that is being offered us to present our views. Now since (in behalf of a conceivable public need along these lines) I had asked the artists merely for an explanation, it came as no shock of surprise to read: We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative power. We refuse to defend them not because we cannot. It is an easy matter to explain to the befuddled that "The Rape of Persephone" is a poetic expression of the essence of the myth: the presentation of the concept of seed and its earth with all its brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth. Would you have us present this abstract concept, with all its complicated feelings, by means of a boy and girl lightly tripping? It is just as easy to explain "The Syrian Bull" as a new interpretation of an archaic image, involving unprecedented distortions. Since art is timeless, the significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full validity today as the archaic symbol had then. Or is the one 3,000 years old truer?

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"Consummated Experience"

Well, up to this point it seemed as if we might be going to get somewhere on a concrete basis. But— these easy program notes can help only the simple-minded. No possible set of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The point at issue, it seems to us, is not an "explanation" of the paintings, but whether the intrinsic ideas carried within the frames of these pictures have significance. We feel that our pictures demonstrate our esthetic beliefs, some of which we, therefore, list: 1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks. 2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. 3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way— not his way. 4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. 5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art. Period. But there is one paragraph more, which covers considerable ground and treads on enough toes to keep the chiropodists busy all Summer: Consequently, if our work embodies these beliefs it must insult any one who is • spiritually attuned to interior decoration: pictures for the home; pictures for over the mantel; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art; prize-winning potboilers; the National Academy, the Whitney Academy, the Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes; trite tripe, etc.

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Trijugated Tragedy"

The foregoing, I think, had best not be picked to pieces, especially by the simple-minded, for it might explode. And besides, I doubt whether it could be explained any more than (as stated by the artists themselves) the pictures can be explained. There must be a "consummated experience" between the text and the reader. And when the reader has participated in that consummation, then he should be able to decide whether the framed "intrinsic ideas" have any "significance." I do not recommend it, but the fearless might gingerly poke at one phrase and marvel that, to be valid, subject-matter must be "tragic." So far Globalism seems to guarantee a rather bleak and cheerless future. [...]

MAUDE RILEY

Excerptfrom "Whither Goes Abstract and Surrealist Art?"

Two exhibitions and a book on Abstract and Surrealist Art in America focus attention during December upon these long-surviving forms in 20th century art. The book is by Sidney Janis (Reynal 8c Hitchock, $6.50); the exhibitions are his, too, for they are composed of the paintings illustrated in the publication, which will be released December 4. The Nierendorf Galleries will show (starting Dec. 5) American and European Pioneers ofzoth Century Art. The Mortimer Brandt Galleries opened the "young" American section of the study on Nov. 28 with an exhibition of 50 paintings which bears the same title as the book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. While both sections of the exhibition drew mostly bewildered comment from a country-wide press when the exhibition was on tour of museums during past months (one newspaper billed the show as "Unpleasant Mishmash"), it can be predicted without conceit that New York audiences will look upon the "pioneer" section at Nierendorf's as almost classic. For there they will find early works by Braque, Gris, Picasso, Léger, Klee, Marin, Demuth, Stella, Miro, etc. Discussion will take place mainly in the midst of the Brandt Gallery

SOURCE: Art Digest (December i, 1944), 8,31. 150

showing of the younger Americans, not the least of the provocations there being one of classification. It will be necessary to hold on tight to reason. For while it would be most gratifying to find some of the confusion in present-day painting cleared up in an "explanatory" exhibition of this nature, the public is in, instead, for real chaos. The younger generation of abstract and surrealist painters is of two kinds: those who are painting elaborations upon the premises set up by the pioneers of these two expressions, and who are like outriders to the main procession; and those who have elected to stay within the traditions set up by the elder Europeans and Americans who preceded them. There are many of the former; few of the latter. There are many abstractionists in modern painting; few true surrealists. Alert observers will not fail to study, in this connection, certain new paintings in the present Whitney annual in which a marked leaning towards abstraction and surrealism was noted by New York critics. The Whitney's paintings are in most cases very recent works and therefore indicate something the two- to five-year-old paintings in the Brandt show do not. There seems to me, as I ponder the signs, a prevailing confusion among those who are painting, and those who would rationalize trends. At the Whitney, it is the artists who are confused and are changing coats with one another. The abstractions are becoming soft, the surrealisms becoming hard, and identities are being lost. At the Brandt show, it is the projector, Mr. Janis, who offers confused explanations by way of cataloguing. Abstract and surrealist art were once two well-understood and theoretically opposed schools of expression. Here, they are interchanged so that the terms that were intended originally, I am sure, as a guide to understanding of the painters' intention, are used to confound the public. (And I would be surprised if many an artist in the show wasn't bewildered to find himself catalogued as he is.) The last time I saw Lee Gatch, Ralph Rosenborg, Gina Knee, Arshile Gorky and Loren Maclver, they were all abstractionists. Now, with the same pictures by which they are known, they have become surrealists. Sandy Calder, who has been explained at great length by James Johnson Sweeney as a surrealist, has become an abstractionist to Mr. Janis. Furthermore, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko were shifted back and forth before the show was set and Motherwell ended up among the abstractionists with a fairly Mirolike painting called Spanish Prison, while Rothko's The Omen of the Eagle and Gottlieb's Pictograph went into the more favored school of surrealism. One gathers that Mr. Janis is bestowing honors when he makes a painter a 1940s

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surrealist. He seems to encourage youth by that device. For instance, William Baziotes has a painting called Balcony in which balustrades are thrown into a wiggling pattern as though seen through smoke or steam. This is "credited" with being a surrealism. [...] Most interesting among the newcomers are Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, who seem to have found something of their own and will perhaps be the start of a third party, of which modern art stands compellingly in need. The forty-year-old terms, abstract and surrealist, are Cinderella slippers and there's no use pretending they fit all of the new generation. M.R.

HOWARD PUTZEL

A Problem for Critics

Classification is extraneous to art. Most labels attached to painting are unenlightening. Talent's the thing. "Isms" are literature. Nevertheless, a large part of the public that looks at contemporary painting demands classification. Possibly classification leads to clarification. The word Cubism, though inaccurate, is apt. I hope that some art critic, museum official or someone will find as pertinent a first syllable which may be applied to the new "ism." During the past dozen years, and particularly since 1940, the tendency toward a new metamorphism was manifest in painting. However this may seem related with totemic images, earliest Mediterranean art and other archaic material, it does not, in re-examination, appear to utilize any of these for direct inspirational sources. One discovers that the real forerunners of the new "ism" were Arp and Miro. Some of Picasso's paintings are in the same category, but the series he calls Metamorphoses are, in aspect, more sculptural than pictorial. Here the new "ism" finds its most effective support among American painters. The closeness of objective resemblance to pre-Columbian expressions indigenous to this hemisphere is an incidental factor. What counts is that the painters, however respectful, are unimpressed with any idea of be-

SOURCE: Edward Alden Jewell, "Toward Abstract or Away?," New York Times, July i, 1945. Copyright © 1945 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission. 152

coming "another Picasso" or "another Miro," and that their works indicate genuine talent, enthusiasm and originality. I believe we see real American painting beginning now.

ROBERT MQTHERWELL AND HAROLD ROSENBERG

Editorial Preface

This is a magazine of artists and writers who "practice" in their work their own experience without seeking to transcend it in academic, group or political formulas. Such practice implies the belief that through conversion of energy something valid may come out, whatever situation one is forced to begin with. The question of what will emerge is left open. One functions in an attitude of expectancy. As Juan Gris said: you are lost the instant you know what the result will be. Naturally the deadly political situation exerts an enormous pressure. The temptation is to conclude that organized social thinking is "more serious" than the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms which that experience has made possible. One who yields to this temptation makes a choice among various theories of manipulating the known elements of the so-called objective state of affairs. Once the political choice has been made, art and literature ought of course to be given up. Whoever genuinely believes he knows how to save humanity from catastrophe has a job before him which is certainly not a part-time one.

SOURCE: Possibilities i (1947-48), i. Motherwell text copyright © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. 153

Political commitment in our times means logically—no art, no literature. A great many people, however, find it possible to hang around in the space between art and political action. If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon him he must perhaps have the extremest faith in sheer possibility. In his extremism he shows that he has recognized how drastic the political presence is.

SAMUEL M. KOQTZ AND H A R O L D R O S E N B E R G

TheIntrasubjectives

The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing simplicity. First, things are painted; then sensations; finally, ideas. This means that in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then on the subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective. These three steps are the points on a straight line After Cezanne, Painting only paints ideas—which, certainly, are also objects, but ideal objects immanent to the subject or intrasubjective. —José Ortega y Gassett The past decade in America has been a period of great creative activity in painting. Only now has there been a concerted effort to abandon the tyranny of the object and the sickness of naturalism and to enter within consciousness. We have had many fine artists who have been able to arrive at Abstraction through Cubism: Marin, Stuart Davis, Demuth, among others. They have been the pioneers in a revolt from the American tradition of Nationalism and of subservience to the object. Theirs has, in the main, been an objective act as differentiated from the new painters' inwardness. The intrasubjective artist invents from personal experience; creates from an internal world rather than an external one. He makes no attempt to chroni-

SOURCE: The Intrasubjectives (New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, 1949). Copyright © Samuel M. Kootz Papers, Archives of American Art / Smithsonian Institution [reel 3090, frames 520-23].

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cíe the American scene, exploit momentary political struggles, or stimulate nostalgia through familiar objects; he deals, instead, with inward emotions and experiences. Dramatically personal, each painting contains part of the artist's self; this revelation of himself in paint being a conscious revolt from our puritan heritage. This attitude has also led him to abandon the curious custom of painting within the current knowledge of the spectator, attempting instead through self-experience to enlarge the spectator's horizon. Such painting (in its inception) may never reach epic heights. As the personal anguish of Tomlin's "Death Cry" (so intimate and sensitive) may seem small when compared to the lacerating revulsion to fascism of Picasso's "Guernica." Yet, on these walls, you will note the great urge to creativity, the high level of intellectual elegance, and always the jealous adherence to individual statement. Intrasubjectivism is a point of view in painting, rather than an identical painting style. Note, in the varied personalities here shown, the lyricism of Pollock, the sensitive calligraphy of Tobey and Graves, the poetry of Baziotes (quiet and understated, as opposed to the optimism and fury of Hofmann), Motherwell's felt images, Gottlieb's inventive recall of ancient and modern myth, de Kooning's love of paint; these, and the others included, have a joint passion for ideas and for a subtler, surer way of expressing them. The artists in this exhibit have been among the first to paint within this new realm of ideas. As their work is seen and understood, we should have more additions to their ranks, until the movement of Intrasubjectivism becomes one of the most important to emerge in America. —Samuel M. Kootz The painter who sees something that inspires him will copy it, you can be sure. He will reproduce landscapes, nudes, apples, merchants, battles, angels, hunting dogs—on one condition: that this image put him in touch with grace, glamor, solidity, whatever it is that arouses him beyond himself. All art is, of course, subjective—or, in Leonardo's term, a mental thing. When there is a thing outside the painter's head that awakens the mental thing, the spectator may recognize it in the painting. As the painted hills speak to him, he hears also the hills of "nature." This happy duet makes painting "intelligible." The modern painter is not inspired by anything visible, but only by something he hasn't seen yet. No super-lively kind of object in the world for him.

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Everything of that sort has to be put there. Things have abandoned him, including the things in other people's heads (odysseys, crucifixions). In short, he begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents. The nothing the painter begins with is known as Space. Space is simple: it is merely the canvas before it has been painted. Space is very complex: it is nothing wrapped around every object in the world, soothing or strangling it. It is the growing darkness in a coil of trees or the trunk of an elephant held at eye level. It is the mental habit of a man with a ruler or a ball of string—or of one who expects to see something delightful crop up out of nowhere. Everyone knows it is the way things keep getting larger and smaller. All this is space or nothingness, and that is what the modern painter begins by copying. Instead of mountains, copses, nudes, etc., it is his space that speaks to him, quivers, turns green or yellow with bile, gives him a sense of sport, of sign language, of the absolute. When the spectator recognizes the nothingness copied by the modern painter, the latter's work becomes just as intelligible as the earlier painting. Such recognition is not really very difficult. The spectator has the nothing in himself, too. Sometimes it gets out of hand. That busy man does not go to the psychiatrist for pleasure or to learn to cook. He wants his cavity filled and the herr doctor does it by stepping up his "functioning" and giving him a past all his own. At any rate, it was knowing the nothing that made him ring that fatal doorbell. Naturally, under the circumstances, there is no use looking for silos or madonnas. They have all melted into the void. But, as I said, the void itself, you have that, just as surely as your grandfather had a sun-speckled lawn. —Harold Rosenberg

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The 1950s ESTABLISHING AUTHORITY

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ROBERTGOODNOUGH,ED.

Excerpts from Artists'Sessions at Studio 35

MOTHERWELL: What then exactly constitutes the basis of our community? STERNE: We need a common vocabulary. Abstract should really mean abstract, and modern should really mean modern. We don't mean the same things with the same words. HOFMANN: Why should we? Everyone should be as different as possible. There is nothing that is common to all of us except our creative urge. It just means one thing to me: to discover myself as well as I can. But every one of us has the urge to be creative in relation to our time—the time to which we belong may work out to be our thing in common HOFMANN: A very great Chinese painter once said the most difficult thing in a work of art is to know the moment when to stop MOTHERWELL: The question then is, "How do you know when a work is finished?"

NEWMAN: I think the idea of a "finished" picture is a fiction. I think a man spends his whole life-time painting one picture or working on one piece of sculpture. The question of stopping is really a decision of moral considerations. To what extent are you charmed by its inner life? And to what extent do you then really approach the intention or desire that is really outside of it? The decision is always made when the piece has something in it that you wanted DE KOONING: I refrain from "finishing" it. I paint myself out of the picture, and when I have done that, I either throw it away or keep it. I am always in the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to move around in it, and there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance, I keep it. If it hasn't, I throw it away. I am not really very much interested in the question REINHARDT: It has always been a problem for me—about "finishing" paintings. I am very conscious of ways of "finishing" a painting. Among modern

SOURCE: Modern Artists in America, ed. Robert Goodnough(Wittenborn Schultz, 1951).

Copyright © 1951 Wittenborn Art Books, Inc., New York. 159

artists there is a value placed upon "unfinished" work. Disturbances arise when you have to treat the work as a finished and complete object, so that the only time I think I "finish" a painting is when I have a dead-line. If you are going to present it as an "unfinished" object, how do you "finish" it? ... HOFMANN: To me a work is finished when all parts involved communicate themselves, so that they don't need me. MOTHERWELL: I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skillfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering. I noticed in looking at the Carré exhibition of young French painters who are supposed to be close to this group, that in "finishing" a picture they assume traditional criteria to a much greater degree than we do. They have a real "finish" in that the picture is a real object, a beautifully made object. We are involved in "process" and what is a "finished" object is not so certain HOFMANN: Yes, it seems to me all the time there is the question of a heritage. It would seem that the difference between the young French painters and the young American painters is this: French pictures have a cultural heritage. The American painter of today approaches things without basis. The French approach things on the basis of cultural heritage—that one feels in all their work. It is a working toward a refinement and quality rather than working toward new experiences, and painting out these experiences that may finally become tradition. The French have it easier. They have it in the beginning. DE KOONING: I am glad you brought up this point. It seems to me that in Europe every time something new needed to be done it was because of traditional culture. Ours has been a striving to come to the same point that they had—not to be iconoclasts GOTTLIEB: There is a general assumption that European ... specifically French—painters have a heritage which enables them to have the benefits of tradition, and therefore they can produce a certain type of painting. It seems to me that in the last fifty years the whole meaning of painting has been made international. I think Americans share that heritage just as much, and that if they deviate from tradition it is just as difficult for an American as for a Frenchman. It is a mistaken assumption in some quarters that any departure from tradition stems from ignorance. I think that what Motherwell describes is the problem of knowing what tradition is, and being willing to reject it in part. This requires familiarity with his past. I think we have this familiarity, and if we depart from tradition, it is out of knowledge, not innocence. DE KOONING: I agree that tradition is part of the whole world now. The point 160

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that was brought up was that the French artists have some "touch" in making an object. They have a particular something that makes them look like a "finished" painting. They have a touch which I am glad not to have. BAZIOTES: We are getting mixed up with the French tradition. In talking about the necessity to "finish" a thing, we then said American painters "finish" a thing that looks "unfinished," and the French, they "finish" it. I have seen Matisses that were more "unfinished" and yet more "finished" than any American painters. Matisse was obviously a terrific emotion at the time and he was more "unfinished" than "finished."

MOTHERWELL: I think Sterne is dealing with a real problem—what is the content of our work? What are we really doing? The question is how to name what as yet has been unnamed BAZIOTES: Whereas certain people start with a recollection or an experience and paint that experience, to some of us the act of doing it becomes the experience; so that we are not quite clear why we are engaged on a particular work. And because we are more interested in plastic matters than we are in a matter of words, one can begin a picture and carry it through and stop it and do nothing about the title at all. All pictures are full of association. REINHARDT: Titles are very important in surrealist work. But the emphasis with us is upon a painting experience, and not on any other experience. The only objection I have to a title is when it is false or tricky, or is something added that the painting itself does not have DE KOONING: I think that if an artist can always title his pictures, that means he is not always very clear.

NEWMAN: I think it would be very well if we could title pictures by identifying the subject matter so that the audience could be helped. I think the question of titles is purely a social phenomenon. The story is more or less the same when you can identify them. I think the implication has one of two possibilities: (i) We are not smart enough to identify our subject matter, or (2) Language is so bankrupt that we can't use it. I think both are wrong. I think the possibility of finding language still exists, and I think we are smart enough. Perhaps we are arriving at a new state of painting where the thing has to be seen for itself....

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HOFMANN: I believe that in an art every expression is relative, not absolutely defined as long as it is not the expression of a relationship. Anything can be changed. We speak here only about means, but the application of the means is the point. You can change one thing into another with the help of the relations of the thing. One shape in relation to other shapes makes the "expression"; not one shape or another, but the relationship between the two makes the "meaning." As long as a means is only used for itself, it cannot lead to anything. Construction consists of the use of one thing in relation to another, which then relates to a third, and higher, value.

HOFMANN: It is related to all of this world—to what you want to express. You want to express something very definitely and you do it with your means. When you understand your means, you can. MOTHERWELL: I find that I ask of the painting process one of two separate experiences. I call one the "mode of discovery and invention," the other the "mode of joy and variation." The former represents my deepest painting problem, the bitterest struggle I have ever undertaken, to reject everything I do not feel and believe. The other experience is when I want to paint for the sheer joy of painting. These moments are few. The strain of dealing with the unknown, the absolute, is gone. When I need joy, I find it only in making free variations on what I have already discovered, what I know to be mine. We modern artists have no generally accepted subject matter, no inherited iconography. But to re-invent painting, its subject matter and its means, is a task so difficult that one must reduce it to a very simple concept in order to paint for the sheer joy of painting, as simple as the Madonna was to many generations of painters in the past The other mode is a voyaging into the night, one knows not where, on an unknown vessel, an absolute struggle with the elements of the real. REINHARDT: Let's talk about that struggle. MOTHERWELL: When one looks at a Renaissance painter, it is evident that he can modify existing subject matter in a manner that shows his uniqueness and fineness without having to re-invent painting altogether. But I think that painters like Mondrian tend to move as rapidly as they can toward a simple iconography on which they can make variations. Because the strain is so great to re-invent reality in painting. REINHARDT: What about the reality of the everyday world and the reality of painting? They are not the same realities. What is the creative thing that 162

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you have struggled to get and where did it come from? What reference or value does it have, outside of the painting itself? ... DE KOONING: If we talk in terms of what kinds of shapes or lines we are using, we don't mean that and we talk like outsiders. When Motherwell says he paints stripes, he doesn't mean that he is painting stripes. That is still thinking in terms of what kind of shapes we are painting. We ought to get rid of that. If a man is influenced on the basis that Mondrian is clear, I would like to ask Mondrian if he was so clear. Obviously, he wasn't clear, because he kept on painting. Mondrian is not geometric, he does not paint straight lines. A picture to me is not geometric—it has a face It is some form of impressionism We ought to have some level as a profession. Some part of painting has to become professional. NEWMAN: De Kooning has moved from his original position that straight lines do not exist in nature. Geometry can be organic. Straight lines do exist in nature. When I draw a straight line, it does exist. It exists optically. When de Kooning says it doesn't exist optically, he means it doesn't exist in nature. On that basis, neither do curved lines exist in nature. But the edge of the U. N. building is a straight line. If it can be made, it does exist in nature. A straight line is an organic thing that can contain feelings. DE KOONING: What is called Mondrian's optical illusion is not an optical illusion. A Mondrian keeps changing in front of us. GOTTLIEB: It is my impression that the most general idea which has kept cropping up is a statement of the nature of a work of art as being an arrangement of shapes or forms of color which, because of the order or ordering of materials, expresses the artist's sense of reality or corresponds with some outer reality. I don't agree—that some expression of reality can be expressed in a painting purely in terms of line, color, and form, that those are the essential elements in painting, and anything else is irrelevant and can contribute nothing to the painting NEWMAN: We are raising the question of subject matter and what its nature is. DE KOONING: I wonder about the subject matter of the Crucifixion scenewas the Crucifixion the subject matter or not? What is the subject matter? Is it an interior subject matter? H о FM ANN: I think the question goes all the time back to subject matter. Every subject matter depends on how to use meaning. You can use it in a lyrical or dramatic manner. It depends on the personality of the artist. Everyone is clear about himself, as to where he belongs, and in which way he can give aesthetic enjoyment. Painting is aesthetic enjoyment. I want 1950s

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to be a "poet." As an artist I must conform to my nature. My nature has a lyrical as well as a dramatic disposition. Not one day is the same. One day I feel wonderful to work and I feel an expression which shows in the work. Only with a very clear mind and on a clear day I can paint without interruptions and without food because my disposition is like that. My work should reflect my moods and the great enjoyment which I had when I did the work BARR: What is the most acceptable name for our direction or movement? (It has been called Abstract-Expressionist, Abstract-Symbolist, IntraSubjectivist, etc.) SMITH: I don't think we do have unity on the name. ROSENBERG: We should have a name through the years. SMITH: Names are usually given to groups by people who don't understand them or don't like them. BARR: We should have a name for which we can blame the artists—for once in history!... MOTHERWELL: In relation to the question of a name here are three names: Abstract-Expressionist; Abstract-Symbolist; Abstract-Objectionist. BROOKS: A more accurate name would be "direct" art. It doesn't sound very good, but in terms of meaning, abstraction is involved in it. TOMLIN: Brooks also remarked that the word "concrete" is meaningful; it must be pointed out that people have argued very strongly for that word. "No-objective" is a vile translation. NEWMAN: I would offer "Self-evident" because the image is concrete. DE KOONING: It is disastrous to name ourselves.

Note

A three-day closed conference took place April 21-23, 1950, from four to seven P.M. It constituted the final activity of Studio 35. The participants who attended one or more of the sessions were William Baziotes, Janice Biala, Louise Bourgeois, James Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, Herbert Ferber, Adolph Gottlieb, Peter Grippe, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Weldon Kees, Ibram Lassaw, Norman Lewis, Seymour Lip ton, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Ralph Rosenberg, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne, David Smith, and Bradley Walker Tomlin. The moderators were Alfred H. Barr,Jr., Director of The Museum of Modern Art, Richard Lippold, and Robert Motherwell. Modern Artists in America was the first and only issue of this magazine edited by Motherwell and Reinhardt.

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ELAINE DE KOONING

David Smith Makes a Sculpture

Hot-forging a piece of metal with a trip-hammer, flame-cutting with an acetylene torch or welding his forms together, David Smith says "the change from one machine to another means no more than changing brushes to a painter or chisels to a carver. . . . Michelangelo spoke about the noise and the marble dust in our profession, but I finish the day looking more like a grease-ball than a miller." The huge cylinders, tanks and boxes of metal scrap; the racks filled with bars of iron and steel-plate; the motor-driven tools with rubber hoses, discs and meters; the large negatively charged steel table on which he executes much of his work; the forging bed nearby; and the big Ford engine that supplies the current for welding and drowns out WQXR on his little radio in the corner, all help to give his working quarters near Bolton Landing, in the Adirondacks, the aspect of a small, erratic but thriving foundry. Here, since 1941, when he built the long room that serves as his studio, poured the concrete floor and topped the structure with a full row of north skylights set at a thirty-degree angle, Smith has turned out some twenty-odd pieces of sculpture a year. With an oil stove at either end, the studio is usable through zero weather, and Smith's winter work-clothes—heavy ski shoes, hunter's-red wool jacket and blue jeans, like those sported by lumbermen in the district—are a further protection against low temperatures. Calling his shop the Terminal Iron Works, after a Brooklyn waterfront company owned by two Irishmen, Blackburn and Buckborn, who gave him working-space in their shop for his sculpture in the thirties, Smith feels that this name more closely defines his "beginning and method" than to call it a "studio." "Since 1933," he says, "I have modeled in wax for single bronze castings; I have carved marble and wood; but most of my works have been steel, which is my most fluent medium." Born in 1906 in a "Sherwood Anderson town" in Indiana where he lived until he was eighteen, Smith left home to go to Ohio University, but quit after a short period arid went to work in the Studebaker factory in South Bend, where he got his "first taste of metal-working." But it was not until seven years later, in 1933, when he borrowed a set of welding equipment from a garage,

SOURCE: Art News (September 1951), 38-50. Copyright © 1951 ARTnews LLC, September.

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that he began the metal sculpture for which he is known. Beginning his career as a painter in New York, he studied with John Sloan at the Art Students League where he met Dorothy Dehner, "a student a year ahead," who became his wife. "You get something from everybody," says the sculptor. From Sloan, he "got revolt against established convention"; he was introduced to Cubism by Jan Matulka. A show of Gargallo at В rummer's and a piece at the Museum of Modern Art by Gonzáles, pioneer experimenter with sculpture in direct metal, interested him in the Spanish ironworking traditions. Most important, he feels, was "the intense interchange among artists on the project" and conversations with Stuart Davis, Gorky and John Graham "in the days when American abstract art was rarely shown except in artists' studios." And now, although Smith likes his solitude, he still finds the company of artists necessary, and makes regular trips to New York "after several months of good work" to go to galleries and museums and to "run into late-up artists chewing the fat at the Sixth Avenue cafeteria, the Artists Club, the Cedar Tavern ... then back to the hills," where he likes to "sit and dream of the city as I used to dream of the mountains when I sat on the dock in Brooklyn." The sculptor—who worked on ships with Blackburn's crews of dock workers, and during the thirties at a locomotive works in Schenectady "where you had to lay down 120 feet of weld to earn a day's pay"—feels that his guiding techniques are not those of sculpture but of industry. "One thing I learned from working in factories," he says, "is that people who make things—whether it's automobiles, ships or locomotives—have to have a plentiful supply of materials. Art can't be made by a poor mouth, and I have to forget the cost problem on everything, because it is always more than I can afford—more than I get back from sales, most years more than I earn. For instance, 100 troy ounces of silvers costs over $100; phos-copper costs $4 a pound; nickel and stainless steel electrodes cost $1.65 to $2 a pound; a sheet of stainless steel 1/8 inch thick and 4 by 8 feet costs $83, etc. I don't resent the cost of the best material or the finest tools and equipment. Every labor-saving machine, every safety device I can afford, I consider necessary." Since recently receiving his second Guggenheim Fellowship, Smith's stock is "larger than it has ever been before." Sheets of stainless steel, cold and hot rolled steel, bronze, copper and aluminum are stacked outside; lengths of strips, shapes and bar stock are racked in the basement of the house or interlaced in the joists of the roof; and stocks of bolts, nuts, taps, dies, paints, solvents, acids, protective coatings, oils, grinding

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wheels, polishing discs, dry pigments and waxes are stored on steel shelving in his shop. From working all shifts on his various jobs, Smith also discovered his profound distaste for "routine-life." "Any two-thirds of the twenty-four hours are wonderful as long as I can choose," says the sculptor, who puts in a regular twelve-hour working day which usually starts at 11:00 A.M. after a "leisurely breakfast and an hour of reading" in his large three-room, one-story house, six hundred feet from the shop. Built with similar economy and Spartan proportions, of pale grey cinderblocks, with a steel roof he welded on himself, a steel floor covered with rubber tile and huge plate-glass windows that face a magnificent stretch of mountains, this structure is plain, elegant and convenient. Here, in a small studio, working from quart bottles of colored ink, Smith makes quantities of the drawings that usually precede or accompany the development of his sculpture. When he starts on a new work, Smith doesn't want to get involved with its dramatic meanings. "The explanation—the name—comes afterwards," he says. Looking at his recent work, The Cathedral, in terms of its inescapable social implications, he sees it as a "symbol of power—the state, the church or any individual's private mansion built at the expense of others." The relation between oppressor and oppressed is conceived as a relation between man and architecture. The poetic existence of the building comes to a focus in the predatory claw. The limp form on the steps under the talons, expressing "the concept of sacrifice," is "a man subjugated, alive or dead, it doesn't matter." The prominent disc in the back is a "symbol of the coin." The relic or fragment of a skeleton displayed on the "altar table" refers to a spurious "exaltation of the dead," as does the silhouette of the man hollowed out of the plaque on the left (here he uses "stitches" of metal running up the center of the figure to evoke the seams on the sacks sewn around corpses in the Middle Ages). The incised plaques suggest walls or the artworks on them and the upright bars reiterate this interior aspect as pillars, which then rise as towering spires in a construction, measuring only 3 feet high, that achieves heroic scale. But much of the content resides in the actual material used—forged steel, encrusted with pale oxides that suggest Pompeian pinks and golds. "Possibly steel is so beautiful," the sculptor feels, "because of all the movement associated with it, its strength and functions Yet it is also brutal: the rapist, the murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring." Human brutality, "the race for survival," has been a predominant subject for this art-

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ist. From his predatory birds and dogs personifying greed and rapacity to his "spectres" of war swooping precipitously in fierce diagonals, Smith's sculpture in the past has been characterized by an overwhelming sense of motion, but his recent work, with the stress on the vertical and horizontal, reveals a new preoccupation with centralized balances and—particularly in the case of The Cathedral—with a curious climactic stillness. Evocative and complex, it expresses the termination of an event. The scene is transfixed, but motion is vividly implicit in the construction of its parts. A flat disc seems to have rolled along its track on the cross-bar before coming to its present equilibrium; pillars with the rings around them can be seen as pistons arrested; a twisted column has reached an impasse in its logical movement downward as a drill; the scythe or scimitar supported by the column has come to the end of a predestined sweep to become the rim of a cupola; the prone form was moving erect before it was caught and pinned to the steps by the downward-pouncing claw. Finally, the separate members of the violent situation are resolved into parts of an architectural structure, as characters in Greek mythology are transfigured into symbols of their last act or emotion. Conceiving a piece of sculpture through different levels of experience, Smith doesn't see a form as stationary but as "going places," having direction, force-lines, impetus: "Projection of an indicated form, continuance of an incompleted side, the suggestion of a solid by lines, or the vision of forms revolving at varying speeds—all such possibilities I consider and expect the viewer to contemplate. An art-form should not be platitudinous or predigested with no intellectual or spiritual demands on the consumer." The first impact of his sculpture on "the consumer" is, naturally, in terms of its most general associations. His works are primarily abstractions whose impetus and rhythm are a matter of "drawing" which then, secondarily, yields up the narrower action of the subject. And finally, on a third and more practical level of reference, Smith's forms suggest motion in the way that tools or parts of machinery not in use still reveal their predisposition to a specific function. It is mainly on this level that Smith consciously composes—and therefore he often finds that he can work with "ready-made" parts (he used sections of an old wagon for his first piece of metal sculpture in 1933). This interplay of form and function can follow either way. A theme will suggest a particular tool (an old hand-forged wood-bit that he had "lying around for fifteen years" became the figure with the wrung neck that he wanted for the foreground of The Cathedral}; and conversely, a tool or piece of machinery will often suggest a theme: thus, four

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turnbuckles he found rusted together in an empty lot were brought home and cleaned and hung in his studio until one day, two months later, the sculptor recalls, "I recognized them as the bodies of soldiers with the hooks for heads," and immediately began work on an eloquent sculpture of four charging soldiers. Constantly on the lookout for discarded machinery, he loads his truck ("a necessity for a sculptor") with his bulky finds which are stored along with his regular stock. Smith has "no set procedure in beginning a sculpture." Usually there are drawings—anything from sketches in pocket notebooks to the large ink drawings on sheets of linen rag. Some works start out as chalk outlines on the cement floor of his shop with cut steel forms working into drawings; some, like The Cathedral, are begun and finished without sketches. There always are, however, weeks of preparation. "I want an abundance of ideas and material so I always make many more pieces than I need. In this case, I knew more or less how the vertical structure, relating to church architecture and a forest maze, was to be arranged." So the first step was to forge a group of bars into right angles with unequal legs, the long leg in each case intended as an upright. In preparation for forging, the bars were clamped in a vise with a flame-torch trained on them and then anchored in place so that the sculptor was free to work on something else. About half of these forgings were selected for the initial grouping. Then the base was forged and a set of short, tapered bars were tack-welded around the rim as supports for the rising, angular structure. (If dissatisfied at any point in the development of a piece with the position or proportions of a form . . . he removes it by flame-cutting, a process "pretty much as easy as running a knife through butter.") For the fore-altar body, he cut down the stubby, partially forged limbs with a band-saw before welding them to the torso. And after the wood-bit was pounded into the limp, ropy line he wanted for the twisted neck, and the knob was built up with melted iron to form the head, they were attached—"like a ball and chain"—to the body which was then placed on the altar steps. When the twisted column was set on its supporting table, he began work on the hollow arm of the claw^ cutting a boiler-tube in half "on the bias," and forging an elongated funnel from each of the parts. For lengths that have to tally exactly, he sometimes uses a micrometer, but more often he gauges distances by eye, testing relationships by holding the piece to be added up against the forms already fixed in place, and then extending or shortening the new piece to make it fit. Searching for the proportions of the plaques, he suspended various rectangles of paper in position,

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and when satisfied with the measurements, he formed them from steel-plate with an oxyacetylene cutting machine. This machine burns smoothly and is most useful, he finds, on straight lines and geometric forms; and the slag it leaves on the edges can be easily hammered off or else smoothed down with a grinder. For the negative "shroud-figure" in the left-hand plaque and for the "mural" on the right, he drew his forms with soapstone and then burned the design completely through the metal with a hand-torch. Working constantly from five sides at once (including the top view), the sculptor will change from one metal to another during the development of a piece, sometimes because of a physical problem. For the glittering wounds under the talons, he used silver, which "served aesthetically" and, thinner than water in its melted state, has a penetrating quality that makes it an excellent soldering agent for fine joints that are not under a strain. Also selected for their brilliance were the stainless steel rivets that plug up the holes or support the encircling bands of the uprights. After all his forms were temporarily tack-welded into position and the sculptor felt he had no more adjustments to make, final arc-welding completed the assembly.... The last step is the surfacing. "I've no aesthetic interest in tool-marks," says Smith. "My aim in handling materials is the same as in locomotive building—to arrive at a given form in the most efficient manner"; but "each method imparts its function to varying materials." And the sculptor is not necessarily interested in eradicating tool-marks either, and generally the act of beating a form into shape gives it its final surface. When he wants small, shiny spots— as on certain seams in The Cathedral—he uses a die-grinder with tungstencarbide burrs, and although he sometimes works with so fine a burr that he needs a magnifying glass (on his medals, for instance), he rarely tries for a high polish, preferring a surface that expresses the crude nature of the metal. Using color in various ways this past year, he applied subdued metallic tones in even, mat coats with a spray gun to some works, or smeared rust solvent mixed with large quantities of powdered pigment on others—like the huge, red Fish recently shown at the Whitney Museum—achieving brilliant, streaky, raw washes; but for the subtle, blonde tones of The Cathedral, his method was more tentative. Dissolving splotches of rust, Smith coated the different metals of the piece with a phosphoric acid, mixing small amounts of cadmium powder with it to produce deposits which varied from the golden patina on the steps to the mottled, whitish-pink of the twisted column, all falling into a unified range of shimmering, elusive tones. 170

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Finished, The Cathedral seems to expand through its own atmospheric haze as an historical edifice, bigger than life, undetailed and unapproachable, taking on as part of itself the surrounding air and countryside. This extraordinary sense of "landscape" in the coloring is reiterated formally in the powerful, horizontal lines that cut through the piece, giving it a curious effect of transparency as each of the elements seems to indicate a receding plane. And with the irregular placement of the six short legs or "corners" that support the "walls" of this sculpture, a sense of deep interior distance is created on the shallow base (the depth is only 17 1/8 inches at the bottom step) as the first level of horizontals, including the two tables, seems always to fall at eye-level, no matter from which angle the piece is viewed. And thus, Smith has magically achieved his aim—to create a sculpture that is, in his own words, at once "scene and symbol."

CLYFFORD STILL

Statement

That pigment on canvas has a way of initiating conventional reactions for most people needs no reminder. Behind these reactions is a body of history matured into dogma, authority, tradition. The totalitarian hegemony of this tradition I despise, its presumptions I reject. Its security is an illusion, banal, and without courage. Its substance is but dust and filing cabinets. The homage paid to it is a celebration of death. We all bear the burden of this tradition on our backs but I cannot hold it a privilege to be a pallbearer of my spirit in its name. From the most ancient times the artist has been expected to perpetuate the values of his contemporaries. The record is mainly one of frustration, sadism, superstition, and the will to power. What greatness of life crept into the story came from sources not yet fully understood, and the temples of art which burden the landscape of nearly every city are a tribute to the attempt to seize this elusive quality and stamp it out.

SOURCE: 15 Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 21-22. Copyright © MoMA. 171

The anxious men find comfort in the confusion of those artists who would walk beside them. The values involved, however, permit no peace, and mutual resentment is deep when it is discovered that salvation cannot be bought. We are now committed to an unqualified act, not illustrating outworn myths or contemporary alibis. One must accept total responsibility for what he executes. And the measure of his greatness will be in the depth of his insight and his courage in realizing his own vision. Demands for communication are both presumptuous and irrelevant. The observer usually will see what his fears and hopes and learning teach him to see. But if he can escape these demands that hold up a mirror to himself, then perhaps some of the implications of the work may be felt. But whatever is seen or felt it should be remembered that for me these paintings had to be something else. It is the price one has to pay for clarity when one's means are honoured only as an instrument of seduction or assault.

THOMAS . HESS

de Kooning Paints a Picture

In the first days of June, 1950, Willem de Kooning tacked a y-foot-high canvas to his painting frame and began intensive work on Woman—a picture of a seated figure, and a theme which had preoccupied him for over two decades. He decided to concentrate on this single major effort until it was finished to his satisfaction. The picture nearly complied to his requirements several times in the months that followed, but never wholly. Finally, after a year and a half of continuous struggle, it was almost completed; then followed a few hours of violent disaffection; the canvas was pulled off the frame and discarded. After that three other related pictures were begun (and these have since been finished). A few weeks later, the art historian Meyer Schapiro visited de Kooning's Greenwich Village studio and asked to see the abandoned painting. It was brought out and re-examined. Later it was put back on the frame, and after

SOURCE: Art News (March 1953), 30-33,60-67; Copyright © 1953 ARTnews LLC, March 172

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some additional changes was declared finished—i.e., not to be destroyed. This was mid-June, 1952. When the canvas was mounted on a permanent stretcher prior to being taken to the Janis Gallery (where de Kooning is having a one man show this month, which includes Woman), another alteration was made. Then Woman escaped by truck from its creator. The painting's energetic and lucid surfaces, its resoundingly affirmative presence, give little indication of a vacillating, Hamlet-like history. Woman appears inevitable, like a myth that needed but a quick name to become universally applicable. But like any myth, its emergence was long, difficult and (to use one of the artist's favorite adjectives) mysterious. Invitation au Voyage

It would be a false simile to compare the two years' work that resulted in Woman to a progress or a development. Rather there was a voyage; not a mission or an errand, but one of those Romantic ventures which so attracted poets, from Byron, Baudelaire, through Lewis Carroll's Snark, to Mallarmé and Rimbaud (Ingres' harem, Delacroix's Barque, Van Gogh's Berceuse who was to accompany lonesome sailors are parallels in painting). There is a certain revulsion preceding and even causing the metaphysical (for the journey is inevitably around the walls of a studio) embarkation. "The flesh is sad, alas, and I've read all the books," complained Mallarmé. In de Kooning's case there was dissatisfaction with an almost totally non-figurative style, the symbolism of which, perhaps, had become too introspective to play the ambitious pictorial role demanded by the artist. But in all such journeys there is also confidence (Mallarmé's "ennui" still "trusts the supreme adieu" of waving handkerchiefs), and belief in the journey. The stages of the painting ... illustrate arbitrarily, even haphazardly, some of the stops en route—like cities that were visited, friends that were met. They are neither better nor worse, more or less "finished," than the terminus. They are memories which the camera has changed to tangible souvenirs. Some might appear more satisfactory than the ending, but this is irrelevant. The voyage, on the other hand, is relevant: the exploration for a constantly elusive vision; the solution to a problem that was continually being set in new ways. And the ending is like the poets' ending, too; the voyage simply stops. You are necessarily "home again"; need for the particular journey no longer exists. The result, like that of all works of art, can be compared to a new map of the human sensibility. 1950s

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Procrustes Improvises

Some artists like to work from an easy chair which is riveted to a concrete slab which is anchored to the center of the earth. Others, and among them de Kooning, prefer to keep off-balance. They insist that everything is possible within the painting, which means they must devise a system for studying an infinitely variable number of probabilities. De Kooning has devised a method of a continuous series of drawings which are cut apart, reversed, exchanged and otherwise manipulated on the painting. It is like Procrustes, who cut or stretched travelers to fit his bed, but with the important difference that this Procrustes does not know the dimensions of his bed. He needs such doubt to keep off-balance. One of the simplest steps in the method is illustrated in the [way] two charcoal studies on paper have been cut laterally in half at the figure's hips and combined to make another figure—the top part frontal; the bottom, threequarters' view. The result is something like an "animated" study; the body has been given a progressive motion by a substitution of new parts. In this context, readers of ARTNEWS may remember an oil-on-paper sketch by Ingres for The Turkish Bath [Nov. '52] of a reclining nude with three arms, or, for that matter, Huck Finn's description of the drawing of a lady who had as many arms as a spider because the artist could never decide which was the best pose. De Kooning achieves similar multiplicity, but each of his figures can be studied with its correct allotment of anatomical parts—a necessary aspect for this artist. It is inconceivable, at this stage of his thinking, that he would paint a three-eyed or one-legged figure. He insists that everything and only everything appropriate be represented in the painting. More complicated applications of the Procrustean method are illustrated in the stages of the work-in-progress. Before making changes, de Kooning frequently interrupted the process of painting to trace with charcoal on transparent paper large sections of, or the whole composition. These would be cut apart and taped on the canvas in varying positions. Thus in stage 1, the position of the skirt and knees has been shifted by the overlay; in 2, that of the figure's left arm and hand. This device serves two purposes, one technical, the other conceptual, but it is a single device and its technical and conceptual uses are separated only to simplify discussion. In practice it is one action; it can be described partially in two ways. Technically the method permits the artist to study possibilities of change 174

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before taking irrevocable steps. It also keeps a continuous if fragmentary record of where the picture has been. De Kooning often paints on the paper overlays, testing differences of color and drawing. Furthermore, when he goes back to the canvas it can be in relation to an area in two different stages of development—the overlay and the state beneath it. Off-balance is heightened; probabilities increase; the painter makes ambiguity into actuality. And ambiguity, as we shall see, is a crucial element in this (and almost all important) art. Conceptually, the method is used to approach what de Kooning calls the "intimate proportions" of anatomy. He attempts to recapture "the feeling of familiarity you have when you look at somebody's big toe when close to it, or at a crease in a hand or a nose or lips or a necktie." Uninterested in "artistic proportions"—the traditional ratios of limb to trunk to height, etc.—he seeks an anatomy that will be stylistically relevant, and also become, as it were, "so many spots of paint." R. P. Blackmur has defined style as the individual qualification of the act of perception, and de Kooning's perceptions focus on the New York he daily observes, populated by birdlike Puerto Ricans, fat mamas in bombazine or a lop-sided blond at a bar. Such are the observations he is ambitious to translate—or rather to synthesize—with the plastic means he controls. One approach to "intimate" perception is by interchanging parts of the anatomy. The artist points out that a drawing of a knuckle, for example, could also be that of a thigh; an arm, that of a leg. Exactly such switches were often made during the painting of Woman, attempting always, in the continual shifts, re-creations, replacements, substitutions, to arrive at a point where a sense of the intimate (i.e., what is seen and familiar in everyday observation) is conveyed by proportion—among other means. So if Procrustes does not know how long and wide his bed is, he knows exactly what kind of a bed the visitor must fit. The refusal to define the dimensions becomes another link in the chain of ambiguities that will finally measure the surface of Woman to the artist and spectator. (Parenthetically it should be added that de Kooning's dissatisfaction with conventional proportions—which have satisfied such older re-inventors of anatomy as Picasso—is based on long experience with them. Years of training at the Academy of his native Rotterdam, and a later period of what might be termed lyrical Ingrism, gave him the mastery of tradition essential to discarding or changing convention.)

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The Skin

The physical appearance of Woman, as has been mentioned, gives no clue to the length of its history. Paint is applied in consistent impastos which thin out to the canvas in a few places and rise elsewhere to heavy ridges. "I like a nice, juicy, greasy surface," says the artist, who refuses to capitalize on the process of correction and the happy accidents it so often produces. Changes, made after prolonged study or in moments of emphatic refusal, are preceded by scraping back to the canvas. The pigments employed are a wide variety of standard tube colors; titanium white; the medium is a mixture of turpentine, stand oil and damar varnish. Surfaces are kept fresh and evenly moist. In this respect it should be noted that although Woman took two years to complete, de Kooning is a fast worker, and the entire picture frequently changed in a few hours time. The voyage may have been long, but its tempo was hectic. If the materials are conventional, they were applied in many different and unconventional manners—as one might expect from the motivating style. In addition to the usual selection of long-handled artists' brushes, de Kooning uses about a dozen inch to inch-and-a-half house-painters' brushes; a wide, slanted palette knife; and a number of "liners"—brushes with about a dozen б-inch bristles attached to a flat ferrule. These are used by display and scenery painters to make emphatic, fluid lines (the artist supported himself when he first came to the U.S. in 1926 by painting houses, signs and decorations, and his early training had included the crafts of commercial art; he is one of the few to have made personal use of the many tricks of the trades). With these instruments he is able to give the skin of his painting a breathing vitality and spontaneity.... "Impossible" passages often appear: a torrent of color will suddenly disappear into strokes of other hues running at right angles. Some of these effects are deliberately produced by masking—i.e., placing paper over the surface adjacent to the one being painted and running the strokes over the paper, which is then removed, leaving a clean edge. More of them—and more important— have a sort of montage effect, a jump in focus, as if someone had abruptly changed the lens through which you were looking. De Kooning says that his wife, Elaine (herself a painter, whose writings have frequently appeared on these pages), was the first to notice this and to attribute it to the use of overlays. The record of a shift in a unit's position is retained in perceptible but unaccountable shifts of plane. Here the masking is not in paint, but in ideas. The 176

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effect, however, is similar, and gives an illusion of shallow space in which edges flicker up and down the surface—as they do in some Cubist painting. Color has been called de Kooning's weakness by some of his colleagues; they point to his many works in black and white and to the emphasis on draftsmanship in his paintings and studies. The artist himself freely admits he is not a colorist as moderns have come to accept this term as equivalent to Matisse or Bonnard. He cannot predict where he wants to put a specific blue or rose— or even which blue or rose he wants. (At the opposite extreme is Bonnard, who walked around a group of paintings with a brush loaded with crimson, putting a bit on here, a bit there. He knew he wanted to use that crimson, on those paintings, that day.) De Kooning often starts his colors from the commonplace—the intimate—objects around him: the blue of a curtain, the red from a box of soap flakes, the off-grey of a wall seen across the street. There are no limits; but the hues must be gay, which, as will be seen, is the ambience of Woman. As work progresses, colors change with shape and meaning of shape, fluctuating as delicately as they might in a Mondrian. They give hints of location, space and texture on the figurative level; they differentiate and accentuate the tensions established on the surface; they relate to each other in the various contradictions of flat surface and apparent depth. In the entity of Woman, they become unanalyzable components of form which add to its air of opulence, violence and laughter. [. . . ] In all the stages of the work in progress, a mouth is attached to the painting. In [a] sketch, it is the ruby smile of the Lucky Strike lady with the "T-zone." In the stages, it is other photographed mouths cut from advertisements and posters, sometimes with enlarged lips, often with teeth accentuated by black verticals. This is not an overlay—which is a point of change—but a point of rest, the center, unturning point of the wheel around which all else moves. The fragment of trompe-Poeil reality becomes a reference within the painting to the actual woman outside it. It is always present, but will be finally discarded. To return to the metaphor of the voyage, the smile is the passport, the silly bit of paper which you must have with you at all times to continue the journey. It also adds a further element of ambiguity and suggests more probabilities to the work in progress.

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No-Environment

Where is the woman sitting; what is behind her; what are the names of her appurtenances? At first Woman was sitting indoors on a chair. Then a window-shape at the upper right established a wall and distance—but she could have been outside a house as well as inside, or in an inside-outside porch space. This state of anonymous simultaneity (not no-specific-place but several no-specific-places) is seen more clearly in the few "objects" which appeared, then disappeared around the seated figure. De Kooning claims that the modern scene is "no-environment" and presents it as such. To make his point, he opened a tabloid newspaper and leafed through its illustrations. There was a politician standing next to an arched doorway and rusticated wall, but remove the return of the arch—the wall might be a pile of shoe boxes in a department store, or "nothing." The outdoor crowd scene with orators on the roof of a sound truck could be the interior of Madison Square Garden during a prize-fight. The modern image is without distinct character probably because of the tremendous proliferation of visual sensation which causes duplicates to appear among unlikes. The Renaissance man saw and visualized, let us say, n things. Today, fed by still, cinema and television cameras, we experience n to the looth power, and of course, the ns become similar because our brains become numb to their differences. Distinctions weaken. Finally the environment of the modern artist—the objects which he names in his pictures—appertains to the pictures only. The decision is neither one of purification or narcissism—it is, in its way, social comment. But note that the reasoned lack of identity of objects adds another major ambiguity to the painting—each object is purposefully shown as liable to many interpretations. Woman

Woman and the pictures related to it should be fixed to the sides of trucks, or used as highway signs, like those more-than-beautiful girls with their eternal smiles who do not tempt, but simply point to a few words or a beer or a gadget. Like the girl at the noisy party who has misplaced her escort, she simply sits, is there, and smiles because that is the proper thing to do in America. The smile is not fearful, aggressive, particularly significant or even expressive of what the smiler feels. It is the detached, semi-human way to meet the world, 178

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and because of this detachment it has a touching irony and humanity. It can be properly compared to the curling lips of the Greek Kouros and the mediaeval Virgin. An interpretation along such lines perhaps accounts for the actual smile pasted to the canvas for two years. The center of realism had to be at the spot where gesture had psychological significance—and ambivalence. And the smile demands a setting of gay color with its intimate derivation from objects in the studio. Intimate proportions, too, become necessary, for without the detachment they give, the smile becomes caricature or sentimental. Ever since Van Gogh, sentimentality has been the curse of the painters, who took the liberty to distort. Lips or foreheads stretch plastically, but emotionally they urge the spectator to weep with the artist for all the sorrows of the world. The painters of the Expressionist movements often have been tricked into self-pity by their liberation from convention. The older, more rigid disciplines could help keep the essential remove between expression and self-analysis. When these became bankrupt, they also devalued a multitude of minor talents who might have become capable decorators, but ended up as rather obnoxious snivelers. For specific examples, there are the novels of Thomas Wolfe, and their opposites but equals in the hard-boiled school, especially in its Gallic phase, like Bosquet. The smiling Woman is de Kooning's notable solution to this problem, and it can be compared to Balthus' adolescents, with their unwavering stares, or (and here the connection is more direct) Picasso's cow-faced girls with crazy hats. The Triple Thinker

Edmund Wilson took the title of his recent book from a phrase of Flaubert's, "and what is an artist if he is not a triple (i.e. triply a) thinker?" Ambiguity exactingly sought and exactingly left undefined has been the recurrent theme in Woman. Ambiguity appears in surface, parts, illusion of space, in masking, overlays, interchangeable anatomies, intimate proportions and colors, no-environment, etc. The artist suggests a further complication of meaning, and points out that his "idolized" Woman reminds him strongly of a landscape—with arms like lanes and a body of hills and fields, all brought up close to the surface, like a panorama squeezed together (or like Cézanne). Then you notice again the openness of certain forms, where contiguous objects seem set in different planes, and the width of the eyes opens up the face to a vista. The thinker is on many levels; to make the number three: the paint, the 1950s

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woman, the landscape. Each level could be divided into several others, and interrelated in more ways. This was perhaps one reason for the length of the voyage, for in less than twenty-four months, the accretion of subtleties and multi-interpretations might not have occurred. The fact that the picture was never really ended—never satisfied—and that it brought a number of paintings and sketches through with it, might have been predicted from the conditions laid down by the artist at the start. But all that we need care about is that the image, in all its complexity, came through to the end. Last Change

After Woman was declared finished by the artist it was prepared for stretching on a permanent frame. De Kooning had purposely used an over-size canvas, and had covered the unused edges with aluminum paint, so they would not "make a plane," but still allow room for shifting the format

LOUISE BOURGEOIS

Artist's Statement

An artist's words are always to be taken cautiously. The finished work is often a stranger to, and sometimes very much at odds with what the artist felt, or wished to express when he began. At best the artist does what he can rather than what he wants to do. After the battle is over and the damage faced up to, the result may be surprisingly dull—but sometimes it is surprisingly interesting. The mountain brought forth a mouse, but the bee will create a miracle of beauty and order. Asked to enlighten us on their creative process, both would be embarrassed, and probably uninterested. The artist who discusses the socalled meaning of his work is usually describing a literary side-issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all, in the work itself. Just the same, the artist must say what he feels: My work grows from the duel between the isolated individual and the shared awareness of the group. At first I made single figures without any free-

so URGE: Design Quarterly, no. 30 (1954), 18. Reprinted with the permission of the Louise Bourgeois Studio. 180

dom at all: blind houses without any openings, any relation to the outside world. Later, tiny windows started to appear. And then I began to develop an interest in the relationship between two figures. The figures of this phase are turned in on themselves, but they try to be together even though they may not succeed in reaching each other. Gradually the relations between the figures I made became freer and more subtle, and now I see my works as groups of objects relating to each other. Although ultimately each can and does stand alone, the figures can be grouped in various ways and fashions, and each time the tension of their relations makes for a different formal arrangement. For this reason the figures are placed in the ground the way people would place themselves in the street to talk to each other. And this is why they grow from a single point—a minimum base of immobility which suggests an always possible change. In my most recent work these relations become clearer and more intimate. Now the single work has its own complex of parts, each of which is similar, yet different from the others. But there is still the feeling with which I began—the drama of one among many. The look of my figures is abstract, and to the spectator they may not appear to be figures at all. They are the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and states of awareness. Eighteenth-century painters made "conversation pieces"; my sculptures might be called "confrontation pieces." Louise Bourgeois, 1954

allan kaprow

The Legac y of Jackso n Polloc k

The tragic news of Pollock's death two summers ago was profoundly depressing to many of us. We felt not only a sadness over the death of a great figure, but also a deep loss, as if something of ourselves had died too. We were a piece of him: he was, perhaps, the embodiment of our ambition for absolute liberation and a secretly cherished wish to overturn old tables of crockery and flat

SOURCE: Art News (October 1958), 24-26,55-57. Copyright © 1958 ARTnews LLC, October. 181

champagne. We saw in his example the possibility of an astounding freshness, a sort of ecstatic blindness. But there was another, morbid, side to his meaningfulness. To "die at the top" for being his kind of modern artist was to many, I think, implicit in the work before he died. It was this bizarre implication that was so moving. We remembered van Gogh and Rimbaud. But now it was our time, and a man some of us knew. The ultimate sacrificial aspect of being an artist, while not a new idea, seemed in Pollock terribly modern, and in him the statement and the ritual were so grand, so authoritative and all-encompassing in their scale and daring that, whatever our private convictions, we could not fail to be affected by their spirit. It was probably this sacrificial side of Pollock that lay at the root of our depression. Pollock's tragedy was more subtle than his death: for he did not die at the top. We could not avoid seeing that during the last five years of his life his strength had weakened, and during the last three he had hardly worked at all. Though everyone knew, in light of reason, that the man was very ill (his death was perhaps a respite from almost certain future suffering) and that he did not die as Stravinsky's fertility maidens did, in the very moment of creation/annihilation—still we could not escape the disturbing (metaphysical) itch that connected this death in some direct way with art. And the connection, rather than being climactic, was, in a way, inglorious. If the end had to come, it came at the wrong time. Was it not perfectly clear that modern art in general was slipping? Either it had become dull and repetitious as the "advanced" style, or large numbers of formerly committed contemporary painters were defecting to earlier forms. America was celebrating a "sanity in art" movement, and the flags were out. Thus, we reasoned, Pollock was the center in a great failure: the New Art. His heroic stand had been futile. Rather than releasing the freedom that it at first promised, it caused not only a loss of power and possible disillusionment for Pollock but also that the jig was up. And those of us still resistant to this truth would end the same way, hardly at the top. Such were our thoughts in August

1956. But over two years have passed. What we felt then was genuine enough, but our tribute, if it was that at all, was a limited one. It was surely a manifestly human reaction on the part of those of us who were devoted to the most advanced artists around us and who felt the shock of being thrown out on our own. But it did not seem that Pollock had indeed accomplished something, 182

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both by his attitude and by his very real gifts, that went beyond even those values recognized and acknowledged by sensitive artists and critics. The act of painting, the new space, the personal mark that builds its own form and meaning, the endless tangle, the great scale, the new materials are by now clichés of college art departments. The innovations are accepted. They are becoming part of textbooks. But some of the implications inherent in these new values are not as futile as we all began to believe; this kind of painting need not be called the tragic style. Not all the roads of this modern art lead to ideas of finality. I hazard the guess that Pollock may have vaguely sensed this but was unable, because of illness or for other reasons, to do anything about it. He created some magnificent paintings. But he also destroyed painting. If we examine a few of the innovations mentioned above, it may be possible to see why this is so. For instance, the act of painting. In the last seventy-five years the random play of the hand upon the canvas or paper has become increasingly important. Strokes, smears, lines, dots became less and less attached to represented objects and existed more and more on their own, self-sufficiently. But from Impressionism up to, say, Gorky, the idea of an "order" to these markings was explicit enough. Even Dada, which purported to be free of such considerations as "composition," obeyed the Cubist esthetic. One colored shape balanced (or modified or stimulated) others, and these in turn were played off against (or with) the whole canvas, taking into account its size and shape—for the most part quite consciously. In short, part-to-whole or part-to-part relationships, no matter how strained, were a good 50 percent of the making of a picture (most of the time they were a lot more, maybe 90 percent). With Pollock, however, the so-called dance of dripping, slashing, squeezing, daubing, and whatever else went into a work placed an almost absolute value upon a diaristic gesture. He was encouraged in this by the Surrealist painters and poets, but next to his their work is consistently "artful," "arranged," and full of finesse—aspects of outer control and training. With the huge canvas placed upon the floor, thus making it difficult for the artist to see the whole or any extended section of "parts," Pollock could truthfully say that he was "in" his work. Here the direct application of an automatic approach to the act makes it clear that not only is this not the old craft of painting, but it is perhaps bordering on ritual itself, which happens to use paint as one of its materials. (The European Surrealists may have used automatism as an ingredient, but we can hardly say they really practiced it wholeheartedly. In fact, only the writers 1950s

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among them—and only in a few instances—enjoyed any success in this way. In retrospect, most of the Surrealist painters appear to have derived from a psychology book or from each other: the empty vistas, the basic naturalism, the sexual fantasies, the bleak surfaces so characteristic of this period have impressed most American artists as a collection of unconvincing clichés. Hardly automatic, at that. And, more than the others associated with the Surrealists, such real talents as Picasso, Klee, and Miró belong to the stricter discipline of Cubism; perhaps this is why their work appears to us, paradoxically, more free. Surrealism attracted Pollock as an attitude rather than as a collection of artistic examples.) But I used the words "almost absolute" when I spoke of the diaristic gesture as distinct from the process of judging each move upon the canvas. Pollock, interrupting his work, would judge his "acts" very shrewdly and carefully for long periods before going into another "act." He knew the difference between a good gesture and a bad one. This was his conscious artistry at work, and it makes him a part of the traditional community of painters. Yet the distance between the relatively self-contained works of the Europeans and the seemingly chaotic, sprawling works of the American indicates at best a tenuous connection to "paintings." (In fact, Jackson Pollock never really had a malerisch sensibility. The painterly aspects of his contemporaries, such as Motherwell, Hofmann, de Kooning, Rothko, and even Still, point up at one moment a deficiency in him and at another moment a liberating feature. I choose to consider the second element the important one.) I am convinced that to grasp a Pollock's impact properly, we must be acrobats, constantly shuttling between an identification with the hands and body that flung the paint and stood "in" the canvas and submission to the objective markings, allowing them to entangle and assault us. This instability is indeed far from the idea of a "complete" painting. The artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved here. (And if we object to the difficulty of complete comprehension, we are asking too little of the art.) Then Form. To follow it, it is necessary to get rid of the usual idea of "Form," i.e., a beginning, middle, and end, or any variant of this principle—such as fragmentation. We do not enter a painting of Pollock's in any one place (or hundred places). Anywhere is everywhere, and we dip in and out when and where we can. This discovery has led to remarks that his art gives the impression of going on forever—a true insight that suggests how Pollock ignored the confines of the rectangular field in favor of a continuum going in all directions simultaneously, beyond the literal dimensions of any work. (Though evidence 184

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points to a slackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of his canvases, in the best ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the painted surface around the back of his stretchers.) The four sides of the painting are thus an abrupt leaving off of the activity, which our imaginations continue outward indefinitely, as though refusing to accept the artificiality of an "ending." In an older work, the edge was a far more precise caesura: here ended the world of the artist; beyond began the world of the spectator and "reality." We accept this innovation as valid because the artist understood with perfect naturalness "how to do it." Employing an iterative principle of a few highly charged elements constantly undergoing variation (improvising, as in much Asian music), Pollock gives us an all-over unity and at the same time a means to respond continuously to a freshness of personal choice. But this form allows us equal pleasure in participating in a delirium, a deadening of the reasoning faculties, a loss of "self " in the Western sense of the term. This strange combination of extreme individuality and selflessness makes the work remarkably potent but also indicates a probably larger frame of psychological reference. And for this reason any allusions to Pollock's being the maker of giant textures are completely incorrect. They miss the point, and misunderstanding is bound to follow. But given the proper approach, a medium-sized exhibition space with the walls totally covered by Pollocks offers the most complete and meaningful sense of his art possible. Then Scale. Pollock's choice of enormous canvases served many purposes, chief of which for our discussion is that his mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings and became environments. Before a painting, our size as spectators, in relation to the size of the picture, profoundly influences how much we are willing to give up consciousness of our temporal existence while experiencing it. Pollock's choice of great sizes resulted in our being confronted, assaulted, sucked in. Yet we must not confuse the effect of these with that of the hundreds of large paintings done in the Renaissance, which glorified an idealized everyday world familiar to the observer, often continuing the actual room into the painting by means of trompe l'oeil. Pollock offers us no such familiarity, and our everyday world of convention and habit is replaced by the one created by the artist. Reversing the above procedure, the painting is continued out into the room. And this leads me to my final point: Space. The space of these creations is not clearly palpable as such. We can become entangled in the web to some extent and by moving in and out of the skein of lines and splashings can experience a kind of spatial extension. But even so, 1950s

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this space is an allusion far more vague than even the few inches of spacereading a Cubist work affords. It may be that our need to identify with the process, the making of the whole affair, prevents a concentration on the specifics of before and behind so important in a more traditional art. But what I believe is clearly discernible is that the entire painting comes out at us (we are participants rather than observers), right into the room. It is possible to see in this connection how Pollock is the terminal result of a gradual trend that moved from the deep space of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the building out from the canvas of the Cubist collages. In the present case the "picture" has moved so far out that the canvas is no longer a reference point. Hence, although up on the wall, these marks surround us as they did the painter at work, so strict is the correspondence achieved between his impulse and the resultant art. What we have, then, is art that tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to fill our world with itself, art that in meaning, looks, impulse seems to break fairly sharply with the traditions of painters back to at least the Greeks. Pollock's near destruction of this tradition may well be a return to the point where art was more actively involved in ritual, magic, and life than we have known it in our recent past. If so, it is an exceedingly important step and in its superior way offers a solution to the complaints of those who would have us put a bit of life into art. But what do we do now? There are two alternatives. One is to continue in this vein. Probably many good "near-paintings" can be done varying this esthetic of Pollock's without departing from it or going further. The other is to give up the making of paintings entirely—I mean the single flat rectangle or oval as we know it. It has been seen how Pollock came pretty close to doing so himself. In the process, he came upon some newer values that are exceedingly difficult to discuss yet bear upon our present alternative. To say that he discovered things like marks, gestures, paint, colors, hardness, softness, flowing, stopping, space, the world, life, death might sound naive. Every artist worth his salt has "discovered" these things. But Pollock's discovery seems to have a peculiarly fascinating simplicity and directness about it. He was, for me, amazingly childlike, capable of becoming involved in the stuff of his art as a group of concrete facts seen for the first time. There is, as I said earlier, a certain blindness, a mute belief in everything he does, even up to the end. I urge that this not be seen as a simple issue. Few individuals can be lucky enough to possess the intensity of this kind of knowing, and I hope that in the near future a careful study of this (perhaps) Zen quality of Pollock's personality will be undertaken. At any rate, for 186

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now we may consider that, except for rare instances, Western art tends to need many more indirections in achieving itself, placing more or less equal emphasis upon "things" and the relations between them. The crudeness of Jackson Pollock is not, therefore, uncouth; it is manifestly frank and uncultivated, unsullied by training, trade secrets, finesse—a directness that the European artists he liked hoped for and partially succeeded in but that he never had to strive after because he had it by nature. This by itself would be enough to teach us something. It does. Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Fortysecond Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible accidents. An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or a billboard selling Drano; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat—all will become materials for this new concrete art. Young artists of today need no longer say, "I am a painter" or "a poet" or "a dancer." They are simply "artists." All of life will be open to them. They will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well. People will be delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or amused, but these, I am certain, will be the alchemies of the 19605.

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MARUGA SAW1N

In the Galleries: Franz Kline

When Franz Kline draws his brush across the canvas the gesture is automatically associated with authority, so much so that a showing of his latest paintings is a portentous event: he is forced to measure up to the test of his own reputation instead of coming before us freshly and without reference to previous accomplishments. The exhibition of his work which closed the 1957-58 season at the Janis Gallery has both its rewarding and its disappointing aspects, but of greatest interest was the indication of continued exploration on the artist's part, a confident reaching out to break new ground rather than the strengthening of mastery over already demarcated areas. This preference for extension over consolidation is apparent in the greater play of space, the massed rather than the fragmented darkness, the bold introduction of color and a generally freer painting activity, with the attendant diminishing of clarity. The small paintings, oil on paper, sometimes combined with collage, are masterful in their taut balance, their richness of tone and texture, and they exemplify on a modulated scale the welding of strong contrasts which is Kline's forte. The larger works in color, notably King Oliver, in which the color range is at its fullest, appear florid in contrast with the purgative purity of the black and white canvases. Colors here are deployed with more regard for their light and dark properties than for their tonal variety, so that they function still in terms of contrasts, although with greater complexity. In the black and white canvases (most of which are dated 1958) the emphasis is on space rather than the innate character of the forms; engulfing masses of black pierced by streaks of light create a fathomless darkness. The essence of these paintings is motion, the force that brings light out of dark and substance out of void, the ultimate drama. In such paintings as Siegfried and Requiem Kline has succeeded in conveying this as well as or better than any of his contemporaries. (Janis, May ig-June 14.)

—M.S.

SOURCE: Arts Magazine (September 1958), 57-58. Reprinted with the permission of Martica Sawin.

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HAROLD R O S E N B E R G

The American Action Painters

J'ai fait des gestes blanc parmi les solitudes. —Apollinaire The American will is easily satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in knowing itself. — Wallace Stevens

What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement—certainly not as well as, if successful, it does the others. Yet without the definition something essential in those best is bound to be missed. The attempt to define is like a game in which you cannot possibly reach the goal from the starting point but can only close in on it by picking up each time from where the last play landed. Modern Art? Or an Art of the Modern?

Since the War every twentieth-century style in painting is being brought to profusion in the United States: thousands of "abstract" painters—crowded teaching courses in Modern Art—a scattering of new heroes—ambitions stimulated by new galleries, mass exhibitions, reproductions in popular magazines, festivals, appropriations. Is this the usual catching up of America with European art forms? Or is something new being created? . . . For the question of novelty, a definition would seem indispensable. Some people deny that there is anything original in the recent American painting. Whatever is being done here now, they claim, was done thirty years ago in Paris. You can trace this painter's boxes of symbols to Kandinsky, that one's moony shapes to Miró or even back to Cézanne. Quantitatively, it is true that most of the symphonies in blue and red rectangles, the wandering pelvises and birdbills, the line constructions and plane suspensions, the virginal dissections of flat areas that crowd the art shows are accretions to the "School of Paris" brought into being by the fact that the

SOURCE: Art News (December 1952), 22-23,48-50. Copyright © 1952 ARTnews LLC, December. 189

mode of production of modern masterpieces has now been all too clearly rationalized. There are styles in the present displays that the painter could have acquired by putting a square inch of a Soutine or a Bonnard under a microscope. ... All this is training based on a new conception of what art is, rather than original work demonstrating what art is about to become. At the center of this wide practicing of the immediate past, however, the work of some painters has separated itself from the rest by a consciousness of a function for painting different from that of the earlier "abstractionists," both the Europeans themselves and the Americans who joined them in the years of the Great Vanguard. This new painting does not constitute a School. To form a School in modern times not only is a new painting consciousness needed but a consciousness of that consciousness—and even an insistence on certain formulas. A School is the result of the linkage of practice with terminology—different paintings are affected by the same words. In the American vanguard the words, as we shall see, belong not to the art but to the individual artists. What they think in common is represented only by what they do separately. Getting Inside the Canvas

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or "express" an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter. It is pointless to argue that Rembrandt or Michelangelo worked in the same way. You don't get Lucrèce with a dagger out of staining a piece of cloth or spontaneously putting forms into motion upon it. She had to exist someplace else before she got on the canvas, and the paint was Rembrandt's means for bringing her here. Now, everything must have been in the tubes, in the painter's muscles, and in the cream-colored sea into which he dives. If Lucrèce should come out she will be among us for the first time—a surprise. To the painter, she must be a surprise. In this mood there is no point in an act if you already know what it contains. "B. is not modern," one of the leaders of this mode said to me the other day. "He works from sketches. That makes him Renaissance." Here the principle, and the difference from the old painting, is made into a 190

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formula. A sketch is the preliminary form of an image the mind is trying to grasp. To work from sketches arouses the suspicion that the artist still regards the canvas as a place where the mind records its contents—rather than itself the "mind" through which the painter thinks by changing a surface with paint. If a painting is an action, the sketch is one action, the painting that follows it another. The second cannot be "better" or more complete than the first. There is just as much significance in their difference as in their similarity. Of course, the painter who spoke had no right to assume that the other had the old mental conception of a sketch. There is no reason why an act cannot be prolonged from a piece of paper to a canvas. Or repeated on another scale and with more control. A sketch can have the function of a skirmish. Call this painting "abstract" or "Expressionist" or "Abstract-Expressionist," what counts is its special motive for extinguishing the object, which is not the same as in other abstract or Expressionist phases of modern art. The New American Painting is not "pure art," since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The apples weren't brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting. In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, color, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which—or practically all, as has been attempted, logically, with unpainted canvases—can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act. It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever to be or be not in it, will be a tension. Dramas of as If

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a "moment" in the adulterated mixture of his life— whether "moment" means, in one case, the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or, in another, the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist's existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life. It follows that anything is relevant to it. Anything that has to do with action —psychology, philosophy, history, mythology, hero worship. Anything but art criticism. The painter gets away from Art through his act of painting; the critic can't get away from it. The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, 1950s

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styles, form, as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas, is bound to seem a stranger. Some painters take advantage of this stranger. Having insisted that their painting is an act, they then claim admiration for the act as art. This turns the act back toward the aesthetic in a petty circle. If the picture is an act, it cannot be justified as an act of genius in a field whose whole measuring apparatus has been sent to the devil. Its value must be found apart from art. Otherwise the "act" gets to be "making a painting" at sufficient speed to meet an exhibition date. Art—relation of the painting to the works of the past, Tightness of color, texture, balance, etc.—comes back into painting by way of psychology. As Stevens says of poetry, "it is a process of the personality of the poet." But the psychology is the psychology of creation. Not that of the so-called psychological criticism that wants to "read" a painting for clues to the artist's sexual preferences or debilities. The work, the act, translates the psychologically given into the intentional, into a "world"—and thus transcends it. With traditional aesthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is not the psychological data but role, the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation. The interest lies in the kind of act taking place in the four-sided arena, a dramatic interest. Criticism must begin by recognizing in the painting the assumptions inherent in its mode of creation. Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction —psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations among the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked. "It's Not That It's Not That It's Not That"

With a few important exceptions, most of the artists of this vanguard found their way to their present work by being cut in two. Their type is not a young painter but a reborn one. The man may be over forty, the painter around seven. The diagonal of a grand crisis separates him from his personal and artistic past. Many of the painters were "Marxists" (W.P.A. unions, artists' congresses) —they had been trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism)—it amounts to the same thing. The big moment came when it was decided to paint Just To Paint. The 192

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gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral. If the war and the decline of radicalism in America had anything to do with this sudden impatience, there is no evidence of it. About the effects of large issues upon their emotions, Americans tend to be either reticent or unconscious. The French artist thinks of himself as a battleground of history; here one hears only of private Dark Nights. Yet it is strange how many segregated individuals came to a dead stop within the past ten years and abandoned, even physically destroyed, the work they had been doing. A far-off watcher, unable to realize that these events were taking place in silence, might have assumed they were being directed by a single voice. At its center the movement was away from rather than toward. The Great Works of the Past and the Good Life of the Future became equally nil. The refusal of Value did not take the form of condemnation or defiance of society, as it did after World War I. It was diffident. The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world. Liberation from the object meant liberation from the "nature," society, and art already there. It was a movement to leave behind the self that wished to choose its future and to nullify its promissory notes to the past. With the American, heir of the pioneer and the immigrant, the foundering of Art and Society was not experienced as a loss. On the contrary, the end of Art marked the beginning of an optimism regarding himself as an artist. The American vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville's Ishmael took to the sea. On the one hand, a desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaustion; on the other, the exhilaration of an adventure over depths in which he might find reflected the true image of his identity. Painting could now be reduced to that equipment which the artist needed for an activity that would be an alternative to both utility and idleness. Guided by visual and somatic memories of paintings he had seen or made—memories which he did his best to keep from intruding into his consciousness—he gesticulated upon the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare him and his art to be. Based on the phenomenon of conversion the new movement is, with the majority of the painters, essentially a religious movement. In every case, however, the conversion has been experienced in secular terms. The result has been the creation of private myths. 1950s

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The tension of the private myth is the content of every painting of this vanguard. The act on the canvas springs from an attempt to resurrect the saving moment in his "story" when the painter first felt himself released from Value —myth of past self-recognition. Or it attempts to initiate a new moment in which the painter will realize his total personality—myth of future self-recognition. Some formulate their myths verbally and connect individual works with their episodes. With others, usually deeper, the painting itself is the exclusive formulation, it is a Sign. The revolution against the given, in the self and in the world, which since Hegel has provided European vanguard art with theories of a New Reality, has re-entered America in the form of personal revolts. Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating. "Except the soul has divested itself of the love of created things ..." The artist works in a condition of open possibility, risking, to follow Kierkegaard, the anguish of the aesthetic, which accompanies possibility lacking in reality. To maintain the force to refrain from settling anything, he must exercise in himself a constant No. Apocalyps e and Wallpape r The most comfortable intercourse with the void is mysticism, especially a mysticism that avoids ritualizing itself. Philosophy is not popular among American painters. For most, thinking consists of the various arguments that то PAINT is something different from, say, to write or criticize: a mystique of the particular activity. Lacking verbal flexibility, the painters speak of what they are doing in a jargon still involved in the metaphysics oí things: "My painting is not Art; it's an Is." "It's not a picture of a thing; it's the thing itself." "It doesn't reproduce Nature; it is Nature." "The painter doesn't think; he knows." Etc., etc. "Art is not, not not not not ..." As against this, a few reply, art today is the same as it always has been. Language has not accustomed itself to a situation in which the act itself is the "object." Along with the philosophy of то PAINT appear bits of Vedanta and popular pantheism. In terms of American tradition, the new painters stand somewhere between Christian Science and Whitman's "gangs of cosmos." That is, between a discipline of vagueness by which one protects oneself from disturbance while keeping one's eyes open for benefits; and the discipline of the Open Road of risk that leads the farther side of the object and the outer spaces of the consciousness. 194

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What made Whitman's mysticism serious was that he directed his "cosmic T" toward a PikeVPeak-or-Bust of morality and politics. He wanted the ineffable in all behavior—he wanted it to win the streets. The test of any of the new paintings is its seriousness—and the test of its seriousness is the degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the artist's total effort to make over his experience. A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an action and its relation to a transforming process in the artist. The canvas has "talked back" to the artist not to quiet him with Sibylline murmurs or to stun him with Dionysian outcries but to provoke him into a dramatic dialogue. Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered by a new question. By its very nature, action painting is painting in the medium of difficulties. Weak mysticism, the "Christian Science" side of the new movement, tends in the opposite direction, toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself or his own desire to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper. The cosmic "I" that turns up to paint pictures but shudders and departs the moment there is a knock on the studio door brings to the artist a megalomania that is the opposite of revolutionary. The tremors produced by a few expanses of tone or by the juxtaposition of colors and shapes purposely brought to the verge of bad taste in the manner of Park Avenue shop windows are sufficient cataclysms in many of these happy overthrows of Art. The mystical dissociation of painting as an ineffable event has made it common to mistake for an act the mere sensation of having acted—or of having been acted upon. Since there is nothing to be "communicated," a unique signature comes to seem the equivalent of a new plastic language. In a single stroke the painter exists as a Somebody—at least on a wall. That this Somebody is not he seems beside the point. Once the difficulties that belong to a real act have been evaded by mysticism, the artist's experience of transformation is at an end. In that case what is left? Or to put it differently: What is a painting that is not an object nor the 1950s

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representation of an object nor the analysis or impression of it nor whatever else a painting has ever been—and that has also ceased to be the emblem of a personal struggle? It is the painter himself changed into a ghost inhabiting The Art World. Here the commonplace phrase, "I have bought an O" (rather than a painting by O) becomes literally true. The man who started to remake himself has made himself into a commodity with a trademark. Milieu: The Busy No-Audience

We said that the new painting calls for a new kind of criticism, one that would distinguish the specific qualities of each artist's act. Unhappily for an art whose value depends on the authenticity of its mysteries, the new movement appeared at the same moment that Modern Art en masse "arrived" in America: Modern architecture, not only for sophisticated homes, but for corporations, municipalities, synagogues; Modern furniture and crockery in mail-order catalogues; Modern vacuum cleaners, can openers; beer ad "mobiles"—along with reproductions and articles on advanced painting in big-circulation magazines. Enigmas for everybody. Art in America today is not only nouveau, it's news. The new painting came into being fastened to Modern Art and without intellectual allies—in literature everything had found its niche. From this isolated liaison it has derived certain superstitions comparable to those of a wife with a famous husband. Superiorities, supremacies even, are taken for granted. It is boasted that modern painting in America is not only original but an "advance" in world art (at the same time that one says "to hell with world art"). Everyone knows that the label Modern Art no longer has any relation to the words that compose it. To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern or art; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand-year-old mask from the South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach becomes Art. When they find this out, some people grow extremely enthusiastic, even, oddly enough, proud of themselves; others become infuriated. These reactions suggest what Modern Art actually is. It is not a certain kind of art object. It is not even a style. It has nothing to do either with the period when a thing was made or with the intention of the maker. It is something that someone has had the power to designate as psychologically, aesthetically, or ideologically relevant to our epoch. The question of the driftwood is: Who found it? 196

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Modem Art in America represents a revolution of taste—and serves to identify power of the caste conducting that revolution. Responses to Modern Art are primarily responses to claims to social leadership. For this reason Modern Art is periodically attacked as snobbish, Red, immoral, etc., by established interests in society, politics, the church. Comedy of a revolution that restricts itself to weapons of taste—and which at the same time addresses itself to the masses: Modern-design fabrics in bargain basements, Modern interiors for office girls living alone, Modern milk bottles. Modern Art is educational, not with regard to art but with regard to life. You cannot explain Mondrian's painting to people who don't know anything about Vermeer, but you can easily explain the social importance of admiring Mondrian and forgetting about Vermeer. Through Modern Art the expanding caste of professional enlighteners of the masses—designers, architects, decorators, fashion people, exhibition directors—informs the populace that a supreme Value has emerged in our time, the Value of the NEW, and that there are persons and things that embody that Value. This Value is a completely fluid one. As we have seen, Modern Art does not have to be actually new; it only has to be new to somebody—to the last lady who found out about the driftwood—and to win neophytes is the chief interest of the caste. Since the only thing that counts for Modern Art is that a work shall be new, and since the question of its newness is determined not by analysis but by social power and pedagogy, the vanguard painter functions in a milieu utterly indifferent to the content of his work. Unlike the art of nineteenth-century America, advanced paintings today are not bought by the middle class. Nor are they by the populace. Considering the degree to which it is publicized and feted, vanguard painting is hardly bought at all. It is used in its totality as material for educational and profitmaking enterprises: color reproductions, design adaptations, human-interest stories. Despite the fact that more people see and hear about works of art than ever before, the vanguard artist has an audience of nobody. An interested individual here and there, but no audience. He creates in an environment not of people but of functions. His paintings are employed not wanted. The public for whose edification he is periodically trotted out accepts the choices made for it as phenomena of The Age of Queer Things. An action is not a matter of taste. You don't let taste decide the firing of a pistol or the building of a maze. 1950s

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As the Marquis de Sade understood, even experiments in sensation, if deliberately repeated, presuppose a morality. To see in the explosion of shrapnel over No Man's Land only the opening of a flower of flame, Marinetti had to erase the moral premises of the act of destruction—as Molotov did explicitly when he said that Fascism is a matter of taste. Both M's were, of course, speaking the driftwood language of the Modern Art International. Limited to the aesthetics, the taste bureaucracies of Modern Art cannot grasp the human experience involved in the new action paintings. One work is equivalent to another on the basis of resemblances of surface, and the movement as a whole a modish addition to twentieth-century picture making. Examples in every style are packed side by side in annuals and in the heads of newspaper reviewers like canned meats in a chain store—all standard brands. To counteract the obtuseness, venality, and aimlessness of the Art World, American vanguard art needs a genuine audience—not just a market. It needs understanding—not just publicity. In our form of society, audience and understanding for advanced painting have been produced, both here and abroad, first of all by the tiny circle of poets, musicians, theoreticians, men of letters, who have sensed in their own work the presence of the new creative principle. So far, the silence of American literature on the new painting all but amounts to a scandal.

CLEMENT GREENBERG

"American-Type" Painting

The latest abstract painting offends many people, among whom are more than a few who accept the abstract in art in principle. New painting (sculpture is a different question) still provokes scandal when little that is new in literature or even music appears to do so any longer. This may be explained by the very slowness of painting's evolution as a modernist art. Though it started on its "modernization" earlier perhaps than the other arts, it has turned out to

SOURCE: Partisan Review (Spring 1955), 179-96. Reprinted with permission of Janice Van Home for the Estate of Clement Greenberg. 198

have a greater number of expendable conventions imbedded in it, or these at least have proven harder to isolate and detach. As long as such conventions survive and can be isolated they continue to be attacked, in all the arts that intend to survive in modern society. This process has come to a stop in literature because literature has fewer conventions to expend before it begins to deny its own essence, which lies in the communication of conceptual meanings. The expendable conventions in music, on the other hand, would seem to have been isolated much sooner, which is why the process of modernization has slowed down, if not stopped, there. (I simplify drastically. And it is understood, I hope, that tradition is not dismantled by the avant-garde for sheer revolutionary effect, but in order to maintain the level and vitality of art under the steadily changing circumstances of the last hundred years—and that the dismantling has its own continuity and tradition.) That is, the avant-garde survives in painting because painting has not yet reached the point of modernization where its discarding of inherited convention must stop lest it cease to be viable as art. Nowhere do these conventions seem to go on being attacked as they are today in this country, and the commotion about a certain kind of American abstract art is a sign of that. It is practiced by a group of painters who came to notice in New York about a dozen years ago, and have since become known as the "abstract expressionists," or less widely, as "action" painters. (I think Robert Coates of the New Yorker coined the first term, which is not altogether accurate. Harold Rosenberg, in Art News, concocted the second, but restricted it by its implication to but three or four of the artists the public knows under the first term. In London, the kind of art in question is sometimes called "American-type painting.")1 Abstract expressionism is the first phenomenon in American art to draw a standing protest, and the first to be deplored seriously, and frequently, abroad. But it is also the first on its scale to win the serious attention, then the respect, and finally the emulation of a considerable section of the Parisian avant-garde, which admires in abstract expressionism precisely what causes it to be deplored elsewhere. Paris, whatever else it may have lost, is still quick to sense the genuinely "advanced"—though most of the abstract expressionists did not set out to be "advanced"; they set out to paint good pictures, and they "advance" in pursuit of qualities analogous to those they admire in the art of the past. Their paintings startle because, to the uninitiated eye, they appear to rely so much on accident, whim, and haphazard effects. An ungoverned spontaneity seems to be at play, intent only on registering immediate impulse, and the 1950s

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result seems to be nothing more than a welter of blurs, blotches, and scrawls —"oleaginous" and "amorphous," as one British critic described it. All this is seeming. There is good and bad in abstract expressionism, and once one can tell the difference he discovers that the good owes its realization to a severer discipline than can be found elsewhere in contemporary painting; only it makes factors explicit that previous disciplines left implicit, and leaves implicit many that they did not. To produce important art it is necessary as a rule to digest the major art of the preceding period, or periods. This is as true today as ever. One great advantage the American abstract expressionists enjoyed in the beginning was that they had already digested Klee and Miró—this, ten years before either master became a serious influence in Paris. Another was that the example of Matisse was kept alive in New York by Hans Hofmann and Milton Avery at a time when young painters abroad tended to overlook him. Picasso, Léger, and Mondrian were much in the foreground then, especially Picasso, but they did not block either the way or the view. Of particular importance was the fact that a large number of Kandinsky's early abstract paintings could be seen in New York in what is now the Solomon Guggenheim Museum. As a result of all this, a generation of American artists could start their careers fully abreast of their times and with an artistic culture that was not provincial. Perhaps it was the first time that this happened. But I doubt whether it would have been possible without the opportunities for unconstrained work that the WPA Art Project gave most of them in the late '305. Nor do I think any one of them could have gotten off the ground as well as he did without the small but relatively sophisticated audience for adventurous art provided by the students of Hans Hofmann. What turned out to be another advantage was this country's distance from the war and, as immediately important as anything else, the presence in it during the war years of artists like Mondrian, Masson, Léger, Chagall, Ernst, and Lipchitz, along with a number of European critics, dealers, and collectors. Their proximity and attention gave the young abstract-expressionist painters self-confidence and a sense of being in the center of art. And in New York they could measure themselves against Europe with more benefit to themselves than they ever could have done as expatriates in Paris. The justification for the term, "abstract expressionist," lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they 200

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all started from French painting, got their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time. Picasso was very much on their minds, especially the Picasso of the early and middle '305, and the first problem they had to face, if they were going to say what they had to say, was how to loosen up the rather strictly demarcated illusion of shallow depth he had been working within, in his more ambitious pictures, since he closed his "synthetic" Cubist period. With this went that canon of drawing in faired, more or less simple lines and curves that Cubism imposed and which had dominated almost all abstract art since 1920. They had to free themselves from this too. Such problems were not attacked by program (there has been very little that is programmatic about abstract expressionism) but rather run up against simultaneously by a number of young painters most of whom had their first shows at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in 1943 to 1944. The Picasso of the '305—whom they followed in reproductions in the Cahiers d'Art even more than in flesh-and-blood paintings—challenged and incited as well as taught them. Not fully abstract itself, his art in that period suggested to them new possibilities of expression for abstract and quasiabstract painting as nothing else did, not even Klee's enormously inventive and fertile but equally unrealized 1930-1940 phase. I say equally unrealized, because Picasso caught so few of the hares he started in the '305—which may have served, however, to make his effect on certain younger artists even more stimulating. To break away from an overpowering precedent, the young artist usually looks for an alternative one. The late Arshile Gorky submitted himself to Miró in order to break free from Picasso, and in the process did a number of pictures we now see have independent virtues, although at the time—the late '305 —they seemed too derivative. But the 1910-1918 Kandinsky was even more of a liberator and during the first war years stimulated Gorky to a greater originality. A short while later André Breton's personal encouragement began to inspire him with a confidence he had hitherto lacked, but again he submitted his art to an influence, this time that of Matta y Echaurren, a Chilean painter much younger than himself. Matta was, and perhaps still is, an inventive draughtsman, and in some ways a daring painter, but an inveterately flashy and superficial one. It took Gorky's more solid craft, profounder culture as a painter, and more selfless devotion to art to make many of Matta's ideas look 1950s

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substantial. In the last four or five years of his life he so transmuted these ideas, and discovered so much more in himself in the way of feeling to add to them, that their derivation became conspicuously beside the point. Gorky found his own way to ease the pressure of Picassoid space, and learned to float flat shapes on a melting, indeterminate ground with a difficult stability quite unlike anything in Miró. Yet he remained a late Cubist to the end, a votary of French taste, an orthodox easel painter, and virtuoso of line, and a tinter, not a colorist. He is, I think, one of the greatest artists we have had in this country. His art was largely unappreciated in his lifetime, but a few years after his tragic death in 1948, at the age of forty-four, it was invoked and imitated by younger painters in New York who wanted to save elegance and traditional draughtsmanship for abstract painting. However, Gorky finished rather than began something, and finished it so well that anybody who follows him is condemned to academicism. Willem de Kooning was a mature artist long before his first show in 1948. His culture is similar to Gorky's (to whom he was close) and he, too, is a draughtsman before anything else, perhaps an even more gifted one than Gorky and certainly more inventive. Ambition is as much a problem for him as it was for his dead friend, but in the inverse sense, for he has both the advantages and the liabilities—which may be greater—of an aspiration larger and more sophisticated, up to a certain point, than that of any other living artist I know of except Picasso. On the face of it, de Kooning proposes a synthesis of modernism and tradition, and a larger control over the means of abstract painting that would render it capable of statements in a grand style equivalent to that of the past. The disembodied contours of Michelangelo's and Rubens's nude figure compositions haunt his abstract pictures, yet the dragged off-white, grays, and blacks by which they are inserted in a shallow illusion of depth— which de Kooning, no more than any other painter of the time, can deepen without risk of second-hand effect—bring the Picasso of the early '305 persistently to mind. But there are even more essential resemblances, though they have little to do with imitation on de Kooning's part. He, too, hankers after terribilità, prompted by a similar kind of culture and by a similar nostalgia for tradition. No more than Picasso can he tear himself away from the human figure, and from the modeling of it for which his gifts for line and shading so richly equip him. And it would seem that there was even more Luciferian pride behind de Kooning's ambition: were he to realize it, all other ambitious painting would have to stop for a while because he would have set its forward as well as backward limits for a generation to come. 202

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If de Kooning's art has found a readier acceptance than most other forms of abstract expressionism, it is because his need to include the past as well as to forestall the future reassures most of us. And in any case, he remains a late Cubist. And then there is his powerful, sinuous Ingresque line. When he left outright abstraction several years ago to attack the female form with a fury greater than Picasso's in the late '305 and the '405, the results baffled and shocked collectors, yet the methods by which these savage dissections were carried out were patently Cubist. De Kooning is, in fact, the only painter I am aware of at this moment who continues Cubism without repeating it. In certain of his latest Women, which are smaller than the preceding ones, the brilliance of the success achieved demonstrates what resources that tradition had left when used by an artist of genius. But de Kooning has still to spread the full measure of that genius on canvas. Hans Hofmann is the most remarkable phenomenon in the abstract expressionist "school" (it is not really a school) and one of its few members who can already be referred to as a "master." Known as a teacher here and abroad, he did not begin showing until 1944, when he was in his early sixties, and only shortly after his painting had become definitely abstract. Since then he has developed as one of a group whose next oldest member is at least twenty years younger. It was only natural that he should have been the maturest from the start. But his prematureness rather than matureness has obscured the fact that by 1947 he stated and won successful pictures from ideas whose later and more single-minded exploitation by others was to constitute their main claim to originality. When I myself not so long ago complained in print that Hofmann was failing to realize his true potentialities, it was because I had not caught up with him. Renewed acquaintance with some of his earlier work and his own increasing frequency and sureness of success have enlightened me as to that. Hofmann's pictures in many instances strain to pass beyond the easel convention even as they cling to it, doing many things which that convention resists. By tradition, convention, and habit we expect pictorial structure to be presented in contrasts of dark and light, or value. Hofmann, who started from Matisse, the Fauves, and Kandinsky as much as from Picasso, will juxtapose high, shrill colors whose uniform warmth and brightness do not so much obscure value contrasts as render them dissonant. Or when they are made more obvious, it will be by jarring color contrasts that are equally dissonant. It is much the same with his design and drawing: a sudden razor-edged line will upset all our notions of the permissible, or else thick gobs of paint, without 1950s

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support of edge or shape, will cry out against pictorial sense. When Hofmann fails it is either by forcing such things, or by striving for too obvious and pat a unity, as if to reassure the spectator. Like Klee, he works in a variety of manners without seeming to consolidate his art in any one of them. He is willing, moreover, to accept his bad pictures in order to get in position for the good ones, which speaks for his self-confidence. Many people are put off by the difficulty of his art—especially museum directors and curators—without realizing it is the difficulty of it that puts them off, not what they think is its bad taste. The difficult in art usually announces itself with less sprightliness. Looked at longer, however, the sprightliness gives way to calm and to a noble and impassive intensity. Hofmann's art is very much easel painting in the end, with the concentration and the relative abundance of incident and relation that belong classically to that genre. Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell have likewise gotten less appreciation than they deserve. Not at all alike in their painting, I couple them for the moment because they both stay closer to late Cubism, without belonging to it, than the painters yet to be discussed. Though one might think that all the abstract expressionists start off from inspired impulse, Motherwell stands out among them by reason of his dependence on it, and by his lack of real facility. Although he paints in terms of the simplified, quasi-geometric design sponsored by Picasso and Matisse and prefers, though not always, clear, simple color contrasts within a rather restricted gamut, he is less of a late Cubist than de Kooning. Motherwell has a promising kind of chaos in him but, again, it is not the kind popularly ascribed to abstract expressionism. His early collages, in a kind of explosive Cubism analogous to de Kooning's, have with time acquired a profound and original unity, and between 1947 and 1951 or so he painted several fairly large pictures that I think are among the masterpieces of abstract expressionism: some of these, in broad vertical stripes, with ocher played off against flat blacks and whites, bear witness to how well decoration can transcend itself in the easel painting of our day. But Motherwell has at the same time painted some of the feeblest pictures done by a leading abstract expressionist, and an accumulation of these over the last three or four years has obscured his real worth. Gottlieb is likewise a very uneven artist, but a much more solid and accomplished one than is generally supposed. He seems to me to be capable of a greater range of controlled effects than any other abstract expressionist, and it is only owing to some lack of nerve or necessary presumptuousness that he 204

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has not made this plainer to the public, which accuses him of staying too close to the grid plans of Klee or Torrès-Garcia, the Uruguayan painter. Over the years Gottlieb has, in his sober, pedestrian way, become one of the surest craftsmen in contemporary painting, one who can place a flat, uneven silhouette, that most difficult of all things to adjust to the rectangle, with a rightness beyond the capacity of ostensibly stronger painters. Some of his best work, like the "landscapes" and "seascapes" he showed in 1953, tends to be too difficult for eyes trained on late Cubism. On the other hand, his 1954 pictures, the first in which he let himself be tempted to a display of virtuosity and which stayed within late Cubism, were liked better by the public than anything he had shown before. The zigzags of Gottlieb's course in recent years, which saw him become a colorist and a painterly painter (if anything, too much of one) between his departures from and returns to Cubism, have made his development a very interesting one to watch. Right now he seems one of the least tired of all the abstract expressionists. Jackson Pollock was at first almost as much a late Cubist and a hard and fast easel-painter as any of the abstract expressionists I have mentioned. He compounds hints from Picasso's calligraphy in the early '305 with suggestions from Hofmann, Masson, and Mexican painting, especially Siqueiros, and began with a kind of picture in murky, sulphurous colors that startled people less by the novelty of its means than by the force and originality of the feeling behind it. Within a notion of shallow space generalized from the practice of Miró and Masson as well as of Picasso, and with some guidance from the early Kandinsky, he devised a language of baroque shapes and calligraphy that twisted this space to its own measure and vehemence. Pollock remained close to Cubism until at least 1946, and the early greatness of his art can be taken as a fulfillment of things that Picasso had not brought beyond a state of promise in his 1932-1940 period. Though he cannot build with color, Pollock has an instinct for bold oppositions of dark and light, and the capacity to bind the canvas rectangle and assert its ambiguous flatness and quite unambiguous shape as a single and whole image concentrating into one the several images distributed over it. Going further in this direction, he went beyond late Cubism in the end. Mark Tobey is credited, especially in Paris, with being the first painter to arrive at "all-over" design, covering the picture surface with an even, largely undifferentiated system of uniform motifs that cause the result to look as though it could be continued indefinitely beyond the frame like a wallpaper pattern. Tobey had shown the first examples of his "white writing" in New 1950s

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York in 1944, but Pollock had not seen any of these, even in reproduction, when in the summer of 1946 he did a series of "all-over" paintings executed with dabs of buttery paint. Several of these were masterpieces of clarity. A short while later he began working with skeins of enamel paint and blotches that he opened up and laced, interlaced, and unlaced with a breadth and power remote from anything suggested by Tobey's rather limited cabinet art. One of the unconscious motives for Pollock's "all-over" departure was the desire to achieve a more immediate, denser, and more decorative impact than his late Cubist manner had permitted. At the same time, however, he wanted to control the oscillation between an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion of depth beneath it as lucidly and tensely and evenly as Picasso and Braque had controlled a somewhat similar movement with the open facets and pointillist flecks of color of their 1909-1913 Cubist pictures. ("Analytical" Cubism is always somewhere in the back of Pollock's mind.) Having achieved this kind of control, he found himself straddled between the easel picture and something else hard to define, and in the last two or three years he has pulled back. Tobey's "all-over" pictures never aroused the protest that Pollock's did. Along with Barnett Newman's paintings, they are still considered the reductio ad absurdum of abstract expressionism and modern art in general. Though Pollock is a famous name now, his art has not been fundamentally accepted where one would expect it to be. Few of his fellow artists can yet tell the difference between his good and his bad work—or at least not in New York. His most recent show, in 1954, was the first to contain pictures that were forced, pumped, dressed up, but it got more acceptance than any of his previous exhibitions had—for one thing, because it made clear what an accomplished craftsman he had become, and how pleasingly he could use color now that he was not sure of what he wanted to say with it. (Even so, there were still two or three remarkable paintings present.) His 1951 exhibition, on the other hand, which included four or five huge canvases of monumental perfection and remains the peak of his achievement so far, was the one received most coldly of all. Many of the abstract expressionists have at times drained the color from their pictures and worked in black, white, and gray alone. Gorky was the first of them to do so, in paintings like The Diary of a Seducer of 1945—which happens to be, in my opinion, his masterpiece. But it was left to Franz Kline, whose first show was in 1951, to work with black and white exclusively in a succession of canvases with blank white grounds bearing a single large calligraphic image in black. That these pictures were big was no cause for sur206

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prise: the abstract expressionists were being compelled to do huge canvases by the fact that they had increasingly renounced an illusion of depth within which they could develop pictorial incident without crowding; the flattening surfaces of their canvases compelled them to move along the picture plane laterally and seek in its sheer physical size the space necessary for the telling of their kind of pictorial story. However, Kline's unmistakable allusions to Chinese and Japanese calligraphy encouraged the cant, already started by Tobey's example, about a general Oriental influence on American abstract painting. Yet none of the leading abstract expressionists except Kline has shown more than a cursory interest in Oriental art, and it is easy to demonstrate that the roots of their art lie almost entirely within Western tradition. The fact that Far Eastern calligraphy is stripped and abstract—because it involves writing—does not suffice to make the resemblances to it in abstract expressionism more than a case of convergence. It is as though this country's possession of a Pacific coast offered a handy received idea with which to account for the otherwise inexplicable fact that it is now producing a body of art that some people regard as original. The abstract-expressionist emphasis on black and white has to do in any event with something more crucial to Western than Oriental pictorial art. It represents one of those exaggerations or apotheoses which betray a fear for their objects. Value contrast, the opposition and modulation of dark and light, has been the basis of Western pictorial art, its chief means, much more important than perspective, to a convincing illusion of depth and volume; and it has also been its chief agent of structure and unity. This is why the old masters almost always laid in their darks and lights—their shading—first. The eye automatically orients itself by the value contrasts in dealing with an object that is presented to it as a picture, and in the absence of such contrasts it tends to feel almost, if not quite as much, at loss as in the absence of a recognizable image. Impressionism's muffling of dark and light contrasts in response to the effect of the glare of the sky caused it to be criticized for that lack of "form" and "structure" which Cézanne tried to supply with his substitute contrasts of warm and cool color (these remained nonetheless contrasts of dark and light, as we can see from monochrome photographs of his paintings). Black and white is the extreme statement of value contrast, and to harp on it as many of the abstract expressionists do—and not only abstract expressionists—seems to me to be an effort to preserve by extreme measures a technical resource whose capacity to yield convincing form and unity is nearing exhaustion. The American abstract expressionists have been given good cause for this 1950s

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feeling by a development in their own midst. It is, I think, the most radical of all developments in the painting of the last two decades, and has no counterpart in Paris (unless in the late work of Masson and Tal Coat), as so many other things in American abstract expressionism have had since 1944. This development involves a more consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts than seen so far in abstract art. We can realize now, from this point of view, how conservative Cubism was in its resumption of Cezanne's effort to save the convention of dark and light. By their parody of the way the old masters shaded, the Cubists may have discredited value contrast as a means to an illusion of depth and volume, but they rescued it from the Impressionists, Gauguin, van Gogh, and the Fauves as a means to structure and form. Mondrian, a Cubist at heart, remained as dependent on contrasts of dark and light as any academic painter until his very last paintings, Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie—which happen to be failures. Until quite recently the convention was taken for granted in even the most doctrinaire abstract art, and the later Kandinsky, though he helped ruin his pictures by his insensitivity to the effects of value contrast, never questioned it in principle. Malevich's prophetic venture in "white on white" was looked on as an experimental quirk (it was very much an experiment and, like almost all experiments in art, it failed aesthetically). The late Monet, whose suppression of values had been the most consistently radical to be seen in painting until a short while ago, was pointed to as a warning, and the fin-de-siecle muffling of contrasts in much of Bonnard's and Vuillard's art caused it to be deprecated by the avant-garde for many years. The same factor even had a part in the underrating of Pissarro. Recently, however, some of the late Monets began to assume a unity and power they had never had before. This expansion of sensibility has coincided with the emergence of Clyfford Still as one of the most important and original painters of our time—perhaps the most original of all painters under fiftyfive, if not the best. As the Cubists resumed Cézanne, Still has resumed Monet —and Pissarro. His paintings were the first abstract pictures I ever saw that contained almost no allusion to Cubism. (Kandinsky's relations with it from first to last became very apparent by contrast.) Still's first show, at Peggy Guggenheim's in 1944, was made up predominantly of pictures in the vein of an abstract symbolism with certain "primitive" and Surrealist overtones that were in the air at that time, and of which Gottlieb's "pictographs" represented one version. I was put off by slack, willful silhouettes that seemed to disregard every consideration of plane or frame. Still's second show, in 1948, was in a different manner, that of his maturity, but I was still put off, and even out208

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raged, by what I took to be a profound lack of sensitivity and discipline. The few large vertically divided areas that made up this typical picture seemed arbitrary in shape and edge, and the color too hot and dry, stifled by the lack of value contrasts. It was only two years ago, when I first saw a 1948 painting of Still's in isolation, that I got a first intimation of pleasure from his art; subsequently, as I was able to see still others in isolation, that intimation grew more definite. (Until one became familiar with them his pictures fought each other when side by side.) I was impressed as never before by how estranging and upsetting genuine originality in art can be, and how the greater its pressure on taste, the more stubbornly taste will resist adjusting to it. Turner was actually the first painter to break with the European tradition of value painting. In the atmospheric pictures of his last phase he bunched value intervals together at the lighter end of the color scale for effects more picturesque than anything else. For the sake of these, the public soon forgave him his dissolution of form—besides, clouds and steam, mist, water, and light were not expected to have definite shape or form as long as they retained depth, which they did in Turner's pictures; what we today take for a daring abstractness on Turner's part was accepted then as another feat of naturalism. That Monet's close-valued painting won a similar acceptance strikes me as not being accidental. Of course, iridescent colors appeal to popular taste, which is often willing to take them in exchange for verisimilitude, but those of Monet's pictures in which he muddied—and flattened—form with dark color, as in some of his "Lily Pads," were almost as popular. Can it be suggested that the public's appetite for close-valued painting as manifested in both Turner's and Monet's cases, and in that of late Impressionism in general, meant the emergence of a new kind of taste which, though running counter to the high traditions of our art and possessed by people with little grasp of these, yet expressed a genuine underground change in European sensibility? If so, it would clear up the paradox that lies in the fact that an art like the late Monet's, which in its time pleased banal taste and still makes most of the avant-garde shudder, should suddenly stand forth as more advanced in some respects than Cubism. I don't know how much conscious attention Still has paid to Monet or Impressionism, but his independent and uncompromising art likewise has an affiliation with popular taste, though not by any means enough to make it acceptable to it. Still's is the first really Whitmanesque kind of painting we have had, not only because it makes large, loose gestures, or because it breaks the hold of value contrast as Whitman's verse line broke the equally traditional hold of meter; but just as much because, as Whitman's poetry assimilated, 1950s

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with varying success, large quantities of stale journalistic and oratorical prose, so Still's painting is infused with that stale, prosaic kind of painting to which Barnett Newman has given the name of "buckeye." Though little attention has been paid to it in print, "buckeye" is probably the most widely practiced and homogeneous kind of painting seen in the Western world today. I seem to detect its beginnings in Old Crome's oils and the Barbizon School, but it has spread only since the popularization of Impressionism. "Buckeye" painting is not "primitive," nor is it the same thing as "Sunday painting." Its practitioners can draw with a certain amount of academic correctness, but their command of shading, and of dark and light values in general, is not sufficient to control their color—either because they are simply inept in this department, or because they are naively intent on a more vivid naturalism of color than the studio-born principles of value contrast will allow. "Buckeye" painters, as far as I am aware, do landscapes exclusively and work more or less directly from nature. By piling dry paint—though not exactly in impasto—they try to capture the brilliance of daylight, and the process of painting becomes a race between hot shadows and hot lights whose invariable outcome is a livid, dry, sour picture with a warm, brittle surface that intensifies the acid fire of the generally predominating reds, browns, greens and yellows. "Buckeye" landscapes can be seeд in Greenwich Village restaurants (Eddie's Aurora on West Fourth Street used to collect them), Sixth Avenue picture stores (there is one near Eighth Street) and in the Washington Square outdoor shows. I understand that they are produced abundantly in Europe too. Though I can see why it is easy to stumble into "buckeye" effects, I cannot understand fully why they should be so universal and so uniform, or the kind of painting culture behind them. Still, at any rate, is the first to have put "buckeye" effects into serious art. These are visible in the frayed dead-leaf edges that wander down the margins or across the middle of so many of his canvases, in the uniformly dark heat of his color, and in a dry, crusty paint surface (like any "buckeye" painter, Still seems to have no faith in diluted or thin pigments). Such things can spoil his pictures, or make them weird in an unrefreshing way, but when he is able to succeed with, or in spite of them, it represents but the conquest by high art of one more area of experience, and its liberation from Kitsch. Still's art has a special importance at this time because it shows abstract painting a way out of its own academicism. An indirect sign of this importance is the fact that he is almost the only abstract expressionist to "make" a 210

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school; by this I mean that a few of the many artists he has stimulated or influenced have not been condemned by that to imitate him, but have been able to establish strong and independent styles of their own. Barnett Newman, who is one of these artists, has replaced Pollock as the enfant terrible of abstract expressionism. He rules vertical bands of dimly contrasting color or value on warm flat backgrounds—and that's all. But he is not in the least related to Mondrian or anyone else in the geometrical abstract school. Though Still led the way in opening the picture down the middle and in bringing large, uninterrupted areas of uniform color into subtle and yet spectacular opposition, Newman studied late Impressionism for himself, and has drawn its consequences more radically. The powers of color he employs to make a picture are conceived with an ultimate strictness: color is to function as hue and nothing else, and contrasts are to be sought with the least possible help of differences in value, saturation, or warmth. The easel picture will hardly survive such an approach, and Newman's huge, calmly and evenly burning canvases amount to the most direct attack upon it so far. And it is all the more effective an attack because the art behind it is deep and honest, and carries a feeling for color without its like in recent painting. Mark Rothko's art is a little less aggressive in this respect. He, too, was stimulated by Still's example. The three or four massive, horizontal strata of flat color that compose his typical picture allow the spectator to think of landscape—which may be why his decorative simplicity seems to meet less resistance. Within a range predominantly warm like Newman's and Still's, he too is a brilliant, original colorist; like Newman, he soaks his pigment into the canvas, getting a dyer's effect, and does not apply it as a discrete covering layer in Still's manner. Of the three painters—all of whom started, incidentally, as "symbolists"—Rothko is the only one who seems to relate to any part of French art since Impressionism, and his ability to insinuate contrasts of value and warmth into oppositions of pure color makes me think of Matisse, who held on to value contrasts in something of the same way. This, too, may account for the public's readier acceptance of his art, but takes nothing away from it. Rothko's big vertical pictures, with their incandescent color and their bold and simple sensuousness—or rather their firm sensuousness—are among the largest gems of abstract expressionism. A concomitant of the fact that Still, Newman, and Rothko suppress value contrasts and favor warm hues is the more emphatic flatness of their paintings. Because it is not broken by sharp differences of value or by more than a few incidents of drawing or design, color breathes from the canvas with an en1950s

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veloping effect, which is intensified by the largeness itself of the picture. The spectator tends to react to this more in terms of décor or environment than in those usually associated with a picture hung upon a wall. The crucial issue raised by the work of these three artists is where the pictorial stops and decoration begins. In effect, their art asserts decorative elements and ideas in a pictorial context. (Whether this has anything to do with the artiness that afflicts all three of them at times, I don't know. But artiness is the great liability of the Still school.) Rothko and especially Newman are more exposed than Still to the charge of being decorators by their preference for rectilinear drawing. This sets them apart from Still in another way, too. By liberating abstract painting from value contrasts, Still also liberated it, as Pollock had not, from the quasi-geometrical, faired drawing which Cubism had found to be the surest way to prevent the edges of forms from breaking through a picture surface that had been tautened, and therefore made exceedingly sensitive, by the shrinking of the illusion of depth underneath it. As Cézanne was the first to discover, the safest way to proceed in the face of this liability was to echo the rectangular shape of the surface itself with vertical and horizontal lines and with curves whose chords were definitely vertical or horizontal. After the Cubists, and Klee, Mondrian, Miró, and others had exploited this insight it became a cliché, however, and led to the kind of late Cubist academicism that used to fill the exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists group, and which can still be seen in much of recent French abstract painting. Still's service was to show us how the contours of a shape could be made less conspicuous, and therefore less dangerous to the "integrity" of the flat surface, by narrowing the value contrast its color made with that of the shapes or areas adjacent to it. Not only does this keep colors from "jumping," as the old masters well knew, but it gives the artist greater liberty in drawing—liberty almost to the point of insensitivity, as in Still's own case. The early Kandinsky was the one abstract painter before Still to have some glimpse of this, but it was only a glimpse. Pollock has had more of a glimpse, independently of Still or Kandinsky, but has not set his course by it. In some of the huge "sprinkled" pictures he did in 1950 and showed in 1951, value contrasts are pulverized as it were, spread over the canvas like dusty vapor (the result was two of the best pictures he ever painted). But the next year, as if in violent repentance, he did a set of paintings in black line alone on unprimed canvas. It is his insights that help explain why a relatively unpopular painter like Still has so many followers today, both in New York and California (where he 212

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has taught); and why William Scott, the English painter, could say that Still's was the only completely and originally American art he had yet seen. This was not necessarily a compliment—Pollock, who may be less "American," and Hofmann, who is German-born, both have a wider range of power than Still— but Scott meant it as one. The abstract expressionists started out in the '405 with a diffidence they could not help feeling as American artists. They were very much aware of the provincial fate around them. This country had had good painters in the past, but none with enough sustained originality or power to enter the mainstream of Western art. The aims of the abstract expressionists were diverse within a certain range, and they did not feel, and still do not feel, that they constitute a school or movement with enough unity to be covered by a single term—like "abstract expressionist," for instance. But aside from their culture as painters and the fact that their art was all more or less abstract, what they had in common from the first was an ambition—or rather the will to it—to break out of provinciality. I think most of them have done so by now, whether in success or failure. If they should all miss—which I do not think at all likely, since some of them have already conclusively arrived!—it will be at least with more resonance than that with which such eminent predecessors of theirs as Maurer, Hartley, Dove, and Demuth did not miss. And by comparison with such of their present competitors for the attention of the American art public as Shahn, Graves, Bloom, Stuart Davis (a good painter), Levine, Wyeth, etc., etc., their success as well as their resonance and "centrality" is assured. If I say that such a galaxy of powerfully talented and original painters as the abstract expressionists form has not been seen since the days of Cubism, I shall be accused of chauvinist exaggeration, not to mention a lack of a sense of proportion. But can I suggest it? I do not make allowances for American art that I do not make for any other kind. At the Biennale in Venice this year, I saw how de Kooning's exhibition put to shame, not only that of his neighbor in the American pavilion, Ben Shahn, but that of every other painter present in his generation or under. The general impression still is that an art of high distinction has as much chance of coming out of America as a great wine. Literature —yes: we know now that we have produced some great writing because the English and French have told us so. They have even exaggerated, at least about Whitman and Poe. What I hope for is a just appreciation abroad, not an exaggeration, of the merits of "American-type" painting. Only then, I suspect, will American collectors begin to take it seriously. In the meantime they will go on 1950s

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buying the pallid French equivalent of it they find in the art of Riopelle, De Staël, Soulages, and their like. The imported article is handsomer, no doubt, but the handsomeness is too obvious to have staying power.... "Advanced" art—which is the same thing as ambitious art today—persists in so far as it tests society's capacity for high art. This it does by testing the limits of the inherited forms and genres, and of the medium itself, and it is what the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, and Mondrian did in their time. If the testing seems more radical in the case of the new American abstract painting, it is because it comes at a later stage. The limits of the easel picture are in greater danger of being destroyed because several generations of great artists have already worked to expand them. But if they are destroyed this will not necessarily mean the extinction of pictorial art as such. Painting may be on its way toward a new kind of genre, but perhaps not an unprecedented one—since we are now able to look at, and enjoy, Persian carpets as pictures—and what we now consider to be merely decorative may become capable of holding our eyes and moving us as much as the easel picture does. Meanwhile there is no such thing as an aberration in art: there is just the good and the bad, the realized and the unrealized. Often there is but the distance of a hair's breadth between the two—at first glance. And sometimes there seems—at first glance—to be no more distance than that between a great work of art and one which is not art at all. This is one of the points made by modern art.

Note

i. In the revised version of the essay, published in Art and Culture, this parenthesis was enlarged into a lengthy footnote in which Greenberg stated that he got the term "American-type" painting from Patrick Heron. Greenberg rejected all other labels for such painting. The attack on Rosenberg's concept of "Action Painting" was his first in public. [John O'Brian]

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MEYERSCHAPIRO

Excerpt from "The Liberating

Quality of Avant-Garde Art"

The Vital Role That Painting and Sculpture Play in Modern Culture

In discussing the place of painting and sculpture in the culture of our time, I shall refer only to those kinds which, whether abstract or not, have a fresh inventive character, that art which is called "modern" not simply because it is of our century, but because it is the work of artists who take seriously the challenge of new possibilities and wish to introduce into their work perceptions, ideas and experiences which have come about only within our time. In doing so I risk perhaps being unjust to important works or to aspects of art which are generally not comprised within the so-called modern movement. There is a sense in which all the arts today have a common character shared by painting; it may therefore seem arbitrary to single out painting as more particularly modern than the others. In comparing the arts of our time with those of a hundred years ago, we observe that the arts have become more deeply personal, more intimate, more concerned with experiences of a subtle kind. We note, too, that in poetry, music and architecture, as well as in painting, the attitude to the medium has become much freer, so that artists are willing to search further and to risk experiments or inventions which in the past would have been inconceivable because of fixed ideas of the laws and boundaries of the arts. I shall try to show however that painting and sculpture contribute qualities and value less evident in poetry, music and architecture.

In a number of respects, painting and sculpture today may seem to be opposed to the general trend of life. Yet, in such opposition, these arts declare their humanity and importance. Paintings and sculptures, let us observe, are the last hand-made, personal objects within our culture. Almost everything else is produced industrially, in mass, and through a high division of labor. Few people are fortunate enough to make something that represents themselves, that issues entirely from their hands and mind, and to which they can affix their names. Most work, even much scientific work, requires a division of labor, a sepa-

SOURCE: Art News (Summer 1957), 36-42. Copyright © 1957 ARTnews LLC. 215

ration between the individual and the final result; the personality is hardly present even in the operations of industrial planning or in management and trade. Standardized objects produced impersonally and in quantity establish no bond between maker and user. They are mechanical products with only a passing and instrumental value. What is most important is that the practical activity by which we live is not satisfying: we cannot give if full loyalty, and its rewards do not compensate enough for the frustrations and emptiness that arise from the lack of spontaneity and personal identifications in work: the individual is deformed by it, only rarely does it permit him to grow. The object of art is, therefore, more passionately than ever before, the occasion of spontaneity or intense feeling. The painting symbolizes an individual who realizes freedom and deep engagement of the self within his work. It is addressed to others who will cherish it, if it gives them joy, and who will recognize in it an irreplaceable quality and will be attentive to every mark of the maker's imagination and feeling. The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous in the painting and sculpture stimulates the artists to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence the great importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation—all signs of the artist's active presence. The work of art is an ordered world of its own kind in which we are aware, at every point, of its becoming. All these qualities of painting may be regarded as a means of affirming the individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working and doing. I need not speak in detail about this new manner, which appears in figurative as well as abstract art; but I think it is worth observing that in many ways it is a break with the kind of painting that was most important in the 19205. After the First World War, in works like those of Léger, abstraction in art was affected by the taste for industry, technology and science, and assumed the qualities of the machine-made, the impersonal and reproducible, with an air of coolness and mechanical control, intellectualized to some degree. The artist's power of creation seems analogous here to the designer's and engineer's. That art, in turn, avowed its sympathy with mechanism and industry in an optimistic mood as progressive elements in everyday life, and as examples of strength and precision in production which painters admired as a model for 216

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art itself. But the experiences of the last twenty-five years have made such confidence in the values of technology less interesting and even distasteful. In abstraction we distinguish those forms, like the square and circle, which have object character and those which do not. The first are closed shapes, distinct within their field and set off against a definite ground. They build up a space which has often elements of gravity, with a clear difference between above and below, the ground and the background, the near and far. But the art of the last fifteen years tends more often to work with forms which are open, fluid or mobile; they are directed strokes or they are endless tangles and irregular curves, self-involved lines which impress us as possessing the qualities not so much of things as of impulses, of excited movements emerging and changing before our eyes. The impulse, which is most often not readily visible in its pattern, becomes tangible and definite on the surface of a canvas through the painted mark. We see, as it were, the track of emotion, its obstruction, persistence or extinction. But all these elements of impulse which seem at first so aimless on the canvas are built up into a whole characterized by firmness, often by elegance and beauty of shapes and colors. A whole emerges with a compelling, sometimes insistent quality of form, with a resonance of the main idea throughout the work. And possessing an extraordinary tangibility and force, often being so large that it covers the space of a wall and therefore competing boldly with the environment, the canvas can command our attention fully like monumental painting in the past. It is also worth remarking that as the details of form become complicated and free and therefore hard to follow in their relation to one another, the painting tends to be more centered and compact—different in this respect from the type of abstraction in which the painting seems to be a balanced segment of a larger whole. The artist places himself in the focus of your space. These characteristics of painting, as opposed to the characteristic of industrial production, may be found also in the different sense of the words "automatic" and "accidental" as applied in painting, technology and the everyday world. The presence of chance as a factor in painting, which introduces qualities that the artist could never have achieved by calculation, is an old story. Montaigne in the sixteenth century already observed that a painter will discover in his canvas strokes which he had not intended and which are better than anything he might have designed. That is a common fact in artistic creation. Conscious control is only one source of order and novelty: the unconscious, 1950s

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the spontaneous and unpredictable are no less present in the good work of art. But that is something art shares with other activities and indeed with the most obviously human function: speech. When we speak, we produce automatically a series of words which have an order and a meaning for us, and yet are not fully designed. The first word could not be uttered unless certain words were to follow, but we cannot discover, through introspection, that we had already thought of the words that were to follow. That is a mystery of our thought as well. Painting, poetry, and music have this element of unconscious, improvised serial production of parts and relationships in an order, with a latent unity and purposefulness. The peculiarity of modern painting does not lie simply in its aspect of chance and improvisation but elsewhere. Its distinctiveness may be made clear by comparing the character of the formal elements of old and modern art. Painters often say that in all art, whether old or modern, the artist works essentially with colors and shapes rather than with natural objects. But the lines of a Renaissance master are complex forms which depend on already ordered shapes in nature. The painting of a cup in a still-life picture resembles an actual cup, which is itself a well-ordered thing. A painting of a landscape depends on observation of elements which are complete, highly ordered shapes in themselves—like trees or mountains. Modern painting is the first complex style in history which proceeds from elements that are not pre-ordered as closed articulated shapes. The artist today creates an order out of unordered variable elements to a greater degree than the artist of the past. In ancient art an image of two animals facing each other orders symmetrically bodies which in nature are already closed symmetrical forms. The modern artist, on the contrary, is attracted to those possibilities of form which include a considerable randomness, variability and disorder, whether he finds them in the world or while improvising with his brush, or in looking at spots and marks, or in playing freely with shapes—inverting, adjusting, cutting, varying, reshaping, regrouping, so as to maximize the appearance of randomness. His goal is often an order which retains a decided quality of randomness as far as this is compatible with an ultimate unity of the whole. That randomness corresponds in turn to a feeling of freedom, an unconstrained activity at every point. Ignoring natural shapes, he is alert to qualities of movement, interplay,

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change, and becoming in nature. And he provokes within himself, in his spontaneous motions and play, an automatic production of chance. While in industry accident is that event which destroys an order, interrupts a regular process and must be eliminated, in painting the random or accidental is the beginning of an order. It is that which the artist wishes to build up into an order, but a kind of order that in the end retains the aspect of the original disorder as a manifestation of freedom. The order is created before your eyes and its law is nowhere explicit. Here the function of ordering has, as a necessary counterpart, the element of randomness and accident. Automatism in art means the painter's confidence in the power of the organism to produce interesting unforeseen effects and in such a way that the chance results constitute a family of forms; all the random marks made by one individual will differ from those made by another, and will appear to belong together, whether they are highly ordered or not, and will show a characteristic grouping. (This is another way of saying that there is a definite style in the seemingly chaotic forms of recent art, a general style common to many artists and unique individual styles.) This power of the artist's hand to deliver constantly elements of so-called chance or accident, which nevertheless belong to a well-defined, personal class of forms and groupings, is submitted to critical control by the artist who is alert to the Tightness or wrongness of the elements delivered spontaneously, and accepts or rejects them. No other art today exhibits to that degree in the final result the presence of the individual, his spontaneity and the concreteness of his procedure. This art is deeply rooted, I believe, in the self and its relation to the surrounding world. And the pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within a culture that becomes increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state intensifies the desire of the artist to create forms that will manifest his liberty in this striking way—a liberty that in the best works, is associated with a sentiment of harmony, and the opposite stability, and even impersonality through the power of painting to universalize itself in the perfection of its form and to reach out into common life. It becomes then a possession of everyone and is related to everyday experience.

If the painter cannot celebrate many current values, it may be that these values are not worth celebrating. In the absence of ideal values stimulating to his imagination, the artist must cultivate his own garden as the only secure

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field in the violence and uncertainties of our time. By maintaining his loyalty to the value of art—to responsible creative work, the search for perfection, the sensitiveness to quality—the artist is one of the most moral and idealistic of beings, although his influence on practical affairs may seem very small. Painting by its impressive example of inner freedom and inventiveness and by its fidelity to artistic goals, which include the mastery of the formless and accidental, helps to maintain the critical spirit and the ideals of creativeness, sincerity and self-reliance, which are indispensable to the life of our culture.

International Reaction to Alfred H. Barr Jr., 'The New American Painting"

Mercedes Molleda, Revista, Barcelona, August 30,1958

I had resigned myself to not seeing the exhibition. But others did not resign themselves, and thus in rapid, improvised, and exhausting days, it was possible to move eighty-one canvases, packed in more than forty enormous cases, from Milan to Madrid. To judge the size of the transoceanic guests, a detail will suffice: to bring into the Museum two of the canvases, one by Jackson Pollock and one by Grace Hartigan, required sawing the upper part of the metal entrance door of the building the night before the inauguration. Upon entering the room, a strange sensation like that of magnetic tension surrounds you, as though the expression concentrated in the canvases would spring from them. They are other myths, other gods, other ideas, different from those prevailing in Europe at present, and from the grayish and textured Parisian fog which also in this country of light and color today masks the polychromatic traditions. Each picture is a confession, an intimate chat with the Divinity, accepting or denying the exterior world but always faithful to the more profound identity of conscience. The present painting is a mystery to many who wish to understand its significance without entering into its state, thereby committing an error as profound as he who wishes to attain the Moradas of Teresa de Avila by means of intelligence and not by means of Grace.

SOURCE: The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries, 1958-1959 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1958), 9-12. Copyright © MoMA, New York. 220

L D. H., La Libre Belgique, Brussels, December 12,1958

This is a demonstration of strength in proportion to the size of the United States. The Biggest in the World. The show must be seen. Even if you leave this encounter in a state of terrible dejection and of real anxiety as to the solidity of human reason on this planet in 1958. For this strength, displayed in the frenzy of a total freedom, seems a really dangerous tide. Our own abstract painters, all the "informal" European artists, seem pygmies before the disturbing power of these unchained giants. They paint in terms of walls, not of easel-size canvases. Size counts for a great deal in the impression of space they give Some years ago, the American painting shown here stood for virtually nothing. Today, whether you oppose or accept it, it exists. It is a fact. And a fact, as the British say, is stronger than a Lord Mayor.... The movement is generally known as "abstract expressionism" or, more accurately, "action painting." This latter, to my mind, corresponds better to the immediate impression received at first contact. Here is an esthetic terrifying for its excess, its chaos. But it certainly seems to represent "action" in its most frenetic and hallucinatory aspects. Whether it is produced and performed by geniuses or intelligent orangutangs, intellectual weaklings or complete humbugs, there is in this work an undeniably "active" quality. Beyond which, there is no spontaneous explanation possible. This is the existential nothingness expressed by various temperaments. Unsigned, Le Phare, Brussels, December 14,1958

The packing alone of some of these works weighed no less than 800 pounds! The show is, therefore, a substantial one, all the canvases being of imposing dimensions. Now that we have paid this homage to questions of size and transportation, let us say quite bluntly that this enormous sideshow is the most frightening demonstration of impotence that has ever been hawked around the world. Seventeen painters, famous (we are told) in the United States, find themselves involved in this wretched imposture. An extremely handsome catalogue provides us with their photographs. And these deserve to be closely examined. In the expressions, the postures, the gaze of each of these artists, one can really discover one of the various complexes, which, among our transatlantic colleagues, are the qualifications of nobility of thought These artists prove to themselves that they are something or someone by saying: "I paint, therefore I am." Almost the way certain criminals of recent American vintage have projected themselves into reality by saying: "I kill, therefore I am." 1950s

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The Belgian—and European—public (the exposition will make a European tour, like a wild-west show) should pay attention to this cultural manifestation. It is with great profit that the programmatic remarks of several of the exhibition's artists will be read. Each is the expression of a frustration, of a desire for self-punishment or possession which relate quite distinctly to psychiatry. As for the paintings themselves, they far exceed the worst excesses imaginable as for indigence, mediocre imitativeness, and intellectual poverty. One can examine here with consternation inkspots measuring 2 yards by 2 1/2; graffiti enlarged 10,000 times, where a crayon stroke becomes as thick as a rafter; vertical stripes 2 1/2 yards wide separate areas 2 yards wide; soft rectangles, formless scribblings, childish collections of signs; enough to make our own abstract painters blush for shame, exposed henceforth to the most humiliating comparisons. There has been a great deal of crowing about the traditionalism of modern Russian artists. It seems to me that if art needs air and free imagination, it also needs the disciplines that any honestly practiced craft demands. The seventeen Americans presented to us as the most representative of the new transatlantic painting have neither craft nor imagination. They are free, perhaps, but they are pathetic creatures who make poor use of their freedom. To those of my readers who find my remarks irritating, I simply extend the request that they pay a visit to the Palais des Beaux-Arts and judge the evidence for themselves. It is essential that certain things be said and understood. Will Grohmann, Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin, September 7,1958

The New American Painting is an event, and as such was feted in Basel, from where the exhibit came. The fact that the large Pollock one-man show came too, is chance; it had not been intended for Berlin. Pollock is without question the genius of the post-war generation of painters, who were born between 1900 and 1923, and correspond in age to our own successful artists from E. W. Nay to Sonderborg. The youngest, Sam Francis, is born in the same year as Sonderborg (1923), Mark Rothko about the same time as Nay and Jackson Pollock (1912), as most of our "tachistes," whose leader, the unforgettable Wols, like Jackson Pollock, died an all too early death. The seventeen American painters at the "Steinplatz," though not drawing on the entire present artistic output of the United States, do present a representative section thereof. In view of the large number of great talents, one can speak of an American School; for the first time in the history of art, personalities are emerging that are not influenced by Europe, but, on the contrary, 222

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influence Europe, including Paris, through the convincingness of their conceptions. For nearly ten years Pollock has exerted his influence on the avantgarde of all countries. The appearance of his paintings in Paris and in Venice was a sensation; and since the young Sam Francis lives in Paris, he too is in the center of international interest. The unshakable fortress of the French School is shaken Pollock is regarded as a tachist, the originator of the movement, but he is more. In front of his giant canvases one does not think of schools or slogans, but only of talent and singularity. His rich inventiveness and his force of movement and organization are admirable. Here is reality, that of today not of yesterday. A Walt Whitman revival, superabundance of the continent, the sea and the moods, the seizing of the undiscovered world, as 300 years ago, when the pioneers arrived. And what a culture of the painterly. How differentiated the single layers of events are gradated one on top of the other, so that in the end it includes the whole of reality, evoked, not represented, because nothing is represented, all is invented in the spirit of a natural and universal happening. Pollock was a genius, but by European standards, one can easily count half of the other sixteen to be exceptional talents. Someday these painters too will make their mark in Paris; it will, as in the case of Kandinsky, still take two decades. Only the painters already know today what it is all about. They may not be quite equal to the task, because our society does not know any more the jungle nor a society in progress. There is, for example, Willem de Kooning, who suggests in his February part of a season, in composition and in memory. There are dimensions of memory, but fused to painterly inventions or perhaps it is the opposite. For the spectator that is not essential, he is not concerned with the process, but with the result. De Kooning also has influence; Grace Hartigan, the only woman painter of the group, belongs to his way of expression, and Theodoros Stamos, with his High Snow and Jack Tworkov with his Prophets? They may have the same conception of what art can be today: They are painters without regard for the ready-made world. What they paint is real; it is the spectator himself who must have a certain amount of imagination in order to comprehend. Without an actual consciousness of the universe this is not possible. Here there is no comfort, but a struggle with the elements, with society, with fate. It is like the American novel; something happens, and what happens is disquieting and at the same time pregnant with the future. Here we do not have a question of aesthetics, not today, but possibly in another twenty years, when we have gotten used to the idea that painting is also this. 1950s

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Unknown to us were Clyfford Still and James Brooks, who with their enormous dimensions make us sense what goes on within an American painter, faced with the immensity of his continent and his growing history. These are maps that reach from the South Sea all the way to the Atlantic; and when Brooks calls a painting Doubt (1954), it is not meant in a psychological sense (what would we care about the psychology of Mr. Brooks) but in the sense of a universal event. Nevertheless the colours are as optimistic as those of our E. W. Nay, the only one who dares to work in larger dimensions. Still, they would seem like miniatures next to these world maps. Very different are Mark Rothko and Sam Francis. Both see things from a greater distance, the one as a last residue of remembered prairie or desert, the other as rampant growth without limits. Those are dreams as they exist in childhood, mixed with fear but also with palpitating hope. Every great artist keeps within himself part of this state which is as cruel as it is believing. In Europe childhood dreams are different, more hereditary, more archaic. The archaic lacks in this colonial country, memory does not reach back as far as the Sumerians but only to the Indians, which were encountered on the roads toward the West Coast. That is not yet long ago. Possibly more burdened are those painters, who immigrated from the east, as Arshile Gorky, in this case not from Poland or Russia, but from Armenia. Here we have surreal, tragic, metamorphosed through the centuries, entanglement in accidental anxieties as once Hieronymus Bosch communicated them in this way. Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline stand apart from the rest. They paint gigantic symbols on the wall and call their proclamations Elegy for the Spanish Republic or Accent Grave. The paintings are hypotheses of that which could come; but poems by Ezra Pound or the Spaniard Guillen are exactly as hypothetical if one starts with the limitations of one's own imagination. What makes these painters artists is the advance into a world which is not prefabricated, but for that reason is also not boarded in; on the contrary, it is so vast that one hardly dares to enter it. What is emphasized here? An event that starts like a poem by Ezra Pound and ends with a statute for the investigation of the space of the universe. Greece is not a European suburb anymore. These are examples of the whole, not a sum total of personalities, not a grouping. Nevertheless, there does exist enough common ground. They all use vast dimensions, not from megalomania, but because one cannot say these things in miniature. Klee was able to do just that; his world was not smaller because of it; he was a monk and wrote the psalter of our speculum. Americans are world travellers and conquerors. They possess an enormous daring. 224

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... One proves oneself in the doing, in the performance, in the act of creation. In the United States one speaks of Action Painting. We speak of Abstract Expressionism. This difference characterizes Americans as well as Europe. We cannot forget, we distill the conceptions of long experience instead of creating new ones. In any case, these young Americans stand beyond heritage and psychology, nearly beyond good and bad. In Europe we are a little bit afraid before such a lack of prejudice. Could it be that we are already in a state of defense?

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The 1960s CONSOLIDATING THE CANON

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P. G PAVÍA

The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism

In Two Parts PART I: THE " H E S S - P R O B L E M " AND ITS SEVEN PANELS AT THE CLUB 1952

If we temporarily shelve the over-powering personalities in the avant-garde, we can reach down to underground ideas that are foundations of the American Abstract Art movement. Subtle but strong essences of its beginnings are buried in seven very special panels given at "the club" in a series entitled "Abstract Expressionism." Some of the ideas and the element of chance that went into making this "handy" title can be traced, ironically and philosophically, through these seven panels. The American movement of abstract art is not the fireworks of one or two artist personalities but is a deeply-rooted idea clawing the only strong perch for art in the second half of this century. It is not so easy to explain this phenomenon, and yet it is not so hard to feel with it— and get a feeling of being reborn. The title "Abstract Expressionism" was not heard by me nor was I ever aware that it had been mentioned before by any of the later claimants to authorship of the title. I insist on this point: before these panels, I, as the initiator of the panels, the writer of the weekly postcard-announcements to the club-members, had never heard of this title except for a near sounding of it in Kandinsky's well-known title of the Thirties, "Abstract-impressionism." Kandinsky's writings contain many titles that, like this one, are rich in esthetic thinking. Anyone who lived in Paris during the Thirties couldn't avoid exposure to pure and impure titles and some real isms. But the Germanic twist of "Abstract Expressionism" I never heard till Thomas B. Hess mentioned the two esthetic strains and suspected that the artists were making underground changes in their art. Is not the definition of the avant-garde this particular need for seeking a change? Henry Miller said someplace that an avant-garde change is measured in time by the duration of a particular generation. Perhaps this group of artists was the Golden Generation for abstract art. As an eye- and ear-witness and also the doer and maker of these seven panels, I'm presenting first the whole outlay of panel members, and annotated

SOURCE: It Is (Spring 1960), 8-11. Reprinted with the permission of Philip Pavia.

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schedules marking the most curious transformation of the unwanted title "Abstract Expressionism." These panels bustled with new ideas and sparked dormant, underlying sensibilities. But still the name "Abstract Expressionism" is unpopular. PART ONE

A large, stimulating, provocative climate of new air arrived at the end of the first and the beginning of the second phase of modern art. This new force was not as one expected: one of the many forms it took was a book, Abstract Painting, by Thomas B. Hess. This was the first substantial book on abstract painting in New York, and in the eyes of the artists easily a prime mover of the Fifties. The atmosphere was frantic in the early Fifties. Professional publicists and art journalists were predicting for the coming decade that a definitely declining movement standing on the shoulders of a few artist personalities would find no shoulders, no movement, period. Cutting through the gloom of that period in New York, Hess built up an esthetic that appealed to working artists. His book was not entirely optimistic; it had a healthy mixture of conviction and cynicism. But he sought an idea that would tie together all the variegated personalities of the then young abstract art, and thus would free esthetics from personalities. As Mr. Hess delved seriously into American abstract art, his tone of writing and his highly-tuned sensibility were a deep, moving inspiration to working artists. The ideas he unraveled, the directions to which he pointed and his awareness of future possibilities reversed the gloom, and the American artists gained new momentum. In Abstract Painting, Hess paraded sensory observations full of esthetic definition: But the very manipulation of pigment has pried the subject from nature into the personal sensation of terror, violence—and paint. Forms are distorted to increase their natural action; the claws are more clawing, the rocks more jagged. This is the final dilemma of the Expressionist—how to make "Art" out of the sensation. He gives warning that appeals only to working artists: The answer (to eclectics) seems obvious—pick up where Munch left off, work hard at techniques, balance each tone, paint "abstractly" so forms will run 230

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nicely into their neighbors and the edge of the picture will curve the eye back towards the central drama. Never before this time had such tactile phrasing been offered to the eager, hungry sensibilities of abstract and nearabstract artists. Then Mr. Hess reached one of the main points in his probing of abstract

art: The tendencies toward and of abstract painting and Expressionism may be the most important movements in the art of the first half of our century, and the most relevant ones to more recent developments. (Italics mine.) From the first, Hess's suspicion that "abstract painting" and "Expressionism" were two poles of the same esthetic was not at all popular with the avant garde artists. Jackson Pollock, for instance, came to the "club" the same week Abstract Painting was published and in an argument threw the book at me (and missed). A few weeks later, I felt the importance of airing out the "Hess problem." In fact, I decided to have several panels at the "club" in order to test the "problem's" worth. Forming panels was always a complex procedure. Once the topic and panelists had been selected, all might seem to be going smoothly, but then when we started the panels, the six or so members would make things complicated again. The style at the "club" was to "jam" (improvise) panels, with the panelists' moods allowed complete freedom. Forgetfulness, lateness and current feudings prevented them from becoming stiff contractual affairs. The panels on "Abstract Expressionism" started simply enough. The artists joined in for the plain business of deciding whether Hess was right or wrong. I decided to keep the two ideas separated, as Hess's theory had left them. That is, as he did not combine the words "abstract painting" and "Expressionism" but merely juxtaposed two irreconcilable ideas, so should the series of panels start. First, I thought to exhaust "Expressionism" and then bring in a contrasting panel on the "pure" or "abstract painting" (terms obviously closer to abstract artists). Next, perhaps there would be contrasts with other groups such as the structuralists, the constructionists, etc. The plan was not that thoroughly premeditated, but a general must also prepare for retreats, so I readied these possible positions in case the "Hess problem" needed more panels—and more fire.

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Before describing the actual happenings of these panels, I must explain the stratifications of the "club." Of course, there never was an opinion-poll taken at the "club," but those weekly artists' panels, year after year, are a cross-section of esthetic ideas in New York. A miraculous law of dedication kept these highly individualistic artists together, their ideas criss-crossing and over-lapping in a conflict that would tear apart any other togetherness. They faced each other with curses mixed with affection, smiling and evil-eyed each week for years. The "club's" heroes can be roughly divided among the following camps. Picasso was the crowned king for most of the artists in the "club." His middleperiod was most liked and praised. Kandinsky and Soutine, however, were two princes held in deepest reverence by a rather large, strong group. Panel after panel, the ideas, works and genius of these two neglected pioneers were debated with strong conviction. (Miro, Ernst, Arp and Breton had been supplanted, and in fact were almost extinct in this "club," in contrast to their being apotheosized in "Studio 35," an earlier "club"-like school on Eighth Street.) And almost as strong an influence as this group in the "club" and always the most stubborn obstacle at all panels was the hard-core purist group, who were pals of Mondrian when he was alive in America. Anyone who attended "club" nights and panel talks was beholden to and bewildered by this teeming, individual infighting about contemporary abstract and nearabstract art. The ground rule was exactly as Robert Goldwater said in It is, #4, "... no mention of names . . . who might be present or have friends. The idea was to prevent riots." First, the panel would make an esthetic major premise and another minor one; this would bring on a group rebuttal which, in turn, would bring on another group for counter-rejoinder. The arguments went in a see-saw pattern; encountering of personalities, feuding of personalities; play down ideas, play up ideas; wronging down the cause and righting up the effect; the firs ter and seconder, the major and minor; whether to split into two and mend back into one or let it alone; either you're against it or you're for it. There were many leaders and one was always aware of the pressure of many personable individual artists whose opinions were felt in moments of decision. At the drop of a hat, however, these individuals would cut loose and whip out stinging cries for or against an idea. And if an individual upped one of the above heroes and downed another, it was demanded, if not commanded, that he prove his arguments by tactile, on-the-spot sensory evidence: he had

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to hit the quick of the artists' sensations to win. No man was allowed to ride horseback. The "club" was like a mythical Pittsburgh: firing, melting, annealing, cutting, shaping, rolling—not steel but fibre-sensations for a renewed purified experience. This talking out of art experiences, substituting specific psychology for general logic, came to one concrete conclusion: a change must be made, but this change should be deep-rooted and definitely from top-to-bottom. The artists must also thirst for coolness. Thus, the "club" was almost indispensable in New York if an artist was thinking and creating, seeking a new esthetics of abstract art. With no fanfare, the panels on "Abstract Expressionism" started. The audiences, 95% of them artists, witnessed one of the strangest series of discussions in American art. From start to finish, the panels followed the rhythm of a seesaw, with conclusions posing more questions, and answers opposite to one another. The cuts and wounds of the polemics multiplied dangerously. The exchanges were altogether too personal, and, as attacks on the "Hess problem" accelerated, there was no stopping the crevices between opposing ideas from becoming deeper and wider. It was gradually made clear that personalities were being jostled by ideas. Indeed, the "problem" was digging deeper and deeper into the foundations of abstract art itself. Here is the panel schedule as announced to members, with notes tracing the mutation of an unwanted title: — "Expressionism " ( I ) January 18,1952. Panel Members and Alternates: Philip Guston, Thomas B. Hess, Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, Harold Rosenberg, and Jack Tworkov. The title "Expressionism" was taken from the first half of the quotation in T. B. Hess's book. Later, I intended to use his exact words, "painting ''abstractly'" or "abstract painting"for a separate panel. — "abstract Expressionism " ( II ) January 25,1952. Panel Members and Alternates: Peter Busa, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Burgoyne Diller, John Ferren, Perle Fine, Adolph Gottlieb, Harry Holtzman, Landes Lewitin, Emanuel Navaretta, and Esteban Vicente. Title was extended to make it nearer to the actual phrase used in Mr. Hess's

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book. John Ferren and I consulted and decided not to make it read like the titles which Kandinsky invented during the Thirties (like "Abstract-impressionism"). So the words were used as one adjective and one proper noun. — "abstract-Expressionism " ( III ) February i, 1952. Panel Members and Alternates: James Brooks, R. Eglehart, Fritz Glarner, Robert Goldwater, Ad Reinhardt, Milton Resnick, Kurt Seligman, and two others whose names are illegible in my notebook. Title was hyphenated at the suggestion of Ad Reinhardt. — "Abstract Expressionism " ( IV) Sub-title: "Questions to Young Artists" March 7,1952. Panel Members and Alternates: Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, John Myers, Frank O'Hara, and Larry Rivers. The hyphen was omitted at the insistence of a few members whose names and reasons I have forgotten. — "The Structural Concept of the Twentieth Century" March 21,1952. Sub-title: "Abstract Expressionism" (V) Peter Busa (Moderator) and James J. Sweeney. The original title was omitted entirely because opposition was getting stronger. My wishful thinking pressed the hope that "structural" would balance the word "abstract" and solve the problem. -"The Purists'Idea" March 28,1952. Sub-title: "Abstract Expressionism" (VI) Panel Members and Alternates: Paul Brach, John Ferren, John Fitzsimmons, Harry Holtzman, and Ad Reinhardt. / think it was Ad Reinhardt who forbade the term on this panel. The original title was again omitted. Still, this panel continued discussion of the "Hess problem" -

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"CaféNight" April 4,1952. Sub-title: "The 'Open night' on 'Abstract Expressionism' " (VIII) The title had not only been omitted but this café night was meant to be used for

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an open discussion about having these provocative and feuding panels continue under their unwanted title. On the advice of some of the principal members, it was decided in a time-out conference to end the panels that very same night. The title was withdrawn butfor a very long time afterwards the air was full of fights and threats. Historically, the counterpart of the "abstract" and "Expressionist" duality may be the never-defined Delacroix vs. Ingres duality in French painting. One cannot hyphenate the esthetic equivalents of "Delacroix" and "Ingres" and call it pure. In the art experience is there a threshold (that can never be exactly fixed) where visual elements enter the sensibilities and are separated from one another? Must we choose at this point either one way or the other, as did those two great French antagonists? Do the "abstract" and the "Expressionist" reach a final fork in the road? The awesome thought that Abstract Art has a duality parallel to the other major art movements in history is almost unbelievable. "Abstract" to have a pattern equivalent to the Old Masters' esthetic! In art, a name cannot be just a name. A name, like a catalyst, must weld elements into one. The name "Abstract Expressionism," even though it is easy for journalists to handle, has never won approval from artists as the name. (Nor has any other.) What was the chief objection—the point of friction? It was the implication of a sinister collaboration of the abstract artists with the representational artists, making the nearabstract more important than the abstract. From the hyphenation or coupling of the words, "abstract" and "Expressionist," dedicated abstract artists saw the handwriting on the wall: after such long underground resistance, they were to be swallowed up by representational art. Instead of proud, pioneering abstract artists, they were to be nothing but bastardized nearabstract artists with hybrid experiences. A bastard word, a bastard idea and a bastard artist would be a compact paraphrase of complaints. If the "Hess problem" did anything, it certainly woke up the American artist, making him conscious that abstract art can be full of esthetic undercurrents and that "abstract" was not a simple word to signify style. And these undercurrents in abstract art are more susceptible to the sensibility than to memory or logic. Thus, by exploring these potentialities negatively and positively, the avant-garde movement entered a more permanent phase, going towards a pure land undreamed of by the connoisseurs of fading Continental styles.

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One great indirect feature emerged from these polemics: the arguments were the biggest shot in the arm American Abstract artists had ever had. That is, they felt absolutely free, and joyously dumped out the art journalists' current singsong idea that abstract art was based on one or two or so personalities. It is true that in the past, as art history books show, some light-weight isms were based on personalities. But Abstract Art emerged as a movement based on a solid new esthetic and independent of personalities, as evidenced by its inspiration to so many giant abstract artists in New York. However unmendably split and broken from one another are these artists over the unwanted title "Abstract Expressionism" and however undesirable this title is among abstract artists when said in a certain tone, one thing is sure: the title was the first real beachhead gained by abstract art after the danger of succumbing in that watery grave prepared by the soft-minded surrealists. P. G. Pavía In Part Two, in the next issue, we will collate as completely as possible quotations from these sessions as remembered by the panelists and audiencemembers who talked and listened at the seven "Abstract Expressionism" panels at the Eighth Street "club."

LOUISE ELLIOTT RAGO

We Interview Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner admitted she was dubious when I called to ask if I might come to talk with her about "Why People Create." She said that at first she thought we were publicity seekers. Before I arrived for our appointment Miss Krasner had checked various sources and was pleased to learn that this was one vehicle that gave the artist an opportunity to express himself without the usual mixed up estheticjargon, and without distorting any of the artist's views. Miss Krasner volunteered that this was the first time she had allowed anyone to interview her, and now was pleased with the idea of having an opportunity to express some of her ideas on art and to see them in print. After talking

SOURCE: School Arts (September 1960), 31-32. Reprinted with the permission of Donna Elliott. 236

with her briefly I realized she was most articulate, and that her clarity about some existing issues would be beneficial. I opened my visit with Miss Krasner by telling her that recently I heard a lively discussion in which the participants, men and women, discussed a study that had been made whereby it was determined that many women were currently more experimental in their painting than men. The question finally arose that, if there were so many more women doing experimental work in painting, how is it that we haven't had a great woman painter since Mary Cassatt? (It occurred to me then that it would be most interesting to discuss this point with Lee Krasner, since she has been a member of the Avant-Garde group since the thirties, and oftentimes was the only woman invited to exhibit with men.) LOUISE RAGO: Miss Krasner, do you really believe that there have been no great women painters since Mary Cassatt? LEE KRASNER: I do not think it is a question of Mary Cassatt's greatness. It's like asking when were women permitted to give up their veils? I believe this is a problem for the sociologist and anthropologist. We are discussing a living problem and painting is one of the most complex phenomena today. There is undoubtedly prejudice. There are some galleries which will not show women. It takes years to knock off prejudice. When I am painting, and this is a heroic task, the question of male or female is irrelevant. Naturally I am a woman. I do not conceive of painting in such a fragmented sense. LOUISE RAGO: Some artists say that they cannot remember ever not sketching or painting—it is something they have done all their lives—while others developed later in life. Have you always been interested in painting or was this something you developed later in life? LEE KRASNER: Ironically enough when I went to Washington Irving High School (a high school devoted to art majors in New York City), I passed all other courses with flying colors except art. I barely passed the final art exam. I then went on to the National Academy to study for three years, where I was considered a nuisance and impossible. Somehow I hung on. LOUISE RAGO: Since you recall your high school days and I am a high school art teacher, I am often confronted with the question—do you think my child has talent? How do you feel about this business of "talent?" LEE KRASNER: Talent, as you speak of it, disturbs an equilibrium. It's too easy. It's a dangerous thing. The word talent, and what it implies, is commonplace, and in fact more detrimental than helpful. 1960s

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LOUISE RAGo: Miss Krasner, would you mind telling us what your reaction was to some of your art teachers? LEE KRASNER: I must have had a strong inner conviction because there certainly was no encouragement from the outside. I was told to take a "mental bath" at the Academy. In the thirties when Hans Hofmann first came over from Europe I went to study with him. For the first time I felt a personal ease, and an encouraging response from a teacher. Miss Krasner added that her first big break was in the late thirties when she was invited to participate in the McMillen Inc. exhibition of French and American painting. Honored at being shown with Matisse and Picasso she was unaware that two of her co-exhibitors were Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKoenig [sic]. It was through this exhibition that Lee Krasner met Jackson Pollock. Miss Krasner went to Pollock's studio unannounced—literally "crashed." No one—not even Pollock's brother with whom he lived, was allowed in his studio. As an artist Miss Krasner was acutely aware of and completely overwhelmed by what she saw. Pollock's work was a living force. LOUISE RAGO: Do you feel that you have lost your personal identity because you happened to be the wife of Jackson Pollock? LEE KRASNER: If anything my identity has been enriched through knowing Pollock. Naturally I would be influenced by as dynamic and powerful an artist as Pollock. I owe an astonishing debt to him. It was a tremendous advantage to know him; however, I still paint as Lee Krasner. (Miss Krasner forcefully and unhesitatingly added, "Unfortunately, it was most fortunate to know Jackson Pollock.") LOUISE RAGO: I am so very happy to hear you say that you loved Pollock's work and that there was no competition between you. He must have been a "real great guy." (I observed closely and couldn't help notice a twinkle which I am sure brought back fond memories. Miss Krasner merely smiled and softly mused that he sure was a "great guy." She continued thoughtfully, "Yes, we are fortunate if we get one like Pollock in a century.") LEE KRASNER: Painting is revelation, an act of love. There is no competitiveness in it. As a painter I can't experience it any other way. LOUISE RAGO: This is pretty remarkable that you have managed to sustain yourself despite so much criticism and antagonism. How would you account for this? LEE KRASNER: I am preoccupied with trying to know myself in order to com238

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municate with others. Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like asking—do I want to live? My answer is yes—and I paint. LOUISE RAGO: Miss Krasner, we have discussed your reaction to the Academy and we also know that you have been an Avant-garde painter since the thirties—what is your reaction to the Avant-garde today? LEE KRASNER: We have a great deal of academy in the "so-called" Avantgarde today. I do not like it. It is closed and standing still. Status-quo is the easy way. It must be punctured—no matter how painful. Like so many people in the public limelight, we often read and hear things about them that often are half-truths or no truth at all. So it is with Lee Krasner, widow of the late Jackson Pollock. I had heard that Lee Krasner was now reaping the harvest of Pollock's name and that she had copied his style of painting. I also heard that even though Lee Krasner had been his wife, that she and Jackson Pollock had been in professional competition with each other. These were some of the things I wanted to talk with Miss Krasner about, because I felt we would all be interested.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM

The Abstract Sublime

How Some of the Most Heretical Concepts of Modern American Abstract Painting Relate to the Visionary Nature-Painting of a Century Ago

"It's like a religious experience!" With such words, a pilgrim I met in Buffalo last winter attempted to describe his unfamiliar sensations before the awesome phenomenon created by seventy-two Clyfford Stills at the Albright Art Gallery. A century and a half ago, the Irish Romantic poet, Thomas Moore, also made a pilgrimage to the Buffalo area, except that his goal was Niagara Falls. His experience, as recorded in a letter to his mother, July 24,1804, similarly beggared prosaic response:

SOURCE: Art News (February 1961), 38-41. Copyright © 1961 ARTnews LLC, February. 239

I felt as if approaching the very residence of the Deity: the tears started into my eyes; and I remained, for moments after we had lost sight of the scene, in that delicious absorption which pious enthusiasm alone can produce. We arrived at the New Ladder and descended to the bottom. Here all its awful sublimities rushed full upon me ... My whole heart and soul ascended towards the Divinity in a swell of devout admiration, which I never before experienced. Oh! bring the atheist here, and he cannot return an atheist! I pity the man who can coldly sit down to write a description of these ineffable wonders: much more do I pity him who can submit them to the admeasurement of gallons and yards ... We must have new combinations of language to describe the Fall of Niagara. Moore's bafflement before a unique spectacle, his need to abandon measurable reason for mystical empathy, are the very ingredients of the midtwentieth-century spectator's "religious experience" before the work of Still. During the Romantic Movement, Moore's response to Niagara would have been called an experience of the "Sublime," an aesthetic category that suddenly acquires fresh relevance in the face of the most astonishing summits of pictorial heresy attained in America in the last fifteen years. Originating with Longinus, the Sublime was fervently explored in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and recurs constantly in the aesthetics of such writers as Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Diderot, and Delacroix. For them and for their contemporaries, the Sublime provided a flexible semantic container for the murky new Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundlessness, and divinity that began to rupture the decorous confines of earlier aesthetic systems. As imprecise and irrational as the feelings it tried to name, the Sublime could be extended to art as well as to nature. One of its major expressions, in fact, was the painting of sublime landscapes. A case in point is the dwarfing immensity of Gordale Scar, a natural wonder of Yorkshire and a goal of many Romantic tourists. Re-created on canvas between 1811 and 1815 by the British painter James Ward (1769-1855), Gordale Scar is meant to stun the spectator into an experience of the Sublime that may well be unparalleled in painting until a work like Clyfford Still's ig^-D. In the words of Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) was the most influential analysis of such feelings, "Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime." Indeed, in both the Ward and the Still, the spectator is first awed by the sheer magnitude of the sight before him. (Ward's canvas is 131 by 166 240

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inches; Still's, 113 by 159 inches.) At the same time, his breath is held by the dizzy drop to the pit of an abyss; and then, shuddering like Moore at the bottom of Niagara, he can only look up with what senses are left him and gasp before something akin to divinity. Lest the dumbfounding size of these paintings prove insufficient to paralyze the spectator's traditional habits of seeing and thinking, both Ward and Still insist on a comparably bewildering structure. In the Ward, the chasms and cascades, whose vertiginous heights transform the ox, deer, and cattle into Lilliputian toys, are spread out into unpredictable patterns of jagged silhouettes. No laws of man or man-made beauty can account for these God-made shapes; their mysterious, dark formations (echoing Burke's belief that obscurity is another cause of the Sublime) lie outside the intelligible boundaries of aesthetic law. In the Still, Ward's limestone cliffs have been translated into an abstract geology, but the effects are substantially the same. We move physically across such a picture like a visitor touring the Grand Canyon or journeying to the center of the earth. Suddenly, a wall of black rock is split by a searing crevice of light, or a stalactite threatens the approach to a precipice. No less than caverns and waterfalls, Still's paintings seem the product of eons of change; and their flaking surfaces, parched like bark or slate, almost promise that this natural process will continue, as unsusceptible to human order as the immeasurable patterns of ocean, sky, earth, or water. And not the least awesome thing about Still's work is the paradox that the more elemental and monolithic its vocabulary becomes, the more complex and mysterious are its effects. As the Romantics discovered, all the sublimity of God can be found in the simplest natural phenomena, whether a blade of grass or an expanse of sky. In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant tells us that whereas "the Beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having boundaries, the Sublime is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or by occasion of it, boundlessness is represented" (I, Book 2,23). Indeed, such a breathtaking confrontation with a boundlessness in which we also experience an equally powerful totality is a motif that continually links the painters of the Romantic Sublime with a group of recent American painters who seek out what might be called the "Abstract Sublime." In the context of two sea meditations by two great Romantic painters, Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea of about 1809 and Joseph Mallord William Turner's Evening Star, Mark Rothko's Light, Earth and Blue of 1954 reveals affinities of vision and feeling. Replacing the abrasive, ragged fissures of Ward's and Still's real and abstract 1960s

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gorges with a no less numbing phenomenon of light and void, Rothko, like Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities discussed by the aestheticians of the Sublime. The tiny monk in the Friedrich and the fisher in the Turner establish, like the cattle in Gordale Scar, a poignant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the infinite smallness of His creatures. In the abstract language of Rothko, such literal detail—a bridge of empathy between the real spectator and the presentation of a transcendental landscape—is no longer necessary; we ourselves are the monk before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit night. Like the mystic trinity of sky, water, and earth that, in the Friedrich and Turner, appears to emanate from one unseen source, the floating, horizontal tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths. If the Sublime can be attained by saturating such limitless expanses with a luminous, hushed stillness, it can also be reached inversely by filling this void with a teeming, unleashed power. Turner's art, for one, presents both of these sublime extremes. In his Snowstorm of 1842, the infinities are dynamic rather than static, and the most extravagant of nature's phenomena are sought out as metaphors for this experience of cosmic energy. Steam, wind, water, snow, and fire spin wildly around the pitiful work of man—the ghost of a boat—in vortical rhythms that suck one into a sublime whirlpool before reason can intervene. And if the immeasurable spaces and incalculable energies of such a Turner evoke the elemental power of creation, other works of the period grapple even more literally with these primordial forces. Turner's contemporaryjohn Martin (1779-1854), dedicated his erratic life to the pursuit of an art which, in the words of the Edinburgh Review (1829), "awakes a sense of awe and sublimity, beneath which the mind seems overpowered." Of the cataclysmic themes that alone satisfied him, The Creation, an engraving of 1831, is characteristically sublime. With Turner, it aims at nothing short of God's full power, upheaving rock, sky, cloud, sun, moon, stars, and sea in the primal act. With its torrential description of molten paths of energy, it locates us once more on a near-hysterical brink of sublime chaos. That brink is again reached when we stand before a perpetuum mobile of Jackson Pollock, whose gyrating labyrinths re-create in the metamorphical language of abstraction the superhuman turbulence depicted more literally, in 242

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Turner and Martin. In Number 1,1948, we are as immediately plunged into divine fury as we are drenched in Turner's sea; in neither case can our minds provide systems of navigation. Again, sheer magnitude can help produce the Sublime. Here, the very size of the Pollock—68 by 104 inches—permits no pause before the engulfing; we are almost physically lost in this boundless web of inexhaustible energy. To be sure, Pollock's generally abstract vocabulary allows multiple readings of its mood and imagery, although occasional titles (Full Fathom Five, Ocean Greyness, The Deep, Greyed Rainbow) may indicate a more explicit region of nature. But whether achieved by the most blinding of blizzards or the most gentle of winds and rains, Pollock invariably evokes the sublime mysteries of nature's untamable forces. Like the awesome vistas of telescope and microscope, his pictures leave us dazzled before the imponderables of galaxy and atom. The fourth master of the Abstract Sublime, Barnett Newman, explores a realm of sublimity so perilous that it defies comparison with even the most adventurous Romantic exploration into sublime nature. Yet it is worth noting that in the 19405 Newman, like Still, Rothko, and Pollock, painted pictures with more literal references to an elemental nature; and that more recently, he has spoken of a strong desire to visit the tundra, so that he might have the sensation of being surrounded by four horizons in a total surrender to spatial infinity. In abstract terms, at least, some of his paintings of the 19503 already approached this sublime goal. In its all-embracing width (1141/2 inches), Newman's VirHeroicus Sublimis puts us before a void as terrifying, if exhilarating, as the arctic emptiness of the tundra; and in its passionate reduction of pictorial means to a single hue (warm red) and a single kind of structural division (vertical) for some 144 square feet, it likewise achieves a simplicity as heroic and sublime as the protagonist of its title. Yet again, as with Still, Rothko, and Pollock, such a rudimentary vocabulary creates bafflingly complex results. Thus the single hue is varied by an extremely wide range of light values; and these unexpected mutations occur at intervals that thoroughly elude any rational system. Like the other three masters of the Abstract Sublime, Newman bravely abandons the securities of familiar pictorial geometries in favor of the risks of untested pictorial intuitions; and like them, he produces awesomely simple mysteries that evoke the primeval movement of creation. His very titles (Onement, The Beginning, Pagan Void, Death of Euclid, Adam, Day One) attest to this sublime intention. Indeed, a quartet of the largest canvases by Newman, Still, Rothko, and Pollock might well be interpreted as a post-WorldWar-II myth of Genesis. During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature 1960s

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gave proof of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed through the abstract medium of paint alone. What used to be pantheism has now become a kind of "paint-theism." Much has been written about how these four masters of the Abstract Sublime have rejected the Cubist tradition and replaced its geometric vocabulary and intellectual structure with a new kind of space created by flattened, spreading expanses of light, color, and plane. Yet it should not be overlooked that this denial of the Cubist tradition is not only determined by formal needs, but also by emotional ones that, in the anxieties of the atomic age, suddenly seem to correspond with a Romantic tradition of the irrational and the awesome as well as with a Romantic vocabulary of boundless energies and limitless spaces. The line from the Romantic Sublime to the Abstract Sublime is broken and devious, for its tradition is more one of an erratic, private feeling than submission to objective disciplines. If certain vestiges of sublime landscape painting linger into the later nineteenth century in the popularized panoramic travelogues of Americans like Bierstadt and Church (with whom Dore Ashton has compared Still), the tradition was generally suppressed by the international domination of the French tradition, with its familiar values of reason, intellect, and objectivity. At times, the countervalues of the Northern Romantic tradition have been partially reasserted (with a strong admixture of French pictorial discipline) by such masters as van Gogh, Ryder, Marc, Klee, Feininger, Mondrian; but its most spectacular manifestations—the sublimities of British and German Romantic landscape—have only been resurrected after 1945 in America, where the authority of Parisian painting has been challenged to an unprecedented degree. In its heroic search for a private myth to embody the sublime power of the supernatural, the art of Still, Rothko, Pollock, and Newman should remind us once more that the disturbing heritage of the Romantics has not yet been exhausted.

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H.H.ARNASON

Excerpt from American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists

[...] As the title indicates, the present exhibition is really a double exhibition which not only surveys the present state of the Abstract Expressionists but follows in some detail the direction to which the name "Abstract Imagists" has been applied. It is a fact that from the late Forties to the present day certain painters, loosely grouped with the Abstract Expressionists, have rather been concerned through extreme simplification of their canvases—frequently to the dominant assertion of a single overpowering element—in presenting an all-encompassing presence. This "presence" could be described as an "image" in the sense of an abstract symbol rather than as a reflection or imitation of anything in nature. The paintings of Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, and frequently Still and Motherwell all very different, all have in common this sense of symbolic content achieved through dramatic statement of isolated and highly simplified elements. A comparable effect is achieved in the endless hypnotic squares of Josef Albers and, among younger artists, in the great, floating, free color shapes of Raymond Parker or the precisely delineated shape tensions of Ellsworth Kelly. At the present time, in 1961, there is much evidence of seeking for new directions among younger American painters. Although the majority of younger painters is still probably exploring one or another form of free abstraction, a great deal of attention has recently been given to a number who are attempting to break with what they feel to be the tyranny of Abstract Expressionism. Some of these are seeking new expressive directions within the formal control of geometry; others are applying the directness and spontaniety of Action Painting to a restudy of the figure or of landscape. In both painting and sculpture there has been recently a resurgence of Dada and Surrealist exploration. The present exhibition has deliberately placed together a number of artists, some of whom are normally described as Abstract Expressionists, others as Neo-Precisionists or Classicists, others as Neo-Dadaists, to suggest that there is actually at the present time a substantial tendency among both free and precise abstractionists towards a process of simplification of forms with

SOURCE: American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1961), 23-31. Reprinted with the permission of the Guggenheim Museum. 245

an accent on large abstract color shapes whose expressive intent makes of the entire painting an abstract image. Whereas Hans Hofmann has for many years worked back and forth between free and geometric abstraction, some painters such as Leslie and Carone who have generally been thought of as Action Painters begin to demonstrate in certain works a substantial use of geometric forms. The exhibition would suggest the continually increasing influence of the "Imagist" wing of "Abstract Expressionism," the drawing together among certain artists of some elements of free and geometric expression towards the end of greater simplicity, clarity, and power of expressive means.

As the current exhibition attempts to point out, Abstract Expressionism is itself a complex of almost as many different styles as there are artists involved; and many of these artists are themselves in a constant process of change and development, on the one hand or, on the other, of a continuing refinement and simplification of a dominant image. While the tendencies suggested in this exhibition by no means exhaust the varied experiments now being carried on by both the free and the precise abstractionists in America, they do suggest on the part of both older and younger artists a significant tendency in the direction of a more obvious and recognizable order and structure, a process of simplification and regularization on the part of many which actually seems to bring closer together the Expressionist, the Imagist, and the Geometric trends in current abstraction. When the paintings around 1950 by a number of the pioneer Abstract Expressionists (so-termed) are re-examined, their tremendous diversity is at once apparent. The surging labyrinth of what is now called a "classic period" drip painting by Jackson Pollock is entirely different from the slashing virtuosity of de Kooning's brush stroke, even though both have the sense of immediacy and participation in the act of painting involved in the concept of Action Painting. The paintings of Motherwell or Gottlieb presented more isolated shapes or signs which took on a suggestion of symbolic content that might justify the term "image." In the same way the great unified color shapes of Rothko or the vast color planes of Newman, divided or joined by his characteristic vertical "line" (which is itself of course a color plane or shape that combines with the larger planes in the creation of a dramatically ambiguous space)—these are certainly subject pictures in the overpowering impact of color and of expanding or contracting space. 246

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As suggested above, the paintings of Rothko, Motherwell, Newman, Gottlieb, as well as Still, all very different, have in common this sense of an abstract image or a symbol presented through the abstract visual means of color and line and shapes. Of course, every abstract as well as realistic painter has an "image" which becomes the painting itself, but in these artists the sense of the image or of the painting as a mysterious presence is capable of moving the emotions of the spectator, of developing complex associations from the purest visual stimuli. When we examine recent paintings by these and other pioneers of the movement, the continuing diversity is still apparent, but in some cases there is a curious drawing together of some of the different trends. The de Kooning reveals more apparently the geometric structure which has always underlain his most violent expressionistic works. The color areas are larger and more architecturally simplified. The brush stroke, still strong and emphatic, no longer dominates the picture plane. The sense of immediacy insisted upon by most of the Action Painters is now more apparently coupled with the control which long experience has always brought to these artists' most direct and intuitive painting. For several years Gottlieb has also been working towards an art of dramatic simplicity. His series of recent paintings, with dominant closed and exploding shapes, has unquestionably had great influence on younger artists seeking a new expressive image. The Rolling of this exhibition, with its red and blue circles hovering over the powerful, black, tangled shapes, is suggestive of some of his earlier symbolic landscapes, but has gained in expressive power through the economy of means. Here the image begins to develop many different individual associations—landscape, outer space, symbol of order and chaos—whatever the spectator brings to it. While still a completely abstract work, the implication of subject or symbolic content is so strong that it is impossible to think of the picture as essentially an arrangement of abstract color shapes on a two-dimensional surface. The painting is an abstract image. Robert Motherwell throughout his career has alternated in his painting between the presentation of elegant and of brutally dramatic color shapes or signs. His great painting The Voyage: Ten Tears After can be considered almost as a summary of his principal expression and achievements. Vast, pure areas of cream color bound the central area of bare, sized canvas in which explodes a brilliant splash of blue. A powerful black vertical shape divides the right and center, and across this floats a cloudlike amorphous form which lends a sense of mystery to the entire work. Here, with the most deceptive simplicity and 1960s

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economy of means, the artist has not only created a painting of great formal beauty but has presented a powerful and suggestive image. Black and White No. 2 by Franz Kline is an astonishing work for this artist in its severe geometric clarity. Here the whites, which are too often in his works thought of as a background for an expressive calligraphy, assume a position almost of dominance. A work like this moves towards the architectural simplification of Motherwell and has even some affinity to recent experiments of some geometric abstractionists. This single work cannot, of course, summarize the entire current direction of Kline, since he continues to work back and forth between a severe architectural style and an over-all, more violent surface, as well as between black and white and color. The same is true of newer works by Hans Hofmann, who recently has been alternating freely expressive paintings with strongly vertical-horizontal geometric works, intricately textured paint surfaces with experiments in the most delicately simplified paintings.... Floating Mirage is an astonishing example of an image achieved through the greatest economy of means, a work which exemplifies the dictum of "less is more."

The exhibition of "American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists," 1961, raises rather than answers a number of questions about American abstract painting today. It recognizes that many important trends exist within current American abstraction beyond the ones which are illustrated here. However, if we accept the premise that Abstract Expressionism as it has developed over the last fifteen years is actually several different movements centered in several highly individual artists, we can observe certain trends and changing patterns during this period. In summary, we have here suggested that while different artists associated with Abstract Expressionism in fact contain elements of Cubism, of Impressionism, and of other seemingly contradictory styles, one may broadly divide the principal painters involved under the labels of "Expressionists" (Pollock, de Kooning, Tworkov, Bluhm, Mitchell, etc.) or "Imagists" (Rothko, Newman, Reinhardt, Gottlieb, Motherwell, etc.). It is recognized that these terms are arbitrary and in some degree interchangeable, since all these artists are expressing something and all of them are also creating an image. However, distinctions can be recognized between those artists who more actively express, through the energy of the brush or palette knife and of the total canvas surface, the act of painting itself; and on the other hand, those artists in whom the gesture of the brush stroke is relatively less significant, who 248

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attempt through simplified color areas or through dramatically isolated shapes or signs to present in abstract terms a conflict or relationship which has moved or pleased or troubled them. The essence of all this painting is, of course, the expressive power of the abstract means; of color, space relationships, contrasts on the canvas, of lines, and textures and the brush strokes themselves. This expressive power has always been recognized by painters, and from the time of the Impressionists in the late nineteenth century the separation of the abstract expressive means from the expression of naturalistic subject matter has been increasingly the quest of experimental artists. The ability of Abstract Expressionist painting to move the emotions (if only to rage) has been recognized from the beginning, although the validity of this expression has been questioned, and the seeming lack of order, of structure, of form, of technique, has been constantly deplored. However, when one now looks at a Pollock or de Kooning of the late Forties, the interval of years enables us to recognize both the skill and the discipline which underlie the intuitive spontaneity of the painting's surface. A principal characteristic of this painting in 1961 is perhaps that the skill and the structure are more immediately apparent, in some cases with a loss of the feeling of immediacy. As pointed out, there is evident a move on the part of both Expressionists and Imagists towards a dramatic simplification. In many instances the greater sense of discipline is achieved by the use of essentially geometric means or motifs. We also find geometric abstractionists using images comparable to those of the free abstractionists for similar effects. There are, of course, even within the exhibition, exceptions to all these generalizations. Grace Hartigan's and George McNeil's paintings seem to become even more compressed and complex. There is a whole group of Imagists (Pousette-Dart, Richenburg, Ferren, Jimmy Ernst, etc.) who achieve their effects through intricate elaboration of their canvas surfaces. Nevertheless, there is evidence of certain significant trends and changes within the movement of Abstract Expressionism. Whether these augur a decline in the movement as a movement is a matter of interest primarily to its foes and to art historians. All movements in art ultimately decline, but the fallacy involved is the impression that the leaders of these movements, if still surviving, also inevitably decline. One is reminded of the French critic who, in reviewing a Salon of 1919, observed that there seemed to be very few Cubist works represented. "At last," he said, "we are now finished with that nonsense, thank Heavens." The fact that great Cubist works continued to be produced during the Twenties, that Picasso and Braque and many other painters have continued to 1960s

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use Cubist elements down to the present day, would suggest that the critic was at least premature. However, more significant is the fact that Picasso and Braque may have ceased to be Cubists but they never ceased to be artists. The question today is similarly not whether Abstract Expressionism is dead or alive. It is: "What and how well is de Kooning—or Motherwell—or Guston— or Rauschenberg—or Goldberg—or Ronald—painting now?" In a sense there are no art movements. There are only artists.

LAWRENCE ALLOWAY

The Biomorphic '40s

BIO

"a combining form denoting relation to, or connection with, life, vital phenomena, or living organisms."

MORPHOLOGY

"the features, collectively, comprised in the form and structure of an organism or any of its parts."

The movements of 20th-century art, to the extent that they began with artists' acts of self-identification, in opposition either to another group of artists or against a public made grandiose and threatening as the Philistines, tend to stay monolithic. Efforts are made to unify these discrete movements, like different shaped beads on a string of "the classical spirit" or "the expressionist temperament," but obviously this delivers very little, except an illusion of mastery to the users of cliché. More is needed than the revival of the exhausted classical/romantic antithesis, which leaves the movements to be united sequentially undisturbed. Modern art tends to be written about by the artists and their friends in the first case, and by generalizers and popularizers after that, with the result that the mosaic of movements has remained largely unaffected, to the detriment of unorganized artists and traditions. For example, there is a line of biomorphic art (which combines various forms in evocative organic wholes) that, to the extent that it is discussed in the usual framework, could only be viewed as a part of Surrealism. What failed to fit would come under such headings as Precursors of, or The Inheritance of, Surrealism, or,

SOURCE: Artforum (September 1965), 18-22. Copyright © Artforum, September 1965, The Biomorphic '405, by Lawrence Alloway. 250

maybe, just plain Independents (as if the artists were eccentrics, or nuts, off the main-line). Biomorphism, so far as Surrealism goes, is a painterly equivalent of the transcriptual puzzles and combinations of objects of Magritte and Dali. However, the main painters of biomorphism have been merely affiliated to Surrealism, or Shanghai-ed into it, as is the case with Arp and Miró; Masson alone, for much of his career, was an official Surrealist. Biomorphism, with its invention of analogies of human forms in nature and other organisms, has wide connections, for example, with Art Nouveau (in which the human body shares a promiscuous linear flow with all created objects) and with Redon, whose ambiguous imagery is born of reverie. In New York in the mid-4os biomorphism was of the greatest importance and one of its sources was certainly Surrealism. However, we must also account for the position of an artist like Baziotes whose Moon World, 1951, is very close to the bland sack of Brancusi's marble seal, Le Miracle, 1936. Another example of the pervasiveness of biomorphism apart from the influence of Surrealism is the late work of Kandinsky. After 1934 there is a persistent use of waving tendrils and squirming free forms, but dried out when compared with the juiciness of Miró, or the ripeness of Arp. These irregular radiating or flattened forms, however parched, are fully characteristic of biomorphism's inventory of organic form. In the visual arts it is a cultural reflex to regard nature as landscape. However, in biomorphic art, nature can also be a single organic form, or a group of such forms (like Baziotes' Moon World). Or they can be presented in swarms, tangling with one another. Barnett Newman, writing about Stamos, indicates the importance of nature to him, as to other biomorphic artists: "His ideograph captures the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed. He redefines the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon."1 In addition to the flat, more-or-less placid, and (as it were) one-cell biomorphs, another aspect of organic imagery is important. This is linear-based (as opposed to painterly and planar) biomorphism, with the canvas or paper swarming like the jungle which exists below the ordinary scale of human vision. (Hence the importance of microscopy, either as a direct visual influence, or, more usually, as conceptual backing to justify an artist's working assumption of "endless worlds," extensions of consciousness beyond the proportionate contour of classical and Renaissance art.) Proliferating biomorphism is the analogue of manic activity in the artist, whose muscular activity issues in the marks which we interpret as a self1960s

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discovering subject. The graphic preliminaries of the artist suggest forms out of which conflations of human, floral, animal, and insect-like forms can be developed. Crowded and manic biomorphism is directly linked to automatism, which was cultivated by the Surrealists as a means of direct access to the Unconscious mind. The ideal of direct action was most clearly recognized in drawing, except for phases of Masson's and Ernst's painting. In New York in the '408 automatism was pressed as a cause by Matta, who influenced Motherwell and Baziotes. Pollock, too, expressed interest in its procedures. Referring to "European moderns" Pollock said: "I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the unconscious."2 There is an unbroken link between automatic processes in art (working at speed, encouraging accidents) and belief, often of a rather nonchalant and expedient sort, in the unconscious. The unconscious, in its turn, is linked to mythology which, after a lively influence on 20th-century culture, reached a climax in the '405, and nowhere more than in New York. The appeal of myth must have had something to do with the fact that it offered a control mechanism by which all data, all experiences, could be handled. It was not myth as a body of precise allusions as, say, in lyth-century poetry, but myth as a kind of "manna." Myths, absorbed more or less automatically in our education, updated by Freud and Jung, revealed ubiquitous patterns that tied in the personal psyche with the greatest events, new or old. Revealing of this aspect is "A Special Issue on Myth," published by the magazine Chimera in K)46.3 Here is a partial name-list from its 88 pages: Alcestis, John Buchan, Columbus, Dante, Earwicker, Faustus, Gluck, Hitler, and so on to Veblen and John Wesley; subjects discussed include witches and warlocks, Hegel's spirit, the Siegfried cycle, and Walpole's Castle ofOtranto. This should be enough to show that in the '405, mythology was seriously regarded as a key to the psycho-social order we share with world culture. (Adolph Gottlieb remembers that he had a copy which he kept for about ten years.) Mythology, used like this, turned the whole world into an intimate and organic spectacle. Thus, an artist with an interest in mythology could discover its enduring and fantastic patterns in his art and, at the same time, project his personal patterns out into the world. The pleasure taken in prehistory, as subject and title, in Rothko and S tamos, for example, is indicative of this quest for unplumbed humanity, with the remote in time as a metaphor of psychological depth. At a moment when abstract artists were turning from existing geometric styles, mythology gave to evocative and suggestive, but not precisely decod252

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able, signs, the appropriate atmosphere and ideal context. Of the biomorphists, Baziotes, Gottlieb, Pollock, and Rothko used myth-conferring titles, and so did Gorky in the sense of binding his paintings to personal desire and memory. There is a psycho-sexual content in biomorphic art, which abounds in visceral lyricism full of body allusions. Gorky, in this respect comparable to Baziotes and Rothko, creates a kind of polymorphous fabulism. Particular cases of resemblance are not interesting: the point is the identity of everything with its simultaneous phases of seeding, sprouting, growing, loving, fighting, decaying, rebirth. The impression is of a natural and personal abundance, in opposition to geometric art (urban or platonic) or figurative art (bound to particular cases). The desire for a nuanced and subjective imagery was manifested in paintings that did not subordinate the artist's use of paint to a tidy and cleaned up end-state. On the contrary, rich meanings were located within the creative act itself, so that the process-record itself is sensitized. Biomorphic art depends in part (i) on the depiction of beings and places, but also (2) on the enactment of the work itself. The artist's gestures are image-making and keep their identity as physical improvisation beyond the point of completion. Gorky's and Pollock's linearism, Rothko's liquidity, Baziotes' scumbled haze of color, were all technical devices fused with permissive meanings. Thus biomorphic art emerged in New York as the result of a cluster of ideas about nature, automatism, mythology, and the unconscious. These elements fed one another to make a loop out of which this evocative art developed. It made possible, too, the continuation of aspects of biomorphism familiar in European art (especially Miró and Klee) although native artists like Arthur G. Dove, with his uterine landscapes, may have helped predispose American artists to the ambiguous mode. If it was the conjunction of these varied elements that was fruitful in New York for biomorphism, considerable latitude in its forms is to be expected. This, in fact, is the case, and assuming that a tradition is validated more by how far it can be stretched than by how narrowly it can be administered, it is a sign of biomorphic art's historical appropriateness that so much could be made of it. One aspect of its diversity is seen in Still's biomorphism, which is at the border of his abstract art, and hence ambiguously interpretable as abstract. His paintings of circa 1938 to circa 1946 are rocky and troll-like; a stickily dragged paint creates a Northern melodrama of thrones and presences, like Mount Rushmore as the statue of the Commander. A checklist of American biomorphists in the '403 would be unmanageable if it were comprehensive, but it is possible to indicate the central groupings. 1960s

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Pollock, in drawings of the late '305, made what are virtually straight biomorphic exercises. These chain-reactions of repetitive and transforming imagery are presumably the type of drawing that he discussed with his Jungian analyst in 1939. Pollock's paintings were not stylistically kin with these fluent drawings, however: his biomorphic paintings of 1943-46 set the human or totemic passages in a late Cubist framework. These works are a turbulent extension of Picasso's so-called Surrealist Three Dancers, 1925, in the direction of more direct passion and fuller human traces. It was not until 1951 that he revived the iconography of these periods, ambiguously human, fully biomorphic, in the black paintings, without any Cubist bracing. Gorky's early metamorphic scenes also derive from Cubism; in the '305 he made what Alfred Barr called Curvilinear Cubism, as undulant as cartoons of well-stacked girls or rippling biceps. In a way, Gorky's development parallels André Masson's, who, from being a Cubist, and friend of Gris, expanded Cubist subject-matter, and then relinquished its forms entirely for organic and improvisatory work. However, Gorky's sexy Cubism was only a preliminary for the full biomorphism of the three Garden in Sochi^paintings (1940-41), with their conspicuous adaptation of Miró, leading into the linear twists and folds, washed with transparent color and flecks of clear hue (like a parted orifice) of The Pirate 1,1942. Gorky influenced de Kooning, but biomorphism in de Kooning (circa 1945-48,1949-50), no matter how many breasts and slits jerk and ripple, in forms like ghosts made out of sheets in old-fashioned cartoons, is implicitly urban. His mannequins piled in a warehouse are a rationalized version of the pastoral bacchanals of Gorky. Four artists were particularly occupied with the evocation of the primal, using pre-history and marine biology. Rothko, between circa 1945 and 1947, paints an imagined ocean floor in which linear organisms wriggle as his wrist moves, creating animate forms transparent to their misty backgrounds. A 1945 painting was entitled Birth of Cephalopods, which are a class of Mollusca "characterized by a distinct head with 'arms' of tentacles attached to it; comprising Cuttlefishes, the Nautilus, etc., and numerous fossil species" (OED). Alien but beguiling, disembodied but sexual forms drift, hover, and coalesce. Stamos stated the theme clearly in 1946 (after hesitant moves in the preceding year). Omen and Nautical Warrior, both of 1946, present marine forms animated in ways to imply combat, encounter, self-awareness and contact. Biological low life is the analogue of human feeling and order. Gottlieb's pictographs, begun in 1941, have a biomorphic potential, as when the artist speaks of using "hand, nose, arms" as details in painting, "often separating them 254

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from their associations as anatomy."4 Beyond this, however, is the frequent appearance in paintings of 1946-47 of fleshy marine forms, as in Return of the Mariner, 1946. Baziotes evolved in 1947 (after a period in 1942 when he was occupied by the promises of automatism) a biomorphic style that was the base of all his subsequent work. He used, in that year, rudimentary human contours which assimilated references to a dwarf, Cyclops, an armless and legless veteran of World War I, a heavy female contour. These elements were not opposed, but subsumed to unified images. Other interests of Baziotes were "lizards and prehistoric animals,"5 not to mention the zoo and the aquarium. To conclude: a description of biomorphic art cannot be restricted to a Surrealist ambience, although this was certainly a stimulus. It is important to stress that several of the American artists contacted earlier, original traditions which Surrealism had adapted and rigidified. Thus, Baziotes went around "behind" Surrealism to a form of reverie more like Redon's than, say, Dali's: in Baziotes flora and fauna lyrically oscillate but within a formal canon of unperturbed refinement. When he wrote, "[I]t is the mysterious I love in painting. It is the stillness and the silence,"6 he raised unmistakably the symbolist canon of inert and strange beauties. Gorky, too, can be connected behind André Breton, who helped with his titles, to a broader style, the tradition of the Grotesque. Vitruvius, who objected to this capricious ornamental style, described it well by writing against it: "How can a tender shoot carry a human figure, and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies grow out of roots and tendrils?"7 Several aspects of biomorphic imagery can be considered as an incorporation into easel painting of the monstrous fusions and calligraphic energy of the Grotesque. Other connections could be made back to traditional iconographies of herbal, bacchanal and paradise, which combine pastoral scene with erotic act. However, enough has been said to show that biomorphism is a continuation of extensive traditions of fantasy, as well as the product of a particular historical situation in New York in the '405.

Notes

This essay incorporates brief passages from two other pieces by the author: the introduction to William Baziotes: A Memorial Exhibition, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1965, and "Gorky," Artforum i, no. 9, March 1963. 1. Theodores Stamos. Exhibition Catalogue, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, March 19472. Quoted from Arts and Architecture, February, 1944, in "New York School, The First Generation," Los Angeles County Museum, 1965. 1960s

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3- Chimera, New York, vol. 4, no. 3, Spring 1946. 4. Quoted from "Limited Edition," 1945 in: New York School: The First Generation, Los Angeles County Museum, 1965. The Tiger's Eye, 2, 1947 (a magazine that Barnett Newman was an associate editor of) included an anthology of poetic writing and painting on the theme of "The Sea" (pp. 65-100). It included a Milton Avery beach scene, two fully biomorphic Stamos paintings of circa 1946, and Baziotes' patterned cubist Florida Seascape 1945. Elsewhere in the magazine Stamos wrote (in "The Ides of Art"): "I am concerned with the Ancestral Image which is a journey through the shells and webbed entanglements of the phenomenon" (my emphasis). 5. For these quotations, and others, see: William Baziotes, A Memorial Exhibition, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1965. 6. Baziotes. Ibid. 7. Quoted by Wolfgang Kayser: The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Indiana University Press, 1963.

MICHAEL FRIED

Jackson Pollock

The almost complete failure of contemporary art criticism to come to grips with Pollock's accomplishment is striking. This failure has been due to several factors. First and least important, the tendency of art writers such as Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess to regard Pollock as a kind of natural existentialist has served to obscure the simple truth that Pollock was, on the contrary, a painter whose work is always inhabited by a subtle, questing formal intelligence of the highest order, and whose concern in his art was not with any fashionable metaphysics of despair but with making the best paintings of which he was capable. Second, in the face of Pollock's all-over drip paintings of 1947-50—the finest of which are, I believe, his masterpieces—the vocabulary of the most distinguished formal criticism of the past decades, deriving as it does chiefly from the study of Cubism and Late Cubist painting in Europe and America, begins to reach the furthest limits of its usefulness. Despite Pollock's intense involvement with Late Cubism through 1946, the formal issues at stake in his most successful paintings of the next four years

SOURCE: Artforum (September 1965), 14-17. Copyright © Artforum, September 1965, "Jackson Pollock," by Michael Fried. 256

cannot be characterized in Cubist terms,1 and in general there is no more fundamental task confronting the formal critic today than the evolution and refinement of a post-Cubist critical vocabulary adequate to the job of defining the formal preoccupations of modernist painting since Pollock. What makes this task especially difficult is the fact that the formal issues with which Pollock and subsequent modernists such as Louis, Noland, Olitski and (though perhaps to a lesser degree) Stella have chosen to engage are of a phenomenological subtlety, complexity and richness without equal since Manet. The following discussion of Pollock's work will concentrate on a nexus of formal issues which, in my opinion, are central both to Pollock's art after 1947 and to some of the most salient characteristics of subsequent modernist painting. These issues concern the ability of line, in modernist painting of major ambition, to be read as bounding a shape or figure, whether abstract or representational. The discussion will begin with an attempt to describe the general nature of Pollock's work between 1947 and 1950, and will move on to consider several specific paintings which illustrate the virtually self-contradictory character of Pollock's formal ambitions at this time. The Museum of Modern Art's "Number One" (1948), roughly typical of Pollock's best work during these years, was made by spilling and dripping skeins of paint on to a length of unsized canvas stretched on the floor which the artist worked on from all sides. The skeins of paint appear on the canvas as a continuous, all-over line which loops and snarls time and again upon itself until almost the entire surface of the canvas is covered by it. It is a kind of spacefilling curve of immense complexity, responsive to the slightest impulse of the painter and responsive as well, one almost feels, to one's own act of looking. There are other elements in the painting besides Pollock's line: for example, there are hovering spots of bright color, which provide momentary points of focus for one's attention, and in this and other paintings made during these years there are even handprints put there by the painter in the course of his work. But all these are woven together, chiefly by Pollock's line, to create an opulent and, in spite of their diversity, homogeneous visual fabric which both invites the act of seeing on the part of the spectator and yet gives his eye nowhere to rest once and for all. That is, Pollock's all-over drip paintings refuse to bring one's attention to a focus anywhere. This is important. Because it was only in the context of a style entirely homogeneous, all-over in nature and resistant to ultimate focus that the different elements in the painting—most important, line and color—could be made, for the first time in Western painting, to function as wholly autonomous pictorial elements. 1960s

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At the same time, such a style could be achieved only if line itself could somehow be prized loose from the task of figuration. Thus an examination of "Number One," or of any of Pollock's finest paintings of these years, reveals that his all-over line does not give rise to positive and negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is no inside or outside to Pollock's line or to the space through which it moves. And this is tantamount to claiming that line, in Pollock's allover drip paintings of 1947-50, has been freed at last from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes. It has been purged of its figurative character. Line, in these paintings, is entirely transparent both to the non-illusionistic space it inhabits but does not structure, and to the pulses of something like pure, disembodied energy that seem to move without resistance through them. Pollock's line bounds and delimits nothing—except, in a sense, eyesight. We tend not to look beyond it, and the raw canvas is wholly surrogate to the paint itself. We tend to read the raw canvas as if it were not there. In these works Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas. In a painting such as "Number One" there is only a pictorial field so homogeneous overall and devoid both of recognizable objects and of abstract shapes that I want to call it "optical," to distinguish it from the structured, essentially tactile pictorial field of previous modernist painting from Cubism to de Kooning and even Hans Hofmann. Pollock's field is optical because it addresses itself to eyesight alone. The materiality of his pigment is rendered sheerly visual, and the result is a new kind of space—if it still makes sense to call it space—in which conditions of seeing prevail rather than one in which objects exist, flat shapes are juxtaposed or physical events transpire. To sum up then: in Pollock's masterpieces of 1947-50, line is used in such a way as to defy being read in terms of figuration. I hope it is clear that the opposition "figurative" versus "non-figurative," in the sense of the present argument, stands for a more fundamental issue than the opposition between the terms "representational" and "non-representational." It is possible for a painting or drawing to be both non-representational—what is usually termed "abstract"—and figurative at the same time. In fact, until Pollock that was the most that so-called "abstract" painting had ever been. This is true, for instance, of de Kooning, as well as of all those Abstract Expressionists whose work relies on Late Cubist principles of internal coherence. It is true also of 258

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Kandinsky, both early and late. For example, in Kandinsky's "Painting with White Forms" (1913), a heroic attempt has been made to allow line to work as freely as color. But one senses throughout the canvas how the line has been abstracted from various natural objects; and to the degree that one feels this, the line either possesses a residual but irreducible quality as of contour, so that one reads it as having an inside and an outside—as the last trace of a natural object that has been dissolved away by the forces at work in the pictorial field—or else it possesses the quality of an object in its own right: not merely as line, but as a kind of thing, like a branch or bolt of lightning, seen in a more or less illusionistic space. In his later work—"Yellow-Red-Blue" (1929) is a case in point—Kandinsky tried to overcome his dependence upon natural objects by restricting himself to geometrical shapes that could be made with compass and ruler; and he chose to emphasize or heighten the quality which his line possessed from the start, of being another kind of thing in the world. In paintings such as this, Kandinsky's line seems like segments of wire, either bent or straight, which are somehow poised in a space that is no less illusionistic than in the earlier paintings. Both these canvases by Kandinsky could be called non-representational; but both are clearly figurative, if we compare them with Pollock's all-over paintings of 1947-50. Pollock, however, seems not to have been content with the non-figurative style of painting he had achieved, and after 1950 returned to figuration, at first in a series of immensely fecund black-and-white stain paintings, and afterwards in works which tended to revert to something close to traditional drawing. These latter paintings probably mark Pollock's decline as a major artist. But it is important to observe that Pollock's involvement with figuration did not cease entirely between 1947 and 1950. For example, the painting "White Cockatoo" (1948) was made by dripping black paint in a series of slow-moving loops and angular turns which come nowhere near covering the brown canvas; but instead of trying to create the kind of homogeneous visual fabric of paintings like "Number One," Pollock chose to fill in some of the areas accidentally circumscribed when his black line intersected itself, with gouts of red, yellow, green, blue and white oil paint, either knifed onto the canvas or squeezed in short bursts directly from the tube. It is significant that Pollock was careful not to fill in only the most conspicuous of these areas. Some of the most positive contours are left almost completely devoid of painted fill-in, whereas areas that seem to lie between more positive contours have been filled in. The result is that the painting leaves one with the strong impression that the black line, instead of retaining the 1960s

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non-figurative character it possesses in the optical paintings made at the same time, works to described shapes and evoke forms seen as if against a colored background. By filling in certain areas isolated by his black line as it loops and angles back upon itself, Pollock restored to it some measure of line's traditional role in bounding and describing shapes and figures. And the fact that in "White Cockatoo" he filled in both predominantly convex and concave (or positive and negative) areas does not work to counteract the figurative character of the line. Rather, it creates a rough equivalent to a Synthetic Cubist ambiguity of figure versus ground, but without the rigor and strict consequentiality of Synthetic Cubism itself. "White Cockatoo," then, represents an awkward compromise among three stylistic modes: first, Synthetic or Late Cubism; second, what might be called naive abstract illusionism or naive abstract figuration, in which an abstract shape or figure is seen against a background situated an indeterminate distance behind it; and third, the all-over, optical, non-figurative abstraction of Pollock's best contemporary work. "White Cockatoo" is not a successful painting. But it is an important one, because it suggests that as early as 1948, when Pollock was realizing masterpiece after masterpiece in his optical style, he could not keep from chafing at the high price he had to pay for this achievement: the price of denying figuration, of refusing to allow his line to describe shapes, whether abstract or representational. It is significant, however, that "White Cockatoo" does not try to repudiate the techniques of paintings such as "Number One." Instead it suggests that Pollock had begun to cast about for some way to do what seems, on the face of it, impossible: to achieve figuration within the stylistic context of his all-over, optical style. There are other paintings, such as "The Wooden Horse" (1948) and "Summertime" (1948), which reinforce this interpretation. In all of these Pollock seems to have been preoccupied with the problem of how to achieve figuration within the context of a style that entailed the denial of figuration; or to put it another way, with the problem of how to restore to line some measure of its traditional figurative capability, within the context of a style that entailed the renunciation of that capability. Only if we grasp, as vividly and even as painfully as we can, the contradiction implicit in what seems to have been Pollock's formal ambition in these works—to combine figuration with his allover, optical style—will we be able to gauge the full measure of his achievement in two other paintings of these years. The first of these I want to consider is the painting "Cut-Out" (1949). Either before he came to paint it or, more probably, in the course of painting it, 260

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Pollock arrived, almost certainly through intuition rather than rational analysis, at the realization that the only formally coherent way to combine his allover, optical style with figuration was somehow to make the painting itself proclaim the contradiction implicit in this ambition. This sounds more paradoxical than in fact it is. It has been observed how Pollock's all-over style entailed the negation of figuration; and how figuration in turn entailed the negation of that style. In "Cut-Out" these negations become the fundamental means by which the painting is made. That is, in "Cut-Out" Pollock achieved figuration by negating part of the painted field—by taking something away from it—rather than by adding something as in "White Cockatoo," "The Wooden Horse" and "Summertime." Here Pollock actually cut away the figure or shape, which happens to be roughly humanoid in outline, from a piece of canvas on which an all-over painted field had previously been dripped, and then backed this piece with canvas-board. The result is that the figure is not seen as an object in the world, or shape on a flat surface—in fact it is not seen as the presence of anything—but rather as the absence, over a particular area, of the visual field. This enhances, I think, the force of the word "optical" with which I have tried to characterize Pollock's all-over style. Figuration is achieved in terms of eyesight alone, and not in terms that imply even the possibility of verification by touch. The figure is something we don't see—it is, literally, where we don't see—rather than something, a shape or object in the world, we do see. More than anything, it is like a kind of blind spot, a kind of defect in our visual apparatus; it is like part of our retina that is destroyed or for some reason is not registering the visual field over a certain area. This impression is strengthened if we ask ourselves where, in this painting, the cut-out area seems to lie in relation to the painted field. For me, at any rate, it does not lie behind the field, despite the fact that where the field is cut away we see the mostly blank canvas-board behind it; and it does not seem to lie on the surface, or in some tense, close juxtaposition with it, as in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism. In the end, the relation between the field and the figure is simply not spatial at all: it is purely and wholly optical: so that the figure created by removing part of the painted field and backing it with canvas-board seems to lie somewhere within our own eyes, as strange as this may sound. In "Cut-Out" Pollock succeeds, by means of the most radical surgery imaginable, in achieving figuration within the stylistic context of an opticality almost as unremitting as that which characterizes paintings such as "Number One." But there are two important respects in which "Cut-Out" remains inconsistent with Pollock's all-over, optical style. The first is its tendency to 1960s

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focus our attention on the figure created where Pollock cut away the painted canvas. This figure is emphasized as no single visual incident or cluster of incidents is ever emphasized in those all-over pictures in which the painted fields are left intact. And the second has to do with the proportion of the total canvas occupied by the cut-out figure. In "Cut-Out" it is large enough to deprive the visual field of the sense of expansiveness, of sheer visual density, that we find in a painting such as "Number One." Both these qualifications disappear in the face of the last painting I want to consider in detail, "Out of the Web" (1949). Again in "Out of the Web" Pollock achieved figuration by removing part of a painted field, which in this case had been dripped onto the smooth side of a piece of brown masonite. This time, however, the figures that result do not occupy the center of the field; they are not placed so as to dominate it and to focus the spectator's attention upon themselves. Instead they seem to swim across the field and even to lose themselves against it. In "Out of the Web," as in "Cut-Out," figuration is perceived as the absence, over a particular area, of the visual field. It is, again, like a kind of blind spot within our eyes. But unlike the figure in "Cut-Out," the sequence of figures in "Out of the Web" is almost as hard to see, to bring one's attention to bear on, as a sequence of actual blind spots would be. They seem on the verge of dancing off the visual field or of dissolving into it and into each other as we try to look at them. "Out of the Web" is one of the finest paintings Pollock ever made. In it, for the first and only time, he succeeded completely in restoring to line its traditional capability to bound and describe figures within the context of his allover, optical style—a style I have argued was largely founded on the liberation of line from the task of figuration. It is, however, not surprising, if one is at all familiar with Pollock's career, that he did not repeat his remarkable solution throughout a whole series of works; among the important American painters who have emerged since 1940 Pollock stands almost alone in his refusal to repeat himself. And having solved the problem of how to combine figurative line—the line of traditional drawing—with opticality in "Cut-Out" and "Out of the Web," Pollock abandoned the solution: because it could not be improved upon, or developed in any essential respect, and because to repeat the solution would have been to debase it to the status of a mere device. In this sense Pollock's solution was both definitive and self-defeating, and from 1951 on his work shows the strong tendency already mentioned to revert to traditional drawing at the expense of opticality. But in a series of remarkable paintings made by staining thinned-down black paint into unsized canvas in 1951, 262

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Pollock seems to have been on the verge of an entirely new and different kind of painting, combining figuration with opticality in a new pictorial synthesis of virtually limitless potential; and it is part of the sadness of his last years that he appears not to have grasped the significance of what are perhaps the most fecund paintings he ever made.

Note i. For example, in his essay "American-Type Painting," Clement Greenberg remarks on what seems to him the close visual relationship between Pollock's all-over painting and Analytical Cubism. "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytical Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braque had left it when, in their collages of 1912 and 1913, they drew back from the utter abstractness for which Analytical Cubism seemed headed." ("Art and Culture," Boston, 1961, p. 219.) One is always ill at ease disagreeing with Greenberg on visual grounds; however, I cannot help but see Pollock's all-over painting of these years in radically different terms.

SIDNEY SIMON

Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta, Conducted in Minneapolis in December 1966

SIMON: Your exile from Europe began when, Matta? MATTA: In October 1939.1 had already joined the Surrealist group. I had signed too many anti-Hitler and anti-Stalin papers not to be persecuted by the SS. The "resistance" was not yet possible. Especially after the Trotsky experience, most Trotskyites felt the need to get out of Europe. It is perhaps of some interest that I came to New York on the same boat as Tanguy. SIMON: Tell me something about your life in New York. MATTA: In New York, I lived rather poorly at first. Julian Levy was our natural contact among the art dealers. Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Reis, who collected

SOURCE: Art International (Summer 1967), 17-20. Reprinted by permission of Sidney Simon and Art International. 263

Surrealist art, were our sponsors. I found an apartment at 15 Gay Street, near 8th Street and 6th Avenue. It was there that I began to paint and to meet the younger American artists. The first person I met in New York was Francis Lee. He had a loft on loth Street where I used to go. I remember that his loft was one of these great big spaces without any room separations. The New York situation was very strange to me. There were—how would I say?—many artists who knew something about European art. But it was as if "art" was something not in Europe but something imported to America. Do you know what I mean? Art was something rare or artificial instead of being the expression of a man. BUSA: I went to parties in Lee's loft. In fact, Baziotes, who knew Francis Lee, took me there. It was there that I met Matta. Matta, I remember, was married. No one else of our generation was married yet. There were plenty of others around, people in the Village who were what you would call trained artists although they did not have formal training in "how to be imaginative." Gerome Kamrowski and I were close friends. Did you know, Matta, that Kamrowski was one of the first to practice automatic painting in this country? MATTA: No, I wasn't aware of that. BUSA: During the last legs of the WPA even Pollock was squeezing tubes of tempera color directly onto the canvas without using brushes. This would have been around 1940 or thereabouts. So even before Matta came on the scene, there was quite a bit of groundwork for art being done that was definitely outside the galleries. On the WPA, for instance, we used to practice a clandestine kind of automatic drawing, which we took seriously, but was obviously not acceptable to the Project officials. Stuart Davis and Léger were big influences in those days. But Picasso was God. Picasso influenced all of us. MATTA: Don't you think all of that has something to do with what we find in the Soviet Union today? What I mean, of course—Picasso was known—but the idea that someone would express himself in relation to the oppression of the workers around him was, as you suggest, almost underground. The WPA artists painted the working class, "looking at" it, not from the "inside," not from the need for emancipation. SIMON: What was your work like at that time, Peter? BUSA: I was practicing an idiom that came directly out of Léger and Picasso, but it was also related to American Indian art in the sense of being flat. It 264

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was also close to Stuart Davis. In those days I knew the work of Tony Smith, Steve Wheeler and Robert Barrrell. I felt close to the abstract artists on the Project. But, you know, we couldn't submit any of that work. It wouldn't have been acceptable. It would have been considered blotchy, or simply "paint on canvas." What we did on the Project was colored by our having to do commissioned work. It's ironic, but some of the best things were the murals. Those by Davis and Byron Browne for station WNYC; and those by Xceron, Gorky, Von Wicht, Bolotowsky, Brooks and Guston on the Rikers Island project. The murals were certainly of a different caliber than the US Treasury Department murals, which were really deadly. SIMON: Do you have any recollection of the Museum of Non-Objective Art? BUSA: We used to call it the Art-of-Tomorrow Museum. Another place we frequented was the Museum of Living Art at N.Y.U., the Gallatin Collection. We haunted it like it was our own personal Village museum. Then Matta came. He was the first big influence on a small group of us. The wonderful thing about Malta's stimulus was his grasp of the morphology of paint. From him we got the idea that paint could transcend the fact that it was just something on the canvas. SIMON: I'm not sure I get exactly what it is you're saying. BUSA: Paint was not just paint; it could become crushed jewels, air, even laughter. It was quite open. It had that tremendous possibility of transformation, which we hadn't recognized before. And we wouldn't have recognized it had it not been for the stimulation we got from each other. SIMON: Did you know Gorky in 1939? BUSA: Yes. But Gorky came late to this idea. Bill Baziotes, for example, started drip painting even before Pollock. He destroyed a lot of that work. My own work, in my exhibition at Peggy's in 1946, was quite free. I was throwing and dripping paint onto the canvas and pouring it as well. But the point is, as I am sure Matta agrees, the flashes of understanding were momentary. It wasn't sustained. MATTA: These artists I started meeting—yourself, Pollock, Kamrowski, Baziotes, Motherwell—were full of vitality. But in some funny way they were painting from color reproductions instead of painting about themselves. You know what I mean? Actually they had a fantastic experience to report—the experience of America. To me, this was fascinating. And this automatic technique of the Surrealists (which means to show the functioning of the mind) fit them like a glove. They were very professional. They 1960s

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knew a great deal! As a matter of fact, they knew even more than we Surrealists knew about art history. Their studios were covered with reproductions of pictures pasted to the walls, while in our case there was not so much reference to these things. BUSA: But to know history gave the American artist a greater chance to reject history. Look at what happened. We had to start somewhere. We had this healthy attitude of anti-art which for many of us became personalized as self-destruction. It was amazing how we could all come out of it and smile. The point I am making is this: we were, all of us, really abstract painters, so that our idea of the role of the imagination differed greatly from that of the Surrealists. Pm not saying we didn't gain anything from Surrealism. It was a fuse which lit up the American scene. But from where? It was your presence, Matta, that personalized Surrealism for us. MATTA: What I was transmitting was the theory of Surrealism. In those days Surrealism was known through Dali; so you never really knew what was behind it. As for myself, I felt that nothing would be new, only old-new—that is, until we changed the game and not only the pieces in the old game. You know what I mean? BUSA: What you are saying is that art was not mixed up enough with life. As I said before, we were abstract artists and abstract art had no place in Surrealism. It is true, we were working to make art; and even if it was good, professionally, it didn't really mean anything insofar as tying it up with life. You were right, this was the important thing. It is interesting to reflect on our first efforts to overcome this limitation: the work looked like vomit. Because none of us got the message on the ideal level (which you knew so well). It was sheer catharsis. SIMON: I want to return for a moment to Matta's statement that Surrealism was known here mainly through Dali. I don't think that's the whole story, do you? MATTA: I meant that only figuratively. Look. The only gallery besides Pierre Matisse that had to do with Surrealism in a big way was Julian Levy. He had a show before I came here, of de Chirico. The lack of interest it created was unbelievable. Most of those pictures were unsold; three or four years later, I was able to buy a well-known de Chirico for a small amount, something like $700. You have to understand that America was practically virgin territory. SIMON: There was a small group of artists who met at your studio. Am I correct in this? MATTA: Yes, but that was much later. I knew them before as individuals. We 266

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talked alone first. There was a vague interest in what we were doing, but the problem was not grasped until later. You may recall, there was a big Surrealist show—it was organized by a French refugee committee of liberation. Then I think it was that all of you realized that you had in me someone who knew something about all of this. This show awoke a lot of things in you. You didn't know where to turn; and then, perhaps, you remembered that there was this guy who knew something about it. And then—it was about a year later—things started getting more interesting to you. SIMON: You had your first show at the Julian Levy Gallery in 1940. MATTA: Yes. I will tell you something very amusing. I remember I first showed my pictures in the Julian Levy Gallery with Tchelitchew in the main room and with Walt Disney in the second room. In a tiny little room in one corner was my work. Everything in America, you see, was still at the beginning. BUSA: But to get back to the popular notion of Surrealism as we understood it. We knew about Dali. We knew that Dali was a kind of illustrator. The dirtiest word you could call an artist then was an "illustrator." We considered Dali as an illustrator of dreams, an artist without plastic consciousness. That is why most of us dismissed Dali as an influence. Which artists were influenced by Dali? None except a few Marxist realists. SIMON: Peter, you knew Pollock in the Benton class; but when did Pollock and Matta first meet? BUSA: I don't remember. But I know that Pollock got to know Matta by going with us to Matta's studio, like we all did on Saturdays. We would show each other our work and have discussions MATTA: ... Yes, yes, I want to recall some of the details—somebody told me—this was after I met you, Peter—that there was this man called Pollock who had a studio on 8th or gth Street. And I went to see him. I saw his work. (You see, all of these artists somehow I saw by themselves first.) BUSA: It was Motherwell who told you about Jackson. MATTA: Yes, yes, Motherwell. He became a very important link. BUSA: Motherwell was very important in all this. He organized our meeting with you. In those days, Matta was still a kind of nebulous figure. Naturally, I'd seen his work. I had seen Matta's work in a 1939 issue of Minotaur—in color. We all had this feeling that he was a well-known artist, a European. He had his nice studio on gth Street. So when we rang the bell and went upstairs it was to call on a well-established artist. Here we were, no older than him—Pollock might have been a year or two older—but we had a feel1960s

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ing like students, in a way. I don't want to labor the point; but that was the situation: we were still on a kind of learning level. MATTA: Yes, but I don't know if "learning" is the right word. Because I think you will agree that it had also something to do with the idea of creating a group and agreeing on a direction. By getting together we were more likely to succeed in attacking a vocabulary. I remember that some of the first things we used to do were things like that—images of man. Everyone brought a sample of his work. I felt that we had to keep a degree of reference to reality. It couldn't be all explosion, you know. BUSA: Let me ask you a question, Matta. What was it that most attracted us to Surrealist automatism? For instance, we'd already known about Masson's work which was quite free. What attracted us particularly to this idea of total freedom of expression? MATTA: I think that—how would I say?—I think that you were all ready to explode. The situation was very WPA. There was a time bomb—definitely a morphology of explosion in those very early things you were doing. They looked like something that was the feeling you had. BUSA: But what I was getting at was our antagonism to Surrealism. Don't you remember how it was expressed even in our discussions in the group? MATTA: Yes, but I had it myself in those days BUSA: ... I remember that quite well. That's why I asked you the other day if you still consider yourself a Surrealist. Because even though you were one of the Surrealists, you were something new. MATTA: I always defended Breton's definition of Surrealism, which has to do with the total emancipation of man. Surrealism is "more reality." There is always the need for man to grasp "more reality"; for only in this way can we create a truly human condition. SIMON: Can you tell me something more of what you remember about Motherwell? BUSA: Well, Motherwell was always a very organized fellow—I mean he had a tremendous facility for gathering ends together. MATTA: That's true. He was a translator in pragmatic terms of the things that BUSA: ... that were even vague to us. He would come out and explain things and bring them out. As a matter of fact, I was annoyed in the beginning, because he talked more than Matta did MATTA: ... He would translate in terms of esthetics what I was trying to say, and then I would say, "No, it's not that at all that I am trying to say." He 268

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would try to drive everything into esthetics, you know. I don't deny beauty in a work, but I regard it as only one of the conditions necessary to create. Emancipation is another. SIMON: Peter, would you say that Matta's work in those days was the most advanced artistically? BUSA: Yes, as a Surrealist. He was the most mature of our group. Matta's work was not dogmatically Surrealist, but was on an idea plane, which made it more exciting. We were not attracted to the clichés of Surrealism. After all, some of us had been painting for ten years and we knew Surrealism for what it was. MATTA: I want to tell you something quite curious. Max Ernst spent the summer of 1942 in Cape Cod, at our house, a house we rented near the beach. Max started working with different cans, making holes in them. He put the picture on the floor and made the cans move above them as if they were mobiles. They dripped paint on the canvas. These were the first drip paintings I was aware of. This freedom of Pollock (which came much later) was very clear to me, but very elemental. It was like going from hand-painting to arm-painting. BUSA: True. But there was muscle in it. In Pollock it came out strong. In Kline, too, it was evident from his first works in that direction. You have to admit that Max Ernst's efforts with the cans were very modest compared to Pollock. The structure of imagination in our work revealed a feeling quite different from European art. SIMON: To return to the so-called group ... BUSA: There was never an official group. We didn't form a group from the point of view of having an ideology. We merely shared certain ideas and interests. SIMON: Were there six of you, including Matta? BUSA: Yes. We were the first American practitioners of automatic painting that I know of. Gorky wasn't part of it. As I remember it, when we came to Matta's studio, there was Motherwell, Baziotes, Pollock, Kamrowski, and myself. It was a very small group; but it was as many as we could corral at the time—those who were really involved, that is. SIMON: When exactly did you start to meet? Can you pin it down for me? MATTA: I'm trying to remember. In October—like it used to happen in those days, everybody changed apartments. There were a lot of available apartments. We moved to gth Street. BUSA: That was in '42, because I remember that very well. I'd spent the sum1960s

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mer away from New York. Then, when I came back, I saw Motherwell, Baziotes and Kamrowski. We didn't meet together as a group until the fall of 1942. We started meeting in October and continued through that winter. Motherwell was on 8th Street. I used to visit him there. I think it was a period of good times and productive as hell. In the restaurants the food was spiced with parlor games. Remember, I borrowed your book on mental telepathy. MATTA: Pollock, you recall, was the one who resented most this idea of a group. It was then that he painted an enormous picture of very anthropomorphic things. It was quite free already, vibrating. BUS A: Pasiphàe, very likely. Or Totem I or II. MATTA: I would say that the winter of 1942-43 was when we met. Then in 1943, things were starting to get difficult. We didn't see one another. With Motherwell especially I had a terrific incompatibility of ideas. I was really very much in this Surrealist revolution, and he became more and more a collage man. In 1943—that summer—I passed, in my own work, from a sort of burning fire, mineral lights kind of thing into a space that was described by geodesic lines and waves. Then we moved to the country. The war was becoming a ferocious thing. I couldn't ignore it any more. I began to feel "society" in a new way, for the first time. BUSA: Do you remember the painting you did of the figure with the gun? MATTA: Yes, yes, it was a portrait of Breton. No doubt it represented in some funny way my hostility to certain aspects of Surrealism. Once when I was working on a picture I called the Vitreur, I got very furious. I was very discontented with it, and I destroyed the picture. In destroying this picture (it was a large one of 6 or 7 yards) I used—perhaps remembering what Max Ernst had done the summer before—just paint drippings to cover the picture. I created chaotic circles of drippings and things like that. I liked the result as a sort of expression of my anger in terms of the war. It was a curious feeling. I wasn't in the war. I felt that I should participate, but being terrifically antimilitarist, I went through a ferocious crisis, so to speak. And then I passed, in my work, to these anthropomorphic things. SIMON: Did this change about in your feelings and in your work affect your relations with the others? MATTA: Yes. It created a very definite divorce. Especially Motherwell. When he came to visit me, he would say, you are coming back to the figure. BUSA: He had an abhorrence of the figure as I remember. As soon as we painted the figure it was as though it wasn't art. 270

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MATTA: I became sort of the fellow who wasn't accepted. They were happy as long as my work expressed cosmic violence and whirlpools. I think it was a pity we didn't see more of each other. Because action is not necessarily the hands. в USA: It was a fratricidal situation in many ways. I remember the very first time you met Gorky and overhearing the conversation. It was at a small gathering. Gorky was saying, "You know, I think you paint too thin." And Matta graciously replied, "Oh, I don't think I paint so thin." It was an infantile conversation that went on in that way for a while. Gorky, if you remember, was painting very heavy in those days. He hadn't even started to become influenced by any of our ideas. You could hardly lift his palettes; they were like African shields, very heavy. Exasperated, finally, Gorky pulled himself up to his full height (I thought he was going to fight), and he said, "Well, let's put it this way—you don't paint so thin, I don't paint so thick." With that we all relaxed. His sense of humor, which ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, endeared him to all of us. We all laughed, but Gorky laughed the most. SIMON: When did the issue of "scale" enter into your thinking? BUSA: Almost immediately after our contact with Matta. American artists hardly ever attempted large canvases. We always had this idea that we were making pictures instead of the pictures making us. The change in our thinking stemmed from a sense of relief which resulted from a feeling that we were breaking down the barriers between art and life. This feeling freed our sense of scale. SIMON: Do I understand you to mean that it was Matta who inspired you in this direction? BUSA: Yes, very profoundly. Matta's idea was that we have a rich world within and don't have to look for it outside ourselves. It was an idea that combined, ultimately, brilliance of the mind with enthusiasm of the act. MATTA: To me the image always represented an act. The action of the imagination is somehow more valid to me, more developed, than the action of

the arm. BUSA: We had a horror about making an image. But actually Matta's ideas were new, even for Surrealism. I don't see, however, that the emphasis, in our case, was necessarily on the arm. There was freedom, yes, but of both mind and imagination as well. MATTA: At one point the artists started discussing not any more who we are and what happens to us and how we are changed by our paintings, etc., but 1960s

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started talking with their hands, trying to describe space like a dancer does. в USA: This business of physical instead of mental space—we were all aware of the difference. Pollock less so than the others because he already had an idea of total configuration, of having all of the canvas pulsate. The "tourists" call it "all-over art." MATTA: What interested me at this time, however, was to find some reference in my mental space to the human being, to society. This I regarded as a natural step in my art. But you felt it, too, you know. Because Pollock, at one moment, from all this whirlpool of cosmic matter wanted to reach the figure too... BUSA: Yes, he did. MATTA: ... to return to the "old-new," as I see it. One of the last things Gorky said to me was that he wanted to get some kind of human reference in his work. And de Kooning did, too. Except that de Kooning went back to some curious Rouault notion, some German Expressionist notion of the figure. Very—how would you say?—very unlucidly. Because de Kooning was still afraid of a reference to the human figure. BUSA: I don't follow you entirely. But it is true, Pollock did call de Kooning a "French" painter. I didn't understand this then, but I do now. But to get back to Pollock for a minute. Pollock had an extreme awareness of the physical aspect of his talent. I remember conversations we had about his use of accident. It was his favorite term. I asked Pollock, "Do you try to control the accident?" And he said, "No, don't control it, use it. Let it be yours!" Of course, you have to remember that we were all human beings in the sense of trying to create great art. In my opinion, this was the tragic aspect of Gorky and de Kooning. But Pollock never thought in this way when he worked. This was his power. Pollock's life was tragic; but not his achievement. Not his work. SIMON: Did you know Clyfford Still? MATTA: No. BUSA: All of the American artists seemed to know each other. I knew Still. You couldn't miss his large canvases at Peggy's. She gave him his first New York show there in 1945. Or was it 1944? I don't remember. She doesn't say much about him in her book. But in my book, Still's quiet hand created the critical distance we needed: from the anti-art gestures, from Surrealism, from French painting and from de Kooning's painting as well. Also his was

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an attitude markedly different from Pollock's. In retrospect, he was the guide post to Rothko, to Newman's bigness of form as well as to later developments. SIMON: You've mentioned Gorky only in passing. BUSA: Gorky, I feel, was an important figure for me personally. Gorky had a deep sense of humor that was high-class satire. It had a ring of truth about it. The reason for this humor, I felt, was his unconscious and deep wealth of knowledge about art. He knew a lot about "history." But he also had the humility of an artist who wanted to destroy "history," to solve an equation of zero. Never a cynic, he retained enough innocence to project his romantic personality onto other people. He could even do so with an intimate group. He would tell all that were present that the basis of the "real new" (as he called it) was for them to admit that they were bankrupt as artists. He meant this to apply in the realm of ideas about art, because he had a real interest in non-art and anti-art. Well, everyone was holding on to art and not willing to take up anti-art or the destruction of art, as an involvement, by admitting they were bankrupt. But Gorky understood this. He would selfconsciously and lightheartedly hide his understanding by the impertinence of his approach. Gorky, with his great mixture of gentleness and sarcasm, understood better than most the unpredictable quality of human action— especially in the case of an artist willing to face life more bare. But with it all, we had some fun, too. SIMON: You haven't said much about Baziotes. MATTA: Baziotes was a very good fighting fellow. I think he really wanted something new. BUSA: Among all of us, he was probably the most faithful adherent to orthodox Surrealism. In fact, he considered himself a Surrealist. He was the only one of our group who proclaimed any adherence to it. Even Kamrowski (who later had the blessing of Breton) was squeamish about it. Baziotes' position created the first split in our ranks. I let him know where I stood. My feeling was that he was the most scared. At least Motherwell used to say, "Let's pretend we're not afraid." Always with good humor, of course. MATTA: But, no! For Baziotes, it was not a question of Surrealism, but a question of emancipating himself! BUSA: Baziotes worked with a kind of Miró orientation. And he made amoeba-like shapes which came from Arp. Baziotes was as involved with "history" as Motherwell was. Baziotes studied Miró. I remember he bor-

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rowed the Miró book from me. You know, we all tried to get a little corner on this and that. It was only natural. It was Jackson, of course, who broke out of it completely. SIMON: Matta, what were your feelings about Pollock's work at that time, that is, before 1943? Or before the drip paintings? MATTA: My feeling was that it was very Masson. With all due respect to Masson, he was never very important in this searching of imagination. Masson didn't have enough imagination. He had to come back constantly to these little nudes and things. SIMON: Did you ever talk with Pollock about Masson? MATTA: No, because in that period ... BUSA: ... there was a kind of isolation between all of us after we started to show. MATTA: I don't know if you remember, but I was all of 1946 and 1947 in Europe. Then I came back in 1948. Pollock's drip paintings—for a moment, when I saw them, I thought that Pollock had broken into something new, that Pollock was operating in terms of the mind. These paintings interested me very much. BUSA: Which year was that? MATTA: His first drip paintings were done in 1947. It is interesting, but what made me believe that his attitude was not, as I had thought, that of a man who wanted to grasp things through the imagination, was that slowly the scribble, instead of differentiating itself into a new morphology of form, started to become those nudes, those figures again with the heads and eyes. In the end, it was very clear to me that the reference wasn't to the imagination at all. Probably Pollock was always making nudes, even though to us his free style always seemed to convey some enormous cosmic reference. BUSA: My reaction to Pollock's work was that it had tremendous assertion. He never consciously made a fetish out of accident, or was interested in accident per se, or accident for its own sake. He used incident, rather, to create a situation which he could transform into an event. This was really a transformation of his life into art. He went out on a limb as no one else did. He was willing to go to hell for this idea. He had exuberance, enthusiasm. His work had tremendous scale and breadth—and all of it was on a thin line of making a mess of it. This was his forte and his contribution, which is priceless. I remember that he did a big canvas in about three hours. To some people it seemed a case of an idea taking on the aspect of a criminal act, you 274

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know, against all that was sacred in art. Pollock broke all sense of time in doing that canvas. What I mean is that with a mural it is usual to take time to plan it and then you go to work. Pollock didn't work this way, not at all. Instead, he created a new basis for physical involvement, one which was psychic, one in which there was real involvement with the idea of where man's space is (which most of us talked about simply as mental space). As de Kooning said, rightly, "Jackson broke the ice." SIMON: This notion of time in relation to scale was revolutionary, obviously. BUSA: You have to admit that Pollock worked havoc with the concept of time as a factor in painting. He devaluated it. It was no accident. Pollock knew how to use his means (his talent) so that it transcended pure "incidentality" so to speak. He once said to me, "Go ahead, make a mess. You might find yourself by destroying yourself and by working your way out of it." SIMON: One final question. What was Pollock's feeling about paint as paint, about the medium? BUSA: Pollock was a natural painter. He could swim in it and come out creating the most beautifully organized lyrical effects. Pollock had the most articulate understanding of his means. While lavish and extravagant in spirit, he utilized the most economical means of color to get at a special kind of lyricism. He could make that magical nothingness everything. He gave painting an organism of existing, a canvas pulsating with the heart of a new-born creature. MATTA: He was very concerned with paint! BUSA: He was what you might call anal-erotic about it. He could play with paint. He could make a painting called "Shimmering Substance" like you would make a mudpie. He was a natural painter. MATTA: Yes. But you know, it was in this sense that art and not life were the main preoccupations of American action painting. Sometime again we will have to talk about the younger generation of American painters who are picking up where we began—Rauschenberg and the others—and how I feel they are still going back to the "old-new." New York is being colonized now by Los Angeles just as it was colonized by Paris before. We have, unfortunately, still to change the game.

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SIDNEY SIMON

Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: An Interview with Robert Motherwell Conducted in New York in January 1967

SIMON: Since these discussion are concerned with the origins of the socalled New York School, I would welcome your detailed reminiscences of the period roughly from 1939 to 1943. What, for example, were the circumstances that led to your close association with Matta in 1940? MOTHERWELL: To give some idea of what must have taken place, I will have to emphasize the fact that my background up to 1940 had little to do with painting. Until then, I had known only one obscure American artist. My grown-up life had been spent in prep school and universities, involving various scholarly pursuits. It is true, on the other hand, that I drew and painted all my youth, so that I can't really say that I walked into the New York art situation visually naked, but I certainly had no professional experience at all. SIMON: Might we back-track a bit? You were at Harvard for a time, isn't that so? When was that? MOTHERWELL: The academic year of 1937-1938.1 was a graduate student in the Philosophy department. That particular year, Arthur Lovejoy, who was a visiting professor, had a year-long seminar in the History of the Idea of Romanticism. When he discovered that I was interested in painting, he assigned to me Eugène Delacroix, whose journal had just been published in translation. Both Lovejoy and my Harvard mentor, David Prall, liked what I wrote well enough to suggest that I go to Paris for a year and prepare it for publication. It was in May, 1938, that I went to France. After a short stay at the University of Grenoble to improve my French, which remained awful, I spent the rest of the time in Paris almost until the war began. There was an interlude at Oxford, in July 1939. SIMON: Had you yet decided on a career in painting? MOTHERWELL: No. Back in the States, I got a teachingjob at the University of Oregon for one year, as a substitute for someone on sabbatical leave. I took the job so that I would have something to do while I was trying to SOURCE: Art International (Summer 1967), 20-23. Reprinted by permission of Sidney

Simon and Art International. Motherwell text copyright © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York. 276

make up my mind whether to continue my academic career or to become a painter—which I really longed to do, but did not know how to go about. During that year I met the composer, Arthur Berger, who advised me to go to New York and study with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia, while making up my mind. New York, he thought—and quite rightly—was much more of a center of art than the other places I had been. So I wrote to Columbia. They pointed out that I was unqualified technically to be in the graduate school of art history but were willing to take me, on probation. SIMON: Your contact with Meyer Schapiro is of course very well known. MOTHERWELL: I owe him a lot. When I came to New York I knew no one. By coincidence I lived near Schapiro. I began to paint a lot. Occasionally, because I didn't know anyone else who would be interested, I used to take my pictures and show them to him—I realize now, somewhat to his annoyance. I had no conception of how busy people are in New York. One day he suggested that what I really needed was to know some other artists. He knew most. He wanted to know whom I would like to meet. If it were possible, he said, he would arrange it. SIMON: Did he influence you about becoming a painter? MOTHERWELL: He felt strongly that I should become a painter and not a scholar—not that my scholarship was inadequate—but that my real drive was obviously toward painting. He asked me what American painters I liked; and I said I didn't know of any that I really liked or wanted to meet. And then he said, what about the Parisian Surrealists (who were most of them in New York in exile)? SIMON: Do you remember when exactly this conversation took place? MOTHERWELL: It must have been around Christmastime, 1940.1 said that, judging from the little I had seen, I didn't like Surrealist painting either. What I had in mind was the work of Dali, the more literary kind. And he said, whether you like their painting or not, they are the most lively group of artists around. (They would have been in their 4o's then.) They are highly literate; and, since you have an orientation toward modern French culture, it could be good for you. So I said, from that point of view, fine. After some reflection, he arranged that I study engraving with Kurt Seligmann. (Seligmann spoke English very well.) He was learned, and, as we would say nowadays, "square." Although I was interested in learning engraving, the thing was really a pretext (which we both understood) to help me to enter a bit into the French milieu. After all, I couldn't just hang around 1960s

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SIMON: What kind of impression did the Surrealists make on you? What were they like? MOTHERWELL: They were a real fraternity. Such as I have never seen before, or since, among artists. (Most of the artists I have known have as their best friends other artists, but it is a personal rather than an ideological relationship.) Surrealism was a complicated system of ideas and attitudes, having to do not only with art. SIMON: Since you found them such a close-knit group, was it hard for you to get to know them? MOTHERWELL: No. What I am trying to emphasize is their comradeship. To answer your question, through Seligmann—all the Surrealists appeared in his studio at one time or another—and his reciprocal visits to various studios (taking me with him) I not only met them, but also had an important, if minor, function to perform: I was an American. Most of them had been plunged straight into exile. There were lots of things that puzzled them, from the most minor things like—If you couldn't get olive oil, what other kind of cooking oil would serve as well? Why do Americans do this or that or the other thing? And being an American I was in a position to be helpful, to provide other frames of reference. SIMON: I take it from what you say that they had few real contacts with Americans? MOTHERWELL: They were artistically isolated on the whole. They knew that the American artists held off, either out of jealousy or out of lack of sympathy; or perhaps feeling threatened, or merely not being interested: I don't know. But I, of course, had nothing yet about which I could feel threatened. Not yet a painter, and being imbued in French culture, and regarding them as forming a distinctive part of this culture, I had great sympathy. And so I was useful to them in some ways. I think they liked me, too. SIMON: You would have met Matta about this time? MOTHERWELL: Yes. The first Surrealist I met and the only one who was close to my age was Matta. He was the most energetic, enthusiastic, poetic, charming, brilliant young artist that I've ever met. This would have been the spring of 1941. We tend to forget, in thinking about this period, that it was the end of the Depression. The war was about to begin; it had already begun in Europe. Most of the artists of my generation nearly all had been on the WPA, at $25 a week, or whatever it was. The WPA was heavily socially oriented; and those few artists who were attracted to modern or abstract art had a rough time. 278

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None had recognition. Most were poor, depressed, with considerable feelings of hopelessness, but determined nevertheless to carry on, in their respective aspirations. For an enthusiastic person like Matta to appear—this had an extremely important catalytic effect. (Matta and I were both "foreigners" to the New York painting scene. Matta came from a different world, while I, an American, had never been forced to endure what my colleagues had.) SIMON: Can you recall the first time you met Matta? MOTHERWELL: I can't. I would imagine it was in Seligmann's studio. (The other possibility is that I met him through the Onslow-Fords. I can't remember. Gordon Onslow-Ford had something of the same relationship as I had to Matta—that is, we were both his admirers.) What I do remember is that Matta and I became friendly very quickly. By this I mean we met at least a couple of times a week, etc., during the spring 1941. He was married at the time to an American girl. I remember that he wanted very badly to get out of America for the summer. Seligmann had another pupil in engraving, a young girl, Barbara, who was the daughter of Bernard Reis, the art collector. It was finally arranged that the Mattas and the Seligmanns, Barbara Reis and I would all go to Mexico for the summer. Then, as you will recall, in May, Paris fell to the Germans. And the Seligmanns, both of whom were Swiss Jews, were worried about their relatives in Europe and so they decided they couldn't go. The Mattas, Barbara and I got on a boat and left for Mexico. On the boat was a young Mexican actress with whom I promptly fell in love, and soon after married. SIMON: How important do you feel this Mexican sojourn was for your artistic development? MOTHERWELL: It was important in a special sense. In the three months of that summer of 1941, Matta gave me a ten-year education in Surrealism. Through him, I met Wolfgang Paalen, a prominent Surrealist, who was living in Mexico City. At the end of the summer, the Mattas and Barbara Reis returned to New York. Maria and I settled near Paalen till nearly Christmastime. Paalen was an intellectual, a man widely read; and it was with him that I got my postgraduate education in Surrealism, so to speak. By the time Maria and I returned to New York, we were already married. We took an apartment on Perry Street in the Village, not far from where Matta lived. One day, I recall, Matta and I went up to Columbia to see the mathematical three-dimensional objects (like very beautiful abstract sculptures) that are made by mathematicians, to show their concepts in three 1960s

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dimensions. In the subway, on the way back, there was a very attractive young woman, who spoke to Matta. Afterwards I asked who she was, and he said that she was the wife of a very good young American artist, Bill Baziotes. Come to think of it, he said, you ought to get to know Baziotes. He thought we would like each other. Matta had us to dinner, and we became friends on the spot. SIMON: Do you recall seeing Malta's first show in New York, at the Julian Levy Gallery? It opened in April 1940. This would have been a year before you met him. MOTHERWELL: No, I don't remember seeing it. My vivid feelings about his work were always the same. I loved his pencil drawings, but I never really liked his paintings. For me they were theatrical and glossy, too illusionistic for my taste. But I do think the drawings he made in those years—in the late I93o's and 1940's—are among the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful work made in America at that time. And there were hundreds of them. Matta, with all his worldliness and sociability, has always been a very hard worker, enormously productive. SIMON: How do Pollock, Busa and Kamrowski relate to the general situation that we have been discussing? MOTHERWELL: Well, here is where I have got to talk about what has always seemed to me the beginnings of what later became known as Abstract Expressionism. The thing that I want to establish (and I say this as a metaphor) is that Matta had an Oedipal relation to the Surrealists. He was, in the time we are talking about, only about 30 years old while all of the other Surrealists were in their forties. He was the loved son, the heir apparent; but he was also treated with a certain amount of suspicion, somewhat unfairly, because the last person to play his role was also Spanish speaking—I'm referring, of course, to Salvador Dali. The Surrealists at the moment hated Dali; and I think there was some suspicion that Matta might be ultimately another Dali. In any case, Matta certainly had a deep love-hate relationship with the Surrealists. At one moment when the hate relationship was more dominant, he wanted to show the Surrealists up, so to speak, as middleaged grey-haired men who weren't zeroed into contemporary reality. He realized that if he made a manifesto by himself, or even if he had a beautiful show by himself, the Surrealists could say, well, he's a Surrealist and he's very talented; but if there were a group who made a manifestation that was more daring and qualitatively more beautiful than the Surrealists themselves, then he could succeed in his objective of showing them up. 280

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SIMON: The possibility of succeeding in this I would say must have been rather dim. Would you agree? MOTHERWELL: Of course. The thing was that there weren't a lot of good painters around; or if there were we didn't know about them; so the problem was how to go about it. Matta came to me and Baziotes with the problem. Of course, I didn't know any American artists, though by this time I had got to know most of the European artists reasonably well. Baziotes, however, had been on the WPA for many years and perhaps was still on it at that time. So Matta said to Baziotes, are there some guys on the WPA who are interested in modern art and not in all that social realist crap? Baziotes said there are very few. He named Pollock, de Kooning, Kamrowski and Busa. And then Matta said to me, how can we make a manifestation? And I answered that the great manifestation in America had been the Armory Show, that perhaps we should hire an armory, or a big loft or something, and show new work. Matta said—quite properly—if we are going to make a manifesto against the Surrealists, the work has to have some group point, something more than simply personal talent. Then I said, you and I have talked for a year constantly about Surrealist theories of automatism and we believe that they can be carried much further. Since the three of us have been experimenting with various forms of automatism all winter, perhaps we could explain what automatism is to the artists Baziotes has named and see if they would be interested in some kind of collaboration. I suggested that perhaps we could even rent a place, a month in advance of the show, and all go there for a month and make this manifestation on the spot. SIMON: You make it sound like a quite feasible idea after all. I would be interested to know why it never came off. MOTHERWELL: Matta was all for it then. He was very enthusiastic, full of ideas, loved to see things start; but once they got started, he often lost interest or got interested in something else. So what ultimately happened was that I , as the theoretician, and Baziotes, as the friend of the artists, were sent to explain all of this to them somewhat on our own. Matta, you see, retreated from the enterprise, which nonetheless was more personal to him than to us. SIMON: But you went ahead with the project anyway? MOTHERWELL: Yes. I asked Baziotes who he thought to be the most talented of his friends. Baziotes thought probably Pollock. He gives the impression of being very tough and he didn't know how receptive he would be to the idea. I remember that Baziotes called up Pollock and we made a date to go 1960s

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and spend a whole afternoon with him. I talked, I guess, for four or five hours explaining the whole Surrealist thing in general and the theory of automatism in particular, which nowadays we would call a technique of free association. I showed Pollock how Klee and Masson made their things, etc. And Pollock, to my astonishment, listened intently; in fact, he invited me to come back another afternoon, which I did. This would be the winter of 1942. SIMON: Just how interested would you say Pollock was? MOTHERWELL: What I haven't said is that by this time Pd become friendly with Peggy Guggenheim (who either had or was about to marry Max Ernst and was very much part of the Surrealist milieu). I think a lot of Pollock's interest in me was not altogether in what I was saying, but in that I had a connection with Peggy Guggenheim. (In those days it was almost impossible for an unknown American artist to show in a first-rate modern gallery, such as Curt Valentin or Pierre Matisse.) And it turned out, in fact, that Peggy Guggenheim was the only one who recognized—because of the milieu she was in—the value of the new artists, and showed us with style and class, to her credit. But Pollock learned something esthetically too. He was barely past the Mexicans and coming up to the Picasso of the I93o's. SIMON: You mentioned a second visit to Pollock. MOTHERWELL: That second visit I recall vividly. Pollock was living with Lee Krasner, who was a pupil and admirer of Hofmann, who lived only a few doors from them. I think it was at Lee's behest that Pollock took me over after dinner to see Hofmann. It was the first time I had met him, and I at once realized that my being 26 years old—Hofmann was already in his 6o's—it would be impertinent for a young apprentice artist to tell him about what painting was. As it turned out, Pollock got drunk on a big jug of red wine, and we all had to carry him down four flights into the street and then up four flights to his place. It was a helluva job. SIMON: Did you see much of Pollock after that? MOTHERWELL: After several months, Pollock and I became somewhat friendly. He and his wife and I and my wife and the two Baziotes used to write automatic poems together, which I kept in a book. Unfortunately, this book is now lost, given away or stolen. I greatly regret that I have never been able to recover the poems which were inserted in the book for safekeeping! SIMON: After Pollock, which artist did you contact? MOTHERWELL: I think Peter Busa was the next. In those days Busa struck me 282

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as the epitome of the Italian artisan, gentle and charming. Just married. I seem to recall that he was painting the female figure with the degree of abstraction of, let us say, Karl Hofer, or perhaps, Modigliani. After Busa, we called on Kamrowski, a depressed man who expressed an interest in our proposed project and did begin to work in these directions. The last person to be visited—it was Pollock's initiative that took me to see him—was de Kooning. He had a loft around West igth Street. In those days de Kooning was painting figure paintings in a direction that he developed jointly with Gorky and John Graham. De Kooning was also doing abstractions in a rather loose and to me not very interesting manner. I think at this particular time his figure paintings were not wholly resolved. He had some inability to "finish" them. I remember that there were never eyes in the sockets. There were other details that baffled him. In any case, he wasn't particularly interested in what I told him; he became interested in automatism only much later. SIMON: Does Gorky figure in this at all? MOTHERWELL: Only to the extent that about two years later, Matta, on his own, converted Gorky to the theory of automatism. Gorky in those days wouldn't pay much attention to what we said, although I spent a whole evening at Peggy Osborn's house telling him all about Surrealism, about which, incidentally, he knew very little. This would be the spring of 1942. SIMON: Would it be correct to say that an informal group of the artists you and Baziotes contacted ended up by meeting from time to time in Matta's studio in order to conduct certain experiments? MOTHERWELL: To be truthful I don't recall an awful lot about that. The meetings must have been separate. It was an awkward situation in that Matta was the guiding spirit. You have to remember that he was much more "successful," he was earning his living as an artist, he knew many famous collectors and artists very well, and he was part of the international art-establishment. On the other hand, we were all loners, basically, ignored and neglected; so that he would, so to speak, flirt with us, but never abandon his other world for us. In the end, though he was the instigator of it all, the strongest relationships grew up among the American artists, because, in a way, we were left in the lurch by him, and we made our own way. Nevertheless, my conviction is that, more than any other single thing, the introduction and acceptance of the theory of automatism brought about a different look into our painting. We worked more directly and violently, and ultimately on a much larger scale physically than the Surrealists ever 1960s

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had. It was the germ, historically, of what later came to be called Abstract Expressionism. SIMON: Can you recall any of the early experiments you and the others made? MOTHERWELL: Let's see. The summer of'411 was in Mexico. Either the next summer or the one after, Peggy Guggenheim, who was by then married to Max Ernst, took a house for the summer in Provincetown. I and several other people followed. Matta was living nearby—he had a house in Wellfleet. Several times (in going to Peggy's for dinner) Max took me into his studio. There he had hung brushes from the ceiling on a cord so that they would just touch a canvas placed on the floor beneath. They would swing like a pendulum, making a kind of labyrinth on the canvas. Of course, this anticipated Pollock's drip style, but only in a very limited sense, i.e., limited to arcs. By comparison, what Pollock achieved was totally different, totally free. We experimented rather freely. Together we would make what the Surrealists called the Exquisite Corpse. You know what that is? SIMON: Yes, of course. The paper is folded and each one does a different part of the figure. MOTHERWELL: Right. I remember that a conflict came up between Matta and myself. As I said earlier, I greatly admired his pencil drawings, which were, roughly speaking, in the same vein as Miró—very comic and very plastic. When we began to play the Exquisite Corpse, I thought Matta would use this degree of abstraction, but instead he drew comically, very realistically. As in a Barney Google cartoon there would be a nose and, very carefully, a pimple on it, a couple of hairs coming out of it—very much in the style of present-day Mad Magazine. I expected that he would draw in a more inventive Klee or Miró way—more the way I tried to draw at the time. So the group drawings looked funny. SIMON: Was Pollock receptive at all to these various experiments? MOTHERWELL: I don't know. To be truthful, it always astonished me when he appeared. He said very little, and made it very clear, after the second session I had with him, that he didn't believe in group activities and would not join the proposed manifestation that we were going to have. At the same time, I think now, in retrospect, that he was much more ambitious than I realized. In those days, given my university background, I did things with a certain gratuitousness, with a love of doing things for their own sake. As and "amateur" in the English sense. Pollock had had a much more tor284

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merited, and, socially, a much more difficult life than I had. He was probably much tougher than I was, but didn't reveal this to me. He was certainly interested in getting in a functioning world. Peggy Guggenheim, rather than the Surrealists, was the real center of attraction to him, I think now. SIMON: Peggy Guggenheim opened her gallery in November 1942. Exactly a year later she gave Pollock his first one-man show. MOTHERWELL: I don't remember exactly when Peggy became aware of Pollock, Baziotes and myself among the young American artists. But I do remember that she was going to put on the first international collage show that had ever been held in America. It was going to include all the names— Schwitters, Max Ernst, Cornell, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Masson, etc. And because she was benignly and generously interested in the three of us—you see, she suggested to me that we all make some collages, and if they were any good (she reserved the right of judgment) she'd put them in the show. It was to have been the first chance for all three of us to show in a major gallery with major artists. The idea both excited and intimidated us. One day, Pollock suggested to me—Pollock in a funny way was a very shy as well as a very violent man—he suggested in a reticent way that since neither of us had ever made a collage that we try to do them together. I liked the idea and we decided to do so in his studio. (He had been painting much longer than I had, and had a much more professional set-up than mine in terms of space, light and materials.) And we did make our first collages together. He, I remember, burnt his with matches and spit on it. Generally, he worked with a violence that I had never seen before. As is well known, I took to collage like a duck to water. I showed my results to Matta, who liked them very much, but said that they are too little. "If you can do them that well little, you can do them bigger." He urged me to make some big ones. And I did. They became the core of my first show at Peggy Guggenheim's in October 1944. SIMON: To return to Pollock for a moment, what, in your opinion, led him to adopt the drip technique? MOTHERWELL: I have a theory about how Pollock came to work this way. Of course it's not demonstrable, but from everything I saw of him in those days and from looking at his work, I believe it to be true: when I met him he was just coming out from having been deeply influenced by the Mexican painters—I think, particularly, by Orozco. The only American painter he liked then—he told me so—was Albert Ryder. (In that famous early document by him which appeared in one of the art magazines—I actually wrote it 1960s

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for him on the basis of interviews—he says this specifically.) As you know he studied with Benton. What Ryder, Benton and Orozco all have in common is that they are highly rhythmic, brutal and Expressionist painters. I am convinced that an intense, brutal rhythm was at the heart of Pollock's plastic understanding as well. When I met him, as I say, he was just coming out of Orozco into violent Picassos of the sort having to do with the drawings for Guernica. In those days Mary Gallery had a collection of art devoted entirely to Picasso and Léger. It included Picasso's famous woman with a knife in her hand holding a rooster—a brutal, beautiful picture. And I think Pollock's aspiration was to make his own version of that kind of Picasso—the Picasso's of the midI93o's. And he wasn't able to do it without making them look too much like Picasso. Pollock, by nature, was a convulsive man, a really violent man and a hard-drinking man. I think that at certain moments of despair and frustration, he would violently cross out his Picasso images, and, at a certain moment, some of them took on a beauty of their own. Part of the beauty of Pollock's work is the sense that underneath his beautiful surface there is a sea of swarming eels, lobsters and sharks. And I think that, at a certain moment (it was perfectly natural), he realized that he didn't have to make the Picasso thing at all, but could directly do the crossing out or dripping, or what have you But even in one of his very last shows, he returned to a version of a Picassoesque figure. I think a lot of Pollock's doubt—which doesn't seem to me strange at all—was that his gift was for something other than that what he really wanted to do. I have a feeling that in many artists, when they finally find their style, it's not what they originally wanted to do at all, but it turns out to be what they are best at doing. And it would be a foolish man who would do something else. SIMON: Your comments about Pollock bring to my mind the question of Masson. How much had you looked at Masson's work? MOTHERWELL: We all looked at Masson's work a lot. He was here. No one, it is true, knew him very well. To the best of my knowledge, he never learned a word of English. Also, he lived in the country, in Connecticut; the Surrealists, after they had been here a couple of years, tended to move to the country. Gorky, when he was picked up by the Surrealists, also moved to Connecticut. There was a regular enclave there. SIMON: Where would you have seen Masson's work? MOTHERWELL: He exhibited a lot. I can remember several one-man shows. 286

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He was a prolific, hard-working artist. Everyone would have been very aware of his work in terms of automatism, which is how his work is built. And many of us were also aware of some beautiful collages he had made much earlier—a fairly blank canvas with a few automatic lines and very often feathers or something like that pasted on—around 1927, or so. SIMON: What about Kandinsky's work? MOTHERWELL: I don't think most of us paid much attention to Kandinsky, with the exception of Gorky; but even in Gorky's case, the interest was much more technical, about edges, lines, etc., than in Kandinsky's overall conception. I think that some historical things are, in a way, invented all over again. My personal conviction is that had Kandinsky never existed, Abstract Expressionism would look exactly the same way. What I am saying is that at the particular moment in American art that we are talking about, what was needed was a creative principle. It is never enough to learn merely from pictures. When you learn merely from pictures, the result is bound to be somewhat imitative as compared to starting off with a real principle. In this sense, the theory of automatism was the first modern theory of creating that was introduced into America early enough to allow American artists to be equally adventurous or even more adventurous than their European counterparts. It was this that put America on the artistic map, so to speak, as authentically contemporary. SIMON: In this respect Peggy Guggenheim's gallery served a very practical function. MOTHERWELL: Yes. Look at the artists who showed at Peggy's—Baziotes, Pollock and myself—and a little later Rothko, Still and Gottlieb, and so on. Before that time, Gorky had a large underground reputation. Also Hofmann. But very few people had seen their pictures. Around 1945 Kootz came along and offered us money to paint—very little but enough to manage on. Many of the artists of what I think of as the second wave of Abstract Expressionism were impressed that we were making a mark, so to speak, and decided that it was time for them to start to move. And only then did they begin to examine seriously the principles on which our work was based—and in the process partly distorted them. Peggy always said she would go back to Europe when the war was over, and she did. I remember some years ago talking to Rothko about automatism. He and I became friends in the mid 1940's. I told him a lot about Surrealism. He was one of the few American painters who really liked Surrealist painting, went to Surrealist shows, and understood very well what I was talking 1960s

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about. When he developed the style in the late 1940's for which he is now famous, he told me that there was always automatic drawing under those larger forms. When I talk about automatic drawing—the method we used— I don't mean doodling, something absent-minded, trivial and tiny. If we doodled—and perhaps you can say that we did—it was ultimately on the scale of the Sistine Chapel. The essential thing was to let the brush take its head and take whatever we could use from the results. And of course it was Pollock who became the most identified with this technique of working. In his dripping, one could see most clearly and nakedly the essential nature of the process. SIMON: A new sense of scale, then, I take it, you feel was an essential factor in Abstract Expressionism—even in the 1940's? MOTHERWELL: I think that one of the major American contributions to modern art is sheer size. There are lots of arguments as to whether it should be credited to Pollock, Still or Rothko, even Newman. It's hard to say, probably Pollock, possibly Still SIMON: Yes, what about Still in this connection? MOTHERWELL: I had never heard of Still, until he had his first show at Peggy's. Pollock had his in '43, Baziotes and I in '44, Rothko and Still in '45.1 must say, it is to Still's credit—his was the show, of all those early shows of ours, that was the most original. A bolt out of the blue. SIMON: In what sense? MOTHERWELL: Most of us were still working through images toward what ultimately became Abstract Expressionism. Baziotes, Pollock and I all had some degree of figuration in our work, abstract as our work was; whereas Still had none. His canvases were large ones in earth colors. I don't suppose that they would seem so large now, but they did then. They mainly had a kind of jagged streak down the center, in a way like a present-day Newman if it were much more free-handed, that is, if the line were jagged, like lightning. My belief is that Still's influence on Abstract Expressionism was strongest later on, in the very late 40's when he and Rothko met in San Francisco teaching in the same school. Rothko was deeply impressed with Still; and Rothko, in those days, was, in turn, very close to Newman. (I also think that they must have had some experience with Expressionism, which undoubtedly contributed a certain element to Abstract Expressionism.) But the developments I have been talking about—automatism particularly—came out of Paris, and not out of either German or American Expres288

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sionism. I think the "Expressionist" part of Abstract Expressionism had to do with a certain violence native to the American character; I do not think it was the result of esthetic considerations. What, in my opinion, happened in American painting after the war had its origins in automatism that was assimilated to the particular New York situation—that is, the Surrealist tone and literary qualities were dropped, and the doodle transformed into something plastic, mysterious, and sublime. No Parisian is a sublime painter, nor a monumental one, not even Miró.

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The 1970s EMERGING CONTEXTS AND CLOSER READINGS

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JUDITH WOLFE

Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery

While Jackson Pollock's interest in high art was paramount, the theories of Carl Gustav Jung were also important as a means of realizing an expression that was both individual and universal in its implications. This aspect of Pollock, while widely known, has not been sufficiently explored, nor has it even received proper credit as a motivating force within his development. Pollock's knowledge of Jung's work seems to have begun in 1934 when, as a janitor at the City and Country School in New York City, he met Helen Marot, a teacher interested in Jungian psychology. Through her guidance, he would have been aware of Jung's latest writings, for she knew Mrs. Gary Baynes, who translated Jung's writings for English language publication both in England and in the United States under the auspices of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York.1 A letter from Sanford Pollock to his brother Charles in July 1937 states that he, Sandy, had taken Jackson to "a well recommended Doctor, a Psychiatrist, . . . some six months" previously.2 Art therapy may have been used in this treatment, for it was Pollock who suggested to Henderson in 1939 that he use drawings as a basis of psychological analysis.3 The painter was at the Westchester Division of New York Hospital in treatment for acute alcoholism from June to September, 1938. Early in 1939, for 18 months until the summer of 1940, Pollock was in analysis with the Jungian psychologist, Joseph L. Henderson. (Henderson is included in Man and His Symbols, a collection of essays edited by Jung and published in 1964 as a popular introduction to Jungian thought.) After Henderson left for San Francisco, Pollock consulted Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlow, a prominent Jungian who later edited Psyche and Symbol (1958) and the Modern Library Basic Writings (1959) of Jung.4 This relationship lasted at least two years, possibly longer.5 In the fall of 1943 Pollock sought a different treatment, with a homeopathic physician in New York, whom he visited more or less regularly until his death.6 Five years later, in 1948, he received help that seemed effective from a general practitioner in East Hampton: "He is an honest man, I can believe him," was Pollock's explanation to his wife.7 Two years later (1950) Pollock was drinking

SOURCE: Artforum (November 1972), 65-73. Copyright © Artforum, November 1972, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery," by Judith Wolfe 293

again. From March 1951 to June 1952 he consulted a woman psychiatrist specializing in alcoholism and took part in group therapy sessions, only to discontinue them when the doctor objected to the nature of his concurrent biochemical treatment, which lasted for two years, beginning in September 1951. Then, in the summer of 1955, he reentered analysis with Ralph Klein, a clinical psychologist of the Sullivanian Institute.8 The listing of professional treatments Pollock underwent is not an exhaustive probe, but it is fair to say that Pollock's contacts with Jungian thought are strongest early in his career. In fact, he had immediate access to Jung's writings and ideas from the mid-'30s to the early '405. Also, it seems as if Pollock gave up on psychological means and favored the physiological for the better part of that career, that is, from around 1943 to early 1951, mid-1952 to 1955. Nonetheless, weeks before his death in 1956, Pollock said in reference to the labels "nonobjective" and "nonrepresentational," "I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time."9 Mrs. Lee Krasner Pollock recalls that Pollock referred to his sessions with Dr. Henderson as having been important to him.10 Yet, in 1939 Henderson was only in his first year of practice and has since admitted to having to cope with the problem of his own counter-transference: I wonder why I neglected to find out, study or analyze his personal problems in the first year of his work alcoholism

I wonder why I did not seem to try to cure his

I have decided that it is because his unconscious drawings

brought me strongly into a state of counter-transference to the symbolic material he produced. Thus I was compelled to follow the movement of his symbolism as inevitably as he was motivated to produce it.11 Thus, personal problems were not the issue, but "symbolic material" was. As Jungians are schooled in mythology and anthropology, Henderson probably dealt with such information in his sessions with the artist. "Most of my comments centered around the nature of the archetypal symbolism in his drawings," Henderson later wrote to В. Н. Friedman, Pollock's most recent biographer.12 Pollock we know was interested in American Indian cultures. It is noteworthy that 20 years later, in "Ancient Myths and Modern Man," the chapter which Henderson contributed to Man and His Symbols, the psychologist used as many examples from folk tales of American Indians as from Greek myths. 294

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Pollock therefore was cognizant of the areas of psychology and American anthropology—so important to the New York painters in the early '405— earlier than were most other American painters of his generation. In addition, his attitudes resulted from an internal need rather than from a programmatic artistic development. In Pollock's case, the Jungian intonation preceded the fashionable psychological stress (primarily Freudian) which accompanied the absorption of Surrealist thinking in this country during World War II. Jung's 1932 article on "Picasso," his only article devoted to a painter, may have been known to Pollock in 1940 when a translation appeared in New York, or even earlier through the offices of his Jungian friends. There Jung states that a series of images ... begins as a rule with the symbol of the Nekyia—the journey to Hades, the descent into the unconscious The journey through the psychic history of mankind has as its object the restoration of the whole man, whole with regard to the bipolarity of human nature. After the symbols of madness experienced during the period of disintegration there follow images which represent the coming together of the opposites: light/dark, above/ below, white/black, male/female, etc.13 The ideas of a journey into the unconscious, often called the "night sea journey," and the coming together of opposites abound in Jung's writings as well as in his students' discussions, so that this particular article, though surely of interest to Pollock, need not be the sole source of these ideas. The disintegration of conflicting opposites might find its painterly analogue in Pollock's early allover abstraction in which light/dark and warm/cool colors frenetically interrupt each other in short brushstrokes. Most of Pollock's paintings before 1942 can be dated only approximately.14 They show great diversity of subject matter and style. The subjects may be loosely classified as figure groups and less frequently single figure studies, stylized landscapes with and without figures, purely symbolic forms, and forms so thoroughly abstracted as to only arbitrarily belong to the above groupings. When the animal is part of a figure group in these earlier works, it is as a separate entity and man is present in some connected way, as, for instance, horse and rider. At a point which seems simultaneous with the entry of stylistic elements derived from Picasso, animal and human parts are conjoined in the same figure. Such a metamorphosis is clearly present in a work called Painting of around 1938. Lawrence Alloway feels the point of departure for this work was a late Cubist still life such as the 1925 Studio with Plaster 1970s

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Head or Ram's Head by Picasso.15 If this is so, it doesn't entirely account for the emotional effect communicated by the inverted human head, upwardthrust clenched fist, and downward-piercing beak shape. Painting may be the earliest example of one of Pollock's preferred formats: a horizontal rectangle with registers above and below and closed off at the sides, a type more fully developed in Guardians of the Secret and Pasiphaë of 1943 and furthered with variations in Night Mist of 1944 and Numbers и and 14 of 1951, to cite the most important. While Picasso and the Mexican muralists are clearly influential in Painting, William Blake may have also contributed to the conception of the picture in terms of both content and format. The 1936 Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art included precursors of these movements and kindred works by artists of earlier centuries. A plate from Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job is listed and illustrated in the influential catalogue: "With dreams upon my bed, Thou scarest me and affrightest me with Visions." Certainly such a personal religious view would have appealed to Pollock. His partiality to Blake is clear, for a work by that artist was one of the illustrations which Pollock had tacked on his Long Island studio wall.16 Jungians stress the importance of Job's perception of God as a dual power. Blake expresses this duality in his depiction of God, whose leg metamorphoses from a manlike calf to a cloven hoof. And the text which Blake engraved just above this image, from II Corinthians, reads: "Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light "Job, outstretched upon a bed, pushes away the hovering Satan-God, who is depicted with pointed tufts of hair. Muscular arms loop up from flames below and tug at Job. At the top register are "stone tablets of the Law" from which emanate "the lightnings of damnation."17 In Pollock's Painting the horizontal registrations with wider implications than a purely sexual reference may well owe much to this composition by Blake. Pollock's painting, however, resembles the etching only in general tone, in the undulating lower area and menacing pointed form above. Pollock has felt the need to leave more space at the sides. On the left, in fact, are two elements which correspond to specific shapes in the etching: an arc similar to half the stone tablets and a zigzag like the bolt of lightning; both elements are seen laterally. The Painting remains much more personal than any of its possible iconographie sources. Certainly some private symbolism is intended. Perhaps the beaked birdlike head may represent reputed spiritual qualities, a false god with the capacity to torture. The object of its wrath is a human/bull-or-horse 296

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head, itself symbolic perhaps of more earthy, impulsive qualities. A sentence from Jung's discussion of Job is apposite: Here Job is voicing the torment of soul caused by the onslaught of unconscious desires; the libido festers in his flesh, a cruel God has overpowered him and pierced him through with barbed thoughts that agonize his whole being. Jung goes on to comment (C. W., V, pp. 289-90): The same image occurs in Nietzsche: Stretched out, shivering, Like one half dead whose feet are warmed, Shaken by unknown fevers, Shuddering from the icy pointed arrows of frost, Hunted by thee, О thought, Unutterable! veiled! horrible one! Thou huntsman behind the clouds. Struck to the ground by thee, Thou mocking eye that gazeth at me from the dark: Thus do I lie, Twisting, writhing, tortured With eternal tortures, Smitten By thee, cruel huntsman, Thou unknown—God! Pollock probably looked at the volume in which Jung wrote these lines, Psychology of the Unconscious, in a chapter entitled, "The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother." At about the same time as Painting, Pollock executed a vertical canvas of more dense and masklike interlocked shapes. Its title, Birth, may have more than one meaning. There are similarities with Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting generally regarded as heralding the birth of Cubism, and one which Pollock especially liked.18 In addition to Pollock's strident use of mask forms and a cascading composition, the bent "leg" in the lower left part of the painting recalls the leg of the squatting woman in the Picasso canvas. The head of the same figure in the Picasso is cupped in a variation on the crescent shape of the melon slice beside her leg. Such shapes seem to form each of the circular "masks" of the Pollock. That these telescoping, tumbling forms can be read as masks is clear from an untitled painting of about 1936 in which Pol1970s

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lock depicts a standing male nude, rather like an archaic Kouros except that the head is represented by the same mask-and-crescent form which is multiplied in Birth.19 The masks of Birth acquire an additional resonance when we realize Pollock seems to innovate upon just that section of the Demoiselles in which the derivation from the ritual mask is most extreme. Pollock's leg has an odd terminus, rather like the end of a hollow cylinder. The analogous Picasso leg terminates behind a still life in which there is a similar round shape, probably an apple. There may be a larger reason for the existence of this aperture at the end of a limb. It could represent the place from which life emerges and into which life-forming substance is put: Jung treats most symbols as bisexual in nature. In fact, an illustration from Jung's Symbols of Transference, first published in the United States in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious, depicts people walking out of a large hollow tube, a "birth-giving orifice" of Mexican mythology (C. W., V, p. 125). That Pollock's circular mask-beings emerge from between the legs is not surprising. The upraised fingers to the right of this area, quite Picasso-like, and similar to those in the upper left of Demoiselles d'Avignon, comprise the most naturalistic element in the picture. Such a distinction calls to our attention the fact that the hand is the immediate means of creating a painting, and perhaps this could be an additional meaning for Pollock's title. Tony Smith, the sculptor, says that Pollock was very curious about the idea of having children and asked questions of Smith, father of four, implying that he related human offspring to the production of art: "He was always asking what it was like. Did they seem a part of you, an extension of you? ... It was almost as if he thought you could have some kind of control over what they would be like— even as babies. It must have been the way he thought about art."20 In 1939 Henderson formed the opinion that "a psychic birth-death-rebirth cycle was essential to the maintenance of Pollock's sanity."21 This is a widely held Jungian concept and would certainly have been known to Pollock before he met Henderson, and therefore, could figure in the painting's heritage at whatever date the painting was made. Birth was exhibited in a group show of American and French paintings selected by John Graham early in 1942 at McMillen, Inc., New York City. Pollock probably sought the acquaintance of this cosmopolitan artist after the appearance of Graham's article, "Primitive Art and Picasso," in the Magazine of Art of April, 1937. In his paper, which is steeped in Jung, Graham spoke of the collective unconscious as having manifested itself throughout the ages in meaningful forms which the present-day unconscious is capable of receiving. 298

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He felt this force was most evident in the design of primitive art and in Picasso's work after 1927. As Picasso, Jung, and the art of tribal cultures, specifically the Indians of the American Southwest, were all important to Pollock, there was certainly matter in the article to delight him. But the degree of Graham's influence is hard to pinpoint, as is Graham's work of the time. One of Pollock's paintings, at least, seems to bear some relation to Graham. Bird, tentatively dated c. 1941, is marked by the color preferences associated with Graham: cerulean blue, red, white, black outlining. Such a heraldic combination of images must reflect a will to meaning. The single eye hovering in the sky might imply spirituality and possibly godliness; in a 1943 explication of Jung's psychology, such a floating eye was the "Eye of God," and for the patient who drew it, interpreted to be "a symbol of the Self."22 The bird's body is another variation on the mask motif. The top half, including the wings, stands against the sky while the lower portion is in the darkness of the bottom half of the picture, in which two human heads extend from opposite poles of a glowing, golden orb. The heads are only minimally differentiated—symmetry was important in this painting—but the differences in the rendering of noses and mouths convince me that the heads must be female and male. The female nose is marked by nostrils (openings), while the male nose is a protruding shape; the female lips seem fuller and softer than the male. Considered diagrammatically, the painting could be interpreted as the balance and conjoining of male and female qualities in the treasured region of the unconscious. From this harmonious balance, one's conscious state may realize its highest possibilities. This heavy, even dogmatic, treatment contrasts sharply with Pollock's usual multivalent references, both artistic and symbolic, a multivalence which provokes a more mysterious interest and more closely approximates the complexities of Jungian interpretation. Pollock's painting of 1942-1946 is more "of a piece" than the early work but still shows great diversity. Imagery contributes to the seeming consistency, but Pollock has largely settled on a composition of one or two or more abstract personages. This concentration on human/animal imagery is exercised with varying degrees of figure-readability and of figure-on-ground versus an allover interaction of forms. A theoretical position would make us want to see this stylistic variation establish a progression leading into the allover drip paintings. If one selects the proper paintings, this can be done. However, contemporaneous with such "development," Pollock continued to paint legible figures against distinct grounds, as in The Child Proceeds of 1946.23 It seems that Pollock's attitude at this time favors what he is saying as much as how he 1970s

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says it. Indeed, Robert Motherwell, with whom he was briefly associated in the early '405, wrote prophetically in 1944 that Pollock's "principle problem is to discover what his true subject is. And since painting is his thought's medium, the resolution must grow out of the process of his painting itself."24 Moon Woman of 1942, a painting included in Pollock's first one-man show held in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1943, clearly derives from Pollock's Jungian interests, as its title attests. For Jung, the moon is a symbol of periodic creation, death (when invisible), and recreation. Most important to Pollock, perhaps, the moon represents the Diana-Hecate dualism: the young girl, anima-spirit, contrasted with the all-devouring Terrible Mother. The painting, Moon Woman, with its cursive arabesques and the slim aspect of its stick figure, appears to deal with the anima-spirit: "vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feelings for nature, and... [a man's] relation to the unconscious."25 This picture, unlike many of the period, is easily experienced as capricious and delightful, though sinister overtones are present as well. The eye pierces a crescent shape which produces little scratches of tears or blood, and a version of the conventional Picasso profile is soberly incorporated into what at first seemed the back side of the lady's head. Guardians of the Secret,, 1943, while not much larger than Moon Woman, suggests the incipient monumentalism of the later Pollock. Its rectangular sectioning, working in from the framing edge, provides a structure similar to both the ground plan and the post-and-lintel elevation of a Greek temple, a structure which also bears testimony to Mondrian's presence in New York. The vertical guardians flanking the center, which houses the inner chaos of the secret—the casket or bed or altar—are most likely male and female figures, the alchemical King and Queen, Sol and Luna. Which is male and which is female remains unanswered, though most probably the female is on the left, as was the case in Bird and as is consistent with Jung's historical and psychological data. The lower guardian, an alert dog, derives from the animal world and is also the least abstracted figure. From him, an ability to decipher the images decreases in moving upward through the flanking figures to the upper register, and intelligibility is confounded altogether in the central area. The forms which emerge from this center seem to occupy the two adjacent registers of background in the upper section. This background duality may refer to the higher and lower aspects of conscious ideas, emerging from the undifferentiated unconscious. These "ideas" are more conceptualized than the instinctual ani300

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mal world. In this sense, then, the painting can be understood to represent both the manifestations of, as well as the guardians of, that central secret, the unconscious. Such a diagrammatic interpretation of the painting is consonant with the fact that Jungians diagram all aspects of the psyche—the ego, the unconscious, the sphere of consciousness, to name but a few. However,Jungian diagrams are most frequently circular, radiating from a center and divided into four parts which contain no figure. If Pollock's composition represents a Jungian scheme, it has been entirely remodeled. Pasiphaë of 1943 uses a similar design format. Geometry is not nearly so evident, however; the strongest internal boundary is the broken ellipse in which the central struggle takes place. There appears to be an "audience" in the double flanking figures, now four in all. In Jung's writings four is a symbol of wholeness and completeness, and the number plays a prominent role in his discussions of the process of individuation: the four developmental stages of the anima; the four functions of consciousness—thought, intuition, feeling, sensation; or the four elements of the physical world whose alchemical interaction provides an analogy for that process. The four beings who witness the central event might locate it in some such psychic drama. According to William S. Lieberman, Pollock's first title for this painting was The White Whale; according to Bryan Robertson, Moby Dick.26 Pollock only changed it to Pasiphaë at the enthusiastic insistence of James Johnson Sweeney, the curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Art, now the Guggenheim. One must remember that Pollock took great care in choosing titles but that it was generally after the completion of the painting that he dealt with this problem. The central motif of Pasiphaë seems equally as much a woman astride a bull as a white whale pursued by Ahab. Whatever the final title, each of the possibilities concerns the obsession of a human being with an allegorical animal. "In mythology," Jung notes, "the unconscious is portrayed as a great animal, for instance ... as a whale, wolf or dragon," and since the equivalent area in Guardians of the Secret was the unconscious, the elliptical arena of Pasiphaë may symbolize the unconscious as well (C. W.y XIV, p. 210). In this ellipse a sticklike figure struggles with a larger animal-being, white shot with yellows, pale blue and lavender and whose flailing limbs, neither distinctly bull nor whale, end in toes and possibly fingers. Whether the action be a sexual or tragic agon is of little consequence to the overall Jungian view, in which the "conjunctio" takes place in the "vessel," here the ellipse, which "is also called the grave"; the union is understood to be a "shared death," with 1970s

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rebirth following. The striving for this union—fully-achieved psychic integration and the attendant expansion of understanding—is the central concern of Jung's work and, quite certainly, of Pollock's paintings. Moby Dick was a favorite book of Pollock's.27 He fully appreciated the symbol for which he named his picture. There can be no doubt that he meant to represent the quest and anger and engagement with a central force potent enough to bite off one's leg—to castrate. Unlike Pasiphaë, the animal imagery of She-Wolf is readily identifiable. The large wolf occupies the major portion of the composition; a central, rectangular area is marked by the ground line, foreleg, and a straight line somewhat near the creature's back. This central area, so different from that ofPasiphaë, is devoid of activity, especially in contrast with the swirling lines and overpainting at the edges of the picture. This barren area is occupied by the creature's teats, a place of nourishment. Just where Romulus and Remus ought to suckle if we accept as Pollock's source the Etruscan statue of the she-wolf with the Renaissance addition of infants, there is studiously nothing. The absent nurslings may find a counterpart in a drawing Pollock had given to Henderson several years earlier, in which a human mother raises her hand in denial against the child seeking her breast.28 Jung mentions the Roman she-wolf in his Psychology of the Unconscious, with which Pollock was probably acquainted. In the same chapter, "The Dual Mother," Jung describes the psychosis of a possessive mother who in a delirium, "at the time of the climacteric ... [ran] about on all fours, howling like a wolf. . . . She had herself become the symbol of the all-devouring mother" (С.Ж,У,рр.321,328). The relation of both the mother and a large animal with the unconscious is clear in Jung's writings, as is the fact that every mythical element has positive and negative aspects. In the She-Wolf, Pollock has presented an animal with power over life and death. The teats exhibit her life-giving function; the absence of children indicates her more fearful aspects. Pollock's comment on the painting was: She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it.29 There is a specific instance where Pollock uses an American Indian image published by Jung. Sir Herbert Read, one of the editor's of Jung's Collected

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Works, wrote in 1961 to Lawrence Alloway of a Haida Indian tattoo pattern representing the woman in the moon comparable to Pollock's Moon Woman Cuts the Circle of 1943. Read also mentioned a "reference on the same page to a Hottentot legend about 'cutting offa sizeable piece' of the moon."30 The legend in question actually refers to the sun, but this does not dilute the source of Pollock's title. Jung illustrates the tattoo in Psychology of the Unconscious in the chapter on "The Dual Mother." In this chapter, Longfellow's Hiawatha was used as a framework upon which Jung discussed the nature of the son's relationship to the mother, with the specific intention of illustrating that the act of breaking away from the mother is itself a form of death necessary to begin a new life. "Young Hiawatha asks his grandmother what the moon really is. She tells him that the moon is the body of a grandmother who had been thrown up there by one of her warlike grandchildren in a fit of rage." Jung then relates this concept to "the throwing upward of the mother, her fall and birthpangs" (C. W.y V, pp. 317-318). The Hottentot legend next put forward is again meant to illustrate a human birth from a heavenly body. These origins come into play in Jung's further discussion of Hiawatha's relationships to his grandmother, nature, dead mother, and bride. It may be possible to make an intricate, direct interpretation of the painting from Jung's text, but perhaps it is wiser to let the matter stand as Pollock's personal translation of the ideas of birth, entry into the mother-unconscious, and cutting loose, the emergence into the outer world in a state of renewed fruitfulness. Alloway's text implies that it is the figure on the right in Moon Woman Cuts the Circle which is based on the tattoo. However, its swinging counter-gestures strain the similarity, which I find only in the arc-curve of the body and in the billowy contour of the legs. Pollock has even added a feather headdress to this creature. The little semicircular entity in the disintegrating red circle, because of its vague sketchiness, can be seen as nearer to the Haida figure. But this concerns only the visual motif. The title and context of the picture clearly do relate to Jung. What is more, Pollock employed the tattoo in another painting. It is quite recognizable as the figure floating at the top center of Guardians of the Secret, but reversed to face the opposite direction. It hovers in what might be the realm of conscious ideas, midway between the heads of the male and female. This symbol of woman in the moon, emerging from the unconscious, might serve as mediator between man and his anima, "the woman within." As Jung

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says, "The assimilation of contrasexual tendencies . . . becomes a task that must be fulfilled [in the second half of life] in order to keep the libido in a state of progression."31 Another variation of this motif can be found in Night Sounds of 1944. The crescent moon is clearly mounted on a neck and the negative spaces in the little figure now can be read as features of a face. Chalked next to "her" in this painting is a motif we've met before: the winged figure of Bird, without its wings. The embryolike form in the "body" of the bird itself resembles an upside-down variation on the Haida tattoo. The bird could now be a muchdemeaned (in relation to the moon) "sun-disc equipped with . . . feet." Similarly, it could be a particle either to be subsumed into the growing moon, or just cut away from the waning moon. For each of these possibilities there are male/female, consciousness/unconsciousness analogies. Thus we see Pollock borrowing a specific Jungian motif and welding it into more complex situations and even new formal versions but nonetheless respecting the "moonness" of the motif and, in one instance, even its "Indianness." Similar sources probably may be found for many of the frequently repeated motifs in Pollock's work. They need not always come from primitive art through Jung's publications, although this seems a likely source. In going through Pollock's papers, Bernice Rose came across many references to articles and books by or about Jung.32 It is noteworthy that Pollock has chosen images from Jung that were originally produced on the American continent. The rationale for this may derive from Jung himself: he specifically states that his allusion to the Indian legend of Hiawatha has greater validity because it is used in interpreting the writings of an American (C. W., V, p. 313). One of the later paintings from the 1942-1946 period is Circumcision of 1946, which was shown in the spring of the same year. It may well be one of the pictures Clement Greenberg found "at first sight crowded and repetitious reveal[ing] on second sight an infinity of dramatic movement and variety."33 Circumcision, an initiation "rite of death and rebirth, which provides the novice with a 'rite of passage' from one stage of life to the next," as explained by Henderson, is the "break .. . with the original parent archetype" and the beginning of "assimilation into the life of the group." Man "gives himself to his assigned role in the community" and "becomes more consciously related to woman."34 As one unravels the "dramatic movement" of the painting, a ground line becomes apparent. Beneath this line, at the left half, lies the boy undergoing 304

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the initiation. It is here that Pollock chose to put his signature. The ground band is balanced by a less distinct top area and the space in between appears vertically divided approximately in thirds. In the middle section I find the figure of a grown man in a "snowshoveling" posture, presumably inflicting the wound upon the boy. Above the man are violent lightning forms. Perched on a post to the man's right may be the figure of an owl, traditionally representative of darkness and death, not very auspicious but indicative of one aspect of the ceremony. Black and white reproductions increase the difficulty involved in "reading" the other two sections which, unlike that of the man, seem to continue into the upper area. Each could be a giant cult figure, such as one Pollock had drawn for Henderson several years earlier.35 On the right one can make out a seated man with a tattooed body smoking a pipe and, on the left, a standing woman whose eye focuses downward on the boy's head in a reciprocallycrossed beam. The triangle superimposed on her head, as well as its balancing counterpoint below, recall Matisse's Piano Lesson (1916-17), acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, the very year of Pollock's painting. Incidentally, in the Matisse, a representation of a woman sits over and behind a boy. Perhaps these large scale beings in Pollock's painting represent the parent archetypes, or the future grown-up life, or both. In the year 1947, Pollock elaborated his allover drip technique. To one of the early paintings of this period (1947-1950) he gave the title Alchemy'.36 It was Jung who focused on the study of alchemy when in the late 19205 he "had found a quotation in literature that [he] thought might have some connection with early Byzantine alchemy," and in 1929 his Commentary on the Golden Flower first presented his interest in the symbolic significance of alchemy for modern psychology.37 His lectures at the Éranos conferences in 1935 and 1936 dealt with the subject again; they were translated and published in New York in 1939 and later formed the basis of Psychology and Alchemy, published 1944. Further studies followed, but it is clear that Jung's main concepts on the importance of alchemy were available to New Yorkers by the late '305 and certainly by the mid-'4os. Alchemical evolution is epitomized by the formula, Solve et Coagula (dissolve and congeal): "analyze all the elements in yourself, dissolve all that is inferior in you, even though you may break in doing so; then, with the strength acquired from the preceding operation, congeal."38 Cirlot, the Spanish poet, art critic, and symbology expert, explains, "The four stages of the process were signified by different colors, as follows: black (guilt, origin, latent forces) for 1970s

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'prime matter' (a symbol of the soul in its original condition); white (minor work, first transmutation, quicksilver); red (sulphur, passion); and, finally, gold." These are the colors of Pollock's Alchemy, with yellow instead of gold, to which aluminum has been added to mediate between the light-dark contrasts. Did Pollock title the work only after he noticed fire colors and melting forms, or did the motto solve et coagula guide him in its facture? Pollock had always had a predilection for equalizing the paint activity across the surface of his canvas, manifested in various ways from his paintings as a Thomas Hart Benton student to Flame, from Stenographic Figure to Circumcision. In Eyes in the Heat and Shimmering Substance of 1946, as William Rubin points out, "fragments of Pollock's earlier totemistic presences are covered by the rhythmical linear pattern of white paint which dominates their surfaces.^^ Alchemy appears to be one of the first attempts to deal with paint interactions in such a way that the underlying figure is not necessary. Paint movement itself, as an analogy to other, deeper processes, can become the subject. While I think the process of painting prompted Pollock's stylistic "breakthrough," it is entirely likely that Jung's concept of the process of psychic individuation provided important confirmation for the new style. Curiously, it seems that Pollock added some "figures" to the top layers of this painting. I read an asterisk-star, a numeral "4," a space, and a numeral "6" from left to right laid on in thick white paint. The "4" and the "6" show up in enough other works to merit attention. In an untitled drawing of around 1943 they are scattered across the "body" of a figure reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf, and "6 4" is plainly written at the lower part of the body of Wounded Animal, 1943. To Jung, four represented completeness; six, with even and uneven factors, represented the hermaphrodite or fusion of male and female, and could be "most skilled in begetting" and a representative of "marriage and harmony" (C. W., XVI, p. 238, n. 8). As Jung never underestimated numbers, I feel that Pollock is here, in a marginally abstract manner, indicating what is going on in his work. Lee Krasner Pollock once asked him about the numbers "4" and "6" and "he insisted that '46' was his magic number." She went on to explain that he had lived at 46 East 8th Street and his address at West Houston, she believed, had been 46.40 Alchemy was shown early in 1948 at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The titles of most of the sixteen other paintings in that show might be classed under the headings "sky" and "sea": Shooting Star, Comet, Reflections of the Big Dipper; Sea Change, Full Fathom Five, Watery Paths; and, in between, Lucifer, Vortex, and Phosphorescence. These titles, Mrs. Pollock has explained, were the result 306

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of a group effort. Just before the paintings were sent off to the Betty Parsons Gallery, the Pollocks' neighbors Mary and Ralph Manheim came over to Pollock's studio and the four of them had a naming session. Everyone contributed, with Pollock vetoing or approving titles. Largely, it was the Manheim's titles which were used, Mrs. Pollock remembers.41 By the 1949 exhibition, all works were numbered. It is worth reviewing Pollock's choice of titles. Almost two-thirds of the individual titles of these paintings attest to a new interest in nature. In the 1947 exhibition the works were divided into two series: Sounds in the Grass and Accabonac Creek. These nature themes reflect the fact that Pollock moved to Long Island in November 1945; the summer of 1946, when he would have painted the works for the January 1947 show, was his first summer of exploration in his countryside territory. Before that, in the spring show of 1946, his titles were more specifically related to Jungian themes: Circumcision, The Troubled Queen, The Little King, High Priestess, Once Upon a Time. They are urban ideas, taken from books rather than from nature. The 1945 titles clustered around black, totems, and the night: Horizontal on Black, Square on Black, The Totem—Lesson I, The Totem—Lesson II, The Night Dancer, The First Dream, Night Ceremony, Night Mist, Night Magic. In 1943 the titles centered on the moon and the male-andfemale themes. Despite these generalizations, we can clearly see Pollock's ideas moving from Jungian mythical concepts to natural phenomena. Jung is not forgotten, though. For one thing, the theme of the "night sea journey" of the psyche through the unconscious may inform the sea titles of the 1948 exhibition, or at least Pollock's receptiveness to such titles. Constellation titles allude to Jung as well. Early in 1949 Pollock's show at the Parsons Gallery heralded the change to paintings designated by numbers. The accompanying descriptive titles which sometimes emerged were mostly names of colors, although references to nature and an object did slip in: Shadows, Summertime, White Cockatoo, The Wooden Horse, (and Arabesque]. At the end of that year, the next show had only Out of the Web and Birds of Paradise as subtitles for two of the 34 paintings. The latter must be a later addition for Mrs. Pollock had never heard of it. In 1950 the exceptions were Lavender Mist, titled by Clement Greenberg, Shadows, probably a later name, Autumn Rhythm, Pollock's own title, and One, again Pollock's own, but the result of a somewhat forced situation.42 Alfonso Ossorio, Pollock's friend, wrote the introduction for the late 1951 exhibition catalogue at the Parsons Gallery and at Pollock's request, it was 1970s

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reprinted in the 1952 Museum of Modern Art catalogue for the Fifteen Americans exhibition. It has a remarkably Jungian ring: The attention focused on his immediate qualities ... has left largely untouched the forces that compel him to work in the manner that he does His painting confronts us with a visual concept organically evolved from a belief in the unity that underlies the phenomena among which we live. Void and solid, human action and inertia, are metamorphosed and refined into the energy that sustains them and is their common denominator.... The present group of paintings is done with an austerity of means that underlies their protean character: thin paint and raw canvas are the vehicles for images full of the compulsion of dreams and the orderliness of myth [The paintings] both reawaken in us the sense of personal struggle and its collective roots and recall to us the too easily forgotten fact that "what is without is within." Ossorio's final quote is probably from Jung. As so many efforts have been devoted to describing the nature of the space in Pollock's painting, I would like to give in full one of Jung's famous "within-without" passages as an alternative prospect: I can only stop and gaze with admiration and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its nonspatial world conceals an untold abundance of images that have been amassed and organically consolidated during millions of years of development. My consciousness is like an eye that contains in itself the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic nonego that fills them nonspatially. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is to misunderstand them, but we can never rob them of their power by denying them. Beside this picture I would like to place that of the starry vistas of the heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the world within is the world without, and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche.43 This ambivalence between the spatial and non-spatial, the natural and the psychically phenomenal is what we experience in Pollock's now classic allover drip paintings. The drip technique evolved as Pollock dealt with the process of painting; and at this period there is seldom any imagery to analyze as "Jungian"; yet I feel Jung's involvement with the ultimate meaningfulness of

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the image—its numinous quality—must be credited as one of the factors behind these magnificent "outpourings." The fact that Pollock discontinued his sessions with Jungian doctors need not imply a détente in his interest in Jung's ideas. In 1951 Pollock, to use his own words, was "drawing on canvas in black—with some of my early images coming thru "44 By 1954, even his early titles had returned. Four Opposites specifically relates to Jung's four elements of the conjunctio, while other titles call forth the night sea journey and correspondences with nature: Ocean Greyness, The Deep, Grayed, Rainbow, Easter and the Totem, Moon Vibrations, and Ritual are also versions of his interests of the mid-'40s. As titles of the '505 recall various phases of the titles of the '405, so too some of the formal solutions hark back to earlier works. Easter and the Totem, 1953, probably comes from the same source as The Totem—Lesson II, 1945, and Male and Female, 1942: Matisse's Bathers by a River (c. 1910-17), which in the late 19305 had "hung for a long time in the lobby of the Valentine Gallery."45 Four Opposites, 1953, seems a slightly less linear recall of The Blue Unconscious of 1946. White Light, 1954, and Scent, 1955, are related to Eyes in the Heat and Shimmering Substance of 1946 and to the untitled allover work of around 1937-

Even a sketchy review of themes and compositional devices in Pollock's work shows a continuing reliance upon Jungian thought and also upon Pollock's ability to be inspired by and to assimilate qualities from the work of other artists—for his own ends. It is perhaps precipitous in terms of my research, which has concentrated on Pollock's middle years and Jung, but I would hazard the hypothesis that in his later paintings the dialogue with other artists' works had become a revival of his own earlier choices of art works and a dialogue with his own earlier creations. Reasons for this turning in upon himself might be found in the greater critical and public acceptance of the newly heralded Abstract Expressionist movement. In reference to his latest, more figurative works, Pollock himself said in 1951, ". . . [I] think the nonobjectivists will find them disturbing—and the kids who think it simple to splash a Pollock out."46 Thus, it was with his imagery and even with the formal solutions of the early '403 that he apparently felt most uniquely himself, most inimitable. Pollock's return in the later works to the motifs and content of the '405 confirms the importance of Jung as a touchstone to his art. While I feel that the major impetus came from art itself, both from Pollock's appreciation of works

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by other artists and from his experience with the processes inherent in making a painting, Jung provided a method of ordering concepts and of raising the personal to universal experience.

Note s 1. C. L. Wysuph, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings, New York, 1970, p. 13, tells us that it was Mrs. Baynes, through Helen Marot, who referred Pollock for treatment to Dr. Henderson. 2. Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967, p. 22. Unless otherwise stated, the following facts regarding Pollock's treatments come from O'Connor's well-researched biographical chronology. 3. Wysuph, p. 12, n. 11. 4. It is from Bernice Rose, author of Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1969, that I learned of Dr. de Laszlow's name. 5. Lee Krasner Pollock, in conversation. O'Connor, p. 25, gives no indication of duration. Wysuph, p. 18, says Pollock worked with her "for the next few years." 6. See В. Н. Friedman, Jackson Pollock, Energy Made Visible, New York, 1972, p. 170, for additional facts. 7. Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who Was Jackson Pollock?" Art in America, May-June, 1967, p. 48. 8. Friedman, pp. 172,192,22O. 9. Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1961, p. 82. 10. In conversation, April 25,1972. 11. Joseph L. Henderson, "Jackson Pollock: A Psychological Commentary," unpublished essay, 1968, quoted in Wysuph, p. 14. 12. Letter of November 11,1969, in Friedman, p. 41. 13. Carl G.Jung, Collected Works, translated by R.F.C. Hull, Princeton, 1956, XV, pp. 138, 140. Hereafter referred to as Jung, C. W. Also available in paperback: Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, Princeton, 1971. 14. Hopefully this will be clarified with the publication of the Pollock catalogue raisonné, which is in preparation under the editorship of Eugene Victor Thaw and Francis V. O'Connor. 15. Lawrence Alloway, Jackson Pollock, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London, June 1961, no. 26. Zervos V, pp. 445 and 443. 16. Information from Virginia Allen, consultant for the Pollock catalogue raisonné, in conversation. 17. Source given in S. Foster Damon, Blake's Job, Providence, 1966, pp. 32,59. 18. The similarity to the Demoiselles d'Avignon was observed by Robert PincusWitten in a seminar lecture, Fall 1971, City University of New York, Graduate Division. Ossorio says it was one of Pollock's favorite paintings, in "Who Was Jackson Pollock?" p. 58; Lee Krasner Pollock has confirmed this in conversation. The painting was in the Museum of Modern Art Picasso exhibition of 1939

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and acquired by the museum in the same year. It had been reproduced in the 1936 MOMA catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art. The possibility remains that Birth, now dated 1937, may be considered a slightly later work, allowing for personal experience of Picasso's Demoiselles. 19. Bryan Robertson, Jackson Pollock, London, 1960, pi. 112; Marlborough-Gerson, 1964, no. 10. 20. Ossorio, "Who Was Jackson Pollock?" p. 54. 21. Wysuph, p. 21. 22. Jolandejacobi, The Psychology of Jung, an Introduction with Illustrations, translated by K.W. Bash, New Haven, 1943, pi. G, p. 130. 23. Alloway, no. 47. 24. Robert Motherwell, Partisan Review, Winter 1944, in O'Connor, p. 31. 25. M.-L. von Franz, "The Process of Individuation," Man ana His Symbols, New York, 1964, p. 177. 26. Mr. Lieberman's account cited in Bernice Rose, Works on Paper, p. 106, n. 32; Robertson, p. 139. 27. Robertson, p. 148. 28. Wysuph, pi. 58. Henderson contributed the momentous information that "Pollock's mother was central to his difficulties" (Wysuph, p. 17). Lee Krasner Pollock, Tony Smith, and Alfonso Ossorio affirm this judgment in "Who Was Jackson Pollock?" 29. O'Connor, p. 34 (from Sidney Janis, Abstract ¿r Surrealist Art in America, N.Y., 1944). 30. Alloway, no. 34. 31. Jung, C. W., V, p. 318.1 have not come across an English-language edition of Psychology of the Unconscious published prior to the Collected Works in which this illustration appears. However, since "cutting off a sizeable piece" so relates to Pollock's title and since he would have been personally interested in the content of the chapters, "Symbols of the Mother and Rebirth," "The Battle of Deliverance from the Mother," and "The Dual Mother," in this classic work by Jung, one must leave the matter open for the present. [Of the two English-language publications of this Haida tattoo cited in Jung's German-language source, the volume most likely to have been seen—possibly owned—by Pollock is: Franz Boas, éd., The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 5, published as Memoir[s] of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, vol. 8, part I (Leiden and New York: 1905-09), "Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida," by John R. Swanton, PL XXI. While the explanation of the image in Swanton's text is so close to that given by Jung that an interested reader of both texts might identify it with Jung's explanation, the only claim that can be made here is that Pollock probably knew the image.] 32. Ms. Rose told me of these notations among Pollock's papers in conversation. 33. Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation, April 13,1946, p. 445. 34. Henderson, "Ancient Myths and Modern Man," Man and His Symbols, pp. 129-133. 1970s

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35- Wysuph, pi. il; O'Connor, p. 85, lower right. 36. While I feel this title was Pollock's own, some doubt must remain, as will be discussed in note 41 below. 37. Jung, "Approaching the Unconscious," Man and His Symbols, p. 54. 38. In J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, New York, 1960, pp. 6,8, from P.V. Piobb, Clef universelle des sciences secrètes, Paris, 1950. 39. William Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition, Part I," Artforum, February, 1967, p. 18. Reproduced in O'Connor, p. 89, lower right; Rose, Works on Paper, p. 35. Bernice Rose, p. 34, also relates this numbers to Jungian influences. 40. Lee Krasner Pollock in conversation. The West Houston address was 76, but 46 had been the street number at Carmine Street in 1932-33 (O'Connor, pp. 17-18). Friedman, p. 61, gives this information in connection with Wounded Animal, without mention of Jung. 41. Lee Krasner Pollock in conversation. She has affirmed that somewhere it is written down which titles were Pollock's. Virginia Allen has not yet located that record in her work on the catalogue raisonné. Alchemy is different enough from the other titles, as is the work from the other paintings, that I feel Pollock finished it earlier, that is, early enough to have titled it himself. A point of interest: Ralph Manheim subsequently translated from the German Jolande Jacobi's Complex, Archetype, Symbol in the Psychology ofC. G. Jung, London and N.Y., 1959. 42. Mrs. Pollock's comments on the titles of the last two exhibitions mentioned were given in conversation. 43. Jacobi in Complex, p. 189, quotes this from Jung's introduction to Otto Kranefeldt, Secret Ways of the Mind, 1932, p. xxxix. 44. Letter of June 7,1951, to Ossorio, quoted in O'Connor, p. 59. 45. Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York," Art and Culture, 1961, Boston, P. 23346. From the letter to Ossorio, note 44.

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LAWRENCE ALLOWAY

Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism

A problem that reciprocally involved both subject matter and formality engaged the Abstract Expressionist painters of the middle and late forties. It was how to make paintings that would be powerful signifiers, and this led to decisions as to what signifiers could be properly referred to without compromising (too much) the flatness of the picture plane. The desire for a momentous content was constricted by the spatial requirement of flatness and by the historically influenced need to avoid direct citation of objects. Something of this train of thought can be seen in Barnett Newman's reflections on the role of the hero image in sculpture. He pointed out that the heroic was no longer directly available to the sculptor and hence, though he does not say so, to the painter. Therefore, he argued, the human gesture, freed of anatomy, could be used to signify the human presence. Herbert Ferber, by removing this mock hero, has reevoked the naked heroic gesture. Hanging his powerful line on and over pure space, he has succeeded in freeing himself from this hero, so that the gestures of his images move in free splendor, thus enabling each of us to fill the open masses with our bulky selves to become our own personal heroes. Ferber's skeletal line, by the majesty of its abstract freedom, touches the heroic base of each man's own nature.1 There is some reason to think, if one considers Ferber's naive sculpture of the period, that Newman is doing the best he can for a friend and that perhaps the real subject is Newman's own work. Certainly in his paintings the bands of color seem to have a comparable symbolic function, indicating in terms of verticality the basic human posture. In addition, an important group of large paintings includes bands that are literally close to human scale. The term "gestural" is commonly applied to Abstract Expressionism with reference to conspicuous brushwork, but the term is also applicable to those of Newman's paintings in which the whole work has a gestural function. The tall lines and the man-sized area are a kind of gestural condensation of "the naked heroic gesture."

SOURCE: Artforum (November 1973), 36-43. Copyright © Artforum, November 1973, "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism," by Lawrence Alloway 313

In 1948 Newman wrote: "we are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, and what have you, that have 2 been the devices of Western European painting." In later statements Rothko and Still confirmed the renunciatory mode. Rothko rejected "memory, his3

tory, or geometry," and Still dismissed "outworn myths and contemporary 4

alibis." Common to these three artists in the late forties is, therefore, an idea of art as the outcome of essentializing doctrine: art is what is left when surface detail and secondary ideas have been scraped away. These statements have been taken pretty much at face value, but actually there is more to be said. For instance, it is notable that the renunciations demanded have a definite cultural context. Newman wrote that "here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer by completely denying 5

that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it."

This can be compared to Still's statement: "the fog has been thickened, not lifted, by those who, out of weakness or for positions for power, looked back to 6

the Old World for means to extend their authority in this newer land." These statements clearly set the renunciations of the artist into the traditional contrast of two continents, which originated in the igth century as part of the attempt to encourage national arts in America. The typology includes contrasts of dedication (America) and exhaustion (Europe), vitality and elegance, honesty and learning. As Benjamin Т Spencer has pointed out, when writing about America, "Emerson resorted to metaphors which implied primal energies rather than mature ideologies," such as "a colossal youth" or a "brood of 7 Titans." It is significant that the claim to be free of the (European) past should be argued in terms of a 19th-century (American) idea. What is the meaning of this old defense of newness? It relates to a dominant theme of Newman's early writing, namely, the connection between primitive art and American art. In 1944 he wrote about Pre-Columbian stone carving and on "The Arts of the South Seas" exhibition at The Museum of 8

Modern Art. In each case Newman takes a primitive art form that is associated with America, or is at least non-European. In addition, he takes early, if not the first, artists and discusses their work as part of "the metaphysical pat9

tern of life." Contemporaneously with his Indian and Pacific pieces, he applied notions derived from primitive art to the work of his contemporaries. In the catalogue The Ideographic Picture, he defines "a new force in American 10

painting that is the modern counterpart of the primitive art impulse."

Of

the eight artists in the show, four were Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Rothko, and Still. (American-ness here is identified with primal energies and should not 314

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be confused with the later artist-as-coonskinner image of Harold Rosenberg, which trivialized the theme of national identity.) The exhibition that followed "The Ideographic Picture" at Betty Parsons' Gallery was by Theodoros Stamos, and again Newman wrote the catalog. Stamos is on the same fundamental ground as the primitive artist who never portrayed the phenomenon as an object of romance and sentiment, but always as an expression of the original noumenistic mystery in which rock and man are equal. Stamos is able, therefore, to catch not only the glow of an object in all its splendor but its inner life with all its dramatic implications of terror and mystery.11 Thus, America is both newer than Europe and older: to the extent that it is newer it is free from a late culture's habits of elaboration and attenuation; but it is older because artists have not lost their access to primal (i.e., young) energies and intuitions. These ideas, securely based on 19th-century precedents, suggest that the tablet of the Abstract Expressionists had not been wiped as clear as was supposed. A similar situation exists in these artists' treatment of mythology. As early as 1943 Rothko stated: "if our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas."12 And, again, "we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than their graceful classical version," renewing in oneself "the primeval and predatory passions from which these myths spring."13 On the same occasion, Gottlieb said that he was aware of "denying modern art" by placing "so much emphasis on subject matter" but "the mechanics of picture making has been carried far enough."14 (At the time of the broadcast at which they spoke Gottlieb was in the third year of his pictographic period.) Four years later, Clement Greenberg wrote, apropos of the pictographs: "Gottlieb is perhaps the leading exponent of a new indigenous school of symbolism which includes among others Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Benedict Newman."15 Here then are several open avowals of the mythology that marked one group of Abstract Expressionists in the forties before it was submitted into less explicit forms. Gottlieb's "denial of modern art" as a formal system has the same basis as Newman's polemic against geometry. Writing in 1958, he declared: "Only an art free from any kind of the geometry principles of World War I, only an art of no-geometry can be a new beginning."16 What he was after, for himself and on behalf of American painters, was "a new image based on new principles It is precisely this death image, the grip of 1970s

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geometry that has to be confronted."17 Malevich is expressly mentioned as representative of the limits that American artists, strengthened by their primitive roots, had to transcend. Greenberg's description, though he soon dropped it, of New York painting as "a new indigenous school of symbolism" is very much to the point. Abstract Expressionism achieved a new alignment of the existing styles of modern art and found a way of painting that maintained flatness without any diminishment of signification. If it is not evident from the art, though I believe it is, there is ample verbal evidence in the written and recorded statements of the artists of their conviction that art was a projection of their humanity. Art's value was to be derived from its success in embodying great thoughts and enduring themes. However, the sententious aspect of Abstract Expressionism was gradually lost sight of and as early as 1959 E. C. Goossen, referring to Gottlieb, discussed "how then to keep the physical presence of the painted surface alive, sensually immediate and materially present, while wielding the immateriality and illusion of space behind it."18 This expressed well the pictorial problem of reconciling the picture plane with the spatial implications of color, but it confers prime value on this matter. What has happened is that Gottlieb is being interpreted in terms of "the mechanics of picture making." It is true that by this time Gottlieb was out of his pictographs, so that the evocation of universal patterns and motifs was reduced. Beyond this, however, Goossen's language is typical of the estheticizing analysis of Greenberg himself, whom Goossen is following, and the later writing of William Rubin and Michael Fried. Goossen's stress on syntax at the expense of signification reveals a bias that characterizes American criticism at large. As the imagery of the myth-makers became flatter and larger, with fewer internal episodes, the level of symbolism was less and less discussed. What had been an antiabstract art was turned into another kind of abstract art, but one with a coloristic rather than a geometric base. The abstract potential of Newman, Rothko, and Still was exaggerated at the expense of other readings, including connections between their earlier and later work. It is crucial to remember in this respect that these three artists were late starters; though they began weakly, their early work is far from being student work. It may be clumsy, but it is not empty or uninformed. Newman's and Rothko's biomorphic imagery and Still's troglodytic imagery, for example, were the product of men who had reached their forties. Though there are real morphological changes in their work of the late 19405, the Abstract Expressionists can hardly be expected to have started entirely anew at that time 316

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of their lives. As suggested above, even the topic of renewal by renunciation should not be taken literally but as a cultural reflex. Thus the tendency of criticism to concentrate exclusively on the later work has led to a neglect of its sources. The problem to consider is whether the reductive mode, initiated in New York 1947-50, necessarily acts to exclude meanings or whether the declared concerns of the early forties may not persist in condensed and elliptical forms. Newman wrote his article on the Sublime in the same year that he painted the first and second pictures called Onement. The verbal and pictorial statements coincide exactly, but not all the ideas in the article have their origin at that moment. Aspects of Newman's primitivism are certainly carried into this fresh context. Similarly with Still, the chronology of his work is obscure but it is at least clear that he had painted numerous fully characteristic paintings by 1952, when he made the rejective statement quoted above. Rothko's statement dates from 1949, the year in which he established his mature format of stacked edge-to-edge forms, but the original article in The Tiger's Eye is not illustrated by such work. The accompanying illustrations show patchy, free-form paintings, with internal incidents and vertical divisions as well as horizontal.19 The announced rejection of "memory, history, or geometry" therefore does not necessarily entail the high level of unity of the mature work, as has been assumed. It is possible that the stress on renunciation may have been intended to cool some of the more ardent of the mythological references, but, in fact, this could only be a secondary motive. The subjects of renunciation and rebirth have their iconographical value, as in a text Rothko wrote for Still's first exhibition in New York in 1946: It is significant that Still, working out West, and alone, has arrived at pictorial conclusions so allied to those of the small band of Myth Makers who have emerged here during the war. The fact that his is a completely new facet of this idea, using unprecedented forms and completely personal methods, attests further to the vitality of this movement. By passing the current preoccupation with genre and the nuance of formal arrangements, Still expresses the tragic-religious drama which is generic to all Myths at all times, no matter where they occur. He is creating new counterparts to replace the old mythological hybrids who have lost their pertinence in the intervening centuries. For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone Myth. As he himself has expressed it his paintings are "of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated." 1970s

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Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself before the will to live— a profound and moving experience.20 As the paintings of Newman, Rothko, and Still became simpler in format they did not lose in complexity of content. Although various elements were dispensed with, what remained was a great deal more than nothing. The parts that they kept were, in fact, maximized and presented emphatically. The more art is simplified the more potent what is kept can become; this is obvious but the rhetoric of 20th-century art gives more prestige to the act of giving up than holding on. What characterizes the work of the Abstract Expressionists from the late forties on is precisely the significative magnitude of their austerities. I am connecting early texts with later paintings not to circumscribe the paintings by a genetic theory but because I know of no better way to account for their special resonance. If we compare paintings by Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly with those of the Abstract Expressionists, it becomes evident that a dimension of allusion, an aura of content, has been suspended by the later artists. They certainly take off from positions given by Newman and Rothko, but the field of color, the holistic imagery, and the expanded scale of the canvas no longer imply momentous content. The allusions of the Expressionists are not present simply because of the intensity of the older artists' feelings compared to the reduced passion of the younger generation; the allusions are present as a set of specific cues, to which Newman's Sublime text is one basic source.21 In the i8th century the Sublime was an additional esthetic category, as was the Picturesque; both were added to the existing criterion of Beauty in recognition of the expanded awareness of the period. Similarly in the 19405, the Sublime was regarded as an addition to European "modern art" in which geometry was (unfairly) equated with that is known and measurable. In both its i8th- and 20th-century usages Sublimity was an index of the expansion of esthetic limits. Some of the formal properties described by Edmund Burke, to take his Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful as a summarizing text, fit American painting very well. On "Uniformity" as a cause of the Sublime Burke writes: if the figures of the parts should be changed, the imagination at every change finds a check; you are presented at every alteration with the termination of one idea, and the beginning of another; by which means it becomes impossi318

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ble to continue that uninterrupted progression which alone can stamp on bounded objects the character of infinity.22 Appropriate to the Sublime, according to Burke, are "sad, fuscous colors, as black, or brown, or deep purple."23 Rothko's mulberry paintings or Still's black ones come to mind, as well as Newman's observation on "the revised use of the color brown ... from the rich tones of orange to the lowest octave of dark browns,"24 colors that connote the "majestic strength of our ties to the earth."25 The concept of "artificial infinity" as symbolized by uninflected works and color in a somber range does not exhaust the correspondences between the Sublime esthetic and American painting. Burke observed that "extreme light . . . obliterates all objects, so as in its effects to resemble darkness,"26 which is a better way of describing the effect of a dark painting by Rothko than most of his critics have arrived at. And, of course, light itself is part of an expressive tradition that includes the paradox of dark in light described by Burke and radiance as an image of revelation. Rothko's avoidance of complementary colors and of black-and-white tonal contrasts gives his paintings an other-worldly look, raising Neo-Platonic memories of light as the energy of the Creator. Burke also considered as a source of Sublimity the effect on the spectator's mind of being dominated by an immense object. This can be related to Newman's statement, "the large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance."27 Finally, Sublimity, as defined originally by Longinus, was regarded as "the echo of a noble mind."28 That is to say the Sublime is not reached by rule; it is a projection of the artist which is not equated with emotional self-expression, a view that accords well with the Abstract Expressionist self-image of the artist's role in the world. It is significant that of the Abstract-Expressionist generation, it is the three artists we are concerned with here who have entertained environmental ambitions. Pollock in 1947 may have opened the way with his version of the deathof-easel painting topic which led him to propose paintings halfway between easel and wall.29 Rothko painted three groups: the first done in 1958-59 for the Four Seasons Restaurant and now in the Tate Gallery; the Harvard murals, 1961-62; and the Rothko Chapel, as it is called, painted 1966-68. Newman painted The Stations of the Cross, 1958-66. Still has not done any ensembles like these but his exhibitions (Buffalo, 1959; Philadelphia, 1963) are constructed units. Still has written: These works are a series of acts best comprehended in groups or as a continuity. Except as a created revelation, a new experience, they are without value. It 1970s

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is my desire that they be kept in groups as much as possible and remain so. ... So I am in the strange position of seeking an environment for the work, and the small means wherein I'll be free to continue the "act."30 He was referring to an exhibition at the Parsons Gallery when he wrote, but clearly he had in mind cross-referential sequences on larger than gallery scale. These unitary schemes imply content by format, thus ascribing an expressive function to the environmental display itself. For instance, in the Rothko Chapel there are three triptychs, a form of picture with unbreakable associations to Christian art, and to number symbolism. The paintings of The Stations of the Cross are not decodable as specific episodes in Christ's Passion, but they do, as a total of 14 contiguous works, allude to the event as a whole. Incidentally there are 14 paintings in the Rothko Chapel (the three triptychs and five singles) and at one point Rothko contemplated indicating their location on the outside of the Chapel by numbers, a clear reference to The Stations.51 Reviewing a Rothko exhibition in 1961, Robert Goldwater singled out for praise "the small chapel-like room in which have been hung three of the mural series of 1958-59-"32 Later Rothko really painted a chapel: it was first announced as a Roman Catholic chapel for St. Thomas University; subsequent plans changed it to an interdenominational chapel at Rice University; it ended up attached to the Institute of Religion and Human Development, a part of the Texas Medical Center. The Institute combines ecumenical religious and interdisciplinary studies with good works (hospital training and family counseling). The Chapel bears neither the name of the donors (the John de Menus) nor that of a saint: it is named for the artist, as if the Sistine Chapel were to be called the Michaelangelo Chapel. In Newman's The Stations the number 14 is a symbol as well as a reckoning and there is in addition a sequential pattern. The first six and the Eighth Stations are more related to each other than to the Seventh; the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh are white; the Twelfth and Thirteenth are mainly black; and the last is the whitest. The order of The Stations is the chronological order in which they were painted, suggesting that the subject is not only the biblical event but the artist himself. The Christian hero and the artist as hero are related as type and antitype in the Testaments, a view of The Stations that fits both specific comments by the artist and his exalted notion of the role of the artist. Newman reasoned that the first pilgrims walked the Via Dolorosa to identify themselves with the original moment, not to reduce it to pious legend; not even to worship the 320

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story of one man and his agony, but to stand witness to the story of each man's agony; the agony that is single, constant, unrelenting, willed—world without end.33 It is Christ's connection to mankind that Newman stresses. As to Newman's expectations of the artist, the prime text is his early article, "The First Man Was an Artist": "Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his helplessness before the void."34 The artist for Newman is one who renews man's original act of defiance. In The Stations and in the Rothko Chapel what has happened is that the traditional iconography and layout of Christian art have been usurped by purely artistic values. By this I do not mean an estheticization of religious art so much as an assertion of the heroic stance of the artist within the traditional themes. In Rothko's case, a certain religiosity is also present which emotionally repeats the motive of the domination of culture by the artist. The topics that contributed to Abstract Expressionism include mythology, biomorphism, and the heroic state of being an artist. This cluster is often given schematically in the early works, but developed and fused in the later works of Newman, Rothko, and Still. It should perhaps be pointed out that the recognition of a genetic unity in a group does not eliminate the members' empirical diversity as artists, as men. These artists had in common an avoidance of the basically naturalistic acceptance of the world as it comes that marks de Kooning's and Kline's art. The high claims made on behalf of art by Newman, Rothko, and Still are the outcome of personal experience and of a traditional view of the function of art. Art does not reflect life nor is it separated from society; it is conceived as a model of behavior; it has an exemplary moral function. The art of the Sublime painters, or the field painters, is decidedly an art for the educated, both in terms of the social responsibility of being an artist and in terms of the issues to be dealt with as subject matter. In the use of ideographs and pictographs the artists showed a conscious recognition of the long-term potency of linguistic systems. Signs have a certain persistency that elongates their usage far past their original communication situation. There are many signs learned in our culture and assumed to be almost natural owing to absorption and repetition. These reinforced systems carry meanings and values that we have forgotten learning, as one forgets having had to learn one's first language. In American art of the forties and fifties these residues of earlier doctrines and ideas included mixed organic imagery,35 an inventory of information systems (such as ideographs), and a re1970s

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discovery of the expressive power of size. It is notable that scale is not present as a factor in earlier 20th-century painting, though it entered esthetics in the i8th century. Color, too, in its revelatory aspect, reentered painting, drawn from popular association with religious visions and mysterious light sources. There was, of course, nothing popular about the way this color symbolism was used by the artists, who subjected it to a searching and original reorganization. The presence of these available, historically rooted residues is essential to the continuity of culture. One of the ways in which the artists discussed here are unlike de Kooning and Kline is the fact that their paintings evoke if not a timeless realm, at least one of long duration with a slow rate of change. Witness the continuity of terror as a subject of both primitive and recent artists, for example. Contrary to the notion therefore that these Abstract Expressionist artists started with the minimum, the truth is that they incorporated complex layers of cultural allusion into their art. In a real sense, Newman, Rothko, and Still were History Painters by inclination but Abstract painters by formal inheritance. That is why the work is remarkable, for the diversity of residual signs that are successfully bound into their art.

Notes

1. Barnett B. Newman, Herbert Ferber. Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947. 2. Barnett B. Newman, "The Ides of Art, 6 Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art?" The Tiger's Eye, 6,1948, pp. 51-533. Mark Rothko, "Statement," The Tiger's Eye, 9,1949. 4. Clyfford Still, 15 Americans, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1952. 5. Newman, Sublime. 6. Paintings by Clyfford Still, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1959. 7. Benjamin T. Spencer, The Questfor National Identity, Syracuse, 1957. 8. Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1944; Northwest Coast Indian Painting, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1946; "Las Formas Artisticas del Pacifico," Ambos Mundos, June, 1946, pp. 51-55 (reprinted in Studio International, February, 1970, pp. 70-71). 9. Newman, Northwest Coast Indian Painting. 10. Barnett B. Newman, The Ideographic Picture. Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947. 11. Barnett B. Newman, Theodoros Stamos, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947. See also Newman's "La Pintura de Tamayo y Gottlieb," La Revista Belga, 4,1945: Gottlieb's capacity to handle mythology is said to link him with "the North American primitives." 12. Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, WNYC broadcast, October 13,1943, on "The Portrait and Modern Art." 13. Ibid. 322

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14. Ibid. 15. Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation, December 6,1947. In 1945 an unsigned note in the catalogue of the Rothko exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery described the artist as occupying "a middle ground between Abstraction and Surrealism." (The writer was probably Howard Putzel.) 16. Barnett B. Newman, The New American Painting, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959, p. 60. 17. Ibid. 18. E. C. Goossen Monterey Peninsula Herald, May 12,1954. 19. Rothko, The Tiger's Eye, 9. 20. Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Art of This Century Gallery, 1946. Typically Still separated himself, in retrospect, from Rothko, by stating that: "Appropriation by 'Myth-makers' group in New York at this time led to misinterpretation of meaning and intent of the painting" (Paintings by Clyfford Still). 21. Newman, Sublime. For a more detailed comparison of Burke and American painting, see the author's "The American Sublime." 22. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, II, ix. 23. Burke, II, xiv. 24. Newman, La Revista Belga, 1945. 25. Ibid. 26. Burke, II, xiv. 27. Barnett B. Newman, Typescript, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1951. 28. Longinus, On the Sublime, IX, 2. 29. Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1967, p. 40. 30. Clyfford Still, Letter to Betty Parsons, September 26,1949. 31. Information kindly given to me by Jane Dillenberger. 32. Robert Goldwater, "Reflections on the Rothko Exhibition," Art, March, 1961. 33. Barnett B. Newman, Statement, The Stations of the Cross, Lema Sabachthani, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966. 34. Barnett B. Newman, "The First Man Was an Artist," The Tiger's Eye, i, October, X 947î PP- 57~6o (reprinted in Guggenheim International Award exhibition catalogue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1964, pp. 94-95). 35. See the author's "The Biomorphic '408," Topics in American Art Since 1945, 1975, pp. 17-24, for comments on the significative aspects of biologically derived images.

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ROBERT C H O B B S

Robert Moth e rwe I Is Elegies to the Spanish Republic

For Robert Motherwell, the act of titling his art is an essential component of the creative process. He is convinced that viewers require specific intellectual and emotional perspectives when looking at his paintings so that their experiences of them will be directed and concrete. While some titles reinforce the type of painterly abstraction for which he is renowned, others, including his justly famous Elegies to the Spanish Republic, bear political and literary tags. He intends these ad hoc conjunctions to be mutually supportive and consequently is careful to consider his options when titling works. The practice of grafting literary titles onto seemingly nonobjective forms has its origins in Wassily Kandinsky's pre-World War I abstractions that were often named Composition or more simply Abstraction, and yet are not substantially different from those bearing such apocalyptic monikers as Last Judgment. While one might argue that the quality of the experience is substantially unchanged by these radically different types of titles, I contend that each one predisposes viewers to specific orientations that substantially affect their understanding and appreciation of the work before them. Such titles as Composition and Abstraction suggest a mode of apprehension more in line with Kantian aesthetics while Last Judgment extends centuries of close affiliation between religion and art to suggest the sublimity of a shattering apocalypse, which in this case releases art from the close connections with the visual world that have made it readily intelligible. Referential titles attached to abstract paintings might be said to function analogously to the standard staffage figures appearing in Claude Lorrain's Arcadian scenes, for example, since they provide a way of characterizing in readily understood terms a given work's specific mood. However, the conjunction of shepherd and bucolic landscape is a far cry from Kandinsky's loaded reference to the "Last Judgment" and also Motherwell's determination to eulogize the Spanish Republic's demise in his Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which were initiated in the late 19405 and have continued to the present day. The way in which referential titles provide a mental focus for Motherwell's work can be ascertained by recounting an evening I spent in his studio in the

SOURCE: Robert Motherwell, ed.Jürgen Harten (Stadtische Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 1976), 29-34 (revised 2004). Reprinted with the permission of Robert Hobbs, The Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University. 324

spring of 1976 when he was titling some recently completed pieces.1 During this session he invited me to act as a sounding board for his choices. He was having a particularly difficult time naming a powerful study in black and white similar to his large Africa in the Baltimore Museum.2 This recently completed austere and solemn painting, which exhibits a prominent diagonal in black, is so abstract and powerful that it presented a problem as to how it should be titled. Specifically, the challenge was how to direct its force so that people might know how to respond to it. The title needed to be both general and yet specific enough to galvanize a constellation of readily understood meanings so that the work would not become an open-ended Rorschach. Throughout this evening the unarticulated assumption guiding Motherwell's quest was his sincere desire to understand the work in question and provide it with an identifying label so that others might be equipped to respond similarly to it. When making the work, he relied on the Surrealist improvisatory method of psychic automatism—a variant on automatic writing—in which he would attempt to court the unconscious first through doodling and spilling puddles of paint that he would then study as possible clues to his inner or essential nature before cohering them into an overall composition. The process, which represents a means for encouraging painterly daydreams, constitutes a concerted attempt at self-enlightenment through paint. Motherwell considers the resultant work of art to be an intuited insight that he gratefully receives with the realization that he might not even begin to fathom its significance until after he has had time to study the completed work and develop a suitable title for it. That evening he first proposed a title for this painting that would turn its huge black pyramidal shape on the right into a landscape. Glancing at one wall in his studio cluttered with photographs and reproductions of works of art, which he had culled from books and periodicals over the preceding two decades, he noted a scene of Mount Kilimanjaro and suggested it as a name. Then, realizing that such a label not only turned his painting into a landscape but also made the black mound look as if it lay behind other forms and loomed upwards toward the sky, he immediately rejected it, no doubt because he has always insisted on painting shapes so that they exist in a shallow space parallel to the picture plane. He then began to think in more atavistic terms, reflecting aloud that there is something brutal about the painting, something forceful, primitive, and almost primeval. Perhaps, we conjectured, the piece has something to do with the dolmen cultures of Brittany or maybe the ancient Druid sites that his ancestral Scots frequented in the Middle Ages. Consequently, titles incorporating words such as "menhir" and "megalith" were 1970s

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suggested and thoughtfully considered in light of the painting. Looking again at the work, he felt its content could more appropriately be connected to voodoo, but he soon rejected this idea because it seemed too trite, even though he kept maintaining throughout our session that the title of the work should allude to some chthonic force that dwells within human beings similar to the one in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Tentatively he settled on Haitian Ritual, then quickly thought of Haitian Black, which seemed to him to be a perfect title. Later, I discovered that he changed his mind yet again and concluded that In Black and White No. 2 was the best possible solution since he had been too hesitant about his more geographic references. Motherwell's inability to immediately think of a definitive title should not be taken as a sign that meanings in his art are arbitrarily assigned. Some of his suggested titles might well be employed for another work, and all of them circumscribe his general goal of connecting his art to a primitivistic theme.3 While he was puzzling over various possible names for this work, my awareness of it changed subtly so that it became in effect different paintings. Each of the titles became a distinct lens that defined and modified my experience of the work. With each one, some forms were emphasized while others were diminished in importance. A similar type of shift occurred when Motherwell titled an enlarged version of a small study made in 1948 to illuminate the poem "The Bird for Every Bird" by his then friend Harold Rosenberg. The title for this larger work, which is the first Elegy to the Spanish Republic, is At Five in the Afternoon after a signal phrase found in the first stanza of a famous poem by Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. According to the artist, one of the reasons for dispensing with the reference to Rosenberg's poem in the enlarged work is his conviction that its frame of reference was limited. For his new piece he was searching for a metaphor capable of catalyzing the imagination of a range of viewers by cuing them into a broader historic view. As we will see, Motherwell's first sketch illuminating the Rosenberg poem correlates closely with one of Lorca's poems and, in fact, appears to have been anticipated in his reading of it. He was astounded by the way his sketch so closely parallels this Spanish writer's theme and images. Among Lorca's writings, Motherwell preferred his Gypsy ballads, which are found in his Romancero Gitano. He was deeply moved by their atavism, emphasis on the fundamentals of life and death, and highly stylized yet intense world symbolically presented in terms of the stark contrasts of black and white—all of which he regarded as germane to his own art.4 326

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One of Lorca's Gypsy ballads, his "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejias," is a eulogy for a close friend—a matador and fellow poet—who was gored to death on August 11,1934, during a bullfight. Appearing in its first stanza, the recurring refrain "at five in the afternoon" sounds in English like a sequence of drum beats, in Spanish "a las cinco de la tarde" reminds one of a funeral knell. In both English and Spanish it is portentous of the gloom, sorrow, and sense of desolation that follow an unjust death. For Lorca the refrain specifically reinforces the incomprehensible shock and sense of inevitability that he felt. In the first stanza, the phrase "at five in the afternoon" is repeated thirty times in fifty-two lines of poetry. The effectiveness of this continued reverberation is borne out in the first eight lines of the poem: At five in the afternoon. A las cinco de la tarde. It was exactly five in the afternoon. Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde. A boy brought the white sheet Un niño trajo la blanca sábana At five in the afternoon. a las cinco de la tarde. A frail of lime ready prepared. Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida At five in the afternoon. a las cinco de la tarde. The rest was death, and death alone Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte At five in the afternoon a las cinco de la tarde After each line the refrain reiterates an unchanging tempo. At first it sounds like the beating of a musical instrument in a procession or festival. Then it becomes the heightened tempo that accompanies intensified action. Later it suggests the incessant throbbing of pain from a wound, or—even more graphic— the rhythmic spurting of blood from an open gash. Again the poem builds up momentum, everything appears in a blinding haze, and a shriek inadvertently is emitted. Finally, there appears a droning in one's ears and a dull ache: a realization that it is over. At the end of the first section of the "Llanto," one feels exhausted as if one has been through a wrenching emotional experience. By piling refrain upon refrain and interspersing between them lines that 1970s

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serve as expletives, Lorca creates a sustained climax that shares with Motherwell's painting an emphasis on the phrase "at five in the afternoon." It is a sustained force that surrounds and compresses together the intervening lines of the poem and the ovoid shapes in the painting, which viewers are no doubt expected to imagine as once having been round before the ponderous and implacable verticals surrounding them forced them out of shape. Because "at five in the afternoon" is a most appropriate title for this painting, it might have remained as a generic label for the entire series except that it was incomprehensible to people in the United States, unfamiliar with Lorca's poem, who thought the painting might have something to do with the cocktail hour. Since Motherwell was still intrigued by the composition, he decided to explore its possibilities in another work, which he named "Granada." The choice of this city as a title for a painting indicates a desire to continue focusing on Lorca and his poem as a central theme, especially since Granada, a strategic city in the early days of the Spanish civil war, was both Lorca's birthplace and the site where he was murdered. After completing this work, Motherwell continued to make variations on the overall schema, which it extends, and decided that titles commemorating cities important to the Loyalists such as Malaga, Seville, Barcelona, and Madrid might clue viewers into his overall theme. However, he soon recognized that for some people references to such Spanish cities conjured up the country's romance and history instead of underscoring the tragic war that had raged throughout the country only a decade earlier. Reflecting on this situation, he decided to honor the country itself, and in 1951 he titled a small work Spanish Elegy, Garcia Lorca Series. Even though he later decided on the overall title of Elegies to the Spanish Republic and assigned a number for each new piece in the series, thus dispensing with the reference to Lorca's name, his initial idea of connecting the name of this poet with a general title demonstrates how closely he linked the two in his mind. At the time he described his Elegies "as an effort to symbolize a subjective image of modern Spain" in terms of "funeral pictures, laments, dirges, elegies—barbaric and austere." Although the series became the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Lorca would have been a fitting subject. Even though he was uninvolved in partisan politics, he came to symbolize for Loyalists and others the few years of freedom and democracy that the Spanish Republic represented. In his poetry and plays, he created stirring images of the country's indigenous strengths, and he repeatedly affirmed in interviews his strong identification with his country and its many folkloric traditions, which served as catalysts for his own writ328

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ing. Although he advocated understanding the country's literary heritage, he was not a chauvinist. Often he remarked first on his ties with humanity at large and then spoke movingly of his identification with Spain before zeroing in on his connections with his native Andalusia. Rather than representing Lorca the man in his Elegies, Motherwell has chosen to follow the dictum of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, "to paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces," and to create by indirection symbols alluding to the fact that modern Spain castrated itself when it killed Lorca and destroyed the Republic. But even though he has opted for modernist allusion as a modus operandi, a comparison between lines in Lorca's "Llanto" with MotherwelPs Elegies reveals close connections between the two, suggesting a thorough grounding in the poem, which provided the artist with a range of symbols and a stark emotional ambiance, which he hoped to parallel in his Elegies. Both the colors and the forms in the series reinforce images in the poem and present moreover a similar intensity of feeling. When death appears in the first section of the "Llanto," it takes the form of the "desolate horn" of the bull that lays "eggs in the wound" of the bullfighter. While the image of eggs correlates with ovoid forms in the paintings, the relationship between the two goes deeper than morphological parallels since eggs, connotative of birth and fertility, become the insidious seeds of death, reminding one of the often-quoted cynicism that birth is a terminal disease. The image of implanting eggs in a wound is an insidious characterization of life as death's fetus, which in turn sets up a tension between the desire to live and the realization that death is life's natural culmination. Lorca dramatizes the audience's awareness of Ignacio's death in terms of the arresting metaphor "and the crowd was breaking the windows." Earlier in the poem he inserted the line "And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel," which in the English translation (which impressed Motherwell) creates an onomatopoeic effect, which foreshadows the crashing panes of glass heralding the bullfighter's death. The image of the crowd's uproarious act is a spectacular presentation of violently opening a window onto death as well as escaping from it. It correlates with the image of a window in the Elegies, which is usually found in the upper right-hand corner. Almost always windows and openings in MotherwelPs paintings are placed at a level higher than his viewers. Usually they are hieratic and flat and painted with an intensity that makes them mysterious and beckoning even though one is incapable of going beyond them since the realm of the dead is by definition always inaccessible to the living. 1970s

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The colors in the first section of Lorca's poem are mainly red—iodine covering the bullring—and white, which is interpreted in terms of white sheet, cottonwood, and frail of lime. In addition, an intriguing interplay of white and green appears in the line "Horn of the lily through green groins," in which the lily, usually symbolic of purity, assumes the terrifying form of the bull's lethal horn; and the green of the groins results from the gangrene that has overtaken the cankerous wound. Often Motherwell accents large passages of black and white in the Elegies with small amounts of red and green: red implies blood, while green—usually a bright Kelly green suggesting verdure—is so rich that it establishes a tension between itself and its austere surroundings. In the second part of the poem, Lorca invokes a series of white objects to shield him from Ignacio's blood. The rhythm of the lines in this section reminds one of the sounds of a Spanish guitar when strings are strummed quickly and intensely, reaching a climax, then are followed by an abrupt cessation before the entire cycle is again enacted. Each time that the assertion "I will not see it!" is repeated, a brief silence follows. In some Elegies similar climatic buildups are preceded or followed by expressive lacunae that serve as foils for the lacerated black forms that encroach themselves on white areas, sometimes overwhelming them. In this section, Ignacio's death has already occurred, and with it the numbing realization of the loss it represents. Still, with a frailty that is part of human beings' paradoxical nature, the poet shrinks from it, attempting to forestall its full visual effect, thus inadvertently allocating to vision responsibility for full awareness. The poet attempts to use familiar and comforting white things to shield himself from the indelible appearance of Ignacio's blood. The underlying irony of this section of the poem is that white is also the color of Ignacio's deadly pallor so that the shielding objects also recall the ultimate horror they are called on to suppress. White plays a further ambivalent role in this poem when it acts as a wall, a protective barrier, and also as the lily of the bull's horn, which is the piercing dagger causing Ignacio's death. Firmly aware of the expressive possibilities of white, Motherwell has often referred those intrigued with its significance in his art to a chapter in Herman Melville's Moby Dick in which it is viewed as a particularly insidious covering that casts those wearing it with an even more frightening visage than if they were dressed in black. In the paintings white is the insidious backdrop; the bull's color, black, connotes death, while red is the hue of Ignacio's blood: "Oh, white wall of Spain / Oh, black Bull of sorrow! Oh, hard blood of Ignacio! Oh, Nightingale of his veins!" The joining of the white wall and black 330

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bull are crucial for the Elegies because the white—sometimes a wall and often a void—provides some emotional security for the painter in this abstracted tragedy, as he has readily acknowledged. The black forms in these paintings can be equated, as they often have been in critical reviews, with cajones—the bull's gonads—that are also emblems of the defeated and the dead that are removed and tacked on a wall after a particularly valorous bullfight. In the last section of the poem Lorca provides the coup de grace to traditional elegiac poetry. Instead of relying on nymphs to mourn a dead hero and prophesy his ultimate resurrection, he reaffirms Ignacio's death and ultimate disappearance since he will no longer be remembered just "like all the dead who are forgotten in a heap of lifeless dogs." Only the poem is left to memorialize Ignacio, and even the poet, as he tries to capture the bullfighter's essential nature, can only "remember a sad breeze through the olive trees." While Charles Baudelaire, an earlier authority on the meaninglessness of modern life, asserted that the uniqueness of Eugène Delacroix's highly Romantic paintings lies in the languorous melancholy exuded by some of his figures that in turn is suffused throughout the space enclosing them, Lorca's and Motherwell's melancholy assumes a different form. They present a stark picture of death in which there is no resurrection, no afterlife, not even the Greek compromise of a crepuscular underworld occupied by dim shades. With death all existence ceases; only the mourning of it briefly remains; and then art supplants mourning. In his art Motherwell has been able to project an asthmatic childhood obsession with death onto the demise of an entire government and its consequent lost culture. Schooled in the methods of psychoanalysis, he has long recognized that the treatment of patients comprises of necessity two phases. In the first they discover internal conflicts within themselves and learn to accept total responsibility for them. In the second they begin to see how these conflicts relate to the outside world. Points of contiguity are thus established between the personal and the social so that individual problems are conceived, in part, as reflections of broader concerns. In his work Motherwell follows a similar procedure, which is largely unconscious, when he looks for a common meeting ground between his own experiences, particularly those which evoke strong feelings within him, and events occurring in the world that are capable of containing as well as enlarging upon his own individual conflicts. If he did not search for analogies between himself and the world at large and contented himself with painting historical subjects that he knows only from secondary sources, his painting could become cold, melodramatic, 1970s

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and rhetorical—a compromise and a monologue—and the tensions that serve as signs of authenticity would not be there. His approach is distinctly Romantic albeit different from Delacroix's, and it is based on his attempts to achieve aspects of the universal through the personal by being fully aware that the personal is constituted by his own deeply felt reactions to his anxieties, his immediate environment, and the world at large. When we examine his Elegies and find that they are remarkably similar to Lorca's "Llanto," we might be surprised at the conjunctions between the two since the sketch came before his reading of the poem and yet this disjunction is only a momentary obstacle when we recognize that Motherwell throughout his life identified strongly with Spain since he felt, either rightly or wrongly, that it connected with threads of Spanish colonial culture still evident in the California of his youth. Partially because of his background in an arid Mediterranean-type climate, which had been prescribed as a cure for his childhood bouts with asthma, Motherwell believed Lorca to be a comrade spirit since he created in his writings powerful images that joined conjunctions of similar climate and locale with death. Between the paintings and the poem, the rapport then is more than coincidence since Motherwell perceived it in terms of his own background, no matter how distantly related it might appear. Later, as we have seen, he played on the similarity between the "Llanto" and his Elegies and employed the poem as both local color for this series of paintings and an intellectual context of informed primitivism in which the abstract forms in them might assume meaning. Although these poetic allusions are certainly not intended to be coercive and do not force viewers into a single reading, they do establish an aura of mourning for a lost ideal that had briefly occurred in the recent past and thus present viewers with the schematic formality of a majestic funeral dirge and the opportunity to reflect on time's passage and its sweeping effects. While the Elegies parallel the imagery of the poem, they are not just illustrations of it. Between the two a more important and subtle relationship exists, and this parallel is found in the similarity of feeling that the two evoke. Deeply entrenched in his country's traditions, Lorca settled on an atavism that stretches back to the fifteenth-century Spanish Gypsies, in particular their deep song known as the cante jondo, a profoundly moving lamentation, which at one time was regularly practiced by many ancient pagans. The cante jondo is a primitive chant—a form of trilling—that is repeated obsessively. In the course of being uttered with frequency and with deep feeling entire phrases can often be lost when impassioned mourners reach self-hypnotic, almost 332

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hysterical states. Lorca incorporates this Gypsy musical device in the first part of his "Llanto" when he repeats the single, emphatic refrain "at five in the afternoon" to the point that words, losing their meaning, recall the poet's obsessiveness. When Motherwell appropriates the refrain from the "Llanto" as a title, he allies his work with Lorca's poem and with the ancient tradition it recalls, making both of them germane to his own work. "I take an elegy," Motherwell has said, "to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for something one cared about." As visual equivalents for music, the Elegies are concerned with creating and sustaining an emotion: they strike a cord of feeling, like a particular state of being, when black verticals and ovals create a measured beat and pulsating rhythm across the canvas. Ovoid shapes, caught and squeezed between massive verticals, are analogous to the cante jondo, in which certain phrases and sounds are repeated until the lament, ceasing to be structured by words and meter, assumes the heightened pitch of a deepthroated cry. Motherwell's atavism in the Elegies assumes two alternative forms that can be described as either architectonic or organic. The sketch illuminating Rosenberg's poem belongs to the former category, as do At Five in the Afternoon and Elegy No. 100. Examples of the organic include The Figure 4 on an Elegy and No. j8. In addition, many Elegies position themselves between the two. From the beginning paintings in this series that call to mind architecture have been monumental in conception if not always in scale, including the first one, which is about the size of a piece of typing paper. Some of these works allude to Paleolithic structures such as Stonehenge, menhirs in Brittany, and colossal stone walls of Mycenae. When this type of Elegy is enlarged, the change is not as spectacular as one might think since monumentality has already been achieved in terms of the grandeur of its concept and relationship of part to whole. In the architectonic group formality implies distance. Often white areas in these pieces appear to create space, keeping the overall compositions hieratic and formal. In contrast to these Elegies, organic ones seem more intimate, and their backgrounds assume the look of walls. In some pieces verticals resemble giant penises, and a paradoxical relationship is established between intimate subject matter and spontaneous technique coupled with the type of scale that was formerly regarded as a property of public art. Achieving a dichotomy between the public and the private, the organic Elegies manifest the artist's stated quest to attain the universal via the personal. One of the most common fallacies in critical writing, which is more common in literary than in art criticism, is the tendency to view artists as incar1970s

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nated in their own work. Even though this is certainly a fallacy, it is one that often gives an aesthetic lie to the truth. With some Abstract Expressionists such as Motherwell, who uses psychic automatism as a pathway to his own unconscious, the lie is not entirely removed from the truth. Proceeding along this course of thought, I can vouch for the fact that connecting the public and the private is a signal characteristic of Motherwell's daily conversation. One reason why he joins in these exchanges, both socially sanctioned rules for polite discourse and very intimate subjects, is his commitment to Sartre's belief that nothing in life should be considered off limits. Whatever this French existentialist does can enter into the public domain since he is committed to understanding his personal life as an aspect of the human condition and consequently regards the sharing of it as valuable to him and others. In other words he considers himself as an instance of humanity rather than a unique and separate manifestation, and so does Motherwell. Coupled with this goal of spanning truthfully one's public and private selves, Motherwell indulges in hyperbole, which he jokingly refers to as a "Celtic propensity for exaggeration." To some this proclivity borders on braggadocio, but seen in terms of his art it enables the artist to assume epical proportions in his conversation so that he can express in words the depth of his feeling. This penchant for hyperbole allows him to conflate in the Elegies the passing away of his childhood fear of death with the actual demise of the Spanish Republic. Such a conflation indicates the highly cathected nature of his imagery that celebrates the burial of one specter at the same time that it mourns the passing of another. In his own person, as in his art, Motherwell incorporates the seemingly contradictory qualities of awkwardness and elegance. When he moves, his gestures are somewhat offhand, lacking deliberateness. He ambles about as if he is preoccupied with more important matters and walking is only a means for getting from one place to another. But combined with this sense of being preoccupied to the point of absentmindedness, there is an air of surety that comes from his resonant voice and penchant for poetic explanations. These same characteristics can also be discerned in his paintings. The parallel between the artist's awkwardness and his art that often first strikes viewers is the way that the edges of the verticals and ovoid shapes in the Elegies appear to be almost crude as if they had been hacked out of wood with an ax or formed of paper that has been bluntly cut with large shears in some places and deliberated ripped in others. Another parallel between his person and his style is found in his forms with their blunted and lacerated edges that are also ele334

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gant and sensuous. Moreover he spatters and drips paint with a careless nonchalance that makes one think of the Renaissance-era word "sprezzatura," which conceives of sophistication as an ability to make the difficult appear easy—certainly a feature of the many analogies that punctuate Motherwell's everyday speech. In consideration of his use of full-blown, aggressive black shapes in the Elegies to communicate power, it is useful to note the subtleties incorporated in them. In Elegy No. 100 the artist has chosen to leave the pronounced black swathes largely unmodulated while enriching the warm light areas with warm grays and cool whites to create varied harmonies. In addition he casually sprinkles areas of flesh color in them for dramatic relief. Although the purfles along the edges of the black stripes look as if they were casually painted, they are the areas that receive the most consideration since they are subtly accented and reinforced by diminutive touches and slender threads of pink, ocher, and sienna. These definitive accents are barely apparent from a distance of five to ten feet unless one already knows that they are there. Since the large areas in this and other Elegies are so imposing and the slashing brushwork comprising them is so redolent of bravura and power, the tenuous networks of smudges, drips, and lightly brushed traceries of paint along the edges are often missed by even the most discerning viewers. Although they are often unaware of these subtleties, these touches characterize Motherwell's entire endeavor as a masterful one. Moreover, the refinement along the edges endows these works with resoluteness and a sense of inevitability, and it also helps to disengage the black shapes at times from the white background while at other times permitting them to lie flatly next to these passages. Motherwell's visual poetry becomes ecstatic in his highly organic and relatively small The Figure 4 on an Elegy, one of the most explosive paintings in the series, which is exemplary of his automatist technique at its height. He created The Figure 4 on an Elegy in the early 19605 during a particularly creative period. Even though these frenetic outbursts represent only approximately two years of output, they greatly enrich the entire series by transforming the overall schema from slow moving, ponderous dirges into bacchanalian revels. Individual elements of his basic elegiac composition are pulled together into one amorphous mass in this painting. Tension, evident in most works in this series, reaches an extreme, causing the forms to explode in a frenetic outburst. Like blood gushing from a wound, these black shapes seem vehemently to release spatters and drips. Because the abstracted shapes resemble genitalia in this work, one might 1970s

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think that a Dionysian rite is taking place in which worshippers are re-enacting the sacrifice of a bull. The Titans, legendary ancestors of humankind, ripped apart this totemic animal that served as a substitute for Dionysus. Freud has pointed to this myth as one of the sources of the Oedipal idea, which he believes all mankind shares. The killing and eating of the totem in ancient religions, according to Freud, occurred periodically and represented an opportunity for worshippers to enact symbolically their Oedipal desire with religious sanction, thus feeling exonerated of their crime. When Motherwell created this painting, he may have vented the repressed hostility that he readily acknowledged having against his father, whose first and last names he shared. At any rate, when he painted this Elegy, he achieved an image of tremendous psychological release, which can be calculated in terms of the exhilaration and vitality that the liberated drips and spatters exude. After having studied Lorca's "Llanto" and MotherwelPs Elegies for an extended period of time, I am reminded of the statement made by an anonymous Roman writer—the so-called Longinus—who referred to the sublime as an echo of a great mind. The beauty and futility of such an echo is evident in Lorca's attempts to come to terms with Ignacio Sánchez Mejias after his death and his discovery that nothing remains—only the wind blows through the olive trees and the sounds of his own elegiac song are heard. It is evident too in Motherwell's search to understand death in his Elegies and his realization that only his memory of it can be resurrected in the form of his powerfully morbid Elegies with their lacerated black shapes marching to a measured beat across a white void, creating a stirring rhythm that is reflective of humanity's tragic and heroic state. Postscript:

Because of my effort twenty-eight years ago to distill my research and many conversations with Motherwell into this meditation on his Elegies, I left unresolved a problem that the essay indirectly raises, and that is the status of Abstract Expressionism's purported nonobjectivity. The point is exacerbated when one realizes that its major adherents repeatedly attempted to frame their minimal forms in terms of maximal content that was either literary or historical. We might well question whether the art by Motherwell and other Abstract Expressionists, with its potentially rich iconography presented in terms of allusive titles, is really nonobjective. Tying subject matter to even the most abstract forms changes and transforms them so that they lose their idealist apirations and become firmly grounded in a historical network of signs that en336

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cumbers them as it directs them to articulated ends. The Elegies' overarching title precludes looking at this series of works in terms of open-ended melancholy since it equates them with a distinct historic time and place. Thus MotherwelPs choice of title makes them function like surrogate history paintings. With its stated aims of elevating art to the level of a meaningful discourse on a par with the humanities by connecting it with already canonized historic, philosophic, and literary ideas, history painting intends to intensify the reciprocity between the arts and the humanities at the same time that it demonstrates its adaptability to inter-disciplinary investigations. Although many of the Abstract Expressionists were concerned with having their suggestive yet prescribed meanings inhere in abstract forms, they did not recognize that this goal ultimately connected their art to centuries-old academic practices. Even though they railed against the academy—an admissible goal in mid-century America even though it had long ceased to be a contributing factor to new art for at least fifty years—their art, unbeknownst to them, co-opted the central aspect of history painting even as it directed this quest for meaning to highly personal and seemingly abstract ends. Though they wished to create both intimate and monumental works, their psychologically predisposed subject matter subscribed to many of the same types of historical and mythological subjects that academic history painters employed, thereby making it anything but personal and idiosyncratic. Thus their abstraction can be seen as perpetuating far more traditional, time-honored ways of working; in fact, it can be regarded as a form of elevated referential painting—the twentieth century's response to history painting.

Notes

1. After completing my dissertation on Robert MotherwelPs Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which provides a basis for this essay, I was hired as a one-year replacement in the History of Art Department, Yale University. Because Ivy League universities often pay junior faculty astonishing low sums, my search for affordable housing in New Haven was unsuccessful until Motherwell offered to rent his guesthouse to me for the tempting sum of $1.00 per day. The year spent teaching in New Haven and living in MotherwelPs guesthouse in Greenwich was an extraordinary one. During this time many of the conversations that are referenced both directly and obliquely in this essay took place. Before this essay was published as the lead piece for MotherwelPs first European retrospective at the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle in 1976, he read and approved all quotations and ideas in it that are attributed to him. 2. This painting, according to Motherwell, was named in honor of Arthur Rimbaud, 1970s

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who escaped the cultivated realms of French symbolist poetry for life as an adventurer in Africa—a metaphor, no doubt, intended to refer also to his own escape from the confines of Surrealism to the open-endedness of Abstract Expressionism since he tended in conversation to couch his art in terms of a grand and heroic struggle. 3. Rereading this section, I am amazed at the extent to which the ideological biases of race had been internalized by Motherwell, who equated the feeling in his work with a blackness that was atavistic, primitive, and African, or least diasporic. I am also amazed at my blindness then to this social and historical construction, but such is the far-reaching effect of dominant, well-ensconced ideologies. 4. As I now look at this section I am struck by the degree to which Motherwell, one of the most urbane of twentieth-century writers, was intrigued with a world that could be characterized as the polar opposite of the one he inhabited. With the exception of a dysfunctional childhood and his recurrent bouts with alcoholism, which he freely acknowledged, MotherwelPs world was a highly cultivated and carefully circumscribed one, which was populated by his psychoanalytic pokerplaying buddies who had life-long passions for James Joyce's writings, his few artist friends such as the highly literate sculptor David Smith, his penchant for French culture and cooking that he perfected as a Cordon Bleu student of Dione Lucas, and the overall affluent lifestyle that was financed first by a father who had been CEO of Wells Fargo Bank and later by sales of his own work and investments. In retrospect it appears that his atavism was highly intellectual and based on a thorough understanding of its effectiveness as a psychoanalytic metaphor for Freud's subconscious and Jung's unconscious mind.

DAVID SHAPIRO AND C E C I L E S H A P I R O

Excerpt from "Abstract

Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," Parts

Abstract art was the main issue among the painters I knew in the late thirties. Radical politics was on many people's minds, but for these particular artists Social Realism was as dead as the American Scene. (Though that is not all, by far, that there was to politics in those years: some day it will have to be told how "anti-Stalinism," which started out more or less as "Trotskyism," turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.) —Clement Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York" SOURCE: Prospects 3 (1977), 175-214. Reprinted with the permission of David and Cécile Shapiro. 338

Ill The most surprising fact about American art in the late 19508 is the dearth of well-written published material critical of or hostile to Abstract Expressionism. Since a conspiracy is entirely unlikely—even Senator Joe McCarthy never claimed to have uncovered any in the art world—more likely possibilities must be examined. [...] Abstract Expressionism, of course, can in no way be equated with McCarthyism, although the conformism that pervaded the decade goes a long way toward explaining the power of each. But while McCarthyism was the expression of a vicious political authoritarianism, Abstract Expressionism might better be described as anarchist or nihilist, both antipodes of authoritarianism, in its drive to jettison rules, tradition, order, and values. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," Yeats prophetically wrote. Anarchist Abstract Expressionism and neofacist McCarthyism ruled in their separate spheres during the same period, and the fact that their control was almost complete for a time makes it fair to suggest certain parallels. If the atmosphere of the times and the support of the leading critics, museums, and art publications helped Abstract Expressionism to reach an unprecedented vogue that stifled other forms during the 19505, there were other stimulants to its success as well. The GI Bill for veterans and a new prosperity meant that schools, in this case mainly college art departments, were expanding and thus catching as young faculty the first wave of artists trained as Abstract Expressionists. They, in turn, taught the next generation of art students, a group substantially larger than ever before in our history. The varied modes of art noticeable during the 19305 and 19405 were virtually untaught and unrepresented during the 19505 for more reasons than that they seemed tired and perhaps old-fashioned in a postwar world. Unlike earlier periods, all art seemed to be funneled toward one type of expression [. . .] The lever that lifted Abstract Expressionism to the peak it achieved as the quasi-official art of the decade, suppressing other kinds of painting to a degree not heretofore conceivable in our society, was an arm of the United States government. [...] The United States Information Agency, which as time went on was to sponsor a great deal of American art, worked within an official censorship policy which ruled that our government was not to support nonrepresentational examples of our creative energy nor circulate exhibitions that included the work of "avowed communists, persons convicted of crimes involving a threat to the 1970s

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security of the United States, or persons who publicly refuse to answer questions of Congressional committees regarding connection with the communist movement."16 Among the artists and organizations attacked at some point by one congressional committee or another were the Los Angeles City Council, the Dallas Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the American Federation of Art circulating exhibit called "100 American Artists of the Twentieth Century," the Orozco murals at the New School for Social Research, the Diego Rivera murals in Detroit, and the Anton Refregier mural created with federal funds for the Rincón Annex Post Office in San Francisco.17 Almost any style, then, was a potential target for congressional pot-shots, ranging from that which was explicitly political and/or executed by artists involved with sociopolitical affairs, to art that categorically denied any possibility of ideological communication. Yet despite the problems, Abstract Expressionism became the style most heavily dispensed by our government, for reasons that were in part explained by Thomas W. Braden in a 1967 article that appeared under the title "I'm Glad the C.I.A. Is Immoral" in the Saturday Evening Post.18 Braden, executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art for a short period in the late 19405, joined the Central Intelligence Agency as supervisor of cultural activities in 1951, and remained as director of this branch until 1954. Recognizing that congressional approval of many of their projects was "as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare," he became involved with using such organizations as the Institute of Labor Research and the National Council of Churches as fronts in the American cold war against communism here and abroad. The rules that guided the CIA allowed them to "use legitimate existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest; protect the integrity [sic] of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy."19 Braden said that "we placed one agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for Cultural Freedom."20 The agent remained for many years as executive director; another CIA agent became editor of Encounter. When money was needed to finance these projects it was supplied by the CIA via paper organizations devised for that purpose. Commenting on these activities years later, Conor Cruise O'Brien said that the "beauty of the operation . . . was that writers of the first rank, who had no interest in serving the power structure, were induced to do so unwittingly."21 The same might be said of the Abstract Expressionists, and perhaps of the critics and museum personnel supporting 340

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them. In any case, Braden, possibly taking his aesthetic cue from his Museum of Modern Art years, supported the export of Abstract Expressionism in the propaganda war. It appears likely that he agreed with Greenberg's 1949 remark, the purport of which became for a time the American twentieth-century version of the discredited "white man's burden," which held—apropos art —that this country, "here, as elsewhere . . . has an international burden to carry."22 Backed by money available to the CIA and supportive of Abstract Expressionism, Braden's branch became a means of circumventing Congress and sending abroad art-as-propaganda without federal intervention. In his study of one of the organizations infiltrated by the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Christopher Lasch wrote that especially in the fifties American intellectuals, on a scale that is only beginning to be understood, lent themselves to purposes having nothing to do with the values they professed—purposes, indeed, that were diametrically opposed to them. The defection of intellectuals from their true calling—critical thought— goes a long way toward explaining not only the poverty of political discussion but the intellectual bankruptcy of much historical scholarship. The infatuation with consensus; the vogue of disembodied "history of ideas" divorced from considerations of class or other determinants of social organization; the obsession with "American Studies" which perpetuates a nationalistic myth of American uniqueness—these things reflect the degree to which historians have become apologists, in effect, for American national power in the holy war against communism.... The prototype of the anti-communist intellectual in the fifties was the disillusioned ex-Communist, obsessed by the corruption of Western politics and culture by the pervasive influence of Stalinism and by a need to exorcise the evil and expiate his own past.23 Lasch's description fits both Greenberg and Rosenberg, who wrote articles supporting Abstract Expressionism for CIA-subsidized journals as well as others. (Partisan Review, according to Lasch, was one of those journals that for a time was sponsored by the CIA.) Their published material had a great deal to do with the acceptance of the style by other intellectuals in the 19505. It is also worth remarking in this connection that the word "American" drums repeatedly in the titles of essays sympathetic to Abstract Expressionism: "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture," "American Action Painting," "American Type Painting," "The New American Paint1970s

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ing," "Is Abstraction Un-American?"—the last a peculiarly 19505-type question. It is not surprising, Lasch says, that these cold war intellectuals became affluent as well as powerful as their usefulness to the government, corporations, and foundations became apparent, "partly because the Cold War seemed to demand that the United States compete with communism in the cultural sphere as well as in every other."24 The Abstract Expressionists were used in the 19505 in a series of international exhibitions, sponsored by the International Council of MOMA, whose purpose appears to have coincided with the aims of government bodies.25 (This may be a good place to note that from 1954 to 1962 the U.S. Pavilion in Venice was the property of the Museum of Modern Art, the only such national pavilion privately owned.) "The functions of both the CIA's undercover operations and the Modern Museum's International programs were similar."26 [...] Although the artists who made this art were generally no longer political (including those who had been at some time in the past), they were on the whole in accord with official policy, not only in its fixation on the Communist menace but also in their disdain for figurative art, especially the left-wing political art of the Social Realists in America. If these factors did not entirely allay qualms about their employment as part of the establishment propaganda apparatus, they could take comfort, as artists inevitably do, in the exhibition record. Few are ever likely to argue about the purposes for which their paintings are exhibited just so long as they are in fact widely and regularly shown. A vocal portion of the art world, moreover, was cockily triumphant about the splash American art was making abroad for the first time. As the Luce publications proclaimed, this was to be the American century. We had emerged from the war unscathed; we had the biggest and best of everything. We wanted the rest of the world to know it, and to know that it was all due to our true-blue goodness, our planning, and our form of government. The new world had invented a new art which lay claim to epitomizing a new freedom. Yet another reason suggests itself for the speed with which government and museums cooperated in arranging exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism abroad. Social Realism, widely exhibited until World War II, is programmatically critical of capitalism. Its stated aim, in fact, is to serve as an instrument in the social change that will disestablish capitalism. The Museum of Modern Art had on occasion exhibited and purchased works of certain Social Realists and continued to do so for a time after the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, in 1946 MOMA had shown Social Realist Ben Shahn's 342

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work in a retrospective that established his reputation. But they may now have been relieved to be helped off a hot spot, for it should not be forgotten that MOMA, like most American museums, was founded and funded by extremely rich private collectors, and MOMA was still actively supported by the Rockefellers, a clan as refulgent with money and power as American capitalism has produced. These people, to paraphrase Churchill, had no wish to preside over the dismantling of the economic system that had served them so well. It is likely that related reasons influenced other museums, which, after varying periods of hesitation, joined in support of Abstract Expressionist art. (Many other elements, of course, were operative as well.) Museums backed up exhibitions of the new mode with massive purchases of work by living artists on a scale that had never before been approached. "It was a kind of instant history, and quickly a sampling of their works was to be found in most museums," wrote Joshua Taylor, director of the National Collection, Smithsonian Institution.27 Earlier the rule had been for museums to be extremely chary of acquiring work by living artists. Now museums not only splurged on canvases sold to them at ever-augmenting prices; the trustees who had authorized the acquisitions became collectors of the new art. "Trustees often urged the museum to acquire works by the very artists they were collecting, thus helping to bolster their own taste," Daniel Catton Rich has observed.28 Even curators—giving rise to ethical problems—functioned as public taste makers and private clients. Thus it came about that the critics and their theories, the art publications as well as the general press, the museums led by the Museum of Modern Art, the avant-garde art galleries, the clandestine functions of the CIA supported by the taxpayer, the need of artists to show and sell their work, the leveling of dissent encouraged by McCarthyism and a conformist era, the convergence of all varieties of anti-Communists and anti-Stalinists on a neutral cultural point, the cold war and the cultural weapons employed in its behalf, American postwar economic vigor and its sense of moral leadership, plus the explosion of a totally new kind of American-born painting that seemed the objective correlative of Greenberg's early announcement that "the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States"29—all these combined to make Abstract Expressionism the only art acceptable on a wide scale during the conforming 19505. The rise of Abstract Expressionism to its leadership of the avant-garde, and from there to its position of official art, is replete with irony. First, because the very term "avant-garde," as proudly vaunted as Baudelaire's "modernism," 1970s

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was first used in art by socialist artists in the nineteenth century, and its meaning then was very close to what we have come to call Social Realism. "Avantgarde" as cultural vanguard was used in an 1845 essay in the following way: Art, the expression of Society, reveals in its highest forms the most advanced social tendencies; it is a precursor and herald. Now, to know whether an art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, if an artist is really at the avantgarde, one must know where humanity is heading, what is the destiny of the species ... strip nude with a brutal brush all the ugliness, all the garbage that is at the base of our society.3Q Or, as the French socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon wrote twenty years earlier, It is we, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde [in the struggle toward socialism]: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or canvas.31 It is ironic, too, that an apolitical art that arose at least in part as a reaction to didactic art, as an "art-for-art's-sake" antidote to "art-as -a-weapon," should have become a prime political weapon. As Max Kozloff wrote in 1973, in the 19505 the art establishment saw this kind of art as the "sole trustee of the avant-garde spirit, a belief so reminiscent of the U.S. Government's notion of itself as the lone guarantor of capitalist liberty."32 It is also an irony that an art indifferent to morality became the prime example of the morality of free expression, and that an art foreswearing aesthetics came to be used as the originator of a new aesthetic. And perhaps the final irony is that instead of reigning for a thousand years, as Adolph Gottlieb had predicted,33 it lasted as king for a decade, with pop art—the epitome of the banal and the glorification of kitsch—its immediate successor. Jack had killed the giant, but the giant arose again, deformed, stronger, with greater pretensions, and flexing muscles never dared before. Pop, as everyone knows, has been succeeded by op, minimal, conceptual, photorealism, and more yet—but each of these in one way or another either derives from Abstract Expressionism or is a violent reaction against it, so that the disruption caused by the dominance of Abstract Expressionism for its decade will be felt not only in American art but all over the world throughout this century.

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Notes

16. William Hauptman, "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade," Artforum, October 1973, p. 49. 17. Ibid., pp. 50-51. 18. Thomas W. Braden, "I'm Glad the C.I.A. Is Immoral," Saturday Evening Post, May 20,1967, pp. 10 ff. 19. Ibid., p. 11. 20. Ibid. 21. Christopher Lasch, "The Cultural Cold War," in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, éd., Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Pantheon, 1968), p. 353. 22. Clement Greenberg, "Art Chronicle: A Season of Art," Partisan Review (JulyAugust 1949), p. 414. 23. Lasch, "Cultural Cold War," pp. 323,336. 24. Ibid., p. 344. His statement about the CIA and the Partisan Review is on p. 335. 25. Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), p. 384. MOMA's international exhibition program, Lynes said, was "to let it be known especially in Europe that America was not a cultural backwater that the Russians, during the tense period called 4he cold war,' were trying to demonstrate that it was." 26. Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Artforum, June 1974, p. 40. 27. Joshua C. Taylor, "The Art Museum in the United States," in On Understanding Art Museums, éd., Sherman E. Lee (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), p. 60. 28. Daniel Catton Rich, "Management, Power, and Integrity," in Lee, On Understanding Art Museums, p. 137. 29. Clement Greenberg, "Art Chronicle: The Decline of Cubism," Partisan Review (March 1948), p. 369. 30. James S. Ackerman, "The Demise of the Avant-Garde: Notes on the Sociology of Recent American Art," Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (October 1969), 375n. (Italics added.) Ackerman quotes from Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968). The original lines were written by Gabriel-Desire Laverdant, a follower of the socialist Fourier. 31. Ackerman, "Demise of the Avant-Garde," p. 375n. Ackerman is quoting from Donald Egbert, "The Idea of the Avant-Garde in Art and Politics," American Historical Review 70 (1967). (Italics added.) 32. Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," Artforum, May 1973, p. 44. 33. Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961),

P. 87.

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MELVIN P. LADER

Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the "Ingres Revival" in America

Recent studies have revealed and clarified the prominent role played by the Russian immigrant John D. Graham in the American avant-garde art scene in the 19303 and 1940s.1 Having arrived in New York in 1920, this man of diverse talents was simultaneously an artist, writer, theoretician, collector, polemicist for modernism, mystic and self-proclaimed magus. By the latter Twenties, he had become a pivotal personality in a loose-knit group that ultimately would include some important members of the Early New York School, chief among whom were the painters Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Of the three, Graham indisputably was the most eloquent and the most prolific writer, and it is largely through his writings that we can gain valuable insights into what I will call the "Ingres Revival." In 1937, Graham published his System and Dialectics of Art, a book of philosophical thought and theory which stands today as one of the most important documents for the study of American art of the Thirties and Forties.2 In our present knowledge, it would seem that the significance of this volume does not lie to any marked degree in its direct influence on other artists or their art.3 Indeed, many of the ideas expressed in the treatise were not necessarily original with Graham, but rather exemplified vanguard thought during the period under discussion. It is in this capacity as a mirror of contemporary avant-garde thought that System and Dialectics is used here. In addition to this work, Graham also authorized articles that expressed similar ideas, and he kept detailed notebooks and journals in which he often jotted down his views on art and life.4 Taken collectively, these sources furnish us with a wealth of information on this crucial period in the history of American art. Basic to all of Graham's writings is his concept of art history as a succession of styles, the highest points of which are reached during periods of what he called "pure painting." By "pure painting" he meant painting that does not resort to pictorial illusionism, which does not attempt to reproduce reality on the canvas.5 In accordance with contemporary thought Graham thus was stressing the necessity for preserving the integrity of the two-dimensional picture plane. He traced the history of "pure painting" as the following progression: Pre-

SOURCE: Arts Magazine (March 1978), 94-99. Copyright © Melvin P. Lader. 346

historie, Graeco-Egyptian, Pompeian, Byzantine, Gothic, Uccello, Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso, and Mondrian.6 At one time or another, and in one form or another, Graham in his art and in his thought drew upon most of these links in the chain of "pure painting."7 But at the time he was writing System and Dialectics and especially in his own painting of the 19405 Graham was partial to Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Pablo Picasso, it is true, had been a strong influence on Graham's abstract paintings of the Thirties and had played a major positive role in the treatise, but by 1944 Graham had emphatically rejected Picasso both in word and in deed. In about 1946, Graham even authored a manifesto denouncing him as a fraud.8 It should be noted here that Picasso also was an admirer of Ingres, a point to which I shall return later. Unlike Picasso, however, Ingres never fell out of Graham's favor and remained very much on his mind throughout this entire period. It is significant that Graham wrote System and Dialectics in the late Thirties, for throughout the twentieth century in America there had been a mounting interest in Ingres' art. By 1930, the "Ingres Revival" was clearly detectable, prompting one author to remark that "the coming of Ingres to America forms a definite chapter in his reestablishment in high favor among critics and artists."9 The Revival had been heralded in 1918 when New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the portrait Monsieur Jacques Leblanc and its pendant, Madame Françoise Leblanc (both of 1823), which were among the first paintings by Ingres to enter into American public institutions. Prior to this time, not one American museum had possessed an important work by that French master.10 Thereafter, many such acquisitions were made by various American Institutions. Chief among these, for example, were The Comtesse d'Haussonville (1845, acquired by the Frick Collection in 1927) and his Portrait of a Gentleman (c. 1807, bequeathed by the Havermeyer family to the Metropolitan Museum in 1929). Ingres' drawings, too, became prized acquisitions during this period. There was also an increase in the number of exhibitions featuring works by Ingres, culminating in the great "David and Ingres" exhibition of 1939-1940,n and there was a marked rise as well in the number of scholarly writings devoted specifically to him. The climax of this renewed interest seems to have occurred between the years 1937 and 1945, when all of these manifestations proliferated. Graham's writings could not remain unaffected by this. Some scholars previously have noted that Ingres held a fascination for particular artists of the Early New York School, but none yet have studied the phenomenon as a collective revivalist trend. Moreover, they have not spoken 1970s

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adequately of it in stylistic and visual terms, nor have they explained satisfactorily the reasons for such a revival. Whether this "Ingres Revival" resulted from an increased interest by artists and critics or whether they merely were swept along within it is not important here. What is important is to realize that this increased interest in Ingres coincided with a growing awareness of Surrealism in America, and also that it reflected the twentieth century's preference for formal abstraction. Using Graham's writings and [considering] an example of his art, we can now turn to a more detailed discussion of the Ingriste influence. Like Ingres, Graham was fond of painting women's portraits, and such compositions comprise his most powerful and successful paintings. A superb example is his Two Sisters of 1944, i.e., from about the time that Ingres' influence on Graham's art seems to have begun. This painting falls well within Graham's definition of and preference for "pure painting." For although the figures obviously are based upon nature, they could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a realistic representation of the sitters. In his System and Dialectics, Graham wrote: To copy nature one does not have to be born an artist. Everyone can be taught to copy nature. It is easy to copy nature, it is only a matter of training. It is difficult to create. Art is essentially creation. Creation without abstraction is unthinkable. Therefore nature is used in art only as a point of departure.12 This approach, of course, is reminiscent of Ingres, who had attempted to combine reality and abstraction, art and life. In fact, Graham often cited Ingres in his notebooks as having said "... the purpose of art is to imitate nature which means not to copy nature, but to understand its processes and to imitate these processes as well as to imitate the appearance."13 Ingres made several such statements, and Graham mentions the same concept in various terms throughout his writings. In addition, the flatness of the space, which Graham named as the major characteristic of "pure painting," is also apparent in his Two Sisters. Graham wrote at length on space and its perception by man. In one extremely important passage in System and Dialectics he concludes that in reality there are but two dimensions. He said: Space and matter, as it is accessible to human mind, is only two-dimensional. Even human vision is essentially two-dimensional since when we look at a man ... we see the face only and cannot see his back. Only the phenomenon of binocularity or seeing from two points with a distance between them ac348

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counts for the optical delusion of volume.... Furthermore the third dimension is not a new dimension but a dimension made up at an angle, to the already established: a) longitude and b) latitude So the third dimension is not an element as the first and second but a by-product. Consequently Space is two-dimensional and can appear three-dimensional only by the operation of the plane and due to the optical delusion resulting from the binocularity.14 In Two Sisters, Graham stressed this two-dimensionality by using large, simplified, flat areas of color, by using frontal forms, and by including a planar background that prevents any pronounced visual penetration into depth. Moreover, the interception of the figures' arms and hands by the picture's edge, which repeats on the same plane the interception by the border with the linear background elements, firmly ties the images to the picture's surface. Comparing the spatial characteristics of this painting with Ingres' portrait Mme. De Senonnes, one reason becomes apparent why Graham was drawn to Ingres' art. He, too, has depicted his sitter in a shallow, compressed space. The mirror behind Mme. de Senonnes functions in a manner analogous to the background plane in Two Sisters, thus limiting spatial depth and tending further to flatten the figure. Graham was well aware of this characteristic of Ingres' art, as were others of the Early New York School, and when in System and Dialectics he lists the great two-dimensional art of all times, Ingres' name finds a prominent place.15 Graham termed this type of painting "planimetric" or "extensive" painting.16 He proceeded to say: It can be three dimensional in so far as detail modeling is concerned but remains within the plane neither protruding nor receding. This is achieved by a planimetric arrangement of limbs of the figure by articulating them in the direction of the design.... Ondulation [sic] within the operating plane means that the shoulders, arms, legs are thrust and aligned so as not to disturb by the ondulation [sic] the whole flatness of the plane.17 It is significant that Graham again mentions Ingres as a primary example of this technique.18 In Two Sisters, Graham shows us what he means by this planimetric arrangement and "ondulation." First, detailed modeling is limited to certain areas as, for example, in the neck. This does not result in any deep spatial illusionism. On the contrary, all parts seem to adhere to the picture plane, with the outline of the form helping to maintain this flatness. Second, the limbs of the figures are spatially located in nearly the same plane, as illustrated here, for example, by the positioning of the arms. Third, in the figure at the right, the arms, shoulders, and the thrust of the lower body are so 1970s

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aligned and woven into the composition that they do not disturb the overall two-dimensional effect. Ingres' painting also exemplifies Graham's ideas, though, of course, on a much more subtle level. Graham undoubtedly was familiar with Ingres' statement that "the beautiful forms are those with flat planes and with rounds," which, though seemingly contradictory, approximates Graham's theories and exemplifies the struggle of many modern artists to synthesize reality and abstraction.19 Beyond this, there is still another characteristic of Ingres' works that undoubtedly touched Graham. This is the mood of the paintings which could be seen as "enigmatically timeless" or "psychologically mysterious." To attain such feeling, Graham felt that an inert and static quality was paramount. Again, in his writings, he said: A great work of art is always static. A dynamic state is the natural state of things and there is no accomplishment in falling in with eternal motion, the heroic feat is to arrest motion by stupendous effort and to contemplate.20 Indeed, he felt that the purpose of all art, in the abstract sense, was to arrest this eternal motion and to "establish personal contact with static eternity."21 In Ingres' Mme. de Senonnes this sense of timelessness is conveyed by her frozen pose and her introspective character. Her mood suggests an uneasyone might venture to say surreal—quality that appealed to Graham's longing for the enigmatic. Related to this, of course, was Graham's fascination with modern psychology. He refers to Freud and Jung in his writings, and he often mentions the relationship between psychology and modern art. This interest in modern psychology represents still another factor that drew him to Ingres' portraits which capture not only the appearance of the sitter, but a feeling for their personality and the workings of their mind as well. In fact, some members of the New York School referred to Ingres as the "Freud of Painting."22 Graham's Two Sisters, in its expressive mood, successfully presents us with psychological mystery and enigma as conveyed by the figures' static, frontal pose and their fixed, cross-eyed stare. They seem to exist esoterically as goddesses of the modern world, sorceresses, and ritualistic icons whose presence intrigues and tantalizes the viewer. According to Graham, one of the most important elements contributing to this expressive quality of a painting was form. "Form itself," he said, "expresses fully all elements of subject matter, character, tragedy and psychology."23 "Pure form in space speaks of great psychological dramas more poignantly than psychological art can ever do."24 "Pure form can tell more about 350

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the content than any story could possibly do."25 The exactitude and clarity of definition with which Graham has drawn his forms in Two Sisters brings to contemporary art the same expressive precisionism found in the works by Ingres, who, at one time, had said that "Expressionism in painting demands a very great science of drawing; for expression cannot be good it if has not been formulated with absolute exactitude."26 Before proceeding, it would be well to note that Ingres' painting Mme. de Senonnes may be one of several by Ingres that served as a source for Graham's Two Sisters. This is especially true of the right-hand figure. She and Mme. de Senonnes are seated at similar angles with their gaze directed at the viewer, both wearing Empire-style dresses that expose the upper areas of the breasts. Indeed, the figure's left breast in either case is shown in near-profile, a device which allows for spatial ambiguity and further anchors an otherwise threedimensional form to the surface of the canvas. Even more striking is the resemblance found in the positioning of the arms. The left one, partially hidden behind the figure, seems nearly detached and terminates in abstractly elongated hands and fingers. Meanwhile, the right arm has become an extension of the arc that sweeps down from the base of the neck, glides over the shoulder, and comes to rest in the women's lap in a marvelous demonstration of abstract composition. Graham has left this area in his painting in what would appear to be an unfinished state. He may, however, have been recalling a specific device used by Ingres in such portraits as Mme. Philibert Rivière (с. 1805, The Louvre, Paris). Ingres often cloaked the arms of his figures in shawls or other wrappings in order to avoid the angularity of a naturalistically rendered elbow. Such angles formalistically would disrupt the harmonious curvature of the arm and even the entire composition. The treatment of this area in Graham's woman may have been similarly motivated. It should be noted in support of this that in the left-hand figure Graham, too, has avoided depicting the elbow, but here he simply places the right elbow beyond the picture's border and hides the left one behind the second sitter. The eyes of Graham's women frequently are crossed, as they are in his Two Sisters. Some reasons have been offered to explain the use of this device; for example, it not only contributes to the heightened psychological power of the paintings, but it also imparts a degree of tension within the composition that tends to make the figures more timeless and immobile.27 This explanation is borne out in part by Graham's own writings when he mentions that eyes naturalistically rendered tend to wander off the canvas.28 On the other hand, Graham was a practitioner of Yoga and he assuredly was aware of the typical Yoga 1970s

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exercise of crossing the eyes, which allows the participant to focus his mind upon a single point of intense concentration. But in his notebooks he also wrote that cross-eyed women contained what he called "the mystery of genesis heightened by lines converging in the distance."29 This statement suggests still another heretofore unmentioned possibility—that it relates to his theory of binocularity and the resulting illusion of the third dimension. He had stated, in effect, that the shorter the distance between two points, the less would be such an illusion and the greater the degree of true two-dimensional vision. He cited the example that a bull with the wider spacing of his eyes can see things more volumetrically than can human beings.30 By implication, shortening the span between the eyes or making the vision converge at an external point would increase true two-dimensional sight. Historical antecedents for depicting cross-eyed women are many, including portraits by Raphael. Since Raphael was a major source for Ingres' art, it is interesting that Ingres, too, at times distorted the vision of his sitters, as in his Mme. Aymon, known as La Belle Zelie (1806, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), whose eyes veer off center. To sum up what has been established thus far, it is obvious from the writings and from the art that Graham admired Ingres because of the abstract formalist elements of his paintings and because of the Surrealist-related psychological and mystical aura. For the moment, we will leave it at that. His figures throughout the decade continued to reflect Ingres' influence. Celia (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), also of 1944, exhibits all of the same compositional and stylistic characteristics as well as a similar mood. Generally, it recalls Ingres' portrait Mme. Inès Moitessier (1851, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Graham mentions a portrait of Mme. Moitessier in his notebooks, but he probably was referring to the 1856 seated version in the National Gallery, London. In this painting, he seemed especially impressed by Ingres' devotion to fine craftsmanship. Specifically, he had noted that it had taken Ingres four or five years to complete the painting.31 This concept of craftsmanship and Graham's preoccupation with it is an important point to bear in mind. Having established the foregoing foundations, it remains to show how these general attitudes, and specifically the love for Ingres—so apparent in Graham's writings—reflects the art and views of Graham's New York cohorts Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Gorky, who had met Graham in New York City in the later Twenties, was also an enthusiastic devotee of Ingres. But this interest and influence on his own art apparently predates that of Graham, going back to the mid-Twenties 352

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or shortly before.32 It is therefore tempting to speculate that Gorky may have been a major factor in guiding Graham's taste in that direction, a speculation in need of much further study. However that may be, many of the same qualities that endeared Ingres to Graham are found in Gorky's The Artist and His Mother of c. 1926-29. The connection with Graham may be even more direct, since it has been suggested that Graham's Two Sisters was done in response to this Gorky painting.33 Based upon an often reproduced photograph of 1912 depicting the artist and his mother, Gorky has altered the images of his painting compositionally in order to create a harmoniously constructed, flattened picture. These alterations, of course, recall Graham's and Ingres' pronouncements to use the natural world only as a point of departure. Gorky shared this view, believing that art must go beyond what is seen by the eye to encompass what is seen with the mind. In other words, the artist must utilize creative imagination to venture into the realm of the abstract beyond stagnant physical appearance.34 In addition, the silent atmosphere and the static immobile figures in Gorky's painting present us with a heightened form of reality similar to that in the work of Ingres and Graham. It is also perhaps significant that the mother's pose is extremely frontal, almost heraldic in appearance. Although close to the pose in the photograph, it nevertheless calls to mind Ingres' powerful images of Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806, Musée de l'Armée, Palais des Invalides, Paris) and his portrait of Ж Louis-François Berlin (1832, The Louvre, Paris). It is known that Gorky frequently borrowed poses, motifs, or even styles because they conveyed expressive forces that echoed his own feelings, and this possibility should not be discounted here. There are many stories and written statements, as well as the works of art themselves, that document Gorky's fondness for Ingres. Friends recount, for example, how he would buy post cards or reproductions of works by Ingres, and how he delighted in showing these to others while supplying a discourse in Ingres' expertise and working methods. Moreover, we know that he also owned and read books on Ingres, and it was not unusual to find him standing for long periods of time before an Ingres painting in the museums or galleries that he often frequented. On the wall of Gorky's studio, there were large life-size reproductions of paintings by Uccello and Ingres. One of these was the latter's Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty-Four of i8o4.35 His student and biographer Ethel Schwabacher has recounted how he would glance quickly at the Ingres reproduction, or at the Uccello, measuring them against his own canvases on which he 1970s

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was working. The reproduction, then, was more than mere decoration. It served as inspiration and as a model of excellence with which he could compare his own works. Ingres' Self-Portrait may have inspired Gorky's own three-quarter length Self-Portrait of c. 1937, which exhibits a number of iconographie and stylistic affinities. The turn of the figure, the facial expression, the simplified forms, and the flat background areas, for example, are all similar. The comparison is one of types, however, and should not be pressed too far. Further, we might compare Gorky's work to Ingres' portrait of the painter FrançoisMarius Granet (c. 1807, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence), which also shares the same general design and composition. In the Gorky Self-Portrait, the artist holds an object in his right hand that imaginatively might be interpreted as an artist's palette or a book, like the artist's portfolio held by Granet. We know that Gorky was extremely fond of art books, showing a decided preference for monographs on his favorite artists. Not unexpectedly, one of the most sacred of his books was Walter Pach's monograph on Ingres, a book which had the distinction of being the first American volume on the French painter, having been published in 1939 at the height of the "Ingres Revival." Significantly, Pach felt that the mission of his book was "to restore him [Ingres] to his position as an artist of the truest originality, one who knew how to use the past rightly, which is to say as the great guide to the present and the future."36 The book was very popular among artists and the public, and its role in the "Ingres Revival" undoubtedly was great. Indeed, Gorky maintained that he slept with this very book under his pillow at night in the belief that he could thus acquire all the aspects of Ingres' art he so dearly admired.37 Although this story has more than a touch of Gorky's self-created myth, it nevertheless says something of his ardent devotion to his artistic hero. It is tempting to suppose that the book-like object in Gorky's Self-Portrait might also be a book on the Frenchman, but this, of course, is highly speculative. About 1937, Gorky also painted his Portrait of Master Bill, which has been interpreted as a painting of his friend de Kooning.38 It seems, however, to have been fashioned upon Ingres' painting Ж Philibert Riviere, and it is virtually a mirror image of that work. The pose, the alignment and "ondulation" of the limbs, the cropped legs, the turning of the head, the facial expression, the prominent emphasis given to the chair, and other Ingriste elements mentioned earlier are once again evident. It has been suggested that Gorky's Portrait of Master Bill may have served as a model for Graham's Poussin m'instruit of 1944 (Collection of Fritz Bultman, New York).39 Although the visual comparison is not conclusive enough to warrant the supposition, there 354

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is a stylistic similarity that undoubtedly reflects the influence of Gorky and Ingres on Graham's painting. Gorky has earned the reputation as being one of the greatest draftsmen of our century. In System and Dialectics, Graham had noted that "It is impossible for one to paint well unless one draws well. . . ."40 Thus, not only did drawing furnish the expressive qualities mentioned above, but it was the very foundation for all great painting. In this, Graham echoed Ingres, who had stated that "Drawing is the probity of art Drawing includes three and one 41 half quarters of the content of painting." Gorky, too, believed in this: ... drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But a good drawer can always paint Drawing gives the artist the ability to control his line and hand. It develops in him the precision of line and touch. This is the path towards masterwork.42 Gorky's own mastery of line was due in no small measure to Ingres' influence. His Self-Portrait of c. 1935 (Collection of Ethel Schwabacher, New York), for example, utilizes Ingres' precise linear style combined with delicately modeled areas. There are stylistic borrowings as well, exemplified by the elongated curvature and detached quality of the arm. It is also obvious in this drawing that eyes held a particular fascination for Gorky, as they had for Graham. He, too, was concerned with the spiritual and psychological quality conveyed by the eyes, considering them the "soul of portraiture" and "the prime communication between the artist and those who view his work."43 In noting the psychological quality he expresses through the eyes, it is not difficult to understand why others of the New York School referred to Gorky as "the Ingres of the Unconscious;"44 which is, of course, a direct paraphrase upon Ingres' reputation as the "Freud of Painting." By at least 1933, Graham, Gorky, and Willem de Kooning had become mutually close friends. De Kooning's name appears but once in System and Dialectics, but it is significant that he was listed there as one of the outstanding young American painters.45 He shared many of the same beliefs with Graham and Gorky, including, of course, his admiration for Ingres. Pictorially, the Ingriste influence does not begin in de Kooning's work until the late Thirties at the height of the "Ingres Revival." Gorky, whose interest predates this, may have been his immediate source as indicated by de Kooning's statement that "If the bookkeepers think it necessary continuously to make sure of where things and people come from, well then, I come from 36 Union Square [the address of Gorky's studio]."46 De Kooning, in turn, may have acted as a cata1970s

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lyst upon Graham's implementation of Ingres' principles in Graham's own art of the 19405. Eila Kokkinen has written how Graham did indeed borrow freely from de Kooning's drawings and has suggested de Kooning's role as the probable stimulus toward Graham's changing approach to the figure.47 This is probably true in spite of the fact that Graham's interest in Ingres' ideas dates from an earlier period, as has been shown, and it somewhat explains the gap between Graham's interest in the theory and the implementation of it. De Kooning has readily admitted his debt to Ingres. In a 1958 publication, for example, the artist said, "I used to make imaginary portraits from Ingres and the Le Nains (I never did copies; I don't think I'd be able to)."48 A few examples of de Kooning's art works will suffice as illustration of Ingres' impact. De Kooning's Seated Man of c. 1939 is an early work showing the influence of Ingres. It relates not only to Gorky's Portrait of Master Bill but also to their common source in Ingres' M. Riviere. De Kooning's Woman Sitting, also c. 1943-44, continues the Ingriste seated-portrait tradition. Notable here is the uneasy stillness which is enhanced by the melancholic gesture of the figure. This is a device that can also be traced to Ingres' influence as exemplified in his seated portrait Mme. Moitessier. Furthermore, the finely drawn line which defines the neck and arm areas is reminiscent of the line in Ingres' Mme. Henri-Placide-Joseph Panckoucke, for example, and like the line Graham was to use later in his Two Sisters. This concern with the anatomy and the struggle to integrate it harmoniously into the composition were of equal importance to de Kooning, who frequently expressed his great difficulty in rendering the shoulder.49 De Kooning's Seated Woman of c. 1942 also recalls Mme. Panckoucke. The tilting of the head, the facial expression, the exaggerated anatomy, and the accent on the full breasts make de Kooning's painting roughly a reflection of Ingres' work. The erotic breast imagery in de Kooning's and Graham's paintings again reminds us of their intense interest in Surrealism and Freudian psychology. As a final example, de Kooning's drawing Reclining Nude may have its source in the Metropolitan's Odalisque in Grisaille, acquired in 1938.50 It is as if de Kooning simply has turned the body of the figure around and toward the viewer. But here are the same elongated proportions, the full breasts, the large hips, and a similar contorted positioning of the legs. The mysterious blank stare and the pro file-frontal double reading of the face are also clearly the same. These brief examples show that the Ingres influence pervaded not only the 356

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art of Graham but also that of his friends, Gorky and de Kooning. Because of their friendship, their similar views, and because of the types of things they borrowed from Ingres, we might consider Graham's writings as a general mirror reflection of their common interest and principles. Recognizing this, I will conclude by returning to the question of why they persistently and repeatedly chose to follow Ingres. It was more than the formalistic and psychological-surreal aspects of his art that have been mentioned thus far, especially since these qualities might have been found in a number of artists, including Picasso. In fact, it is often said that Graham, Gorky, and de Kooning saw Ingres through the eyes of Picasso, a statement which is only partially true. In many cases, their works are much more closely akin to the older artist's paintings. During the 19305, in particular, Picasso's influence indeed had weighed heavily upon them, but by the latter part of the decade and in the early Forties all had moved beyond him in their art. The reason for this sudden shift in outlook is stated explicitly in Graham's own writings. In his notebooks of the 19405, Graham several times mentions that Picasso's art had become too sketchy, too facile, too unfinished. He felt that art, as exemplified by Picasso, had lost the quality of craftsmanship that was so very essential to continue the tradition of great art. "To be an artist," Graham said, "you have to be a master craftsman."51 Gorky expressed similar views when he said of Picasso's best works, "The more I admire them, the further I feel myself removed from all art, it seems so easy, so limited."52 In turning from Picasso, Graham, Gorky, and de Kooning merely traced the development of Picasso's art back to one of its basic roots, namely Ingres, where this quality of craftsmanship was still intact. Moreover, by doing this they were reestablishing a vital link with the tradition of modern art at its very beginnings, a link which they felt had been eroded by recent developments. Graham had put it this way: "Great art, no matter how revolutionary, presents a legitimate link in the unbroken chain of the development of tradition."53 De Kooning agreed, saying that "the idea that art can come from nowhere is typically American."54 "Being anti-traditional is just as corny as being traditional."55 Gorky also concurred: "Every artist has to have tradition. Without tradition art is no good. Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems with authority, with solid footing."56 Graham went on to say that the truly great artists are those who are able to forge an inevitable link with this chain of tradition. Moreover, learning from the past masters, as he, Gorky, and de Kooning did from Ingres, did not mean that a work would be alien to its own age. Graham was most emphatic on this point and again cited Ingres as an example: "To be true to one's 1970s

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time," he said, "is an automatic thing. You do not have to try it. Ingres was true to his time in spite [of the fact] that he followed Raffael."57 Thus, there is no need to consciously seek to invent styles that break with tradition, as he felt Picasso was doing, since any style, no matter how imitative or eclectic, would inevitably remain of its own time and spirit. The revival of interest in the art of Ingres in the 19303 and 19405 is only one aspect of a more general growing réévaluation of many old masters that included, besides Ingres, Uccello and Piero della Francesca among others. But it was Ingres to whom Graham, Gorky, and de Kooning paid their closest attention and gave their most unswerving devotion; for it was he who best epitomized and synthesized the qualities of formalist abstraction, Surrealistpsychological mood, and perfection of craftsmanship that they so highly esteemed.

Notes

1. See especially Hayden Herrera, "John Graham: Modernist Turns Magus," Arts Magazine, 51 (October 1976), pp. 100-105; Hayden Herrera, "Le Feu Ardent: John Graham's Journal," Archives of American Art Journal, 14 (1974), pp. 6-17; Eila Kokkinen, "John Graham During the 1940 V Arts Magazine, 51 (November 1976), pp. 99-103. Mention should also be made of the valuable and scholarly introduction by Marcia Allentuck (ed.) in John Graham's Systems and Dialectics of Art, Baltimore, 1971, pp. 1-84. The present article is a revised version of a paper presented at the University of Delaware's symposium on American art, April i, 1977, under the title of "An Aspect of John D. Graham's Writings: Ingres and the Early New York School." I am especially grateful to the University of Delaware for a grant which helped to defray the cost for photographs used in this essay. 2. John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, New York, 1937. 3. Whether or not this particular book influenced Jackson Pollock's development toward automatism or whether it affected the development of Minimal art in the 19603 are two such questions yet to be more fully explored. At this point, it is perhaps more reasonable to assume that Graham's influence on his contemporaries was on a more personal level through direct contacts. 4. Some of Graham's journals and letters are available on microfilm at the Archives of American Art. 5. Graham, System and Dialectics, pp. 23-24; Allentuck, pp. 104-105. In this and in succeeding notes references will be given to both the original System and Dialectics (hereafter cited as "Graham") and to Professor Allentuck's edited version (hereafter cited as "Allentuck"). 6. Graham, p. 24; Allentuck, p. 105. 7. Uccello and other quattrocento artists held a particular fascination for Graham. For example, his Apotheosis (1957, Collection of Edwin Bergman, Chicago) clearly 358

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is based upon a quattrocento panel (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge) recently identified as that of a Warrior and attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini. See Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, "A Rediscovered Series of Uomini Famosi from Quattrocento Venice," Art Bulletin, 58 (June 1976), pp. 184-95. 8. Elia Kokkinen, "loannus Magus Servus Domini St. Georgii Equitus," Art News, 67 (September 1968), p. 64. 9. Morton D. Zabel, "Ingres in America," Arts, 16 (February 1930), p. 372. 10. Agnes Mongan, "Introduction" in Ingres Centennial Exhibition (Fogg Art Museum, February 12-April 9,1967), Greenwich, Conn., 1967, p. x. 11. The exhibition, whose full title was "David and Ingres: The Classical Ideal," was first seen at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in December of 1939. In January of 1940, it traveled to M. Knoedler &: Co. of New York, and the following month it was shown in Cincinnati. 12. Graham, p. 35; Allentuck, p. 118. 13. Notebooks, Archives of American Art. 14. Graham, p. 105; Allentuck, p. 179. 15. Graham, p. 107; Allentuck, p. 181. 16. Graham, p. 86; Allentuck, p. 163. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. This is an often quoted statement and can be found, for example, in Walter Pach, Ingres, New York, 1939, p. 172. 20. Graham, p. 51; Allentuck, p. 131. 21. Graham, p. 15; Allentuck, p. 95. 22. Interview with Mrs. Ethel Baziotes, New York City, November 4,1976. 23. Graham, p. 64; Allentuck, p. 143. 24. Graham, p. 52; Allentuck, p. 132. 25. Graham, p. 41; Allentuck, p. 122. 26. Pach, Ingres, p. 173. 27. Kokkinen, "loannus Magus," p. 65. 28. Notebooks, Archives of American Art. 29. Quoted in Allentuck, p. 6. 30. Graham, p. 105; Allentuck, p. 179. In paragraph 91, entitled "What Is Binocularity?," Graham further states: "The distance between the two ray feelers from the two eyes establishes by differentiation the fact of flatness or protrusion" (Graham, p. 92; Allentuck, p. 167). 31. Notebooks, Archives of American Art. Graham was incorrect in saying that the painting took Ingres four or five years to complete. Commissioned in 1844, Ingres worked seven years on the seated version of Mme. Moitessier before temporarily giving up and creating, in a relatively brief time, the 1851 standing version. He then resumed the painting now in the National Gallery of London, completing it only in 1856, twelve years after the original commission. An article relating the problems Ingres had faced with the commission was published in 1936: Martin Davies, "Portrait by the Aged Ingres, Madame Moitessier Seated" 1970s

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32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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Burlington Magazine, 68 (June 1936), pp. 256-68. The painting was acquired by London's National Gallery in that same year. If the dating is to be accepted, Gorky had already formulated his Ingriste taste in 1923 when he painted Portrait of Myself and My Imaginary Wife (Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, B.C.). While the male head obviously is derived from Picasso's Tête de marin (1905-06, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller, New York), the female head stylistically recalls works by Ingres, such as his Mme. de Laureal (1840, Musée Ingres, Montauban). This is true even to the extent that both Ingres and Gorky have juxtaposed the female head with the head of a second relatively unrelated and isolated figure. Kokkinen, "John Graham," p. 102. Letter from Gorky to his family, February 17,1947, published in Ararat, 12 (Fall 197l), F-39Ethel Schwabacher has confirmed that the Ingres reproduction was the Musée Condé's Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty-Four of 1804, and not the Self Portrait that the Metropolitan Museum acquired in 1943. However, Mrs. Schwabacher has identified the reproduction as being that of an earlier state of the Musée Condé's painting. In its original state, the artist held a handkerchief in his left hand with which he was rubbing out a portrait of the lawyer Gilibert drawn on the easel before him. There was also an overcoat draped over Ingres' right shoulder which has been changed in the present version. For a reproduction of this earlier state and a discussion, see: George Wildenstein, Ingres, New York, 1954, pp. 162-63. Pach, Ingres, p. 19. Interview with Mr. Peter Busa, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 26,1976. Gorky's wife Agnes believes that this is not a portrait of de Kooning. See Herrera, "John Graham," p. 103. Ibid. Graham, p. 89; Allentuck, p. 165. Pach, Ingres, p. 170. Letter to Gorky's sister Vartoosh, February 9,1942, published in Ararat, p. 29. Letter to Vartoosh, October 11, щф, Ararat, p. 38. Donald Carroll and Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Modern Art, New York, 1973, p. 120. Graham refers to him here as "W. Kooning." Graham, p. 75; Allentuck, p. 154. Willem de Kooning, Letter to the Editor, Art News, 47 (January 1949), p. 6. Kokkinen, "John Graham," p. 101. W. de Kooning, "Is Today's Artist With or Against the Past?," Art News, 57 (Summer 1958), p. 27. Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, New York, 1959, p. 22. The authorship of the Odalisque in Grisaille has since been in doubt. During the period under discussion, however, its authenticity as a work by Ingres was unquestioned.

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51. Marcia Allentuck has recognized the fact that Graham was indeed reacting against Picasso's lack of craftsmanship. But she seems to imply that the overriding reason for the rejection was jealousy, not theoretical principle. The "crux of the matter," as she sees it, was Graham's own lack of recognition, which he blamed upon the frequent comparisons made between his work and Picasso's. Her point is valid, but based upon the material available to me, I believe the emphasis should be placed upon the theoretical principles to which Graham devotes much more space and repeats in many instances. For Allentuck's discussion, see especially Allentuck, pp. 65-84. Hayden Herrera discusses extensively Graham's commitment to craftsmanship, but she, too, seems to suggest that jealousy was a primary reason for Graham's rejection of Picasso. See Herrera, "Le Feu Ardent," pp. 9, 12-13. On the other hand, Eila Kokkinen suggests the major emphasis should be placed upon the War and Graham's questioning of the survival of the past and present culture. Kokkinen, "John Graham," p. 102. 52. Quoted in The 30's: Painting in New York, Poindexter Gallery, New York, 1957, n.p. 53. Graham, p. 81; Allentuck, p. 158. 54. De Kooning, "Is Today's Artist With or Against the Past?," p. 27. 55. Ibid. 56. Letter to Gorky's family, January 6,1945, in Ararat, p. 33. 57. Notebooks, Archives of American Art.

DONALD B. KUSPIT

Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still

By symbolic pregnance we mean the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents It is the perception itself which, by virtue of its own immanent organization, takes on a kind of spiritual articulation—which, being ordered in itself, also belongs to a determinate order of meaning It is this ideal interwovenness, this relatedness of the single perceptive phenomenon, given here and now, to a characteristic total meaning that the term "pregnance" is meant to designate. Can we continue to ask how signification, a meaning, issues from the mere raw material of sensation, considered as something fundamentally alien to meaning, once we have seen that this "unmeaningness" is itself a fiction? —Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms SOURCE: Arts Magazine (March 1978), 120-25. Reprinted with the permission of Donald Kuspit. 361

Yes, we can continue to ask, for it is the core epistemological question about abstract art, sharply and freshly raised by the works of Rothko and Still, which generate intense sensations and unpredictable meanings and the question of their interrelation. As Michel Conil-Lacoste wrote of the late Rothko, there are "deux lectures de Rothko: non pas seulement celle du technicien de la coleur, mais aussi celle de l'âme éprise de mysticisme."1 The technician of color supplies the raw material of sensation, and the mystic communicates ideal meanings. But how much can the two be said to interweave, when the sensory experience of color is so intense it is almost indescribable and meaning so indeterminate it is porous? How, in the perception of color, can one discover spiritual meaning, when the perception is so much a private response and the meaning no more than suggested, erratically and ambiguously? Rothko and Still seem to carry to an extreme Redon's belief in: an expressive, suggestive, and indeterminate art. Suggestive art is the irradiation of sublime plastic elements, drawn together and combined with the purpose of evoking visions which it illuminates and exalts, meanwhile inciting thought.2 The abstract irradiations of Rothko and Still evoke but do not name visions, incite but do not clarify thought, and illuminate and exalt but to no clear purpose. Rothko and Still produce pictures which are kinds of palimpsests, with layer upon layer of implication but with no firm, final layer of sense. Perceiving them, one experiences deeper and deeper sensations, profounder and profounder meanings, but one erases the other, and none reaches bottom, where all are rooted and connect. In the end the pictures imprint no absolute sensation, no one meaning. Sensing comes to seem a hardly adequate response to them and pursuit of meaning a game of blindman's buff. The possibility of their collapse into meaninglessness suggests the "unreliability" and even groundlessness of their form and content. Unless color is understood as what Kandinsky thought it must be—"purposive playing upon the human soul"3—there is no way one can assume that the pictures imply the "tragic and timeless."4 There is no way one can assume that the "immanent organization" of the pictures has a "spiritual articulation" unless one presupposes that form and color have spiritual import. Art supplies the abstract elements and culture the abstract meanings, but their transcendental unity is a wish—a matter of intention and belief, of a mystique or intention. It may be that such transcendental unity is not the true issue of abstraction. As Greenberg wrote: 362

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Abstract art is effective on the same basis as all previous art, and can convey a content equally important or equally unimportant; there is no difference in principle. On the other hand, it is possible to assert... that the great masters of the past achieved their art by virtue of combinations of pigment whose real effectiveness was "abstract," and that their greatness is not owed to the spirituality with which they conceived the things they illustrated so much as it is to the success with which they ennobled raw matter to the point where it could function as art.5 But Greenberg himself is confused about the role of content in abstract art, for he celebrates its hidden presence while being unwilling—or unable—to name it. Writing about David Smith's sculpture, he remarks: I am not able to talk about the content of Smith's art because I am no more able to find words for it than for the ultimate content of Quercia's or Rodin's art. But I can see that Smith's felicities are won from a wealth of content, of things to say; and this is the hardest, and most lasting, way in which they can be won. The burden of content is what keeps an artist going 6 The burden of content in Rothko and Still is conveyed by their intention that their works be spiritual or transcendental—communicate, in Greenberg's words, "metaphysical pretensions." "Pictures must be miraculous," wrote Rothko, "revelations," "unexpected and unprecedented resolutions,"7 while Still thought he was presenting the "Vision" through the "Act."8 But because the relation between form and meaning in their works "oscillates," to use Schiller's term, they do not show the transcendental as belonging to a "determinate order of meaning." It may be that the imprecision that arises because, as Schiller says, form and content are "contradictory impulses" is itself the transcendental, which shows itself as the perpetual disjunction between particular and universal. But if this is what the transcendental is, then the pictures have no chance at all for symbolic pregnance, which insists upon the synthesis of specific sensation and determinate meaning as its source. In fact, the RothkoStill metamorphosis of form into configurative color obscures rather than illuminates spiritual meaning, for it establishes an infinite regress of sensation: meaning becomes completely indeterminate as one is overwhelmed and swept along by a continuum of sensation. Reflection on meaning becomes, on the one hand, a response to color consciousness, which can give no determinate meaning. On the other hand, it becomes a meditation on the artist's intention to be profound, but can find no profundity itself—which is why I speak of the 1970s

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mystique of intention sustaining and animating the works, rather than of unintended meanings realized through their intended sensations. Thus, the art of Rothko and Still is susceptible to what has been called "metaphysical pathos," especially the "pathos of sheer obscurity, the loveliness of the incomprehensible," and, akin to it, the "pathos of the esoteric."9 From its origin in the artist's intention to its perception and the attempt to determine its meaning, their art is inevitably subject to mythologization, which simultaneously preordains its greatness but hides the reasons for it.10 While the pathos and myths must be cleared away before the pictures can be comprehended, they correspond to something in their condition. For, as noted, neither reading of Rothko-Still actively supports the other—decisively relates to the other. In fact, each seems to interfere with the other, get in the way of the other, because to be entirely absorbed in color sensations leaves no room for spiritual meanings, and to insist on such meanings is to be distracted from one's sensations. In Rothko-Still sensation and meaning are both, in a sense, abstract: neither is concretely grounded in nor firmly associated with the other. Thus, the pictures are "pathetic" not only because form and meaning in them seem mutually exclusive, but because this affords the opportunity to mythologize them as simultaneously physical and metaphysical. Their physical intensity is self-evident, their meaning mysterious—and so presumably metaphysical. They evoke the metaphysical without substantiating it because one expects them to be meaningful without knowing what they might mean. Thus, the pictures become arrogant: they dismember into esoteric sensations —sensations with a source but without a purpose—and farfetched but unmentionable meanings. They perfectly exemplify, in Neumeyer's language, abstract art's uncertainty of meaning and ineffability.11 Since they do not refer to a familiar reality, they presumably refer to a higher reality, but what that reality might be, and whether it is knowable or unknowable, is never hinted at. Rothko-Still pictures are thus colossal promises based on exaggerated expectations—demanding that one believe in them, but not rewarding one's belief. Their physicality calls strong attention to them, but their ambiguous metaphysicality seems a poor, even illusory object for the attention they raise to a high pitch. The pictures, then, arouse faith in themselves, and it has been said that faith is a willing suspension of disbelief, but the rewards of such suspension are highly uncertain, and the ultimate object of faith so invisible it seems nonexistent. The pathos of the true believer's position is mirrored back to him by the art's supposed metaphysicality, but that is no more than a tautological hypostatization of his suspended disbelief. 364

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The sensation of suspension— of indeterminate hovering—generates the momentum of Rothko-Still pictures, and is the source of their lovely incomprehensibility and esoteric implications. It is created by the "forthright verticality" Greenberg finds in Still, and the "scumbled over colors" he finds in Rothko, and is responsible for the "activated, pregnant 'emptiness' " he finds in both.12 (This "emptiness," activated and made pregnant by color sensation, is the ambiguous sign of the transcendental spirituality of the pictures— "ambiguous" because it may be nothing but the physical effect of large shape filled with color, and so an indication of the absence rather than presence of spirituality.) More crucially, the sensation of suspension is created by "Still's slack, willful silhouettes"—Rothko's are as slack but not as willful and less "arbitrary in contour"—and above all by Still's: great insight... that the edges of a shape could be made less conspicuous, therefore less cutting, by narrowing the value contrast that its color made with the colors adjacent to it. This permits "the artist to draw and design with greater freedom in the absence of a sufficient illusion of depth," sparing the surface "the sudden jars and shocks that might result from 'complicatedness' of contour." This insight, accepted and adapted by the "less aggressive" Rothko to his less complicated, more convenient contours, is for Greenberg the gist of "field" painting. It is not simply, in Rothko's words, the creation of the meta-easel "large shape" that "has the impact of the unequivocal,"13 but the projection of a subtly differentiated "flatness that breathes and pulsates." Such an extensive, nuanced surface—Greenberg first experienced it as "utterly uncontrolled"—functioning as an environment for the viewer, is not without precedent. It originates not simply with Monet, but is recidivist romantic naturalism, as Greenberg implicitly acknowledges when he connects Still with Whitman and writes of the "fray-leaf and spread-hide contours that wander across his canvas like souvenirs of the great American outdoors." Greenberg, in fact, has argued that: The best modern painting, though it is mostly abstract painting, remains naturalistic to its core, despite all appearances to the contrary. It refers to the structure of the given world both outside and inside human beings.14 One can regard Rothko-Still pictures, with their rejection of the classicist "craving for clear lines of demarcation,"15 as visionary English gardens— "dream landscapes," Greenberg once called Rothko's early pictures—and 1970s

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both artists can be viewed as belated, decadent, igth-century romantics, abstracting romantic intention and attitude to an ultimate. Romanticism can "be described as a conviction that the world is an englischer Garten on a grand scale": The God of Romanticism was one in whose universe things grew wild and without trimming and in all the rich diversity of their natural shapes. The preference for irregularity, the aversion from that which is wholly intellectual16 ized, the yearning for échappées into misty distances The irregularity of Still's images, Rothko's escapes into misty distance, the untrimmed quality of general configurations and particular shapes—making it hard to give them an intellectual import and intelligible meaning, but making them seem to drift in a netherworld of latent emotion—attest to a romantic yearning for a wild cosmos symbolic of a full, complex, difficult spirit. Rothko and Still are not esprits simplistes but "sensible of the general complexity of things,"17 and as such find any straightforward image anathema and a betrayal of the complexity of art, as well as of nature and consciousness. Yet they do not offer a full cosmos, only the activated, pregnant emptiness Greenberg encountered—really too loosely structured to be called a cosmos, and too uneventful to be called full. Nor does it make sense, in the last analysis, to regard their pictures as alluding, in however disguised a manner, to nature. While, in Ehrenzweig's words, Rothko's "use of the weakest possible forms, such as insubstantial quadrangles insecurely suspended against a more solid ground,"18 conveys distance, it is not clear that the distance belongs to a landscape sky. As Friedlander wrote, "a low horizon is always and everywhere a sign of advanced contemplation of nature,"19 and there is rarely anything that can still be consistently called a low horizon in Rothko and Still, and so their pictures cannot be understood as advanced or abstract contemplations of nature. Even when the "lucid film-like transparency of the colour bands . . . thickened into almost solid cloud banks several miles deep," as in Rothko's black paintings (among others), it is not clear that because the distance now appears to be definite and measurable it is cosmic. This thickening, the consequence of what Ehrenzweig calls a "secondary solidification process," which also involves verticalization (powerfully evident in Rothko, Still, and Newman),20 is not concerned to "naturalize" abstraction by showing it to deal in very dense, "figurative" matter. Rather, the conversion of "mobile pictorial space" (such as Pollock's) "into precise almost measurable illu-

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sions" aims to discreetly differentiate a potential chaos and thereby bring it under some control. This chaos is a purely creative one—it, or transcendental unity of matter and meaning, can be the outcome of the creative process. Rothko and Still forestall the chaos by means of solidification and verticalization. At the same time, as noted, these do not necessarily produce the transcendental, but only suspension—between potential chaos and potential transcendence. The false perspective—self-evident in Rothko, implicit in Still (and Newman)—the solidification and verticalization processes evoke does not promise transcendence because it does not point beyond itself. Rather, the space implied by the hypothetical perspective is static—almost stagnant in Rothko, and festering in Still—and undirected, directionless. It is because of these qualities that the space of their pictures is usually ignored: the works in fact are spoken of as spaceless, which really means, as Greenberg put it, that they are "almost altogether devoid of decipherable references" to Cubist space. However, it is not so much that there is no space in Rothko-Still pictures, but that it does not live up to our expectations of what space should do: contain something, in some orientation to it, and move somewhere. But Rothko-Still space seems constitutionally incapable of containing anything, and congenitally unmoved. It is these factors that are responsible for the sense of the emptiness of the pictures, and their impacted immediacy. This unyielding, barren space seems to push the work in a transcendental direction, as well as keep it from sinking back into an inchoate state. Yet to say one knows what it does is to presuppose one knows what emptiness is about. It is this hovering emphasis, a negative of space, that one recurs to in considering Rothko-Still pictures—a saturated emptiness, an impure absence, which seems fraught with implications. Now it is noteworthy that Rothko describes the transcendental as though it were absent—in purely negative terms an unnamable alternative to the familiar.21 And Still, while he shouts about it, also does not know how to name it. For both, in the last analysis, it remains a gray eminence, and their pictures are its runic remains. Both in fact are more certain of what they are doing when they deny the claims of those they regard as pretenders to the throne of the transcendental, than they are when they themselves pretend to it.22 They are obsessed with separating the profane from the sacred, but this does not in itself assure them of their own priesthood, or even guarantee that what they wish to worship exists. They are manqué religious men, for whom the transcendental can never be self-evident, and thus whose

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aspiration remains peculiarly muted. This cannot be attributed to their being enamoured of the deus absconditus. Rather, it has to do with a hovering between scepticism and faith, and doubt of both. Magician-priests, they create pictures, in a genre familiar from Morris Louis, that are like temple veils or stage curtains—Rothko's has rents in it, Still's is in a tattered, fiery state. The Rothko-Still picture means to be, in Breton's words, "an intellectual event, or a landmark in the direction of mystery and fire." We are tempted to believe— and they themselves want to believe—there is something significant behind the curtain. But it is never lifted, the veil is never parted, the god remains invisible or invented, a hope or a deception. The pictures strongly intend the transcendental, but leave it literally a matter of the artist's sleight of hand. In viewing them, we do not know whether we are in the temple or theater. They seem to call for ritual, but the script to accompany them has not yet been written. Rothko-Still pictures are either magical incantations or pious frauds, perhaps both, for they traffic in the magic of belief as well as the belief in magic. Yet viewers believe the pictures touch them with spiritual power, and are able to find "that lever of consciousness which will change a blank pointed fabric into a glow perpetuating itself into the memory," as Kozloff puts it.23 The glow, because it is inwardly as well as outwardly revealed, acquires spiritual significance. What is the nature of the "lever of consciousness" that converts glowing emptiness into pregnant perception—that needs no other confirmation than its own activity to find emptiness articulate? Spontaneous and self-justifying, its results stand in no need of clarification, because its force stands behind them. Ehrenzweig finds this consciousness implicit in the spacelessness of the pictures—the source of their emptiness. But more than being implied by the spacelessness, the spacelessness is the exemplification of the abstract consciousness: The lack of spatial depth suggested in a mystic-oceanic feeling, of individual existence lost in the universe. The annihilation of space indicated a dreamlike level of experience where our commonsense concepts of space and time have no meaning. The first sentence offers a conventional interpretation of the unusual experience of abstraction—the suspension of commonsense concepts of space and time—the second sentence reports. Ehrenzweig, like Rothko and Still, filters this experience of abstraction through a familiar concept—the mystic-oceanic feeling, the transcendental—to make sense of it. All three predetermine the meaning of abstract consciousness—the transcendental particularly puts it in 368

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a straitjacket—rather than accept it on its own, perhaps frightening terms: the suspension of active relations with everyday reality, allowing consciousness to show itself as a generalized state of feeling. The transcendental—the supermeaningful—is announced to fill the vacuum of meaning created by the removal of the commonsensical, as if to obviate the experience of death by the prediction of immortality. But the experience of abstraction is not one of mortification of matter and contemptu mundi, but rather of the revelation of consciousness as a phenomenon in itself, not one which will outlast matter but which dynamically charges it with purposive meaning. Abstraction, in other words, is the discovery of consciousness as the power of intention. To call abstraction transcendental is to call attention to it not only as a sign of the disengagement of consciousness from the commonsense world—rather than its engagement with the uncommonsensical world of the divine—but as a manifestation of consciousness in and for itself. The hovering emptiness of Rothko-Still pictures suggests both the disengagement and concentration of consciousness as reciprocal events. The hovering intends something, but nothing in particular; it is simply the muscle of consciousness. Ideally, abstract consciousness would like to mirror itself, as it seemingly does in the pictures realistically, it can re-present the world as meaningful, as it would seem to want to do in the pictures, but they represent no world for it to rework. The purity of abstraction in Rothko and Still—for it can hardly be said to be significantly naturalistic or geometrical in derivation—is another sign that their pictures are about consciousness in a state of suspended animation or abstract suspension, full of intention toward the world but free of it ("oceanic"). The pictures are, in a sense, fictional accounts of phenomenological reduction, of the suspension of consciousness from active involvement in the world and of awareness of its power of intention (but without a conception of the structure of intention)—of its potential for creating meaning without actually creating specific, this-worldly or other-worldly meanings. The pictures are thus uncommonsensical, being essentially spaceless and timeless— non-worldly—and purely "sensible." They are pointedly non-representational —empty—and ironically dreamlike, i.e., full of potential representations which can never actualize, but remain kinds of haunting fantasy. The pictures show consciousness withdrawing into itself, and at the same time projecting the possibility of a meaningful cosmos, without saying anything about the actual shape or sense of such a cosmos. The epitomizing abstract picture is simultaneously a withdrawal and a proposal, with the content of neither self-evident. Rothko and Still carry the condensation and displacement of abstraction to 1970s

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an extreme in which consciousness itself seems to be revealed, with no commitment to either the reality of nature (space) or the self (time), the conditions of the world. Consciousness at its root, as pure intention ("feeling"), abstractly reduced to its own activity, seems, as Ehrenzweig notes, to lack differentiation, and thereby to be able to "accommodate a wide range of incompatible forms," i.e., to suggest a world but not necessarily to give or commit itself exclusively to one. To reach the root level of consciousness, in which it seems vivid but indefinite—is felt but undefined—"suppression of form" rather than "precise articulation" is necessary. Rothko and Still show suppression of form in process. It is particularly evident in Rothko's development, where an early preoccupation with the "organic life" of abstract figuration is replaced by, in Hegel's words, the "principle of tonality" which is responsible for all beauty. Still has always seemed midway between these extremes. His interest in both the organic and the beautiful seems tenuous and tentative. He has relatively consistently been concerned to accommodate a wide range of incompatible forms, which are not so much alive or beautiful as deviously disembodied, like fire was for Plotinus. Rothko also seems to achieve a Plotinean disembodiment, but he shows it to be charming—as Greenberg wrote, after 1955 he "produced far more gorgeous than achieved paintings."24 This not only nullifies their "glow," making it less significant as abstraction and less the resolute step of consciousness coming to itself, but making it seem hollow—exactly why Rothko's works seem more empty and less pregnant than Still's. The transcendental ego Rothko's works are pregnant with aborts. Nonetheless, the surface tension in both Rothko and Still signifies a state of crystallization so advanced that it can be conceived as an articulation of disembodiment rather than an abstraction from embodiment. Ehrenzweig takes "the plastic quality of pictorial space in painting ... as a conscious signal of a vast unconscious substructure." This substructure was self-evident in Rothko's early mythological works (mid-Forties), where it was directly connected with the idea of myth as an attempt to give body and voice to the ineffable.25 Since then, Rothko's canvases grew increasingly empty, while Still's, despite similar mythologizing tendencies, also involving the use of a latent figuration, stayed more or less as they were in principle, i.e., in their indifference to the organic and the beautiful. Ironically, although Rothko's pictures became emptier than Still's, they never achieved the same pure concentration, because they were concerned to organicize and beautify —vitalize and aestheticize—the transcendental, rather than evoke the fitful play 370

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of consciousness, as Still's art does. Still's works risk more because they are less beautiful, and achieve more because they are less openly transcendental. They thus seem more able to evoke a vast unconscious substructure, without mythologizing or explicitly "figuring" it. That is, they are more personal— less universal—than Rothko's pictures. Still has an implicitly more individual content—and consciousness—than Rothko. Rothko's pictures have always been more easily labeled—mythological, beautiful, transcendental—than Still's because they run a culturally prescribed course. Still's, because they do not do so, can more easily signal the unconscious, without making it conscious. Their suspension exists to greater effect. An understandable mistake in the interpretation of the work of Rothko and Still is to characterize this suspension as sublime, and to pay undue attention to the environmental scale and impact of the work.26 This is to predetermine its meaning and formal effect. It is not transparently clear that the infinite is suggested by the apparently unscalable openness of the form, nor that its grandeur is all-encompassing. The big pictures are not blindly boundless but have both circumference and center, only, in Nicholas Cusanus' words, the "center coincides with the circumference." That is, one's perceptual location in them always depends upon one's conceptual realization of them, a sense of their closure as forms of consciousness. Also, the pictures seem less a surrounding environment than a suppurating flatness—an irresistably swelling flatness pushing one away rather than engulfing one, signaling one to keep one's distance rather than drawing one in. Engulfment occurs only if one abstractly attends to the flatness, rather than to the fact that it is a colored flatness —a flatness made pushy by color. As Ehrenzweig remarks, "The battle for the flat picture plane has been lost over and over again in the history of art." Color is another way of losing it, of achieving what one might call reverse or projecting depth—a space that pushes out at the spectator rather than into the picture. If this battle had not been lost—if the picture was perceived as nothing but pure plane—one would long ago have become indifferent to it, and the picture would have become nothing, i.e., another indifferent object. The Rothko-Still picture is empty but not nothing; its flatness is activated and its emptiness pregnant. It is because of the intensity and implications of the picture's surface that we cannot enter it as we would an environment. It is too forbidding, too swollen with its own self-absorption and self-esteem, to permit easy penetration of its surface. Its openness is a mirage; it is really an abstract wall. This alien abstract surface gives no clues to any content that might make us feel at home on it. It is sheer border, implying a vast unconscious substruc1970s

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ture but not divulging it, implying a conscious world but not implementing it. The abstract surface gives the sensation of a boundary about to burst and impinging on and implying what is beyond itself, but this beyond is too absolutely beyond to be appropriated by vision, to be enjoyed as even an imaginary environment. Kozloff has recognized this "brinksmanship" in Rothko, in which "mists are kept from becoming too introspective or nebulous by the austerity of the format."27 Rothko's "combination of puritanic restrictions and lavish selfindulgence produces a drama." Rothko himself thought of his pictures as dramas,28 and his preoccupation with the dramatic is an inevitable result of his brinkmanship. What he said of Milton Avery's pictures can apply to his own: they communicate at once "a gripping lyricism" and "the permanence and monumentality of Egypt."29 But what is most important about the dramatic in both Rothko and Still is that it is the source of their art's symbolic pregnance, reconceived as indifferent to the question of referencing, with which it was so involved for Cassirer. In fact, true symbolic pregnance involves a deliberate refusal to reference particular meanings, an insistence on the indeterminate situation of meaning. To conceive, as Cassirer did, of symbolic pregnance in the first place as involving determinate meanings means to conceive of sensation as necessarily representational of reality. But sensation's role is different, once we recognize its subjective as well as objective origins. It invokes, even provokes possible meaning, like a gadfly; it does not fix or confirm actual meaning. All sensations are conditioned by our general sense of reality, bringing its indeterminacy to bear on particular situations, crystallizing that indeterminacy into a sense of living possibility. Sensations "dramatize" the indeterminate yet vital sense of possible meaning reality might have if it were subject to our intentionality, and the symbol any constellation of sensations issues in articulates such a possible meaning. This dramatic character of sensations is evident in the unceasing drama of the Rothko-Still picture, and its correlate indeterminacy and unresolvable yet "felt" meaning. The drama in a Pollock or de Kooning has the same indeterminacy, but with less sense that it is the expression of strong intention toward reality. The Rothko-Still use of an open field makes clear that such indeterminate intention is not arbitrary, as the congestion in a Pollock or de Kooning might lead us to believe. At the same time, the openness or abstractness of the field makes it clear that the "reality" intended is uncommon. In general, the best Abstract-Expressionist painting never resolves itself, never conveys a final meaning, let alone a finished surface. The gestures that 372

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constitute that surface may be decisive in themselves, but their relation to other gestures is indecisive—"open." Moreover, Abstract Expressionism is not simply dramatic action between specific formal protagonists—e.g., color and format—but between the inherent possibilities of form and meaning. It is a search for, and setting in conflict of, all such possibilities, so that they apocalyptically cancel one another out in expectation of still more profound possibilities—of the final saving possibilities, which will make all come closer. These, of course, never arrive. Abstract Expressionism epitomizes the eschatological brinksmanship inherent in all art—that risking of chaos and meaninglessness (dogmatized uncertainty) to achieve a pregnance beyond ordinary, artless appearances. As such, it epitomizes the fundamental conflict between intended form and given content inherent in all art, a conflict whose resolution is always tentative, incomplete, and inevitably forced. The equilibrium that results is momentary, a truce but not a peace. In Rothko and Still, the uncertain outcome of the battle or drama creates the effect of symbolic pregnance. It sets loose a totally abstract and completely arbitrary power of suggestion which holds full sway over the work. It is a dangerous, permanent undertow in the work, pulling one away from the safe shores of clear perception and known meaning into a sea in which one can drown in obscurity—which reads as profundity—of form and meaning. Such absolutely arbitrary power of suggestion, let loose by dramatic brinksmanship, undermines the effort to find anything innate to the art. Form and meaning become nominal, and the paintings of Rothko and Still cannot even be securely established as pictures, whether of an inner or outer world. In KozlofPs words, it is possible to read them as no more than "pigmented containers of emptiness," as forms of resolute absence. Their work shows that all absolutes of form and universals of meaning are illusions—perhaps possibilities, but magical ones. Their works leave us with a sense of uncategorizable form and makeshift meaning. A picture is produced in which everything seems possible but nothing is ever actual, leaving one in a state of perpetual turmoil of expectation, a kind of psychic randomness—a state of incipient chaos, a kind of nervous breakdown. One clings to the subtle surface differentiations, the formal possibilities, but these quickly slip out of one's grasp and become informal. One clings to a variety of attempted meanings, the most ultimate and the most banal, but none can be decisively articulated. The work perpetually surprises and perpetually stymies: it is infinitely rich with possibilities yet emptily finite. In the midst of this arbitrariness, what then can the work of Rothko and 1970s

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Still be said to give, apart from doubts—apart from the temptation to end the willing suspension of disbelief and indulge in the pure suspension of scepticism? It gives the promise and pregnance of the life-world, its abounding with new possibilities, none of which seem to be interfered with by old actualities. The arbitrariness—the blank check on the power of suggestion—clears away, as encrusting excess, given forms and meanings, well-known "truths" of statement (including Rothko's "stated" rectilinear forms, which in the "course" of his work slowly become "unstated"). It leaves a tabula rasa of creative intention, what Emerson called "heroic passion" using "matter as symbols of it(self)."30 It generates pure abstract passion, creating the illusion of being charged with absolute passion. To feel charged with such passion is to feel with inexhaustible, limitless potentiality. Their art is thus quintessentially romantic: it is an art of quintessential desire. The dramatic art of Rothko and Still creates the illusion of existing in a presuppositionless state of consciousness in which one's being is an undifferentiated continuum of potentialities, all of which seem realizable and none of which are specifiable, and which will never be put to the test—which will never have to stand up to reality, which has been dismissed by the same abstraction that generated the sense of potentiality. The art communicates a sense of inward plentitude, which one need not, in Ehrenzweig's Freudian fashion, identify with mystic-oceanic feeling, but recognize as a Utopian source of fruition. In Rothko and Still emptiness turns inside out and reveals itself as disguised fullness, if the emptiness is approached in the proper spirit. As Rothko wrote, the picture can only show itself for what it might be when there is "a consummated experience" between it and the viewer. "The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment."31 This romantic, participation mystique conception of the relationship to art echoes Hegel's assertion that "The work of art has not such a naive self-centered being, but is essentially a question, an address to the responsive heart, an appeal to affections and to minds."32 Sufficiently appealing, the question can be answered, the heart responds to the emptiness of the image with its own fullness, the involved mind gives the emptiness its own center—its own intention. In a sense, Rothko and Still show a horror vacui in an abstract, ironical way. The abstract sensation of potentiality they supply is a product of the creative belief they stimulate. It is color that is the source of this belief for it creates a sense of inner movement, of inner timing that triggers expectations, which must be realized if only in fantasy. What Husserl calls inner time consciousness is involved in the perception of their color—a sense of an irrational 374

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color flux harboring potentiality. The abstract flux implicit in color generates the sense of potentiality which "fills" the vacuum of the large, open picture, the vacuum generated by its immensity of scale relative to the human body. (While Alloway has shown the figurai implications of their work, the emptiness of the work, and the irrationality it introduces into the sense of scale, nullifies such implications, or throws them off.) It is the color flux that keeps the vacuum from being a total void, and, as long as it is perceived, that prevents the picture from losing its symbolic pregnancy—its significance. It is the color flux that keeps the suspension dynamic—prevents the verticality from becoming either static or inspirational, but remaining ambiguously hovering. The color flux, which is so generative, is also responsible for the overall sense of off-symmetry in Still and anti-gravity in Rothko. The solidification of the color flux (Ehrenzweig) brings the matter which symbolizes the heroic passion of creative intention into being. As long as the color is in flux, the sense of potentiality is sustained, and the life-world will not abort its futurity to become empty facticity: the picture will not lose its blinding suggestiveness and become, in Ehrenzweig's words, mere form, academic and decadent. It is the color which sustains the myth of primordial creativity the picture means to establish. The art of Rothko and Still thus presents such a fluidity and interpénétration of percepts and concepts, such a fecundity of possibilities of sensation and meaning, that one cannot help but speak of it as "spiritual," for as has been remarked, the realm of spirit seems not only to permit but to necessitate contradiction.33 The Plotinean emanations of their pictures, leading to all kinds of discordant forms and meanings, and discordant relations between form and meaning—which Plotinus saw as inevitable in spiritual creativity, and as a sign of its fullness and diversity34—shows, in Rothko's words, "an insatiable appetite for ubiquitous experience in face of the fact of mortality."35 This speaks not only for the artist's mortality, but for that of the work—not of its possible destruction or loss to history, but the way, during perception of it, it seems simultaneously consequential and inconsequential, become now another aesthetic appearance, now what Plotinus called the "self-intent" of consciousness. Abstraction, in Rothko and Still, has been stretched to a limit at which it almost breaks—becomes senseless. It has become so concentrated— so completely metamorphosized concrete being into pure intensity—that one can only respond to it silently. At the same time, while Rothko said that "silence is so accurate," it is often also purblind and close to indifference. The pictures may suffer from the same self-appointed or self-stylized greatness— 1970s

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self-prejudiced superiority—Rothko and Still were contemptuous of in intellectuals, critics, and historians.36 At one time I thought of their pictures in terms of Heidegger's conception of the ecstasy or standing-out of futurity, but I have come to see that the suspension implies no particular time-direction—certainly not memory and the past—and there is not a sufficient momentariness about it to convey the singular present. Then I thought they showed a concern for "symbolic immortality," in Lifton's definition "a compelling urge to maintain an inner sense of continuity, over time and space, with the various elements of life,"37 but I do not see the elements of life in the pictures. I have thought of Rothko's pictures as "partaking" of the atomic bomb burst,38 with its fusion of light and matter, surface and form in hovering smoke—a totalitarian synthesizing of all beings, an ironical unity. The glow of Rothko and Still seemed to me a sublime revenge against all matter. The pictures seem so much a matter of the world of color, which, as Goethe said, represents "the acts and sufferings of light," that they dissolve the seeming opposition between matter and energy. Yet because their matter is color it seems insubstantial, and because the light is not present as an independent phenomenon it seems consequential and energetic, more impacted, so that the со-implication of matter and energy in the works seems undermined by the ambiguously significant charge of each. Finally, I thought the spacelessness of Still's pictures was an ideal way of directly forcing time into the open, since it could no longer hide in space as its symbol (Bergson): but without the symbol the phenomenon did not seem to exist. The weakness of the works of Rothko and Still, if one can call it that, is that they give no determinate symbols, which can eventually lead us to become oblivious of them. The strength of the works is that they show us how belief generates symbols— how important the "lever of consciousness" is in the discovery of any kind of determinateness in art. I see the abstractions of Rothko and Still as a deliberate intaglio of consciousness, a visible relief of consciousness whose features are, if not invisible, forever changing—faster than Proteus—because they are not legible, but only felt as spontaneously on the move. Rothko and Still show Leonardo's blank wall overgrown with possibilities, pregnant with creative intention but not creative presentation.

Note s

i. Michel Conil-Lacoste, "La transcendence de Rothko," Le Monde des Arts, March 29,1972, p. 13. The scepticism of my article arose out of an experience of discrepancy between the two readings of Rothko and Still, i.e., my perceptual awareness 376

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2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

of their art did not coincide with the conceptualization of it as transcendental. They themselves tried to force a transcendental or spiritual meaning upon their works: this straining for transcendental effect showed that it was not self-evident in the sensations aroused by the work. Shaped color is not in and of itself transcendentally convincing; expected meaning do not necessarily come into existence in experience. In a sense, the question of this article is whether the pictures of Rothko and Still are visual molehills whose interpretation has made them into transcendental mountains, or transcendental mountains that are inherently difficult to climb. To assume both—to accept both readings as a matter of course—is to be intellectually dishonest as well as false to one's experience. It is to evade the logic of the situation of the art as much as it is to accept an unstructured plurality of meanings. It is to ignore the fact that a picture by Rothko or Still is an incomplete symbol. Their art seems to stretch the limits of symbolism, perhaps beyond the breaking point. Odilon Redon, "Introduction to a Catalogue," Theories of Modern Art, Herschel B. Chipp, ed. (Berkeley, 1968), p. 120. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Chipp, p. 155. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, "Statement," Chipp, p. 545. For Gottlieb and Rothko, the tragic and timeless are the only "valid" subject matter, so that the experience of their pictures in purely phenomenal terms—as nothing but a source of unique sensations—misses their point. Yet if the tragic and timeless are not directly experienced, but are read into the works—with the prompting of the artist—their meaning is falsified. The ambiguity of the works is that they sometimes seem tragic and timeless, but at other times purely immediate and without any connotations of value. Clement Greenberg, "Art Chronicle: Irrelevance Versus Irresponsibility," Partisan Review, 15 (1948), p. 577Clement Greenberg, "David Smith's New Sculpture," Art International, 8 (1964), p. 37. Greenberg argues in effect that all content is implicit in the work: any content that is explicit has not been assimilated by its style. However, this does not mean the content cannot be articulated—is "ineffable"—only that in speaking of it one must also discuss its transformation by style and the point of this transformation. That is, style must be understood as an interpretation of content—a way of qualifying it. Mark Rothko, "The Romantics Were Prompted," Chipp, p. 549. Correlate with his desperate desire to produce visionary pictures was Rothko's sense of "the urgency for transcendent experience," but uncertainty of his ability to achieve and sustain such experience. Clyfford Still, "Statement," Chipp, p. 576. Both Still and Rothko suffer from a sense of historic self-presentation, which cannot abide any questioning of motives and results. Such hubris masks their uncertainty about the success of their great ambition. Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1960), p. 11. All quotations from Lovejoy are from this source. Still is particularly guilty of the attempt to absolutize his works. Their workings, 1970s

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according to Still, are mysterious, and their implications horrendous. Not only is the artist a kind of god for Still—the update of this Renaissance idea is that he is now a deus absconditus rather than, as in the Renaissance, openly divine (Still's sense of the artist's "obscure" position thus represents a retreat from the Renaissance artist's sense of his position)—but his work is also charged with divine power. It is to be regarded with awe and handled with the care that sanctifies. Thus, Still could assert, "Let no man undervalue the implications of this work or its power for life—or for death, if it is misused" (Chipp, p. 576). (One might replace "misused" with "not properly respected and unquestionably worshipped.") 11. Alfred Neumeyer, The Search for Meaning in Modern Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964), pp. 88-90. Neumeyer's exploration of the uncertainty and ineffability of abstract art is based on the assumption that "Whatever insights we may gain, they come to us neither through nature nor as literary content... but solely through associations evoked by sense impressions which cannot be rationally checked." This does not preclude an implicit or hidden content; at the same time, it implies that this content can never be completely verified—our sense of its reality is not binding—but exists as one among many possible interpretations of the work. 12. Clement Greenberg, " 'American-Type' Painting,'Mr¿ and Culture (Boston, 1961), p. 225. All subsequent quotations from Greenberg are from this source unless otherwise noted. 13. Gottlieb and Rothko, p. 545. Correlate with the large shape is the use of "flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth." It is interesting that for Greenberg flatness is simply an essential property of the medium of painting, while for Gottlieb and Rothko it has transcendental significance, and becomes a way of achieving "the simple expression of the complex thought." 14. Clement Greenberg, "The Role of Nature in Modern Painting," Partisan Review, 16 (1949), p. 81. The question, however, is not whether abstract art is naturalistic in origin and end, but why it presents outer and inner nature in abstract—"non-objective" or subjective—form. It is hard to believe that the reasons are purely stylistic, i.e., art historical in origin, and without any general spiritual purpose. The shift to abstraction, in other words, involves inner as well as historical (outer) necessity. 15. Lovejoy,p.56. 16. Lovejoy, p. 16. 17. Lovejoy, p. 7. 18. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley, 1971), p. 159. All quotations from Ehrenzweig are from this source. 19. Max J. Freidlander, Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life (New York, 1963), p. 55. 20. In Still the verticality is already apparent in a number of realistic works painted in the 19308, such as the American scene picture Grain Elevators (1937) in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. The uprightness of Rothko's pictures seems to imply the centrality of a wingless altarpiece, and Newman's verticality seems a romantic reminiscence of an obelisk. Thus, Still's verticality seems 378

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naturalistic, Rothko's religious, and Newman's nostalgic-historicist (a disguised quotation) in origin. In general, the verticality is meant to be the sign of a permanent transcendence—man, as it were, transcending the ground by standing upright on it, and no longer able to return to his prone relation to it. This uprightness is in effect the beginning of his spirituality, its first sign, for it gives him a look beyond his finite state and immediate situation and seems to free him from the material condition of being earthbound. See Erwin Straus, "The Upright Posture," Phenomenological Psychology (New York, 1966), pp. 137-65. Still and Newman tend to make the verticality more telling by placing it in a relatively horizontal format, as though in conflict with this context, and seeking to aspire or reach beyond—and dominate—it. Rothko's works, because they don't truly do so, convey a seemingly more self-assured, more recognizable spirituality or transcendence, but thereby a more static, unmoving one. His verticality is fixed into and so an echo of his format, thereby losing the energy implicit in the transcendental "direction." Rothko's sense of transcendence is more charming and mechanical, and so less significant than that of Still and Newman. 21. Rothko, p. 549. Rothko sees only a negative way to the transcendental, through the "pulverization" of "the familiar identity of things" in order to destroy their "finite associations." However much he argues that "not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental," the transcendental for him is experienced as strange or unfamiliar, i.e., as not fully possessed or known and as such not completely real. 22. For Still (p. 574), particularly to be denied are "self-appointed spokesmen and self-styled intellectuals with the lust of immaturity for leadership." His contempt for them is the catalyst for his own higher purpose, but does not insure its success. 23. Max Kozloff, "Mark Rothko," Renderings (New York, 1969), p. 152. All quotations from Kozloffare from this source. 24. Clement Greenberg, "ROSC '71," Art International, 16 (1972), p. 62. 25. Rothko's early works make a dogmatic assumption of mythological meaning amounting to the adoption of an ideology of mythology. Andrea Gain's article "On Mythology" in fact follows Rothko's "The Romantics Were Prompted" in its original publication in Possibilities, i (Winter 1947-48), and is illustrated by Rothko's mythological pictures from 1946-47. 26. The most convincing argument for the sublime character of the works of Rothko and Still was made by Lawrence Alloway, "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism," Artforum, 12 (1973), pp. 36-42. Alloway's argument is that their paintings are disguised traditional pictures with traditional meaning. However, insofar as their abstraction is taken seriously, as something important in itself and not simply as a device for heightening (by hiding) well-known meanings, it transcends the sublime. Modern abstract art is interested neither in the beautiful nor the sublime, but the moment when "art"—with all its paradoxical, multi-level implications—seems to come into existence out of worked-over matter. It is concerned with the tension between non-art and art, the moment when one seems to 1970s

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become the other and vice versa. (On the most elementary level, this is the tension between material and the expressive use to which it may be put—and the way this expressive use does not always seem to come off, so that the art seems to reduce to an awkwardly "handled" material.) For a work to be recognized as beautiful or sublime one must already take for granted the fact that it is a work of art. Modern abstract art does not take its own artisticness for granted, but is always—at its best—in the position of demonstrating that it is art, not simply ordinary appearance. It is interested in the moment of imaginative transformation of non-art appearances into artistic appearances, not the aesthetic qualities that might result from this transformation. 27. What Kozloff treats purely formally, Gottlieb and Rothko (p. 545) see as a "poetic expression" which has "the impact of elemental truth." Kozloff does not see the tension between subjective and objective tendencies in Rothko's work as having to do with subject matter, but reduces it to a matter of composition. 28. Rothko (p. 548) asserts that he thinks of his "pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are performers." He also remarks that "The presentation of this drama in the familiar world was never possible, unless everyday acts belonged to a ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm." Clement Greenberg, "The Crisis of the Easel Painting," Partisan Review, 15 (1948), p. 482, remarks on the "dramatic imbalance" of forms in Rothko. 29. Mark Rothko, Milton Avery Prints and Drawings, 1930-^64 (Exhibition Catalogue, Brooklyn Museum, 1966), p. 16. 30. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature." Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1957), P- 4431. Gottlieb and Rothko, p. 545. 32. Quoted by Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (New York, 1957), p. 472. 33. Lovejoy,p.83. 34. Quoted by Lovejoy, pp. 65-66. 35. Rothko, p. 549. 36. Still, p. 547. 37. Robert Jay Lifton, Boundaries (New York, 1969), p. 22. 38. Willem de Kooning, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," Chipp, p. 560, remarks that "Today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all." It is possible to argue that the light that led Rothko away from his mythological paintings was that of the atomic bomb, and that in fact in a number of Rothko works one has disguised reminiscences of the famous mushroom shape of the atomic cloud. The cloud—made up of mistscan be interpreted as a libidinous discharge, helping explain Rothko's exploitation of the libidinous or erotic character of color. Also, the grand sensation it affords becomes the scaffolding for Rothko's attempt to create a grand manner of color.

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The 1980s READING NEW SIGNIFICATIONS

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SERGE GUILBAUT

The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the "Vital Center"

We now know that the traditional make-up of the avant-garde was revitalized in the United States after the Second World War. In the unprecedented economic boom of the war years, the same strategies that had become familiar to a jaded Parisian bourgeoisie were skillfully deployed, confronted as they were with a new bourgeois public recently instructed in the principles of modern art. Between 1939 and 1948 Clement Greenberg developed a formalist theory of modern art which he would juxtapose with the notion of the avant-garde, in order to create a structure which, like that of Baudelaire or Apollinaire, would play an aggressive, dominant role on the international scene. The evolution of Greenbergian formalism during its formative period from 1939 to 1948 cannot be understood without analyzing the circumstances in which Greenberg attempted to extract from the various ideological and aesthetic positions existing at the end of the war an analytical system that would create a specifically American art, distinct from other contemporary tendencies, and international in import. When we speak about Greenbergian formalism, we are speaking about a theory that was somewhat flexible as it began clearly to define its position within the new social and aesthetic order that was taking shape during and after the war; only later would it solidify into dogma. We are also speaking about its relationship to the powerful Marxist movement of the 19305, to the crisis of Marxism, and finally to the complete disintegration of Marxism in the 19405 —a close relationship clearly visible from the writings and ideological positions of Greenberg and the abstract expressionists during the movement's development. Greenbergian formalism was born from those Stalinist-Trotskyite ideological battles, the disillusionment of the American Left, and the deMarxification of the New York intelligentsia. [...]

SOURCE: October 15 (Winter 1980), 61-78. Reprinted with the permission of Serge Guilbaut and M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass. Translated by Thomas Repensek. This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper delivered at the conference "Art History and Theory: Aspects of American Formalism," Montreal, October 1979. This text has been edited, and footnotes have been renumbered. 383

De-Marxification really began in 1937 when a large number of intellectuals, confronted with the mediocrity of the political and aesthetic options offered by the Popular Front, became Trotskyites. Greenberg, allied for a time with Dwight MacDonald and Partisan Review in its Trotskyite period (1937-1939), located the origin of the American avant-garde venture in a Trotskyite context: "Some day it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism which started out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way heroically for what was to come."1 When the importance of the Popular Front, its voraciousness and success are taken into account, it is hardly surprising that Trotskyism attracted a certain number of intellectuals. The American Communist party's alliance with liberalism disillusioned those who sought a radical change of the political system that had been responsible for the Depression. This alliance prepared the stage for revolution. [...] It was the art historian Meyer Schapiro who initiated the shift. In 1937, abandoning the rhetoric of the Popular Front as well as the revolutionary language used in his article "Social Bases of Art," in which he emphasized the importance of the alliance between the artist and the proletariat,2 he crossed over to the Trotskyite opposition. He published in Marxist Quarterly his celebrated article "Nature of Abstract Art,"3 important not only for its intelligent refutation of Alfred Barr's formalist essay "Cubism and Abstract Art,"4 but also for the displacement of the ideology of his earlier writing, a displacement that would subsequently enable the Left to accept artistic experimentation, which the Communist Popular Front vigorously opposed. If in 1936, in "Social Bases of Art," Schapiro guaranteed the artist's place in the revolutionary process through his alliance with the proletariat, in 1937, in "Nature of Abstract Art," he became pessimistic, cutting the artist off from any revolutionary hope whatsoever. For Schapiro, even abstract art, which Alfred Barr and others persistently segregated from social reality in a closed, independent system, had its roots in its own conditions of production. The abstract artist, he claimed, believing in the illusion of liberty, was unable to understand the complexity and precariousness of his own position, nor could he grasp the implications of what he was doing. By attacking abstract art in this way, by destroying the illusory notion of the artist's independence, and by insisting on the relationships that link abstract art with the society that produces it, Schapiro implied that abstraction had a larger signification than that attributed to it by the formalists. Schapiro's was a two-edged sword: while it destroyed Alfred Barr's illusion of independence, it also shattered the Communist critique of abstract art as an 384

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ivory tower isolated from society. The notion of the nonindependence of abstract art totally disarmed both camps. Leftist painters who rejected "pure art" but who were also disheartened by the Communist aesthetic saw the "negative" ideological formulation provided by abstract art as a positive force, a way out. It was easy for the Communists to reject art that was cut off from reality, isolated in its ivory tower. But if, as Schapiro claimed, abstract art was part of the social fabric, if it reacted to conflicts and contradictions, then it was theoretically possible to use an abstract language to express a critical social consciousness. In this way, the use of abstraction as critical language answered a pressing need articulated by Partisan Review and Marxist Quarterly: the independence of the artist vis-à-vis political parties and totalitarian ideologies. An opening had been made that would develop (in 1938 with Breton-Trotsky, in 1939 with Greenberg, in 1944 with Motherwell)5 into the concept of a critical, avant-garde abstract art. The "Nature of Abstract Art" relaxed the rigid opposition of idealist formalism and social realism, allowing for the réévaluation of abstraction. For American painters tired of their role as propagandizing illustrators, this article was a deliverance, and it conferred unassailable prestige on the author in anti-Stalinist artistic circles. Schapiro remained in the minority, however, in spite of his alignment with J. T. Farrell, who also attacked the vulgar Marxism and the aesthetic of the Popular Front in his "Note on Literary Criticism."6 In December 1937, Partisan Review published a letter from Trotsky in which he analyzed the catastrophic position of the American artist who, he claimed, could better himself, caught as he was in the bourgeois stranglehold of mediocrity, only through a thorough political analysis of society. He continued: Art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of Bourgeois society. To find a solution to this impasse through art itself is impossible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably —as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture founded on slavery— unless present day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution.7 [...] Trotsky and Breton's analysis, like Greenberg's, blamed cultural crisis on the decadence of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and placed its solution 1980s

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in the hands of the independent artist; yet they maintained a revolutionary optimism that Greenberg lacked. For Trotsky, the artist should be free of partisanship but not politics. Greenberg's solution, however, abandoned this critical position, as well as what Trotsky called eclectic action, in favor of a unique solution: the modernist avant-garde.8 In fact, in making the transition from the political to the artistic avant-garde, Greenberg believed that only the latter could preserve the quality of culture against the overwhelming influence of kitsch by enabling culture to continue to progress. Greenberg did not conceive of this cultural crisis as a conclusion, as had been the case during the preceding decade, that is, as the death of a bourgeois culture being replaced by a proletarian one, but as the beginning of a new era contingent on the death of a proletarian culture destroyed in its infancy by the Communist alliance with the Popular Front, which Partisan Review had documented. As this crisis swiftly took on larger proportions, absorbing the ideals of the modern artist, the formation of an avant-garde seemed to be the only solution, the only thing able to prevent complete disintegration. Yet it ignored the revolutionary aspirations that had burned so brightly only a few years before. After the moral failure of the Communist party and the incompetence of the Trotskyites, many artists recognized the need for a frankly realistic, nonrevolutionary solution. Appealing to a concept of the avant-garde, with which Greenberg was certainly familiar, allowed for a defense of "quality," throwing back into gear the progressive process brought to a standstill in academic immobility—even if it meant abandoning the political struggle in order to create a conservative force to rescue a foundering bourgeois culture. Greenberg believed that the most serious threat to culture came from academic immobility, the Alexandrianism characteristic of kitsch. During that period the power structure was able to use kitsch easily for propaganda purposes. According to Greenberg, modern avant-garde art was less susceptible to absorption, not, as Trotsky believed, because it was too critical, but on the contrary because it was "innocent," therefore less likely to allow a propagandistic message to be implanted in its folds. Continuing Trotsky's defense of a critical art "remaining faithful to itself," Greenberg insisted on the critical endeavor of the avant-garde, but a critique that was directed inward, to the work itself, its medium, as the determining condition of quality. Against the menacing background of the Second World War, it seemed unrealistic to Greenberg to attempt to act simultaneously on both a political and cultural front. Protecting Western culture meant saving the furniture. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" was thus an important step in the process of de386

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Marxification of the American intelligentsia that had begun around 1936. The article appeared in the nick of time to rescue the intellectual wandering in the dark. After passing through a Trotskyite period of its own, Partisan Review emphasized the importance of the intellectual at the expense of the working class. It became preoccupied with the formation of an international elite to the extant that it sometimes became oblivious to politics itself. [...] Greenberg's article should be understood in this context. The delicate balance between art and politics which Trotsky, Breton, and Schapiro tried to preserve in their writings is absent in Greenberg. Although preserving certain analytical procedures and a Marxist vocabulary, Greenberg established a theoretical basis for an elitist modernism, which certain artists had been thinking about since 1936, especially those associated with the American Abstract Artists group, who were also interested in Trotskyism and European culture.9 "Avant Garde and Kitsch" formalized, defined, and rationalized an intellectual position that was adopted by many artists who failed fully to understand it. Extremely disappointing as it was to anyone seeking a revolutionary solution to the crisis, the article gave renewed hope to artists. By using kitsch as a target, as a symbol of the totalitarian authority to which it was allied and by which it was exploited, Greenberg made it possible for the artist to act. By opposing mass culture on an artistic level, the artist was able to have the illusion of battling the degraded structures of power with elitist weapons. Greenberg's position was rooted in Trotskyism, but it resulted in a total withdrawal from the political strategies adopted during the Depression: he appealed to socialism to rescue a dying culture by continuing tradition. "Today we no longer look towards socialism for a new culture—as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now."10 The transformation functioned perfectly, and for many years Greenberg's article was used to mark the beginning of the American pictorial renaissance, restored to a preeminent position. The old formula for the avant-garde, as was expected, was a complete success. The appearance of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" coincided with two events that threw into question the integrity of the Soviet Union—the GermanSoviet alliance and the invasion of Finland by the Soviet Union—and which produced a radical shift in alliances among Greenberg's literary friends and the contributors to Partisan Review. After the pact, many intellectuals attempted to return to politics. But the optimism which some maintained even 1980s

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after the alliance was announced evaporated with the Soviet invasion of Finland. Meyer Schapiro could not have chosen a better time to interrupt the selfsatisfied purrings of the Communist-dominated American Artist's Congress and create a split in the movement. He and some thirty artist colleagues, in the minority because of their attempt to censure the Soviet Union, realized the importance of distancing themselves from an organization so closely linked not only to Stalinism, but also the social aesthetic of the Popular Front. And so the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors was born, a nonpolitical association that would play an important part in the creation of the avant-garde after the war, and from which would come many of the firstgeneration painters of abstract expressionism (Gottlieb, Rothko, PousetteDart). After the disillusion of 1939 and in spite of a slight rise in the fortunes of the Popular Front after Germany attacked Russia in June of 1941, the relationship of the artist to the masses was no longer the central concern of major painters and intellectuals, as it had been during the 19305. With the disappearance of the structures of political action and the dismantling of the Works Progress Administration programs, there was a shift in interest away from society back to the individual. As the private sector reemerged from the long years of the Depression, the artist was faced with the unhappy task of finding a public and convincing them of the value of his work. After 1940 artists employed an individual idiom whose roots were nevertheless thoroughly embedded in social appearance. The relationship of the artist to the public was still central, but the object had changed. Whereas the artist had previously addressed himself to the masses through social programs like the WPA, with the reopening of the private sector he addressed an elite through the "universal." By rediscovering alienation, the artist began to see an end to his anonymity; as Ad Reinhardt explained, "Toward the late '303 a real fear of anonymity developed and most painters were reluctant to join a group for fear of being labeled or submerged."11 [...] Nineteen forty-three was a particularly crucial year, for quietly, without shock, the United States passed from complete isolationism to the most Utopian internationalism of that year's best-seller, One World by Wendell Wilkie.12 Prospects for the internationalization of American culture generated a sense of optimism that silenced the anticapitalist criticism of some of its foremost artists. In fact, artists who, in the best tradition of the avant-garde, organized an exhibition of rejected work in January 1943, clearly expressed this new point of view. In his catalogue introduction Barnett Newman revealed a new notion of the modern American artist: 388

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We have come together as American modern artists because we feel the need to present to the public a body of art that will adequately reflect the new America that is taking place today and the kind of America that will, it is hoped, become the cultural center of the world. This exhibition is a first step to free the artist from the stifling control of an outmoded politics. For art in America is still the plaything of politicians. Isolationist art still dominates the American scene. Regionalism still holds the reins of America's artistic future. It is high time we cleared the cultural atmosphere of America. We artists, therefore, conscious of the dangers that beset our country and our art, can no longer remain silent.13 This rejection of politics, which had been reassimilated by the propagandistic art of the 19305, was, according to Newman, necessary to the realization of international modernism. His manifest interest in internationalism thus aligned him—in spite of the illusory antagonism he maintained in order to preserve the adversary image of the avant-garde—with the majority of the public and of political institutions. The United States emerged from the war a victorious, powerful, and confident country. The American public's infatuation with art steadily increased under the influence of the media. Artists strengthened by contact with European colleagues, yet relieved by their departures, possessed new confidence, and art historians and museums were ready to devote themselves to a new national art. All that was needed was a network of galleries to promote and profit from this new awareness. By 1943 the movement had begun; in March of that year the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, which dealt in old masters, opened a wing for experimental art, headed by Betty Parsons, to satisfy the market's demand for modernity.14 In April 1945, Sam Kootz opened his gallery. And in February 1946, Charles Egan, who had been at Ferargil, opened a gallery of modern art, followed in September by Parsons, who opened her own gallery with the artists Peggy Guggenheim left behind when she returned to Europe (Rothko, Hofmann, Pollock, Reinhardt, Stamos, Still, Newman). Everything was prepared to enter the postwar years confidently. The optimism of the art world contrasted sharply with the difficulties of the Left in identifying itself in the nation that emerged from the war. In fact, as the newly powerful middle-class worked to safeguard the privileges it had won during the economic boom, expectations of revolution, even dissidence, began to fade among the Communist party Left. And the disillusions of the postwar period (the international conferences, the Truman ad1980s

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ministration, the Iron Curtain) did nothing to ease their anxiety. What began as a de-Marxification of the extreme Left during the war, turned into a total de-politicization when the alternatives became clear: Truman's America or the Soviet Union. Dwight MacDonald accurately summarized the desperate position of the radical Left: "In terms of'practical' political politics we are living in an age which consistently present us with impossible alternatives.... It is no longer possible for the individual to relate himself to world politics. . . . Now the clearer one's insight, the more numbed one becomes."15 Rejected by traditional political structures, the radical intellectual after 1939 drifted from the usual channels of political discourse into isolation, and, utterly powerless, surrendered, refused to speak. Between 1946 and 1948, while political discussion grew heated in the debate over the Marshall Plan, the Soviet threat, and the presidential election in which Henry Wallace and the Communists again played an important part, a humanist abstract art began to appear that imitated the art of Paris and soon began to appear in all the galleries. Greenberg considered this new academicism16 a serious threat, saying in 1945: We are in danger of having a new kind of official art foisted on us—official "modern" art. It is being done by well intentioned people like the Pepsi-cola [sic] company who fail to realize that to be for something uncritically does more harm in the end than being against it. For while official art, when it was thoroughly academic, furnished at least a sort of challenge, official "modern" art of this type will confuse, discourage and dissuade the true creator.17 During that period of anxious renewal, art and American society needed an infusion of new life, not the static pessimism of academicism. Toward that end Greenberg began to formulate in his weekly articles for the Nation a critical system based on characteristics which he defined as typically American, and which were supposed to differentiate American from French art. This system was to revive modern American art, infuse it with a new life by identifying an essential formalism that could not be applied to the pale imitations of the School of Paris turned out by the American Abstract Artists. Greenberg's first attempt at differentiation occurred in an article about Pollock and Dubuffet18

[--•]

Greenberg emphasized the greater vitality, virility, and brutality of the American artists. He was developing an ideology that would transform the provincialism of American art into internationalism by replacing the Parisian standards that had until then defined the notion of quality in art (grace, craft, 390

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finish) with American ones (violence, spontaneity, incompleteness).19 Brutality and vulgarity were signs of the direct, uncorrupted communication that contemporary life demanded. American art become the trustee of this new age. On March 8, 1947, Greenberg stated that new American painting ought to be modern, urbane, casual, and detached, in order to achieve control and composure. It should not allow itself to become enmeshed in the absurdity of daily political and social events. That was the fault of American art, he said, for it had never been able to restrain itself from articulating some sort of message, describing, speaking, telling a story: In the face of current events painting feels, apparently, that it must be epic poetry, it must be theatre, it must be an atomic bomb, it must be the rights of man. But the greatest painter of our time, Matisse, preeminently demonstrated the sincerity and penetration that go with the kind of greatness particular to twentieth century painting by saying that he wanted his art to be an armchair for the tired business man.20 For Greenberg, painting could be important only if it made up its mind to return to its ivory tower, which the previous decade had so avidly attempted to destroy. This position of detachment followed naturally from his earlier critical works (1939), and from many artists' fears of participating in the virulent political propaganda of the early years of the Cold War. It was this integration that Greenberg attempted to circumvent through a reinterpretation of modernist detachment—a difficult undertaking for artists rooted in the tradition of the 19305 who had so ruthlessly been made a part of the social fabric. The central concern of avant-garde artists like Rothko and Still was to save their pictorial message from distortion: "The familiar identity of things had to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment."21 Rothko tried to purge his art of any sign that could convey a precise image, for fear of being assimilated by society. Still went so far as to refuse at various times to exhibit his paintings publicly because he was afraid critics would deform or obliterate the content embedded in his abstract forms. In a particularly violent letter to Betty Parsons in 1948, he said: Please—and this is important, show them [my paintings] only to those who may have some insight into the values involve [d], and allow no one to write about them. NO ONE. My contempt for the intelligence of the scribblers I have read is so complete that I cannot tolerate their imbecilities, particularly when 1980s

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they attempt to deal with my canvases. Men like Soby, Greenberg, Barr, etc. ... are to be categorically rejected. And I no longer want them shown to the public at large, either singly or in group.22 The work of many avant-garde artists, in particular Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, and Still, seemed to become a kind of un-writing, an art of effacement, of erasure, a discourse which in its articulation tried to negate itself, to be reabsorbed. There was a morbid fear of the expressive image that threatened to regiment, to petrify painting once again. Confronted with the atomic terror in 1946, Dwight MacDonald analyzed in the same way the impossibility of expression that characterizes the modern age, thus imputing meaning to the avant-garde's silence. "Naturalism is no longer adequate," he wrote, "either esthetically or morally, to cope with the modern horror."23 Description of nuclear destruction had become an obscenity, for to describe it was to accept it, to make a show of it, to represent it. The modern artist therefore had to avoid two dangers: assimilation of the message by political propaganda, and the terrible representation of a world that was beyond reach, unrepresentable. Abstraction, individualism, and originality seemed to be the best weapons against society's voracious assimilative appetite. In March 1948, when none of the work being shown in New York reflected in any way Greenberg's position, he announced in his article "The Decline of Cubism," published in Partisan Review, that American art had definitively broken with Paris and that it had finally become essential to the vitality of Western culture. This declaration of faith assumed the decline of Parisian cubism, he said, because the forces that had given it birth had emigrated to the United States. The fact that Greenberg launched his attack when he did was not unrelated to certain political events and to the prewar atmosphere that had existed in New York since January of that year.24 The threat of a Third World War was openly discussed in the press; and the importance accorded by the government to the passage of the European Recovery Plan reinforced the idea that Europe—France and Italy—was about to topple into the Soviet camp. What would become of Western civilization? Under these circumstances, Greenberg's article seemed to rescue the cultural future of the West:25 If artists as great as Picasso, Braque and Léger have declined so grievously, it can only be because the general social premises that used to guarantee their functioning have disappeared in Europe. And when one sees, on the other hand, how much the level of American art has risen in the last five years, with 392

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the emergence of new talents so full of energy and content as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, David Smith—then the conclusion forces itself, much to our own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power.26 New York's independence from an enfeebled, faction-ridden Paris, threatened by communism from within and without, was in Greenberg's eyes necessary if modern culture was to survive. Softened by many struggles and too much success, the Parisian avant-garde survived only with difficulty. Only the virility of an art like Pollock's, its brutality, ruggedness, and individualism, could revitalize modern culture, traditionally represented by Paris, and effeminized by too much praise. By dealing only with abstract-expressionist art, Greenberg's formal analysis offered a theory of art that finally brought "international" over to the American side. For the first time an important critic had been aggressive, confident, and devoted enough to American art to openly defy the supremacy of Parisian art and to replace it on an international scale with the art of Pollock and the New York School. Greenberg dispensed with the Parisian avant-garde and placed New York at the center of world culture. From then on the United States held all the winning cards in its struggle with communism: the atomic bomb, a powerful economy, a strong army, and now artistic supremacy—the cultural superiority that had been missing. After 1949 and Truman's victory, the proclamation of the Fair Deal, and the publication of Schlesinger's Vital Center, traditional liberal democratic pluralism was a thing of the past. Henry Wallace disappeared from the political scene, the Communist party lost its momentum and even at times ventured outside the law. Victorious liberalism, ideologically refashioned by Schlesinger, barricaded itself behind an elementary anticommunism, centered on the notion of freedom. Aesthetic pluralism was also rejected in favor of a unique, powerful, abstract, purely American modern art, as demonstrated by Sam Kootz's refusal to show the French-influenced modern painters Brown and Holty.27 Individualism would become the basis for all American art that wanted to represent the new era—confident and uneasy at the same time. Artistic freedom and experimentation became central to abstract-expressionist art.28 In May 1948, René d'Harnoncourt presented a paper before the annual meeting of the American Federation of Art in which he explored the notion of individuality, explaining why—his words were carefully chosen for May 1948 —no collective art could come to terms with the age. Freedom of individual 1980s

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expression, independent of any other consideration, was the basis of our culture and deserved protection and even encouragement when confronted with cultures that were collectivist and authoritarian. The art of the twentieth century has no collective style, not because it has divorced itself from contemporary society but because it is part of it. And here we are with our hard-earned new freedom. Walls are crumbling all around us and we are terrified by the endless vistas and the responsibility of an infinite choice. It is this terror of the new freedom which removed the familiar signposts from the roads that makes many of us wish to turn the clock back and recover the security of yesterday's dogma. The totalitarian state established in the image of the past is one reflection of this terror of the new freedom.29 The solution to the problems created by such alienation was, according to d'Harnoncourt, an abstract accord between society and the individual: It can be solved only by an order which reconciles the freedom of the individual with the welfare of society and replaces yesterday's image of one unified civilization by a pattern in which many elements, while retaining their own individual qualities, join to form a new entity.... The perfecting of this new order would unquestionably tax our abilities to the very limit, but would give us a society enriched beyond belief by the full development of the individual for the sake of the whole. I believe a good name for such a society is democracy, and I also believe that modern art in its infinite variety and ceaseless exploration is its foremost symbol.30 In this text we have, perhaps for the first time, the ideology of the avantgarde aligned with postwar liberalism—the reconciliation of the ideology forged by Rothko and Newman, Greenberg and Rosenberg (individuality, risk, the new frontier) with the liberal ideology as Schlesinger defined it in Vital Center: a new radicalism. [...] The new liberalism was identified with the avant-garde not only because that kind of painting was identifiable in modern internationalist terms (also perceived as uniquely American), but also because the values represented in the pictorial work were especially cherished during the Cold War (the notion of individualism and risk essential to the artist to achieve complete freedom of expression). The element of risk that was central to the ideology of the avantgarde was also central to the ideology of Vital Center.31 Risk, as defined by the avant-garde and formulated in their work as a necessary condition for freedom of expression, was what distinguished a free society from a totalitarian 394

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one, according to Schlesinger: "The eternal awareness of choice can drive the weak to the point where the simplest decision becomes a nightmare. Most men prefer to flee choice, to flee anxiety, to flee freedom."32 In the modern world, which brutally stifles the individual, the artist becomes a rampart, an example of will against the uniformity of totalitarian society. In this way the individualism of abstract expressionism allowed the avant-garde to define and occupy a unique position on the artistic front. The avant-garde appropriated a coherent, definable, consumable image that reflected rather accurately the objectives and operations of a newly powerful, liberal, internationalist America. This juxtaposition of political and artistic images was possible because both groups consciously or unconsciously repressed aspects of their ideology in order to ally themselves with the ideology of the other. Contradictions were passed over in silence. It was ironic but not contradictory that in a society as fixed in a right-ofcenter position as the United States, and where intellectual repression was strongly felt,33 abstract expressionism was for many people an expression of freedom: freedom to create controversial works, freedom symbolized by action and gesture, by the expression of the artist apparently freed from all restraints. It was an essential existential liberty that was defended by the moderns (Barr, Soby, Greenberg, Rosenberg) against the attacks of the humanist liberals (Devree, Jewell) and the conservatives (Dondero, Taylor), serving to present the internal struggle to those outside as proof of the inherent liberty of the American system, as opposed to the restrictions imposed on the artist by the Soviet system. Freedom was the symbol most enthusiastically promoted by the new liberalism during the Cold War.34 Expressionism became the expression of the difference between a free society and totalitarianism; it represented an essential aspect of liberal society: its aggressiveness and ability to generate controversy that in the final analysis posed no threat. Once again Schlesinger leads us through the labyrinth of liberal ideology: It is threatening to turn us all into frightened conformists; and conformity can lead only to stagnation. We need courageous men to help us recapture a sense of the indispensability of dissent, and we need dissent if we are to make up our minds equably and intelligently.35 While Pollock's drip paintings offended both the Left and the Right as well as the middle class, they revitalized and strengthened the new liberalism.36 Pollock became its hero and around him a sort of school developed, for which 1980s

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he became the catalyst, the one who, as de Kooning put it, broke the ice. He became its symbol. But his success and the success of the other abstractexpressionist artists was also the bitter defeat of being powerless to prevent their art from being assimilated into the political struggle. The trap that the modern American artist wanted to avoid, as we've seen, was the image, the "statement." Distrusting the traditional idiom, he wanted to warp the trace of what he wanted to express, consciously attempt to erase, to void the readable, to censure himself. In a certain way he wanted to write about the impossibility of description. In doing this, he rejected two things, the aesthetic of the Popular Front and the traditional American aesthetic, which reflected the political isolationism of an earlier era. The access to modernism that Greenberg had theoretically achieved elevated the art of the avant-garde to a position of international importance, but in so doing integrated it into the imperialist machine of the Museum of Modern Art.37 So it was that the progressively disillusioned avant-garde, although theoretically in opposition to the Truman administration, aligned itself, often unconsciously, with the majority, which after 1948 moved dangerously toward the right. Greenberg followed this development with the painters, and was its catalyst. By analyzing the political aspect of American art, he defined the ideological, formal vantage point from which the avant-garde would have to assert itself if it intended to survive the ascendancy of the new American middle class. To do so it was forced to suppress what many first generation artists had defended against the sterility of American abstract art: emotional content, social commentary, the discourse that avant-garde artists intended in their work, and which Meyer Schapiro had articulated. Ironically, it was that constant rebellion against political exploitation and the stubborn determination to save Western culture by Americanizing it that led the avant-garde, after killing the father (Paris), to topple into the once disgraced arms of the mother country.

Note s

1. Clement Greenberg, "The Late 3o's in New York," Art and Culture, Boston, Beacon Press, 1961, p. 230. 2. Meyer Schapiro, "Social Bases of Art," First American Artist's Congress, New York, 1936, pp. 31-37. 3. Meyer Schapiro, "Nature of Abstract Art," Marxist Quarterly, January-February Х 937? PP- 77~98; comment by Delmore Schwartz in Marxist Quarterly, AprilJune 1937, pp. 305-310?and Schapiro's reply, pp. 310-314. 396

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4- Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1936. 5. Leon Trotsky, "Art and Politics," Partisan Review., August-September, 1938, p. 310; Diego Rivera and André Breton, "Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art," Partisan Review, Fall 1938, pp. 49-53; Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World, Dyn, November 1944, pp. 9-14. 6. J. T. Farrell,^4 Note on Literary Criticism, New York, Vanguard, 1936. 7. Trotsky, "Art and Politics," p. 4. In spite of Trotsky's article, which was translated by Dwight MacDonald, the magazine's relationship with the movement remained unencumbered. In fact, Trotsky distrusted the avant-garde publication, which he accused of timidity in its attack on Stalinism and turned down several invitations to write for the magazine (Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America, New York, John Wiley and Sons, p. 200). 8. Trotsky agreed with Breton that any artistic school was valid (his "eclecticism") that recognized a revolutionary imperative; see Trotsky's letter to Breton, October 27, 1938, quoted in Arturo Schwartz, Breton/Trotsky, Paris, 10/18, 1977, p. 129. 9. Many members of the American Abstract Artists were sympathetic to Trotskyism but looked to Paris for an aesthetic standard; Rosalind Bengelsdorf interviewed by the author, February 12,1978, New York. 10. Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Partisan Review, Fall 1939, p. 49. 11. Ad Reinhardt, interviewed by F. Celentano, September 2,1955, for The Origins and Development of Abstract Expressionism in the U.S., unpublished thesis, New York, 1957, p. xi. 12. Nineteen forty-three was the year of internationalism in the United States. Although occurring slowly, the change was a radical one. The entire political spectrum supported the United States involvement in world affairs. Henry Luce, speaking for the right, published his celebrated article "The American Century" in Life magazine in 1941, in which he called on the American people vigorously to seize world leadership. The century to come, he said, could be the American century as the nineteenth had been that of England and France. Conservatives approved this new direction in the MacKinac resolution. See Wendell Wilkie's best-seller, One World, New York, 1943. 13. Catalogue introduction to the First Exhibition of Modern American Artists at Riverside Museum, January 1943. This exhibition was intended as an alternative to the gigantic one organized by the Communist-dominated Artist for Victory. Newman's appeal for an apolitical art was in fact a political act since it attacked the involvement of the Communist artist in the war effort. Newman was joined by M. Avery, B. Brown, G. Constant, A. Gottlieb, B. Green, G. Green, J. Graham, I. Krasner, B. Margo, M. Rothko, and others. 14. Betty Parsons, interviewed by the author, New York, February 16,1978. 15. Dwight MacDonald, "Truman's Doctrine, Abroad and at Home," May 1947, published in Memoirs of a Revolutionist, New York, World Publishing, 1963, p. 191. 16. The abstract art fashionable at the time (R. Gwathmey, P. Burlin, J. de Martini) borrowed classical themes and modernized or "Picassoized" them. 1980s

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iy. Greenberg, Nation, April 1947. 18. Greenberg, "Art,"Nation, February i, 1947, pp. 138-139. 19. For an analysis of the ideology of this position see S. Guilbaut, "Création et développement d'une Avant-Garde: New York 1946-1951," Histoire et critique des arts, "Les Avant-Gardes,"July 1978, pp. 29-48. 20. Greenberg,4Art," Nation, March 8,1947, p. 284. 21. M. Rothko, Possibilities, No. i, Winter 1947-48, p. 84. 22. Clifford Still, letter to Betty Parsons, March 20,1948, Archives of American Art, Betty Parsons papers, N 68-72. 23. Dwight MacDonald, October 1946, published in Memoirs, "Looking at the War," p.180. 24. His article had an explosive effect since it was the first time an American art critic had given pride of place to American art. There were some who were shocked and angered by it. G. L. K. Morris, a modern painter of the cubist school, former Trotskyite and Communist party supporter, violently attacked Greenberg's position in the pages of his magazine. He went on to accuse American critics in general of being unable to interpret the secrets of modern art: "This approachcompletely irresponsible as to accuracy or taste—has been with us so long that we might say that it amounts to a tradition." He ironically attacked Greenberg's thesis for being unfounded: "It would have been rewarding if Greenberg had indicated in what ways the works of our losers have declined since the 3o's." Working in the tradition of Picasso, Morris was unable to accept the untimely, surprising demise of cubism ("Morris on Critics and Greenberg: A Communication," Partisan Review, pp. 681-684; Greenberg's reply, 686-687). 25. For a more detailed analysis of how events in Europe were understood by the American public, see Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthy ism, New York, Schocken Books, 1974, pp. 293-306. 26. Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism," Partisan Review, March 1948, p. 369. 27. When Kootz reopened his gallery in 1949 with a show entitled "The Intrasubjectives," Brown and Holty were no longer with him. The artists shown included Baziotes, de Kooning, Gorky, Gottlieb, Graves, Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock, Reinhardt, Rothko, Tobey, and Tomlin. It was clear what had happened: artists who worked in the tradition of the School of Paris were no longer welcome. In 1950 and 1951, Kootz disposed of Holty and Brown's work, making a killing by selling the paintings at discount prices in the Bargain Basement of the Gimbels department store chain. It was the end of a certain way of thinking about painting. The avant-garde jettisoned its past once and for all. 28. The ideology of individualism would be codified in 1952 by Harold Rosenberg in his well-known article "The American Action Painters" Art News, December 1952. 29. René d'Harnoncourt, "Challenge and Promise: Modern Art and Society," Art News, November 1949, p. 252. 30. Ibid.

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31. See discussion in "Artist's Session at Studio 35" in Modern Artists in America, ed. Motherwell, Reinhardt, Wittenborn, Schultz, New York, 1951, pp. 9-23. 32. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center: Our Purposes and Perils on the Tightrope of American Liberalism, Cambridge, Riverside Press, 1949, p. 52. 33. We should recall that at that time the power of the various anticommunist committees was on the rise (HUAC, the Attorney General's list) and that attempts were made to bar persons with Marxist leanings from university positions. Sidney Hook, himself a former Marxist, was one of the most vocal critics; see "Communism and the Intellectuals," The American Mercury, Vol. LXVIII, No. 302 (February 1949), 133-144. 34. See Max KozlofF, "American Painting during the Cold War," Artforum, May 1973, PP- 42-5435. Schlesinger, Vital Center, p. 208. 36. The new liberalism accepted and even welcomed the revitalizing influence of a certain level of nonconformity and rebellion. This was the system's strength, which Schlesinger clearly explains in his book. Political ideology and the ideology of the avant-garde were united: "And there is a 'clear and present danger' that anti-communist feeling will boil over into a vicious and nonconstitutional attack on nonconformists in general and thereby endanger the sources of our democratic strength" (p. 210). 37. See Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War," Artforum, XII (June 1974), 39-41.

EVAN R, FIRESTONE

James Joyce and the First Generation New York School

The artists of the first generation New York School, most of whom are known collectively as Abstract Expressionists, were as a group generally well-read or well-informed and in touch with the literary currents of their time. Nonfiction works by Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and James Frazer combined on their reading lists with the writings of Baudelaire, the French Symbolist poets (especially Rimbaud), Herman Melville, André Breton and Garcia Lorca, among others. Although scholars have examined the connections between this group of artists and literature rather carefully, except in the case of David Smith

SOURCE: Arts Magazine (June 1982), 116-21. Reprinted with the permission of Evan R. Firestone.

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there has been relatively little mention of James Joyce.1 This is surprising since Joyce is considered by many to be one of the greatest writers of fiction in the twentieth century, and a number of first generation New York School artists have acknowledged their interest in him. For example, James Brooks, speaking of his friend Bradley Walker Tomlin, said, "I think a writer who influenced most of us, and I think him pretty strongly, certainly one who influenced me more than any painter, was James Joyce."2 Others of this generation who have indicated admiration for Joyce include Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Jack Tworkov, Ad Reinhardt, and Tony Smith. A number of characteristics of his writing appealed to American artists of the 19405 and '505, but initially, it was Joyce's "stream of consciousness" technique that attracted them. Joyce's method of directly conveying his characters' unedited interior thoughts, begun in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and expanded in Ulysses, provided another literary equivalent of the visual automatism they were struggling to develop. In Robert Motherwell's case, his appreciation of Joyce preceded his preoccupation with the "automatic writing" of the Surrealists. His conviction that a modern artist must be experimental was in part formed by his reading and intense discussion of Ulysses while a student at Stanford University in the mid-ig30s.3 The implications of Joyce's writing must have further crystallized for Motherwell when he discovered Surrealist writing and art in the early '405. Motherwell's involvement with Joyce has been recognized in the literature by his choice of a title for The Homely Protestant of 1948. He has described how this title was selected: I could not find a title for possibly my single most important "figure" painting. Then I remembered a Surrealist custom, viz, to take a favorite book and place one's finger at random in it. In either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake (I forget which), my finger rested on the words "the homely protestant "4 For the record, the title is located in a list of abusive phrases on page 71 of Finnegans Wake.5 Motherwell's interest in Joyce continues to this day. It has been reported that he still "regularly dips back into Ulysses,"6 and in recent years titles of a number of works, for example, The River Liffey, Stephen's Iron Crown, Stephen's Gate, and Bloom in Dublin, carry Joycean references. Although the titles were assigned after the works were completed (that is, Joyce was not consciously on his mind while he was working), the choice of

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titles underscores Motherwell's perception, which he shared with a number of others of his generation, that Joyce's writing was relevant to the art they were creating.7 That the "simulated" automatism of Joyce's "stream of consciousness" writing ("simulated" because Joyce's prose actually is very carefully constructed) influenced artists is evidenced by Barnett Newman's activities in the mid19405. According to Thomas B. Hess, "he started to write fiction, influenced by Joyce's Ulysses, automatic writing, getting it down as fast as he could."8 At the same time, Newman was creating a series of rapidly executed drawings and watercolors, no doubt influenced by the biomorphic marine imagery and automatist techniques of Surrealism, but equally as Joycean in spirit. The equation between automatism and aquatic imagery, which in Surrealism [is a metaphor for the unconscious mind,] is characteristic of Joyce's thinking as well. Several of the most extended "stream of consciousness" monologues in Ulysses occur in Chapters III and XIII, in settings at the seashore. Chapter III, the "Proteus" episode, in particular, is a model for the merger of vividly fluid marine imagery and free associational thought. At the opening of this chapter we find these lines: Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.9 The sea, which yields from its depths unexpected objects and signs, is easily recognized as analogous to the mind. Joyce was familiar with Freud's theories, incorporated them in his writings, and consequently, his works have encouraged a significant amount of Freudian interpretation.10 In one strikingly visual passage towards the end of Chapter III we read the following description: Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hissing up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds (U, 49:35-37). Not only does this sound like a possible description of a poured painting by Jackson Pollock, but in Joyce's next paragraph we find the source for the title of one of Pollock's breakthrough pictures of 1947, the silver, green-blue, and white Full Fathom Five. Although there is no minimizing the difficulties associated with attaching importance to titles in abstract-expressionist works,

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especially in Pollock's case, Pollock did admire Joyce's writings, and the literary context in which the title of Full Fathom Five is found may have iconographical significance for the painting. Lee Krasner has recalled that Joyce was one of Pollock's favorite authors. 12

His library contained Stephen Hero, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

11

Betty

Parsons, Pollock's [second] dealer, remembered that "he often talked about 13

Joyce." His neighbor in East Hampton, the artist Alfonso Ossorio, observed that Pollock "read Finnegans Wake, and you felt that he was in tune with the idea that one word could mean many things

He loved the Joyce recordings 14

of his collected works, the music of Joyce's voice." Some who knew him, Fritz Bultman and В. Н. Friedman, for example, feel that although Pollock was attracted to Joyce, he probably did not read deeply into the works. More likely, they believe, his occasional perusals of Joyce were greatly supplemented by the recordings and by friends such as Tony Smith, who as early as the '405 was known to quote large chunks of Joyce by heart.

15

The title for Full Fathom Five is located in a passage which speaks of "a loose drift of rubble," quite befitting a painting that has embedded in its surface pebbles, nails, tacks, buttons, keys, coins, matches, and other debris: Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now (U, 50:4-10) The poured paintings of 1947 were given titles after they were completed in picture-naming sessions with Pollock, Lee Krasner, and their neighbors in East Hampton, Ralph Manheim and his wife. It is generally agreed that most of the titles were supplied by Manheim. However, as В. Н. Friedman has pointed out, Pollock had final approval of the titles, and they clearly convey a sense of his artistic ambitions and concerns.

16

[Joyce's description of a

corpse "full fathom five" is based on Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which either Manheim or Pollock probably encountered in the December 1947 issue of The Tiger's Eye, one of the New York avant-garde's "little magazines," but Pollock would have been more responsive to Joyce's prose.] Could Joyce's passages which so aptly describe the color, movement, and "drift of rubble" in Full Fathom Five also provide a clue to its content? Citing Lee Krasner that Pollock once told her, "I choose to veil the imagery," Charles F. Stuckey finds in Pollock's poured paintings "images hidden or 'veiled' from 402

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sight by his webs. . . ,"17 He notes, "The titles Pollock chose for some of his non-representational canvases refer to spooky presences embedded in or hidden behind tangled, nearly impervious barriers. . . ,"18 In the case oí Full Fathom Five Stuckey could not have been more correct, although [he did not acknowledge the source of the title]. It is provocative to consider the possibility that Pollock's title, whether initially his or not, provides evidence of hidden imagery, in this instance represented by a corpse "sunk though he be beneath the watery floor." Alfonso Ossorio has commented on Pollock's interest in Finnegans Wake, and it is with this great book, first published in 1939, that the artist's work is most instructively compared. One Joyce critic, Clive Hart, has called Finnegans Wake "the most outstanding example of what can be done with objet trouvé collage in literature."19 He sees Joyce's method as "strikingly similar" to twentieth-century painting techniques: "Bits and pieces are picked up and incorporated into the texture with little modification, while the precise nature of each individual fragment is not always of great importance."20 Borrowing a term from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Margot Norris describes Joyce's "practice of using bits and pieces of heterogeneous materials without regard to their specific function" as "bricolage."21 The parallel is obvious with Pollock's amalgamation of materials in Full Fathom Five, allowing an assortment of foreign objects to retain their individuality, but a great deal of Pollock's work can be understood in terms of "bricolage." As in the case of Finnegans Wake, which has been described as "essentially visual There never was a book more cluttered with visual symbols,"22 Pollock's pre-1947 paintings are dense with signs and symbols. Both writer and painter create complex worlds that evoke a sense of endless symbolic interplay. Pollock, as Ossorio noted, appreciated Joyce's use of portmanteau words, the conjoining of semantically dissimilar words to suggest multiple and contradictory meanings. These constructions provide a literary analogue to the artist's symbol-making tendencies. Pollock also must have been drawn to Joyce's use of words as material, which gave them an apparent quality of abstraction and autonomy. In a formal sense, a number of pre-1947 paintings, like Joyce's text, read as "parts placed side by side without transition, parts in a variety of rhythms, shapes and tones."23 Pollock's friend, James Brooks, observed that: Joyce had a non-narrative style. What you were reading was right there. You're not waiting for something to come. I hated to leave a paragraph because I didn't need to go anywhere else. But his irreverence, his strange 1980s

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juxtaposition of things and unexpectedness was pretty much what we were after at that time. That was in the air.24 The "substitutionality of parts" and the "variability and uncertainty of structural and thematic elements" are features common to Joyce's book and Pollock's pre-1947 paintings. In both "meanings are dislocated—hidden in unexpected places, multiplied and split, given over to ambiguity, plurality, and uncertainty.. . ,"25 The element of unpredictability created by fluid symbolism and continually shifting relationships in Finnegans Wake and Pollock's earlier paintings is finally heightened and transformed by the artist's adoption of a radical automatist technique in the poured paintings of 1947-1952. Margot Norris sees Finnegans Wake as "a decentered universe" in which "[t]he formal elements of the work... are not anchored to a single point of reference, that is, they do not refer back to a center."26 Simply put, this is what modern painters call allover composition, a concept with which Pollock is inseparably linked. Clement Greenberg, Pollock's critical champion in the '405, noted in a 1948 essay that Joyce provides a literary parallel for "all-over" painting.27 James Brooks observed that in Finnegans Wake, "The plot wasn't the important thing. You are not getting from one place to another. But the whole book was spread out over an enormous expanse."28 It is conceivable that Pollock related this aspect of Joyce to his own work. Aside from any influence Joyce may have had on Pollock, the fundamental similarities between these men had profound significance for twentiethcentury literature and art. For both, the making of art, the process of creation rather than the result, was the meaningful part of the effort. As is frequently said about their respective endeavors, "everything is in a constant state of becoming."29 Most importantly, in exploring the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, they developed new languages which undermined traditional notions of artistic structure.30 Like the letter in Finnegans Wake, the book's principal "expanding symbol [which] quickly comes to stand for the book itself,"31 Pollock's painting is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it only looks like it (FW, 118:28-30). David Smith frequently alluded to Joyce's writing and its relevance to contemporary art, and a number of his comments have been recorded in the literature. In 1965, Robert Motherwell offered this recollection of Smith: 404

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I have known David Smith for twenty years, ever since that afternoon we met by prearrangement (but unknown to each other) during the 19405 In those days I was full of French Symbolist aesthetics, of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and of André Breton, of the possibilities of representing reality indirectly but passionately in one's medium. I can still see David saying, with his characteristic bluntness and inalterable sense of his own identity, "I don't need them. I've read James Joyce!" He was right, all of it is in Ulysses, and I looked at him with a sudden intellectual respect that has not yet diminished as my affection for him has continually grown.32 Smith, who had a dog named Finnegan,33 recommended "the study of Joyce's work, such as Finnegans Wake, wherein the use of words and relationships function much as in the process of the creative artist's mind."34 Stanley Meltzoff reported in a 1946 essay, "One of the sculptor's main influences was the appearance of'Work in Progress' in [the journal] transition"^ He compared Smith's "sculptural use of metamorphising objects" to Joyce's "literary use of the pun," and observed that certain of his works "are as complicated as parts of'Finnegans Wake' and as complete a departure "36 Although a number of Smith's pieces have been compared to Joyce's writing, only The Letter of 1950 can be directly related to the author's work. Referring to this sculpture, Smith told Thomas Hess, "That relates the Little Red Hen that scratched in Joyce . . . the Little Red Hen that scratched the letter up."37 The letter, as previously noted, is the central symbol in Finnegans Wake, "a sprawling and somewhat formless motif-complex which ... recurs in literally hundreds of places in more or less fragmentary form."38 It is evident that Smith strongly identified with the writer and his symbol. He observed, "I'm always scratching up letters and that's one of the nice things about Joyce. There's a part of Joyce in me all my life."39 Rosalind Krauss sees The Letter as an assimilation of Joyce's symbol by reference to Adolph Gottlieb's pictorial structure in the "Pictograph" paintings.40 Be that as it may, I find that the content and structure of The Letter reflect a very direct response to Joyce's text. While there are numerous fragmentary references to the letter throughout Finnegans Wake, it is quoted and described at some length in Chapter V, where a number of descriptions are compellingly visual. Smith's sculpture, which, in Krauss's words, "reads like a set of secret glyphs for which the viewer has no key,"41 not only conveys the inscrutability of Joyce's discussion of the letter, but can be seen as a rather faithful representation of the writer's images: 1980s

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ruled barriers, along which the traced words run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety ... with lines of litters slittering up and loads of latters slettering down (FW, 114:7-9,17-18) Or again, in Joyce's description of the letter previously quoted in connection with Pollock—"a miseifectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops"—we find a possible source for Smith's Ys ("whyacinthinous"), Os ("balls and hoops"), and the lines ("bars") that Joyce earlier called "ruled barriers."42 Joyce's letter, comprised of letters, came from litter scratched up by the hen in a dump. Joyce informs us, "if you are abced-minded ... what curios of signs in this 'allaphbed'" (FW, 18:17-18), and he asks, "will this kiribis pouch filled with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the pouch . . . ?" (FW, 66: 25-26). Smith, who could not have failed to see the dump, or "allaphbed," as a symbol of the unconscious mind, said, "I don't differentiate between writing and drawing, not since I read that part of Joyce."43 However, The Letter, and rj h's and 24 Greek Y's of the same year, can quite literally be seen to have come from an "allaphbed" since the steel letters that Smith used were part of an assortment of junk metal he bought from a hardware dealer.44 Like Joyce and Pollock, Smith was one of the great "bricoleurs" of the century, making "bricolage" out of a personalized, fragmented symbolism and bits and scraps of material. Joyce the "bricoleur" is displayed in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. His earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although containing some elements of the later works, propounds an aesthetic antithetical to the concept of bricolage. In Chapter V, Stephen Dedalus advocates what "amounts to a theory of impersonality and autonomy . . . a theory of art for art's sake . . . [a] static contemplative art."45 Joyce had an audience for these ideas also. In a 1953 article Thomas Hess noted that "[Ad] Reinhardt enjoys the phrasing of Joyce—young Stephen's trinity of wholeness, radiance and harmony. . . ,"46 On another occasion, Hess observed that many of Reinhardt's illustrated art satires were strongly influenced by Joyce's later writings.47 An obvious example is found in the title of one of the better-known art jokes, "A Portend of the Artist as a Yhung Mándala," where the author's early title is conjoined with the punning word play oí Finnegans Wake. It is worthy of note that Hess recorded Reinhardt's appreciation of Stephen Dedalus' aesthetics at the time the artist's work was evolving from relational compositions emphasizing shape, value, and color contrasts to the monochromatic pictures that culminated in the "Black Paintings." I do not mean to infer a crucial connection between 406

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Joyce and Reinhardt, only that this aspect of the writer's work may have had some influence on Reinhardt's thinking, or at the least reinforced it. In a discussion with a friend, young Stephen translates Aquinas' "Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, daritas" as "Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance" (AP, 248:18-21), and then explains his theory of art at length: ... [T]he esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas (AP, 249:5-10). ... [I]mmediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing[,] you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia (AP, 249:16-21). The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure (AP, 250:12-17). The process of perception that Joyce has Stephen describe matches the experience of many viewers of Reinhardt's "Black Paintings." The writer who has best described the gradual recognition of structure in Reinhardt's later works is Lucy Lippard. She has written: On entering a room with one or more black paintings, one has a first impression of only the most general nature. One sees a black square hanging on the wall After a period of looking at the dull glow, one begins to perceive the non-blackness ... the extremely muted colors begin to emerge, and with them, but lagging a little, comes the trisection [of the surface].48 Lippard has given us, without making the association, an excellent description of Stephen's integritas and consonantia. But what of claritas, radiance? Once again, Lippard writes: Reinhardt's development from around 1949 to 1960 traces the process of draining color from light, so that in the last works, light practically replaced color.... Black, white and gray are called achromatic colors though black is caused by a complete absorption of color. A high degree of light absorbance is not the same as total absence of light. The light has been taken in rather than rejected, the opaque surfaces have paradoxically become transparent containers of light.49 1980s

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Sidney Tillim observed the same phenomenon, stating that "[djarkness in Reinhardt's painting is a form of light, not illumination of chiaroscuro but an aspect of form—what might be called total light."50 Reinhardt intentionally created this effect, thinning his paint and superimposing layer upon layer of color to get "not colored light" as Reinhardt wrote to Sam Hunter, "but color that gives offlight."51 Not only do Reinhardt's "Black Paintings" provide a visual demonstration of Stephen Dedalus' wholeness, harmony and radiance, but Joyce and Reinhardt agree on the subject of the artist's presence in a work of art. Joyce has Stephen say, "The personality of the artist... finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself... remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence" (AP, 252:15-23). Reinhardt's opinion of artists expressing themselves is well known, but on one occasion he said simply, "The less an artist obtrudes himself in his painting, the purer and clearer his aims."52 Tony Smith was perhaps the biggest fan of Joyce's writings. Although he came into prominence as a sculptor in the 19605, he was a friend and colleague in the '405 of Newman, Rothko, Pollock, and other artists of the first generation New York School. Irish, with a Jesuit education, and an artist, Tony Smith strongly identified with Joyce.53 He was always ready to quote Joyce, and frequently related his work to the writer's. He once cited A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as one source of his interest in mazes.54 Although Stephen's family name is similar to that of Daedalus, the mythological mazemaker, Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake would seem to offer more obvious examples of labyrinthian structures. At one point Smith speculated on inflatable sculpture which he related to Surrealism, topology, and to the writings of Joyce.55 He was interested in all of Joyce's major works, and seems to have assimilated them in his sculpture. In some instances, Smith's work provides a three-dimensional exposition of Stephen's ideas. A piece such as Amaryllis of 1965, for example, initially appears to consist of simple forms quickly grasped. However, it can not be understood from a single vantage point. Made of two truncated prisms, the sculpture's appearance and impact change with each viewpoint. Smith, with a down-to-earth illustration, succinctly paraphrases Stephen's discussion of wholeness, harmony, and radiance: I'm interested in the inscrutability and the mysteriousness of the thing. Something obvious on the face of i t . . . is of no further interest. A Bennington earthenware jar, for instance, has subtlety of color, largeness of form, a general sug408

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gestion of substance.... It continues to nourish us time and time again. We can't see it in a second, we continue to read it.56 Smith's Wandering Rocks (1967) derives its name from the "phantom" chapter heading of Chapter X in Ulysses. Any serious reader of Joyce, of which Smith was one, knows that he assigned to each episode of his novel a heading based on a Homeric reference, and these titles are employed in discussions of Ulysses in the Joyce literature. Since there are no wandering rocks in Homer's Odyssey y except by allusion, the title of Smith's sculpture is undoubtedly Joycean, as is the spirit of the work. In Chapter X, an assortment of Dubliners, named and described, come into contact, pass each other, and continue their perambulations around the city. They are, as William York Tindall says, "connected with others, but arbitrarily and by temporal coincidence alone." He observes that "human elements, like parts of fractured atoms, collide, part, go separate ways Related by time and place, they lack vital relationship."57 So it is with Smith's sculpture. Each of the five pieces is different and individually named (Smohawk, Crocus, Slide, Shaft, and Dud), yet as six-sided prisms they share a familial relationship. Viewed from numerous vantage points, with the possibility, encouraged by the sculptor, of each installation being different, Smith's sculpture communicates those elements of unpredictability, simultaneity, connectedness and disconnectedness that Joyce examined in "The Wandering Rocks" episode. The title of Smith's Gracehoper (1962-72) is an explicit reference to Joyce's fable of the "Ondt and Gracehoper" in Chapter XIII ofFinnegans Wake. According to Joyce: The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity, (he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him), or if not, he was always making ungraceful overtures He would of curse melissciously, by his fore feelhers, flexors, contractors, depressors, and extensors, lamely.... (FW, 414:22-24,29-31)-58 Smith's looming, lumbering sculpture is aptly named after Joyce's Gracehoper. The question is, did he have the creature in mind when he was making the piece, or for that matter, was he consciously thinking of the chapter in Ulysses when he was working on Wandering Rocks? In Smith's case, a man whose thinking was pervaded by Joyce, who committed extensive portions of Joyce to memory, and who frequently related his work to Joyce's writing, it is almost a chicken-or-egg question. It is safe to say that his sculpture reflects a significant involvement with Joyce's images and ideas. 1980s

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Tony Smith frequently put sculpture together like Joyce wrote prose. For instance, Willy (1962) is made up of parts from several sculptures, and P.N. (1969) is a piece of a model from another work enlarged and turned upside down.59 This way of working is not uncommon in twentieth-century art, but with Smith the comparison to Joyce seems inescapable. He is related to the other "bricoleurs" of his generation, who, to one degree or another, absorbed and reconstituted Joyce's methods in the creation of expressive visual objects. A number of artists undoubtedly identified with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Echoes of Stephen Dedalus can be discerned in the pronouncements of members of the first generation New York School. MotherwelPs statement in the '505 that the aim of Abstract Expressionism "was to forge a whole new language of painting,"60 as Phil Patton has noted, is reminiscent of Stephen's desire to forge "the uncreated conscience of my race." Stephen's view of the artist as "a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life" (AP, 260:1-3), finds a counterpart in MotherwelPs claim that "abstract art is a form of mysticism . . . one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union."61 The polemic nature of Ad Reinhardt's various writings has more than a little suggestion of Stephen's confident aesthetic discourse. As Nathan Halper, a Joyce scholar and one-time art dealer, sees it, Joyce, because of the life he led and the radical explorations he made, became "a sort of patron saint" of avant-garde artists in the '405 and '505.62 Certainly, for these painters and sculptors Joyce stood as a convincing example, a symbol, in fact, of the modern artist, his work and vision.

Notes

An abbreviated version of this essay similarly titled was presented as a paper in the Second Annual Symposium on Contemporary Art, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York City, April 30,1982. Revised 2004. i. Joyce's name has been invoked every so often in discussions of Abstract Expressionism, but usually as simple comparison, not in terms of concrete relationships. Thomas B. Hess spoke of "the Joycean addition of ambiguity employed by De Kooning," "Is Abstraction Un-American?," Art News, vol. XLIX, no. 10, February, 1951, p. 41; Ethel K. Schwabacher saw Gorky's "composite structures" developing "in the direction of James Joyce's elaborate analogies," Arshile Gorky, New York, 1957, p. 126; and Karen Wilken, "Adolph Gottlieb: The Pictographs," Art International, vol. XXI/6, December, 1977, p. 28, observed that the literary equivalent of Gottlieb's pictographic images "would be the portmanteau word 410

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coinages of James Joyce, with their superimposed layers of meaning. . .," but in the cases of all three there is little evidence of a special interest in Joyce. 2. Christopher B. Crosman and Nancy E. Miller, "Speaking of Tomlin" Art Journal, Winter 1979/80, vol. XXXIX/2, p. 114; from an interview with Brooks and Ibram Lassaw, East Hampton, New York, September 5,1975. 3. H. H. Arnason, "On Robert Motherwell and His Early Work," Art International, vol. X/i, January 20,1966, p. 19. 4. H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1977, p. 103. 5. My page and line references are to The Viking Press editions oïFinnegans Wake, first published in New York in 1939, which henceforth, as a citation in the text, will be referred to as FW. 6. Phil Patton, "Robert Motherwell: The Mellowing of an Angry Young Man,'Mr¿ News, vol. 81, no. 3, March, 1982, p. 76. 7. This perception is demonstrated by the invitation to Nathan Halper, author of several articles on Joyce in the late ¿(.os and early '505, and later an art dealer, to speak about Joyce at The Club, the artists' club that was first established in 1949 at 39 East 8th Street, and which then moved to various addresses in the '50s. In a March 10,1982 letter to the author, Halper recalled: "Early in the '505,1 was not as yet involved in the art world; but living in the Village, I would meet some of the painters. When they found that I had published a few articles on Joyce, I was asked to give a talk about him to The Club. Not about Joyce and painting or sculpture—but Joyce in general. It was felt that he was relevant." Joyce was also the subject of a seminar held during "Forum '49?" an exhibition in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1949 that included the work of Pollock, Baziotes, Rothko, Tomlin and Pousette-Dart, among others. 8. Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971, p. 43. The artist's Ulysses, 1952, according to Hess (p. 82), "probably is Newman tipping his hat to James Joyce, one of his first heroes." 9. I am using the Random House, 1961 edition of Ulysses, p. 37, lines 2-4. Henceforth, as a citation in the text, this work will be referred to as U. 10. Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, New York, 1972, p. 37, states: "Literary enthusiasts were actively linking their favorite writers with Freudian theories. James Joyce, for instance, was immediately perceived to be a stream-of-consciousness exemplar of Freud's speculations. . . . Already in the bohemian circles of the immediate postwar period Freud was as potent a subject as cubism, Ezra Pound, and Joyce's Ulysses (then being published in installments in The Little Review)." 11. Francis Valentine O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Work, New Haven and London, p. 193: IV. 12. Ibid. 13. Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who Was Jackson Pollock?? Art in America, vol. 55, no. 3, May-June, 1967, p. 55. Betty Parsons' interview was reprinted in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, New York, 1972, pp. 181-182. 1980s

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14. Du Plessix and Gray, p. 58. 15. Conversation with Fritz Bultman and B. H. Friedman, February 27,1982 in New York City. Bultman and Friedman also mentioned Weldon Kees, the poetpainter, one of the "Irascible Eighteen," as a great transmitter and enthusiast of Joyce in the '408 and early '508. 16. Friedman, Jackson Pollock . . . , p. 120. Lee Krasner has stated that some of the titles were Pollock's, although she can not recall which ones. See Judith Wolfe, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery," Artforum, vol. XI, no. 3, November, 1972, pp. 72,73, note 41. 17. Charles F. Stuckey, "Another Side of Jackson Pollock," Art in America, vol. 65, no. 6, November-December, 1977, pp. 84,86. 18. Ibid., p. 88. 19. Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Evanston, Illinois, 1962, P-3420. Ibid., pp. 34-35. Critics of Joyce on a number of occasions have compared his writing to the visual arts. Frank Budgen, a painter, friend of Joyce's, and one of his early critics, in James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Bloomington, Indiana, 1960 (reprint of 1934 edition), pp. 91-92, writes that Joyce's method of internal monologue "is more like impressionist painting. The shadows are full of colour; the whole is built up out of nuances instead of being constructed in broad masses; things are seen as immersed in a luminous fluid; colour supplies the modelling, and the total effect is arrived at through a countless number of small touches. ..." A more recent critic, William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce, New York, 1959, p. 238, says, "To proceed from Ulysses to Finnegans Wake is like proceeding from a picture by Cezanne to a recent abstraction. In the absence of identifiable surface, we must make what we can of blots, blurs, and scratches, patiently awaiting the emergence of an order which, though there maybe, is not immediately visible." 21. Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake, Baltimore and London, 1974, p. 130. 22. Hart, p. 37. 23. Tindall, p. 37. Norris, p. 131, associates the habit of mind that produces "bricolage" with the compiling of voluminous notebooks. She reports that Joyce's notebooks were "crammed with list upon list of apparently unrelated words, phrases, snatches of thought, and bits of data." Pollock, too, filled numerous notebooks, particularly in the '305, and made countless sketches. 24. Crosman and Miller, p. 114. Many of the syllable combinations that Brooks puts together to create titles for his paintings have a Joycean flavor. 25. Norris, p. 7. 26. Ibid.,p. 120. 27. Clement Greenberg, "The Crisis of the Easel Painting," Art and Culture, Boston, 1961, p. 157. Reprinted from an essay in Partisan Review, April, 1948. Greenberg also mentions Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas as other parallels in literature. 412

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28. Crosman and Miller, p. 114. 29. See Hart, pp. 50-51, for a discussion of process in Joyce. 30. Joyce's and Pollock's works constitute an attack on the traditional concept of structure. Norris, p. 121, discussing Joyce, notes that "[t]his attack was not isolated, but belonged to an 'event' or 'rupture' in the history of the concept of structure, which, according to philosopher Jacques Derrida, took place in the history of thought sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.... The 'rupture'... results in the idea of a structure in which presence is not so much absent as unlocatable." 31. Hart, p. 200. 32. Frank O'Hara, Robert Motherwell, Museum of Modern Art, 1965, p. 56; excerpt from Robert Motherwell, "A Major American Sculptor: David Smith," Vogue, February i, 1965. 33. Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971, p. 139, note 16. Jackson Pollock had a dog named Ahab in appreciation of Herman Melville. The bestowal on these canines of names derived from literary sources suggests the amusing possibility of a study of pet names among artists as an index of their cultural interests. 34. Garnett McCoy (éd.), David Smith, New York, Washington, 1973, p. 64. From a talk titled "What I Believe About the Teaching of Sculpture," Midwestern University Art Conference, Louisville, Kentucky, October 27,1950. 35. Stanley Meltzoff, "David Smith and Social Surrealism," Magazine of Art, vol. 39, no. 3, March, 1946, p. 100. Portions of Work in Progress, the working drafts for Finnegans Wake, appeared in seventeen issues of the journal transition between 1927 and 1938. 36. Ibid.,p.ioi. 37. McCoy, p. 180. Reprinted from Thomas B. Hess, "The Secret Letter," David Smith, exhibition catalogue, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1964. 38. Hart, p. 182. 39. McCoy, p. 180. 40. Krauss, p. 136, note 16. 41. Ibid., p. 84. 42. Edward Fry, David Smith, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1969, p. 62, offers the following interpretation of The Letter: "The imagery in the words of his sculptural letter includes the schematic interior of a house, a running man, and a hermit crab; and Smith's reply, couched in Joycean verbal-visual puns, was thus the question of why о why did he ever leave Ohio." 43. McCoy, from Hess, "The Secret Letter," p. 185. 44. Krauss, pp. 136,139. 45. Tindall, pp. 95-96.1 will be quoting The Modern Library, Random House, 1928 edition OÍA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; henceforth, as a citation in the text, it will be referred to as AP. 46. Thomas B. Hess, "Reinhardt: The Position and Perils of Purity," Art News, vol. 52, no. 8, December, 1953, p. 59. Hess adds that for Reinhardt, "even this verges 1980s

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toward the soul and essences of Celtic hokum." In a telephone conversation of March 27, 1982, Rita Reinhardt confirmed that her husband had read and enjoyed Joyce, and she vaguely recalled discussions about Joyce, who, she noted, was the subject of conversations among many artists and intellectuals in the '403 and '505. She also said that had Hess been inaccurate in his writing, Reinhardt would have corrected any misrepresentations in print. 47. Thomas B. Hess, "The Art Comics of Ad Reinhardt," Artforum, vol. XII, no. 8, April, 1974, p. 47. Hess wrote, "The twin heroes of this effort [the art satires] ... were Joyce and Beckett. The spirit of the former presides over Reinhardt's lust for cataloguing and naming everything in the world. . . . You hear Joyce in the tropes, oxymorons, onomatopoeia and alliterations, in the lilt of the language, in the dirty jokes, plays on names, scholarly, almost pedantic references." 48. Lucy R. Lippard, "Ad Reinhardt: One Work," Art in America, vol. 62, no. 6, November-December, 1974, pp. 96-97. 49. Ibid., pp. 97-98. 50. Sidney Tillim, "Ad Reinhardt," Arts Magazine, vol. 33, no. 5, February, 1959, P. 5451. Letter to Sam Hunter, Summer, 1966, cited in Margit Rowell, Ad Reinhardt and Color, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1980, p. 21. 52. Ad Reinhardt, "Twelve Rules for a New Academy," Art News, vol. 56, no. 3, May, 1957, F-38. 53. Smith's special attraction to Joyce was described to me by Fritz Bultman in a conversation on July 16,1981 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, of course, is largely involved with the Jesuit education of an aspiring artist. 54. A letter from Tony Smith, October, 1975, in "Janet Kardon Interviews Some Modern Maze-Makers," Art International, vol. XX/4~5, April-May, 1976, p. 65. 55. Lucy R. Lippard, "Diversity in Unity: Recent Geometricizing Styles," Art Since Mid-Century: The New Internationalism, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 247. 56. Samuel Wagstaff,Jr., "Talking with Tony Smith," Artforum, vol. 5, no. 4, December, 1966, p. 18. 57. Tindall,p.i8o. 58. Eleanor Green, "The Morphology of Tony Smith's Work," Artforum, vol. XII, no. 8, April, 1974, pp. 55-56, quotes a section of this passage and parts of others (416:8-13,26-30) in relation to Gracehoper and briefly discusses the connection between Joyce and Smith. 59. Lucy R. Lippard, "Interview with Tony Smith," Tony Smith: Recent Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, M. Knoedler Be Co., New York, 1971, pp. 9,19. 60. Patton,p. 75. 61. Robert Motherwell, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 3, Spring, 1951, pp. 12-13. 62. Letter to the author, March 10,1982. Halper feels that perhaps "Motherwell and Tony Smith were the only ones to do more than make an obligatory dip into the waters" of Joyce, but his perspective is that of a Joyce scholar. 414

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A.DIERDREROBSON

The Market for Abstract Expressionism: The Time Lag Between Critical and Commercial Acceptance

The immediate post-World War II years are taken to be those that mark the emergence not only of the United States as a major world power but also of new American artistic avant-garde, aggressively different in style and aesthetic from previous European modernism. Recently some attention has focused on how Abstract Expressionism came to critical prominence and on the political and cultural implications of this new avant-garde, due to the apparent congruence between an aesthetic that stressed individuality and vigour and the Cold War liberal ideology of the postwar Truman era, which equated these two characteristics with Western (American) democracy. However, within the context of this reappraisal of Abstract Expressionism and its increasing prominence, little attention has been focused upon this group's performance within the marketplace. Where this subject has been broached, there has been a tendency to equate critical and commercial acceptance. If this equation were true, then it would suggest that Abstract Expressionism achieved commercial success in the late 19405. My contention is that this reading of the situation creates a distortion, predating such success by a number of years, and that only in the mid-1950s did one see any measurable public willingness to buy the work of Abstract Expressionists. Such a misapprehension could be based upon a misunderstanding or incomplete reading of economic and cultural factors that indicate that Abstract Expressionist artists could achieve market success in the 19405. The early to mid-i94os were years of remarkable war-induced prosperity, with concommitant high levels of liquidity. Between 1942 and 1946, the Gross National Product of the United States rose sixty-six percent, the stock market was newly buoyant with share prices rising by eighty percent, personal income levels doubled for most sections of the population, and despite the introduction of a widely-based income tax system in 1942, levels of disposable income were exceptionally high.1 This liquidity was accompanied, as a result of years of Depression and war-induced shortages, by a public hunger for consumer durables and luxury goods, and in the mid-i94os one sees a dramatic increase

SOURCE: Archives of American Art Journal, no. 3 (1985), 19-23. Reprinted with the permission of A. Dierdre Robson.

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in spending on luxury goods (consumer durables still being unobtainable because of wartime controls on industry). This spending activity was reflected in the art world. In 1943 one auction house, Parke-Bernet, reported a gross for the previous season of $6.15 million—a considerable increase from the $2.5 million spent in 1940—and the total annual value of such sales remained between $6 million and $6.5 million until 1946.2 The year 1943 also saw the start of a reported boom for the commercial galleries on Fifty-Seventh Street with large increases in sales in successive seasons until, in 1946, they were three hundred percent higher than in 1940.3 Also present at the time was a belief, propounded by sections of the media (and more particularly the art press), that there was a new, more widely-based middle-class public for contemporary art. This public was thought to be newly willing to concede respectability to American art and artists, largely as a result of the federal New Deal patronage of the 19305, which had for the first time legitimized the fine arts as a profession in America. It was thought to have been familiarized with modern art by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (in New York) and to have overcome its prejudices against new expressions in art (a conclusion that was deemed to be proved by greatly increased museum attendance—at the Museum of Modern Art attendance rose from two hundred-nine thousand in 1936 to five hundred-eighty-five thousand in 1940).4 This public was also encouraged to see that the purchase of art works was no longer the province solely of the very wealthy, particularly via national events such as the federallysponsored "Art Weeks" of 1940 and 1941 and through the efforts of commercial dealers who encouraged sales of modestly priced work both in their own galleries and in non-conventional venues such as department stores.5 The years 1943 to 1947, during which the future Abstract Expressionist artists (among them Baziotes, Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock, and Rothko) were given their first exposure at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, would seem to be auspicious for them, coinciding as they did with the war-induced boom. Prices fetched by major contemporary artists appeared healthy when one compares them to a national mean income of $2,8oo6—a major Picasso could cost $5,000, School of Paris painters such as Modigliani and Soutine generally fetched $1,000 to $5,000, while an established American such as Kuniyoshi was asking $3,000 for large works in the mid-i940s. Theoretically, there should have been another advantage for the pro toAbstract Expressionists in exhibiting at Art of This Century, shown as they were alongside major names in European modernism in the most discussed gallery in New York, something that should have favorably affected their sales. 416

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Indeed, their prices, ranging on average from $50 to $750, do seem higher than one might expect for new American artists—during the same period, and at the same stage in his career, Jack Levine was asking $100 to $500 at the Downtown Gallery, while in 1944 Stuart Davis could only get an average of $500 to $700 for large works, though his prices doubled in the following two years.7 But a closer examination of sales of proto-Abstract Expressionist work at Art of This Century shows that they were slow and that only rarely did any of these artists get anything close to the maximum asking price for any of their works. Only one painting was sold from Pollock's first exhibition in 1943, She Wolf for $400, and during the time he was under contract to Guggenheim (from 1943 to 1947), Pollock's sales never equalled the value of his stipend. Baziote's sales amounted to nearly $1,430 in the few years after his show in 1944, but only three Rothkos, totalling $265 in value, were sold after his exhibition in 1945. The highest price paid for a Pollock before 1947 was $740 in 1945, while the most paid for a Baziotes was $275 in 1946, for a Motherwell $225 in 1944, and for a Rothko, $120 in 1946.8 In this situation Art of This Century was no different from the market for modern art as a whole, for despite increased museum attendance and the high total figures of art sales annually in the mid-i94os, sales of contemporary art accounted for only fifteen percent of all Fifty-Seventh Street profits.9 In the immediate postwar years, new galleries concerned with avant-garde American art (Betty Parsons, Samuel Kootz, and Charles Egan) opened, and the Abstract Expressionist artists began to receive wider exposure, increased critical coverage, and attention from museums. At the same time, their asking price levels rose gradually. At Samuel Kootz's gallery, from 1946 to 1948 the general price range for work by his Abstract Expressionist gallery artists (Baziotes, Hofmann, and Motherwell) was $100 to $950.10 At Betty Parsons's gallery, Pollock's prices rose to $25O-$3,ooo by 1950, while Rothko's asking prices rose from $75~$4OO in 1947 to $6oo-$3,ooo in 1951.n It is this rise in prices that has led to the suggestion that the Abstract Expressionists were becoming commercially successful in the late 19405, for it has been taken as indicative of an increased demand for their work on the part of collectors. But in arriving at this conclusion, two factors have been overlooked. First, there was a general inflation in art prices in the immediate postwar years. The increase mirrors the state of the general economy, for in the three years after the end of the war and with the deregulation of the wartime economy the cost of living in the United States rose by sixty percent. Among the Americans, Kuniyoshi's 1980s

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sale prices rose to $6,000 for large canvases, and Stuart Davis's to $1,000$4,500 for similar works, while paintings by major School of Paris painters could fetch up to $15,000. Second, there has been an apparent failure to distinguish between asking price and selling price in noting rising prices for Abstract Expressionist work—and in practice the two can be quite dissimilar, particularly in the case of a new artist. In fact, Pollock rarely got more than $900 for any work he sold in the years he was with the Parsons Gallery (1947 to 1951). Among these were Number 5, 1948, for which he got $1,500, and Number i, 1948, which sold for $2,350.12 The highest price paid for a Rothko in the same period was $1,250, for Number 10,1950 in 1951.13 The importance of inflation as a factor in the rise in asking prices is reinforced by the knowledge that the art market as a whole was depressed during the late 19405, with auction sales dropping below $6 million per annum, though the real fall was far greater because of the high inflation. Several dealers, including Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery and Betty Parsons, complain about how slow business was in these years.14 Other galleries fared no better. For instance, the closure of the Kootz Gallery in 1948 was due to financial difficulties caused by commitments to gallery artists for outweighing the amount made in sales.15 The sluggishness of the art market can be seen as part of the generally uncertain state of the economy (which went into a mild recession in 1948) and widespread lack of confidence about its future. Matters did not markedly improve, either in a general economic sense or within the market for modern art, until after the Korean War (1951-1953), for though this conflict stimulated a boom, anticipation of it also generated the highest-ever single rise in the rate of inflation in late 1950. But the cessation of hostilities and the lifting of economic controls in 1953 was not followed by the inflationary spiral that characterized 1946. Instead, a short boom and recession sequence was followed in the mid-1950s by the first period of economic stability and business confidence, not distorted by war, for several decades. This change in economic climate and, more important, the increase in confidence that it generated eventually had a profound effect on the art market, and particularly for postwar American painting. The first signs of Abstract Expressionist market success came soon after Pollock's death in 1956. Until the mid-1950s the market for modern art continued to be dominated by major European artists and some more established, older American painters. By 1955, a work by a modern "old master" such as Matisse had been known to fetch $75,000, up to $45,000 was being asked for major examples by School of Paris painters, while artists such as Kandinsky, 418

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Klee, and Léger fetched $8,000 to $10,000. In the same year, Stuart Davis was asking $7,500 for large paintings, Ben Shahn had a waiting list on works at $3,500, while more established names such as Kuniyoshi and Hopper had active markets in the $4,500 to $7,500 price range. By 1955, only Pollock among the Abstract Expressionists had gotten more than $5,000 for any work: $6,000 in 1954 for One (Number 31, 1950) and $8,000 in 1955 for Blue Poles (Number n, 1952).16 Generally, until this date, top prices for any Abstract Expressionist work seem to have been no more than $2,000 to $3,000. In 1957, however, Pollock's Autumn Rhythm was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $30,000—a painting that the Museum of Modern Art had been reluctant to buy for $8,000 before the artist's death.17 This sale served as an important validation of Abstract Expressionism, for it was the first time that a major museum had bought a painting in this style for a price commensurate with what it might pay for a work by a major European artist. Although the sum paid was influenced by Pollock's death and thus was not directly applicable to the other artists working within this style, this sale set the ceiling price for Abstract Expressionist work for some years and helped to boost prices for the other artists. Where in 1953 $2,000 to $2,500 was being asked for a large de Kooning, in 1956 a similar work cost $7,500 to $8,500 and had nearly doubled again in price by 1959.18 Between 1956 and 1958, Rothko's top prices rose to the region of $5,000, Hofmann's to $7,500, and those of Baziotes to $3,500. This rise in prices was accompanied by a sharp increase in the volume of sales, with a number of Abstract Expressionist artists managing to sell out their exhibitions from 1956 onward, something that none had managed before this date. In addition to the general economic circumstances already discussed that had some bearing on the market for modern art as a whole and for Abstract Expressionism in particular in the immediate postwar period, there are still other considerations that provide some clue as to why commercial success came to these artists in the mid-1950s and no sooner. On a financial level, where in the early to mid-19408 hopes were pinned on a newly-prosperous middle class as a prospective market for modern, and in particular American, art, those concerned overlooked the fact that in reality less than one percent of the population had sufficiently high incomes (at least $10,000 per annum in the latter half of the 1940s)19 to enable them to buy more than the occasional minor work of art. Thus, such purchases remained the province of if not solely the very wealthy then at least the most prosperous. This situation was exacerbated by the postwar economic uncertainties. It was not until 1956 1980s

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that the purchasing power of income recovered to 1944 levels with the help of cuts in personal taxation in 1954. But of more significance were the attitudes of the newly prosperous toward the purchase of art. It remained a low priority and was, as a rule, bought only to satisfy purely decorative needs. There was a general reluctance to view such spending as an investment. In this the monied of the United States displayed a marked dissimilarity to their European counterparts, who, over many years of economic uncertainties, had come to regard art as an investment. For many years in the United States, only a few very wealthy collectors, concerned primarily with the established names of European modernism, were willing to spend large sums of money on art. Also of importance was the generation factor: collectors tend to be much of an age with the artists they collect. Few older collectors, including those known for their support of the more radical European modernism in the 19305 and early 19405, were able to make the transition to the new American art. Only in the mid-1950s does one see a younger generation of collectors, seemingly better able to empathize with Abstract Expressionism, reach economic maturity. It is these attitudes that have been overlooked when the ideological and nationalistic links between a new generation of entrepreneurs and Abstract Expressionism have been stressed, creating the mistaken presumption of the former's early appreciation of the latter. Instead, those entrepreneurs most interested in collecting American art per se, at least until the early to mid-1950s, appear to have been more concerned with earlier or more conservative work. A shift in attitudes on the part both of those already collecting and those with the money to do so had to be accomplished before Abstract Expressionism could become commercially successful. On one hand, collectors had to be reassured about the status of this new art by its linkage to European modernism —first by museum exhibitions and purchases that served to validate the new style; second by the juxtaposition of European and American Abstract Expressionist work in the same galleries (in this process Sidney Janis and Samuel Kootz were particularly important). On the other hand, to appeal to a new generation the style had to be strongly identified with the future and with American aspirations. The first process inevitably took some years to accomplish; the requisite shifts in prosperity and confidence that gave a stimulus to the second only occurred in the years immediately after the Korean War. Then, and only then, was Abstract Expressionism in a position to achieve commercial success.

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Notes

This article is based on a paper delivered at the "New Myths for Old: Redefining Abstract Expressionism" seminar, College Art Association Conference, New York, N.Y., February 1986. 1. For information about the postwar economy, see: Lester Chandler, Inflation in the United States 1940-1948 (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1976); Joseph P. Crockett, The Federal Tax System in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1955); Herman P. Miller, Income of the American People (New York: Wiley, 1955); Harold G. Vattner, The United States Economy in the 19505 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 2. "Report on Auction Season," Art News XLIII, 10: 21; "Fifty-Seventh Street—a tight bottleneck for art...," Fortune (September 1946): 145. 3. A. B. Louchheim, "Who Buys What in the Picture Boom," Art News XLIII, 9: 12-14, 23, 24; Louchheim, "Second Season of the Picture Boom," Art New s XLIV,io:9-n,26. 4. D. MacDonald, "Profiles—Action on West Fifty-Third Street—II," The New Yorker (12/19/53): 39,425. "Week of Weeks," Time (9/12/40): 59; "Art Week Commentary," Magazine of Art 34, i: 42, 50-56; "Art Week II," Magazine of Art 34,10: 534-535; American Art Annual XXXV (1938-1941): 17-18; Eugenia L. Whitridge, "Trends in the Selling of Art," College Art Journal III, 2: 58-64. 6. Miller, p. 111. 7. Prices quoted in this article for European painters are from a variety of sources, including contemporary art periodicals, published auction prices, and various gallery and collectors' papers held by the Archives of American Art. Prices quoted for artists belonging to the Downtown Gallery were obtained from the Downtown Gallery Papers, microfilm rolls NDi-ND7i, and unfilmed correspondence, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 8. These figures are taken from the annual balance sheets of Art of This Century, 1942-1946. Photocopies of these are in the Bernard J. Reis Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 9. Fortune, p. 148. 10. Samuel Kootz Gallery Papers, microfilm rolls 1318-1321, Archives of American Art; Kootz to Alfred H. Barr, January 17,1949, Alfred H. Barr Papers, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 11. For Pollock records, see Betty Parsons Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; for Rothko, Betty Parsons Gallery Papers, microfilm rolls N68-62 to N68-74. 12. Barbara Harper Friedman in Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972) claims that Lavender Mist (Number i, 1950) was sold for $1,500 on its exhibition in 1950, but no record of this sale appears in the Parsons Gallery Papers. 13. Betty Parsons Gallery Papers. 1980s

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14. Edith Halpert in speeches given at Chicago (11/9/48) and Boston (n.d.), Edith Gregor Halpert Papers, microfilm roll 1883, Archives of American Art; Betty Parsons to F. C. Bartlett, October 10,1947, and in typescript, November 30,1965, both Betty Parsons Gallery Papers. 15. L. Levine, "The Spring of '55," Arts Magazine (April 1947): 34; Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne, tape-recorded monologue on the relationship between Byron Browne and dealer Samuel Kootz, n.d., Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. 16. Sidney Janis interviewed by Paul Cummings, March 21-September 9, 1972, Archives of American Art; Friedman, pp. 198-199. 17. Janis, ibid.

18. Ibid. 19. Miller, pp. 16-26; Edith Gregor Halpert, "Function of a Dealer," College Art Journal (Fall 1949): 56.

W. JACKSON RUSHING

The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea of Redemption in the Abstract Sublime

In the late 19305 and early 19405 the "myth-makers" of the New York avantgarde, including Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Mark Rothko, made paintings that referred to atavistic myth, primordial origins, and primitive rituals and symbols, especially those of Native American cultures.1 Barnett Newman began to work in a similar fashion about 1944 and was influential as a theorist and indefatigable promoter of this new art. The "myth-makers" shared a tendency to depict ritual violence or inherently violent myths as well as an archaism exemplified by biomorphic forms and, often, coarse surfaces. This self-conscious primitivism of early Abstract Expressionism, which included totemic imagery and pictographic writing derived from Native American art, differed in essence from the primitivism of the earlier European avant-garde in that it was "an intellectualized primitivism."2 Indeed, if the primitivism of Picasso and Matisse, for example, was the decontextualization of the plastic form of African sculpture, then that of the New Yorkers I am considering here was the willful recontextualization of both primitive form and primitive myth. SOURCE: Art Journal (Fall 1988), 187-95. Reprinted with the permission of W.Jackson Rushing III. 422

Newman focused intently on Northwest Coast Indian ritual art because he perceived it as a parallel to his own art and to that of his contemporaries. In fact, the exhibition Northwest Coast Indian Painting, which he organized for the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946, may be thought of as a prolegomenon to The Ideographic Picture, another exhibition he organized for Parsons. Fewer than ninety days separated the two shows, which suggests that the premise of The Ideographic Picture (paintings about ideas) was probably already established in Newman's mind when he asked, concerning the Indian art, "Does not this work rather illuminate the work of those of our modern American abstract artists who, working with pure plastic language we call abstract,... are creating a living myth for us in our own time?"3 Newman's essay for The Ideographic Picture begins with the image of "the Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide," an aesthetic act that represents "the pure idea."4 By calling up such an image Newman hoped to "make clear the community of intention"5 that motivated the ideographic painters, who included himself, Mark Rothko, and others. The "myth-making" of this community often consisted in taking old myths—notably Greek and Northwest Coast Indian—and recasting them according to the function of myth as defined by aspects of the early philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the psychological theories of C. G.Jung.6 Admittedly, the influence of both Nietzsche and Jung on the New York avant-garde in the 19405 has been treated elsewhere.7 Yet the interrelatedness of their ideas, and their connections to those of Wilhelm Worringer (whose Abstraction and Empathy was, as I hope to show, an important text for Newman), as well as to contemporary anthropological texts, such as Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), has not been thoroughly examined. It is now clear that Newman's awareness of ethnological texts on primitive art and culture, anthropological theory, and various exhibits of Indian art interacted with his understanding of the theories of Nietzsche, Jung, and Worringer about consciousness and the spiritual function of art, myth, and ritual. This essay explores the way in which Newman's knowledge of primitive art and cultures, particularly Native American, coincided with and affirmed those European intellectual theories, resulting in a view of the world as tragic but redeemable through art. And this theme is a central aspect of the pictorial content of Newman's Abstract Expressionist paintings. In the Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1871) Nietzsche stressed the primacy of the Archaic period in his search for the origins of the tragedy as an art form. The essential paradigm through which Nietzsche argued his 1980s

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thesis was the Apollinian/Dionysian duality, which he conceived "as the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness." The Greeks synthesized these opposing creative forces into "the equally Dionysian and Apollinian art-work of Attic tragedy." Nietzsche explained that the Dionysian vision is not only a recognition of the "terrors and horrors of existence," but also a "drunken reality [that] seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness." Dionysian experience is simultaneously an ecstatic union with the "mysterious Primordial Unity," and a cognizance of the world as fundamentally lacking in any objective meaning. Furthermore, he saw Dionysian revelry as a universal and fundamental stage of experience: "From all quarters of the Ancient World—to say nothing of the modern ... we can prove the existence of Dionysian festivals [in which] the very wildest beasts of nature were let loose."8 Nietzsche associated the Apollinian mode with repression of the barbarism and ecstasy of Dionysian vision, with the beautiful illusion of the dream world, and with the search for an absolute truth to mask the constant flux and subjectivity of genuine reality. Instead of the mystic oneness, the Apollinian vision maintains the illusion of the principium individuationis.9 And yet, Nietzsche insists, the Apollinian Greek had to realize that "his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and knowledge, which was again disclosed to him by the Dionysian."10 Moreover, as noted above, Nietzsche perceived the Apollinian as essential to the creation of tragic art. Concerning the origins of the tragic form, Nietzsche had much to say about myth that no doubt rang true to Newman's generation. For example, Nietzsche writes that it is through tragedy—the dialectical synthesis of the Apollinian and Dionysian modes—that "the myth attains its profoundest significance, its most expressive form." Warning of the limitations of science (associated with the order and logic of the Apollinian), Nietzsche states that where reason is insufficient "to make existence appear to be comprehensible," then "myth also must be used." Particularly poignant for Newman and the other "mythmakers" was Nietzsche's insistence that "it is only a horizon encompassed with myths which rounds off to unity a social movement."11 Nietzsche discovered that the more he came to understand the human need to redeem the horror of existence, the more he felt "driven to the metaphysical assumption that the Verily-Existent and Primordial Unity, as the Eternally Suffering and Self-Contradictory, requires the rapturous vision, the joyful appearance for its continuous salvation." One could, however, respond 424

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with affirmation to the existential texture of life, embrace both barbarism and the illusion of beauty, if one simply realized that "only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified" And finally, in the closing pages of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche offered to "lead the sympathizing and attentive friend to an elevated position of lonesome contemplation," where the treacherous path could be traversed if only we "hold fast to our shining guides, the Greeks."12 Jung took Nietzsche's advice to heart: he began his Psychology of the Unconscious (1916) by referring to "the simple greatness of the Oedipus tragedy— that never extinguished light of the Grecian theatre" and by noting that even today "that which affected the Greeks with horror remains true." Like Nietzsche, Jung located his thesis in a paradigm of duality, positing two kinds of thinking, "directed and dream or phantasy thinking," and observed that the latter "sets free subjective wishes." Fantastic thinking, which he associated with the unconscious, is also remarkably Dionysian in nature. For example, Jung wrote that fantastic thinking "corresponds to the thought of the centuries of antiquity and barbarism." And, where Nietzsche stressed the relationship between Dionysian vision and the tragic content of the myth, Jung noted that fantastic thinking, which flowed automatically from an "inner course," constantly rejuvenated myths "in the Grecian sphere of culture."13 Of prime importance to the primitivist art theory of the "myth-makers" were the parallels Jung drew between the myths of antiquity, the primitive mind, dreams, and the thoughts of children.14 He explained that although "the Dionysian mysteries of classical Athens ... have disappeared," in childhood we repeat these archaic tendencies.15 This is an idea widespread in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century natural and social sciences: ontogeny repeats philogeny, or in its development the individual (organism) recapitulates the evolutionary stages of the species.16 Jung summarized it succinctly: "Our minds ... bear the marks of evolution passed through."17 And concerning the dream, Jung quoted Nietzsche: "The dream carries us back into earlier states of human culture, and affords us a means of understanding it better."18 Moreover, artists in search of access to the unconscious would have observed that Jung, by way of Nietzsche, was suggesting that, like dreams, the myths of antiquity and primitive art (as the product of the primitive mind) can transport us back into the primordial stages of consciousness. Many of the ideas found in Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy (1908) resemble those of Nietzsche and Jung mentioned above. Worringer, too, used a post-Hegelian paradigm, insisting on the importance of synthesizing 1980s

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the two elements of a duality; for Worringer, it is the urge to abstraction and the urge to empathy in art that form the "shape of a comprehensive aesthetic system." Again, he noted that the content of modern culture is founded on the classical tradition, and warns that our dependence on Aristotelian concepts blinds us to the "true psychic values ... of all artistic creation." And, most important of all, Worringer recognized that "there is one great ultimate criterion for mankind's relation to the cosmos: its need of redemption."19 Newman, as I shall show below, was fascinated by the Dionysian tendencies Worringer found in the abstract art of primitive peoples. Primitive man, Worringer wrote, "is spiritually helpless ... because he experiences only obscurity and caprice in the... flux of the phenomena of the external world." Worringer explained abstraction as primitive man's response to the transcendental forces of nature. Furthermore, he linked such abstraction to a metaphysics —beyond beauty—that expressed the dialectical struggle "between instinct and understanding." Worringer's theory pits primitive man, with his transcendental experience of nature, tendency to abstraction, and preponderance of instinct, against postclassical man, characterized by his perception of immanence in nature, urge to empathy in art, and emphasis on understanding.20 Because Newman was a theorist and curator as well as a painter, and because he, of all the American avant-garde, demonstrated the most overt interest in Northwest Coast art, it is not surprising that his writings register most fully the impact of the theories of Nietzsche, Jung, and Worringer. The Nietzschean conception of tragedy underlies Newman's essay "The Object and the Image," which appeared in the third issue of Tiger's Eye (March 1948), an avantgarde journal he coedited for a time. For example, Newman wrote, "Greece named both form and content; the ideal form—beauty, the ideal content— tragedy." He also noted that when the "the Greek dream" (Apollonian vision) prevailed in contemporary European art, it was accompanied by a "nostalgia for ancient forms," and "self-pity over the loss of the elegant column and the beautiful profile." Newman decried this refined agonizing over Greek objects: "Everything is so highly civilized." According to Newman, the American artists, who were barbarians without refined sensibilities, now had the opportunity to "be free of the ancient paraphernalia" and to "come closer to the sources of the tragic emotion." Clearly, this was a reference to the new American painting that dealt with the wellspring of tragedy. Concerning the tragic emotion, Newman asked, "Shall we not, as artists, search out the new objects for its image?"21 426

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In that same issue of Tiger's Eye, the avant-garde's interest in Nietzsche's Apollinian-Dionysian paradigm was made manifest. The following passage from The Birth of Tragedy, selected perhaps by Newman,22 was juxtaposed with a drawing by Theodoros Stamos: I shall keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living and conspicuous representatives of two worlds of art differing in their intrinsic essence and in their highest aims. I see Apollo as the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis through which alone the redemption in appearance is truly to be obtained: which by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the mothers of being, to the innermost heart of things.23 Even if it remains unresolved whether Newman himself chose this passage from Nietzsche, it does further confirm, because of his editorial association with Tiger's Eye, his awareness of the central thesis of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. Furthermore, a poetic and existential tone, reminiscent of Nietzsche, is evident in Newman's introduction to The Ideographic Picture, the exhibition he organized for the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947. For example, he explained the "artist's problem" as "the idea complex that makes contact with mystery—of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy."24 And confronting chaos, Newman believed, linked men across the ages: "All artists whether primitive or sophisticated have been involved in the handling of chaos."25 Likewise, his brief essay for The Ideographic Picture, an exhibition of works that he described as "the modern counterpart of the primitive impulse," bears evidence that Newman knew well Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy. For example, he discussed "the Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide," who used abstract shapes that were "directed by a ritualistic will toward a metaphysical understanding." According to Newman, for the Kwakiutl artist, shapes were "a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable."26 The ideas are comparable to Worringer's assertion of a metaphysics higher than that of beauty, which is documented by primitive and archaic art, and to his description of primitive man's spiritual helplessness in the face of the flux of nature.27 A few months earlier, in an essay written for the exhibition of Northwest Coast Indian Painting, Newman wrote what reads as a paraphrase of Worringer. Whereas Worringer had written, "the urge to abstraction stands at the begin1980s

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ning of every art and in the case of certain peoples at a high level of culture remains the dominant tendency,"28 Newman explained of the Kwakiutl, Tlingit, and Haida Indians: "Among a group of several peoples the dominant aesthetic tradition was abstract," and "among these simple peoples, abstract art was the normal, well-understood tradition."29 Furthermore, just as Worringer had asserted that the theory of empathy (with nature) does not explicate "that vast complex of works of art that pass beyond the narrow framework of Graeco-Roman and modern Occidental art,"30 Newman stated: It is becoming more and more apparent that to understand modern art, one must have an appreciation of the primitive arts, for just as modern art stands as an island of revolt in the narrow stream of Western European aesthetics, the many primitive art traditions stand apart as authentic aesthetic accomplishments that flourished without benefit of European history.31 And, recalling both Worringer and Nietzsche, Newman noted that the Northwest Coast Indian painters were not concerned with "decorative devices," but "with the metaphysical pattern of life."32 As for Newman's knowledge of Jungian theory, he stated that he could communicate with Jungians, but that there might be disagreements about terminology.33 And, like his friends Gottlieb and Rothko, Newman also made paintings (after 1944) that made specific reference to antique myths and primitive art, which Jung had explained as relics of primordial consciousness. In addition to Surrealism,34 the automatic-biomorphic qualities of such works as Gea (1944-45) seem to reflect both Jung's notion of a stream of consciousness (fantastic thinking) that takes place when directed thinking ceases and his use of organic growth as a metaphor for the evolution of consciousness. The flowing hand evident in Newman's works on paper from about 1945 is surely the physical counterpart of the random, spontaneous, and poetic looping of the unconscious mind, as well as a reflection of his interest in the natural sciences.35 Finally, concerning Newman and Jungian theory, it is instructive to recall the words of the "missing irascible," the Abstract Expressionist Fritz Bultman: "Jung was available in the air, the absolute texts were not necessary, there was general talk among painters."36 Newman's interest in Native American art may well date from his days in the early 19205 as a student of John Sloan's at the Art Students League. At the time Newman would have met Sloan, the latter, as critic, collector, and curator, was actively promoting both old and new Indian art.37 And, in all likeli428

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hood, Newman would have discussed both Indian art and Jungian theory with Gottlieb, with whom he visited the Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in the late 1930s.38 Newman also knew the paintercritic John D. Graham, whose concern with primitive art and Jung and whose role as catalyst of the avant-garde are well-known.39 Graham's interest in Native American art was focused on the totemic art of the Northwest Coast, and he lent objects from his personal collection to the exhibition of Northwest Coast painting that Newman organized in 1946.40 Sometime in the 19405 Newman collected four museum-quality model totem poles (probably Haida) and a painted shield (probably Chiricahua Apache), which are still part of his estate.41 In addition, that fourteen titles in Newman's library treat North American Indian art and culture is testimony to his devotion to this subject. Of these, five are exclusively or significantly focused on Northwest Coast art and society; three deal with Aztec art; and the rest are general studies of primitive art, culture, and anthropology. Among the fourteen are three books by the Northwest Coast specialist Frank Boas: Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), The Mind of Primitive Man (1943), and Primitive Art (1955); one rather mystical treatment, Indians of the Americas (1947) by the Native Rights advocate and former Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, John Collier; and Volume XXXV (part 2) of The Annual Report of the American Bureau of Ethnology (1921), which consists of a lengthy report on Boas's field work with Kwakiutl Indians. Five of the books were publications of the American Museum of Natural History, an institution whose collections of Northwest Coast art Newman knew intimately. Conspicuous for its absence from Newman's library, as it exists today, is Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), which was a profoundly influential text in avant-garde circles in the late 19305 and 19403.42 Benedict used as the focus of her argument Nietzsche's Dionysian and Apollonian modes of experience. According to Ann Gibson, Patterns of Culture made the DionysianApollonian distinction "part of the standard intellectual apparatus of the period."43 Newman was apparently well aware of this book, which brought Nietzsche's analysis of the opposing elements of Greek tragedy to bear on the Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Coast and the Zuni Indians of the Southwest. As evidence of this awareness, on at least two occasions Newman found it convenient to appropriate its title. In a previously unpublished letter to Harry Shapiro, dated August 1,1944, Newman stated, "There is every reason for art and anthropology to go together for the objects that form the basis for the scientific study of the patterns of culture are the same objects that form 1980s

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the aesthetic study of the soul of man."44 Shapiro was at that time the Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and had assisted Newman in organizing the Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery some months earlier. In this letter, Newman announced his "conviction that the best audience for anthropology, outside of anthropologists themselves, is the art public." As a result of this conviction, he asked, "Why cannot the Museum do the converse of the Pre-Columbian exhibition by putting on exhibits of outstanding examples of modern art?"45 Later, in a passage from his unpublished essay "The New Sense of Fate," Newman alluded to Benedict's book in discussing his preference for primitive, as opposed to Greek, plastic art: All we know concretely of the primitive life are its objects. Its culture patterns are not normally experienced, certainly not easily. Yet these objects excite us and we feel a bond of understanding with the primitive artists' intentions, problems, and sensibility, whereas the Grecian form is so foreign to our present esthetic interests that it virtually has no inspirational use. One might say that it has lost its culture factor.46 Benedict's Patterns of Culture was surely the prototype of that marriage of Nietzschean archaism (violent myth) and Northwest Coast art, myth, and ritual which was a distinct feature of much avant-garde art, literature, and criticism in the forties.47 It no doubt inspired Newman to select from Boas's report on the Kwakiutl Indians a shaman's song, which appeared in a special section devoted to the sea in Tiger's Eye, 2 (December 1947). Not surprisingly, the first part of the song recounts the acquisition of shamanic power by way of a Dionysian experience involving a totemic animal (Killer Whale) and descent into the underworld (the sea): "I was carried under the sea by the supernatural power, the supernatural power."48 Newman would have found in the texts of Benedict, Boas, and others, ethnological confirmation, so to speak, of Nietzsche's thesis. Patterns of Culture, in particular, probably mediated between Nietzsche's interpretation of archaic tragedy and Newman's own study of Northwest Coast art and ritual. The keystone of Kwakiutl spiritual life is the Tsetseka—a round of winter ceremonies that take place from November to March.49 The winter ceremonials are, to use Nietzsche's words, a time of "festivals of world-redemption and days of transfiguration."50 During this period everything in the whole of soci430

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ety is indeed transformed: everyone sheds his or her summer name and takes a Tsetseka name; there are new songs, and new forms of protocol based, not on secular wealth, but on clan-ceremonial rank. Broadly speaking, Tsetseka is a time when the spirits come into the village to initiate the novices into one of the four principal dancing societies. The most important of these is the Hamatsa, whose ceremony is held under the auspices of Bakbakwalanooksiwae, a powerful man-eating spirit who lives in the sky (or at the north end of the woods-world). The Hamatsa initiate fasts in the woods until he goes into an ecstatic trance, during which he meets the Cannibal Spirit, from whom he derives power and whose protege he becomes. Benedict noted, "The experience of meeting the supernatural spirit was closely related to that of the vision."51 She went on to say, The whole Winter Ceremonial, the great Kwakiutl series of religious rites, was given to "tame" the initiate who returned full of the "power that destroys man's reason" and whom it was necessary to bring back to the level of secular existence The initiation of the Cannibal Dancer was peculiarly calculated to express the Dionysian purport of Northwest Coast culture. Among the Kwakiutl the Cannibal Society outranked all others.52 And, in another passage, Benedict stressed the Dionysian aspect of the Kwakiutl ritual enactment of cannibalism: Like most of the American Indians, except those of the Southwest pueblos, the tribes of the Northwest Coast were Dionysian. In their religious ceremonies the final thing they strove for was ecstasy. The chief dancer, at least in the high point of his performances, should lose normal control of himself and be rapt into another state of existence. He should froth at the mouth, tremble violently and abnormally, do deeds which would be terrible in a normal state The very repugnance which the Kwakiutl felt toward the act of eating human flesh made it for them a fitting expression of the Dionysian virtue that lies in the terrible and the forbidden.53 Under the spell of the supernatural, the Hamatsa dancer moves in a frenzy through the winter house crying haap (eat) and occasionally trying to bite the spectators. They, in turn, surreptitiously encourage him by whispering under their breath such words as eat and body, which only intensifies the dancer's madness. And then, like Nietzsche's Dionysian cultist, "in this extremest danger to the will, art approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress."54 That is, the taming of the cannibal dancer is a highly structured ritual performance. 1980s

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The whole ceremony, in fact, is a supreme artifice with a script (oral tradition), prescribed sequence of events (ritual), stage hands (cult members), and stage props. The art objects involved, the likes of which Newman included in the Northwest Coast Painting exhibition, include masks, drums, dance blankets, rattles, and shaman's robes. For the Kwakiutl, the theatrical nature of the ritual does not diminish its transforming power. Again, Nietzsche explained this aspect of art: "In the dithyramb we have before us a community of unconscious actors, who mutually regard themselves as transformed among one another.... This enchantment is the prerequisite of all dramatic art."55 As Benedict explained: Perhaps the most striking Dionysian technique of the Winter Ceremonial is that which finally tames the Cannibal and ushers in his four-month period of tabu. According to ideas that are current in their culture it expresses in the most extreme manner the supernatural power that lies in the horrible and the forbidden.... The final exorcism ... was that which was performed with menstrual blood. Upon the Northwest Coast menstrual blood was polluting to a degree hardly excelled in the world.56 Dealing as it does with starvation, ritual death, and rebirth, Tsetseka is an attempt to make a symbolic spiritual defense against the death of nature during the long darkness of the winter months. Newman would surely have recognized this Dionysian aspect of the Hamatsa dancer. For example, writing in The Golden Bough, James Frazer linked Dionysus to Adonis, Attis, and Osiris as fertility gods who symbolize the death of nature in winter and her rebirth in spring: "Like other gods of vegetation Dionysus was believed to have died a violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his sufferings, death, and resurrection were enacted in his sacred rites."57 Nietzsche also linked the ecstatic behavior of the Dionysian cult to rites of spring: "It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness." And his description of the Dionysian's ecstasy is not unlike the image of the Hamatsa dancer presented by Benedict: "Even as the animals now talk . . . so also something supernatural sounds forth from him: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted and elated even as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams." In his state of bestial desire, the cannibal dancer reenacts the primordial myth-time. Thus, he is 432

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akin to Nietzsche's satyr, who "is the offspring of a longing after the Primitive and the Natural." Concerning the chorus as the origin of the tragedy, Nietzsche observed, "The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives in a religiously acknowledged reality under the sanction of the myth and cult."58 There could be no more precise description of the Hamatsa initiate than this. His selfinduced madness occurs during a clearly defined period of societal transformation; his barbarism is sanctioned by the secret society that sponsors him; and his society as a whole recognizes the validity of the sustaining myth (encounter with the Cannibal Spirit). Indeed, even the spectators in the house are full participants in the ritual performance. With the Nietzschean analysis as model, Benedict and Newman would have perceived the Kwakiutl Hamatsa ceremony as a Northwest Coast tragedy. The savagery of the cannibal dancer, which represents primal experience, or Dionysian content, was redeemed by a total illusion, or Gesamkunstwerk, which is the supreme Apollonian form. It cannot be coincidental that shortly after a time of violence and unprecedented brutality—World War II—Newman chose to exhibit ceremonial painting from the Northwest Coast, which he called "a valid tradition that is one of the richest of human expressions."59 Furthermore, Newman, in discussing this "pure painting," warned against appreciating it only for its Apollonian qualities: "It is our hope that these great works of art, whether on house walls, ceremonial shaman frocks and aprons, or as ceremonial blankets, will be enjoyed for their own sake, but it is not inappropriate to emphasize that it would be a mistake to consider these paintings as mere decorative devices. . . . These paintings are ritualistic."60 Newman was drawn to this art because it, like that of his contemporaries, was an "expression of the mythological beliefs" of artists who "depicted their mythological gods and totemic monsters in abstract symbols, using organic shapes."61 Beyond shaping his art theory and informing his criticism, the idea of tragedy as the artistic redemption of chaos was also given form by Newman in his own paintings. Beginning in 1944, Newman made a series of relatively small, expressionistic works on paper, characterized by biomorphic images that signify both the creative act and the organic evolution of consciousness. One such untitled work from 1944 features at the bottom center-to-left a hybrid "totemic monster" of Northwest Coast derivation. With its canine body, long, pointed snout and exaggerated eye it recalls Kwakiutl wolf masks of the type Newman borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History for 1980s

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his Northwest Coast show at the Parsons Gallery. Its curved horns and coiled tongues, however, are reminiscent also of Sisiutl, a serpent monster that has the power to transform itself into a fish. One of Newman's books, Pliny Goddard's Indians of the Northwest Coast (1934), featured numerous illustrations of composite mythological animals, including a horned water monster.62 In the center of the picture there is another horned or feathered canine, and floating, swimming, and flying around this animal are several birds and insects. The natural freedom of the forms in the biomorphic, totemic world of this untitled work (and the related works of 1944) demonstrates that Newman shared with this Kwakiutl painter a concern "with the nature of organism."63 Moreover, these are pictures of the subconscious mind's fantasy landscapes, created by the hand automatically when, as Jung stated, directed thinking ceases. Newman's choice of fast mediums—chalks, oil crayons, ink, watercolor —reveals his desire to connect his hand directly to the bank of primeval images stored in his unconscious, enabling him to produce images free of rational dictates. He spoke later of the liberation of possibilities inherent in such a mode of drawing: "How it went. . . that's how it was . . . my idea was that with an automatic move, you could create a world."64 The sensuous, hothouse growth and fluid movement of the organic forms in this created world relate to Newman's conception of the freedom common to primitive and modern experience. Betty Parsons, who described Newman as "a great authority on the primitive," recalled that "he gave me the idea that the primitive world was a free world and [that] this world that I was now in was a free world." According to Parsons, it was Newman's "idea that there was a relationship between the primitive world and the present world."65 In two of these primitivistic works, The Song of Orpheus and The Slaying of Osiris (both 1944-45), Newman used organic forms suggestive of the unconscious to pictorialize the tragic content of two ancient myths, both of which share numerous traits with the myth of Dionysus. Orpheus, a Thracian poet of Greek legend, used his divinely inspired music to secure the return of his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld of the dead. But Orpheus ignored the warnings of Hades and just before he set foot on earth, he looked back into the underworld and Eurydice disappeared. The women of Thrace were so angered at Orpheus's prolonged mourning that during one of their Dionysian orgies they tore his body to pieces. Despite Orpheus's power to restore the dead through his music, his story, on account of his fallibility, ends in his tragic dismemberment. Newman's selection of the divine musician as subject matter cannot be coincidental to his concern with tragedy. Tragedy, Nietzsche 434

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argues, is born out of the spirit of music, and "the essence of tragedy . . . can only be explained . . . as the visible symbolisation of music, as the dreamworld of Dionysian ecstasy." Like the Dionysian musician, Orpheus symbolizes "primordial pain" and its "primordial re-echoing." Furthermore, according to Nietzsche, "the pictures of the lyricist [Dionysian musician] . . . are nothing but his very self... the only verily existent and eternal self resting at the basis of things."66 Similarly, and with a tragic elegance, Newman writes, "The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject of painting."67 In the myth and ritual associated with the Egyptian deity Osiris, Newman may have seen parallels to the Hamatsa Cannibal Society. For instance, not only is Osiris a "personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature," but, according to Frazer, he redeemed the Egyptians from the savagery of cannibalism.68 And Osiris, like Dionysus, is associated with the origin of wine, suffers dismemberment, is resurrected, and is celebrated with elaborate ritual. In giving form to this myth, Newman again eschewed a narrative transcription, focusing instead on abstract forms that signify growth. Newman's treatment of these mythic subjects, and others such as Gea and Pagan Void (1946), represents his willingness to confront the Dionysian content of tragic modernity. The deprivations of the Great Depression and the brutality of World War II had demonstrated to Newman and his contemporaries that modern and primitive experience—as Nietzsche, Jung, and Worringer had suggested—were essentially the same. Furthermore, the war, Newman explained, turned the terror of the unknown into the tragedy of the known: We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no longer in the face of a mystery. After all wasn't it an American boy who did it? The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have is a tragic rather than a terror situation. After more than two thousand years we have finally arrived at the tragic position of the Greek and we have achieved this Greek state of tragedy because we have at last ourselves invented a new sense of all-pervading fate.69 Although he continued to reject the ideal form of Greek plastic art because it overemphasized the Apollonian, his titles bear out his belief that "we can accept Greek literature, which by its unequivocal preoccupation with tragedy is still the fountainhead of art."70 But the "tragic perception," according to Nietzsche, "even to be endured, requires art as a safeguard and remedy."71 Thus, Newman's desire to make an art that would heal, transform, and re1980s

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deem modernity underlies his concept of the sublime. Furthermore, this desire for the sublime was the source of the drama, clarity, and even purity that first came into his art with the creation of Onement I (1948) and was fully articulated in Onement II (1948). In these two paintings, the expressive zip, which Newman had already begun to clarify in works such as Moment (1946), becomes an ideograph of Newman's "first man," who experiences, albeit in a tortured way, the primal existent unity. But now, true to the idea of tragedy as an art form, the primordial expression, as given form by the zip, is secured and made to take its place in a logical order—an artifice of Newman's making. Despite the fiery passion of the painterly zip in Onement I, its iconic centrality, balance, and monumental repose speak of exaltation and of the sublime. Less than one year after Newman applied the zip in Onement I— thus beginning a mature articulation of the abstract sublime—his essay "The Sublime Is Now" appeared in Tiger's Eye, 6 (December 15,1948).72 Not only does this essay provide insight into Newman's artistic intentions, but it reveals the link between those intentions and Nietzsche's view of "the sublime as the artistic subjugation of the awful."73 For example, Newman begins by announcing that the legacy of the Greek ideal of beauty (Apollonian form) is the European artist's "moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity."74 In this context, and with the paintings as witness, the desire for sublimity must be read as a desire for a tragic art: subjecting Dionysian content to Apollonian form.75 Even the modernist revolution, Newman explains, represented "the rhetoric of exaltation" and not "the realization of a new experience." The result, according to Newman, was a modern art without a sublime content. He believed, however, that some of the American avant-garde, by refusing to capitulate to "the problem of beauty" at the expense of myth, exaltation, and abstraction, were making sublime art out of their own feelings.76 There is a sense of triumph over resignation in Newman's pronouncement that the sublime is now. Indeed, Newman was confident enough in 1949 to title a painting Dionysus. In keeping with his solution to the question of how to make sublime art, Dionysus is painting as an expansive theater of emotion, embodied in color and space. And yet, Newman's artistic will imposes the beauty of order on the orgy of emotion associated with Dionysus. From Dionysus issues that metaphysical comfort which Nietzsche assigns all tragic art: "In spite of the perpetual change of phenomena, life at bottom is indestructibly powerful and pleasurable."77 In the heroic Dionysus Newman locates the idea of redemption in the abstract sublime. 436

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Notes

1. The term "myth-makers" originated with Mark Rothko. See: Mark Rothko, introduction to Glyfford Still, exh. cat. New York, Art of This Century Gallery, 1946, n.p. The present essay extends my earlier study, W.Jackson Rushing, "Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986, pp. 273-95. A further discussion of the issues presented here (particularly as they relate to Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko) occurs in W. Jackson Rushing, "Native American Art and Culture and the New York Avant-Garde, 1915-1950" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1989). 2. William Rubin used the term "intellectualized primitivism" to explain aspects of modern primitivism since World War II. And although I agree in the main with his assertion that the "object-to-object relationship" between modernist artists and tribal art "has been largely displaced," there are powerful and notable exceptions. See: William Rubin, "Modernist Primitivism," in "Primitivism" in Twentieth-Century Art, exh. cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1985, p. 10. For a discussion of Abstract Expressionist works with an "object-to-object relationship" to Native American art, see: Rushing, 1986 (cited n. i), pp. 277-93. 3. Barnett Newman, Northwest Coast Indian Painting, exh. cat., New York, The Betty Parsons Gallery, 1946, n.p. 4. Barnett Newman, The Ideographic Picture, exh. cat., New York, The Betty Parsons Gallery, 1946, n.p. 5. Ibid. The other artists who exhibited in The Ideographic Picture were Hans Hofmann, Pietro Lazzari, Boris Margo, Ad Reinhardt, Theodoros Stamos, and Clyfford Still. Newman originally intended to include Jackson Pollock and Richard Pousette-Dart, but contractual obligations prevented that (personal communication from Richard and Evelyn Pousette-Dart, Suffer n, New York, September 15,1986). 6. Dore Ashton noted in 1972 that the juxtaposition of Greek and Northwest Coast Indian Culture was commonplace in the 19403 and that "the repeated conjuration of Nietzsche . . . whose dual Apollonian-Dionysian position looked more interesting as the world moved into the nineteen-forties, was a measure of the spiritual restlessness." See: Dore Ashton, The New York School, New York, 1972, pp. 188,124. 7. For a lengthy bibliography on the debate over Jungian influence on Jackson Pollock, see: W.Jackson Rushing, "The Influence of American Indian Art on Jackson Pollock and the Early New York School" (M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1984), p. 102, n. 14. On the painter-critic John Graham as a credible source of Jungian theory for Pousette-Dart, Gottlieb, and Pollock, see: Rushing, 1986 (cited n. i), pp. 274, 277-78, 282-83. On the relevance of Nietzsche for the American "bohemian elite," see: Ashton (cited n. 6), pp. 86, 124,129, 187-88. See also the comments on Jung and the well-reasoned analysis of Nietzsche's importance to Abstract Expressionist theory in Ann Gibson, "Theory Undeclared: Avant-Garde Magazines as a Guide to Abstract Expressionist Images and Ideas" 1980s

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(Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1984), pp. 228-30,239-55.1 am indebted also to the discussion of the influence of Jung and Nietzsche on Abstract Expressionism, in general, and Mark Rothko in particular, in Stephen Polcari, "The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko," Arts Magazine, 54 (September, 1979), pp. 124-348. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Wm. A. Hausmann, London, 1909, pp. 22,34,28,27,29-30. It is not clear when Newman first encountered the writings of Nietzsche, Jung, and Worringer. His wife, Mrs. Annalee Newman, insists that he was not impressed with either Nietzsche or Worringer. It is my belief, however, that the analysis of Newman's texts in this essay argues against such a contention. Mrs. Newman's recollection is that Newman was first introduced to Worringer when Clement Greenberg, on an unspecified date, referred him to Form in Gothic. She also recalls that Newman obtained a copy of Form in Gothic either by loan from the public library or by borrowing a copy from a friend. As she remembers it, Newman, because of financial circumstances, often acquired reading materials in these ways. This may explain why pre-1940 editions of certain texts relating to the development of his art theory are not extant in his library. By her own admission, however, Mrs. Newman has continued to purchase, since Newman's death in 1970, the "kinds of books in which he was interested" (personal communications from Mrs. Annalee Newman, New York City, September 25,1986, and telephone conversation, April i, 1987). Thus, she has added to the collection a 1967 translation by Walter Kaufmann of The Birth of Tragedy, as well as several volumes on Northwest Coast Indian art that were published after 1970. For allowing me access to her husband's books, and for her gracious cooperation in general, I am grateful to Mrs. Newman. 9. Ibid., pp. 24-25,32-35,2510. Ibid., p. 46. 11. Ibid., pp. 85,116,174. 12. Ibid., pp. 38,50,176. 13. C. G.Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle, New York, 1916, p. 4. Jung freely acknowledged his intellectual debt to Nietzsche and quoted from him here (e.g., p. 28); pp. 5,22,35,25. 14. Ibid., pp. 27-28. 15. Ibid., p. 35. 16. See: Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Philogeny, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 76,13. My thanks to Stephen Polcari for calling my attention to this citation. For a discussion of recapitulation theory and Abstract Expressionism, see: Polcari (cited n. 7), p. 125. 17. Jung (cited n. 13), p. 35. On Jung and recapitulation theory, see: Gould (cited n. 16), pp. 161-62. 18. Jung (cited n. 13), p. 28. 19. Wilhem Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock, London, 1963, pp. 4, 123, 127,131. Abstraction and empathy, Worringer explained, "are only gradations of a common need, which is revealed to us as the deepest and ultimate essence of all aesthetic experience," ibid., p. 23. 438

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20. Ibid., p. 18. 21. Barnett Newman, "The Object and the Image," Tiger's Eye, 3 (March 1948), p. 111. 22. According to Dore Ashton, "Newman probably chose the Nietzsche text" cited above; see: Ashton (cited n. 6), p. 187. Ann Gibson, however, reports that the passage was selected by the other two editors, Ruth and John Stephan; see: Gibson (cited n. 7), p. 23923. Nietzsche, quoted in Tiger's Eye, 3 (March 1948), pp. 91-92. 24. Newman (cited n. 4). 25. Barnett Newman, "The Plasmic Image" (1945), quoted in Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, exh. cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1971, p. 37. 26. Newman (cited n. 4). 27. See: Worringer (cited n. 19), p. 127. 28. Ibid., p. 115. 29. Newman (cited n. 3). 30. Worringer (cited n. 19), p. 8. 31. Newman (cited n. 3). 32. Ibid. 33. See Newman's comments on Jung, in Barbara Reise, " Trimitivism' in the Writings of Barnett B. Newman: A Study in the Ideological Background of Abstract Expressionism" (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1965), p. 42. 34. See: Mollie McNickle, "The American Response to Surrealism: Barnett Newman," in The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism, exh. cat., Newport Beach, Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1986, pp. 51-56. Although McNickle points out the scarcity of reference to myth in Newman's writings, she admits that his titles were not chosen arbitrarily. In fact, Newman intended titles such as Gea, The Slaying of Osiris (1944), The Song of Orpheus an (1944-45), d Dionysus (1947) to be clues to the audience about the mythic orientation of their pictorial content. As evidence of this, see his comments about selecting titles in David Sylvester, "Concerning Barnett Newman," The Listener, 88 (August 10,1972), p. 170. 35. On Newman and the sciences, see: Hess (cited n. 25), p. 26. 36. Fritz Bultman, interview with the author, quoted in Rushing 1986 (cited n. i), p. 283. Bultman (1919-85) was an active member of the New York avant-garde for many years and knew well numerous artists, including John Graham, Hans Hofmann, Weldon Kees, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Smith. Along with Newman, Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Pousette-Dart, and others, Bultman signed the famous "irascible" letter protesting the exhibition policies of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bultman, however, like Hofmann and Kees (who were also signers), was not available for the famous photograph of the "Irascibles" taken by Nina Leen and published in Life (January 15,1951). В. Н. Friedman is convinced that the absence of these three from the photograph "contributed to their omission from the official, institutional Abstract-Expressionist 'list.' " See: В. Н. Friedman, "In Memoriam: An 'Irascible,' "ArtsMagazine, 60 (January 1986), p. 79. In the last years of his life, scholars found Bultman to be an accurate and credible 1980s

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37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 440

informant concerning the emergence of Abstract Expressionism (Friedman; and Irving Sandier, communication with the author, Austin, Texas, November 13, 1984). On Sloan as a patron of Indian art, see: Rushing igxx (cited n. i), Chs. 3,5. See: Phyllis Tuchman, "Interview with Esther Gottlieb," 1982, for The Mark Rothko Oral History Project; typescript on file at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; see p. 6. On Newman's friendship with and admiration for Gottlieb, see: Hess (cited n. 25), p. 23. On Graham, see: Jacob Kainen, "Remembering John Graham" Arts Magazine, 61 (November 1986), pp. 25-31; Eila Kokkinen, "John Graham during the 19405," Arts Magazine, 51 (November 1976), pp. 99-103; and Irving Sandier, "John D. Graham: The Painter as Esthetician and Connoisseur," Artforum, 7 (October 1968), pp. 50-53. See also: Dorothy Dehner's comments in the foreword to John Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Marcia Epstein Allentuck, Baltimore, 1971, pp. xiii-xxi. Graham also lent objects to the exhibition Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture, which Newman organized at the Wakefield Gallery in 1944. Newman was also aware of Wolfgang Paalen's and Max Ernst's concern with the totemic aspects of Northwest Coast art; see: Rushing 1986 (cited n. i), pp. 274-75. My thanks to Judy Freeman, Associate Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Los Angeles County Museum, for bringing these objects to my attention. The iconography and painting style of the shield are remarkably similar to that found on a Chiricahua Apache painted leather poncho in the collection of the Museum of the American Indian, which was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in 1941; see: Frederic H. Douglas and René D'Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1941, pp. 30-31. Ann Gibson indicates that the records of the Betty Parsons Gallery show that Newman purchased a Northwest Coast carved spoon as well. For this information and a photograph of the object that she located in the files of the Parsons Gallery, see Gibson (cited n. 7), p. 266, and figure 90. Unfortunately, such an object is no longer extant in Newman's estate, and his wife has no memory of the purchase. On the popularity of Patterns of Culture, see: Ann Gibson, "Painting outside the Paradigm: Indian Space," Arts Magazine, 57 (February 1983), p. 104, n. 9. Ibid. Barnett Newman, letter to Harry L. Shapiro, August i, 1944; on file at the Archives of the Department of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History. Ibid. Newman, quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 41. Benedict, however, was taking her cue from her mentor Franz Boas, who compared, in a book owned by Newman, the similarities between the Phaeton legend of the ancient Greeks and the Northwest Coast Indians; see: Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, New York, 1929, pp. 156-57. Newman's copy of this volume is copyright 1943. Kwakiutl Shaman Song, collected by George Hunt, in Franz Boas, "Ethnology of

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the Kwakiutl," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology igi^-Ц, Vol. 35, part 2 (1921), pp. 1294-95; quoted in Tiger's Eye 2 (December 1947), p. 83. 49. Any single ceremony is Tseka. Tsetseka is distinguished from Bakoos, the summer (secular) season, and Klasila, the transitional time, which begins with a period of mourning for those who have died since the last winter season ended. See: Audrey Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians. Seattle, 1967, pp. 33,35,398. 50. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 31. 51. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (ist edition, 1934), Boston, 1961, p. 177. 52. Ibid., pp. 177-78. 53. Ibid., p. 175. Another book in Newman's library contained a similar account; see: Pliny Earl Goddard, Indians of the Northwest Coast, New York, 1934, pp. 147-50. 54. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 62. 55. Ibid., p. 68. 56. Benedict (cited n. 51), pp. 180-81. 57. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged, 2nd edition, New York, 1951, pp. 449-50. Gottlieb, who had read The Golden Bough, recalled that he discussed myth, psychology, and philosophy with his well-read friends. See: Sara L. Henry, "Paintings and Statements of Mark Rothko (and Adolph Gottlieb), 1941-49: Basis of Mythological Phase of Abstract Expressionism" (M.A. thesis, New York University, IFA, 1966), p. 15. See also: n. 38 above. 58. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), pp. 27,63,60. 59. Newman (cited п.з). 60. Newman referred to Northwest Coast painting as "pure painting" in a letter to Harry Shapiro, September 23,1946, on file in the Archives of the Department of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History; Newman (cited n. 3). 61. Newman (cited n. 3). 62. See: Goddard (cited n. 53), pp. 158-59. Sistiutl is often double-headed, and Boas's report on the Kwakiutl (cited n. 47) contains several references to the monster, pp. 805-6,812,816,820,952,1117,1349. 63. Newman (cited n. 3). For reproductions of the works of 1944 that are related to the one discussed here, see: Brenda Richardson, Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, ig44~ig6g, exh. cat., Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979, Pis. i-io. 64. Newman, quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 43. 65. Betty Parsons, quoted in Gerald Silk, Interview with Betty Parsons, June 11, 1981, "Mark Rothko and His Times" (Oral History Project); pp. 8-9 of the typescript on file at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 66. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), pp. ill, 46,46-47. 67. Barnett Newman, quoted in Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, New York, 1978, p. 21. 68. Frazer (cited n. 57), pp. 420-21. 69. Barnett Newman, "The New Sense of Fate," quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 43.

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For a discussion of certain aspects of early Abstract Expressionism as a primitivistic response to the "awe and fear of a world born again into the atomic age," see: Jeffrey Weiss, "Science and Primitivism: A Fearful Symmetry in the Early New York School" Arts Magazine, 62, (March 1983), pp. 81-87. 70. Newman, quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 43. 71. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 119. 72. Hess (cited n. 25), p. 51, reports that Newman made Onement I on his birthday, January 29,1948. 73. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 62. 74. Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now," Tiger's Eye, 6 (December 15, 1948), P. 5175. Ann Gibson (cited n. 7), pp. 245-49, finds in "The Sublime Is Now" Newman's preference for the Dionysian mode. 76. Newman (cited n. 74), pp. 52,53. 77. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 61.

ANN GIBSON

The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism

The idea of Abstract Expressionism having a rhetoric—of artists such as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko having recourse to a set of verbal skills—will appear to most as a contradiction in terms. Abstract Expressionism has become synonymous with a reluctance to explain, and that reluctance has become associated with the assumption that it is irrelevant to discuss meaning as the relation between form and subject matter. The idea that explication is antithetical to Abstract Expressionist art was generated in part by critics who took artists at their word. When Clement Greenberg told an interviewer: "I don't think I quote living painters. And I don't pay any attention to what they say in connection with their art," paradoxically, he based his conviction at least in part on comments by painters such as Jackson Pollock. Greenberg recalled, "He said to me once, 'I don't know where the pictures come from—they just come,' with a look of surprise on his face. And he expected me to be surprised. I knew then that when things go good for you you don't know where they come from. But Jackson was so surprised that he didn't figure the picture

SOURCE: Michael Auping, éd., Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (Albright- Knox, 1989), 64-93. Reprinted with the permission of Ann Gibson. 442

out—as if works of art ever really succeeded by being figured out whether it be Mondrian or Poussin or Rubens."1 Much recent scholarship has been devoted, nonetheless, to attempts to "figure out" these paintings and sculptures by rooting out their subject matter, with fruitful and sometimes surprising results. Some of Gorky's paintings have been demonstrated to flow rather directly from objects he associated with his childhood and his personal life; Pollock's Jungian vision has come to be seen as a factor in his choice of the "primitive" objects whose forms he chose to adapt for his work; and David Smith's observations about the similarity of social and sexual aggression appear to have played a significant role in the development of some of the forms in his sculpture.2 Little attention, however, has been paid to the development of the devices (even to use such a word seems like an affront to a movement whose original critics described it as spontaneous and antiliterary) by which these meanings are attached to the art. This is where rhetoric comes in. Rhetoric has another definition besides its common usage to mean a set of (perhaps insincere, if persuasive) verbal skills. As educators in the forties and fifties were quick to point out, the term refers also to those practical means, so essential to democracy, that people use to link their personal worlds to larger, interpersonal affairs; contemporary scholars have emphasized the importance of rhetoric by equating it as the figurai potential of language with literature itself.3 These skills, or better, agencies of meaning, were understood in the 19405 and 19505 to include the use of such devices as allegory, symbolism, and metaphor, as well as more elusive formulations such as New Critical paradox and Kenneth Burke's "mystic oxymoron," literary structures aimed at escaping the confines of rhetoric altogether. Although theorists have distinguished among these terms, they do not always agree with one another on their meaning, and artists have often used some of them almost interchangeably in discussing painting and sculpture. Abstract Expressionists sometimes use the word symbol, for instance, when a rhetorician might have used the word metaphor. What matters here is that the sense of their statements and, above all, the testimony of their work reveal that they were critically concerned with just such distinctions as those examined by writers such as Cleanth Brooks and Kenneth Burke. About causal links in this coincidence—whether the artists' insights influenced the writers or vice versa—one can at this point only speculate. In many cases, it may be as William Baziotes noted in 1954, "Music and literature do not inspire any of my works, but I do find brothers in those arts."4 1980s

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Developments in the work of artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Theodore Roszak, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Peter Grippe, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, Barnett Newman, and others may be articulated in the light of understandings represented by these rhetorical terms. Although this essay cannot present an analysis of each career, it is possible in this format to demonstrate that an old tool (rhetoric) may be adapted to a new purpose (looking at the ways in which subject matter and form are related in Abstract Expressionism). I hope that the ideas advanced here may be read in that spirit, and that further investigations will lead to more precise adjustments in the analysis of individual careers. The present exploration, however, does provide two benefits: it serves to tell at least as much about the distinctions among these artists as it does about their similarities; and it establishes a common stage on which painting, sculpture, and literature may play to one another, bringing out what may be of use to our age in the character of each. One may note in some careers the successive employment of these rhetorical devices: the symbol, the metaphor, the icon, the mystic oxymoron, and what we will call the narrative allegory. One can identify these devices with the status of referring in an artist's work—with the manner in which the visible forms are linked to meaning. It is important to note that the use of these strategies usually developed gradually, as an artist's employment of one merged into the next, and that one work may employ more than one device. Not all the artists associated with Abstract Expressionism used all these devices. Rothko, for instance, rejected certain aspects of oxymoronic construction and never accepted narrative allegory. It is important, too, to remain aware throughout this discussion that although most of the Abstract Expressionists were aware of each other's work, they were not all using the same devices at the same time, nor did they all find the same devices equally rewarding. Symbol

By the early 19405, perhaps the most frequently mentioned figurai device among artists in the Abstract Expressionists' circles was the symbol, an element whose purpose was to stand for something beyond itself but in a nonnarrative way. Scholars in these years preferred symbols to allegories, those types of representation frequently couched in narrative, whose meanings were considered to be more extrinsic, pedantic, and conventional.5 Jackson Pollock's move from the comparatively traditional pictorial space he employed in the 19305 to a flatter, less narrative mode at the end of that decade 444

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may be seen as a passage from allegory to symbol.6 Before 1947, his paintings displayed figurative elements, such as the two vertical forms at either side of the central panel of Guardians of the Secret, 1943. These "guardians," whose importance seems only to be magnified by the fact that they have not been easily identified,7 may be called symbolic. Allegory, like realism, was regarded as being tainted with metonymy, as opposed to symbol's metaphor. A signet ring is an allegory of power, for example, because it is worn by someone who is powerful; the signet becomes a sign of power, in other words, because of its métonymie relation to power. A tiger is a symbol of power, however, because it embodies power. The tiger's relation to power is metaphorical.8 Allegory, narrative, and metonymy were linked to mimesis and emblematic portrayal—to the connection of events in time— whereas symbol and metaphor informed the eternal realm of poetry, where reference is made through "real" similarities rather than by the accident of contiguity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge made an influential claim that allegory's weakness lies in the fact of its conventional connection to its meaning (if the lion is not identified with courage, calling a soldier a lion will be meaningless). The organic relation of symbols to their meanings, on the other hand, guaranteed their superiority. Like Coleridge and his successors, most Abstract Expressionists would have considered the symbolism of works such as Albert Pinkham Ryder's Moonlit Cove, about 1890-1900, at once less translatable and more universal than the more allegorical language of paintings such as Peter Blume's The Eternal City, 1937. In 1955, René Wellek quoted Coleridge in a defense of symbolism that would have been agreeable to most Abstract Expressionists: "True symbolism is where the particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the inscrutable."9 Allegories, it was believed, told one story; once they were deciphered, their suggestive potentialities were used up. The meaning of symbols, on the other hand, as noted by Susanne Langer, whose Philosophy in a New Key was published in 1942, was capable of nearly infinite extension: their multiple potentialities were not liable to be exhausted after a few readings.10 David Smith's production in the years 1945 and 1946 was marked by an increasingly varied but also more personal and ambiguous stream of imagery.11 When he linked not one but two versions of the body of a woman to home in The Home of the Welder, 1945 (see the torso of the woman in bas-relief on one side and the stylized mother and child in bas-relief on the reverse side of the sculpture), his connection was more than métonymie. For Smith, the body of 1980s

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woman was coincident not only with his physical home but with the mental and emotional site of artistic creation; various uses of the female were, in Coleridge's sense, organically bound up with social and political interactions and, most significantly, with Smith's own production of sculpture.12 Abstract Expressionists rejected allegory in the sense that the term was understood in the 19405. They scorned forms that conventionally "stood for" something else, striving, rather, for "some strange inner kernel which cannot be reached with explanations, clarifications, examinations, or definitions."13 At the same time, they avoided the narrative methods associated with allegory, such as those employed by such artists as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and Ben Shahn, in favor of less linear, more open-ended modes. As Rothko would later say to Selden Rodman, "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on I communicate them more directly than your friend Ben Shahn, who is essentially a journalist."14 In distinguishing his achievements from Shahn's, Rothko meant to distance himself from storytelling, one aspect of the allegorical, and therefore inauthentic, in Shahn's work. It is significant that Rothko's pictorial methods not only avoided narrative but were intended to be more immediate, another way in which symbols were considered to be superior to allegory.15 As Herbert Read said in his discussion of the symbolic in art, "Л has worked its effect before we have become conscious of its presence"™ Some Abstract Expressionists' preference for symbolic over allegorical reference lay in their appreciation of French Symbolism. The crux of symbolist poetry for both William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell, according to the latter, revolved around Mallarmé's famous dictum that the poet should represent not the thing itself but the effect that it produces—that poetry should refer indirectly. L. Bailey Van Hook has described Motherwell's Mallarmé's Swan, 1944-47, as a painting whose effects Motherwell saw as being analogous to those suggested by Mallarmé's poetics, which emphasized the pursuit of perfection in the arena of chance. The blots in the lower center and right of the painting, she suggested, have two symbolic meanings: they are readily recognizable as the emblems of the mistake; as such they represent the unavoidable factor of chance in artistic creation. At the same time, they also refer to Motherwell's recognition of Mallarmé's obsession with getting things just right. As Motherwell related in 1951: Sometimes I have an imaginary picture in mind of the poet Mallarmé in his study late at night—changing, blotting, transferring each word and its relations with such care—and I think the sustained energy for the travail must 446

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have come from the secret knowledge that each word was a link in the chain that he was forging to bind himself to the universe.17 A symbol for Motherwell, then, might be said to fulfill its function of referring to something indirectly by referring to more than one thing at the same time.18 Some of the most significant additions to the connotations of the word symbol in the twentieth century are a consequence of the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl G.Jung. The interest of a number of Abstract Expressionists and their close associates in the ideas of both of these psychologists has become a commonplace in the literature on this art. The writings, recorded conversations, and often the titles of works by Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Ferber, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Peter Grippe, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Theodore Roszak, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and David Smith all indicate, as recent scholarship has continued to demonstrate, that they knew a good bit about the premises of these famous psychologists.19 The interest of these artists in the psychological, anthropologically defined dimensions of the symbol was paralleled in literature and philosophy by a search for recurrent archetypal patterns in stories by scholars such as Maude Bodkin, Joseph Campbell, Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, and Erich Neumann.20 Freud's most important definition of the function of symbols as it was developed by 1914 is more clinical than Langer's, mentioned above. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud used the term symbol to refer to the expression of a mental state by a dreamed image. Symbols were images or situations that had a double level of significance: the literal (one might dream of flying) and the hidden (such dreams of flight, Freud wrote, stood for the remarkable phenomenon of erection, both involving a suspension of the laws of gravity). He noted, however, that such "symbolic" contents of the dream are overdetermined: their meanings are not wholly subjective (not, thus, only the product of the patient's dreamwork) but are also pregiven facts of culture, often the vestiges of the conceptual and linguistic heritage of the primitive past. Thus, dreams of flying, for instance, are connected to the winged phalli of the ancients.21 Gorky would probably not have rejected the relevance of such an observation as he feathered the abdominal region of the figure at the far right of The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, 1Q44.22 We know that Gorky saw his artistic methods as a continuation of ancient traditions, not as a breaking from them. Thus it is possible that the feathers in Liver refer also to the feathered costumes of Aztec nobility or to the flame- or petal-like forms that stand for the Aztec ritual of disemboweling.23 If one considers that both interpretations are 1980s

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simultaneously possible, Gorky's use of symbolic form may not only be described by Langer's multileveled definition but may be said to exhibit a Freudian dimension also.24 These observations on Gorky's painting indicate the way in which Freud's discussion of the symbol would have been inspiring to artists in the Abstract Expressionist milieu. The symbol's cultural conventionality was what enabled it, for Freud, to function as a universally readable link between cultures and ages. His emphasis on the prefabricated quality of the dream symbol, however, gave artists little individual creative scope.25 Carl Jung agreed with Freud that symbols have a universal cultural validity, but he differed from Freud in believing that the artist's constructive role was to present these symbols to mankind, thus facilitating a healing understanding of the human psyche.26 In The Integration of Personality (available in New York in 1939), Jung defined archetypes as the content of the collective unconscious, as opposed to the content of the feeling-toned complexes, the personal and private aspect of the unconscious. The archetypes, he claimed, teach humans that the psyche may be endangered not only by outside influences but also by its own contents. Only by granting the reality of these forces that are beyond the control of conscious, rational powers, can man proceed upon the task of individuation by integrating the unconscious, centralizing processes that form the personality.27 Jung defined two different categories of archetypes: archetypes that are personalities, such as the wise old man and the chaotic, life-filled female anima (Rothko's Tiresias, Lip ton's Wild Earth Mother, and de Kooning's long series of Women paintings come to mind), and archetypes that represent situations (Pollock's Four Opposites, Ferber's Hazardous Encounter). He called the second group archetypes of transformation. Both of these categories of archetypes, wrote Jung, "are genuine and true symbols that cannot be taken as angela or as allegories, and are exhaustively interpreted. They are, rather, genuine symbols just in so far as they are ambiguous, full of intimations, and, in the last analysis, inexhaustible."28 This passage from The Integration of Personality resonates in Langer's discussion of "charged" symbols: There are many "charged" symbols in our thought, though few that play as many popular roles as the cross. A ship is another example—the image of precarious security in all-surrounding danger, of progress toward a goal, of adventure between two points of rest, with the near, if dormant, connotation of safe imprisonment in the hold, as in the womb. Not improbably the similar

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form of a primitive boat and of the moon in its last quarter has served in past ages to reinforce such mythological values.29 A number of Abstract Expressionists would have recognized and applauded the Jungian tone of Langer's Philosophy in a New Key. It was eagerly analyzed and discussed after its publication in 1942 by artists in circles that included Adolph Gottlieb, John Graham, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Jackson Pollock. Although it is probable that only some of the artists actually read it (Pollock or Krasner, whose library included it, and Newman), many would have known Langer's views.30 Like Langer, the Abstract Expressionists used terms and demonstrated understandings in their statements that are closer in tone and terminology to Jung than to Freud. Theodore Roszak's work after 1945, such as The Spectre of Kitty Hawk, 1946, may be seen as symbolic in the multileveled Jungian sense. The Spectre of Kitty Hawk alludes to David Smith's "Spectre" series in its title as well as its similarly foreboding presence, which recalls a prehistoric pterodactyl. Roszak, however, associates it also with the history of the airplane (the machine, as many were so well aware in those years just after World War II, that dropped the atomic bomb), and the crescent of the moon.31 Roszak's description of the artist's process demonstrates a Jungian understanding of the purpose of endeavors like his own: "By working through these large mythological and legendary aspects of human experience in its large, collective sense, we come back to the integration of the individual per se. . . . We work through all these civilizing devices to get back to the completeness of that one personality."32 Although David Smith read Freud's Totem and Taboo with close attention, his multileveled approach to meaning in such sculptures as his Jurassic Bird, 1946, is also closer to Jung's treatment of the symbolic process than it is to Freud's. Here, Smith employed a reference to a prehistoric bird, coupling it with a winged, phallus-like cannon to express his horrified response to atomic war. Smith's move from the allegorical Medals for Dishonor to the more symbolic structure of Jurassic Bird accompanied a change in his attitude toward war itself. Before the final events of World War II, he believed that some wars are justified. After the dropping of the atomic bomb, Smith, in Jurassic Bird, as Robert Lubar has suggested, equated contemporary military conflict with the evolutionary struggle for survival, symbolically suggesting that modern warfare might extinguish the human race.33 In one of the best-known documents of early Abstract Expressionism,

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Rothko, Newman, and Gottlieb described their work in a letter to the New York Times in 1942 in terms of that aspect of symbols they understood as a common denominator between past and present, artist and audience, upon which both Freud and Jung agreed. They were referring to works like those from Gottlieb's Oedipus series and Rothko's Untitled (Study for Antigone), of the early 19405, with their ambiguous combinations of recognizable and abstract forms. Is that swirl a snail? Those wavy lines snakes? A beard? In their letter they argued that the symbols in their painting were as valid as were archaic Greek symbols three thousand years ago. "No possible set of notes," the trio claimed, "can explain our paintings."34 Following the lead of these artists, then, one could say that for Abstract Expressionists-to-be in the early forties as well as for critics and philosophers, the symbol was an image whose subject was crucial but whose meanings can never be completely explained. When Adolph Gottlieb recalled, in 1959, "I wanted to use ambiguous symbols for my own purposes, to prevent people from giving them interpretations I didn't mean,"35 he may have been thinking of paintings like his Pictograph— Symbol, 1942. In 1941, he developed this flat, gridded composition with no focal point to house his plurivalent symbols.36 Other artists in his circle were also using such compositional housings for their symbols. Mark Rothko, for instance, used a grid in the early forties; Baziotes's Clown and Clock, 1944, appears to demonstrate a similar impulse to organize (or to resist organization) along the horizontal and the vertical; Louise Bourgeois's etching The Symbols, 1942, like Gottlieb's Pictograph—Symbol and some of his earlier pictographs, contains an eye as well as other recognizable images; in Bourgeois's case, a ladder and a pen and inkwell. The ambiguous meaning of these mimetically recognizable objects, however, identifies them as symbols, rather than allegorical emblems. Sculptor Peter Grippe, too, who was to exhibit at Marion Willard's gallery in the years she showed David Smith, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Richard Lippold, was working with symbolic images such as eyes, hands, and mouths in a three-dimensional gridded framework by 1941 in such works as The City #i.37 Metaphor Earlier in this essay I described the guardian images in Pollock's Guardians of the Secret as symbolic. One may distinguish between this symbolic way of referring and the closely related but not identical means of metaphor. Compare, for instance, Guardians of the Secret to Gothic, 1944. Although Gothic, like Guardians, does have some mimetic images (such as the hand that sweeps 450

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up from the lower right), more than many of Pollock's paintings of the midforties, it presents the viewer with a densely filled surface rather than with a series of images. One could consider that the black lattice looks like the leading on medieval stained glass windows, thus symbolically relating to the painting's title in its reference to the middle ages. It is also true, however, that the repeated upward surges of blues and greens, barely contained in the framework of black paint, embodies a resurrection of the kind of Gothic impulse whose demise Jung lamented: When the spiritual catastrophe of the Reformation put an end to the Gothic Age with its impetuous yearning for the heights, its geographical confinement, and its restricted view of the world, the vertical outlook of the European mind was forthwith intersected by the horizontal outlook of modern times.38 This aspect of Gothics identity is achieved metaphorically, by its structure— by the relation of colors, forms, and textures—not by its mimetic resemblance to something outside the canvas.39 The structure of David Smith's sculpture The Hero of 1951 is also metaphorical in this relational sense. At first, the heroic status of the figure as implied by the title may seem gratuitous. In fact, even The Heroes identity as a human form must be based almost entirely on the arrangement of its parts rather than on their shapes, as is indicated by their technical interchangeability. If the eye-shaped head, for instance, were placed where the torso is, it would read as a torso. This strange head is perhaps the most striking aspect of the sculpture. Its large size and oddly horizontal, oval form suggest a deeper meaning than appears at first glance. Rosalind Krauss has connected this form with a poem in which Smith wrote: the subject is me the hero is eye function.40 Scholars have interpreted this conjunction in various ways, but they have agreed that by positioning the form of an eye on the shoulders of a structure called The Hero, Smith wished to identify his own artistic vision with certain aspects of the concept of the heroic.41 Although many of The Heroes associations are mimetic (such as the shape of the eye) the major thrust of meaning (Smith/hero/vision) is accomplished metaphorically, through relations of parts: the "eye" is where the head should be. 1980s

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The word metaphor, as a subcategory, or type of symbol, and the word icon have no universally accepted definitions; inescapably, they share some of the symbol's qualities, especially its apparent opposition to the arbitrariness of allegory. The Dictionary of World Literature in 1943, for instance, announced that metaphors, like symbols, substitute one thing for another, but that their special quality lay in their ability to identify two seemingly disparate things, offering as an example Shakespeare's "Thou art the grave where buried love doth live."42 Thus Pollock allowed a mimetic-metonymic similarity between the forms in his Gothic and glass windows to refer also to a type of energy that had been termed "gothic" by more than one writer in his era.43 Surrealist André Breton, who had lived in New York in the early forties and whose views were discussed and disseminated widely among the Abstract Expressionists, was a most enthusiastic advocate of this kind of structure (which he subsumed under the term "analogy"). He described its excellence in terms of its ability to escape the bonds of reason: Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it transgresses the deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge, in fact opposes a priori any bridge which might be thrown.44 Breton would have approved of the fact that, in discussing the metaphorical structure in these two works, it has been necessary not only to read, but to invent. The fact that interpreters have found it essential to contribute not only their research but their imaginative input to the project is responsible for significant variations in their interpretations.45 I. A. Richards distinguished between simple metaphors based on direct resemblances of (or differences between) the images and the ideas they represent, and more complex ones with several levels of identification that may even be inconsistent, and whose degree of resemblance will depend on the audience's attitude toward the images.46 This latter "interactive" aspect of metaphor proved to be especially interesting to contemporaries of the Abstract Expressionists such as William Empson and Max Black.47 The Abstract Expressionists, too, recognized validity in the "interactive" aspects of interpretation. In their statement to the New York Times, for instance, Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman said that the explanation of their pictures "must come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker." In the work of many of the artists discussed in this essay, there was, in the 452

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mid-forties, a progression away from ways of referring in which the sensory properties of the art look like (are mimetically, or metonymically related to) those of the referent (as in Gottlieb's Pictograph—Symbol of 1942). Increasingly, the works (like Pollock's Gothic) possessed qualities that functioned like those of a model outside the work.48 As mentioned above, artists were not consistent in their terminology, sometimes using the word symbol to refer to this more abstract way of referring, and sometimes using the word metaphor. Some artists used both. Describing what he saw as the two basic twentiethcentury revolutions in sculptural thinking, Seymour Lipton wrote: Cubism permitted plastic rearrangements of physical space and the metaphor permitted emotional and symbolic projection of a content concerning the life of man. This new realm of sculpture leaves out the obvious anatomy of man, but retains its gesture such as twisted struggle, invocation, striding forward, etc The "Cloak" [1951] is a dark interior with totem figures of individual man with its own [figures] growing flower-like and lamp-like internally. The figure of man protects himself from a hostile world by two sheets of armor held in position by many barbed fists jutting through the shield.49 Although Lipton did not define his terms, he referred to "the new realm of sculpture" as what we have here defined as the metaphoric, in which the burden of reference rests on the gestures and relations among forms. Clearly, something was going on among these artists by the mid-forties. There was an intensification of their struggles to reconcile what they knew (their epistemology) with what they, and their mediums, were (their ontology). They conceived this struggle in terms of the relation between form and meaning, and in the work of the artists who have come to be called Abstract Expressionists, the terms of that relationship were severely questioned. One could argue, for instance, that in Lipton's Cloak of 1951 a figurai reference is still apparent. But, in general, Lipton's work, like that of many others in his circle, was progressing from distorted but recognizable figures, such as Man Rising from the Ruins, 1944, to considerably more abstract forms. Peter Grippe recalls that a number of artists met at Barnett Newman's home in 1945 or 1946 to discuss the possibility of a common solution to the question of how art referred to its subjects.50 The meeting failed to resolve the problem; but Gottlieb and Newman, among others, continued to be concerned with the verbal designations that might be applied to their efforts. It is important at this point to reiterate that not all the artists we now call Abstract Expressionists experienced this development at the same time; Clyf1980s

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ford Still, for instance, in the early forties, was one of the earliest to abandon recognizable symbols. By the later forties, however, an ongoing interest in symbol, pictograph, and myth, aided by emerging concerns that may be identified with the terms metaphor, ideogram, and icon, helped to generate in the work of many a type of art whose appearance suggested to some that it might have no reference at all in the real world. One could say that abstraction is really the same as the classical definition of metaphor. As scholars from Condillac to Paul de Man have noted, abstractions come into being "by ceasing to think of the properties by which things are distinguished in order to think only of those in which they agree [or correspond] with each other."51 Although metaphors are not figures that abandon their referents, we see in Condillac's emphasis on properties, rather than objects, the direction many of the Abstract Expressionists were to follow. When Adolph Gottlieb wrote, in 1947, "To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time," his thought paralleled I. A. Richards's position in The Philosophy of Rhetoric that metaphor is not decoration, but, rather, the very fabric from which meaning is made. When metaphor functions to extend language, since language is reality, Richards argues, metaphor expands and secures new realities. Although Abstract Expressionists would have disagreed with Richards's equation of language and reality, they would probably not have quarrelled with a corollary to Richards's argument that gives metaphor two claims to superiority. Its basis in the perceptions of essential realities of apparently unlike things gave it, for thinkers in the forties, a claim to truth; and, in addition, as the core of the perceptual process, it embodied the tissue of thought. As a more abstract extension of the symbol, metaphor epitomized both profundity and reality. To step backward into allegory was to retreat into didacticism and happenstance; but to plunge forward, beyond a discernible anchor in reality, was, many believed, to enter a realm where the only choices were decoration or solipsism. Writing in Art News in May 1947, a reviewer noted of Clyfford Still (regarding works such as 1Q46-L, 1946) that the artist "is preoccupied with the theme of the figure in landscape, with overtones of man's struggle against and fusing with nature. But, considering his extremely abstract style, this symbolism seems somewhat far fetched."52 Likewise, a critic described Herbert Ferber's Unknown Political Prisoner, 1952, as "totally devoid of symbolism." Along with the work of Theodore Roszak, Richard Lippold, and Calvin Albert, she saw it as a "stylish, abstract, technical tour de force" revealing the artists' "con454

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suming egotism, fear, detachment, utter absence of any sense of social responsibility, or lack of the deepest and greatest form of imagination which makes it possible to project oneself into another person's being."53 For these reviewers, a symbol was something one could recognize. Granted, its meanings might not be immediately apparent, but still, the key of access was the resemblance between what one saw in the art and something one knew in the real world. A departure from the mimeticism of the symbol was a departure from meaning. Meanings may still be constructed from works such as Ferber's Unknown Political Prisoner and in Still's work from the mid-forties, but only by viewers willing to contribute their own observation and imagination to the project. One can, for instance, consider the pointed metal curves and mesh grilles of The Unknown Political Prisoner as focal areas in an interactive metaphor that are to be given new meaning in the context of their particular conjunction with one another—the title of the work and the theme of the exhibition (also entitled The Unknown Political Prisoner) in which it appeared. This new context, the "frame" of the metaphor, imposes an extension of meaning on the focal points. No longer simply pointed pieces of metal and barriers pierced with holes, they become symbols of weapons and prisons—the metaphorically whirling elements in the cosmos of cruel forces that threaten and contain the unknown political prisoner. As Max Black pointed out, to make an interactive metaphor work, "the reader [viewer] must remain aware of the extension of meaning—must attend to both the old [sharpened pieces of metal can hurt, metal grilles in our society function to keep people out or in] and the new [their whirling configuration] together."54 In a similarly interactive way, finding "meaning" in the metaphors Still constructed in the mid-forties necessitates a return to his earlier work, such as ig4i-2-C,55 and to his statements about his work; only then can one understand the collapse of images of figure, hand, and phallus into the landscape background in paintings such as 1Q46-L as a metaphor of "man's struggle against and fusing with nature."56 Barnett Newman's thoughts on this matter materialized in an exhibition entitled The Ideographic Picture at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947. The appeal of even multievocative forms with communal meanings had dimmed, and he felt the need to develop a new, more effective, and immediate method of representation. This new form of representation, toward which a number of these painters and sculptors moved in the late forties, was evident in several works in the exhibition, in which Newman presented paintings by Hans Hofmann, Pietro Lazzari, Boris Margo, himself, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, and Clyfford Still.57 The title of Rothko's Tiresias, 1944, could 1980s

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be read as an extension of the meaning of the figurai, archetypal associations of its forms, as is the case with Reinhardt's Dark Symbol, 1941, whose forms are also reminiscent of human figures. Rothko's second work in the exhibition, however, Vernal Memory (present whereabouts unknown), if it resembled his Geologic Memory, Tentacles of Memory, 1945-46, or Prehistoric Memory, 1946, was done in a more abstract mode; the forms in his composition could not be named or, considered individually, be seen to relate to his title. Newman's own Gea, 1945, presents a number of forms that remind one of winged creatures or insects, despite their nonspecific character. For this reason, Gea may be considered symbolic, because of its more obviously mimetic character, and less abstract than Newman's second inclusion, painted over a year later, The Euclidean Abyss, 1946-47. The Euclidean Abyss differs from Gea in a number of senses. Those that concern us here not only revolve around contemporary definitions of the word metaphor, but will also involve the terms ideogram and icon. The flattened structure of The Euclidean Abyss appears to conform to the type of metaphor about which Douglas MacAgy speculated in 1949: "It is possible that pictorial metaphor could allude to a kind of dimensional idiom which would accord more with twentieth century thought than with the three dimensional instrument inherited from the Renaissance."58 Another perceptive observer, Ruth Field, compared traditional Western perspective in the visual arts to what she called "temporal perspective" in poetry: a reference forward or backward in time in the surface of the poem. Both the contemporary poet and painter, she wrote, create flat landscapes, without illusion, characterized by a feeling of infinite expansion. In this, their universe was like that of the modern physicist, she observed: finite but unbounded.59 Considering Newman's Gea and The Euclidean Abyss, Smith's Jurassic Bird and The Hero, or Pollock's Guardians of the Secret and Gothic, one might note, inspired by Field's and MacAgy's observations, that the difference between the first and second work of each of these artists lies in the way the forms in the work reach the viewer's mind. In each first instance (Gea, Jurassic Bird, Guardians of the Secret), the emphasis is as much on what one knows, on the association of various items within the composition with an experience —psychological, visual, or literary—as it is on the relation among the forms. In the second set (The Euclidean Abyss, The Hero, Gothic), the work as a collection of references is subordinated to an emphasis on the relation among the forms. The message one receives has more to do with how one reacts to the thought, or the force, that binds the forms together than with the associa456

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tion of separate forms—more to do with the ecology of the work, than with its individual elements.60 The incipient claim to the incarnation of meaning in material generated what some viewers have felt to be a strangely insistent presence in this art. There is already in these metaphoric paintings and sculptures, along with their invitation to personal interpretation, a refusal of "whiteness," a rejection of reasoned explanation, objectivity, and translatability.61 Karsten Harries has suggested that in the work of poets such as William Carlos Williams, a new type of metaphor is born, one whose avoidance of the commonly understood telos of the object as its basis points to a desire to escape language's referential functions.62 Read in this way, metaphor serves as an appropriate step for such artists as Pollock and Smith in the transition that led through the icon to the antireferentiality of the mystic oxymoron. The essay Barnett Newman wrote to accompany The Ideographic Picture exhibition contains references to a number of currents in the awareness of artists who, in the late 19403, were moving toward more abstract (one might say, with de Man's Condillac, more metaphoric) modes of representation. As Newman explains in his essay, these works all represented ideas, but represented them "directly"—not through the detour of mimesis. They combined act and idea, he claimed in the introduction to the exhibition, to form shapes that carried thoughts, rather than merely stood for them. An ideographic shape was a living thing, an "idea-complex" that actually made contact with the mysteries of life, nature, death, and tragedy.63 Newman began his statement for the show with definitions of the term ideograph and its derivations from the dictionary and the encyclopedia; undoubtedly these formulations played a role in the development of his concept. The word ideographic, however, was closely related to some other words not mentioned by Newman, whose significant implications for his enterprise would have been recognized by many in his audience. Those concerned with avant-garde literature, for instance, would have associated the word ideograph with imagist poet Ezra Pound's definition of "the picture of a thing" that means the thing, without, however, resembling it in a mimetic sense.64 For Pound, an ideogram (such as a Chinese written character) corresponded with the thing it designated because its structure corresponded with its object. He expanded this thought to claim (as Newman did) that primitive languages maintain a close correspondence between signs as ideographic pictures and the things to which they refer.65 "The ideographic process," Pound wrote, "is metaphor, the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations."66 1980s

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In paralleling developments in contemporary painting to Northwest Coast Indian culture, Newman was indebted also to the description of the symbol in Kwakiutl art as it was formulated by Franz Boas. In The Ideographic Picture, Newman distinguished between what he called "the ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding" displayed by the male Kwakiutl artists painting on hides and the "pleasant play of non-objective pattern [of] the women basket weavers." In "Art of the North Pacific Coast of North America," in Boas's Primitive Art (first published in English in 1928), the anthropologist distinguished between the symbolic men's style expressed in carving and painting, and the patterned art of "no especially marked significance" of the women's style, expressed in basketry, weaving, and embroidery.67 Unlike Newman, however, Boas in general restricted his descriptions of what the Kwakiutl symbols mean to the identification of the object or act to which they correspond in tribal life, eschewing the metaphysical implications (and thus the metaphorical dimension) so important to Newman.68 Icon The dimensions Newman appears to have woven into his definition of an ideographic picture included not only Pound's ideogram and Boas's symbol, but also linguistic concepts derived from the icon, as it was defined by C. S. Peirce, whose ideas were revitalized in the early thirties by the publication of his collected papers. For Peirce, both symbols and icons were signs; but a symbol referred to its object only by virtue of social agreement, as the word red, for instance, refers to the quality of redness. (Peirce's definition of "symbol," then, in its conventionality, was more like allegory than were the comparatively romantic definitions of the symbol discussed earlier in this essay.) An icon, however, was linked with the thing it represented by exhibiting that thing, as the red in a representation of an apple both exhibits and stands for the quality of redness in its object.69 Of course, iconic signs may be similar to the objects to which they refer in various ways, and Peirce named three: the image, a sign that, like the example above, reproduces a number of the same sensory impressions as would the object; the diagram, which, like a blueprint, exhibits relations like the relations in the object; and the metaphor, a relationship where the "parallelism is not a correspondence of simple qualities nor a corresponding relation" of parts, but a more general correspondence.70 So defined, Peirce's metaphoric icon is most similar to Newman's "living thing"—a conception of painting in which the work of art embodies in various ways that to which it refers, rather than merely standing for it in absentia. 458

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Peirce's icon shares an important quality with I. A. Richards's and Max Black's "interactive" metaphors: a sign would be recognized as iconic only if the viewer recognized it as such.71 By this criterion Ferber's Unknown Political Prisoner, for example, projects political and emotional "meaning" only to the extent that the viewer is able to find similarities between the associations of its forms, their relationship to each other, its title, and the circumstances of its exhibition. As Rosenberg observed of Barnett Newman, his paintings are icons because they request the viewer's faith—they can exist as art only if his audience believes they are art.72 Mark Rothko's works, too, developed increasingly ironic qualities at the expense of their other symbolic characteristics throughout the forties. During these years, forms reminiscent of deepwater creatures' body configurations and movements—the tentacles and eyes of Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944, for instance—disappeared, to be replaced by the glowing, unnameable forms that float on the aqueous fields of works such as Number 18,1948,1949. Forms that pictured Rothko's particularly light-struck version of the Jungian sea of the unconscious and/or his version of traditional religious subject matter were succeeded by forms that seemed themselves to float and refract light rather than to refer to things that do.73 In the multiforms, then (like Number 18), Rothko could be said to collapse the traditional dichotomy between sensual experience and representation, and thus to blur the borderline between imagination and reason. "To imagine," Paul Ricoeur has observed of this relationship, "is not to have a mental picture of something but to display relations in a depicting mode. When this depiction concerns unsaid and unheard similarities or refers to qualities, structures, localizations, situations, attitudes, or feelings, each time the new intended is grasped as what the icon describes or depicts."74 I have used the concept of the icon here principally to clarify an aspect of the artists' endeavor. I wonder, of course, if it could have had an historical influence: would these artists themselves have understood enough about Peirce's concept to have found in it some confirmation of their own goals? Further research is needed to determine if this was a factor in the development of Abstract Expressionism; but preliminary evidence indicates that it may have been the case. "Charles Peirce was a topic of conversation during the twenties and thirties, and Barney [Newman] most likely knew about him," recalled his friend the poet Leo Yamin, "everybody did." The multitalented mentor of some of these artists, the painter John Graham, Yamin remembers, understood Peirce's definition of an icon, as did Adolph Gottlieb, who would 1980s

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not have read Peirce himself, but would have known about it from his discussions with Newman and possibly Rothko.75 I know of no indication that these artists read Charles Morris's Signs, Language, and Behavior, in which he discusses Peirce's semiotics. The title, however, would have been attractive to them. They might also have been made aware of it by Ernst Gombrich's review in the Art Bulletin.™ And although it was years later that Rosenberg entitled his essay about Newman's achievement "Icon Maker: Barnett Newman," there was a magazine in 1946 and 1947 entitled Iconograph, whose last issue featured Rothko's work. Its program evinced a preference for artists who had been inspired by Northwest Coast Indian art, and its editor, a young poet-painter named Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, particularly admired Newman and Gottlieb.77 Works like Pollock's Eyes in the Heat, 1946; David Smith's Hudson River Landscape, 1951; de Kooning's Woman 1,1952; Gorky's One Year the Milkweed, 1944; Bourgeois's Sleeping Figure, 1950; Lipton's Cloak, 1951; Krasner's Blue Square, 1939-43; and Still's 1Q46-L all have that peculiar iconic character of metaphor that José Ortega y Gasset called transparency. When we look at ordinary objects, Ortega observed, our gaze is bounced back to us; it doesn't penetrate the surface. When we look at glass, however, something different happens. Our vision can pass through it, to things beyond; thus glass can serve as a passage to other objects. On the other hand, we can look at the glass itself; then it becomes itself an object, and, in a sense, opaque. An art object that is an iconic metaphor exists in a double condition of being itself and at the same time being transparent, that is, incorporating things beyond itself. This metaphorical art object, suggested Ortega, is an object that can be seen through itself.78 Thus we can see Pollock's Eyes in the Heat, as a determined struggle to maintain what could be viewed according to Ortega as a certain opacity, to stay true to the viscosity of his paint, the action of his hand, and the twodimensionality of the canvas; or, conversely or concurrently, we can see in it an Ortegan transparency: a reference to the long tradition of the iconography of the eye, from the genital Freudian eye of Surrealism back through the eyeas-articulation of Northwest Coast Indian art, to Leonardo's eye-as-regulator of nature, to the deified eye of the Egyptians.79 Similarly, in David Smith's Hudson River Landscape we can experience both the material lyricism of a metal line in space and/or the banks of the Hudson, its pools sparkling in sunlight and the tail of the plane from which Smith observed the inspiration for the sculpture. 460

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Mystic Oxymoron

Peirce linked one aspect of his definition of an icon to painting in a way that is particularly significant here, because it emphasized the collapse of a painting into its subject: "In contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that is not the thing, the distinction of the real and the copy disappears At that moment we are contemplating an icon"8® This aspect of the icon is the threshold of the next stage of Abstract Expressionist work: the attempt to detach itself altogether from the referring status of rhetorical structures. The development of such "transparent" objects, objects that could be seen through themselves, generated what may be viewed as a crisis of representation. Artists reacted to it in different ways, and with different levels of consistency. Some, such as de Kooning, Gottlieb, Bourgeois, Baziotes, Lip ton, and Roszak, explored the limits of representational territory but were convinced, for the most part, that to abandon referential structure was to abandon significance. Others, however, for example, Newman, Still, Pollock, Smith, Rothko, Reinhardt, and Ferber, attempted to eschew representation altogether in order to establish a new status for art. As Peirce's definition indicates, real iconic status is only achieved when the distinction between the real and the copy, the signifier and the signified, coalesces in the viewer's mind. In other words, when one can no longer distinguish between the art and what it means, when the art is what it means, then it is iconic. Viewed in this way, an icon is a tautology. In years shortly before and after The Action Is the Pattern, 1949, Herbert Ferber would say that "a sculpture should be a metaphor for an idea." By the late 19405, he began to believe that when the idea is abstract, so the metaphor should be, and vice versa. Critics have understood the tautology implied by Ferber's stance. As E. C. Goossen has remarked, Ferber's enterprise reminded his of Yeats's famous line, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"81 By 1952, with works such as Spheroid II, Ferber stopped using titles that referred to anything but the sculpture itself.82 In the late forties, Newman developed a new construction. His consolidation of his more varied types of compositions before 1948 into his landmark style in OnementI, 1948, has most often been linked to his interest in defining a nonobjective American sublime, a topic he discussed in the pages of Tiger's Eye in 1948.83 The sublime, as Newman described it there, is the key to this new structure. He believed that the American expression of the sublime would come from a "natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation1980s

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ship to the absolute emotions.... We are freeing ourselves," he wrote, "of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting."84 Newman took issue with the definitions of sublimity as an objective type of rhetorical structure proposed by Longinus, Kant, and Hegel, preferring what he saw as Edmund Burke's crude but definitive conclusion that beauty and the sublime are different types of things. Beauty was within the world of sensuous and rational apprehension that Newman identified with the rhetorical tradition, whereas the new experience of revelation that he wished to describe was metaphysical, "beyond the devices of Western painting."85 Newman did not claim in 1948 that he, or any of his contemporaries, had actually done a work that was sublime in the terms he described. In the progressive tense, he wrote, "we are finding the answer." By 1950 however, in Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, he produced a painting whose referents are not only ambiguous, as in Onement I, but are also paradoxical. Possible readings contradict one another. The red field is no longer more or less textured than the zips. As a result, the metaphor of void and solid, based on the viewer's determination of what is figure and what is ground, becomes problematic. Do we see the white zip to the left of center through a division in the red field, is it applied on top of the field (which then may be seen as running continuous behind it), or is the white on the same plane as the red, which could then be read as butting up against it? The coexistence of these mutually contradictory elements signals Newman's adoption of what could be called [an] antirhetorical device: the mystic oxymoron. As Kenneth Burke wrote in the pages of trans/formation in 1944, mystic oxymoron is the term in rhetoric for "the figure in which an epithet of a contrary significance is added to a word; e.g., cruel kindness; laborious idleness" Poets use such ambiguous imagery, Burke suggested, when they want to meditate on "motives-behind-motives," that is, when they want to express their subject at a meta-level.86 By constructing his painting so that it could be read simultaneously in contradictory ways, Newman was using the same strategies that Kenneth Burke attributed to Keats when he wrote of "unheard" melodies and "unravish'd" brides in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." It should be noted that not all artists who work with opposites are necessarily employing such oxymoronic structure for the purpose of escaping from rhetorical conventions. One indication that some Abstract Expressionists were using it for such purposes, however, lies in their statements of intention. Thus Barnett Newman, in declaring his search for the sublime, a contra462

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dictory sensation that derives pleasure from pain, a sensation that can be conceived but never really presented, was also declaring his pursuit of what Burke described as the mystic oxymoron.87 Whether or not Newman knew the term, his attempts in painting such as Vir Heroicus to create visually a metaphysical state outside the dominion of the structures of the rational and sensuous world demonstrate that he was using the structure of mystic oxymoron in his work. Rothko occupies a contradictory position, even within this group of artists devoted to equivocal structures. By the early 19505, most of his work was apparently "non-referential." It contained no recognizable mimetic symbols, and seldom even any suggestive titles to direct the viewer toward a topic that might be metaphorically attached to the stacks of radiating rectangles. As Rothko's friends and patrons grew to understand, however, the artist had rather specific associations ("tragedy, ecstasy, doom") in mind for his paintings. In works like Orange and Yellow, 1956, for instance, warmth of tones beneath the thinly painted rectangle of yellow in the upper register throbs through the top layer of pigment. This causes that eminently flat surface to appear to bulge paradoxically forward to accommodate this chromatic contradiction. In his last public speech in 1958, Rothko commented on the necessity of irony, the technique of saying less than one means, or even the opposite of what one means: "There are some painters who feel they must tell all, but I'm not among them."88 If one considers this reluctance in tandem with Rothko's distress when viewers failed to see that his work was about human emotion, human drama, and, in particular, tragedy, one can see that the oxymoronic structure within Rothko's paintings reflected paradoxes in his intentions —an impulse to withdraw into silence coupled with a deep need to communicate.89 The particular subjects of paradox in Rothko's late paintings, anchored as they were to the ironic communication of human tragedy, guaranteed its impurity. Ad Reinhardt also was much involved with paradox. Unlike Rothko, he was determined to keep his surfaces free of the mortality of reference. In his desire to construct a form that is imageless—much as Burke described the poet's use of the mystic oxymoron as a meditation on absolute sound, on the essence of sound, which would be soundless as the prime mover is motionless, or as the "principle" of sweetness would not be sweet, having transcended sweetness90—Reinhardt moved throughout his career to ever more reductive combinations of form and color. From his Dark Symbol in 1941 he moved through the use of metaphoric but still mimetically suggestive forms in Un1980s

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titled, 1946. At mid-century Reinhardt was using rectangles alone, layering one on top of another or, more simply, placing them on a single-colored field in such a way that their vertical and horizontal meetings iconically signified, at the same time that they illustrated, this meeting of opposites.91 But by 1952, he had restricted these vertical and horizontal meetings to the abutment of contiguous edges, as in Red Abstract, 1952. This produced a strange and contradictory warping, as the structure and the color contradict one another. The fact that these forms fit together edge-to-edge tells the viewer, "these rectangles are on the same plane," while the color, close-valued as it is, says, "on the contrary, this violet-tinged red floats at a deeper level, below this orangetinged one." As a result of the contradictory sensations, this symmetrical and ostensibly static composition heaves back and forth, its straight divisions pulled now this way, now that, as the three-dimensional language of its color struggles to free itself from the two-dimensional grid of form. As Reinhardt expressed himself several years later, his works produced "the completest control for the purest spontaneity."92 Reinhardt was most specific about the paradoxical nature of the program he advocated, a stance that time did not abate. If he ever had doubts about the project of pursuing "painting 'about which no questions can be asked,'"93 it was not apparent to his public. Like the long and resolute series of velvety "black" paintings at the end of his career, Reinhardt's most developed verbal statements only emphasized and amplified the possibility of producing work that defied, through its paradoxical structures, its status as a mediated object, an object whose "meaning" is framed by certain conventions: The forms of art are always preformed and premeditated. The creative process is always an academic routine and sacred procedure. Everything is prescribed and proscribed. Only in this way there is no grasping or clinging to anything. Only a standard form can be imageless, only a formularized art can be formulaless."94 The desire to create the thing-in-itself, to make a poem (or here, a painting or a sculpture) that expresses an idea in all its uncontaminated life and wholeness, beyond the reach of rhetorical structures such as allegory and metaphor, may be expressed in several ways. One way is the use of paradox. Another is the ostensible use of a prototypically referential mode, such as portraiture (Pollock's Portrait ofH. M., 1945, for instance, or Herbert Ferber's The Wise One [Portrait о/В. Ж], 1948, in a work that does not convey that degree of

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specificity. The result is a short-circuiting of the function of referring that calls attention to the very fact that the art does not refer. The implication is that the art is ineffable: a thing-in-itself, like a person, rather than something that refers to a person. A related antirhetorical strategy is the use of elements whose usual function is to refer to an attribute of an object (line, for instance, is often used to tell us about the shape of something) as having (as Kandinsky's paintings have regularly been read) an absolute significance independent of its usual referential function. Called to mind are Jackson Pollock's "classic" paintings. In 1947 Pollock began the poured paintings, which synthesized—in the Hegelian sense of the word—the symbolic and metaphoric aims of his earlier work in screens of paint whose figurative status was denied by most critics.95 As Lee Krasner reported, in these works Pollock chose to veil the image, inundating in paint anything that might refer to something in the outside world.96 Until the early 19505, these distinctive paintings, such as Convergence, 1952, displayed the reluctance to refer, demonstrated not only by Kenneth Burke's mystic oxymorons, but also by Ludwig Wittgenstein's gnomic propositions and Cleanth Brooks's paradoxes. Color as well as line has been used allegorically, symbolically, and metaphorically by the Abstract Expressionists as it has been by artists in the past. Some of the artists mentioned here, such as Robert Motherwell, never intended to sever color from its referential function. In 1963, for instance, Motherwell said, "Mainly I use each color as simply symbolic: ocher, for the earth, green for the grass, blue for the sea and sky. I guess that black and white, which I use most often, tend to be the protagonists."97 Others, however, such as Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt, intended their color to function independently, not as symbol or metaphor but as the indescribable absolute: the thing-in-itself.98 Still, for instance, saw his colors not as carriers for associations from previous experience, but as independent entities possessing a primary vigor. He described his experience with them this way: "As the blues or reds or blacks leap and quiver in their tenuous ambience or rise in austere thrusts to carry their power infinitely beyond the bounds of their limiting field, I move with them."99 Still's understanding of the action of color in his painting might be called gnomic. According to the dictionary, to be gnomic is to be obscure. There is, however, a particular type of tautological obscurity possessed by utterances

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such as Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" that can be created also by phrases that oppose common meanings, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Objects are colorless."100 All rhetorical agencies, even metaphorical ones, involve a criterion of usefulness. Paradoxes, contradictions, and tautologies, however, invalidate this criterion. They gesture toward the inexpressible, toward the transcendental, or toward a consciousness that cannot be discussed but that nevertheless lies at the basis of all logical operations. Of this Wittgenstein acknowledged, "There is indeed the inexpressible. It shows itself; it is the mystical."101 The oxymoronic structure of some mature Abstract Expressionists is like Wittgenstein's refusal to talk about metaphysics, and, in some cases, reflects also a conviction similar to his, that the inexpressible was located in feeling, not things.102 One could claim that the construction of paradox and tautology permits certain Abstract Expressionist productions to work on their audience in a way that involves a kind of thinking that is detached from rational understanding. In this view, art exists in its own universe, no longer as a commentary on life or reality, as Northrup Frye has suggested, but rather as a system of relationships that are life and reality contained. Thus Pollock's Shimmering Substance, 1946, both refers to and is a shimmering substance, in an iconic tautology whose self-sufficiency, from the vantage point of the 19805, could be said to represent a desire to exist apart from time and the world. Significantly, on this matter Frye quoted Wittgenstein—"We make to ourselves pictures of facts"—noting that the pictures to which the philosopher referred were themselves facts that existed only in a pictorial universe.103 David Smith may have been less concerned than Reinhardt and Still with escaping from the rhetorical limits of signifying activity. But by his use of tautology in structures such as his Five Units Equal, 1956, whose title mirrors its form, and by his paradoxes, such as those in Timeless Clock, 1957, whose blackening silver affirms rather than denies time, he also demonstrated a desire to achieve the goal Kenneth Burke attributed to the users of the mystic oxymoron: to move beyond the realm of becoming to that of being.104 It is doubtful if Wittgenstein's ideas were known by many Abstract Expressionists until after mid-century.105 Related ideas, however, were available in the forties through the writing of New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, whose classic treatise The Well Wrought Urn contained two chapters on paradox. Major poets like John Donne and William Wordsworth, Brooks told his readers, could only have accomplished the dignity and precision of their major poems by the use of paradox. Most of the language of lovers as well as that of religion is paradox, he observed, quoting such biblical oxymorons as "He 466

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who would save his life must lose it" and "The last shall be first." "Indeed," he observed, "almost any insight important enough to warrant a great poem apparently has to be stated in such terms."106 The conflict between visual and verbal communications, between the instinctual and the intellectual, remarked by artists and writers for centuries, is such a paradox, and one which Lee Krasner was well-situated to recognize. By 1946, when she painted Noon, Krasner had worked extensively with Cubist and Expressionist representational systems, to which she had been introduced in her years as a student of Hans Hofmann. Her interest in the power of symbols may have begun in the Hebrew mysticism she experienced in childhood, and it continued in her adult interest in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Celtic, and medieval scroll writing. She had read Jung's Integration of Personality and John Graham's Jungian System and Dialectics of Art, with its reverence for "primitive" art, and had, with Jackson Pollock, played at the Freudian game of Cadavre Exquis with the Mattas, the Motherwells, and the Bazioteses.107 By Krasner's repeated attestation, her art was based on her own experience, on her own "inner rhythm"; yet at the same time, her desire to communicate, to define her language in respect to the history of art was intense. In the late 19305, Krasner had written on the wall of her studio this quotation from Delmore Schwartz's A Season in Hell: To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast must I adore? What holy image is attacked: what hearts shall I break? What lie must I maintain? In what blood tread?108 One may read the regular containment of opulently painted forms in the lyric Noon, as well as the whole following little image series, with its reference to chance and control in the amalgam of written and drawn line as a series of oxymorons where the line exists, paradoxically, as both things at once. In contrast to her earlier work in which a reference to a still life or a figure hovered, however obscurely, the dead heat of the interlocked opposites in the little image series begs the question of the existence of a realm of timeless stasis. Commenting on her merging of script and image, the organic and the abstract, Krasner has said, "As I see both scales, I need to merge these two into the ever-present. What they symbolize I have never stopped to decide. You might want to read it as matter and spirit. The need to merge as against the need to separate."109 Clyfford Still's work after 1948 may also be considered in terms of a desire 1980s

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to escape the claims of time. Unlike Newman and Rothko, Still did not intend his tautological structures as metaphysical analogies of place or tragic irony.110 He saw his canvasses as operations of consciousness, the product of the confrontation of life and death forces in which self determination—freedom—was the prize.111 He found it necessary to withdraw his paintings from the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1948 and to officially remove the titles applied to them, whether by himself or by others, because referential titles (such as Premonition, Green Wheat, and Yellow Pelvis, titles he used in an exhibition in K)43)112 gave the unavoidable impression that the work referred to something beyond itself.113 During the next two years, as he worked out his version of the oxymoron in works like Oil on Canvas ig4g-C (PH-no), Still showed work in public only once, and that a painting done in 1947.114 In the summer of 1950, he wrote to a friend of this new approach he had developed: "A new implication, as unique as any science or form can be, is created. The old must be only its own proof. My work is equally independent at the moment—alive now, not proven by a continuum."115 "I paint only myself, not nature," Still told an interviewer in 1961.116 There were critics, such as Jermayne MacAgy, who saw by 1948 a distinction between the work of abstract painters who remained with metaphor and those who attempted to abandon this aspect of it: If we acknowledge the spatial idiom itself as a profound philosophical symbol, we may assume that these painters [John Atherton, I. Rice Pereira, Robert Motherwell], however various their outlook, depend in some ways on certain dimensional limits of knowledge. In recent years it has become increasingly apparent that Clyffbrd Still and Mark Rothko have been moving beyond these limits Their painting eludes the hallmarks of conventional spatial meaning. It is a common practice of abstract painters to refer to threedimensional space by a kind of pictorial metaphor.... Still and Rothko move in the opposite direction. Their metaphor invests the physical dimensions of painting with the values of a human realm that has been inaccessible to western art.117 MacAgy saw the two-dimensionality of Still's and Rothko's work in the late forties as an attempt to escape reference to the physical world. Her treatment of the elusion of those conventions by Rothko and Still indicates her comprehension of their program and, as her last sentence indicates, her belief in their accomplishment. Some critics not only recognized the departure on the part of some of the 468

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Abstract Expressionists from more conventional rhetorical devices, but invented remarkable strategies of their own that permitted them to discuss the art, despite its resistance to interpretation. Harold Rosenberg developed an existential argument that avoided the necessity of interpreting specifics by claiming that the real significance lay not in the work, but in the sincerity with which the painter applied his paint; the canvas was the arena in which the artist committed himself to courageously unpremeditated painterly choices.118 The meaning, Rosenberg implied, lay in this action, in these decisions, not in their product: the painting was only a ghost. Clement Greenberg avoided the analysis of referring altogether by denying that significant contemporary art had subject matter. He distinguished between subject matter and content: "every work of art must have content, but ... subject matter is something the artist does or does not have in mind when he is actually at work."119 And for Greenberg, one might say, the medium was the message: "The message of modern art, abstract or not, Matisse's, Picasso's, or Mondrian's, is precisely that means are content."120 For Greenberg, the function of advanced art was not to refer to objects or events beyond the works of art themselves. That was the job of literature. Painting and sculpture were to differentiate themselves from literature by jettisoning these (for them) expendable conventions. Thus the visual arts might be presented as coherent systems based purely on optical qualities, for painting, or purely on three-dimensional relationships, for sculpture.121 If one considers that when both of these essays were written many of the artists discussed were working with oxymoronic structures, and that Rosenberg and Greenberg were in frequent touch with a number of these artists (significantly, not the same ones: Rosenberg was close to Gorky, de Kooning, Newman, Motherwell, and Baziotes; Greenberg was more interested in the work of Smith, Still, and, of course, Pollock), it is not surprising that they supported, each in his own way, the concept that Abstract Expressionism was art that did not refer.122 The acceptance by these critics of the works as thingsin-themselves and their invention of critical strategies based on that acceptance have seemed odd and even somewhat perverse to later historians, especially when these strategies were retroactively used to discourage the search for subject matter in earlier works. As a result, scholars have engaged in increasing numbers in a series of fascinating investigations that read like accounts of scientific discoveries, or detective stories, aimed at revealing just what this rather thoroughly ignored subject-matter was.123 One effect of this barrage of new information, however, has been that of 1980s

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almost canceling out aspects of the original criticism that were valid. As this analysis suggests, Rosenberg and Greenberg were not off the mark at all, in one sense. They recognized that a major element of Abstract Expressionism at this definitive stage of its development involved the rather stunning attempt to escape from the status of art as a structure of meaning.124 Both of these major critics developed their critical frameworks at least in part to accommodate the artists' interest in, and, in some cases, determination to avoid, traditional rhetorical structures.125 Even the relationships described here as the metaphor and the icon, some of these artists seemed to feel, married meaning to referring, nervously restraining it from intercourse with being. Although the bulk of recent scholarship on Abstract Expressionism has concentrated on the retrieval of the subject-matter avoided by early criticism, not all more contemporary scholars are willing to dismiss the validity of the antirhetorical basis of such early criticism. Hubert Damisch, for instance, approached the subject by hailing Erwin Panofsky's iconology as a salutary, if finally unsuccessful, attempt to escape from traditional iconography that has tended to treat the appearance of a work as merely the prop for a signifier that comes from outside. Damisch is more hopeful about the promise of Charles Peirce's late distinction between the icon and the hypoicon, an idea that does not follow the representational behavior of a sign, and yet does refer, in what Damisch terms "some mysterious way." Perhaps the reason we cannot understand the ideas presented by artists such as Rothko and Newman is because they have invented a new way for signs to function, and we know only the old way—where the work is a vehicle for the "real" meaning. These artists, Damisch suggests, "seem to carry out their work on the near side of the figure if not against it, on the near side of the sign, if not against it."126 Art history has not progressed much beyond iconography, Damisch implied, but the "hypoiconic" practices of some Abstract Expressionists may point the way. Other critics, however, saw less promise in nonrhetorical positions. As Theodor Adorno has argued, when one collapses a sign into its signifier, meaning becomes a matter of faith, not of reason. His argument merits close reading: "The completely demythologized fact," as he wrote [we could consider this to include such objects as Newman's work after 1948, for instance; Pollock's "classical" paintings; Ferber's sculptures from the late forties; some of Smith's Cubis and perhaps some of his Circles and Zigs\, "would withhold itself from language [would be beyond interpretation]; through the mere act of intending the fact becomes an other [an other language, that is: by merely 470

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coming into existence through human hands, Adorno argues here, a fact, art, necessarily refers]—at least measured in terms of its idol of pure accessibility. That without language there is no fact [that unless a thing refers it is not art] remains, even so, the thorn in the flesh and the theme of positivism [therefore critics like Greenberg and Susan Sontag must write about the impossibility of interpretation], since it is here that the stubbornly mythical remainder of language [the incapability of interpretation] is revealed."127 Applied to "mature" Abstract Expressionism, Adorno's observations about existential thought may be taken to imply that while it is true, one could say, along with Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Damisch, that content—meaning in the traditional sense—in this art is just not the point, one cannot therefore assume that the work is beyond interpretation. As Adorno suggests, the refusal to participate in one language becomes, perforce, another.128 "In the plastic arts," wrote Ruth Field, "this annihilation of distance had resulted in a painting about painting."129 The later art and statements of Reinhardt, Still, and Ferber are inescapably, at least on one level, about the referential status of their work: they refer to the types of referring addressed in this essay. For Adorno this was a negative strategy, an attempt to attain a position beyond criticism, beyond dialectic adjustment. The later work of a number of Abstract Expressionists presents evidence that they saw it this way too. Allegory

Some of the artists who appeared to adopt, or who considered at one point in their careers the possibility of adopting a nonreferential position, later abandoned its strictures.130 Pollock, Smith, and Krasner, in particular, developed procedures involving pastiche, the simultaneous presentation of jarringly dichotomous codes, signaling the reemergence in their work of that bête noir, allegory.131 Other artists, including Motherwell and Gottlieb, also evolved such procedures without, however, attempting to abandon representational ambitions first. I mentioned earlier in this essay the current interest in a revival of an allegorical impulse in the arts; I would like to suggest here that an assessment of that réévaluation (which is beginning to look less like a revival than a re-cognition) should include certain late Abstract Expressionist practices whose allegorizing tendencies, expressed in pastiche, may now finally be championed rather than disparaged. Later Abstract Expressionism may be divided between those artists who accepted not only the inevitability but the desirability of referring, and those—like Reinhardt and Still—who did not. 1980s

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Some critics, as noted earlier, have seen the reemergence of allegory as a process of decay in which the human will is no longer able to endow objects with meaning.132 Late Abstract Expressionist allegory, however, must not be read as a wholly, or even mostly negative statement, even though it unquestionably represents a shattering freedom that can exist only by bursting the dream of a universal model of meaning. Allegory is intertextual: in it, one text is read through another, as the Old Testament becomes allegorical when it is read through the New. The allegorist uses already existing images and stories (as de Kooning used collage procedures in the "Woman" images; as Krasner used her own cut-up paintings, scraps of handmade paper, dripped and drawn line, and images of eyes and flowers as collage elements in her paintings of the early fifties; and, of course, as Motherwell, the Abstract Expressionist most fully and continuously attuned to collage, has used it throughout his career)133 but not to restore their original meaning. Rather, he or she replaces the old meaning with new ones, which are, nevertheless, dependent on the original meaning for their point. Thus allegory's "artificiality" is also the source of its strength: it redeems the past for the present. When Pollock reintroduced discernible figures into his work in 1951 (see, for example, Portrait and a Dream, 1953), he abandoned the sovereign privilege accorded to the icon, which as the most extreme type of metaphor, and therefore the furthest removed from the artificiality of allegory, was regarded as the utmost figure of authenticity. The later Pollock appeared to sense the interdependence in allegory of metaphor—how the cadence of his strokes embodied his spirit ("I am nature")—and a different kind of connection: metonymy, an accidental juxtaposition of items in time ("When you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge").134 One could see Pollock's rediscovery of allegory in the terms of de Man's Rousseau, for whom the rediscovery, far from being easy or spontaneous, implied "instead the discontinuity of a renunciation, even of a sacrifice."135 Like Pollock, Smith also produced later works that brought back earlier modes, the symbolic and the iconic as well as antirepresentational devices, using them in an allegorical pastiche, that is, as systems of representation whose juxtaposition in a single piece questions the possibility of representation but [in] Smith causes different ways of representing, or figuring, to operate simultaneously in the same work. One can discern found objects, the vise, for example, that iconically retain their identity while they represent a function. If Volton XX is a toolbench, however, in its overall configuration it also makes us think of a still life. And last but not least, the toolbench, as the locus of those 472

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devices—hammers, pincers, welding equipment, and so forth—through which the sculptor empowers himself to perform heroic feats, was a part of the subject matter of the "Voltris": as part of what that tour de force was about.136 One could say, then, that Volton XX is at once the artist's tools, his model, and his product: it is signified, signifier, and sign. Like Portrait and a Dream, Volton XX mixes modes of signifying, presenting presentation and representation in a melange that questions whether any agency of meaning may claim universal superiority. The allegorical procedures of this kind of montage, however, also had another effect, one that would have been abhorred by Reinhardt and Still but that was, one suspects, courted by the later Pollock, by Smith, by Gottlieb, by Krasner, Bourgeois, de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionists whose work either swung back and forth between modes of representation or who incorporated more than one mode in the same work. As a number of recent scholars have remarked, allegorical procedures empty images of their claim to metaphysical authority.137 If an artist uses symbol and icon at the same time, both modes are drained of claims to authenticity. Robert Motherwell mixed these modes in his Je t'aime series; the phrase "je t'aime" in Je t'aime IV, for instance, symbolically turns the meeting of the figure on the right and the taller figure on the left into a lover's discussion. At the same time, this narrative reading contrasts with the ambiguous address of the written phrase. Was the painter saying "je t'aime" to this particular painting, to painting itself, or was he addressing the phrase to the viewer, making the whole painting a kind of iconic love letter to humanity that announces and performs its function at the same time? Like the bricks in the Great Wall of China, the various possible meanings of these works may be carried off by their audience to build with according to the codes of their own desires. The kind of queasiness many viewers feel before this series may be ascribed not only to their (the viewers') resistance to sentimentality, but also to this mixing of modes, a bricolage that undercuts the very possibility of authenticity. The switch by some Abstract Expressionists to multiple and simultaneous kinds of signification and the alternate uses by others of various ways of referring imply a belief that the human search for a primordial totality is in vain— that a God's-eye view is not available. As de Kooning wrote in 1951, "Insofar as we understand the universe—if it can be understood—our doings must have some desire for order in them; but from the point of view of the universe, they must be very grotesque."138 It is possible, in fact, to read the allover configuration of much Abstract 1980s

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Expressionist painting as the allegorical legacy of these painters' and sculptors' attempt to disengage themselves from the metonymous, horizontal structure of narrative. In classical rhetoric, allegory is defined as a single metaphor in continuous series. Much classic Abstract Expressionism may be read as metaphor multiplied into sequential structure, as in Pollock's rhythmic interlaces, de Kooning's black-and-white paintings, Krasner's little image series, Bourgeois's figures, and Gottlieb's web paintings.139 One could, then, with hindsight, define the late procedures of certain Abstract Expressionists as postmodern. We have seen that the gnomic selfsufficiency of classic or "high" Abstract Expressionism (in which, as noted above, Abstract Expressionists engaged to varying degrees) assumed that the rhetorical assumption that images refer could be bracketed, and that the art object could be a thing-in-itself. Postmodernism practice and some later Abstract Expressionists, in contrast to this, do not attempt to suspend reference, but work instead to compare and problematize the activity of referring.140 The difference between this postmodern allegory and the kind of allegory the Abstract Expressionists were trying to escape in the early forties is that this newer allegory more openly investigates metaphor and metonymy simultaneously: it examines the meanings available in the configuration and relation of the images themselves and compares these observations with the meanings available in the things to which the titles and images refer.141 Thus one could say that later Abstract Expressionist construction juxtaposes the insights at which Damisch hints to the imperatives of Adorno in a conversation whose contradictions contemporary artists continue to plumb.

Notes

1. Clement Greenberg, interview with James T. Valliere, 1972. Jackson Pollock Papers, AAA-SI, 3084:827-29. 2. For Gorky, see Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols (Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld &: Shram, 1980); the literature on Pollock's Jungian concerns includes articles and comments by David Freke, Donald Gordon, Rosalind Krauss, Elizabeth Langhorne, David Rubin, William Rubin, Irving Sandier, Jonathan Welch, and Judith Wolfe. The connection in David Smith's work between sexual aggression and war has been most effectively chronicled by Robert S. Lubar and by Justin Carlino. See also note 12. 3. W.M. Parrish, "The Tradition of Rhetoric," The Quarterly Journal of Speech (Urbana-Champaign), Dec. 1947, pp. 464-67; James H. McBurney and Ernest J. Wrage, The Art of Good Speech (New York: Prentice Hall, 1953), pp. 8-15 and 103-5; Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," A llegories of Reading (New 474

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Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 10. See Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 189, for a comment that indicates that of these two meanings of "rhetoric," the former is still the most familiar. 4. William Baziotes, "Symposium: The Creative Ргосе88,'МД Jan. 15,1954, p. 33. 5. In 1943, Joseph Shipley's Dictionary of World Literature defined allegory as "an extended story that may hold interest for the surface tale . . . as well as for the (usually ethical) meaning borne along." A symbol, on the other hand, was "a sign of something beyond the object or idea that it denotes, of another level of significance that somehow reaches forth to embrace the spirit, mankind, the mysteries words cannot otherwise capture that underlie and determine the universe and human destiny" (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1943), pp. 21 and 568. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964) has since examined the basis of the romantic prejudice against allegory. Useful discussions on the historical distinction between symbol and allegory may be found also in Joel Fineman, "The Structure of Allegorical Desire," in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 27-30; Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983 [1971]), pp. 187-228; and Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," October (Cambridge, Mass.), Spring 1980, pp. 67-80. 6. For Pollock's development see the essay by Eugene Thaw in Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), vol. i, pp. xiv-xvi. 7. W. Jackson Rushing has convincingly compared the configuration and placement of the figures in the Pollock painting to a pair of "guardian" officials illustrated in an article about the Zia Pueblo Indians in the Bureau of American Ethnology Report of 1894. "Jackson Pollock and Native American Indian Art," a paper given at the College Art Association Conference, New York, Feb., 1986. 8. One of the most influential distinctions between metaphor and metonymy was made by Roman Jakobson in "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasie disturbances," in Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language ( Janua Linguarum, Series Minor I, The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 69-96. Terence Hawkes summarizes the aspects of Jakobson's discussion relevant to this essay in Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 76-87. Allegory was linked to metonymy before Jakobson, however, as outlined in Fineman, "The Structure of Allegorical Desire." For a discussion of some of the métonymie characteristics of allegorical painting see Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 86-88. 9. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), vol.1, p. 211. 10. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982 [1942]), pp. 281, 284-87. This determination of a symbol as a term whose meaning is not single is quite different from its usage in some psychologi-

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cal literature. Jacques Lacan's distinctions between the Symbolic and Imaginary stages of child development have been brought into the discussion of contemporary art by Rosalind Krauss. In "Notes on the Index," Part i, following Lacan, she characterized the symbol as an arbitrary, stable, preestablished relationship. She does so to emphasize the causally determined, indexical nature of shifters, pronouns like you, and adverbs like here, whose meaning depends on their context. October (Cambridge, Mass.), Spring 1977, p. 70. In her emphasis on the static nature of the symbol, Krauss participates in a more general current dissatisfaction with symbol and metaphor as superior figures. See note 5. 11. Karen Wilkin, David Smith (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), pp. 34-35. 12. Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 62-75; Robert Lubar, "Metaphor and Meaning in David Smith's Jurassic Bird," AM, Sept. 1984, pp. 78-86;Justin Carlino, "The Significance of the Cannon in the Work of David Smith," a paper given at the Fifth Annual Symposium on Contemporary Art, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, Oct. 18,1985. 13. Richard Poussette-Dart, talk at the Boston Museum School, 1951. Reprinted in Maurice Tuchman, New York School (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1965), p. 125. 14. Quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961 [1957]), p. 98. 15. Rothko's sense in this matter was allied to that of Bergson, who, as Langer noted in 1942, speculated that a symbolism of light and color, or of tone, that was not linked to verbal, i.e., rational knowledge, might present the viewer with a kind of "non-discursive symbolism ... which the mind reads in a flash." Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 98. 16. Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1936), p. 66. 17. L. Bailey Van Hook, "Robert MotherwelPs Mallarmé''s Swan" AM, Jan. 1983, pp. 104-5; MotherwelPs quotation in Van Hook reprinted from Robert Motherwell, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," AD, Feb. 1951, p. 27. For Baziotes' interest in symbolism, see the essays by Barbara Cavalière and Mona Hadler in William Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition, organized by Michael Preble (Newport Beach, Calif.: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1978). 18. One should note, however, that unlike earlier works such as Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943, whose two figures call to mind the living and dead Mexican hero, Mallarme's Swan does not display such commonly recognized forms. It thus spans the rhetorical distance between the work of the earlier forties and the more metaphorical, iconic mode of the Spanish Elegies. 19. As far as this author knows, there is no single source that catalogues the multifarious psychological aspects of Abstract Expressionism in general, and it is not possible here to give more than some brief references. Sources include the writing of scholars mentioned in note 3 as well as work by Mary Davis MacNaughton and Stephen Polcari. 20. W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks provide an overview of criticism based

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21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

on myth in Chapter 31, "Myth and Archetype," of their Literary Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). Sigmund Freud, the Standard Edition, 25 vols., trans, and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 5, Chapter 6 (E), "Representation by Symbols in Dreams—Some Further Typical Dreams," pp. 352-53, 360,394. For further discussion of the development of Freud's understanding of the function of the symbol, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 96-100. For a discussion of the possible levels of meaning in The Liver is the Cock's Comb see Rand, Arshile Gorky, The Implications of Symbols, pp. 183-86. Ibid., p. 186; Ann Gibson, "Theory Undeclared: Avant-Garde Magazines as a Guide to Abstract Expressionist Images and Ideas," Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Delaware, 1984, pp. 289-90. Gorky had opportunities to know about Freud in detail. Besides his close relationship with the Surrealist Matta and his association with André Breton (Breton gave Gorky many of his titles [David Hare, interview with the author, New York, Jan. 26,1982]), whose Freudian concerns Gorky could hardly have escaped, Gorky himself was an intellectual omnivore. As May Natalie Tabak, widow of Harold Rosenberg, recalled, "the idea of Gorky not knowing anything that was going on was just incomprehensible. He got letters from Europe, he got magazines from Europe. Before a new movement started, he'd know about it. Even the papers, the magazines he couldn't read himself, he'd get somebody to read for him. He got everything, he knew everything that was going on. All of us, for about twenty years, knew Gorky on different levels. He was a complicated man." Interview with the author, New York, Apr. 1982. Freud's conception of the symbol as a double-meaning but conventional sign was essentially similar to that formulated by Charles Saunders Peirce in the bestknown of his many classifications of signs. Peirce's distinctions between symbol and icon were not always consistent, but by the forties, scholars defined Peirce's symbol as a sign that represents its object by a conventional rule used by the observer. Although Peirce did discuss the function of symbols, his definition of the icon (treated later in this essay) is quite close to some Abstract Expressionists' understanding of their practices. For a discussion of Peirce as he was read in the forties, see Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks, "Peirce's Sixty-six Signs," The Journal of Philosophy (New York), no. 42,1945, pp. 383-88; and Arthur Burks, "Icon, Index, and Symbol," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Buffalo), no. 9, 1948-49, pp. 674-75. Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: W.S. Dell & C.F. Baynes,i933),p.i72. Carl Gustav Jung, The Integration of Personality. Trans. Stanley Dell (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1939), pp. 53,275-76. Ibid., p. 89. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 285. Leo Yamin, telephone interview with the author, Mar. 21, 1986. Yamin, a poet,

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and his wife, the painter Alice Yamin, were close friends of the Barnett Newmans and the Adolph Gottliebs throughout the thirties and forties. For Pollock's ownership of Langer's book, see O'Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 195. 31. Wayne Anderson, American Sculpture in Process: igjo-igyo (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1975), p. 66; Joan Pachner, "Theodor Roszak and David Smith: A Question of Balance," AM, Feb. 1984, pp. 107,114, note 56. 32. Quoted in Stewart Buettner, American Art Theory: 1945-1970 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 82. The quotation is excerpted from an interview with James Eliot, 1956, part 2, AAA-SI. 33. Robert Lubar, "Metaphor and Meaning in David Smith's Jurassic Bird" pp. 78-86, esp. pp. 79, 85. As the title indicates, Lubar has used the term metaphor where I would use symbol. My point here is not to dispute his usage. There are metaphorical relations as well as symbolic elements in Jurassic Bird. The purpose of this essay is to distinguish more clearly among various ways of referring and of avoiding reference so that such distinctions may be discussed. 34. Mary Davis MacNaughton, "Adolph Gottlieb: His Life and Art," Part i in Adolph Gottlieb (New York: The Arts Publisher, Inc., 1981), p. 26, note 14 and Appendix A, p. 169. Irving Sandier, The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970), p. 70, note 2. 35. Quoted by Mary Davis MacNaughton in Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective (New York: The Arts Publisher, Inc. in association with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc., 1981), p. 38, from a statement by Gottlieb in "American Exhibit Scores," The American Weekend, Apr. 18,1959, p. 12. 36. MacNaughton, Adolph Gottlieb, p. 34. 37. For Rothko, see Bonnie Clearwater, Mark Rothko: Works on Paper (New York: Hudson Hills, 1984), p. 26. Andersen, American Sculpture in Process, p. 60. 38. Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 173. In 1949, Greenberg remarked on the lack of this Gothic spirit in modern life, and, in an earlier article, referred to Pollock's work as Gothic, narrow, and powerful. "Our Period Style," Partisan Review (New York), Nov. 1949, p. 1135, and "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture," Horizon (New York), Oct. 1947, p. 27. 39. Scholarship since the fifties would dispute the validity of metaphor's claim to nonmetonymic as well as to nonmimetic superiority (for instance, de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," pp. 12-15). Such thinking is responsible for the revalorization of allegory indicated in notes 5 and 12 and the positive description of allegorical pastiche at the end of this essay. For a survey of some connections between mimesis and metonymy, see Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 78-82. 40. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 93. 41. Ibid., pp. 91-98; Gibson, "Theory Undeclared," pp. 207-12. 42. Joseph T. Shipley, The Dictionary of World Literature (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943), pp. 377-78. See pp. 567-68 for metaphor as a type of symbol. 43. Gibson, "Theory Undeclared," pp. 211-19.

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44- André Breton, "Rising Sign," 1947, in Franklin Rosemont, ed. What Is Surrealism? (New York: Monad Press, 1978), p. 281. 45. Krauss, for instance, believes with justification that The Hero is female, while I maintain that it is Smith himself. See note 42. 46. LA. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), especially Ch. 5, "Metaphor," and Ch. 6, "Command of Metaphor." 47. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (New York: New Directions, 1951), Ch. 18; Max Black, "Metaphor," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (London), New Series, vol. i, 1955, pp. 273-94. Although the status of the metaphor, like the symbol, as the dominant and truest rhetorical figure has come under fire in the last decades, it continues to elicit much interest among scholars. See, for instance, Terence Hawkes's survey, Metaphor (London: Methuen, 1972), On Metaphor, collected essays by various scholars, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), and the experientialist approach of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). 48. In his introductory essay to American Art at Mid-Century, E.A. Carmean, Jr., suggested that in Abstract Expressionist painting, metaphors are stated structurally rather than symbolically. "A study of this transformation of the subject from symbol to structure would clearly be of importance, if it were possible," he remarked. The definition of the interactive aspect of later Abstract Expressionist metaphor, above, and of its ideographic and iconic dimensions, which follows in this essay, attempts to articulate the transition noted by Carmean. 49. Seymour Lipton Papers, AAA-SI, 0386:0074. 50. Interview with the author, Orient Point, Long Island, Feb. 20,1982. Grippe was one of the artists invited; however, he had already discarded the mimetic symbolism of the hands and mouths apparent in The City #i for the more constructive direction of Improvisation, 1944. 51. Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks, pp. 20-21. 52. "Still," ЛД May 1947, p. 50. 53. Emily Genauer, review of sculptures chosen for an international competition whose theme was "The Unknown Political Prisoner," sponsored by the London Institute of Contemporary Art. New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 4,1953. 54. Black, "Metaphor," p. 286. 55. For a discussion of Still's development in these years, see Stephen Polcari, "The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Clyfford S till,"-4/, May/June 1982, pp. 23-27. 56. Ibid. 57. Newman would probably have included the work of other artists, such as Gottlieb, especially, but the show consisted only of artists who were currently showing with Betty Parsons. 58. Douglas MacAgy, "A Symposium: The State of American Art," Magazine of Art

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(Washington, D.C.), Mar. 1949, p. 94. Quoted in Stephen С. Foster, The Critics of Abstract Expressionism (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1980), p. 40. 59. Ruth Field, "Modern Poetry: The Flat Landscape," Trans/formation (New York), vol. 1,1952, pp. 152-53. 60. This observation is similar to Paul de Man's arguments for the necessity of rhetoric devices, such as metaphor, to language, and therefore to thought itself. "The Epistemology of Metaphor," in Sacks, éd., On Metaphor, p. 17. 61. Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 213. 62. "Metaphor and Transcendence," in Sacks, éd., On Metaphor, p. 78. 63. Barnett Newman, "The Ideographic Picture" (New York: Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947). Reprinted in Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), pp. 550-51. Original, with a list of titles of artists' works, in Betty Parsons gallery files. 64. Ezra Pound, А В С of Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1934), p. 7. 65. For a discussion of Pound's theory of the ideogram and his debt to Ernest Fenellosa, see Frederick K. Hargreaves,Jr., "The Concept of Private Meaning in Modern Criticism," Critical Inquiry (Chicago), Summer 1981, pp. 734-35. Newman approximated this thought not only in his essay, "The Ideographic Picture," but also in his essay to accompany the Northwest Coast Indian Painting exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the fall of 1946.1 am grateful to Jack Tilton for providing me with a copy of this essay from the Betty Parsons gallery files. Goldwater used Albert Aurier's distinction between academic idéalisme and the idéasme of the Symbolists. Academic idéalisme was merely personification or allegory, whereas idéasme was true Symbolism, in which the artist sought an expressive unit of form and meaning. Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (London: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1979), p. 9; see also p. 94 and note 18. 66. Ezra Pound, Instigations (New York: Boni &, Liveright, 1920), p. 376. 67. Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955 [1927]), p. 184. 68. These dimensions were, however, explored by Boas's students, such as Ruth Benedict, to whose ideas, such as those expressed in Patterns of Culture, the Abstract Expressionists were closer than they were to those of her mentor. See "Primitivism as a Theme," introduction to Ch. 12, Part 2, in Gibson, "Theory Undeclared." 69. Peirce defined and redefined his terms over the course of his career. For an estimate of his most considered definitions of these terms, see Arthur W. Burks, "Icon, Index, and Symbol," pp. 673-89. 70. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., The Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce, Vols. 1-6 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1931-1935), vol. 2, pp. 157,247. 71. For a discussion of the role of the interprétant in Peirce's sign system, see Burks, "Icon, Index, and Symbol," pp. 674-77.

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72. Harold Rosenberg, "Icon Maker: Barnett Newman," The Redefinition of Art (New York, Collier Books, 1972), pp. 96-97. 73. Rothko's move from the Surrealistic biomorphism of his undersea creatures to the more abstract work of the late forties coincided with a lessened concentration on watercolor as a medium and more on oil on canvas. Bonnie Clearwater, Mark Rothko: Works on Paper, pp. 31-32. For Rothko's religious subjects, see Anna Chave, Mark Rothko's Subjects (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1983). 74. Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process," in Sacks, On Metaphor, p. 148. 75. Leo Yamin, letter to the author, Aug. 9,1986; telephone interview with the author, Mar. 21,1986. 76. Art Bulletin (New York), Mar. 1949, pp. 72-73.1 am grateful to Professor Creighton Gilbert for calling my attention to Morris's book and Gombrich's review of it. 77. David Loshak, letter to the authorjan. 23,1982. For more on Iconograph, its staff, contributors, and its program, see Gibson, "Theory Undeclared," Part i, Ch. i. 78. José Ortega y Gasset, "An Essay in Aesthetics by way of a Preface," [1914] in Phenomenology and Art, Philip W. Silver (New York: W. W. Norton &, Co., Inc., 1975), pp. 139-40. 79. For an examination of some of Pollock's possible immediate sources for imagery involving the significance of the eye, see Jeanne Siegel, "The Image of the Eye in Surrealist Art and Its Psychoanalytical Sources, Part I: The Mythic Eye," AM, Feb. 1982, pp. 102-06; and "Part II: René Magritte," AM, Mar. 1982, pp. 116-19. 80. Charles Saunders Peirce, Collected Papers, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1931-58), vol. 3, p. 362. 81. E.G. Goossen, Herbert Ferber (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981), p. 67. 82. Ibid. 83. See, for instance, Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New York: Harper &, Row Publishers, Inc., 1975), pp. 210-11. 84. Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now," Tiger's Eye (New York), Dec. 1948, P. 5385. Ibid., pp. 52-5386. Kenneth Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," Trans/formation (New York), vol. 2,1944, PP-164-65. 87. For a discussion of this aspect of the sublime, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1979]), pp. 77-78. My thanks to Anna Chave for this suggestion. 88. Dore Ashton, "Art: Lecture by Mark Rothko," New York Times, Oct. 31, 1958, p. 26. 89. Anna Chave, "Mark Rothko's Subject-Matter," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale Univ., 1982, esp. pp. 108-9,176. 90. Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," pp. 164-65. 91. Reinhardt had experimented with a more obvious interpretation of the fusion of word and image that the word iconograph implied, in works such as his Untitled

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of 1947, reproduced in Ad Reinhardt (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981), p. 15. 92. Ad Reinhardt, "25 Lines of Words on Art," It Is (New York), Spring 1958, p. 42. I wish to thank Adrian Jones for this reading of Reinhardt's Red Abstract. 93. Ibid. 94. Ad Reinhardt in Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects (New York: New York Cultural Center, 1970), p. 46. 95. For a Hegelian reading of Pollock's poured paintings, see Rosalind Krauss, "Contra Carmean: The Abstract Pollock," Art in Am., Summer 1982, pp. 123-31 ff. 96. It appears that this "veiling" was intentional on Pollock's part in these years. Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, was not the only one to indicate this (O'Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 263). Edward T. Hults remembers being in Pollock's studio and pointing out what looked to him like a horse's head in a big canvas on the floor. Pollock got a can of paint and obliterated it, saying, "Now you don't see no more horse's head." Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), pp. 140-41. 97. Robert Motherwell, "A Conversation at Lunch," in An Exhibition of the Work of Robert Mother-well (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art, 1963), n.p. Dore Ashton affirms that this is still the case, "On Motherwell," in Robert Motherwell (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Abbeville Press, 1983), PP. 34-3798. For this idea regarding the function of color and for the previous point about the function of naming when the name and the referent don't correspond, I am indebted to the discussions in Steven Winspur, "The Poetic Significance of the Thing-in-Itself," Sub-stance (Madison, Wise.) vol. 12, note 4,1983, pp. 41-49. 99. Clyfford Still in Clyfford Still (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976), p. 122. 100. Angus Fletcher, "Wittgenstein's Gnomics: Thinking a Poem." Address given at Yale Univ., New Haven, Conn., Mar. 25, 1986. Fletcher's reference was to Wittgenstein's observations on the difficulty of associating in any secure way color to objects in Remarks on Color, éd. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977). 101. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 6.522. 102. Jorn K. Bramann, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Modern Arts (Rochester, N.Y.: Adler Publishing Co., 1985), pp. 18-20. 103. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 122. 104. Kenneth Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," pp. 164-65. 105. Wittgenstein was read and discussed by Abstract Expressionists and others, but not until the fifties. Lionel Abel, interview with the author, New York, July 29,1982. 106. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Publishers, 1975 [1947]), pp. 17-18. 482

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107. Ellen G. Landau, "Lee Krasner's Early Career," parts i and 2, Oct. and Nov. 1981. 108. Laudau, "Lee Krasner," Part i, Oct. 1981, pp. 117,121,122, notes 39,57; and Part 2, Nov. 1981, p. 87. 109. Cindy Nemser, "A Conversation with Lee Krasner," AM, Apr. 1973, p. 44. no. Neither Newman nor Rothko intended that his later work would have no effect on human activities. They were interested in developing structures whose usefulness depended on the configuration of the paint, on the signifier, that is, in a new way that avoided referring per se. For Rothko's continued interest in conveying such content as human values in a historical context, see Dore Ashton, "Art: Lecture by Rothko"; for Newman's resistance to formalist readings of his work and his emphasis on his connectedness to human situations, see his catalogue statement in United States of America, VIII, Sâo Paulo Bienal, 1965, n.p. in. Donald Kuspit, "Clyfford Still: The Ethics of Art," 1977, reprinted in The Critic Is Artist: The Intentionality of Art (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984), pp. 188,191-92. 112. Polcari, "The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Clyfford Still," p. 151, note 12. 113. In a letter of Nov. 25,1948, Still instructed Betty Parsons to roll his work up and give it to Mark Rothko to store for him, and advised Parsons that he did not want to show publicly. Betty Parsons Papers, AAA-SI, 68-72:673. 114. He exhibited Oil on Canvas ig4j-HNo. 2 (PH-23J) at the Third Annual Exhibition of Painting at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco from Dec. i, 1948 to Jan. 6,1949. Clyfford Still, ed. John P. O'Neill (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), p. 187. 115. Quoted in Clyfford Still, ed. John P. O'Neill, p. 29. 116. J. Benjamin Townsend, "An Interview with Clyfford Still," Gallery Notes (Buffalo), Summer 1961, p. n. 117. Jermayne MacAgy, foreword to the catalogue for the Third Annual Exhibition of Painting, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1948-49. Quoted in Clyfford Still, ed. John P. O'Neill, p. 188. 118. Harold Rosenberg, "The Action Painters,'M^ Sept. 1952, pp. 22-23,49~5°119. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Lacoôn," Partisan Review (New York), Fall 1940, pp. 229-300. 120. Clement Greenberg, "Irrelevance Versus Responsibility," Partisan Review (New York), May 1948, p. 577. For a discussion of Greenberg's distinction between form and content see Piri Halasz, "Art Criticism (and Art History) in New York: The 19403 vs. the 19803: Part 3: Clement Greenberg," AM, March 1983, pp. 80-88. 121. Clement Greenberg, "American-Type Painting,'Mrf and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press 1961 [1955]), pp. 208-29. Interestingly, although Greenberg defined his criteria for painting and sculpture as optical systems opposed to, or outside of, what he saw as the referential core of literature, for some theorists, such as Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers, Greenberg's system would have been 1980s

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122.

123.

124.

125.

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linguistic at least to the core. Lévi-Strauss believed that language was in essence nonreferential, just as Greenberg believed that what was most essential in the visual arts was systemic, not referential. See Ch. 3, "Structuralism in Linguistics" in Simon Clarke, The Foundations of Structuralism (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1981). Some of the critics' structures, following the paintings, were oxymoronic, too: Greenberg wrote of Newman's "pregnant 'emptiness'" and "darkly burning pictures" (Ibid., p. 255), and Rosenberg that "the painter gets away from art through his act of painting." Rosenberg's well-known essay, in fact, is to an extent built on oxymoronic propositions, whose essence to Rosenberg is existential, such as his rhetorical series of questions, "What is a painting that is not an object, nor the representation of an object, nor the analysis or impression of it, nor whatever else a painting has ever been—and which has ceased to be the emblem of a personal struggle?" Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," PP-28,35. There are far too many contributions to mention here; but a representative list would include, in addition to those mentioned elsewhere in this text, David Antin, Barbara Cavalière, James E. B. Breslin, Mary Davis, Anne Carnegie Edgerton, Evan Firestone, Jonathan Fineberg, Robert Hobbs, Gail Levin, Melvin Lader, Robert S. Mattison, Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock, April J. Paul, Stephen Polcari, Charles Stuckey, Harry Rand, Jeffrey Weiss, and Kirk Varnedoe. These newer efforts have explored the intellectual and personal motivations involved in the production of these works as well as their contexts, and thus broadened the range of associations available to viewers. They have educated the audience for these works in the best sense—that is, they have given them more interpretive choices to articulate what are often strong reactions to these paintings and sculptures. By demonstrating the range of literary, philosophical, art-historical, psychological, and even anecdotal subject-matter buried in these works, and by paying attention to their political, religious, and economic functions, scholars have opened them, not only qualitatively, to a public they have always had, but quantitatively, to a public to whom their former resistance to interpretation was a barrier they could not overcome. I use the term meaning here in the sense that it was qualified by Gottlieb: "I frequently hear the question, 'What do these images mean?' This is simply the wrong question. Visual images do not have to convey either verbal thinking or optical facts. A better question would be, 'Do these images convey any emotional truth?'" The New Decade (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1955), p. 36. The third major critic of this period, Thomas B. Hess, while he shared some convictions with Rosenberg, has received less attention perhaps in part because his attentive analysis of subject matter and of the specific differences among artists' intentions has made his criticism appear less extreme, and therefore, less effective as a foil for current retrospective evaluations. Donald Kuspit, "Two

Critics: Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg,"^ Sept. 1978, p. 32; and Susan Klein, "Thomas Hess and the New York School," unpublished paper, 1984. 126. Hubert Damisch, "Semiotics and Iconography," in The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Lisse: The Peter De Ridder Press, 1975), P

*U* 127. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973 [1964]), pp. 41-42,46. 128. Such observations have sparked various opinions regarding the status of art whose referring function has been thus suspended and the uses that may be made of it. A number of historians have felt that this abdication plays into the hands of established political and economic powers (Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," AF, May 1972, pp. 43-54; Eva Cockroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Jejune 1974, pp. 39-41; Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art); others that it waits for a voice to clarify its purpose (Paul Rogers, "Towards a Theory/Practice of Painting: Abstract Expressionism in the Surrealist Discourse," AF, Mar. 1980, pp. 53-61), or that it stands as a demonstration of the importance of belief in the understanding of art (Donald Kuspit, "Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still," 1978 in The Critic Is Artist, pp. 199-215). 129. Ruth Field, "modern poetry: the flat landscape," p. 155. 130. A number of Abstract Expressionists, however, maintained whatever degree of nonreferentiality they had attained by the fifties: Ferber, Newman, Reinhardt, Rothko, and Still, for instance. 131. As Frederic Jameson has described it, pastiche involves the idea of a failure of art to accomplish its traditional personal and social goals along with a nostalgic desire to believe again in the possibility of individualism. The metonymy of pastiche is the mechanism by which these desires to revive the past are gratified. "Postmodernism and the Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 113-16. For Jameson, pastiche is parody after the retirement of established values, a practice in which some contemporary critics have seen the latest manifestation of modernism's lost subversiveness. Benjamin Buchloh, "Parody and Appropriation in Francis Picabia, Pop, and Sigmar Polke,'MF, Mar. 1982, p. 34. 132. This was Frederic Jameson's reading of Walter Benjamin's understanding of allegory. Marxism and Form (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 70-73. Ш- Jorn Merkert, "The Painting of Willem de Kooning," pp. 125-26 in Willem de Kooning by Paul Cummings, Jôrn Merkert, and Claire Stoullig (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984); Rose, Lee Krasner, p. 76; E. A. Carmean, The Collages of Robert Motherwell (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1972). 134. First quotation, 1942: recorded in Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, ed. Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene Thaw (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), p. 226; second

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135. 136.

137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

quotation, 1956, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, p. 82. For a summary of the basis of the privileging of metaphor and recent reassessments of importance of metonymy [allegory] see Jonathan Culler, "The Turns of Metaphor," in The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981). De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," p. 205. Smith's commission at Voltri was for one or two sculptures. He produced instead twenty-six of monumental size, causing public astonishment at his prodigious output. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, pp. 35-36. Gregory L. Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism," pp. 95-99 in The AntiAesthetic, provides a digest of these claims. Willem de Kooning, "The Renaissance and Order," Trans/formation (New York), vol. 1,1951, p. 87. Craig Owens discussed the sequential structure of pictorial allegory as well as other aspects of allegorical structure in "The Allegorical Impulse." For this definition of postmodernism, see Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse," Part 2, pp. 78-79Maureen Quilligan discusses this kind of allegorical activity in The Language of Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 30-33.

I wish to thank some of my colleagues—Bruce Altshuler, Anna Chave, Joseph Marioni, and Jesse Murray—who read and commented on this manuscript at an earlier stage.

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The 1990s RE(DE)FINING ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

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STEPHEN POLCARI

Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism

In the months of crisis before and during World War II, Martha Graham (b. 1893) reflected, "You do not realize how the headlines that make daily history affect the muscles of the human body." One scholar recently expanded on Graham's observation: "Wariness, the first symptom of fear, was in the air, and though no one spoke openly about private dread, Martha could read nervous tension in her dancers' bodies."1 For Graham as well as for many visual artists, the coming of the war called for a more critical investigation of the human experience than ever before. It also brought forth a more powerful solution to human need in crisis: inner regeneration, or, as Graham often phrased it in theme and form, rebirth. As America entered the second great cataclysm of the twentieth century, Graham increasingly moved toward psychological introspection as a subject in her art. In fact, by the time war clouds overshadowed Europe in 1937, she had already stated that for her the goal of dance was to "make visible the interior landscape," and she described her work as "journeying" into herself. Dance, in Graham's mind, had the power to move into the "depths of man's inner nature, the unconscious, where memory dwells." She added: As such it inhabits the dancer. It goes into the experience of man, the spectator, awakening similar memories. Art is the evocation of man's inner nature. Through art, which finds its roots in man's unconscious—race memory—is the history and psyche of race brought into focus.2 Graham's turn toward psychological introspection was part of a larger turn in American culture. As the war broke out, American artists of many persuasions, having witnessed with alarm the crises of the 19305, confronted an even more serious disaster through an investigation of man and civilization. In his response to the war and to his work with the Office of War Information, Ben Shahn (1898-1969), the quintessential social artist of the 19305, wrote that he was not the only artist who had been seduced by a social dream that could no longer be reconciled with the private and inner objectives of art.3 Of major significance in Graham's turn were its parallels to American art,

SOURCE: Smithsonian Studies in American Art (Winter 1990), 3-28. Reprinted with the permission of Stephen Polcari. 489

particularly Abstract Expressionism, the most important American art of the 19405, if not the twentieth century. Abstract Expressionism, too, was an art of introspection largely, although not exclusively, induced by the war. Thus, just as European modern dance and ballet participated in developments in the visual arts through the work of Léon Bakst (1886-1924), Pablo Picasso (18811973), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), and many others, so the themes and forms of Graham's work were part of the historical and cultural changes taking place in American art at a crucial time in history. Direct connections between Graham and the Abstract Expressionists are well known. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), the Abstract Expressionist sculptor, was Graham's set designer from 1935 to 1966, and her audiences were often filled with painters and sculptors.4 As a whole, however, Graham's dance theater anticipated and illuminated Abstract Expressionism in an unprecedented and heretofore unrecognized way. To view Graham from the 19405 on is to view the idiom of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Mark Rothko (19031970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), and others in three-dimensional movement and performance. Graham's art, like much Abstract Expressionism, was shaped as a mytho-ritual quest. As with the artists, Graham had always been interested in human behavior. The intense grief oí Lamentation (1930), the courage and determination of Frontier (1935), and the complex struggle of American Document (1938), for example, attest to Graham's interest in emotional expression. In the 19405, however, she rendered expression as a trenchant psychological search for the first time. With Letter to the World (1940), Deaths and Entrances (1943), and the symbolist Hérodiade (1944), Graham presented dance as a mode of psychological, ritual, and histórico-cultural self-examination that paralleled the concerns the Abstract Expressionists— partially influenced by the Surrealists—were exploring in their painting and sculpture at the same time. Graham's new emphasis developed gradually, but it can be identified in dances that at first seem to have little to do with Abstract Expressionism. Affinities between her dance and contemporaneous art can be seen, for example, in the increasing complexity of her characters. The inner life of Emily Dickinson is the subject of Letter to the World, which premiered in 1940 and was continually revised for the next two years. In the dance Graham portrays the multiple aspects of Dickinson's psyche. The set, with a trellis at one side and a bench at the other, depicts the shadow world of the poet's imagination as set forth in her writing rather than her real world of Amherst, Massachusetts. Dickinson's psychological and emotional history is divided into a vari490

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ety of characters, no one of which is meant to portray all of her. Each character is an aspect of her personality or an important figure in her life: One Who Speaks, One Who Dances, the Child, the Fairy Queen, and the Young Girl. The Ancestress embodies Dickinson's Puritan background and her fear of death, while March and the other male characters are extensions of her Lover persona and represent her efforts at happiness. Yearnings for happiness, memories of events and feelings, and the loss of her lover force Dickinson to face her destiny as a poet, to realize that her happiness is to be found in her work alone. Letter to the World thus marked the beginning of Graham's turn to simultaneous narration. This technique involves personification of different aspects of self (and humanity) in separate, multiple episodes, split personalities, contrapuntal combinations of real and imaginary events and people, and the fusion of past, present, and even future times. This rich and varied mode of simultaneous narration was likewise fundamental to Abstract Expressionism. Mark Rothko's Entombment (1946, private collection), for example, presents various possibilities of humanity and its past in a single figure that fuses symbols of death (a reclining biomorphic Christ), life (the nurturing breasts), and nature (the claw hand and shell bottom of the central Mary figure). The form in William Baziotes's (1912-1963) Dwarf is simultaneously childlike and sinister, with allusions to prehistoric beasts, human beings, snakes, and rhinoceroses. Gottlieb's Burst series, with its polarized structure, also symbolizes integrated yet divergent mythic, cosmic, and psychological possibilities. As Gottlieb explained, when working on the Bursts, he "put down the discs and thought of what form would most oppose them. . . . Opposites are my view of life."5 Additionally, the form of Graham's dance, a letter, was also used by some Abstract Expressionists to compose an interlocking set of ideas in pictographic form. It can be seen in Gottlieb's Letter to a Friend (1948, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York) and David Smith's (1906-1965) Letter (1950, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New York). Graham's investigation of the multiple aspects of the psyche, personality, and time lie at the root oí Deaths and Entrances, the story of the Bronte sisters, particularly Emily. Ernestine Stodelle explains how the dance narrates, in a labyrinthine maze, the fears and figures of Emily's life and imagination: Fantasies and realities change place before the wandering inner eye; fears assume the shapes of monsters ... and the stream [of unconscious images] 1990s

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instead of coming out... on a peaceful clearing, returns to its source: the primeval world ... of our ancestors. Like some Abstract Expressionists, Graham adopted the stream-of-consciousness technique used by some of her favorite authors, including James Joyce (1882-1941), T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Marcel Proust (1871-1922), and William Faulkner (1897-1962). A journey into the depths of Emily's psyche dominates Graham's drama, unleashing the memories, loves, and events of her past. The three sisters, as youths, bring objects on stage—a conch shell, a goblet—that spark memories, like Proust's madeleines, of lost opportunities. The sisters play chess with Destiny, sporadically gesturing before Emily picks up the goblet, now the symbolic Cup of Life, and sets it down on the chessboard, thereby ending the game. The Cup of Life enables the sisters to live with their destinies.6 Deaths and Entrances thus uses time and memory as a narrative, choreographic device and portrays the simultaneity of past, present, and future. Stodelle explains, "For the person who 'recollects or remembers,' time is seen through the telescopic lens of memory, where personal experience is reproduced with searing vividness. To look back is to look inward."7 Graham's retrospective introspection is the choreographic equivalent of the flashback technique of movies. Significant moments from the past are telescoped as memories retraced in the mind and body. Graham once said, "The human body ... is the instrument by which all the primaries of experience are made manifest. It holds in its memories all matters of life and death and love." The result is a metaphoric, allegorical, and poetic montage, with parallel lines of action crosscut to touch off deep, subconscious ideas. Geneviève Oswald has commented, "With the crosscutting of these images [Graham] reproduces the mental process of idea association, often an irrational correlation, and establishes an inner rhythm to her works."8 The technique was fundamental to Abstract Expressionism during the same period. Rothko, for example, repeatedly referred to fragments of a biological and cultural past as memories of past humanity in such works as Memory, Prehistoric Memory (1946, private collection), and Tentacles of Memory (1945-46, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). His semi-figurative style of the early 19405 also fused fragments of art and history of different eras, from Greco-Roman to modern. In 1949 he summarized his narrative mode by explaining, "An atavistic memory, a prophetic dream, may exist side by side with the casual event of today."9 Gottlieb's Pictographs of the same period 492

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likewise incorporate distant, formative memories from an ancestral past. In works such as Masquerade, he alluded to the simultaneity of different times and places in the mind—and in Carl Jung's (1875-1961) concept of a collective unconscious—by juxtaposing mask images from the ancient, so-called primitive, and modern worlds. He combined an Egyptian mask at the left, for example, with one derived from the Surrealist Max Ernst's (1891-1976) Woman Bird image below it and a lion or another Egyptian god-image in the center. To these are added spirals reflecting southern Arizona's Hohokam pottery, with its triangular-edged, spiral forms, which Gottlieb saw at the Museum of Modern Art's Indian Art of the United States exhibition in 1941. Completing the shift to psychological introspection, Graham's Hérodiade drew from the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). Originally entitled Mirror before Me, the dance deepens Graham's subject of self-examination. While the characters of Herod's wife and his stepdaughter Salome may come from Mallarmé, Graham extended the idea of a temptress to include an older society woman who, to live more fully, must face the reality of her personality in a mirror and in the alter ego of an attendant. For Graham, the mirror is a means to arrive at truth. At the conclusion of the dance, the older woman marches into the "unknown." Symbolist poetry and the idea of the self-searching mirror were also elements in Abstract Expressionist art, used by Pollock in The Magic Mirror (1941, private collection) and by Baziotes in Mirror at Midnight (1942, private collection). In the latter, Baziotes suggested an overlapping, compartmentalized world of stones and jewels, of cellular beginnings in a gothic, dark, and ambiguous space. Baziotes hoped that the painting embodied the spirit of Charles Baudelaire's poem "Favors of the Moon." The artist noted, "To me a mirror is something mysterious, it is evocative of strangeness and otherworldliness." For him the mirror facilitated an examination of fundamental internal forces of the universe.10 In 1946 Graham added myth and ritual to her interest in psychological introspection and thus initiated the final and truest phase of her work paralleling Abstract Expressionism. Several elements aided her, including Jungian thought and her friends Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and Noguchi. Like most Abstract Expressionists, Graham approached myth through Jungian psychology, and in the mid 19405 she underwent Jungian analysis. Her development thus paralleled that of Pollock, who had undergone Jungian analysis from 1938 to 1941. They are perhaps the most Jungian artists of a very Jungian moment in American culture.11 1990s

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Graham's new phase was immediately evident not only in her dance but also in her words. At this time she began recording in notebooks, eventually published in 1973, the thoughts, studies, and reading that informed her dances.12 As Paul Valéry observed in an essay on Leonardo da Vinci, few artists have had the courage to reveal how they produced their works, so Graham's published notebooks are especially valuable. They preserve the specific themes, subjects, and sources of the mythic, psychic, and religious culture out of which Abstract Expressionism developed, and no study of the movement can be complete without them. Combining insights into primal ritual with Graham's understanding of anthropology, myth, and depth psychology, they distill, with citations, the culture and ideology of the American avant-garde of the 19405. Graham's dances make clear that she combined this culture and ideology with her own intuitive thought and action. A brief examination of a sample page from the notebooks reveals Graham's interest in familiar Abstract Expressionist subjects, including war and discord; Greek myths and gods and Christian prophets; the sanctification of light and color; totemism and evolution; psyche and the genesis of consciousness; and the hero. The notion of the hero was a special concern in the 19305 and 19405 that climaxed with the publication of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, a study directly affecting the work of several Abstract Expressionist artists.13 Graham had known Campbell since the early 19305, when they taught together at Sarah Lawrence College. By the mid 19405, she had come to appreciate his interest in myth, ritual, and psychology. Graham's notes, thoughts, and dances reveal the complex cultural sources of her mythic, Jungian, and Greek dramas of the late 19405 and 19505. Dark Meadow of the Soul (1946), Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand into the Maze (1947), Night Journey (1947), and Clytemnestra (1958) interweave world culture and mythic drama in forms drawn from French symbolist poetry, primal ritual, Greek mythology and drama, Jungian and Freudian psychology, the Old Testament, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and organic evolution—sources that also informed the works of the Abstract Expressionists. Graham's notebooks as well as her dances confirm that she, like the artists, explored collective— that is, public—as well as personal history as the archetypal condition of the psyche. Collaboration with Noguchi helped Graham realize her new approach. The two met in 1928, and Noguchi did two portrait busts of Graham the following year. She began working with Noguchi on Frontier in 1935, after a brief collaboration with Alexander Calder (1898-1976), but from 1944 to 1950 No494

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guchi was Graham's only set designer. Indeed, they continued working together intermittently until 1966. There has perhaps been no closer collaboration of artist and choreographer in American modern dance.14 Noguchi first joined Americanist themes with surrealist dream spaces, as in Frontier, in which he wedded the total void of theater space to form and action. In the 19405 he committed himself to what is now characterized as Abstract Expressionist symbolism. In Hérodiade he created a prop composed of a hybrid ancient and modern form, a skeletal kouros figure, suggesting the ancient and biological roots of the characters' experience and quest. To this sense of primal origins and continuity he added fertility symbols in Dark Meadow of the Soul, a biomorphic pelvic gate in Errand into the Maze, and a sense of time and timelessness represented by an hourglass shape amid several fragmentary forms in Night Journey. Perhaps the most stunning are the prop costumes of Cave of the Heart, including a branching tree that becomes a spiky, radiant cloak and chariot—what Noguchi described as a nimbus of the sun—of the fleeing mythic sorceress-goddess Medea. Also noteworthy is the cathedral-like construction for Joan of Arc in Seraphic Dialogue (1955), in which Noguchi sought to represent "the life of Joan of Arc as a cathedral that fills her consciousness entirely."15 The construction soars upward with gleaming geometrical forms symbolizing the saint's medieval celestial divinations. All these themes and forms are familiar in Abstract Expressionism. Noguchi's concept of Saint Joan's divine aspirations in Seraphic Dialogue, for example, recall the medievalism of Richard Pousette-Dart (b. 1916), Rothko, Gottlieb, Lee Krasner (1911-1984), and Barnett Newman (1905-1970), who once declared that he sought to make, with soaring light and color, a cathedral out of man.16 Graham's concerns with myth, ritual, psyche, and ancient and world cultures are immediately clear in her first postwar dance, Dark Meadow of the Soul. In the program note Graham wrote, " 'Dark Meadow' is a re-enactment of the Mysteries which attend the eternal adventure of seeking." The dance combines Celtic, Christian, Egyptian, and other rituals. In the original production men and women danced among Noguchi's organic, vertical forms, some of which served as an altar and some of which sprouted leaves and flowers, symbolizing ritual phallic powers. These forms are much like the forms in Clyfford Still's (1904-1980) phallic Untitled [PH-436] (1936, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and 1Q38-N-1 (1938, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). A rich animal life moving through Noguchi's fertile landscape suggests Newman's drawings of 1944-46. Typically, Noguchi's few props delin1990s

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eated not specific places but rather the deep recesses of mind and memory.17 Graham danced the character One Who Seeks, who is contrasted with a second female, She of the Ground, an earth mother figure. Erick Hawkins played the male god—typically—He Who Summons. Dark Meadow is about mankind's primal heritage and the patterns of human behavior, which Graham called "ancestral footsteps." Containing references to archaic memory, natural, primitive consciousness, primal, prehensile humanity, the cosmic cycles of the seasons, and the regeneration of the species through love, it is one long fertility ritual.18 The dance seems ultimately drawn from the pagan equation of sexual and fertility rites intended to renew land and tribe, as described by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941). While men might physically perish, Graham's allusions in streamof-consciousness imagery to the Christian cross and sprouting phallus suggest that mankind's psyche-spirit will live on and be reborn. Dark Meadow seems less a dance than a reenacted ritual, which renews mankind by allowing it to regain the vital forces that have produced it. Like native American rituals, Dark Meadow celebrates the future because ritualized dance inspires, as Jamake Highwater explains, "new vitality [drawn] from the most distant memories of the past."19 Dark Meadow is perhaps Graham's most vital dance. Indeed, the ritual seems designed, as Don McDonagh has pointed out, to "expiate or placate a disturbance in the deeper flow of vital movement—life." That disturbance, obliquely alluded to in Graham's notebooks, was the war. She wrote: Perhaps a kind of invoking from within oneself the Powers of the Spirit to bring about a better condition—a health of the land, the World ... Perhaps a kind of "Fertility Ritual." not for rain but for growth on a Waste Land —after a War ... Could I make this a drama of resurrection Dark Meadow of the Soul is that drama, a sacred ritual calling up the energy of fertility as the healing balm for her generation's bitter history. Graham once wrote admiringly of Jung's and Paul Klee's (1879-1940) similar capacity to avail themselves "of lost energies" of the psyche and of non-Western societies in the creation of worlds.20 For her as well as for American artists of the 19305 and 19405, history was to be recorded and addressed as historically and culturally induced feelings, needs, and energies in ritual, archetype, and legend. Graham's depiction of ritualistic vitality highlights the ways her ideas and 496

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forms paralleled fundamental Abstract Expressionism. The parallels were not only in the symbols, the use of ritual, and the allusions to the primal aspects of psychology and culture, but through her conception of the importance and power of vital movement itself. Dark Meadow climaxes the thrust of her ideology. Here, as in all of her mythic work—and as in Abstract Expressionist art itself—Graham suggests an eternal psychic-ritual pattern and rhythm as the ultimate order of history and life. Underlying Graham's work is her original conception of the body and its flow through space. Graham founded dance movement on the expansion and contraction of the body. In contrast to classical ballet, in which the torso is held taut and arms, hands, and legs move in a stylized, unearthly manner, she centered movement on the rhythmic flux of the torso. Through exaggerated breathing, with its physical contraction of the diaphragm and its release outward through the neck and arms to the surrounding space, she created a sense of cyclic, rippling, and continuous inward and outward motion. Graham also emphasized the physicality of movement by having her dancers grip the floor with their feet rather than stand above it on their toes as in classical ballet. She replaced the traditional, romantic tutu with the body-revealing leotard. Her movement thus seems to emanate from nature and the earth. Her designs create vitalist and expressive sequences of inward and outward motion, a sense of the ebb and flow of human action. Intense motion seems to originate in the depths of the dancers' psychological and spiritual life. For Graham, the motivation of action was from within rather than from without; the organic was the psychological. Graham focused motion in a new way. Under the influence of Louis Horst (1884-1964), her musical director, she emphasized simple, asymmetrical, blunt, and unadorned motion. She drew on the dances of so-called primitive peoples not to copy their movements but to create a modern parallel to their intensity. She reduced movement to what she considered "primitive" forms of force, power, and simplicity. In other words, she conceived of movement as expressing the concise forms of action that Westerners admired in the dance of primitive peoples. As Stodelle explains: Whereas the primitive dancer stamped on the ground with the whole of the foot, or in lifting the knee flexed the ankle angularly at the joint, the modern dancer, without actually reproducing those movements per se, uses their rough textures and broken rhythms to express the vitality of the feeling behind such movements. An inner muscular awareness of weight and energy is manifest in every step, every lift of the leg, every turn of the body.21 1990s

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To Graham, movement was a vehicle of expressive as well as structural and psychological form. Graham's conception of movement has strong affinities with the fundamental abstract structures of Abstract Expressionism. Rothko's art, for example, consists of images and forms of abstract, contrapuntal, organic, and mythic movement. Through the fluid transitions of shapes in varying combinations of slow expansion, agitation, maturation, contraction and decline, as in Untitledy Rothko alluded to mythic patterns that lay behind much of his and his colleagues' work. He described the process as "life, dissolution, and death." For Rothko and for Graham, human destiny was rooted in and represented by abstract natural form, action, and movement. Both reenacted destiny's fundamental rhythm, with its ebb and flow of energy, in the movement of one gesture or shape into another. Both portrayed human action as a cyclic process that continuously tenses and relaxes, contracts and releases, falls and recovers, or dies and is reborn. Graham characterized the end of her cyclic movement—the stunning "Graham fall" and drop to the ground—as "a dissolution of the body."22 Both felt their work embodied natural truths. Rothko's poet friend Stanley Kunitz recently expanded on this definition of rhythmic human action: "Periodicity." This is what we learn from our immersion in the natural world: its cyclical pattern. The day itself is periodic, from morning through noon to night, so too the stars in their passage, the tides, the seasons, the beat of the heart, women in their courses. This awareness of periodicity is what gives us the sense of a universal pulse. And any art that does not convey that sense is a lesser art. In poetry, it leads us ... toward an organic principle.23 Cyclic movement is also emotionally expressive. Graham exaggerated the rhythmic contractions and expansions of the body to suggest more than nature. By amplifying the move, she made a gesture, indicated a sob, or implied an emotion. The technique thus reveals the emotional "landscape" of her characters. Rothko, too, intensified rhythmic motion through color and brushwork that heightened emotional expression. He described his expression in cyclic terms: "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotionstragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." Graham and Rothko sought to articulate human passion in the dramatic flow, shape, and rhythm of their works. A critic described the cycle of Graham's Primitive Mysteries (1931) as "a simple folk-like rendering of a three-act passion play, in which the Virgin Mary . . .

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relived the tragedy of her Son's crucifixion—and the ecstasy of His resurrection" (italics added).24 Graham's technique also suggests a second mode of human movement and destiny. In the complex development of her characters' actions, she anticipated gesturalism, an aspect of Abstract Expressionism that matured in the 19505 through its heir, the New York School. Depicting action through movement rippling outward from the pelvis through the legs and arms, Graham developed modes of expressing anger, fear, rage, and ecstasy that constitute a gestural dramaturgy. Continuous unfolding is divided into expressive turns, swings, spirals, and falls that form larger, more complex, interlocking and overlapping, dissonant movements. Unlike classical ballerinas, Graham's dancers hold their feet at right angles to their legs. Their bodies open and close, coil and uncoil, and make trajectories. Body movements are tense and broken, explains a critic: The upper body will twist strongly against the lower, the arms twist against each other, or the leg will twist against the vertical spread of the upper body. Changing and broken rhythms are frequent; a vital movement will meet with a sudden halt or an abrupt change of direction or mood; the body unfolding may meet with a sudden collapse; contradictory tensions will occur in the midst of a sequence that demands fulfillment.25 Throughout her work Graham remained attuned to the kinetic dynamism of impulse, rhythm, and stress. In Lamentation, for example, with its convulsive twists, low swings, diagonal extensions, horizontal spreads, and upward thrusts, and in later dances with percussive accents, Graham conveyed a primitive vitality in the weighted contrast of rapid body strokes and counterstrokes. As Susan Leigh Foster explains, Graham's choreography, supported by modern music that is uniquely subordinated to accent the flow of movement itself, generates "a dynamic, psychologically charged atmosphere so that the dance unfolds as an organic progression of emotional states," as a mytho-ritual quest, and as a timeless gesture.26 It is hard not to recognize such vitality in Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture, for dramatic movement formed its basic structure. Convulsive thrusts and counterthrusts lie behind Willem de Kooning's (b. 1904) curvilinear and angular brushwork and Seymour Lipton's (1903-1988) sculpture. Serpentine, overlapping figure-eight curves and spirals can be found in Pollock's Mural (1943, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City), Krasner's

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mature coiling paintings such as Celebration (1959-60, private collection), Gottlieb's Trajectory (1954, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York) and Arabesque (1967, private collection), and in gesturalism as a whole.27 Though they ascribed energy to the city rather than to organic life and ritual action, the New York School painters of the 19505 distilled gestural movement, as in Franz Kline's (1910-1962) Figure Eight. The conventional grace, beauty, and rhythm associated in the 19505 with French painting were swept aside by this intense gesturalism, just as Graham swept aside the seemingly effortless leaps of classical ballet and the delicate, airy grace of curving fingers, smiling faces, and toy characters in such works as Giselle. Graham's dynamism sought to define and express the forces that lay behind human action as her generation understood it. She emphasized the body as an instrument of instinctive, primal, and modern experience and expression, a spokesman for the psyche as she defined it. While movement, of course, is the basis of any dance, Graham regarded all her dances, and Dark Meadow in particular, as representing a vitality, life force, and energy, a quickening that is translated through action. One critic commented: But while Dark Meadow takes introspection to philosophical heights, its choreography is rooted in the visceral world of bodily sensation. Movement bursts forth as though the choreographer had suddenly touched subterranean springs of compulsive-impulsive gesture: angular, slicing motions, asymmetrical jumps, rapid shifts in rhythms, and wild careenings through space.28 In bodily vitality Graham calls to mind another Abstract Expressionist mode, Pollock's abstract paintings. Created by hundreds of curvilinear and some angular sweeps made by the twists and turns of the artist's body, not just his wrist, these paintings were also intended to represent instinctive, unconscious, subterranean, and ritualistic vitality. They, too, were intentionally made on the ground to suggest what Horst described as "mysterious powers that abide in the earth." Susan Leigh Foster's observation applies to both Pollock and Graham: "A moment of suspended balance is not a moment of accomplishment but rather a moment of transition in the dynamic tension between mental and physical efforts."29 Pollock's statement "I am nature" could be Graham's. And Pollock, like Graham in her work from the 19405 on, represented inner space brought forth into the exterior world. More than just form or nature or anthropological ritual, Dark Meadow of the Soul, like Abstract Expressionist work in general, is a vision of human behavior, a vision of the primal past when, as Stodelle explains, "pagan rites set 500

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the pattern of psychic [as well as physical] growth." Like most Abstract Expressionists, Graham recognized that these primitive rites were the original means of growth and development. From the Sun Dance of the Plains Indians to coming-of-age rites, ritual was a way to demonstrate and increase new powers and advance to the next stage of life, often from puberty to adulthood. Jung's psychology elucidated that connection. Pollock found innumerable examples of the use of ritual and myth to enhance life and transfigure personality in Jung and Frazer's work and the publications of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnography. The flowering energies of Dark Meadow—like Newman's Stem and Bloom series of 1944-46, Bradley Walker Tomlin's (1899-1953) Bloom paintings of the 19503, and work by Pollock, Krasner, and Lip ton—symbolize historical, cultural, spiritual, and psychic as well as physical change through organic growth. Interior life and its needs in the wake of the most savage war and most monstrous crimes in Western history underlie the structures of Abstract Expressionist art. For the Abstract Expressionists, vitalist movement symbolized the physical and spiritual rebirth the West required to step toward the next stage of conscious life. Movement had the same meaning for Graham. Her dancing, she claimed, "is the affirmation of life through movement."30 In the wake of the war, the darker side of Graham's imagination asserted itself. The result was the full transition to her great mythic and psychological dances of the late 19405 and beyond: Errand into the Maze, Night Journey, and Clytemnestra. Errand into the Maze fuses myth and psychology in what is essentially a soliloquy of a woman's self-examination. The dance retells the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as Ariadne's psychological quest. Ariadne traces her steps across a zigzagging string to a two-pronged upright bone gate that makes her inner journey concrete. At the bone gate, she confronts her fear of the unknown. She repeatedly throws off an especially aggressive Minotaur—the male, the personification of her fears—until she steps through the gate, conquers her doubts, and emerges psychologically stronger. In Errand into the Maze, Graham created a modern parable of the labyrinth of the mind. Such symbolic labyrinths were used by the Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists, especially by Gottlieb, whose pictographic structure in Threads of Theseus (1948, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York) and Labyrinth series of the early 19505 was partially intended to represent a historical and psychic labyrinth. Gottlieb and Rothko often alluded to Greco-Roman antiquities as well as to Sophocles and Aeschylus in their work. Most Abstract Expressionists used ancient myth and form (they "quoted" 1990s

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from ancient art, while Graham "quoted" movement from preclassical Greek dance and vase painting) to suggest that the modern confrontation with the labyrinth of the mind and the subterranean world of the unconscious had its roots in the past. For them, myth united past and present experience. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Graham reached for the large themes of human life—themes from legend, the Bible, myth, ritual, and history—and distilled them to create epic dramas of human life and experience. Her drama and characters differ from Abstract Expressionism, however, in significant ways. Some of her dramas constitute full literary narratives. Night Journey and Clytemnestra, for example, present the story of Oedipus and the Oresteia trilogy. Rothko and Gottlieb, in contrast, make much more selective use of the Oedipus story and the Oresteia in their early work of the 19405. Another way in which Graham's work differs from that of the Abstract Expressionists is that the central characters are female, not male. Graham uses heroines to universalize these stories of myth. Even more emphatically than Krasner, the most important female Abstract Expressionist, Graham took up and recreated mythic female personae, whom she referred to as the "ancestresses" of the world. She had made women the centerpiece of her art from the beginning and, until the appearance of Erick Hawkins in American Document, had worked with an all-female troupe. Her subjects included a wide variety of women: the anti-Puritanical, sexualized figure in American Document, the innocent and hopeful bride oí Appalachian Spring (1944), the multisided but unhappy Bronte sisters of Deaths and Entrances, the self-analytic, aging woman of Hérodiade, the jealousy-driven Medea of Cave of the Heart, the fearful Ariadne of Errand into the Maze, the distraught Jocasta ofNight Journey, the self-sacrificing, wily Judith of Legend of Judith (1962), the vengeful queen Clytemnestra in Clytemnestra, the bewitching siren Circe in Circe (1963), the quixotic Joan of Arc with three personalities in Seraphic Dialogue, and the unlucky youth of The Rite of Spring (1984). Better than any woman of her generation of artists, Graham revealed the landscape of female passion and experience. Men in her works—Oedipus, Jason, Agamemnon—are often stereotyped as pompous, arrogant, overweening, and insensitive, although some, such as the Husbandman in Appalachian Spring and the lovers of Acts of Light (1981), have depth and complexity. Apparently both sexes are capable of self-absorption. Graham's heroines are, however, projected as universal, not simply female. They represent all people as they battle their fears and limitations to grow or be reborn psychologically. In Night Journey Graham restructured the Oedipus story to make Jocasta 502

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its primary focus. This Greek drama of humankind's inability to alter fate, the "night," takes place in the mind and the dark side of life. The dance drama opens as Jocasta is about to hang herself—Graham repeatedly used such key moments to begin her dramas. Before committing suicide, Jocasta reviews her life and recalls the events that have sealed her fate. The dance is structured as a psychic exploration in which the Oedipus complex is combined with the Jungian idea of memories. The set consists of unusual shapes suggesting archeological fragments and an hourglass, which Noguchi described as "the spirits of his ancestors over whom Oedipus must mount."31 The steps lead to a double bone shape that is joint, bone, reclining phallus, and vagina—a symbol of incestuous love made primal and organic. Graham further reshaped Sophocles' drama by transforming the chorus of Theban elders into the Daughters of the Night. Tiresias, however, retains his role as the physically blind but all-seeing prophet. Graham accentuated her drama with symbols of multiple associations, such as the cord that stands for the joint fate ofjocasta and Oedipus—the umbilical cord of birth and the rope of death. Ultimately Jocasta realizes her guilt, faces it courageously, and takes her own life. Night Journey is a mythic recreation of the interior journey in search of understanding, the resulting revelation, and the heroic if tragic price that must be paid for the knowledge. The dance embodies additional Abstract Expressionist themes. The metamorphosis of an object or image with multiple associations can be found in the work of Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists, most notably Baziotes and Gottlieb. While Rothko referred to Tiresias's role in Tiresias (1944, private collection), the symbolic use of eyes that seek sight can be found in Gottlieb's Oedipus series of the early 19403. These works consist of frontal or profiled eyes distributed in pictographic compartments. Particularly effective is Gottlieb's Troubled Eyes, in which bestial jaws wrap and enclose eyes to imply that one must be "physically blind" and look inward—into the mind's eye—to attain "in-sight" and truth. Like Graham's Night Journey, Gottlieb's Troubled Eyes suggests that violence tragically begets insight; through it one attains vision. A moment of extreme emotional crisis opens Graham's greatest Greek work, the epic, evening-length Clytemnestra. With Clytemnestra's condemnation to Hades for reasons she does not understand, Graham begins the drama at its end, thereby dispensing with linear chronology and plunging directly into an exploration of the Mycenaean queen's consciousness (memories in the unconscious) on stage. From that point, the dance drama is a retrospec1990s

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tive investigation, a journey not only through a series of events but into the feelings and actions that determined the queen's present fate and disgrace. The dance consists of a long prologue, two acts, and a short epilogue in which Clytemnestra's roles as wife, mother, adulteress, and murderer are played forth amid the pride, violence, disaster, evil, death, and revenge that plague the House of Atreus—an archetype of the human family. In Clytemnestra, as Graham noted in her study for The Eye of Anguish (1950), evil is portrayed not only as a private reality, an emanation of the individual soul, but also as a public force. Graham's Greek dramas explore the human psyche, historical causation, human personality, and fate under the rule of impersonal gods. As Stodelle points out: By dispensing with chronological sequence except when necessary to her purposes ... and by running off the entire sequence as if projected from within the queen's consciousness, Martha was able to build a psychological superstructure over the original Greek myth.32 The prologue begins with a modern chorus in evening dress. Chorus members enter and, standing at opposite ends of the stages, sing in a ritual manner. A Messenger of Death, virtually a cadaver, snakes across the stage. Wearing a skull cap and skirt, he is more Egyptian than Greek. Clytemnestra stands behind a curtain of gold threads that symbolizes the veiled underworld. After her name is called and she is declared dishonored among the dead, she begins ajourney into her past. She confronts key figures in her life as they move across the stage: Paris, Agamemnon, and Iphigenia.33 The rest of the dance reenacts the three parts of the Oresteia—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides. Again Graham displays a panoply of Abstract Expressionist symbols with their multiple uses and associations—the red cloak of Clytemnestra as wrap, shroud, carpet; the friezelike movement from Greek vase painting, which Rothko also used; the kinds of male and female sexual traps—phallic spears and thigh gates—seen in the work of several Abstract Expressionists; ghosts, also used by Rothko; biers, depicted also by Theodoros Stamos (b. 1922) and Pollock; totemic columns, also seen in works by Smith, Rothko, and Gottlieb; juries of the gods, an image central to Gottlieb's Jury of Three (1945, private collection); the kind of transparent veiled curtain to the underworld seen in Gottlieb's post-1945 Pictographs and works by Rothko and Pollock; and the mythic gods themselves—the Furies as the dark unconscious forces and their transformation into the Eumenides or positive forces, a vital movement sum504

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marized by the title of Gottlieb's Transfiguration series (1958). At the end of Clytemnestra's journey of self-discovery and self-judgment, the chorus chants "rebirth" as Clytemnestra escapes the underworld. Graham's Clytemnestra is a modern parable of transformation through knowledge and repentance, of resolution through inward examination, of recognition and acceptance of one's actions, and of growth through understanding. As a drama of redemption, it is typical of Graham's mytho-ritualistic art. Stodelle summarizes its structure thus: Darkness has its counterpart in light, the luminous world of self-knowledge, of understanding, of renewed identification with nature and its forces ... the fighting spirit Out of darkness, light; out of light, rebirth ... the cyclical dance of the universe, the psychical dance of Martha Graham.34 And, one could add, of Abstract Expressionism. For the generation of Americans wrenched by crisis, economic collapse, and world war, by the collapse of nineteenth-century civilization and thought, the principle of renewal was the means of consolation. Among the many additional connections, overlappings, and parallels between Martha Graham and the Abstract Expressionists, none is so permeating as their mutual quest. For both, to achieve psychological wisdom and reassert moral values after laying bare the heights and depths of human behavior was to begin the arduous night journey of terrestrial and spiritual rebirth.35 For a generation in search of salvation, understanding lay, as Graham reflected in her notebooks, in The eternal woman caught up into circumstances— The resolving of the difficulties The return to the original state. (A Season in Hell) re-born36

Notes

Sections of this essay are excerpted from my book Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 1. Martha Graham and Ernestine Stodelle, quoted in Stodelle, Deep Song: The Dance Story of Martha Graham (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), p. 119. 2. Martha Graham, "Martha Graham," in Martha Graham: The Early Years, ed. Merle Armitage (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1937; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), p. 84. 1990s

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3- For a discussion of Ben Shahn's shift, see Francis Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold World Climate, ^47-54 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). 4. See Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Viking Press, 1973), pp. 142-455. Quoted in Stephen Polcari, "Gottlieb on Gottlieb," New York Night Sounds i (October 1968): 11. 6. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 123. On Graham's stream-of-consciousness technique, see Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience; Polcari, Lee Krasner and Abstract Expressionism (Stony Brook, N.Y.: University Gallery Publication, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1988). The symbol of the Cup of Life may have been drawn from the symbol of the Grail as discussed by Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920; reprint, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), a book that Graham knew. 7. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 121. 8. Martha Graham, "I am a Dancer ...," in Martha Graham Dance Company Program (New York: Martha Graham Dance Center, 1986), n.p.; Geneviève Oswald, "Myth and Legend in Martha Graham's 'Night Journey,' " in Dance as Cultural Heritage, vol. i (New York: Congress on Dance Research, 1983), p. 43. 9. Mark Rothko, quoted in Douglas MacAgy, "Mark Rothko," Magazine of Art 42 (January 1949): 21. 10. William Baziotes, quoted in Paula Franks and Marion White, eds., "An Interview with William Baziotes," Perspective no. 2 (New York: Hunter College, 1956-57), p. 29. See also Mona Hadler, "The Art of William Baziotes" (Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 1977), pp. 125-26,194-96. 11. Graham's analyst was Frances Wickes. The importance of Jungian psychology in British and American intellectual life was highlighted by the establishment in 1943 of the Bollingen Foundation, which was devoted to the amplification and dissemination of the Jungian program. See Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, chap. 2. 12. Martha Graham, The Notebooks of Martha Graham, with introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Harcourt Bracejovanovich, 1973). 13. Ibid., p. 205. Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces was eagerly anticipated, according to the Abstract Expressionist magazine Tiger's Eye. It was read by many Abstract Expressionists, and Campbell was immediately invited to lecture at the artists' meeting place, The Club. Campbell remains an unacknowledged major influence on the forms and themes of Abstract Expressionist art and thought in the 19505, apparent in such works as The Path of the Hero (1950, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Richard Pousette-Dart, The Hero (195152, Brooklyn Museum) by David Smith, and The Hero (1957, Inland Steel Company, Chicago) by Seymour Lipton (b. 1903). 14. For a full discussion of their collaboration, see Martin Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1978), pp. 25-37. No506

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guchi designed the following sets for Graham: Frontier (1935), Chronicle (1936), El Penitente (1940), Appalachian Spring (1944), Hérodiade (1944), Imagined Wing (1944), Dark Meadow of the Soul (1946), Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand into the Maze (1947), Night Journey (1947), Diversion of Angels (1948), Judith (1950), Voyage (1953), Theatre for a Voyage (1955), Seraphic Dialogue (1955), Clytemnestra (1958), Embattled Garden (1958), Acrobats of God (1960), Alcestis (1960), Phaedra (1962), Circe (1963), and Cortege of Eagles (1966). 15. Isamu Noguchi's comments on Frontier and Seraphic Dialogue are cited in Stodelle, Deep Song, pp. 154-55. Noguchi thought of sculpture "as transfigurations, archetypes and mystical distillations." Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 29, also cited in Oswald, "Myth and Legend," p. 46. For Noguchi's comments on Cave of the Heart, see Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscapes, p. 30. 16. Newman, quoted in Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), p. 17, n. i. See especially Gottlieb's Romanesque Façade (1949, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign), Krasner's Gothic Frieze (ca. 1950, private collection), and Newman's Cathedra (1951, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam) and Chartres (1969, private collection). 17. Graham, program note for Dark Meadow of the Soul, quoted in Don McDonagh, Martha Graham (New York: Praeger, 1973; reprint, New York: Popular Library, 1975), p. 188. Graham once said that when "you've drunk deep enough of the river of memory in the underworld, you will remember not only the actual fact, but you will remember the past of thousands of years ago." Quoted in Friedman, Noguchi's Imaginary Landscape, p. 29. 18. Graham defined archaic memory as "twilight— / ghost / memory of past acts / memory of past experiences"; Notebooks, p. 235. For Dark Meadow of the Soul, she noted, "This state of being one with the world is the reflection, in consciousness, of the condition of that unconscious 'Vegetative Soul' in us which is the foundation of our conscious life"; Ibid., p. 175. See also Marcia B. Siegel, The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 192. 19. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: MacMillan, 1922); Jamake Highwater, Dance: Rituals of Experience, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred van der Marck, 1985), p. 191. 20. McDonagh, Martha Graham, p. 188; Graham, Notebooks, pp. 191,178. 21. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 74. For a discussion of "primitive" and modernist ideas in dance, see Louis Horst and Carroll Russell, Modern Dance Forms in Relation to the Other Modern Arts (San Francisco: Impulse, 1961; reprint, New York: Dance Horizons, 1967). In 1937 James Sweeney, an art and dance critic and one of the "discoverers" of Jackson Pollock's work in 1943, wrote that Graham was dance's equivalent to the modern artist who sought to strip "esthetic experience to its fundamentals," that is, to primal forms thought to be most clearly found in non-Western cultures. James Johnson Sweeney, "Sweeney, 1937," in Martha Graham, ed. Armitage, 1990s

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p. 69. Among other dance critics who wrote of the visual arts were Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Denby. 22. Rothko, quoted in Dore Ashton, "The Rothko Chapel in Houston," Studio International 81 (June 1971): 274; Graham, quoted in Anna Kisselgoff, "Martha Graham at 95: Work, Work, Work," New York Times, 11 May 1989, p. Ci7. For Rothko, see Stephen Polcari, "Mark Rothko: Heritage, Environment, and Tradition," Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2 (Spring 1988): 33-64; and Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, chap. 4. For human action as a cyclic process, see Horst and Russell, Modern Dance Forms, p. 18. 23. Stanley Kunitz, quoted in American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work, ed. Joe D. Bellamy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 146. 24. Rothko, quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn, 1961), p. 93; Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 247. 25. Oswald, "Myth and Legend," p. 43. Edward Denby, the dance critic and good friend of Willem de Kooning, noted that as early as 1943 Graham's Deaths and Entrances was discussed as consisting of "the rapid succession of curiously expressive and unforeseen bursts of gesture." Quoted in Ashton, New York School, p. 145. Critic Anna KisselgofF said Graham's forms were "raw, powerful and dynamic—more jagged and filled with tension than even Picasso's forms." Kisselgoff, "Martha Graham," New York Times Magazine, 19 February 1984, p. 46. 26. Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 25. Graham, like the Abstract Expressionists, wanted to be felt, not merely understood, so much so that she, like they, expected the audience to respond psychologically and emotionally to the work and thus complete it within themselves. See Kisselgoff, "Martha Graham," pp. 50,54. Graham's creative method was in many ways similar to that of the Abstract Expressionists. Both were intuitive. The artists painted as a way of working through problems; Graham danced a problem first and thought it through later. See Edith J. R. Isaacs, cited in George Beiswanger, "Martha Graham: A Perspective," in Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, ed. Barbara Morgan (New York: Duell, Sloan &, Pearce, 1941; reprint, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Morgan and Morgan, 1980), p. 144. Foster's interpretation of Martha Graham, however, unwittingly approximates the misinterpretation in the 19508 of Abstract Expressionism as "Action Painting" by limiting her creative process largely to these intuitive, psychological elements (pp. 43-44). 27. Spirals were also an element in Graham's dance. In the late 19408, Graham recommended the French film Fabrique to her dancers, including Stuart Watson* At a recent symposium Watson noted that the film recorded the growth of plants and their birth and death. He remembers Graham saying, "Life flows along a spiral path." Comments at symposium, "Sixty Years of Martha Graham Technique," 19 May 1988, Asia Society, New York. 28. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 140. 29. Horst and Russell, Modern Dance Forms, p. 61; Foster, Reading Dancing, p. 25.

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30. Stodelle and Graham, quoted in Stodelle, Deep Song, pp. 139, 52. For a discussion of Pollock's use of publications of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnography, see Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. W.Jackson Rushing independently found that these publications influenced Pollock; see his article "Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism," in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, iSgo-igSs (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986), p. 281. 31. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, p. 29. 32. Graham, Notebooks, p. 47; Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 185. 33. The character Iphigenia is a reference to sacrifice, a frequent Abstract Expressionist subject, seen, for example, in Rothko's Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942, private collection), and ultimately a mytho-ritualistic allusion to the victims of World War II. Graham, Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, and Lipton recognized the continuity of ancient and modern sacrifice of the innocent and its purposes. In Altar (1965, present whereabouts unknown) Lipton referred to the ritual practice of sacrificing life ultimately to renew life. For a discussion of sacrifice and its role in Abstract Expressionist culture, see Stephen Polcari, "Adolph Gottlieb's Allegorical Epic of World War II," Art Journal 47 (Fall 1988): 206. Recently Graham said, "We don't bury the flesh in the fields ... but I have to cope with the act of sacrifice today. It is a curious lust for blood that goes back thousands of years." Quoted in Kisselgoff, "Martha Graham," p. 44. 34. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 265. 35. One particularly important affinity can be detected in Graham's overwrought and bluntly sexual melodramas of the 19505 and 19608. In Phaedra (1962), for example, Pasiphae's aging daughter's graphic passion and lust lead to disaster. This dance, performed on a tour under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, raised objections from members of Congress Edna Kelley and Peter Freylinghusen, who considered it vulgar and carnal. Graham's conception is analogous to de Kooning's Women series of the 19508. Both works represent the absorption of wartime carnal sexuality into the postwar world. Another affinity is the use of color and light to depict rites of passage. Graham specifically indicated such a transformation in The Rite of Spring. At the end of a human sacrifice, the cape of a central character, a shaman, changes from black to fertile green, suggesting, as Graham had written earlier about Voyage, the "souls [sic] rite of passage from the death of color into birth of new color." Notebooks, p. 133. Newman's ritualistic Stations of the Cross series (1958-66, National Gallery of Art), in which fourteen black-and-white canvases are followed by the only appearance of color—red-orange—in a fifteenth, entitled Be II (1961,1964), pronounces a similar ritualistic transformation of the soul through the symbolic use of color. Graham uses light itself as the symbol in Acts of Light, with its sun ceremony and radiant dancers. Sacred light radiance also forms the basis of the work of Abstract Expressionist color painters, including Pousette-Dart and even Pollock, as his White Light (1954, Museum of Modern Art) testifies. 36. Graham, Notebooks, p. 185.

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DAVID CRAVEN

'Introduction/' "AbstractExpressionism and Afro-American Marginalisation," and "Dissent During the McCarthy Period"

Introduction

Just as modern art stands as an island of revolt in the narrow stream of Western aesthetics, [so] the primitive art traditions stand apart as authentic aesthetic accomplishments that flourished without benefit of European history... .* There is an answer in these works to all those who assume that modern abstract art is the esoteric exercise of a snobbish élite, for among these simple peoples, abstract art was the normal, well-understood dominant tradition. Shall we say that modern man has lost the ability to think on so high a level?2 —Barnett Newman (1946) In the course of the last fifty years the painters who freed themselves from the necessity of representation discovered wholly new fields of form-construction and expression That kind of view made possible the appreciation of many kinds of old art and of the arts of distant peoples—primitive, historic, colonial, Asiatic and African, as well as European—arts which had not been accessible in spirit because it was thought that true art had to show a degree of conformity to nature and a mastery of representation which had developed for the most part in the West. ... [Now these non-Eurocentric arts] were seen as existing on the same plane of creativeness and expression as "civilised" Western art. [my italics]3 —Meyer Schapiro (1957) In many parts of the world, Abstract Expressionism signifies the ascendancy to cultural pre-eminence of United States art. Yet it is also viewed with disfavour or indifference by the majority of the people in the U.S. whose culture this art presumably represents.4 Equally paradoxical is the relation of Abstract Expressionism to contemporary Latin American art. At a time when U.S. intervention throughout the Americas has intensified, the receptivity of progressive Latin American artists to certain aspects of post-war U.S. art

SOURCE: "Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to 'American' Art," Oxford Art Journal 14, no. i (1991), 44-46,57-60 (for "Introduction" and "Abstract Expressionism"); Abstract Expressionism and Cultural Critique (1991), 128-30 (for "Dissent"). Reprinted with the permission of David Craven. 510

(even as these same artists vigorously oppose U.S. hegemony) raises new questions about the nature of art produced in the U.S. since 1945. At present, the literature on Abstract Expressionism is becoming circumscribed by a new orthodoxy that treats this art as a monolithic expression of Cold War ideology, whether the artists themselves intended this or not.5 For these authors, then, Abstract Expressionism was either conceived to be, or has since become, little more than a conduit of the cultural imperialism that helps sustain U.S. dominance in the Americas. Ironically, however, there are major artists and intellectuals from revolutionary movements (such as in Cuba and in Nicaragua), who view Abstract Expressionism in quite different terms, as decentred vocabularies of visual conventions capable of development in a variety of directions. And in some of these cases Cuban and Nicaraguan artists have actually drawn on post-war U.S. art to advance their own national self-determination culturally in the face of foreign intervention and ideological underdevelopment promoted by Western capital in concert with the U.S. government. It is precisely this contradictory use of U.S. art by progressive Latin Americans that has led Coco Fusco to warn North American leftists against seeing such art as "necessarily a symptom of dependency."6 The complex irony of this inter-relationship is obvious enough if we simply compare an all-over painting by Jackson Pollock with a painting by René Portocarrero of Cuba or an award-winning 1986 work by Boanerges Cerrato of Nicaragua. Of the new generation of painters in this Central American country until he died unexpectedly in 1988 while still in his thirties, Cerrato drew on an inter-image dialogue more related to North American Abstract Expressionism than to the Spanish arte informal that continues to be influential on many of the older painters now active in Nicaragua. As Nicaraguan critic Luis Morales has observed, the visual vocabulary and formal syntax of Cerrato's paintings were intended to foster "spectator participation" in the constitution of the work's meaning.7 While Cerrato's work, which was given a prize in 1986 by the Sandinista Union of Cultural Workers (ASTC), certainly recalls compositionally the all-over drip paintings of Pollock, this triptych is also marked by more measured, no less densely interlaced brushwork. The anguished sensibility expressed by Pollock's all-over through skeins of coiled paint is displaced in Cerrato's all-over by fluent, non-frenetic brushstrokes that notably shift the signification of his work. Instead of the forceful, even harried human movements of which Pollock's lines are well-composed traces, Cerrato's artwork evokes the fluency of organic motion, the density of undomesticated flora. As such, to many Nica1990s

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raguan viewers the painting by Cerrato signifies the organically intermeshed outlines of impenetrable tropical terrain. The visual result is a two-dimensional effect not unlike that associated with the imbricated space oí campesino primitivist paintings, such as those by Alejandro Guevara or Olivia Silva, both of whom are from the well-known Solentiname School.8 Consequently, Boanerges Cerrato's triptych permits a discursive interchange between the Abstract Expressionism of post-war, industrialised North American culture and a type of art connected to the experience of non-Western campesino cultures, which have yet to be extensively industrialised. Here as elsewhere in revolutionary Nicaraguan art, there is a sophisticated dialogical enjoinment of Western culture with Third World culture, of high art with popular traditions. An intermediary step toward the above synthesis can be found in an adroit painting by Boanerges Cerrato that once hung in a hall of the National School of Plastic Arts in Managua. This earlier work is an all-over drip painting with brushstrokes that quite self-consciously echo those of Pollock. Yet in the upper register of this painting, where the all-over stops, are trees sprouting forth, so that the all-over suddenly represents the gnarled forms and twisted movements of undominated nature—a nature that in turn signifies anti-imperialist values in contemporary Nicaraguan culture. Such a reading of unbroken nature as a force for national liberation and against foreign intervention is found in much of the recent literature there, as for example in the famous testimonio of Omar Cabezas or in the "geographical" poetry of Ernesto Cardenal.9 As all these unwieldy comparisons (and many others we shall explore) demonstrate, it is quite simplistic to view post-war North American art, such as Abstract Expressionism, as a cohesive and self-consistent expression of the ideology of the ruling class in the U.S., and even more specifically as the seamless claims of Cold War liberalism concomitant with the predominance of U.S. multinational capitalism throughout the Americas. Instead, we must adopt a more sophisticated conceptual framework that allows us to analyse what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed the "dialogical" nature of art.10 According to this model, an artwork is not a unified whole, but rather an open-ended site of contestation wherein various cultural practices from different classes and ethnic groups are temporarily combined. Any visual language in the arts is thus understood as a locus for competing cultural traditions along with conflicting ideological values. Hence, any artwork, regardless of how much it is publicly identified with one class or society, signifies not only for the dominant sectors but also for the dominated classes and different class fractions. Consequently, artwork such as that by the Abstract Expressionists should be 512

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approached as an uneasy synthesis—more or less stable but not conclusively resolved—of hegemonic values with subordinate ideological tendencies, out of which broader signification is constructed. In keeping with this dialogical conceptual framework, every visual language is not merely a tool for political struggle, but by its very nature a location of ongoing political conflict. All visual languages are unavoidably shaped by cultural, ethnic, and class tensions, so that they are necessarily decentred, to quote Macherey.11 Accordingly, art does not simply reflect, embody, or parallel any one ideology, but rather signifies various ideological values, which are in alliance with each other, none to the complete exclusion of all others. Unlike a reflectionist view of cultural practices that always reduces these values to a passive, largely reproductive role in history, a dialogical analysis treats the production of art as a fundamental means whereby a society materially constructs itself through the absorption, then reconstitution of earlier visual languages (which are none the less capable of being extended in divergent directions). In this way, art, like language, is addressed as a material force that unevenly shapes the social sphere no less significantly than economic or political developments and sometimes in contradistinction to them. (In this respect, a dialogical analysis recalls what Marx termed the "law of uneven development" among various spheres of society.)12 It will be demonstrated in this article, then, that post-1945 U.S. art has not been predicated on the reductive process of "medium purification" outlined by formalists like Clement Greenberg, much less on escapist "apoliticism" or ethnocentric values. Rather, post-1945 U.S. art has emerged from an expansive and highly "impure" process of cultural convergences in which Third World artistic practices—Native North American, Latin American, AfroAmerican, and South Pacific in origin—have been enjoined with the European artistic traditions so ethnocentrically privileged by formalist apologists for U.S. art. Consequently, a sustained critique of Abstract Expressionism will not disclose a unified, white "American" (and ultimately Eurocentric) style leading inevitably to the "triumph" of U.S. culture. Instead, such a deconstruction of Abstract Expressionism will divulge multiple cultural practices, both Western and non-Eurocentric, which, while mediated by U.S. institutions, none the less provide a multivalent and polycentric legacy replete with various possibilities. Furthermore, some of these cultural possibilities of North American art, particularly those originating outside of Western cultural practices, contradict profoundly the dominant logic of U.S. society that post-war U.S. art is often said to "reflect." Abstract 1990s

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Expressionism, for example, has not only served but subverted U.S. hegemony in the Americas, because this North American visual vocabulary has provided noteworthy points of development for progressive artists from the "other Americas," whose work exists in fundamental opposition to the present hierarchy of relations that sustain U.S. dominance through Latin America. This process does not entail simply the "influence" of Abstract Expressionism on dependent cultural traditions, but rather the critical reclamation by Latin American artists of artistic practices that the Abstract Expressionists earlier borrowed from a variety of non-Western, Third World cultures. Nor is it unimportant politically that the Abstract Expressionists drew extensively on "foreign" experiences and "un-American" culture at the very time in history when the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities was terrorising the U.S. with tales of foreign subversion and anti-American conspiracies, while the Truman Doctrine of 1947 initiated an unprecedented military assault by the U.S. on Third World liberation movements.13 In the 19305, Meyer Schapiro rejected the possibility of any national "American Art" as an insidious idea.14 He observed that such a claim would constitute, at best, a veil of fictitious unity in a highly stratified society with considerable racial, class, and gender divisions. Owing to these circumstances, Schapiro noted that the designation of "American Art" would simply publicise the singular interests of those at the top of the economic structure, who, because of attendant political power in a comparably disproportionate amount, would simply speak for everyone else, as if there really were a homogeneous national culture. As subsequent events attest, Schapiro's point was both quite accurate and largely ignored. Indeed, Clement Greenberg, for one, has even insisted that the term "Abstract Expressionism" be replaced by the title "American-Type Painting."15

Abstract Expressionism and Afro-American Marginalisation Just as Barnett Newman contended that "Picasso may have dreamed of a half dozen Utopias but his primary dream—the one that gave him his voice —was Negro sculpture,"99 so most Abstract Expressionists established links with Afro-American culture and some actively supported the Civil Rights movement of the late 19503 and early 19605. Indeed, one of the painters who participated in the Artists' Session at Studio 35 in 1950 (the transcript of which was edited by Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt for publication) was Norman Lewis, the only African-American artist among the first genera514

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tion of Abstract Expressionists. Perhaps it is not surprising that the one major Abstract Expressionist who was Black would be the one member of the group who has been consistently ignored in accounts of this period in U.S. art.100 As was recently noted in a catalogue accompanying a major retrospective of Lewis's paintings, the reasons for this omission seem clear enough: It could be posed that his work was overlooked because of his active political involvement [on the left]; but in the final analysis, given the place and time in which he lived, there is the overwhelming fact that his race and the color of his skin took precedence and caused due recognition to be denied.101 As the large 1989 exhibition at the Kenkeleba Gallery of Norman Lewis's oeuvre demonstrated, he was painting all-over compositions in a fluent gestural style with a very distinctive touch as early as 1946-47. Among the notable works from this period in his career are Metropolitan Crowd (1946), Untitled (1947), Jazz Musicians (1948), and Mumbo Jumbo (1950), the latter two of which directly engage in a subtle inter-image dialogue with the improvisational structure of Afro-American music and also with the oblique figuration of much African Art. Furthermore, Lewis, who was the son of a longshoreman from Harlem, studied in the art school of the John Reed Club and later rejected social realism (which he had practiced in the 19303 and early 405) from a leftwing perspective.102 After 1945 he considered Western realism in art to be "reactionary" because of its provincialism, and by implication its Eurocentrism, or what he termed its lack of "universalism." Nor did he consider his new efforts at creating a multi-cultural art to be "apolitical," however much this new concept of art shifted social engagement to the meta-political, or rather ideological, level on which he was constructing a more internationalist and less Eurocentric visual language capable of synthesising non-Western cultural forms with Western pictorial traditions. In an exemplary essay, Ann Gibson has summarised well the novelty of Lewis's Abstract Expressionist paintings, by observing that the anti-hierarchical field of his all-over canvases "assert that the aesthetic of a specific African people has a status equal to that of dominant European modes such as social realism and expressionism."103 Hence, by intermeshing these divergent sets of images, "Lewis parodied the claim of each of these styles to authority" and created "content by contradiction."104 The multi-cultural and post-colonial aims motivating his own internationalising project were summarised by Norman Lewis, who envisioned art in the following terms: 1990s

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not as reproduction or as a convenient but entirely secondary medium for propaganda but as the production of experiences which combine intellectual and emotional activities in a way that may conceivably add [...] to a universal knowledge of aesthetics and the creative faculty which I feel exists for one form or another in all men.105 It was Lewis who later collaborated with Romare Bearden to found the Spiral Group of 1963 (the spiral meant "up and out for Black artists") and the Cinque Gallery to provide exhibition space for younger African-American artists. Significantly, in the group session of 1950 held by the Abstract Expressionists, when everyone was voicing the view that they felt cut off from the public during the Cold War period, it was Norman Lewis and Ad Reinhardt (longtime friends and union activists) who were most preoccupied with reaching the public somehow. Lewis, for example, lamented the passing of the W.P.A. period and stated: People no longer have this intimacy with the artists, so that the public does not know actually what is going on, what is being done by the painter. I remember organising for a union on the waterfront. People then didn't know the function of a union, or what was good about it, but gradually they were made aware of it. The same is true of our relationship with the people; in making them aware of what we are doing [in art].106 After Reinhardt declared, "I think everybody should be asked to say something about this,"107 the responses mostly dealt either with the undesirability of being integrated into mainstream North American culture or the impossibility of escaping marginalisation by U.S. society. While David Hare said: "It is not always such a good thing to find yourself an accepted part of the culture,"108 Jimmy Ernst added, "I would rather be unattached to any part of society than to be commissioned to carve a picture of Mr Truman."109 But it was de Kooning who eloquently summed up their historical predicament (rather than just existential sentiments) when he declared: "We have no position in the world—absolutely no position except that we just insist upon being around."110 As we shall see, it was this awareness of being marginalised that accounted at least in part for the way some of the white Abstract Expressionists empathised with Afro-Americans (and also Native Americans). References to African-American culture went from the topical, such as was true of Pollock's Lavender Mist of 1950 that was named after a 1947 composition by Duke 516

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Ellington (Romare Bearden has stated that he knew several Abstract Expressionists who used to paint while listening to Black jazz),111 to the quite profound way (as Dore Ashton has pointed out) in which Willem de Kooning identified with a Black protagonist in one of Faulkner's finest novels.112 Titles for de Kooning's paintings often had little connection to ideas that originally motivated the work, but such was not the case with his famous 1947 painting, Light in August. One of ten major paintings (along with an unrecorded number of drawings) at de Kooning's first one person exhibition, which was held in 1948 at the Charles Egan Gallery, this painting was predicated on a deep knowledge of Faulkner's 1932 novel, Light in August. In fact, twenty years later, in 1967, de Kooning was still fascinated with this particular book by Faulkner and he declared in an interview: 'I'd like to paint Joe Christmas one of these days.'113 As Elaine de Kooning has observed, there were other influences from different novels by Faulkner on de Kooning's paintings from the late 19405. On one occasion in this period, for example, she observed that the anvil-like shapes in one of his paintings evoked the image of a particular forest described by Faulkner. In expressing agreement with her insight, Willem de Kooning pointed out this particular passage in his own copy of Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931).114 The convergences between de Kooning's Light in August and Faulkner's novel have been perceptively discussed by Charles Stuckey.115 In noting how de Kooning's painting formally interrelates with the book, he has compared the ambiguous figurative shifts of the oil painting in black and white with the constant fluctuations in Joe Christmas' uncertain sense of self as he moves between the Black and White communities of the South. Furthermore, amorphous intimations of these switches in Faulkner's Light in August are repeatedly based upon visual metaphors limited to black and white. One febrile passage by Faulkner involving a sexual fantasy of Joanna Burden about Joe Christmas refers to "the slow shifting from one to another of such formally erotic attitudes and gestures as Beardsley at the time of Petronius might have drawn."116 (And, in fact, Faulkner himself was a visual artist who in his early twenties published several drawings in a Beardsley-like style.)117 About de Kooning's Light in August as well as many of his other paintings from this period, contemporaries noticed that the internal shapes of these works so completely interlocked that neither black nor white functions as figure or ground. As Thomas Hess (an early and eloquent defender of these paintings) noted of their forms: "the 'line' that evokes them becomes, in turn, legible as a negative of the shape it defines, and then as a shape of its own."118 1990s

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It has been further observed by Stuckey that there is an arresting and hardly deniable inter-image dialogue between de Kooning's 1947 painting and the dust jacket designed by Alvin Lustig for the 1946 New Directions edition of Faulkner's Light in August.119 Explosive filaments of lighting interwoven with primitive graffiti-like forms on this cover are similar to formal elements in de Kooning's painting. Such an interchange with mass culture was not uncommon. On other occasions, he also expressed a qualified admiration for mass cultural phenomena like highway billboards.120 What most attracted de Kooning to Joe Christmas of Light in August, however, was the way this fictional character so brilliantly embodied marginalisation from mainstream U.S. culture. As such, Joe Christmas was the paradigmatic victim of social hierarchies, racist values, and repressive forces that both spawned the domestic repression of the McCarthyist period and sustained Cold War liberal interventionism abroad. Just as de Kooning could say of the Abstract Expressionists that they were on the fringes of U.S. society in this period, so William Faulkner movingly presented the tragic mulatto Joe Christmas in even more desperate terms in Light in August: There was something rootless about him, as though no town nor city was his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home. And that he carried this knowledge with him always as though it were a banner with a quality ruthless, lonely, and almost proud.121 For Faulkner, the racial problem of the South in particular and of the U.S. in general was not any "timeless" struggle between "naturally" antagonistic groups. Rather, racial discrimination in both its individual and institutional forms was seen by Faulkner as the social manifestation of economic exploitation overdetermined by misguided religious values and reactionary cultural traditions. In contending that "people can always be saved from injustice," Faulkner stated in a well-known 1955 interview that "if the problem of black and white existed only among children, there'd be no problem."122 Hence, he said of Southern Whites: It's only when they get old and inherit that Southern economy which depends on a system of peonage do they accept a distinction between the black man and the white man[ ] [Sure] there are certain ignorant people that can be led to believe that one man is better than another because the Christian Bible says so, they believe all sorts of delusions But it's primarily, 123 I think, economic. 518

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In a letter to critic Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner referred to Percy Grimm, the supremely self-assured leader of the Whites who murder Joe Christmas, as a Nazi avant la lettre.124 Conversely, Joe, because of his mixed lineage, internalised the racist views of Southern society and tortured himself with feelings of insufficiency. Unlike the "well adjusted" Percy Grimm, Joe Christmas was an unceasingly introspective and deeply unsettled man of interracial parentage seeking a place in a resolutely segregated society. Subsequently, Faulkner himself spoke of Joe Christmas as a commentary on institutional racism: That was his tragedy, that to me was the tragic central idea of the story—that he didn't know what he was, and there was no way possible in life for him to find out. Which to me is the most tragic condition a man could find himself in.... 125 Faulkner himself not only wrote of these problems, he also worked on behalf of structural change. One such endeavour entailed financial aid for sending Black students to college. As contemporary African-American leader William Fox has stated: "Faulkner was a link to a healthier reality. When it was impossible to penetrate caste and class, he helped us believe in possibilities."126 Just as in the 19305, Faulkner declared: "I most sincerely wish to go on record as being unalterably opposed to Franco and Fascism"127 (here one is reminded of Motherwell's Spanish Elegies), so in 1954 he denounced McCarthyism in a public interview (Washington Evening Star, 11 June 1954). In the course of this same interview, Faulkner was asked why Blacks generally seemed to be superior in his novels. He replied: "Maybe the Negro is the best. He does more with less than anybody else."128 A profound point of intersection exists not only between Faulkner's treatment of displaced Afro-Americans and de Kooning's empathy with them, but also and equally significantly between Faulkner's focus on Native American culture and the aforementioned values of Pollock. When asked about the etymology of the word for the legendary county, Yoknapatawpha, which appears in his novels and stories, Faulkner explained: "It's a Chickasaw Indian word. They were the Indians that we dispossessed in my country. That word means 'water flowing slow through the flatland.'"129 Furthermore, some of Faulkner's early stories and novels deal specifically with the alarming situation of Native Americans in U.S. society. In a lengthy 1957 statement about the way that European civilisation was transplanted in what is now the U.S., Faulkner observed that this White culture had never been integrated with nature as had that of the Native Americans (who held land communally before the advent of 1990s

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colonialism). Faulkner elaborated: "I think the ghost of that ravishment lingers in the land, that the land is inimical to the white man because of the unjust way in which it was taken."13° Thus, de Kooning's identification with African-Americans and Pollock's concern with Native Americans helps to understand much more fully why de Kooning, for example, painted what he called the "no-environment" and "nofigures" of modern Western society.131 His paintings from 1947-51 about the anxious rootlessness of urban life, with their partially obliterated letters derived from scrawled graffiti, along with old billboards, evoke an alien environment. But while many critics would like to see de Kooning's works and those of all the other Abstract Expressionists as signifying the ahistorical "condition humaine" of some existentialist authors, it would be more illuminating to look at these works as signifiers for specific historical problems intrinsic to post-war U.S. society and to the logic of domination on which late capitalism is structurally based. Furthermore, if we do in fact examine the position on racism and capitalism of the existential writer with whom the Abstract Expressionists were most familiar (as Dore Ashton has compellingly shown in some of her books), we find that Jean-Paul Sartre attributed neither the existence of domestic racism nor that of Western imperialism to an unavoidable "human condition."132 Sartre, who was a lifelong socialist, wrote one of his first plays, The Respectful Prostitute (1946), about the quite objectionable and historically avoidable race relations in the Southern part of the U.S. An intense admirer of William Faulkner's novels, about which he wrote some fine literary criticism, Sartre was always in the vanguard of international support for Third World liberation movements in Algeria, in Cuba, and in Vietnam.133 Consistent with this view was the publication by Sartre in the inaugural issue of his journal, Les Temps modernes (i October 1945), of an essay by the Afro-American writer Richard Wright, who at one point was a member of the Communist Party as well as author of an extremely controversial novel on race relations in the United States, Native Son (1940). Similarly, in 1961, Sartre wrote a striking preface to Franz Fanon's Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth).134

Dissent During the McCarthy Period

Several interchanges during this period with artists of color are indicative of why the Abstract Expressionists and Ad Reinhardt would be among the

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most forceful supporters in the art world of the civil rights movement of the 19505 and ig6os. In 1949, Robert Motherwell met (as had Jackson Pollock) with the artist Wifredo Lam, who was then a supporter of the Communist movement in Cuba and who was also a member of the French Surrealist group that had earlier been exiled in New York City. Motherwell's disquisition on their meeting is highly instructive along the above-noted lines: The conditions under which an artist exists are nearly unbearable; but so they are everywhere in modern times. Sunday last I had lunch in a fisherman's inn in Montauk overlooking Gardiner's bay with Wifredo Lam, the Cuban and Parisian painter, who is half-Chinese, half-Negro; he has difficulty in remaining in this country because of the Oriental quota; I know he is humiliated on occasion in New York, for example, in certain restaurants [A] refrain that ran through his questions is less easy to answer, whether artists were always so "unwanted." I replied that artists were more wanted in the past when they spoke for a whole community ... we modern artists constitute a community of sorts.... Lam and I parted advising each other to keep working; it is the only advice one painter ever gives another.... Until the structure of modern society is radically altered, these will continue to be the conditions under which modern artists create. No one now creates with joy; on the contrary, with anguish.... In so doing, one discovers who one is, or, more exactly, invents oneself. If no one did this, we would scarcely imagine of what a man is capable.110 Similarly, Franz Kline commiserated with the African-American painter Sam Middleton, a longtime friend, about the stark racial divide in the United States during this era. Indeed, the latter still remembers Kline saying in the 19505 that Middleton would have a better chance of making it in Europe than in the United States. Kline said: "It won't matter if you're good here. If you're a Negro they'll only take you one at a time: like Richard Wright, then Baldwin." Furthermore, Kline contended that "They'll only take realistic images [from black artists]."111 There was no extensive socializing between black and white artists in the New York art world, despite the fact that several white dealers did have shows of work by African-American artists—Marian Willard showed Norman Lewis from 1946 through 1964; Samuel Kootz exhibited the work of Romare Bearden between 1946 and 1948; Betty Parsons of Wakefield Gallery featured work

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by William H. Johnson in 1943-4. Although Hale Woodruff, for example, taught at New York University along with William Baziotes and Tony Smith, and sometimes drank at the Cedar Tavern Bar, "he was not part of the gang" (to quote one of his former students).112 The reasons for this relatively small amount of multiethnic socializing evidently had much to do with the unspoken strictures of institutional racism in this period. Indeed, recently an African-American comedian wittily summarized this state of social invisibility when he related how he went to a Hollywood studio to try out for a part in a movie about the 19505. The director of the movie, according to this joke, replied to him: "You don't understand. There were no Blacks in the 19505/"ш The artist Ronald Joseph, who like Lewis and Bearden lived in Harlem at this time, gave a more somber but related assessment of this period: I would like to explain ... we didn't mix socially.... Now, if you don't mix into a group, I suppose there are only two reasons. Either you don't want to, or you cannot. Well, if I look back and explain it now, it seems to me a mixture of everything

What is the common denominator? Is it social life? Is it

education? Is it being in the same neighborhood? Probably the neighborhood. Neighborhood is direct and explicit.114 Notwithstanding the infrequency of socializing across ethnic lines owing to these social barriers, the Abstract Expressionists and Ad Reinhardt (a lifelong friend of Norman Lewis and probably the person most responsible for encouraging Lewis to participate in the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35 in 1950) were exemplary supporters of two of the national groups in the vanguard of the civil rights movement during the early 19605, namely, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During May 23-29, 1963, for example, at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, there was an art exhibition and sale to benefit CORE. The artists who donated works for the cause included Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, James Brooks, and Hans Hofmann.115 About these art exhibitions on behalf of CORE, national director James Farmer said: The wonderful generosity of the contributing artists helped to make our Freedom Rides possible. The results of those rides, I think, are well known ... the courage and the restraint of the Freedom Riders, in the face of the most

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dreadful violence and abuse, gave an immense forward thrust to the whole civil rights movement.116 A similar art exhibition and sale was organized in 1963 by the Artists Committee of SNCC. The chair of this committee was Jacob Lawrence, and the vice-chair was Ad Reinhardt; Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden were committee members. Among the sponsors were Elaine de Kooning and critic Dore Ashton. The letter of appeal by the Artists Committee of SNCC recounted its support of the Freedom Rides, sit-ins, and the voter registration drive, and declared: Artists, too, yearn for an end to racial injustice and the birth of equality for all men. Inspired by the students, we pledge ourselves to guarantee support for this vital effort in which we deeply believe and upon which our futures hinge.117 In light of the above-noted ethnic situation, it is not surprising that many members of the New York School who were not African-Americans nonetheless had to contend with ethnocentric remarks about their own work. As Harold Rosenberg ironically observed of "the New York School," it actually originated elsewhere, since it was largely made up of immigrants and sons or daughters of immigrants. Furthermore, most of them came not from Western Europe but from points further east or south.118 In 1947, for example, when William Baziotes won First Prize at an exhibition in the Art Institute of Chicago, his modernist paintings (which drew on non-Western and preindustrial art) were denounced in the Daily News as "foreign art," thus recalling the pervasive period view that modernism was "Ellis Island Art."119 In 1947 when the U.S. government was pressured into canceling an exhibition of contemporary artwork to be sent abroad—which included paintings by Adolph Gottlieb and Philip Guston—ethnocentrism was among the factors. Indeed, President Truman himself (who does not deserve credit for desegregating the U.S. military) used a racist remark to denigrate one painting in the show—a work by the Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi—saying: "the artist must have stood off from the canvas and thrown paint at it... if that's art, Fm a Hottentot."120 Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marshall, the author of the Marshall Plan, declared that henceforth the U.S. State Department would use "no taxpayers' money for modern art."121 Accordingly, in 1948 the Boston Institute of Modern Art changed its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art, because the term "modern art" was seen as too "foreign," that is, as "subversive" and thus likely to attract unwanted attention.122

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Notes to "Introduction" and "Abstract Expressionism and Afro-American Marginalisation"

1. Barnett Newman, Introduction, Northwest Coast Indian Painting (Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1946), n.p. 2. Ibid. 3. Meyer Schapiro, "The Liberating Quality of Abstract Art" (1957), in Modern Art, New York, 1978, p. 215. 4. Lawrence Kilman, "U.S. Poll Shows Majority Don't Care for Abstract Art," The International Herald Tribune (14 May 1985), p. 3. 5. This is the case, for example, in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago, 1983). None the less, it must be noted that this book contains some very important research and many significant insights. In short, Guilbaut's study is a valuable one for many reasons. 6. Coco Fusco, Introduction, Signs of Transition: 8os Art from Cuba (New York: Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, 1988), n.p. 7. Luis Morales, "Arte Nicaragüense," La Segunda Bienal de la Habana (Havana, 1986), pp. 420-1. 8. For an extended discussion of the Solentiname School, see: David Craven, The New Concept of Art and Popular Culture in Nicaragua Since the Revolution in 1979 (Lewiston, New York), 1989, pp. 72-106. 9. Ernesto Cardenal, "Cántico del sol," Ventana, 19 July 1986, pp. 12-13. Also see: David Craven, op. cit., pp. 140-55. 10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Indiana, 1984). 11. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (1966), translated by Geoffrey Wall (London, 1978). 12. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 10-11. 13. Richard Barnett, Intervention and Revolution: The U.S. and the Third World (New York, 1964). Also see Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, The Political Economy of Human Rights, 2 vols. (Boston, 1979). 14. Meyer Schapiro, "Race, Nationality and Art," Art Front (New York, 1936), pp. 38-41. 15. Clement Greenberg, "American-Type Painting," Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), pp. 208-9.

99. Barnett Newman, "Art of the South Seas," Studio International, no. 179, February 1970, p. 70. 100. Corrine Jennings, Foreword, Norman Lewis (Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, 1989), p. 8. 101. Norman Lewis is not mentioned in either Irving Sandier's Triumph of American Painting or in Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. 102. Ann Gibson, "Norman Lewis in the Forties," in Norman Lewis, p. 17.

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103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. no. 111.

Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 20 Norman Lewis, "Thesis, 1946," in Norman Lewis, p. 63. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, editors, op. cit., p. 16. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Gerald Fraser, "Romare Bearden, Collagist and Painter," The New York Times, 13 March 1988, p. 36. 112. Dore Ashton, The New York School, p. 194. 113. David Shirey, "Don Quixote in Sprints "Newsweek (20 November 1967),p. 80. 114. Charles Stuckey, "Bill de Kooning and Joe Christmas," Art in America, vol. 68, no. 3, March 1980, p. 71. 115. Ibid. 116. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York, 1932), p. 245. 117. Lother Hônninghausen, William Faulkner: The Art of Stylization in His Early Graphic and Literary Work (Cambridge, 1987). 118. Thomas Hess, Willem de Kooning Drawings (Greenwich, Conn., 1972), p. 17. 119. Charles Stuckey, op. cit., p. 72. 120. Lawrence Alloway, "Marilyn Monroe as Subject Matter," in Topics in American Art, pp. 140-4. 121. William Faulkner, Light in August, p. 27. 122. James Meriwether and Michael Millgate, editors, Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner (New York, 1968), p. 130. 123. /Wd.,p.i83. 124. William Faulkner, Letter to Malcolm Cowley, in The Portable Faulkner (New York, 1946), p. 652. 125. Frederick Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, editors, Faulkner in the University (New York, 1959), p. 72. 126. Michael Pearson, "The Shrine of Faulkner," The Atlanta Constitution (14 February 1988), p. 5H. 127. Cited in Herbert Mitgang, "Books on the Spanish Civil War," The New York Times (18 August 1986), p. i8C. 128. James Meriwether and Michael Millgate, op. cit., p. 79. 129. Ibid., pp. 133-4. 130. Frank Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, op. cit., p. 43. 131. Irving Sandier, op. cit., 1970, pp. 131,133. 132. Dore Ashton, The New York School, pp. 174-92. 133. Jean-Paul Sartre, On Cuba (1960) (Westport, Conn., 1974). 134. Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), translated by Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), pp. 7-34.

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525

Notes to "Dissent During the McCarthy Period"

no. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 68; emphasis added. On Lam, see: Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952 (New York: Studio Museum of Harlem, December 6,1992-April n, 1993); and also Julia Herzberg, "Wifredo Lam," Latin American Art, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 18-24. in. Interview with Sam Middleton by Ann Gibson (March 3,1988), Amsterdam, Netherlands. Cited by Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 13, 40. See also: Akua McDaniel, "Institutional Support of African American Art: 1930-1945," in Selected Essays: Art and Artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the igSos (Atlanta: National Black Arts Festival, 1988), pp. 19-27. 112. Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 12-13 (quote on p. 12). 113. Richard Pryor, television appearance, c. 1991. 114. Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 12-13. 115. Artists for CORE (New York City, Martha Jackson Gallery, May 23-29,1963). The announcement for the show, which includes an introduction by James Farmer of CORE, lists the artists who contributed to the show as well as its patrons (like Dore Ashton, James Baldwin, and Thomas B. Hess). A copy of this announcement is in the Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, N/69-100: 0687-9. 116. Ibid., N/69-100: 0688. 117. Jacob Lawrence, An Open Letter on Behalf of the Artists Committee for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1963), New York City, p. i. A copy of this letter, which lists Ad Reinhardt as an officer and Norman Lewis as a member of the Committee at Large, is found in the Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, N/69-100: 736. 118. Harold Rosenberg, "Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art" (1954), in Discovering the Present, pp. 101-2. For a discussion of the nature of art-world institutions, see: Harold Rosenberg, "The Art Establishment" (1965), in The Sociology of Art and Literature, edited by M. C. Albrecht,J. H. Barnett, M. Griff(New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 388-95. 119. These derisive comments about Baziotes by C. J. Bulliet of the Daily News of Chicago are cited in Dore Ashton, New York School, p. 147. 120. The comment by President Truman is cited by Jane DeHart Mathews in "Art and Politics in Cold War America," American Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 4 (October 1976): 762-87, at p. 777. William Leuchtenberg, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a past President of the American Historical Association, has written a forthcoming book on Truman's racialist views. 121. "Announcement of Secretary of State Marshall: No More Government Money for Modern Art," New York Times (May 6,1947), p. 24. Cited in DeHart Mathews, "Art and Politics," p. 778. 122. Mathews, "Art and Politics," p. 774. On this issue, see: Serge Guilbaut, "The Frightening Freedom of the Brush: The Boston Institute of Contemporary and Modern Art," in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985), pp. 52-93526

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MICHAEL LEJA

Modern Man Discourse and the New York School

Barnett Newman's observation that he and the other New York School painters had "made cathedrals of ourselves" attests to their participation in the divinization of the self. Schematic though it may be, the outline of some of the varied strands within Modern Man discourse provides an illuminating cultural matrix for the interests and works of the New York School painters. Like the Modern Man authors, these artists saw their work as responsive to the war and other contemporary stresses. One might assume that this was true to some extent of all art made during the war, but this was not the case. Reviewing the "Artists for Victory" show at the Metropolitan Museum in 1942, Manny Farber remarked on the paucity of images addressing the war and its implications. It is interesting how few of these painters were influenced by the war. (Though perhaps the hands of the selection jury may be felt here.) Out of 468 I think there are only three war pictures, yet nothing else is so constantly on our minds and in our feelings. It is as though American painters are so tied to copying scenes on tables, out the window, or on the model stand that they will have to see the war to paint it. But it is just such profound and close to terrifying emotions that Americans seem to be afraid to respond to. These people are artists: they are supposed to have gone beyond the strictures of our culture. Yet there seems to be a definite fear behind the pictures in this exhibit of saying something the spectator will have to look at silently and without even mental phrases, of exposing the emotions we do not talk of politely, of, in other words, being at all profound and personal.101 To be profound and personal was the challenge that Rothko, Gottlieb, Pollock, and others were then taking up with a vengeance, as the numerous manifestoes of the following year make clear. Gottlieb's remark in Tiger's Eye in 1947 makes vivid the relation between the painters and the discourse on modern man: "Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is

SOURCE: Excerpted from Refraining Abstract Expressionism, 249-52,270-72. Reprinted

with the permission of Yale University Press. 527

our reality."102 To cope with the perception of pervasive evil by looking to the subterranean interior, thereby expressing the neurosis of the time, was a preferred strategy of Modern Man authors as well as New York School artists. While histories of this art commonly have traced its notions of self and the human situation to new "existentialist" philosophies filtering into the U.S. from Europe in the wake of the war, there is reason to argue that the subjective identities shaped by the artists and imbricated in their paintings were already highly developed and thoroughly implemented by then. Nor is an existentialist influence necessary (or even able) to explain the formal changes witnessed in New York School art during these postwar years, specifically the gravitation toward system, simplification, and abstraction The paintings and statements seen in the broader context delineated just above indicate that the work and thought of the New York School artists were deeply rooted in the discourse about modern man. Questions about primitive instincts and unconscious impulses and the role of these in mental processes are the principle links between the artists and this broad discourse. These links were not lost on contemporary observers. "The subject of the paintings of Adolph Gottlieb is without question an attempt at revelation of the psychiatric configurations of the 'id' or inner panorama of the mind of modern man," wrote one reviewer.103 The locution modern man was ubiquitous in 1949; in itself it signifies little and is not sufficient to fix a text as part of Modern Man discourse unless it conjures, as here, the particular terms of the discourse. Even in this narrower sense, the locution permeated the criticism and commentary on New York School painting with fluid ease—a mark of congruence between the art and the discourse that engendered the term and gave it meaning. The differences in priorities and attitudes among the artists, some of which I pointed out as obstacles to group identity, become less obtrusive when situated within the enveloping discourse. Whether an artist focuses on primitivism or unconsciousness, whether science and reason are seen as causes or solutions to modern problems—such discrepancies matter less once an overarching discursive frame situates them as different positions within a circumscribed network of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and interests. Furthermore, other interests, which formerly seemed idiosyncratic or irrelevant, may acquire new significance as a result of réintégration into the discourse. One example is the penchant for intellectuality and philosophy in the work of many of the artists—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, in an insistence on the importance of the "subject" in their work. Philosophical ambitions motivated 528

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much New York School work, and the philosophy engaged tended to be that of Modern Man discourse. Like the Modern Man authors, many of the artists exhibited a tendency toward idealism—if the realm of ideas was the terrain on which the major work of reconstruction would take place, then some painters with "reconstructive" interests and ambitions might want to stake a claim to intellectual territory. This ambition could mean more than merely becoming involved with powerful ideas, as the Mythmakers made explicit in the mid to late 19403: it might also justify devising a deliberately idea-based art. This is, I believe, the proper frame for understanding Newman's insistence on the intellectual character of art. In essay after essay, he made the claim in no uncertain terms. In short, modernism brought the artist back to first principles. It taught that art is an expression of thought, of important truths, not of a sentimental and artificial "beauty."104 Art is the realm of pure thought.105 I therefore wish to call the new painting "plasmic," because the plastic elements of the art have been converted into mental plasma. The effect of these new pictures is that the shapes and colors act as symbols to [elicit] sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist's vision The new painter owes the abstract artist a debt for giving him his language, but the new painting is concerned with a new type of abstract thought.... If it were possible to define the essence of this new [American] movement, one might say that it was an attempt to achieve feeling through intellectual content. The new pictures are therefore philosophic.106 Motherwell wrote of Pollock that "painting is his thought's medium," and Harold Rosenberg described the action painter's canvas as "the 'mind' through which the painter thinks."107

Mind/body unity was part of the new knowledge that seemed to have value in the reconstruction of modern man's belief and behavior—sometimes as a way of addressing the pervasive sense of dislocation, sometimes as part of the explanation of instincts and drives. Rothko, too, asserted his support for a version of the idea in his statement for the David Porter exhibition in early 1945: 1990s

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"I insist upon the equal existence of the world engendered in the mind and the world engendered by God outside of it."113 And Robert Motherwell saw the mind-body connection as the answer to the anti-intellectualism of American artists. The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the "mind-and-body" as a whole to the events of reality.114 In short, idealism in general, and the mind-body problem in particular, mark a philosophical interest and ambition that link Modern Man discourse and the theory and practice of some of the young artists of the New York School. The various ties that bound New York School painting to Modern Man discourse would also make it susceptible to criticisms lodged against the latter. Sidney Hook's charge that it represented a failure of nerve was extended to the arts; he asserted that literature and the arts had been deeply affected by the shifts that constituted what I have been calling Modern Man discourse. In the literary arts, the tom-tom of theology and the bagpipes of transcendental metaphysics are growing more insistent and shrill. We are told that... none of the arts and no form of literature can achieve imaginative distinction without "postulating a transcendental reality." Obscurantism is no longer apologetic; it has now become precious and wilful.115 Hook's article preceded by only a few months the letter to the art editor of the New York Times written by Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman which defended their work as "an adventure into an unknown world," a world of imagination, which is "fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense." Their "obscurantist" (so Jewell found it) art, with its allusions to "myth," and their profession of "spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art" would have made these artists appropriate targets for Hook's criticisms. Likewise Robert Motherwell's defense of the modern artist as "the last active spiritual being in the great world . . . it is the artists who guard the spiritual in the modern world."116

The subjectivity conceived, explored, experienced, and represented by these artists was not a natural phenomenon but a specific social and cultural construction. That construction—"modern man"—has been a primary ob530

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ject, one might say the protagonist, of my study. I have aimed to illuminate this figure's internal architecture. Its basic structural element, I have argued, was a matrix of primitive instincts, habits, and unconscious impulses. These components, as I have also tried to show, were responses to specific historical and cultural conditions. The restabilization of bourgeois ideology in the face of the shock of modern historical events depended upon the construction of psychologizing explanations for those events; crucial to this project were the insights offered by the study of "primitive" human life and the unconscious mind. This construction of the problem and its solution achieved wide currency in 19405 America. I have tried to suggest how profound were the effects of its positing the human (white, middle-class, male) individual as the subject —in the sense of a real, identifiable, coherent entity—of reflection upon modernity. This male individual was portrayed as the locus of the conflicts at the source of modern life's tragedies. He was understood to be both agent and victim of the mysterious impulses or forces producing those conflicts. Much as modern man was believed to be both agent and victim of powerful internal and external forces, the New York School painters—as well, for that matter, as the authors of Modern Man literature and the makers of film noir—were, inevitably, both subjects and agents of ideology. I [have] used the Gramscian notion of "hegemony" to describe the process: the dominant middle-class ideology had so permeated the institutions and discourses that shaped the New York School painters that its constraints were part of the very fabric of their experience, development, ambition, and subjectivity. In the absence of deliberate, direct, sustained, radical deconstructive work on that ideology by the artists themselves, its limits were bound to contain their authentic efforts to produce art that would convey something of the difficulty of their lived experience. In the end, those efforts contributed to the renovation and elaboration of the dominant ideology and its models of human nature, mind, and subjectivity. Another way of envisioning the relation between the dominant ideology and the New York School artists is suggested in the work of Michel Foucault. Near the opening of this study I quoted Foucault's injunction to question received syntheses, a challenge that dates from the late 19605—the period of his structural analysis of the discourses of the human sciences. It is fitting that he return here, as the preeminent analyst of "discourses"—that critical concept enabling the analysis of thought and language as a social and political practice—this time with insights dating from the mid-igyos, the period of his preoccupation with the nature of power.147 1990s

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Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application. The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the visa-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects. The individual is an effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.148 I introduce this passage because I find it an indispensible description of certain fundamental aspects of the historical phenomena under analysis. Foucault's picture of power as thoroughly diffused throughout the social body— as constituting entities (discourses, subjects) within the threads of power's web, articulating it, acting as its vehicles as well as its effects—fits the processes of ideological reconstruction I have been tracing. A subject's preference for one form of explanation over another, a preference conditioned by the subject's ideological constitution, is one form in which the constitutive power is articulated and exercised. What I have called the "momentum" of discourses and ideologies—although "inertia" may be more precise—is preserved through such quotidian and apparently insignificant activities. Foucault's statement encapsulates the relation observed in the present study between the constitution of the subject and the subject's participation in the circulation of power. The New York School painters were, speaking generally, Modern Man subjects, constituted by the dominant ideology and its model of subjectivity, both of which their art reproduced, elaborated, and promoted. Their representations of their conflicted interior worlds or inner selves as dominated by particular primitive and unconscious components 532

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helped to consolidate evolving notions of the human individual's nature and mind. Through this complex interlocking of subjectivity and ideology, New York School painting illuminates fundamental mechanisms of culture in a modern bourgeois capitalist society—or at least in a society whose dominant ideology is as secure in its hegemony as is bourgeois ideology in the United States. Consent was not so much manufactured or engineered in the wartime U.S. as it was self-sustaining, so deeply was the dominant ideology embedded in the very subjectivity, mentality, and experience of the subjects it constructed. Those subjects "instinctively" acted as its agents, identifying its interests closely with theirs. Certain subjects employed in characterizing and representing collective experience for large segments of the population—the cultural critics, journalists, popular authors, fiction writers, artists, filmmakers —engaged in "democratic" processes of exchange (including debate and dispute as well as friendly give and take) which functioned ultimately to promote the efficient and continual calibration of integral elements in the hegemonic ideology. Radical critique was not impossible, certainly, as some of the voices heard in this chapter reveal. It could issue from the conflicts and gaps among the various subject positions that individuals were called upon to inhabit, negotiate, and reconcile as members of collectivities and as isolated monads. Most commonly, however, radical critique was overshadowed and undermined by reformist proposals. Resisting the key elements of Modern Man discourse was evidently far more difficult and unusual than succumbing to their seductions.

Notes

101. Manny Farber, "Artists for Victory," Magazine of Art (December 1942): 280. 102. Adolph Gottlieb, "The Ides of Art," Tiger's Eye (December 1947): 43. 103. Alfred Valente, Review of Gottlieb exhibition at Seligmann Galleries, in Promenade (February 1949): 40. Because this review is telling, in my view, and difficult to locate, I will quote it at length: "[Gottlieb's] method is similar to the reclining couch technique of the psychiatrist who recalls the most fugitive, obscure, personal, sexual, atavistic memories. Drawing from the past with a certain naïveté that is lost almost by its directness, Gottlieb contains complete fragments of experiences in squares, one against the other, which derive from the arrangements of medieval books of hours; or again, he will insinuate details in episodic totem pole story-telling arrangements with cubistic overtones. The very use of some of these alien art forms is supposed to imply certain throwback meanings. See Pictograph. Gottlieb's work is primarily individualistic in its pre1990s

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104.

105.

106. 107.

occupation with itself and, more egotistically, with the painter himself. The humanities are overlooked; love, hate, religion, man's hopes, morals and fate are secondary matters in the play of aesthetic form and experiment. Nevertheless, for those clinically interested, this show is outstanding for what is happening in the neon-lighted ateliers." Barnett Newman, "Sobre el arte moderno: Examen y ratificación," La Revista Belga (November 1944): 20. English original published in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed.John P. O'Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990): 67. Hereafter BN-SWI. Newman, "La pintura de Tamayo y Gottlieb," La Revista Belga (April 1945): 17 ("El Arte es dominio del pensiamento puro"). English original published in BN-SWI: 72. Newman, "The Plasmic Image" (1945), BN-SWI: 141-42,155. Robert Mother well, "Painters' Objects," Partisan Review (Winter 1944): 97; Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News (December 1952): 22.

113. David Porter, éd., Personal Statement (Washington D.C.: David Porter Gallery, 1945), unpaginated. (Pamphlet prepared for the exhibition "A Painting Prophecy—1950" at the David Porter Gallery in February, 1945.) 114. Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World," Dyn (November 1944): 9. The italics are Motherwell's. 115. Sidney Hook, "The New Failure of Nerve," Partisan Review (January-February 1943): 3. The italics are Hook's. 116. Motherwell, "Modern Painter's World," 10.

147. For a valuable discussion of the arguments in Foucault's work relevant to the issues under consideration here, see Peter Dews, "Power and Subjectivity in Foucault," New Left Review (March-April 1984): 72-95 and the same author's "Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity," New Left Review (May-June 1986): 28-44. Also influential in my thinking about the relation of subjectivity and ideology in New York School painting was Steve Burniston and Chris Weedon, "Ideology, Subjectivity and the Artistic Text," in On Ideology (London: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1978): 199-229. A useful reference with a wide scope is Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellberry, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy} Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1986). 148. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, igjz-igyj, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980): 98.

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T. J. CLARK

In Defense of Abstract Expressionism

I assume you speak of the age in which great forms appear, only to be taken apart ten years later ... The angriness of the captive is felt, is very plain, it is a large feeling like a light in a toe, a voice of the sky; now it has yielded all its bars, its robes, and become the gentle sentiment of a class.

Frank O'Hara, "About Courbet" Ait News, 1958 We are forty years away from Abstract Expressionism, and the question of how we should understand our relationship to the movement starts to be interesting again. Awe at its triumphs is long gone; but so is laughter at its cheap philosophy, or distaste for its heavy breathing, or boredom with its sublimity, or even resentment at the part it played in the Cold War. Not that any of those feelings has dissipated, or ever should, but that it begins to be clear that none of them—not even the sum of them—amounts to an attitude to the painting in question. They are what artists and critics went in for because they did not have an attitude—because something stood in the way of their making Abstract Expressionism a thing of the past. Not being able to make a previous moment of high achievement part of the past—not to lose it and mourn it and, if necessary, revile it—is, for art in modernist circumstances, more or less synonymous with not being able to make art at all. Because ever since Hegel put the basic proposition of modernism into words in the iSsos—that "art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past"1—art's being able to continue has depended on its success in making that dictum specific and punctual. That is to say, on fixing the moment of art's last flowering at some point in the comparatively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible

SOURCE: Copyright © 1999 T. J. Clark (as part of Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999]), 371-403,441-42. Reprinted with the permission of T. J. Clark. 535

nonetheless. The "can't go on, will go on" syndrome. I think of the relation of nineteenth-century orchestral and chamber music to the moment of Mozart and Beethoven; or of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature managed to continue living on the idea of "the Romantics," or on the terminal images it fashioned of Baudelaire and Rimbaud; or of the past that "Impressionism" went on providing for French painting deep into the twentieth century (till the deaths of Bonnard and Matisse); or of the feeding of later modernisms on the myth of the Readymade and the Black Square. Hegel's dictum had to be localized, in other words. And pointing to the fact that it can be localized, and therefore in a sense evaded, is of course to confirm the Hegelian thesis, not to refute it. For Hegel did not anticipate any literal ceasing, or even withering-away, of activities calling themselves art. He just did not see that they could possibly be the form any longer in which men and women articulated the relations of mind and body to possible worlds. Or rather, articulated them to good effect. What he did not see, I think, was that the full depth and implication of this inability—the inability to go on giving Idea and World sensuous immediacy, of a kind that opened both to the play of practice—would itself prove a persistent, maybe sufficient, subject. That was because he had a naive hubris about philosophy, and because he could not detach himself from the sense of world-historical beginnings and endings that came with an adulthood passed in the shadow of the French Revolution. And other reasons besides. He could never have guessed that the disenchantment of the world would take so long. Modernism, as I conceive it, is the art of the situation Hegel pointed to, but its job turns out to be to make the endlessness of the ending bearable, by time and again imagining that it has taken place—back there with Beethoven scratching out Napoleon's name on the Eroica symphony, or with Rimbaud getting on the boat at Marseille. Every modernism has to have its own proximate Black Square. Therefore our failure to see Pollock and Hans Hofmann as ending something, or our lack of a story of what it was they were ending, is considerably more than a crisis in art criticism or art history. It means that for us art is no longer a thing of the past; that is, we have no usable image of its ending, at a time and place we could imagine ourselves inhabiting, even if we would prefer not to. Therefore art will eternally hold us with its glittering eye. Not only will it forego its role in the disenchantment of the world, but it will accept the role that has constantly been foisted upon it by its false friends: it will become one

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of the forms, maybe the form, in which the world is re-enchanted. With a magic no more and no less powerful (here is my real fear) than that of the general conjuror of depth and desirability back into the world we presently inhabit— that is, the commodity form. For one thing the myth of the end of art made possible was the maintenance of some kind of difference between art's sensuous immediacy and that of other (stronger) claimants to the same power. The situation I have just been describing may not be remediable. It may be that we have lost Abstract Expressionism because we have lost modernism tout court, and therefore the need to imagine art altogether—whether continuing or ending. I have my doubts. But my question here is more limited. I want to mount a defense of Hofmann and Pollock and others, couched in historical terms. Whether the defense makes any of them usable, in the sense I have been proposing—whether it makes them a thing of the past—depends on whether it tallies in the long-term with art practice. At the moment I see no reason why it should; but equally, I find it hard to believe that the present myth of post-ness will sustain itself much past the year 2000. All this remains to be seen—it is not art historians' business: I can only bring it up because it would be futile to pretend that I do not think a great deal hinges on somebody, eventually, giving this painting its due. A word about interpretations, then. There has been a feeling in the air for some time now that writing on Abstract Expressionism has reached an impasse. The various research programs that only yesterday seemed on the verge of delivering new and strong accounts of it, and speaking to its place (maybe even its function) in the world fiction called America, have run into the sand. Those who believed that the answer to the latter kind of question would emerge from a history of Abstract Expressionism's belonging to a Cold War polity, with patrons and art-world institutions to match, have proved their point and offended all the right people. But the story, though good and necessary, turned out not to have the sort of upshot for interpretation that the storytellers had been hoping for. It was one thing to answer the question, "What are the circumstances in which a certain national bourgeoisie, in the pride of its victory after 1945, comes to want something as odd and exotic as an avant garde of its own?" It is another to speak to the implications of that encounter for the avant garde itself, and answer the question, "To what extent was the meeting of class and art-practice in the later 19405 more than just contingent?

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To what extent does Abstract Expressionism really belong, at the deepest level —the level of language, of procedure, of presuppositions about world-making —to the bourgeoisie who paid for it and took it on their travels?" Not that answers to the latter questions will never be available, in my view, not that writers have given up looking for ways to ask them more convincingly. Work is getting done. And certainly they seem to me the kind of questions still most worth asking of the paintings we are looking at—far more so than going through the motions of discovering, for the umpteenth time, that in Vortex or Lent "paintings . . . are made . . . to block the viewer's impulse to constitute an imaginary object out of the painting's sensory reality, the eye being led back incessantly to painting's constitutive elements—line, color, flat surface [les tableaux. . . sont faits. . . pour entraver le mouvement de constitution d'un objet irréel à partir de la réalité sensible du tableau, l'oeil étant incessamment reconduit aux éléments constitutifs de la peinture, la ligne, la couleur, le plan]"2 Once upon a time even this semiotic fairy tale evoked a faint sensation of wonder. But that was in another country ... At least the tellers of the historical story (the New-York-in-the-age-of-JoeMcCarthy-and-Nelson-Rockefeller story) recognize that their researches have landed them in a quandary; at least they are aware their objects resist them. The semioticians, it seems to me, are frozen in the triumph of their prearranged moments of vision. Sometimes the way out of this kind of impasse in historical work comes from proposing another set of possible descriptions that the painting in question might "come under"—making the proposal, especially in the beginning, with no very clear sense of where it may lead. How would it alter things, one asks, what sort of new orders in the objects would be set up, if we chose to look at them this way? How different would they look? Would they look better? Or properly worse? (Sometimes the way out of an impasse of understanding involves putting an end to a false, or even true, cathexis of the object. F. R. Leavis said more about Milton, and Fénéon more about Monet, than all Milton's and Monet's admirers put together.) The theses that follow are offered in a similar speculative spirit. I think we might come to describe Abstract Expressionist painting better if we took them, above all, to be vulgar. The word for us is pejorative, and to be understood as such in the arguments that follow. But this should not present

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an insuperable problem, especially for anyone used to thinking about modernism in general. After all, modernism has very often been understood as deriving its power from a range of characteristics that had previously come under the worst kind of pejorative descriptions—from ugliness, for example, or from the merely fragmentary and accidental; from the material as opposed to the Ideal; from the plain and limiting fact of flatness, from superficiality, from the low and the formless. Nonetheless there still may be a slight frisson to the idea that the form of Abstract Expressionism's lowness is vulgarity. It is not clear how characterizing Willem de Kooning's Woman, Wind and Window //, for instance, or Bradley Walter Tomlin's All Souls' Night, No. 2, as "vulgar" is to do anything besides denigrate them. That is fine by me. Not to be certain, for once, that the negative term brought on to describe a modernist artifact can ever be made to earn its positive keep—to emerge transfigured by the fact of its having been attached to a difficult painting or sculpture—may mean we are on to something. To call an artwork vulgar is obviously (at least for now) to do something a bit more transgressive than to call it low or informe. To have made it vulgar in the first place—to have had vulgarity be the quality in it (maybe the only quality) that raised the work from inertness and had it speak a world—this surely must have felt weird to those doing the job, and for much of the time was barely recognized or tolerated by them, at least when it came to finding words for what they were up to. Pollock's drip paintings, for instance, as I argued previously, seem to me to have been begun at the end of 1947 in a mood of triumphant access to the gaudy and overwrought. Vortex is typical; and yet the title Pollock settled for, beautiful as it is, somewhat naturalizes the painting's mad centrifugal force. The same is true, ultimately, of most of the titles he and his friends dreamed up at this moment—of Phosphorescence and Reflection of the Big Dipper, or Galaxy and Watery Paths, or even Sea Change and Full Fathom Five. They all try to conjure back depth and tactility (I mean natural tactility, the look and feel of the elements) into paintings that hinge, in my view, on not having much of either. They offer the sea and stars, not an indoor (Unfounded) fireworks display. It is an advantage to the term "vulgar," as far as I am concerned, that discursively it points two ways: to the object itself, to some abjectness or absurdity in its very make-up (some tell-tale blemish, some atrociously visual quality which the object will never stop betraying however hard it tries); and to the

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object's existence in a particular social world, for a set of tastes and styles of individuality which have still to be defined, but are somehow there, in the word even before it is deployed. Herein, I hope, lies the possibility of class ascription in the case of paintings like The Oracle and Woman—the possibility of seeing at last, and even being able to describe, the ways they take part in a particular triumph and disaster of the petty bourgeoisie. But I am coming to that. In Abstract Expressionism—and here is the painting's continuing (maybe intensifying) difficulty for us—a certain construction of the world we call "individuality" is revealed in its true, that is to say, contingent, vulgarity. And so is painting; or rather, so are paintings like Hofmann's The Garden and Adolph Gottlieb's Black, Blue, Red—dont as they were under the sign or spell of such a construction, by "individuals" believing utterly (innocently, idiotically) in its power. I should try to define my terms. It will not be easy. The entries under the word "vulgar" and its cognates in the Oxford English Dictionary revel, really a bit vulgarly, in the slipping and sliding of meaning over the centuries, and in the elusiveness (but for that very reason, the intensity) of the panics and snobberies built into them. The three quotations that seem to help most with what we are looking at are, first, Jane Austen in 1797, in Sense and Sensibility, having Elinor reflect on "the vulgar freedom and folly" of the eldest Miss Steele and decide it "left her no recommendation"—I think it was the lady's freedom even more than her folly that Elinor objected to, and needed the word "vulgar" to dispatch. Then Matthew Arnold in 1865, making the link between vulgarity and expressiveness that particularly concerns us here: "Saugrenu [it means 'preposterous'] is a rather vulgar French word, but like many other vulgar words, very expressive." And lastly, George Eliot, quoted in Cross's Life as saying of Byron, in a letter of 1869, that he seemed to her "the most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in literature." Everyone will have their own favorite candidate—Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Hofmann, Pollock when things went best for him— for the proper substitution in the case of visual art. Scanning the columns, the eye stops at OED usage 13: "having a common and offensively mean character; coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement or good taste; uncultured, ill-bred." Of actions, manners, features, recorded

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from 1643; of persons, from 1678; of language, from 1716; of mind or spirit, from 1764. The key idea, from the present point of view, is of vulgarity as betrayal, on the part of those who by rights ought to be in the vanguard of good taste. The dictionary does not seem quite cognizant of this shift, though it provides the evidence for its taking place. It is there already in Coleridge's complaining, in 1833, of the "sordid vulgarity of the leaders of the day!" and it becomes a nineteenth-century commonplace. Ruskin in volume 5 of Modern Painters, we shall see, has a great climactic chapter, "Of Vulgarity," struggling with the shades of Quilp, Chadband, and Mrs. Gamp—and of Dickens himself behind them—and speaking to his deepest fears and hopes for art. The noun "vulgarian"—"a vulgar person; freq., a well-to-do or rich person of vulgar manners"—is coined around 1800.1 guess it is what Ruskin and George Eliot most have in mind. I am proposing that one main kind of intensity in Abstract Expressionism is its engagement with the dangers and falsehoods just catalogued. And what is special about Abstract Expressionism—what marks it off from all other modernisms—is that the engagement is with the vulgar as opposed to the "popular" or "low." I think we should understand the "popular" in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art as a series of figures of avoidance of the vulgar: that is, figures of avoidance of art's actual belonging to the pathos of bourgeois taste: a perpetual shifting and conjuring of kinds of simplicity, directness, naivety, sentiment and sentimentality, emotional, and material force, in spite of everything about art's actual place and function that put such qualities beyond its grasp. Abstract Expressionism does little or no such conjuring. That is what makes it hard to bear. We are used to an art that always sets off again in search of the true underlying the tawdry, and where the tawdry may divulge the true (to the artist) just because the tawdriness is someone else's, out there in the mass or the margin. But Abstract Expressionism does not go elsewhere for its language, and at its best (its most appalling) it seems in search of the false underlying the vehement; where the point is that cheap vehemence, or easy delectation, are what painting now is—the only values, the only forms of individuality, that it can stage without faking. Only those Abstract Expressionist canvases will do that are truly consumed with their own empty intensity, with painting as posturing, with a ludicrous bigness and lushness and generality. (Pollock's big paintings of 1950 are no longer ludicrous and self-consuming enough: they have become almost comfortable with their scale and degree of

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generalization of touch: the "true" is leaking back into the paintings, giving them depth and coherence, displacing the great empty performatives of 1948 and 1949. This again is one way of saying why the big paintings could not be continued.) Nobody would expect the terms and issues I am claiming as most deeply Abstract Expressionism's own to be readily available in the discourse of the time, any more than issues of flatness and modernity were, for example to even the best of Manet's critics. But one would at least expect to find the traces in discourse of the issues being avoided. Here is a New York critic in 1951, writing of an artist he greatly admires. In this case the background is without question the most outrageously overwhelming the artist has ever contrived. Inspired by the most flagrant and bombastic French Baroque wallpaper, [he has] intensified to a maximum its brown and orange arabesque which surrounds areas of the harshest blue in the centers of which cluster pink and red roses ... All these gratuitous incidents superimposed on the wall and floor serve to break up and confuse the patterns on these surfaces so that the eye can find no security even in the repetition of ornamental motif—a comfort afforded in ... earlier compositions ... Visually the Decorative Figure is a garish, violent, and upsetting picture. The rather mild problems which [the painter] had been posing for himself during the previous five years are here suddenly exacerbated almost to the point of burlesque. Luxe, calme et volupté have disappeared and in their places discomfort, excitement, and tension reign. The ... Seated Nude of the year before had expressed [the painter's] rebellion against ease and softness; this big odalisque adds a revolt against charm and good taste. It represents a triumph of art over factitious vulgarity. Yet because the picture is so clearly an act of will in a field of artifice, the victory seems Pyrrhic.3 The last two sentences in particular—"It represents a triumph of art over factitious vulgarity. Yet because the picture is so clearly an act of will in a field of artifice, the victory seems Pyrrhic"—seem to me to provide the terms for a description of Abstract Expressionism. The key question, of course (which this critic understandably skirts) is whether the victory over vulgarity is meant to seem Pyrrhic—whether the hollowness of the victory is what the picture

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wants to figure most urgently. But of course it is right and proper that even though these words were written at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and from what has to become the seat of the movement's institutional power—by Alfred H. Barr in a MoMA catalogue—they precisely could not be written of Gottlieb or Hofmann or de Kooning, but only of Matisse, of his Decorative Figure on Ornamental Ground done a quarter of a century earlier. I realize that it is still not clear what Barr or I mean by the word "vulgarity" as applied to paintings. And I do not think it ever will be. The word is opaque: it points, as Ruskin knew, to a deep dilemma of bourgeois culture: it is as close to an ultimate term of ethics or metaphysics as that culture maybe will ever throw up. "Two years ago," ends Ruskin's chapter "On Vulgarity" in Modern Painters, when I was first beginning to work out the subject, and chatting with one of my keenest-minded friends [Mr. Brett, the painter of the Val d'Aosta in the Exhibition of 1859], I casually asked him, "What is vulgarity?" merely to see what he would say, not supposing it possible to get a sudden answer. He thought for about a minute, then answered quietly, "It is merely one of the forms of Death." I did not see the meaning of the reply at the time; but on testing it, found that it met every phase of the difficulties connected with the inquiry, and summed the true conclusion. Yet, in order to be complete, it ought to be made a distinctive as well as conclusive definition; showing what form of death vulgarity is; for death itself is not vulgar, but only death mingled with life. I cannot, however, construct a short-worded definition which will include all the minor conditions of bodily degeneracy; but the term "deathful selfishness" will embrace all the most fatal and essential forms of mental vulgarity.4 I do not bring on this passage of Ruskin in hopes of solving our problem of definition, but more because it shows (more clearly than anyone nowadays would dare to) what the problem is—what terrible cocktail of class ascriptions and bodily disgust the word "vulgar" is empty container for, and how fatal and essential is the sliding within it between a handy form of class racism and a general sense of class doom. Vulgarity is foulness and degeneracy, it is a "dulness of bodily sense," "all which comes of insensibility." "The black battlestain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is."5

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But Brett's dictum is ultimately impatient of such distinctions. We are all housemaids now. "Vulgarity is merely one of the forms of death." Beware of taking Brett's dictum too literally in the case of Abstract Expressionism, and, above all, beware of converting it back into some ridiculous (vulgar) retelling of Abstract Expressionists' life stories. I think there may be some kind of fatal connection between this painting's vulgarity and its incessant courting of Death; but that is not to be understood as a biographical proposition but a formal one. It is a way of thinking again about Pollock's or Kline's repetition compulsion, their constant (fruitful) drive toward emptiness, endlessness, the non-human, and the inorganic. Perhaps the last paradox these works contain is that of death [this is the novelist Parker Tyler once again, writing of Pollock's drip paintings some time early in 1950, before the last show of them at Betty Parsons]. For in being a conception of ultimate time and space, the labyrinth of infinity, Jackson Pollock's latest work goes beyond the ordinary processes of life—however these might be visualized and recognized—into an absolute being which must contain death as well as life. Hence the spatial distinctions achieved by lines and spots of color within Pollock's rectangles go as much beyond mere optical vision as seems possible to painting ... Jackson Pollock has put the concept of the labyrinth at an infinite and unreachable distance, a distance beyond the stars—a non-human distance ... If one felt vertigo before Pollock's differentiations of space, then truly one would be lost in the abyss of an endless definition of being. One would be enclosed, trapped by the labyrinth of the picture-space. But we are safely looking at it, seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, from a point outside. Only man, in his paradoxical role of the superman, can achieve such a feat of absolute contemplation: the sight of an image of space in which he does not exist? It would be easy to make fun of this. Its metaphysics are vulgar. But the terms and tone seem to me as close as Pollock got to appropriate criticism in his lifetime. It is fitting, again, that these were paragraphs deleted from Tyler's article in 1950 by Robert Goldwater, editor of the Magazine of Art. They only survive at all as part of Pollock criticism because the artist seems to have been given a typescript by the writer, and kept it in his files.

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Maybe the Death in Brett's dictum is simply or mainly that of painting. Maybe it always was, for Brett and Ruskin as much as Pollock and Parker Tyler. Death makes a bad metaphor. Pictures that summon it up too readily— Newman's passim, Rothko's from 1957 on—get to look Gothick before their time. That we are meant to take the portentousness as ultimately having to do with "painting," or "signification," or some such, only makes matters worse. Death is enlisted to make vulgarity look deep. The trouble with Barnett Newman is that he was never vulgar enough, or vulgar only on paper. "The First Man Was an Artist," "The Sublime Is Now," "The True Revolution Is Anarchist!" etc. The great Rothkos are those everybody likes, from the early 19505 mainly: the ones that revel in the new formula's cheap effects, the ones where a hectoring absolute of self-presence is maintained in face of the void; with vulgarity— a vulgar fulsomeness of reds, pinks, purples, oranges, lemons, lime greens, powder-puff whites—acting as transform between the two possibilities of reading. The Birth of Tragedy redone by Renoir. When they are hung in tight phalanx, as he would have them hung, and flooded with the light he demands that they receive, the tyranny of his ambition to suffocate or crush all who stand in his way becomes fully manifest... It is not without significance, therefore, that the surfaces of these paintings reveal the gestures of negation, and that their means are the devices of seduction and assault. Not I, but himself, has made it clear that his work is of frustration, resentment and aggression. And that is the brightness of death that veils their bloodless febrility and clinical evacuations. Thus Clyfford Still on Rothko, in a letter to Sidney Janis, written in 1955.7 It puts me in mind of Fénéon on Monet: which is to say, it is mean-spirited, partial, and tendentious, but somehow for that very reason (because it steps out of the circle of deference for once) the best criticism Rothko ever received. And so to the question of class. "While formal analysis," says Adorno in his Introduction to the Sociology of Music, "was learning to trace the most delicate ramifications of [a work's] manufacture,... the method of deciphering

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the specific social characteristics of music has lagged behind pitifully and must be largely content with improvisations."8 Quite so—and maybe improvisation will turn out to be its method. But equally (this is Adorno in the same paragraph): "If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolutionary bourgeoisie—not the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant— we understand Beethoven no better than does the listener who cannot follow his pieces' purely musical content, the inner history that happens to their themes." What remains to be thought about Abstract Expressionism (though the thought haunts everything written on the subject, especially those texts most anxious to repress it) is the painting's place in a determinate class formation; one which, though long prepared, took on the specific trappings of cultural power in the years after 1945.1 said "its place in a determinate class formation," not in a state apparatus, or a newly improvised system of avant-garde patronage, or a museum/art-world superstructure. Not that the latter are irrelevant. But they cannot be what we mean, fundamentally, when we talk about a certain representational practice inhering in the culture of a class. We mean that the practice somehow participates in that class's whole construction of a "world." We are talking of overlap and mutual feeding at the level of representational practice—at the level of symbolic production (ideology). When we say that the novel is bourgeois, the key facts in the case are not eighteenth-century subscription lists, or even the uses early readers made of The Sufferings of Young Werther. Clement Greenberg begins a review of an exhibition of Courbet at Wildenstein's in January 1949 by saying that "Bosch, Brueghel, and Courbet are unique in that they are great artists who express what may be called a petty bourgeois attitude."9 Like Barr, he seems to me to be averting his eyes from Pollock and Clyfford Still. What is new in their case, of course, is that now a particular (hybrid) form of petty-bourgeois culture—I am including in the term "culture" a set of political and economic compromise-formations, with myths and duplicities to match, as well as a set of established styles of personhood— has become the form, the only viable medium, of bourgeois class power. It is not that the petty bourgeoisie in America has power, but that its voice has become, in the years after 1945, the only one in which power can be spoken: in it,

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and only in it, can be heard the last echoes of what the bourgeoisie had once aspired to be—"the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for that totality in which freedom [no longer reason] is to have its warrant."10 Abstract Expressionism, I want to say, is the style of a certain petty bourgeoisie's aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cultural power. It is the art of that moment when the petty bourgeoisie thinks it can speak (and its masters allow it to speak) the aristocrat's claim to individuality. Vulgarity is the form of that aspiration. Or could we say: Abstract Expressionism is the form of the petty bourgeoisie's aspiration to aristocracy, at that fateful moment when the bourgeoisie itself no longer so aspires; when the petty bourgeois has to stand in for a hidden—nay, vanished—bourgeois elite. (Of course we are dealing here with two class formations, two fictions or constructions, not two brute sociological entities. We are dealing with forms of representation; which is not to say that the kind of representational doubling described here does not have specific, often brutal, sociological effects. McCarthyism was one of them in which the bourgeois Frankenstein was for a while really paralysed by its petty-bourgeois Monster.) Vulgarity, then (to return to our subject), is the necessary form of that individuality allowed the petty bourgeoisie. Only that painting will engage and sustain our attention which can be seen to recognize, and in some sense to articulate, that limit condition of its own rhetoric. Maybe it will always be a painting that struggles to valorize that condition even as it lays bare its deficiencies—for here we touch, as Adorno never tired of telling us, on some constitutive (maybe regrettable) link between art and an ethics of reconciliation or transcendence—but what we shall value most in the painting is the ruthlessness of (self-)exposure, the courting of bathos, the unapologetic banality. The victory, if there is one, must always also be Pyrrhic. You see now why the concept "vulgarity" has more and more the notion of betrayal written into it as the nineteenth century goes on. For the bourgeoisie's great tragedy is that it can only retain power by allowing its inferiors to speak for it: giving them the leftovers of the cry for totality, and steeling itself to hear the ludicrous mishmash they make of it—to hear and pretend to approve, and maybe, in the end, to approve without pretending.

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If this frame of reference for Abstract Expressionism turns out to work at all, one of the things it ought to be good for is rethinking the stale comparison between America and Europe. European painting after the war, alas, comes out of a very different set of class formations. Vulgarity is not its problem. In Asger Jorn, for example—to turn for a moment to the greatest painter of the 19505—what painting confronts as its limit condition is always refinement. Painting for Jorn is a process of coming to terms with the fact that however that set of qualities may be tortured, exacerbated, or erased, they still end up being what (European) painting is; and the torture, exacerbation, and erasure are discovered in practice to be refinement—that is, the forms refinement presently takes if a painter is good enough. They are what refines painting to a new preciousness or dross (it turns out that preciousness and dross are the same thing). In calling Jorn the greatest painter of the 19505 I mean to imply nothing about the general health of painting in Europe at the time (nor to deny that Jorn's practice was hit and miss, and the number of his works that might qualify as good, let alone great, is very small).11 On the contrary. The clichés in the books are true. Jorn's really was an end game. Vulgarity, on the other hand, back on the other side of the Atlantic, turned out to be a way of keeping the corpse of painting hideously alive—while all the time coquetting with Death. An Asger Jorn can be garish, florid, tasteless, forced, cute, flatulent, overemphatic: it can never be vulgar. It just cannot prevent itself from a tampering and framing of its desperate effects which pulls them back into the realm of painting, ironizes them, declares them done in full knowledge of their emptiness. American painting by contrast—and precisely that American painting which is closest to the European, done by Germans and Dutchmen steeped in the tradition they are exiting from—does not ironize, and will never make the (false) declaration that the game is up. Hofmann and de Kooning, precisely because they are so similar to Jorn in their sense of "touch" and composition, register as Jorn's direct opposites. It is my hope that conceiving of Abstract Expressionism as vulgar will lead to a new set of discriminations between particular painters within the group, and between moments in the work of a single artist. I have already referred to one or two such possibilities—for instance, the difference between Pollock's drip paintings in 1947 and 1948 and their final appearance in 1950. I have tried also to give a preliminary sense of the new priorities, and the new kinds

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of belonging together under the general (too capacious) banner, by means of the pictures accompanying this chapter's text. Let me say a word or two more about this. Gottlieb, you will have noticed, emerges as the great and implacable maestro of Abstract Expressionism. He is Byron to Greenberg's George Eliot—the most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in oils. A Mantovani or a Lawrence Welk. Charlie Parker playing insolent variations on the theme of "I'd Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China"—feeling for a way to retrieve, and make properly unbearable, the pop song's contempt for the masses it aims to please. Gottlieb is at his best when he goes straight for the cosmological jugular, straight for the pages of Time or Life—his worlds on fire so many atomic-age parodies of El Lissitzky's Story of Two Squares, ghastly in their beautification of destruction. Certain moments and sequences of work in Abstract Expressionism that everyone, then and since, agrees to have been a turning-point for the new painting begin, in this light, to take on a different valency. For example, De Kooning's Woman series, and the vehemence of Clement Greenberg's reaction to it. (Actually the "vehemence" is mainly a matter of Greenberg's conversation as recalled by witnesses. He said little in print about the Women. But that, of course—coming from the person chosen to write the catalogue essay for de Kooning's 1953 retrospective—was felt to be the point. Greenberg's silence, or his occasional offhandedness, was telling above all by contrast with the general run of journalism at the time, which took it for granted that, love 'em or hate 'em, the Women were Abstract Expressionism's truth.) What Greenberg was recoiling from, I think, is the way in which choosing Woman as his subject allowed de Kooning to extrude a quality of perception and handling that stood at the very heart of his aesthetic, and fix it onto an Other, a scapegoat. "The black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is." For "dirty face of a housemaid" read "perfect smile of the model in a Camels cigarette ad." Greenberg drew back from this not, need I say it, out of concern over de Kooning's misogyny, but from an intuition that such splitting and projection would make it impossible for de Kooning's painting to go on sustaining the right pitch of tawdriness, idiot facility, overweening self-regard. I think he was right. Only when de Kooning found a way to have the vulgarity be his own again—or rather, to half project it into cliché landscape or townscape formats, which were transparently mere props—did

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he regain the measure of meretriciousness his art needed. The male braggadocio, that is to say, had to be unfocused if he was to paint up a storm. It had to be a manner in search of an object, and somehow aggrieved at not finding one. What was wanted was generalized paranoia, not particular war of the sexes. Vulgarity is gendered, of course. At the moment we are looking at, the attribute belonged (as a disposable property) mainly to men, or, more precisely, to heterosexual men. Not that this meant the art done under vulgarity's auspices was closed to reading from other points of view. What Beaton and Alfonso Ossorio and Parker Tyler and Frank O'Hara did to Pollock, with or without Pollock's permission, is clearly part—sometimes, as I have said, a central part—of any defensible history of the New York School. It seems important that, apart from Greenberg, the strongest early readings of Pollock's work (the strongest, not necessarily the best) all came from gay men. Namuth's films and photographs partake of the same homosocial atmosphere. Perhaps the deep reason why Greenberg was never able to realize his cherished project of a book on Pollock was that he found no way to contain, or put to use, the erotic hero-worship that sings in the prose of his shorter pieces about his friend.12 By talking as I have about Pollock's 1947 titles, or Alfred Barr's 1951 treatment of Matisse, I do not mean to give the impression that the set of issues I see as central to Abstract Expressionism simply never appeared in critical discourse at the time, or did so only in utterly displaced form. Now and again they surfaced directly; but what is striking when that happens is how the writer seems not to know what to do with the issues and terms once they show up. The terms are embarrassing. Greenberg, for instance, has the following to say about Clyfford Still's color and paint handling in his great essay, " 'American-Type' Painting," published in Partisan Review in 1955: I don't know how much conscious attention Still has paid to Monet and Impressionism [Greenberg has just been musing on the power within Abstract Expressionism of "an art like the late Monet's, which in its time pleased banal taste and still makes most of the avant-garde shudder"], but his ... art likewise has an affiliation with popular taste, though not by any means enough to make it acceptable to it. Still's is the first really Whitmanesque kind of painting we have had, not only because it makes large, loose, gestures ... but just as much 550

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because, as Whitman's Poetry assimilated, with varying success, large quantities of stale journalistic and oratorical prose, so Still's painting is infused with that stale, prosaic kind of painting to which Barnett Newman has given the name of "buckeye." Though little attention has been paid to it in print, "buckeye" is probably the most widely practiced and homogeneous kind of painting seen in the Western world today ... "Buckeye" painters, as far as I am aware, do landscapes exclusively and work more or less directly from nature. By piling dry paint—though not exactly in impasto—they try to capture the brilliance of daylight, and the process of painting becomes a race between hot shadows and hot lights whose invariable outcome is a livid, dry, sour picture with a warm, brittle surface that intensifies the acid fire of the generally predominating reds, browns, greens, and yellows. "Buckeye" landscapes can be seen in Greenwich Village restaurants (Eddie's Aurora on West Fourth Street used to collect them), Sixth Avenue picture stores (there is one near Eighth Street) and in the Washington Square outdoor shows ... I cannot understand fully why [these effects] should be so universal and so uniform, or the kind of painting culture behind them. Still, at any rate, is the first to have put "buckeye" effects into serious art. These are visible in the frayed dead-leaf edges that wander down the margins or across the middle of so many of his canvases, in the uniformly dark heat of his color, and in a dry, crusty paint surface (like any "buckeye" painter, Still seems to have no faith in diluted or thin pigments). Such things can spoil his pictures, or make them weird in an unrefreshing way, but when he is able to succeed with, or in spite of them, it represents but the conquest by high art of one more area of experience, and its liberation from Kitsch.13 There is a lot going on here, and no one interpretation will do it justice (the tangents and redundancies in Greenberg's text, which I have left out for the sake of brevity, are actually vital to its detective-story tone). But what I see Greenberg doing essentially is struggling to describe, and come to terms with, a specific area of petty bourgeois taste. He rolls out the place names and pieces of New York City geography with a cultural explorer's relish, all the better to be able to plead class ignorance in the end—"I cannot understand fully... the kind of painting culture behind them." Readers of Greenberg will know that the final enlistment of the word kitsch is heavily loaded. Kitsch equals vulgarity, roughly. In Greenberg's original Trotskyite scheme of things the word had strong class connotations. But 1955 is too late, by several years, for Greenberg to be willing to pursue this any further. It is interesting that he pursues 1990s

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it at all—that Still's painting seemingly forces him to think again, at some length, about high art's courting of banality. And he is in no two minds, at this point about the importance of such a tactic, for all its risk. The next sentence after the one on Still and kitsch reads as follows: "Still's art has a special importance at this time because it shows abstract painting a way out of its own academicism." This sentence is altered out of all recognition in the version of " 'AmericanType' Painting" Greenberg put in his book^4rf and Culture six years later.14 All of the section on Still is given heavy surgery. The word kitsch gives way to "one more depressed area of art"—where surely "depressed" is exactly the wrong word. (Kitsch is manic. Above all, it is rigid with the exaltation oí art. It believes in art the way artists are supposed to—to the point of absurdity, to the point where the cult of art becomes the new philistinism. This is the aspect of kitsch that Still gets horribly right.) The "buckeye" of the Partisan Review text is abandoned in favor of "demotic-Impressionist" or "open-air painting in autumnal colors." (Or almost abandoned—Greenberg cannot resist a single, unexplained appearance of the word toward the end.) There are no more names and addresses on Eighth Street. No more baffled talk of a separate, impenetrable "painting culture." This is a critic in flight from previous insights, I feel. And I think I see why. Then, finally, there is the problem of Hans Hofmann. You will not be surprised to hear that it was in coming to terms with Hofmann in particular that the vocabulary of the present argument first surfaced. For everyone who has ever cared at all about Hofmann (including Greenberg, who cared very much) has always known that in Hofmann the problems of taste in Abstract Expressionism come squawking home to roost. A good Hofmann is tasteless to the core—tasteless in its invocations of Europe, tasteless in its mock religiosity, tasteless in its Color-by-Technicolor, its winks and nudges toward landscape format, its Irving Stone title, and the cloying demonstrativeness of its handling. Tasteless, and in complete control of its decomposing means.15 Seen in its normal surroundings, past the unobtrusive sofas and calla lilies, as part of the unique blend of opulence and spareness that is the taste of the pic ture-buy ing classes in America, a good Hofmann seems always to be blurting out a dirty secret which the rest of the decor is conspiring to keep. It makes a false compact with its destination. It takes up the language of its users

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and exemplifies it, running monotonous, self-satisfied riffs on the main tune, playing it to the hilt—to the point of parody, like Mahler with his sentimental Viennese palm-court melodies. A good Hofmann has to have a surface somewhere between ice cream, chocolate, stucco and flock wallpaper. Its colors have to reek of Nature—of the worst kind of Woolworth forest-glade-withwaterfall-and-thunderstorm-brewing. Its title should turn the knife in the wound. For what it shows is the world its users inhabit in their heart of hearts. It is a picture of their "interiors," of the visceral-cum-spiritual upholstery of the rich. And above all it can have no illusions about its own status as part of the upholstery. It is made out of the materials it deploys. Take them or leave them, these ciphers of plenitude—they are all painting at present has to offer. "Feeling" has to be fetishized, made dreadfully (obscenely) exterior, if painting is to continue. I do not believe that what I have just offered is an account of Hofmann's intentions; any more than if my subject had been, say, the coldness and hardness of Matisse's hedonism in the 19205, or the pathos of Picasso's eroticism in 1932. (Of course it would be possible to give an account of all three phenomena which argued that up to now our understanding of the artists' intentions had been deficient, and ought to include the pathos or the coldness or the capacity for self-parody. I just do not think the inclusions are necessary or plausible in Hofmann's case.) No doubt Hofmann believed in his own overblown rhetoric. (What would it be like to go in for it at this pitch of intensity without believing in it? Like Asger Jorn, maybe—not like And Thunderclouds Pass.} I dare say Hofmann thought his titles were wonderful. (Who is going to quarrel with Nikolaus Lenau and the Sonnets to Orpheus? Only a modernist cynic like me.) And as for the place of his paintings in Marcia Weisman's sitting room? He surely assumed that at the level that really mattered—the level of taste, as opposed to day-to-day preference—there was a profound community of interest between himself and the best of his clients. And so there was. He could not have painted their interiors if they were not his interior too. These are not the matters at issue, ultimately. The task for the critic is to find an adequate language for the continuing effect of, say, Hofmann's overblownness (I am not even saying that this is the sole or primary quality of Hofmann's version of Abstract Expressionism, but it is the one that gets more interesting over time). The overblownness matters only because it seems to be what lends the pictures their coherence, maybe their depth. Nor am I meaning

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to congratulate Hofmann on getting a quality to petty-bourgeois experience somehow "right." The quality is not hard to perceive and mimic. What is hard (what is paradoxical) is to make paintings out of it. That is what Hofmann did. Of course I am saying that doing so involved him in an encounter with the conditions of production and consumption of his own art. That is my basic hypothesis. But the encounter could take place only at the level of work, of painterly practice—the encounter was getting the overblownness to be pictorial, or discovering that it was the quality out of which paintings now had to be made. Even to call this an "encounter" is to give it too much of an exterior or discursive flavor. It was what Hofmann did, not what he discovered. Still less is this chapter as a whole an argument about Abstract Expressionists' social or political opinions. Of course I relish the fact that Clyfford Still supported Joe McCarthy, and that Pollock, in Greenberg's opinion, was "a Goddamn Stalinist from start to finish"16; in much the same way that I like to know Manet was a frightful Gambettist, and Renoir believed that "siding with the Israelite Pissarro, that's revolution [rester avec l'israélite Pissarro, c'est la révolution]."17 But I know my interest does not count for much in understanding what any of the four did as painters. At best the facts may strike us as dimly consonant with one or other aspect (usually a surface aspect) of their subject-matter or handling—with Manet's epigrammatic brittleness, say, or Renoir's over-anxiousness to play. But they get us nowhere with what really matters, which is the artists' ability to have these surface qualities coexist with others seemingly at odds: Manet's pessimism and compassion, for instance, or Renoir's uncomplicated monumentality. I am not saying that Abstract Expressionists' social attitudes are just irrelevant. No doubt it helps to know that Rothko, for instance, had his own vision of the petty-bourgeois future; and again, the fact that he saw it in the shape of the university—the University of Colorado at Boulder—is for me irresistible: The University ... is on the hill. At its base are the faculty apartments which are shells around appliances facing a court into which the children are emptied. Two hundred yards away is Vetsville, in which the present faculty itself had lived only four or five years ago when they were preparing to be faculty. Vetsville itself is occupied by graduates from army headquarters, already married and breeding who will be faculty in faculty quarters three or four years

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hence. They breed furiously guaranteeing the expansion which will perpetuate the process into the future. The faculty itself is allowed to stay here only 2 years whereupon they must assume mortgages in similar housing slum developments where thereafter they must repair their own cracks and sprinkle their grass ... Here is a self-perpetuating peonage, schooled in mass communal living, which will become a formidable sixth estate within a decade. It will have a cast of features, a shape of head, and a dialect as yet unknown, and will propagate a culture so distorted and removed from its origins, that its image is unpredictable.18 Anyone familiar with nineteenth-century styles of irony at the expense of the nouvelles couches sociales will recognize this as generic (solecisms and all). Condescension just is the form of the petty bourgeoisie's self-recognition. Compare the 19805 literature on yuppies. All the same, even this passage does not help me with what is really interesting, and ultimately baffling, about Rothko as an artist: why the same banal loftiness could lead to the brightness of death at one moment (1950), and to clinical evacuation at another (1965). My chapter title, "In Defense of Abstract Expressionism," is not meant ironically. I have offered what I think is the best defense possible of this body of work, and of course I am aware that in doing so the noun "vulgarity" has turned into a term of value, whether I wanted it to or not. If the formula were not so mechanical, I would say that Abstract Expressionist painting is best when it is most vulgar, because it is then that it grasps most fully the conditions of representation—the technical and social conditions—of its historical moment. The moment was brief. By the time of the two paintings I choose to end with—1961 and 1962—it was almost over. The mode, and indeed the titles, of the two pictures—Memoria in Àeternum and Coalescence—are nothing if not valedictory. Death puts in its usual appearance. The coffin is straight out of Evelyn Waugh. And this overstuffed, unctuous, end-and-beginning-of-theworld quality seems to me, to repeat, the key to these paintings' strength. They have a true petty-bourgeois pathos. One can see why art in New York felt obliged to retreat from such dangerous ground in the years that immediately followed and why a last effort was made to restabilize avant-garde practice in its previous (exhausted) trajectory. The "popular" was easier to handle

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than the vulgar—it had more of the smell of art about it. Reduction was a better way to generate recognizable modernist artworks than this kind of idiot "Ripeness is all." The site-specific was preferable to the class-specific. Art had to go on, and that meant returning art mainly to normal avant-garde channels.19 But for some of us—certainly for me—the price paid for this accommodation in the 19605 and after seems prohibitively high. The ridiculous moment of coalescence, or of mourning, or of history, is what we still want from painting, and what Abstract Expressionism managed to provide. So now I think I understand what I have been defending all along. It seems that I cannot quite abandon the equation of Art with lyric. Or rather—to shift from an expression of personal preference to a proposal about history—I do not believe that modernism can ever quite escape from such an equation. By "lyric" I mean the illusion in an artwork of a singular voice or viewpoint, uninterrupted, absolute, laying claim to a world of its own. I mean those metaphors of agency, mastery, and self-centeredness that enforce our acceptance of the work as the expression of a single subject. This impulse is ineradicable, alas, however hard one strand of modernism may have worked, time after time, to undo or make fun of it. Lyric cannot be expunged by modernism, only repressed. Which is not to say that I have no sympathy with the wish to do the expunging. For lyric in our time is deeply ludicrous. The deep ludicrousness of lyric is Abstract Expressionism's subject, to which it returns like a tongue to a loosening tooth. This subject, of course, is far from being the petty bourgeoisie's exclusive property. That is not what I have been arguing. Anyone who cares for the painting of Delacroix or the poetry of Victor Hugo will be in no doubt that the ludicrousness of lyric has had its haut bourgeois avatars. But sometimes it falls to a class to offer or suffer the absurdities of individualism in pure form— unbreathably pure, almost, a last gasp of oxygen as the plane goes down. That was the case, I think, with American painting after 1945.

Notes

1. Georg W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. Malcolm Knox (Oxford, 1975), i: 11. 2. Hubert Damisch, "L'éveil du regard," in Fenêtre Jaune cadmium ou les dessous de la peinture (Paris, 1984), 69. The subject is Mondrian, but much the same ver-

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diet and form of words are applied, by Damisch and others, to Pollock, Newman, Rothko, et al. 3. Alfred H. Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York, 1951), 214. 4. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols. (1860; Boston and New York, n. d.), 5: 347-495. Ibid., 344. 6. Parker Tyler, unedited typescript of "Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth," in Archives of American Art, Pollock Papers 3048: 548-49. (The edited text was published in Magazine of Art, March 1950.) For full text and discussion, see Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 315-16,368-69. 7. Clyfford Still to Sidney Janis, 4 April 1955, in Archives of American Art, Alfonso Ossorio papers, quoted in James Breslin, Mark Rothko, A Biography (Chicago and London, 1993), 344. Copies of the letter seem to have been circulated at the time, either by Still or Janis. 8. Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. Edward Ashton (New York, 1976), 62, translation slightly modified. For a reply to an earlier version of this chapter, using Adorno's frame of reference, see Jay M. Bernstein, "The Death of Senuous Particulars: Adorno and Abstract Expressionism," Radical Philosophy, no. 45 (March-April 1996): 7-16. 9. Clement Greenberg, "Review of an Exhibition of Gustave Courbet," in O'Brian, éd., Clement Greenberg, 2: 275. A month later Greenberg reviewed Gottlieb and Pollock. "I feel that Gottlieb should make the fact of his power much more obvious," he wrote, though he welcomed the painter's Totemic Fission—my choice for the quintessential Abstract Expressionist title—Ashes of Phoenix, and Hunter and Hunted as pointing in the right direction. Greenberg's review of the Pollock show at Betty Parsons is the one in which he took Number i, 1948—"this huge baroque scrawl in aluminum, black, white, madder, and blue"—as final proof of Pollock's major status. The words "baroque scrawl" seem to me to be feeling for the qualities in Pollock's work that I am insisting on here. See Clement Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph Albers," in ibid., 285-86. 10. Obviously there are difficulties to making, and sustaining, a distinction between "bourgeois" and "petty bourgeois" as terms of class analysis. But I believe the distinction is real, and I do not want my talk in the text of class "cultures" and "formations" to give the impression that I fail to see the distinction is ultimately one of economic power. A bourgeois, for me, is someone possessing the means to intervene in at least some of the important, large-scale economic decisions shaping his or her own life (and those of others). A bourgeois, for me, is someone expecting (reasonably) to pass on that power to the kids. A petty bourgeois is someone who has no such leverage or security, and certainly no such dynastic expectations, but who nonetheless identifies wholeheartedly with those who do. Of course this means that everything depends, from age to age and moment to moment, on the particular forms in which such identification can take place. The history of the petty bourgeoisie within capitalism is therefore a history of man-

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ners, symbols, subcultures, "lifestyles," necessarily fixated on the surface of social life. (Chs. 3 and 4 of Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers [New York, 1948] were intended to begin such a history for the late nineteenth century. The material on "Modern Man discourse" in Leja, Refranting Abstract Expressionism strikes me as providing some of the elements for a parallel description of the 19408 and 19505.) No need to be oversubtle about these things. Sometimes symbols and lifestyles still have class inscribed on them in letters ten feet tall. What could be more disarmingly bourgeois, in the old sense, than the First Class section on an international airflight? And what more dismally petty bourgeois than Coach? (Those in Business Class—or what one sardonic airline calls Connoisseur—would take a bit more ad hoc class sorting, some going up, some going down. A lot depends in this case on particular styles of corporate reward to middle management, which vary from country to country and phase to phase of the business cycle.) Anyway, the rough balance of numbers on a 747 over the Atlantic seems to me instructive for the balance of numbers in the world at large. 11. You could apply the same rule of thumb to Jorn as Greenberg was fond of doing to abstract painting in general: most Jorn paintings from the 19505 and early 19605 are considerably worse than most from the same period by Gottlieb, Still, Hofmann, de Kooning, Kline, even Tomlin; but a very few Jorns are better than anything by any of the above—in my view, decisively better. (I leave Pollock out of it, mainly because he painted so little, and, by his standards, so badly, after 1951.) A short, though certainly not exhaustive, list of the Jorns I have in mind would include, besides the ones I illustrate: La Grande Victoire: Kujafski, Lodz (1956), Shameful Project (1957), Alcools (1959), The Abominable Snowman (1969), Dead Drunk Danes (1960), L'Homme Poussière (1960), Faustrold (1962), Les Pommes d'Adam (1962), Triplerie (1962), Deux Pingouins. Avant et d'après David (1962), The Living Souls (1963), Something Remains (1963), probably several other Modifications and Défigurations, if I could get to see them, and one or two late works, like the great Between Us (1972). This list is skewed and limited by accidents of availability, but I have a feeling that even if my knowledge of Jorn was more comprehensive it would not swell enormously. 12. It would be too easy to catalogue the more flagrant phrases here ("His emotion starts out pictorially; it does not have to be castrated and translated in order to be put into a picture," and so on), and the result would inevitably have the flavor of Freudian "now-it-can-be-told." Whereas the point is the obviousness of the verbal love-affair, and the fact that the obviousness (which is integral, I think, to Greenberg's insights and descriptions from 1943 to 1955) was only allowable, or manageable, when it went along with a no-holds-bar red, take-it-or-leave-it tone about everything—the tone Greenberg perfected as a writer of fortnightly columns and occasional aphoristic surveys. In a book—even one as brief and essayistic as Greenberg's on Miró had been—there would have been too obvious a seam between the documentary mode (Greenberg, understandably, was more

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and more anxious to disinter Pollock from a mountain of biographical filth) and awe at Pollock's energy and maleness. 13. Clement Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting," in O'Brian, éd., Clement Greenberg, 3: 230-31. For reasons not given, but not far to seek, Mrs. Clyfford Still refused me permission to reproduce any of her late husband's paintings. This strikes me as a happy arrangement. Still, I now realize, will do best as this chapter's invisible ghost, sulking and shrieking in characteristic fashion from beyond the grave. 14. See Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), 223-24. Part of the reason for the changes was the vehemence of Still's and Newman's reaction to Greenberg's original form of words. See Greenberg's reply to a typical blast from ClyfFord Still (dated 15 April 1955), which suggests that Still's original letter may have been sent off at much the same time as the one to Sidney Janis on Rothko), quoted in Clifford Ross, éd., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York, 1990), 251-53. The term "buckeye" was one of the main bones of contention. Still suspected that Greenberg borrowed not only the term from Barnett Newman (which Greenberg acknowledged), but also its application to his work. Greenberg said No. "Barney was the first one I heard name a certain kind of painting as buckeye, but he did not apply the term to yours. When I, some time later, told Barney that I thought there was a relation between buckeye and your painting, or rather some aspects of it, he protested vehemently and said your stuff was too good for that." Since Greenberg regularly gets told off these days for being, in later years, waspish and superior about the Abstract Expressionists (as conversationalists and letter-writers), it is worth pointing to the well-nigh saintly patience of his 1955 dealings with Still on the rampage. For more in the same vein, see Barnett Newman to Clement Greenberg, 9 August 1955, in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O'Neill (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 202-4. "Buckeye" was again the offending term. Marnin Young points out to me that in his spirited 1964 attack on Still, Max Kozloff seized on Greenberg's comparison to "Greenwich Village landscapists" (he quotes a few sentences from the Art and Culture text) and went on: "Critical attempts to portray [Still] as an artist who bursts forth into a new freedom, or as an exponent of the 'American sublime,' overlook his terribly static, one ought to say, vulgar, exaltedness." See Max Kozloff, "Art," The Nation (6 January 1964), 40. But is not the vulgar exaltedness what makes him an exponent? (Of course—especially given the date Kozloff was writing—one sympathizes with his distaste.) 15. For example,. . . And Thunderclouds Pass comes from a poem by the Austrian Romantic Nikolaus Lenau, And Out of The Caves from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. 16. On Still's McCarthyism, see Susan Landauer, "Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism in San Francisco," in Thomas Kellein, éd., Clyfford Still 1904-1980. The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections (Munich, 1992), 93. Greenberg's ver-

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diet on Pollock's politics was given in a 1981 interview with me. I think he meant it seriously. 17. Auguste Renoir to Paul Durand-Ruel, 26 February 1882, discussing participation in that year's Impressionist exhibition. See Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de Vlmpressionisme, 2 vols. (Paris and New York, 1939), i: 122. (The sentence occurs in a rough draft of the letter, and was omitted in Renoir's final version.) 18. Mark Rothko to Herbert and Mell Ferber, 7 July 1955, Herbert Ferber papers, in Archives of American Art, quoted in Breslin, Mark Rothko, 352. 19. This defense is not intended as a covert attack, and these sentences do not claim to characterize what was most productive (and genuinely excessive) in the art of the 19603, especially from 1967 onwards. But I let them stand, because I do not think that part of the history of the 19603 is bound up with art's withdrawal from Abstract Expressionism's impossible class belonging—its dreadful honesty about art and its place. I do mean "part." Because ultimately I believe that the project of "returning art mainly to normal avant-garde channels" was and remains a hopeless one in the United States. The grounds (always shaky) for an enduring avantgarde autonomy, or even the myth of one, simply do not exist here. In the later 19603 and early 19708 in New York, the project imploded. Frantic efforts have subsequently been made to reconstitute avant-gardism around some "new" technology, or set of art forms, or refurbished critical discourse; but what is striking is the way these efforts cannot in practice escape the gravitational pull of the later 19605. And I am saying that the later 19605 are a satellite, or a form of anti-matter, to the preponderant black star of Coalescence and Memoria in Aetumum. A final thing I do not want to be taken as saying, or implying, is that art could make Abstract Expressionism a thing of the past by imitating it, or trying to go one better than it in the vulgarity stakes. That has been a popular, and I think futile, tactic in the last two decades.

LISA SALTZMAN

Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting

Consider, for just one moment Jackson Pollock's Gut-Out of 1948-1950. Don't flip to look at a reproduction. Instead, and perhaps more appropriately, conjure it in your mind. For though Pollock's Cut-Out is a painting, it is a work from which the center, the figure, has quite literally been excised, extin-

s o URCE: Friedel Dzubas: Critical Painting (Medford, MA: Tufts University Gallery, 1998), 9-24. Reprinted with the permission of Lisa Saltzman. 560

guished, a work with nothing more at its core than a ghostly trace, figuration as corpse. Emptied of its bodily fullness, its corporeality, its life, Cut-Out leaves us with nothing other than figuration as a hollow shell, a specter which can only haunt abstraction. Framed by the marginal remains of the spattered, all-over canvas that configures the non-figure, the body which is not a body, the absence at the center of Pollock's Cut-Out reads like the missing body signaled by the chalk drawing at the scene of a crime, where blood and indexical trace give way to the tools of representation. Pollock's Cut-Out could be seen as a response both to his own body of mature abstractions and to the body of critical writing amidst which such work had evolved and flourished, that is, the nascent context of Greenbergian modernism. An aesthetic ideology which might more generously be termed a vision of aesthetic utopia, formed as it was amidst a world political context of intensifying totalitarianism, Greenberg's modernism posited abstraction as a form, a place, a space in which, were it to maintain a position of unqualified purity, autonomy, media-immanency and self-reflexivity, art would serve as a life boat, preserving not simply the values of high culture, but of humanity. Ironically, perhaps even tragically, Greenberg's critical paradigm offered a humanism paradoxically devoid of the human, a conundrum figured, or precisely not-figured, in Pollock's Cut-Out. Of course, a retrospective glance at the postwar years of American cultural ascendancy suggests that even before Pollock's Cut-Out, neither painting nor its critics had been willing to accede entirely to the rigorous regime of renunciation demanded by an ethics and aesthetics of pure abstraction. Not only had insistently metaphoric titles ensnared abstraction in a web of meaning and reminded the viewer of the inevitable operations of likeness and analogy to which even the most obdurately abstract surface remained prey. But as we know from the very first social art historical accounts of New York School painting, abstraction, particularly gestural abstraction, with its available trace signifiers of individuality and personal freedom, had all too easily been coopted by cultural cold warriors.1 But if social art historians retrospectively revealed an idealized American body, or body politic, at play and at stake in the critical and institutional support for and reception of New York School painting, their revisionist account and critique ultimately identified that body as nothing more than the ideological abstraction that it was. For like the absent center of Pollock's Cut-Out, a form which at its most particular could be described as roughly humanoid, the body politic at the heart of the revisionists' accounts, a body politic made 1990s

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up of risk-takers and individualists imaged and imagined as the "vital center" of Arthur Schlesinger's postwar account, was at once everyman and no man. Or was it? As abstract and idealized as the vital center of Schlesinger's liberal ideology may have been, as indistinct as the emblematic body that was no body at the center of Pollock's Cut-Out may have appeared, I would contend that the body at stake was far more particular and far more literal than the contexts of either cold war cultural politics or formalist criticism and practice would seem to suggest. That body was the gendered body, or bodies, of American postwar society, bodies whose social roles were as blurred by the changes wrought by World War II as was the face of painting.2 That is to say, I would contend that the demographic shifts that took place throughout America during and after the war saw their reproduction and intensification in the aesthetic microcosm of New York School painting, where women emerged alongside men as principle practitioners. Although women artists did not perform the same vital function for the national economy as Rosie the Riveter, the war did afford women artists opportunities they might otherwise not have had. As John Elderfield would note years later in his monographic study of Helen Frankenthaler, one of the factors that contributed to her artistic development in the 19405 was precisely "her sex, which spared her military service."3 As in other industries and professions, once established in their careers, Frankenthaler and other women artists did not retreat from their newly-attained positions, nor did their continued presence in the artistic sphere after the war go unnoticed. During the 19508, as the careers of these women artists took shape, a number of articles appeared in the popular press, in magazines such as Life, Time, and Cosmopolitan^ These articles, which typically focused on Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell, highlighted and even celebrated the ascendance of women artists within the ranks of the New York School. Nevertheless, despite the ostensibly congratulatory premise and tenor of these articles, they articulated a very different message about these "lady artists" and "vocal girls." The art world was described as under siege, threatened by a "feminist invasion,"5 such anxious language reflecting the broader social message that the former preserves of men were rapidly losing their insularity, or, more pointedly, that a woman's true place was not in the studio, but in the home. At the same time that these articles treated the social phenomenon of the changing face of the art world, they described the changing face of painting itself. In an era of painting characterized as "dealing more directly with emo562

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tions and intuitions,"6 these articles offered up descriptions of the canvases which ascribed to their surfaces the very characteristics attributed to their female makers. For example, a Cosmopolitan reader learned that "the slender, chestnut-haired Helen Frankenthaler, born in New York City thirty-two years ago, is the wife of abstract painter Robert Motherwell," as a prelude to a similarly indexed description of her "impetuous technique" and her "delicate and subtle" paintings.7 Within the popular press, abstract painting in the hands of these "lady artists" and "vocal girls" became a site for the painterly inscription of femininity. In the perceived impetuosity of this emotional and intuitive form of painting, women artists were regarded as perhaps uniquely suited to its formal demands. Moreover, the perceived subtlety and delicacy achieved in their work was seen as inextricably linked to their identities as women. It is this tendency to ascribe femininity to the canvases of female abstract painters that unites the writing in the popular press with the more rarified discourses of academic art criticism, as is dramatically manifested in the reception of Helen Frankenthaler. Consider, for example, the following discussion of Frankenthaler's unique contribution to the history of Western painting in an article in Art International by E.G. Goossen: Frankenthaler's painting is manifestly that of a woman Without Pollock's painting hers is unthinkable. What she took from him was masculine; the almost hard-edged, linear splashes of duco enamel. What she made with it was distinctly feminine; the broad, bleeding-edged stain on raw linen. With this translation she added a new candidate for the dictionary of plastic forms, the stain.8 If the passage is interesting for its attention to patterns of influence, positioning Frankenthaler's work as distinct from yet inextricably bound to Pollock's methodological innovations, it is even more noteworthy for its establishment of sexual difference as determinative of artistic product. Frankenthaler's painting may have been deeply indebted to Pollock's, but, at the same time, it was "manifestly that of a woman." Their painting is distinguished, and distinguishable, according to culturally constructed notions of gender. Pollock's painting is masculine, as characterized by a linear, hard-edged splash. Frankenthaler's is feminine, as characterized by a seeping, bleeding-edged stain.9 In focusing exclusively on the "stain," on the fluid and coloristic aspects of her work, critics like Goossen leveled the diffuse, complex, and varied surfaces into monolithic entities. If we turn, for a moment, not to criticism, but to its purported object, the 1990s

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actual paintings, we might note that Frankenthaler's work was characterized by more than the fluid emblem of the stain. In what was considered her breakthrough painting, Mountains and Sea of 1952, conceived and painted after Greenberg introduced her to Pollock and his paintings,10 it is undeniable that thin, dark lines trace or subdivide areas of color, the so-called stains. Yet despite this dialectical pull between wide pools of colored pigment and thin lines of black paint, between automatism and rigorous control, it was the aspect of automatism embodied in the liquid areas of color, the perceived fluidity of Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique, that continually captured the imaginations of the critics. In other words, it was less the thematic and formal invocation of the rugged terrain and outline of the mountain than the watery depths of the sea to which critics were drawn. It was this fluidity, specifically the emblematic form of the stain, that provided the touchstone for what became a significantly gendered discourse, one which set Frankenthaler's work apart from that of her modernist male colleagues, past and present. In Frankenthaler's case, the metaphor of the stain was given a particular valence. As Goossen's criticism suggests, Frankenthaler did more than pour paint onto a canvas. She bled onto the "linen." She stained the sheets. In the slippage between literal and metaphorical language which pervaded the majority of the criticism surrounding Frankenthaler's painting, and which I take this passage by Goossen to bring into particularly sharp focus, Frankenthaler's painting became an extension of her differently female body. Insofar as the stain was also culturally coded as menstrual,11 its invocation functioned as an index of a thwarted or ineffectual creative process, signifying not creative inception or biological conception, but their refusal, the flushing of an empty womb. Moreover, her menstrual painterly fluids came to signify the trace of an involuntary bodily function, of uncontrolled nature, turning painting into the record of an accident. This metaphor of automatism, of relinquishing control, of accident, became central to the critical reception of Frankenthaler's creative process. As Harold Rosenberg wrote of Frankenthaler, referring first, as a point of comparison, to those occasional male stainers, Pollock, Gorky and Kandinsky: The early paintings with their borrowing from Pollock, Gorky, Kandinsky and other occasional stainers, are sensitive, but more timid than sensitive ... with Frankenthaler, the artist's action is at a minimum; it is the paint that is active. The artist is the medium of her medium; her part is limited to selecting aesthetically acceptable effects from the purely accidental behavior of her

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color. Apparently, Miss Frankenthaler has never grasped the moral and metaphysical basis of Action painting, and since she is content to let the pigment do most of the acting, her paintings fail to develop resistances against which a creative act can take place.12 In this passage, the presence of the stain is acknowledged in work by male artists. In contrast to Frankenthaler, however, in the hands of Pollock, or Gorky and Kandinsky before him, the stain, if only the occasional stain, could still be redeemed for art, the actions of these men taking place under the aegis of masculinity that protects and defines their work. As the passage continues, two radically different portraits of Pollock and Frankenthaler emerge. Pollock may have flung paint about in a bacchanalian frenzy, but that was part of his mythic, male genius, his actively creative artistic persona, impregnating the virgin canvas with his life-giving painterly seed. Frankenthaler, in contrast, merely allowed accidents to happen, passively staining the canvases with seeping, bodily fluids. Rosenberg's descriptive summation of the divergent painterly processes of Pollock and Frankenthaler sees it visualization in various photographs of the artists in their studio spaces. For example, in characteristic photographic stills from Hans Namuth's filming of Pollock at work, Pollock emerges as active, frozen in time at one point in his rhythmic dance of creation, can and brush in hand, paint, like artist, arrested in flight. In contrast, in a shot accompanying an article in Life, Frankenthaler is depicted sitting demurely atop a canvas, posed against her work less as an artist than as mere vessel for the fluids which seep from her body onto the canvas beneath her. Both Rosenberg's critical description of Frankenthaler's painterly process and the photographic image of Frankenthaler in the studio deny her selfconsciousness and agency in the symbolic field, the arena of language, be it written or painterly.13 If there were some thought or agency behind Frankenthaler's work, it was seen simply in her selection of "aesthetically acceptable effects," suggesting the affinity of her practice to the historical and stereotypical female domain of the decorative arts, to the tasks of the choosing of colors and the dyeing of fabric. Such work had little, on Rosenberg's account, to do with the "moral and metaphysical" project of painting.14 The critical gendering of the stain becomes more problematic when it is taken up as a frequent, rather than occasional form by a male artist, as was the case with Morris Louis. For no sooner had Frankenthaler begun working with her stain technique did Greenberg take Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland

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away from their studios in Washington, D.C. and into New York to see her work. Louis's early paintings, dubbed the veils and florals, created delicately fluid and watery surfaces which, were I to invoke the same metaphors as the critics whom I have been citing, might be described as equally, if not far more "feminine" than Frankenthaler's characteristically bolder, more saturated paintings. Yet despite the undisputed artistic lineage of Louis's paintings, the acknowledged formal similarities between Louis's and Frankenthaler's work, and what I take to be overall the more stereotypical "femininity" of Louis's paintings, his work was received in thoroughly different terms than was Frankenthaler's. Typically described as massive, solid, hard, and sharp, Louis's paintings were seen to demonstrate control, strength, clarity, and firmness, quite a departure from Frankenthaler's accidental, soft, watery, decorative forms.15 As if directly responding to Rosenberg's diagnosis of the absence of a deliberate "creative act" in Frankenthaler's stain paintings, one critic came to describe Louis's stain paintings as "stiffened by intelligence and consistent formality." 16 In the most decisive ascription of masculinity to Louis's formal project, Noland referred to Louis's paintings as "single-shot" images,17 in effect, reducing and transforming the complex, temporally durational, additive process of the soak-stain method into an artistic enactment of male orgasm, allowing Louis to join the ranks of the virile New York School painters.18 At times, the critical attempt to maintain aesthetic differences between the canvases of male and female artists produced a confused critical language, one that revealed the utter instability of the gendered categories upon which it so heavily relied. As E.G. Goossen wrote, in a piece which sets Frankenthaler's work against Gorky's: The thin, curvaceous, form-suggesting line in her early canvases (ca. 1952-53) comes directly from Gorky's mid-40's work. During that period Frankenthaler's colors, similar to Gorky's in their dry feel and tone, were yet paler and more feminine than Gorky's hues. This sounds like a totally unnecessary remark but it is true that many of his later pictures, Agony (1947) and The Calendars (1946-47), for example, have a feminine delicacy in the sensuous line that only a man could have produced.19 In stating that a picture could have "a feminine delicacy . . . that only a man could have produced," Goossen makes the claim that if a painting by a man displays "feminine" aspects, it does not mean he is innately feminine, but instead, that he is solely capable, in his masculinity, of enacting femininity, of 566

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taking its culturally-coded trappings and representing them with admirable, if not superior skill. Rather than suggesting that such criticism posits "feminine" painting in the hands of a male artist as an act of travesty,20 camp, or painterly transvestism, or as a préfiguration of French feminist criticism in its valorizing of the feminine within modernist practice,21 I am suggesting that its seeming illogic reveals the difficult task criticism took on in rendering stable such fundamentally instable paintings. It would seem the only way to conceptualize and control these slippages between categories of gender was to somehow redeem them by incorporating them back into traditional narratives of artistic mastery. Rather than constituting "unnecessary remarks," such remarks were instead of utmost urgency during the years when the changing face of abstract painting undermined the binary logic which had previously afforded clearer demarcations between masculinity and femininity. Of course, Morris Louis was not the only male artist to pursue the pictorial idiom pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler. I have focused, albeit somewhat briefly, upon Morris Louis as a comparative figure, and will shortly turn to Friedel Dzubas as well, precisely because [the work of] both was so deeply and directly indebted to that of Frankenthaler. My discussion could be broadened to include not just Louis and Dzubas, but such artists as Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Paul Jenkins, Jack Bush, or Sam Francis. If we look only in passing at Francis, it is interesting to note that although some of his paintings and watercolors elicit such descriptions as possessing a "flowery lightness that no other Action Painter shows,"22 such infelicitous moments of femininity are later attributed to his time spent in Paris, tendencies which his work overcomes by the time of his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1959. As Herschel Chipp writes, triumphantly reclaiming Francis for America and masculinity, his later work is "more like the New York School in its aggressive far-flung patches thrusting out into vast white spaces ... contrasted to the centrifugal action of these works, the earlier Paris paintings reveal the passivity of an atmospheric veil."23 If Francis's standing and difference from Frankenthaler were restored by his return to America, and with that, to a rugged American masculinity, the case was slightly different for Friedel Dzubas. It would seem that his difference from Frankenthaler, with whom he had even shared a studio space in the early 19503, was not so much, or not only, a function of his male identity. Rather, Dzubas's surfaces were controlled by the critical invocation of his differently foreign body, his German body, the body of an emigré artist who 1990s

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had come to this country in 1939, at the age of 24. For again, although remarkably similar in appearance and effect to Frankenthaler's canonical stain paintings, particularly before Dzubas moved to working on the truly monumental scale of his mature work, his paintings were received in entirely different terms. If in 1973, Laurie Anderson would claim Dzubas's project as more rigorous and intellectually challenging than Frankenthaler's, writing, "the bold and abrupt transitions snatch the work at the last minute from a Frankenthaler-like lushness and thrust it into a more problematic dialectic of its own,"24 she was only following the cue of earlier criticism, which took up his German identity as a means of situating his work in a context far removed from the watery, feminine stains of Frankenthaler's color field painting. Reviewing a show at the Elkon Gallery in 1961, Jack Kroll wrote: These paintings are comparable to Helen Frankenthaler's in their attempt to declaim a poetry of plastically sentient signs, resonating in a Lebensraum of bare canvas ... it is as if an essentially Expressionist esthetics were being deftly raided for its smoothest sovereigns.25 Or, as Kenworth Moffett would later write: Still another artistic affinity present in these pictures is that with German romantic painting, specifically Der Blaue Reiter, Dzubas' first influence: Some of Dzubas' earlier pictures are dark, moody landscapes and abstractions related to Klee and Feininger. The somber, heavy, smoldering warmth and the sense of some grand cosmic event present in his late paintings are reminiscent of the world of northern romanticism and expressionism.26 While we might now cringe at the metaphorical invocation of Dzubas's pictorial bases and spaces as "a Lebensraum of bare canvas" and attempt instead to situate Dzubas and his criticism more firmly within a community of exile and emigré artists,27 what emerges from this criticism more broadly is a vision of Dzubas as an artist whose true identity comes not from his close affiliation with Frankenthaler, though she is perhaps the most significant figure in his artistic development, but from his German forefathers. That is to say, even if he stained, Dzubas did so with the coloristic, spatial, and intellectual sense and sensibility of a male artist, steeped in the traditions of German Expressionism or Romanticism. That Dzubas's, Francis's and Louis's painting, despite its indebtedness and similarity to Frankenthaler's stain painting, could be constructed as supremely and singularly different, and ultimately, supremely and singularly 568

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masculine, was a critical fiction which persisted despite the more nuanced interpretations of later critics. For example, in 1971, Michael Fried would come to acknowledge the dualities of Louis's painting, describing his canvases in the following terms: Intrigue ravishes the beholder with its fullness of something like detail: the subtle, modulating color, simultaneously metallic and floral, the warm soft sepia graining of what may have been the last wave of pigment, the delicate, irregular, fugitive pattern of the overlapping configurations, the fragile, cloudlike crests of those configurations, aureoled by faint bleeds of thinner, evoking distance Terranean on the other hand strikes one as wholly devoid of incidental felicities. The stained portion looms as though just risen, its proportions together with the dense brown tonality of the whole connoting overwhelming mass, its internal figuration stark, sharp, almost menacing, at once flame-like and mineral in character. And yet, for reasons I have tried to make clear, one's perception of the stained area as a whole and of the figuration it contains is not of things that are precisely tangible. Rather, it is as though the apparent massiveness and solidity of the one and the apparent hardness and sharpness of the other are experienced by eyesight alone, without reference to the sense of touch; as though, one might say, massiveness and solidity and hardness and sharpness as such were known to eyesight alone and not to touch; as though the sense of touch itself were strictly visual.28 If the formal dualities of Louis's paintings are acknowledged in Fried's treatment of Intrigue, a painting which is at once "metallic and floral," these elements of difference are ultimately leveled in the interest of establishing, for Louis, a certain conquest of the "incidental felicities" of the stain, enabling Fried to then put forth Terranean as the painting which "establishes a magnitude of realized ambition which only Pollock, perhaps, among Americans had previously achieved."29 In Terranean, the stain "looms as though just risen," firmly reinscribed within a gendered metaphorics of masculinity, devoid of its previously feminine associations.30 Fried's 1971 text on Louis thus displays in the metaphorics of its prose the unacknowledged preoccupation with gender that pervaded discussions of abstraction since its re-emergence in America after the war, and moreover, the unacknowledged preoccupation with controlling, through endless categorization, the potency of the feminine. Albeit in quite elegant and sophisticated terms, the move Fried makes in celebrating Louis's handling of the stain in the name of opticality, in redeeming the feminine in the name of the mascu1990s

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line, is in the end altogether typical of an entire era of formalist criticism. For although painting, rather than the painter, was the expressed subject of nascent high formalist criticism, and opticality, rather than corporeality, was its privileged object,31 it seems that analyses of these paintings were in fact repeatedly suffused with discussions of the body, of masculinity and femininity, locating and displacing gender and artistic subjectivity in and upon the purportedly pure, self-reflexive, autonomous surfaces of high modernist painting. Moreover, in linking artistic practice to the male and female body, critics inscribed gender within, and ascribed essentialized gender difference to a school of painting whose shared formal practices rigorously undermined the rigid boundaries of codified sexual difference.32 I should point out that my intent in excavating and interrogating an operative metaphorics of gender in the critical reception of New York School painting is certainly not to deny the way in which these paintings can or do function as metaphorical evocations of an artist's experience of his or her body. As Frankenthaler herself has variously stated in queries about her identity as a female artist, or the femininity or "female quality" of her work: Obviously, first I am involved in painting, not the who and how. I wonder if my pictures are more "lyrical" (that loaded word!) because I'm a woman. Looking at my paintings as if they were by a woman is superficial, a side issue, like looking at Klines and saying they are bohemian. The making of serious painting is difficult and complicated for all serious painters. One must be oneself, whatever.33 Every fact of one's reality is in one's work: age, height, weight, history, nationality, religion, sex, pains, habits, attractions, and being female is one of many in this long list for me, but has never been a specific issue by itself. What you call the "female quality" is a serious fact that I enjoy, and part of a total working picture.34 Without either completely effacing or upholding the humanist assumption of a foundational artistic/authorial subjectivity, I have sought with my examples from criticism and painting to reveal that very few of these New York School canvases are exclusively masculine or feminine in their characteristics, nor, if they seem to be, is one set of traits necessarily linked to either the male or the female artist. Whether through metaphors of urination, ejaculation, or menstruation, the body, male and female, is inscribed in multiple and various ways in the drips, spills, sprays, and stains that coat the majority of the canvases of the New York School painters. And it is precisely this inter570

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mingling and breakdown of properties of line and color, this breakdown of boundaries, that I believe led critics to at least try to assert, ascribe, and inscribe sexual difference upon the surfaces of these paintings. As a gesture toward a conclusion, I would like to reiterate and then theorize the implications of my assertion, namely, that during the years when New York School painting reigned triumphant, categories of gender and their stabilization were a persistent, if unacknowledged, critical preoccupation. As criticism surrounding the re-emergence of abstraction restrospectively reveals, it was the ubiquitous emblem of the stain which once served as an available sign through which to clearly delineate categories of gender, as is made manifest in the reception of stain painting and its practitioners. Although it could be argued that gender was simply an available metaphor with which to describe abstract painting, or that characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity were simply appropriate and evocative adjectives with which to give critical voice to the mute surfaces of abstraction, I would suggest that the recurrent critical discourse of gender and corporeality surrounding New York School painting signaled something more. Yet what does it mean to suggest that "something more" was at stake in this body of emergent formalist criticism, particularly if it was taking as its selfproclaimed subject neither the social fabric of postwar America, nor the visibly co-ed ranks of the New York School, but the abstract paintings themselves? Such an assertion of "something more" would imply that criticism had unwittingly ascribed to these purportedly autonomous, self-reflexive, and hermetic paintings the unmistakable presence, the unmistakable legibility, of an underlying and foundational artistic subjectivity. It would imply that criticism had perhaps projected onto the abstract surfaces of New York School painting broader societal concerns about the dissolution of gender boundaries in postwar America. In the end, it is precisely to that moment of social dissolution that I want to return. In invoking postwar America, the historical context with which I introduced my discussion of abstraction, Frankenthaler, and the stain, I want to suggest that criticism embodied a response not simply to painterly change, but indeed, to societal transformation as well. I want to suggest that the strictly delineated gender metaphorics of critical language, its seeking and establishing of order, masked and controlled what was, in artistic practice and in the social sphere, a shifting terrain, far less fixed and stable than the criticism would initially seem to allow. I want to suggest that the diffuse, de-hierarchized, all-over canvases of the New York School, in evincing some combination of 1990s

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masculine and feminine characteristics, would seem to have transgressed the normative, stabilizing principles of modernist, patriarchal society, principles already under siege in society at large. In their critical perception and attribution of masculinity to canvases painted by male artists, and femininity to those painted by female artists, critics asserted the fundamental primacy of sexual difference, and did so at precisely a moment when gender boundaries were seen as in danger of disappearing, both artistically and societally. More specifically, in the deeply gendered and fundamentally conservative critical language with which postwar abstraction was received, it was the metaphoric invocation of the stain which was instrumentalized to serve as a particularly powerful signifier of gender, and through that, of difference. More generally, the critical tendency to perceive and locate gender in the all-over canvases of the New York School painters can be read as an almost desperate, albeit unacknowledged attempt to identify and establish difference and maintain order, at precisely a moment when aesthetic practice and social structures emerged radically altered from the Second World War. In many respects, this anxious critical response should not surprise us. Feminist readings of social and cultural history have sought to demonstrate that when a threat to patriarchal society is perceived, an attempt is made to preserve the social order, to reconstitute its boundaries and hierarchies.35 Similarly, and perhaps more broadly, anthropological writings have analyzed and theorized how the establishment of difference, or the creation of hierarchical distinctions, both of which can be conceptualized as the making of order out of disorder, are basic characteristics of human behavior. As Mary Douglas wrote in 1966, "It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created."36 Interestingly, despite the prevalence of a gendered metaphorics in the reception of postwar abstraction, very little has been done to analyze its implications, either for New York School painting, or, more broadly, for the interpretation of abstraction.37 Even in the work of the first generation of feminist scholars who explicitly took on questions of gender, the interpretation of abstraction was shrouded in critical and theoretical silence. Susan Gubar's 1982 essay " 'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity"38 is a case in point. In her examination of Isak Dinesen's short story, "The Blank Page,"39 which tells the tale of a Carmelite convent which produces fine linens as bridal sheets for royal families and then displays the blood-stained sheets as visual 572

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testimonies to the virginity of each princess, Gubar analyzes the metaphors through which women writers, poets, and artists image and imagine their creativity. In Gubar's examples of blood as metaphor, that blood is consistently seen as the result of a painful wounding, a violent penetration. Although her examples are primarily literary, Gubar does include visual artists as well, referring first to the performance artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Carolee Schneeman, and Eleanor Antin, then to Judy Chicago's sculptural installation The Dinner Party, and finally, to Frida Kahlo.40 Without making direct reference to the 1939 canvas, The Two Fridas, Gubar writes that Kahlo, "who presents herself as bound by red cords that are not only her veins and her roots but also her paint, is a painter whose tragic physical problems contributed to her feeling wounded, pierced and bleeding."41 In an article whose very basis is a fictional picture gallery of blood-stained "paintings," the actual painters of such visual analogues go unmentioned. Helen Frankenthaler, whose stain paintings were seen to "bleed" onto white, unprimed canvas, is not included. Moreover, despite the fact that Gubar centers her discussion of the metaphoric potential of the framed, bloodied, wedding-night sheets hung by the nuns in Dinesen's Carmelite convent gallery, it is ultimately not to this metaphor of the feminine stain that she returns. Instead, in what becomes in retrospect a self-reflexive metaphor for her own interpretive silence, Gubar concludes her examination with a discussion of the lone unstained sheet in the Carmelite gallery, the sheet that tells a different story, positing it as a subversive model of female creative potential. The silence in the conclusion of Gubar's own text, then, regarding Dinesen's literary image of the stain as an analogue of abstraction, is as laden with meaning as the lone white sheet of her Carmelite sisters insofar as it calls our attention to a pervasive scholarly silence shrouding questions of gender and abstraction. For Gubar is not alone among feminists in her omission, be it of Frankenthaler specifically, or abstraction more generally. Until recently, an Anglo-American feminist, materialistic hermeneutic has insistently privileged the analysis of figuration over abstraction, leaving as an unchallenged whole the Greenbergian hermeticism of high modernist criticism. As my preceding discussion would suggest, I believe we can begin to redress this art historical and feminist lacuna regarding questions of gender and abstraction by looking back at the historical context in which both New York School painting and its criticism emerged, namely postwar America, and directing a particularly focused gaze on the critical reception of color field painting. Once there, we can see that in the face of radical societal transfor1990s

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mation, as well as radical artistic developments, art criticism turned these complex paintings into either heroic symbols of masculinity or denigrated emblems of femininity. Although from our position in the present, we might now want to recognize and valorize, in their combinations of tangled skeins of paint, drips, and stains, the painterly invocation and intermingling of gender-coded forms, we must acknowledge that we face New York School painting in a fundamentally different moment than did its original critics. Our critical preoccupations, some acknowledged and others still unacknowledged, have changed. So too, I might add, has the practice of abstraction. Contemporary abstract practice showcases, often in exacting and even microscopic detail, the body and its essential fluids. In the work of Kiki Smith, Mike Kelley, Curtis Mitchell, and Andres Serrano, for instance, liquid traces of the body are duly evoked, inscribed, contained, or rendered, in pieces ranging from the sculptural and the painted to the printed and the photographic. A vivid testimonial to the emancipatory politics and concomitant artistic practices of the late 19603 and 19705, today's work marks as well a departure. For although contemporary artists have returned to the representation of the body and identity, the invocation of the corporeal is less to celebrate difference in the name of creating equality, as it was circa 1968, than to expose similarity in the name of dismantling the binary logic that produced such inequalities in the first place. In other words, contemporary artists use the body and its fluids to explore, despite the inherent binarism of sexual difference, the very fluidity of categories of gender. In these contemporary American works, it is often the stain, the fluid trace of the body, male and female, that serves as an available form, an available sign, through which to screen, artistically and theoretically, a deconstruction of gender. While the body remains an anatomical constant, gendered identity is revealed to be historically and culturally variable, the product of social construction.42 During the era of New York School painting, neither painting nor its criticism was armed with the political or theoretical knowledge, or self-knowledge, with which painters and critics now practice their respective crafts. In those years, the stain served as an available sign through which to reconstruct, rather than deconstruct, categories of gender. Within the male bastions of the art world, it was art criticism which assumed the task of preserving tradition, of critically constructing, or reconstructing, through the use of gendered metaphor, a form of painting where men could be men and women could be

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women. And that critical practice had a particular urgency, if not poignancy. For its reconstruction of gender difference was achieved by locating and asserting difference at precisely a moment when painting and society seemed on the brink of blurring and effacing those formerly rigid boundaries, a moment when painting may have been envisioned not so much in its social present, as its future.

Notes

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference in February 1992 and at the Whitney Symposium on American Art in May 1992, and I am indebted to Anna Chave both for these opportunities and for her valuable criticisms. I am grateful as well to Steven Z. Levine and Isabelle Wallace for their comments and suggestions, many of which contributed to the development of the essay into its present form. 1. For the social art historical accounts which take up most fully the relationship of postwar art to its political context, as well as the more specific context, intellectual and ideological, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), as well as the following anthologized essays: Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," Eva Cockroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," David and Cécile Shapiro, "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," Serge Guilbaut, "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," and Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, "Avant-Gardes and the Partisans Reviewed," all of which have been republished in Pollock & After: The Critical Debates, Francis Frascina, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 107-151. Central to Guilbaut's account in particular is Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center: Our Purposes and Perils on the Tightrope of American Liberalism (Cambridge, Riverside Press, 1949). 2. That the body politic is, at its metaphorical essence, a male/masculine body, is taken up by Moira Gatens in her essay, "Corporeal Representation in/and the Body Politic," in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 80-89. 3. John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 12. Of course, there had been a long and varied history of women artists, which might suggest that the presence and concomitant treatment of women artists represents more an instance of historical and critical repetition than uniqueness. See, for example, Griselda Pollock and Rozsicka Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). But, such studies not with-

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standing, it would seem that the level of emancipation occasioned by the war afforded women heretofore unprecedented opportunities in the public sphere, including the arena of artistic practice. 4. See, for example, "Laurels for Lady Artists: Women Artists in Ascendance: Young Group Reflects Lively Virtues of U.S. Painting," Life, Vol. 42, No. 19 (May 13,1957), PP- 74-77, "The Vocal Girls," Time, Vol. 75, No. 18 (May 2,1960), p. 74, and Jean Lipman and Cleve Gray, "The Amazing Inventiveness of Women Painters," Cosmopolitan, Vol. 151, No. 4 (October 1960), pp. 62-66. 5. Lipman and Gray, p. 62. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 66. 8. E.G. Goossen, "Helen Frankenthaler," Art International, Vol. 5, No. 8 (October 20,1961), p. 78. 9. Of course, men too, including Pollock, could be stainers. Women were not the exclusive practitioners of the technique. The most notable stainers, if notability is registered in terms of critical and institutional support, are in many respects Frankenthaler's male followers, to whose work and reception I will turn shortly. The stain, in French the tache, had been an operative term in modernist criticism since the time of Manet and the Impressionists, and was taken up to describe the importation of Abstract Expressionism into France as Taschisme. It is also the case, as Thierry de Duve notes in his "Time Exposure and the Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox," October § (Summer 1978), p. 116, that the German word Mai (which yields malen, to paint) comes from the Latin mascula, stain. As such, painting is, at its etymological if not ontological essence, staining. In regard to the first generation of New York School painters, Michael Fried employs the term "stain" to describe a form in Pollock's work of the early 19505. But it is done in the name of identifying a form, a formal development, which overcomes the opposition of line and color. See Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Museum of Art, 1965), p. 19. In opposition to Fried, Rosalind Krauss points out, in her repudiation of a rigorously formalist reading of a presumptively autonomous modernist practice, that Andy Warhol's Oxidation Paintings reveal to us that the liquid gesture in the work of "Jack the Dripper" always encoded a certain masculine potency. See Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 269-277. 10. As Frankenthaler herself stated after seeing Pollock's canvases at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951, "It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country and didn't know the language, but had read enough, and had a passionate interest, and was eager to live there. I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and master the language." As cited in Barbara Rose, Helen Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1972), p. 29. The statement is intriguing both for the way in which Frankenthaler articulates her own sense of indebtedness to Pollock, and her experience of his paintings as a "language," a foreign language which she wants to "master." 576

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11. See Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, eds., The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1988), as well as Emily Martin, "Medical Metaphors of Women's Bodies: Menstruation and Menopause," in her The Woman in the Body (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). 12. Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words," in The De-Definition of Art (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), p. 64. 13. The critical discourse and its construction of Frankthaler's manifest lack of agency would seem to replay, or play out, a telling witticism of Jacques Lacan, who wrote, "[T]hey don't know what they are saying, which is all the difference between them and me." See Lacan's "God and the Jouissance of The Woman: A Love Letter," in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the écolefreudienne (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 144. 14. In similar terms, although Frankenthaler worked on an extremely large scale typical of the postwar abstract painters and used oil and acrylics, and bore the legacy not just of Pollock, but of Masson, Miró, and Gorky, her technique was seen to bear a resemblance to that of watercolor. It was precisely this resemblance that critics seized upon, providing them an effective means by which to isolate her from the mainstream of the New York School. Deploying this watercolor analogy, critics were able to link her work to such American landscape artists as Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe, establishing a lineage outside of European modernism and implying an intimacy and softness in her paintings despite their monumental scale. The fluidity that characterized her paintings could thus be linked specifically to her identity as a woman, providing another means by which to isolate her, not just from a tradition of early twentieth-century European modernism, but from postwar American high modernism. 15. Like the criticism surrounding Frankenthaler on which I have already drawn, the majority of the articles on Louis to which I refer were published in Art International, Arts Magazine, and Art News during the 19505 and 19608, as well as in exhibition catalogues. 16. Elizabeth C. Baker, "Morris Louis: Veiled Illusions," Art News, Vol. 69, No. 2 (April 1970), p. 36. 17. As cited in E.A. Carmean, Jr., "Morris Louis and the Modern Tradition: I: Abstract Expressionism," Art Magazine, Vol. 51, No. i (September 1976), p. 75. 18. Here we might think specifically of the critical and biographical construction of Jackson Pollock, who came to be seen as a sort of cowboy figure, arriving in New York from the American West and reinvigorating American painting. In addition to his persona, his poured and dripped paintings were described in ways which constructed, foregrounded and celebrated his virility and masculinity. With such a deeply gendered personal and critical history, it is not surprising that his skeins of paint, and his method for applying them to the canvas, came to be described in explicitly sexualized terms, the process of creation the act of "casting paint like seed ... onto the canvas spread at his feet. This was no sissy ... it was, demonstrably, the real thing . . . painting composed of (a) ... mainly ejaculatory splat." See William Feaver, "The Kid from Cody," review of the Jack1990s

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son Pollock: Drawing into Painting exhibition in its Oxford, England, Museum of Modern Art venue, 1979, as recorded in the artist's file on Pollock at the library of the Museum of Modern Art New York. These quotations, as well as an incisive critique of the masculinist construction of Jackson Pollock, are found in Anna Chave's article "Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript," Res 2,4 (Autumn 1993), PP. 95-111. 19. E.G. Goossen, "Helen Frankenthaler," Art International, Vol. 5, No. 8 (October 20,1961), pp. 77-78. 20. It is interesting to reflect for a moment here on Clement Greenberg's critical assessment of "the travesty that was cubism," in "Towards a Newer Laocoon" (1940) as reprinted in Frascina, Pollock and After, p. 44. For is not the "travesty" that was cubism perhaps analytic cubism's quite literal effacing of the recognizable signifiers of the differently male and female body? 21. I refer here to the work of the French theorists Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clement, Luce Irigary, and Julia Kristeva, among others, each of whom posits, though in fundamentally different ways, the emergence or eruption of a "feminine" impulse in modernist writing, an impulse which has been further theorized in this country in the work of Alice Jardine and Susan Rubin Suleiman, among others. 22. Fairfield Porter, "Sam Francis," Art News, Vol. 56, No. 7 (November 1957), pp. 12-13. 23. Herschel Chipp, "Sam Francis," Art News, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Summer 1959), p. 24. 24. Laurie Anderson, "Friedel Dzubas,'Mr¿News, Vol. 72, No. 4 (April 1973), p. 86. 25. Jack Kroll, Art News, Vol. 60, No. 7 (November 1961), p. 37. 26. Kenworth Moffett, "New Paintings by Friedl Dzubas," Art International, Vol. 19 (May 1975), p. 91. 27. Dzubas was included, for example, in the 1976 exhibition The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876-1976, Cynthia Jaffee McCabe and Daniel J. Boorstin, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976). Although Dzubas was not included in the recent show, Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, eds. (Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Harry Abrams, 1997), many of the essays contained therein would be extremely useful in contemplating his status and identity as an emigré (non-Jewish) German artist in postwar America. 28. Michael Fried, Morris Louis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), pp. 25-26. 29. Ibid. 30. That it is criticism which sees and yet does not see the inherent dualism, the bi-gendering, of New York School painting, that criticism recognizes gender yet is ultimately blind to the theoretical and ideological implications of these painterly surfaces, places roughly contemporaneous criticism in a troubled and precarious relationship to the painting it takes as its subject. If, as Michael Fried himself wrote several years before his essay on Louis, "It is one of the most important facts about the contemporary situation in the visual arts that the funda578

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mental character of the new art has not been adequately understood," Three American Painters, p. 4, the present theoretical context may retrospectively reveal his own temporally-bound inability to "adequately understand" New York School painting, his inability to see how his own gendered metaphorics were participating in a broader critical practice and societal context. 31. Again, see Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, for her discussion of the masculinization of opticality in Greenbergian modernism. 32. On the issue or the question of essentialism, see, for example, the special issue of differences, "The Essential Difference: Another Look as Essentialism," Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1989), which has since been reissued in book form as The Essential Difference, Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Woods, eds. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994) and the special issue of Critical Inquiry "Writing and Sexual Difference," Vol. 8, No. 2 (Winter 1981). 33. Henry Geldzahler, "An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler," Artforum, Vol. 4, No. 2 (October 1965), p. 38. 34. Cindy Nemser, "An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler," Arts Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 2 (November 1971), p. 54. 35. In addition to Betty Friedan's path-breaking study on the 19508, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, New York, 1963), we might look to more recent work like Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), or Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Anchor Books, New York, 1991). 36. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 4.1 am indebted to Mark Cheetham's Rhetoric of Purity: Essential Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), both for the reference, and, more generally, for ways of re-thinking abstraction. 37. In recent years, there has been an emergent body of work within the discipline of art history that addresses questions of gender in relation to abstraction and its interpretation. See, for example, Michael Leja, "Barnett Newman's Solo Tango," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring 1995), pp. 556-580; Anna C. Chave, "Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript," Res 24 (Autumn 1993), pp. 95-111; and Anne M. Wagner, "Lee Krasner as L.K.," Representations No. 25 (Winter 1989), pp. 42-57. A discussion of gender, particularly as it relates to the feminization of the Jungian unconscious and its representation in Pollock's painting, is taken up as well in Michael Leja's Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Painting and Subjectivity in the 1940$ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). And, of course, although a generation of social art historians re-interpreted New York School painting and its reception, their concern was Cold War politics, not sexual politics. 38. Susan Gubar, "The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, Elaine Showalter, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 292-313. The essay first appeared in Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1982).

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39- Isak Dinesen, "The Blank Page," Last Tales (New York: Random House, 1957), pp. 99-105. 40. It should be noted that " 'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity" is not the only piece by Gubar to take up the visual arts. For example, we might look as well to her article involving Magritte's Le Viol, "Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism and Depictions of Female Violation," Critical Inquiry 13 (Summer 1987). 41. Gubar, p. 302.1 should add to Gubar's reading that Kahlo's deeply personal symbolism of martyrdom owes its power not only to Kahlo's own resonant iconography, but to the pictorial archetype of the crucified Christ, based not only in a history of visual images, but in Christian exegetical and liturgical tradition. 42. See, for example, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). We might look as well to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

DAVID AN FA M

"Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated": Aspects of Clyfford Still's Earlier Work

Despite its importance, Clyfford Still's work poses greater problems for scholarship than that of any other artist associated with Abstract Expressionism. Secondary sources remain either scarce or obscure, while the complete corpus of his works has neither been shown nor published.1 What is known stems largely from Still himself, who thereby sought to pre-empt the mosaic of art-historical interpretation. He replaced it with a canon whose main agents are the gifts totalling sixty-nine paintings, together with their catalogues, made to three North American institutions: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York's Metropolitan Museum.2 If highly imposing, all are partial representations. Indeed, Still wrote his own history so clearly that its subtexts and probable sources have almost disappeared. For no period are these more relevant than his earlier career where, once reinscribed, they affect a reading of the whole. Shortly after his birth in a tiny North Dakota village in 1904, the Still family SOURCE: Burlington Magazine (April 1993), 260-69. Reprinted with the permission of The Burlington Magazine. British spelling retained. 580

moved to Spokane, Washington state.3 His childhood and youth were spent there and on a wheat ranch across the Canadian border in southern Alberta until, having studied and then taught at Washington State College in Pullman, he left for California in 1941.4 Rather than emphasizing his origins per se, the details that Still added to this sparse biography reinforce a persona that mirrors the long-established "type" of the autonomous creator.5 When embedded in a broader yet less familiar historical context, the same biographical facts yield another perspective—one which suggests a dialectic between intellectual growth and workaday life, as well as a sense of how acute an experience the latter must have been. The migration of Still's family reflects the settlement of the Canadian prairies, for they moved to the Bow Island area in 1909, the first year after the south-western states were opened to homesteading. Such colonisation paralleled that of the American West except for one major difference: Canada's relatively late development meant that pioneer conditions extended well into the twentieth century. An isolated environment bore down on the homestead unit, which was typically governed by a more unrelenting patriarchal system than its American counterpart. This led to domestic tensions of a kind that may have been at the root of Still's much later avowal: "I had learned as a youth the price one pays for a father, a master, a Yahweh.... I must add that the onlooker should bear in mind that the prodigal son has not returned to the father."6 Most crucially, the family must have faced virgin semiarid land on a high plain marked by an extreme climate.7 Harvests during the first six years were good but a drought begin in 1917 which lasted until 1926.8 A return to arid conditions in 1931 coincided with the toll of the Depression on a faltering agrarian economy: already precarious communities went back to a frontier stage and the soil degenerated to a "dust bowl."9 Existence had become marginal, an everyday hell.10 Diverse clues attest the impact of that ecological and social catastrophe, including Still's reminiscences about the period's "hardness" when his arms were "bloody to the elbows shocking wheat" and "men and... machines ripped a meager living from the thin top soil."11 Moreover, he once returned—"very upset"—from his father's ranch to classes at Pullman to be told that the "wheat in Canada isn't dependent on you"; and a pronounced pessimism from then on would persist, a decade thence, as "a strange dark kind of bitterness which the paintings reflected."12 The paintings of the later 19203 and early 19305 certainly embody a severe outlook.13 They show such prairie scenes as wheat rising against massive overcast skies, freight trains, grain elevators, and single 1990s

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figures or groups engaged in hard labour. Trenchant contours, silhouettes and value contrasts are exploited to the extent that draughtsmanship and painterliness vie with each other. Although the subjects at first recall Regionalism, the tenor throughout is more elemental and expressionistic.14 In particular, often emaciated and distorted figures speak for a despair which is rendered topical by details that include axes, spanners, disc ploughs and the crops themselves.15 Machinery, it should be noted, was indispensable to prairie routine and much preoccupied Still.16 This adds another and unexpected initial component to what could appear as the exclusively geological or organic cast of his mature imagery.17 A striking 1936 Untitled composition mediates a turn towards the altogether more imaginative phase which had begun when Still spent the summers of 1934-35 at the retreat called Yaddo (then known as the Trask Foundation) in Saratoga Springs, New York State.18 Two precedents are implicit: primarily, Picasso's La vie and, in the woman's pose, perhaps Van Gogh's wellknown 1882 lithograph Sorrow.19 The earlier work of Van Gogh and Cézanne, alongside Courbet, were already influences.20 The intertwined male-female arrangement may well have evolved from the uppermost picture-within-apicture in La vie. Hitherto problematic or academic organisational factors now became expressive devices. Among them are densely compressed design and the use of a repoussoir, as manifest for instance in the lateral motifs framing previous, more realistic pictures such as Row of Grain Elevators (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).21 Such a disposition of elements, notably the woman's yellow hair falling parallel to, and alongside, the canvas edge in Untitled, anticipates the abstract marginal forms that emerged during the 19405. The foreclosed space thrusts the protagonists onto a frontal plane so that an equation arises between the body's surfaces and the canvas's. In the year before he executed Untitled, Still had written of Cézanne: "Feeling his way around the forms, plane by plane, he was compelled to crowd many segments into a unified whole."22 Crudely vigorous drawing and a few bright focal points such as the three crimson nipples counterbalance an almost monochromatic pictorial fabric. Despite the emphasis on flatness, individual areas press into or unfold within each other in a spatially provocative manner (note the schematic hint of the man's rib-cage in the three horizontal strokes towards the upper left). This implosion of tactile paint and the figure's cartography, of raw expanses and breaks or eruptions, proved seminal.23 Untitled also echoes La vie by evoking an allegory of the human condition. 582

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Behind it seems to lie the pressure of a narrative, no less tragic for being more secretive than before.24 There is an intensity about Still's early output at once graphic yet hard to define. Apart from Orozco, few of his contemporaries exceeded it. With the figures petrified by their plight, disturbance is localised in gestures, in the cadaverous anatomy and in the man's mutilated head. His eyelessness is a negative announcement of Still's stress on "vision" as a driving force.25 The blind "gaze" recurs in the rendering of a single male countenance known as Brown Study (1935, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, Utica).26 Through the next decade this theme underwent an uncanny reversal, part of a rhetoric of insight and blindness. By the mid-i94Os eye-like dots (schemata traceable to Picasso from the Cubist years onwards and to Max Ernst's One Night of Lové) stare from façades which therefore acquire an embodied presence, comparable to that inherent in certain "primitive" fetishes and totems. To return their "gaze"—inverting the customary relations between an active spectator and an inert image—courts transgression. Sight, or the lack of it, eventually engendered a whole metaphysics. At stake was the principle of inwardness found in what Still described as a "metaphor" from William Blake: "The Vision of Christ that thou dost see/Is my Vision's Greatest Enemy: / Thine is the Friend of All Mankind, / Mine Speaks in Parables to the Blind... ."27 "Vision" is among several leitmotifs traceable to Still's intellectual interests at the time of Unfitted (1936). In fact, a strategy that came to dominate all his subsequent aesthetic manoeuvres perhaps first took shape here: the dynamic that turns a prosaic image into hermetic representations or metaphor until his vocabulary, pictorial as well as verbal, ranges at will across both carnal and spiritual levels.28 As Jacques Derrida has observed, "life" necessitates metaphor because it is invisible.29 Although the artist noted it (and never did so without good reason), commentators on his art have said little about his education in philosophy and in literary criticism of the kind which emphasised the classics (one of its lasting effects was an erudite, esoteric diction).30 Such a formative framework is all the more pertinent given Still's youthful indifference to much modern or then-contemporary thought.31 Metaphors of "vision" were analysed in a treatise by a scholar whom Still cited and kept in high regard—his college tutor, Murray W. Bundy.32 In his principal book, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought, Bundy remarks how "Plato insists that truth is a matter of right vision and is the first... to talk about the eye of the mind."33 Bundy furthermore explores two other key concepts for his student's future aesthetic: "imagination" itself and the "idea" as 1990s

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basis for the "image."34 And behind the classical texts stood the more fundamental realm of myth, the aftermath of human contact with nature.35 For Still's generation mythology meant Sir James Frazer and his heirs, Jane Harrison, F.M. Cornford and Gilbert Murray.36 Frazer's The Golden Bough and Harrison's Themis revolve around earth's fertility and wasting as catalysts for myth and ritual, themselves deemed to be the rudimentary types of artistic creativity. Not only might those topics have struck a special chord in anyone who had known Canada's recent agricultural disasters; it would also have been logical to proceed from classical thought and literature to writings which sought to elucidate their genesis. In Harrison, even more vividly than in Frazer, the forces of the natural world (dike), their bearing on the social order (themis) and on the artistic imagination, coalesce. It must be said, though, that any discussion of "sources" entails likelihood rather than ironclad proof because Still denied the rôle of nearly all external causes in an extreme version of what the literary critic Harold Bloom has termed a "strong" response to the "anxiety of influence."37 In the absence of first-hand verification (which, a fortiori, will almost certainly never materialise), what does exist is a network of internal connexions, echoes and probabilities whose design otherwise amounts to sheer coincidence. First, Washington State College library had acquired Themis in iQiy.38 Secondly, opaque aspects of Still's art and discourse only make the fullest sense once a rationale embracing literary allusion, social background and pictorial stimuli is unravelled. When he made his New York début at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in 1946, Still was credited with the famous remark that the paintings were "of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated."39 The phrase may read as a clue that rather than joining the Abstract Expressionist "myth-makers," he had pre-empted them, as it parallels an almost identical triadic sequence ("Earth . . . eternal Hell . . . rise again") twice set forth in Themis.40 Lastly, does not Still's epigraph to the Albright-Knox donation drop another hint? There he quoted the painter Clay Spohn—a friend and fellow teacher privy to Still's thoughts—who had said in 1947: "After seeing many of Clyfford Still's works I have come to the conclusion that he is a sorcerer with powerful magic. ... Nay! An Earth Shaker."41 In chapter IV of Themis, itself entitled "Magic," one guise of the lightning-god (associated with the heavens and therefore also, tellingly, rain and the land) is the "Earth-shaker."42 Controversy over the titles in the 1946 Art of This Century gallery, for example, could perhaps be settled if they were understood as indices to the cyclical destiny of the earth—in turn allegorising their author's own regenera584

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tive odyssey.43 At first the title Jamais seems to have no ties whatsoever to the image it designates; but Frazer's account of the Persephone legend twice uses the fateful word "never" about Demeter's power to waste the corn.44 The seven vertical yellow strands of the painting's background resemble corn stalks (at least three have slightly thicker tops, suggesting ears of grain), logical attendants to the baleful dark creature and, in turn, to the title's proposed cryptic allusion. The embodied blackness and the rich yellow accord with the dualities of Frazer's account, which passes from "leafless" desolation to "a vast ruddy sheet of corn" once Persephone is restored to Demeter.45 The grass widow, with its blatant vegetational reference, is explicable via Themis, in which the earth is termed "mother and husbandless."46 Likewise, Buried Sun recalls the myths in Frazer and Harrison—variations of the same fundamental notions given narrative form in the Persephone legend—personifying the sun and its demise at night or at a solstice.47 Frazer again offers a potential key to Nemesis of Esther III, citing the Biblical protagonists Esther and Mordecai as symbols of "the dying or dead vegetation of the old and the sprouting vegetation of the new year."48 That he should regard Vashti and Haman as "doubles" of the Esther-Mordecai pair might clarify the titular "III" as denoting a new, third enactment of the tale. The apparent connecting thread— dissolution and rebirth—is as straightforward as its encoding proves to be recondite. Four other titles from the 1946 exhibition remain hard to decode without recourse to Gilbert Murray's celebrated Excursus within Themis treating the fortunes of a vegetation god, the "year-spirit." These four are The Comedy of Tragic Deformation, Elegy, Theopathic Entities and Premonition. Each suggests an allusion to unfolding stages in the ritualistic Greek tragedies that memorialise the year-spirit's fate. According to Murray their train of events encompass [es] both "comedy" and "tragedy," a threnos (that is, an "elegy"), a ritual death and sudden resurrection respectively termed pathos and theophany (Still's "theopathic" may be a conflation of these two distinct words), and sometimes a moment when the discovery of the slain god and the subsequent volte-face in the action, though not actually stated, "continue to haunt the atmosphere" so that there remains, in other words, the premonition of rebirth.49 The title Biomorphic Mechanism openly conjoins "life" and the "machinery" that sustained it on the prairies, whereas The Spectre and the Perroquet sounds more arcane. A perroquet is a rather obscure name for a parakeet: it echoes the equally uncommon occurrence of a "parroquet" totem in a passage in Themis which also discusses ghosts and so may account for the 1990s

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titular "spectre."50 Finally, Quicksilver (probably the canvas now entitled July-1945-R) is a synonym for "mercury," otherwise the Greek Hermes.51 To Harrison, Hermes is a chthonic deity who accompanies souls, including Persephone, to and from the underworld. The "very daimon of reincarnation" in her view, he subsumes the "Earth-Damned-Recreated" complex.52 Refracted through a prism of such potential covert meanings, Rothko's own prefatory words for the exhibition also gain a greater resonance: "To me they form a theogony [author's emphasis] of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live—a profound and moving experience."53 In sum, all the foregoing connotations, if such they are, traverse in more specific ways the polarities of "life" and "death" that Still was to identify as the crux of his art.54 What else might Themis have lent to the multifarious images prior to 1946? From the later 19305 until then, Still and Harrison seem to tread common ground, distinguished by a similar dramatis personae and uncanny mood, as found in a 1945 lithograph based on an earlier work and, thus, of dual import.55 Here the down-thrust hand, a single eye (barely visible in reproduction), the grisly shoulder area and the hatched shading derive from the older world of Brown Study (1935) and Untitled (1936). But they blend with something less quotidian. Like Still's daimon (a term from Harrison that suits these presences), the half-humanised forces of Themis often incarnate "Earth" and confront their supernal opposites, usually the sky or sun. Both proclaim a dramaturgy of massy forms risen from the depths and mercurial ones flashing down from above which, during the 19505, became the gist of Still's most abstract style. Their emblems are the snake and a magical stone called an omphalos, both chthonic symbols to Harrison.56 A snake is poised in profile at the lower right of The Spectre and the Perroquet below a lurid, hovering and questionably avian creature which opposes an upright stick-like being on the left. An odd ghostly trio, they provoke speculation as to whether the Themis "perroquet" passage merely sparked a title: the text mentions a day when the "spirits of the dead rose up" and has a line illustration of two, albeit Attic, figures facing one another with a snake at their base.57 The omphalos is among Harrison's richest syncretic cult objects, identified by turns with the body, the earth, death and fertility. To an artist fascinated by stone since he had depicted a still life of rocks in 1925, its lure would be obvious.58 Starting as the grey leftward sentinel of Oil on Burlap (i936),59 recognisable by its volumetric shading and narrower waist, the bullet-like profile of 586

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the omphalos is in time either truncated or becomes a mere template. The twin mounds at the base of Figure (1945) at any rate conform with the idiosyncratic "blunt cone" of its top and the fact that, at one point, Harrison has a sun-god (Apollo) surmount the omphalos is intriguing in the context of the juxtaposition here of celestial radiance and gloom.60 Ultimately, however, it is the poetic axes of Themis as much as any minutiae that match Still's earlier universe. Elemental cosmogonies, grim phantasms, a mineral realm instinct with animistic power (mana) and signs given emblematic life, such as the flash of July-iQ45-R "trembling on the verge of personality," comprise their mutual foundations.61 Upon them, both Still and Harrison built a broad pattern. Whether pointing the dialogue between individual pictures or orchestrating the layout of his final Metropolitan retrospective, Still targeted maximal contrasts of darkness and brilliance.62 The previous year he had also invoked the "vastness and depth" of a "Sophocles drama."63 That epic attitude was well rehearsed in Themis, where Euripides's "voices of the night" and "sunlit song" contend.64 A stylistic development which reveals Still's art-historical shrewdness complicates this iconography.65 Modernist paradigms quickly absorb vestigial symbols during the War years until a stage comes around 1946 when Still lets the energy of the actual image hold sway. How once disparate ideas are fused in the process shows the drift of his originality. Two examples illustrate it in microcosm. Another lithograph from the 1943-45 series again deals with a strongly gendered type of daimon, except that now the conception is less literal and, in this respect, perhaps informed by Picasso and Matisse. If Picasso's Seated Woman may have influenced the basic composition, with each figure caught in a twisting or downward slipping movement despite the bright wedge motif that anchors their heads, Matisse's Yvonne Landsberg may be the source of the striations that arc outward from the neck area.66 Lines stream from the armpit into mechanical silhouettes at the lower left.67 Capricious parts are compacted into a unity. In marked contrast to these shredded effects, linearity and intricate chiaroscuro are the paintings from the first half of the 1940s.68 Their concision is analogous to the "pictographic" and "ideographic" moments of Abstract Expressionism. A reductive Untitled (c. 1945-46) employs unbroken black, tan and brown planes enlivened by a few focal accents such as the haloes crowning each pinnacle.69 Given the air of enigma, it might look extravagant to suggest any model. Nevertheless, a detail from the New York version of Arnold Bocklin's Isle of the Dead shows cypress trees of comparably notched outline; 1990s

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a single light touch below might have prompted the eye-catching red wedge at the bottom left of Untitled. One more link clinches this connexion. The germinal canvas now known as ig4i-2-C in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery— a dark brown mass against a blue-black ambience—had evidently already translated, in its configuration, choice of hue» and internal markings, the foremost cliff face which looms to the left of Bocklin's trees.70 That monolith may have caught Still's attention because its profile approximates the shape of the omphalos. Metamorphosis of this sort pervaded his working habits in general, pulling the most far-flung ideas into a tight nexus. Nineteen forty-six was a turning-point and such paintings as Untitled come just before remarkable developments. Faint mimetic traces are present; but so, too, is a clash between flatness and a sculpturesque palette-knife technique. This held the potential for an aggressively physical approach wherein painterly vectors replace modelling. In the canvases dating from around 1943-45, seen in the 1947 show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, strange entities spring up from the ground, a mixture of negative and positive spaces. In spirit they belong to the past. In fact, by the time of that exhibition, Still had already done away with titles and was entering a highly productive phase initiated by such works as the Metropolitan's superb Untitled. Here we find a gamut of literal earth hues, volatile contours, areas driven to the margins (denoting a domain of activity, an otherness beyond the edge), and luminous outbursts held, like the twin rising presences themselves, amidst the dense pigment.71 A subtle play of balance and asymmetry is underway. These continued to be among the essentials of Still's abstraction which, by the end of the decade, went to extraordinary and audacious limits. Yet its key always struck registers set up long before—the figuration through metaphor of life's resurgence against a mortal world.72 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Notes

This article draws on research incorporated in D. Anfam, Clyfford Still, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1984—cited as Anfam 1984.1 remain grateful to John Golding for his supervision of that work. 1. B. Heller, Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Mary Boone Gallery, New York (1990), n.p. , note3. 2. See The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy: Paintings by Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Albright

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3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Art Gallery, Buffalo (1959); The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy: Clyfford Still; Thirtythree Paintings in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1966), n.p. ; Clyfford Stilly San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (1976); J. O'Neill, éd., Clyfford Stilly exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1979): T. Kellein, éd., Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1992) —henceforth respectively Buffalo (1959), Buffalo (1966); SFMoMA (1976), Metropolitan (1979) and Kellein (1992). His birthplace, Grandin, is some thirty miles north of Fargo and so small as to appear only on detailed maps. Vital records for North Dakota were not maintained until c. 1908. According to Buffalo (1966), p. 13, Still's parents were originally Canadian immigrants. SFMoMA (1967), pp. 107-8. See E. Kris and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1934, trans, and reprinted New Haven, 1979). Still's biography appears, progressively expanded, in the catalogues cited at note 2 above. Its details and logic accord with numerous ancient hallmarks of the artistic "type" enumerated by Kris and Kurz: an heroic persona, rustic background, a battle against material odds, initial studies from nature, the lack of a teacher, a marginal or problematic father, exceptional rapport between the creator and his creations, recognition by a connoisseur and ultimate control of primal forces, including symbolic fire (cf. SFMoMA [1976], p. 122). Buffalo (1966), pp. 17-18. In interviews with the author, Thomas B. Hess (4th August 1977) and John Schueler (3ist January 1978) observed that Still's relationship with his father was problematic. On the social and economic inequalities associated with the Canadian partriarchal system see J. Burnett, Next Year Country, Toronto (1969), pp. 30 and 33. In 1911 Bow Island had 307 inhabitants and the Stills lived outside the village. Summer temperatures exceed ioo°F and in winter may drop to ~45°F: evaporation during the growing season is exacerbated by hot, dry winds. See F. Jakunis, éd., Southern Alberta: A Regional Perspective, Lethbridge (1972), pp. 2O and 78. For example, the wheat yield at Medicine Hat (thirty miles from Bow Island) in 1915 was 37.5 bushels per acre; by 1919 it had fallen to 2.4 bushels. See W. Mackintosh, Prairie Settlement. The Geographical Setting, i, Toronto (1934), p. 128. Ibid., pp. 108 and 130. The net income from farm operations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1928 was $363 million, dropping to a $10.7 million deficit in 1931; see M. Urquhart, Historical Statistics of Canada, Toronto (1965),

P. 35710. See, for example, L. Grayson and M. Bliss, eds., The Wretched of Canada, Toronto (1971). 11. Still in conversation with H. Hopkins, MS in the Library files, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, n.d.: D. Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York School, Bath (1972), p. 34; Statement by the artist (1972) in A. Lerner, éd., The Hirshhorn Museum ¿7 Sculpture Garden, New York (1974), p. 752; Ernest Briggs, interview with the author (igth February 1978). See also E. Stevens, "Still's In-

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tense Vision," The Sunday Sun, Baltimore (2nd December 1979), p. 6: " 'Art was hated there [the Alberta farm] as a waste of time.' " 12. A. Askman, "Still Life," Spokane Magazine (June 1980), p. 22; Murray Bundy, letter to the author (3rd February 1978); T. Pollak, An Art School: Some Reminiscences, Richmond (c. 1969), p. 46. My thanks to Ted Dalziel of the National Gallery of Art Library for tracing the first citation. 13. These observations are based partly on examination of the Still photographic archive: I am grateful to Mrs. Still for access to this record, a self-made catalogue raisonné, in 1989. 14. Certain early titles have a Regionalist sound, such as Moving, submitted to the noth Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Art and Design, 1935, no. 187; and A Funeral, North Dakota, shown at the Faculty exhibition, Washington State College, 14th to 27th April 1937, no. 54. 15. See the early works reproduced in S. Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge (1991), p. 94: the details of a plough are visible behind the man in the central left (reading the entire illustration vertically) picture. In one 19305 painting (seen by the author in the Still photographic archive) the female figure, a more realistic precursor of the formidable presence in 1938-N-No. i, reproduced in SFMoMA (1976), no. 5, wields an axe. Still showed Wheat at Washington State College in 1937, and Man with Sheaf and Green Wheat at his 1943 San Francisco retrospective. 16. T. Albright, "A conversation with Clyfford Still," Art News, 75 (March 1976), p. 32: "I've spent a lot of my life around machinery." Also, The Prescript (the journal of the Richmond Professional Institute, 12th November 1943), p. 3, cites Still's hobby as "mechanical things." Other 1943 retrospective titles were The Yellow Plow and The Yellow Elevator, Burnet, op. cit. at note 6 above, p. 12, observes: "A farmer's son, one of the few from the area to go to university explained his interest in engineering in terms of the mechanization of the farm: 4. . . You grow up with machinery and you get interested in machines.'" 17. The claw-like motifs of the mid-i94Os primarily develop from the downward extended hand as seen in Untitled (1936). But the prominent claw form in the 1946 work in the Peggy Guggenheim show (see SFMoMA [1976], p. 23, top installation photo, far right) resembles an open-end wrench which is, indeed, what a figure appears to hold in an early composition reproduced by Polcari, op. cit. at note 15 above (p. 94, centre). The first canvas in Metropolitan (1979) has mechanistic overtones and may be abstracted from a grain elevator, or related to the studies which Still reportedly made (according to Robert Neuhaus, letter to the author, 13th February 1979) based on the cranes, booms, blocks and cables of his wartime work in the shipbuilding industry. 18. The painting's former owner, the late Mrs. Lois Katzenbach, taught at Washington State College and noted that it was shown there (interview with the author, 4th April 1978). Unfortunately, Yaddo's files remain closed to the public. 19. As with several other works that Still presumably explored, the Picasso was reproduced in Cahiers d'Art, 5-6 (1928), p. 209. For the Van Gogh, see J.-B. de la

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Faille, Vincent Van Gogh: The Complète Works on Paper; Catalogue Raisonné, San Francisco (1928, reprinted 1992), no. 1655. 20. The treatment of the breasts is also closer to the Van Gogh. For Cezanne's relevance see Anfam 1984, pp. 39,49 and 217-26. By 1929 the Metropolitan had acquired eight Courbet landscapes. 21. Reproduced in D. Anfam, Abstract Expressionism, London (1990), pp. 36-37; for the second trait especially, see also Houses atNespelem in ibid., p. 34. Both practices may owe something to Benton's tenets regarding spatial equilibrium: see Anfam 1984, pp. 35-36. 22. C. Still, Cézanne: A Study in Evaluation, unpublished M.A. thesis in Fine Arts for State College of Washington, 1935, p. 18. 23. Consider Still's statement that "the figure stands behind it all" in T. Albright, "Clyfford Still," Art News, 79 (September 1980), p. 160; Mrs Still lately reconfirmed this tenet in conversation with the author (loth September 1989). Conservator Dana Cranmer kindly observed to me that the pigment of Untitled (1936) appears in places to have an admixture of a gritty substance, perhaps sand. 24. To adopt a distinction from literary theory, narrative has here become a kind of "plot" where structural relations replace anecdote, so that what was previously sub specie temporis is now occulted sub specie aeternitatis; see F. Kermode: An Appétite for Poetry, Cambridge (1989), pp. 208-23. 25. Figures of speech concerning uvision"and other somatic capacities such as "grasping" and "walking," allied to "instruments" that lance and cut (the physical body, or the body social) pervade Still's writings. Such metaphors have exemplars in Nietzsche: see Anfam 1984, pp. 48-49 and Chapter 7, passim. 26. An eyeless head reappears in an Untitled (1938), sold Sotheby's, New York, 27th February 1990, lot 15; its features are very close to an Indian stone face from Kentucky reproduced in F. Douglas and R. D. Hardoncourt, Indian Art of the United States, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1941), p. 73. 27. Buffalo (1959). 28. A quintessential instance is the "journey" theme. Its prosaic types are the westward voyages of American social history, including that of Still's family. In a passage in Buffalo (1959) ("It was as a journey that one must make ...") this becomes outright allegory reiterated, nonetheless, by the first image of the San Francisco donation, the quester of Oil on Canvas (1934). Both are prefigured in a 1932 Spokannual (of Spokane University) book cover, designed by Still, where a classical figure directs a neophyte across a mountainous scene. I am indebted to Robert Sandberg for bringing this item to my attention. 29. J. Derrida: Margins of Philosophy, Chicago (1982), pp. 264-65. 30. SFMoMA (1976), pp. 107-8; T. Albright, "The Painted Flame," Horizon, 22 (November 1979)^.32: "... [Still's] familiarity with the early Greeks—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus." See also Metropolitan (1979), p. 27: "I [Still] proposed to him [Andrew C. Ritchie] that he take also the catharsis of Aristotle's Poetics. . . ." Words such as "apostasy," "thesauri," "ontogeny," "phylogenic," "Pyrrhic," "encysted" and "peristalsis" populate Still's statements.

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31. Albright, loe. cit. at note 30 above: "... He [Still] was uninterested in Marx, hostile to Freud, and cold to avant-garde idols like Eliot and Pound." 32. Still invited Prof. Bundy (who generously aided my research), over forty years after their initial relationship, to the opening of his 1979 Metropolitan retrospective. See Askman, op. cit. at note 12 above, p. 23. 33. M. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought, Champaign-Urbana (1927), p. 24. 34. Ibid., passim, and p. 53. Cf. Still in Buffalo (1959): "The work . . . as image of idea." Bundy also discusses "phantasy" at length: Still's ig^S-N-No.i in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was originally titled Totem Fantasy. 35. Bundy, op. cit. at note 33 above, p. 143. 36. To these may be added the medievalist, Jessie L. Weston, best known for From Ritual to Romance (1920). 37. N. Marnier, "Clyfford Still: The Extremist Factor," Art in America, 68 (April 1980), p. 105: " 'My work,' said Still at his opening, 'is not influenced by anybody' "; see H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, New York (1973). 38. Information supplied by Washington State University Library, 28th April 1982. J. Harrison, Themis, Cambridge (1912, reprinted London, 1977)—henceforth Harrison (1912). Polcari, op. cit. at note 15 above, p. 38, gives evidence suggesting Still knew The Golden Bough. 39. Still quoted in M. Rothko, Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Art of This Century Gallery, New York (1946). 40. Harrison (1912), pp. 528-29, and pp. 414-15: "Earth-spirits ... damnation ... increase." Still's penchant for capitalised nouns also follows Harrison's usage. 41. Buffalo (1966); these are the catalogue's first words of text. Polcari, op. cit. at note 15 above, p. 95, states that Still told Spohn at the time that he was the only one who understood his work. 42. Harrison (1912), p. 92. Polcari suggests an American Indian source for this. Indigenous local culture was an indubitable stimulus, but a host of ostensibly primitivist elements (including "life forces," "magic," Lévy-Bruhl and animism, the "spirit world," thunder and lightning deities) occur—seminally, I would argue—in Harrison. 43. A. Rudenstine: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, New York (1985), pp. 707-9, summarises the debate over the titles' authenticity. 44. J. Frazer, Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, i, New York (1935), p. 36. Frazer relates that Demeter learnt her daughter's fate from the Sun: a solar disc is prominent in Jamais. 45. Cf. Rothko, loe. cit. at note 39 above: "For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone Myth." If correct, my reading throws another light on the chromatic dualities that culminate, in the late 19408 and earlier 19503, in nocturnal canvases and those such as 1Q48-D (reproduced in Heller, op. cit. at note i above) engulfed by a singular, organic yellowness. The figure of ig^S-N-No.i grasps a single yellow stalk at left which is twisted or broken and

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conspicuously devoid of an ear at its top. At the left of Oil on Canvas (1937) (see SFMoMA [1976], no. 4) is a hitherto unnoticed figure, with upraised arms beneath three horizontal strokes suggestive of earth furrows, limned in yellow ochre. 46. Harrison (1912), p. 423. 47. See Harrison (1912), pp. 524 and 395~96. 48. J. Frazer, The Scapegoat, New York (1935), p. 405. 49. G. Murray, "Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy," in Harrison (1912), pp. 341-63. Only the titles Apostate, Siamese Cat and Daughters and Self Portrait still elude explication, although the first and last may be read as completing a kind of symbolic self-representation. 50. Ibid., pp. 289-91. 51. Buffalo (1966), p. 85, indicates that July-iQfâ-R was in the 1946 show, while one contemporary review mentions that "Quicksilver, using a white-to-black palette, is a simple striking impression of fleeting matter." J. K. R[eed], "Extending a Myth,'Mrf Digest, 20 (ist March 1946), p. 17. 52. Harrison (1912), p. 295. Subsequently, the flash of July-ig4$-R passes into Still's verbal metaphors of revelation which, while more akin to precedents in Blake and Nietzsche, are present in Harrison. On metaphor, see Anfam 1984, pp. 438-41. 53. Rothko, loc. cit. at note 39 above. 54. Buffalo (1959). And Murray's excursus concludes: "By this train of ideas Dionysus comes to be regarded not as a mere vegetation spirit or Year-Daimon, but as representing some secret or mysterious life, persisting through death or after death." 55. One of twenty-one drawn in Richmond, Virginia, between Fall 1943 and Spring 1945, according to SFMoMA (1976), p. no. 56. Harrison (1912), pp. 396-424 and p. 41: "He [the snake] is clearly a daimon of fertility; to his right springs up a tree." 57. Harrison (1912), p. 291. With its sinuous body, thinner tail end and poised top, the snake is one of the least vague forms in this painting, unseen since the 1946 exhibition. 58. Cited by K. Kuh as being at the Stills' New Windsor house in "Clyfford Still," in The Open Eye: In Pursuit of Art, New York (1971), p. 29 and probably the painting that I saw there on loth September 1989. The stones are piled, curiously, into a mound. Petrified presences recur throughout the 19305 oeuvre. 59. SeeKellein(i992),no.35. 60. Harrison (1912), p. 411. 61. Ibid., p. 6j, passim. 62. Kellein (1992), p. 35. The Metropolitan installation was structured so as to shift from initial small rooms with darker canvases to glowing images spaced farther apart in the largest galleries. 63. Albright, op. cit. at note 23 above, p. 159.

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64. Harrison (1912), p. 395. 65. Mrs. Lois Katzenbach (see at note 18 above) spoke of Still's exceptional gift for analysing paintings in detail. 66. The Picasso was reproduced in A. Barr, éd., Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1939), p. 207; the Matisse in Cahiers d'Art, 7-8 (1927), p. 258. John Golding first made the latter comparison. 67. See note 69 below. 68. E.g., 1941-R, oil on denim, 1942 and 1Q45-K, reproduced in Kellein (1992), nos. 39,40, and 3. 69. An attached Betty Parsons label suggests it was perhaps shown at her gallery. Dated 1946 when auctioned at Sotheby's, New York (6th November 1990, lot 5), this seems slightly too late. The verso has an earlier composition with figurative and mechanical schemata, including angles identical to those at the base of Figure (1944) and ranked lines resembling a plough's discs seen head-on. 70. 1941-2-C is reproduced in Kellein (1992), no. 2. It transposes the two main crevices in Bôcklin's cliff, respectively straight and meandering, as blood-like red rivulets (and blood is another vital cult substance in Themis). 71. See M. Camille, Image on the Edge, Cambridge (1992) for some thought-provoking and apposite observations about marginality in a distant context. 72. Hence, Still's relentless pursuit of an ethics. Fittingly, Harrison (1912) traces Themis's evolution from a chthonic force to a deity of ethos, "morality" and "Justice," pp. 482 and 534. See also, Anon., "Clyfford Still: Parsons Gallery," Art News, 46 (May 1947), p. 50: "He [Still] states he is preoccupied with . . . man's struggle against and fusing with nature."

R I C H A R D S HI FF

Excerpt from "Water and Lipstick: De Kooning in Transition"

For de Kooning, the paint must be on the surface: he rejects any form of illusionism. —Thomas В. Hess, 1967

33

It is in the flesh that the real and painterly values merge most significantly.... —Lucy R. Lippard, 1965^ In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. —Susan Sontag, 1964^ SOURCE: Maria Prather, éd., Willem de Kooning: Paintings (National Gallery of Art, 1994), 38-56,66-69. Reprinted with the permission of Richard Shiff. 594

The personal collection of the painter and critic Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning's wife, included Woman—Lipstick, a small graphite drawing Willem executed while at work on his Woman series of the early 19505. It has a unique feature: the female figure has been surrounded by red lipstick imprints, with one imprint lying within it, tinting the torso. The image might be considered a collaborative creation, a joint representation of and by Willem and Elaine. When it was auctioned in 1989 Elaine de Kooning's explanation accompanied it: "Bill asked me to put on lipstick &, 'kiss' this drawing, carefully picking the exact spots where I should press my lips, six times—each one fainter, ending finally with the mid-section (going counter-clockwise)."36 There is no further indication as to what Elaine de Kooning's action accomplished—whether, at that particular moment in the couple's personal history, this drawing constituted a bond of affection (Elaine often signed notes to Willem with lipstick kisses), a private joke of some kind, or a visual play on either gender relations or the nature of representation.37 The lipstick imprints can represent Elaine de Kooning's touch, Willem de Kooning's touch (since he guided the marking), a mouth (Elaine's or anyone's), and any part of the body or anything else that, when painted, resembles a mouth. Each imprint also represents a kiss and, by extension, any other physical act of pressing against a resistant surface. Is Elaine de Kooning kissing the female figure that Willem de Kooning has drawn, as if to enact its fetishization by adding a sign of her being? Or is she adding red accents to his composition of black marks, intensifying the pictorial effect while covering and therefore completing the sheet? Perhaps the final kiss is meant to locate a center for the represented body, and simultaneously for its paper support: Willem tended to be conscious of both kinds of center and to conflate them.38 Pressing one's lips against a piece of paper is an experience analogous to acts of painting and drawing, which press pigment and graphite into the same kind of surface. The correspondences go beyond the tactile to the synesthetic; Willem believed, as do many artists, that the richness of paint elicits sensations of taste.39 Because the act of kissing must draw its agent flush with the image (the object of affection), perspectival distance is temporarily suspended. This is the kind of intimacy—visual, tactile, even gustatory—that Willem de Kooning desired in his art. It is a smallness, a closeness, a sensory concentration on the otherwise excluded detail. There are innumerable ways to make a mark, just there are innumerable ways to experience the pleasures of one's sensibility. The point of attention can be precise and, as de Kooning might say, "tiny."40 Colloquially, lipsticked lips are often called a "painted mouth" or "painted 1990s

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lips." People seem to utter these phrases with a certain self-consciousness, as if they were making a clever metaphor, or perhaps a character judgment (for Euro-Americans, "painting" one's lips, or any other part of the body, connotes an aggressive and even illicit sexuality, whereas lipstick and cosmetics in themselves do not). Referring to "painted lips" may well entail passing a judgment, but it cannot create much of a metaphor since this description is straightforward—lipstick is oil- or wax-based pigment applied externally to color the lips, painting their surface. Invoking the capacity of cosmetics to standardize and anesthetize the look of people, de Kooning's friend Harold Rosenberg once alluded to "painted lips, masks of feeling," in relation to the artist's practice of collaging bright red lips cut from magazine advertisements.41 The most notorious example dates from 1950: de Kooning's small, intense Woman, for which the artist cut a mouth from the "T-zone" (a combination of mouth and throat) featured in a long-running promotion for Camel cigarettes.42 Rosenberg subtly ironized these mass-culture lips by putting them in the category of "academic art," presumably because photography had rendered them suited for Salon painting—perfectly beautiful, static, insipid. When de Kooning himself was asked about his collaged mouths, he alluded to much more: being photographic, the lips would function metaphorically ("like a pun") within the context of the painting, since they play on the difference between what custom takes to be natural and real (photographic detail) and what it takes to be imaginary (painters' inventions and liberties), even though the advertisement and the painting are both human constructions. The cutand-pasted lips refer back, in a literal way, to the perfect American beauty grafted onto the artist's personal vision and visceral understanding. De Kooning also acknowledged coyly that these lips are sexualized like the ones people call "painted." They are either sexual in their préexistent cultural signification or have been eroticized by the painter's immediate cut and touch. All this is implied in the artist's typically off-hand statement: I cut out a lot of mouths. First of all, I felt everything ought to have a mouth. Maybe it was like a pun, maybe it's even sexual 1 put the mouth more or less in the place [within various images of Woman] where it was supposed to be. It always turned out to be very beautiful and it helped me immensely to have this real thing ... it was something to hang on to.43 The mouth is one of a number of human features de Kooning habitually privileged, reaffirming the conventional sexuality of certain parts of the body or—as his act might better be conceived—investing their representation with 596

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his own, perhaps idiosyncratic, sensuality and eroticism. The viewer recognizes de Kooning's special attention to or investment in certain parts of the body since they so often receive pictorial stress. Enhanced visibility of a given anatomical feature might derive from color or value contrast, striking linear configurations, or a disproportionate prominence within the general scheme. De Kooning's privileged features are these: eyes, mouths, breasts, genitals, feet. Indeed, the list seems to justify the 1959 judgment by Thomas Hess, promoter and friend of both Elaine and Willem, that "the theme of sexuality ... is a major part of de Kooning's painting."44 So there can be no surprise when the artist offers an interviewer a commonplace metaphor: "A woman has two mouths, one is the sex."45 Substitution and analogy characterize de Kooning's art and thought: one thing changes or passes into another. During the greater part of his career, he traced, retraced, and exchanged his set of connotatively sexual features, which are the figurative motifs most central to his painting process. Two of these body parts, genitals and feet, require some qualification. Beginning around 1964 de Kooning made many pictures, both drawings and paintings, of women with legs spread apart, and a lesser but significant number of analogous pictures of men (Man, 1967).46 In the cases of both women and men the genital area becomes particularly marked, a focal point for all potential viewers, because this spread-legged posture is relatively uncommon in conventional imagery and is avoided too by people actually conscious of being viewed; being unexpected, it is all the more noticeable for the interpreter, although many do not mention it. De Kooning sometimes indicated the anatomical details of his spread-legged women and men with precision, in other instances only vaguely, and sometimes without any specificity whatever so that painted man closely resembles painted woman ("There isn't much difference when you paint between a man and a woman").47 Many of the women, especially in drawings, appear in a configuration that renders vulva, anus, and buttocks all visible. In both drawings and oil paintings, the configuration in question can readily be recognized as a bold, thick stroke (or set of strokes) in the form of a curving W; sometimes it will look more like an M or like a J back to back with its mirror image. At least three different versions of this stroke are each visible in a painting of 1968, Woman in Landscape III. In the first instance, near the bottom of the canvas de Kooning had drawn an M in a wet-on-wet mixture of yellow and blue, which might be outlining a "seat" supporting the woman's body. My description should not be taken too literally; there need not be a chair. "Seat" is a proper term for this detail because it can refer either to a device for sitting 1990s

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(such as a lawn chair) or to that part of the body on which, and with which, a person sits.48 Given de Kooning's practice, there are advantages to choosing descriptive terms subject to shifting reference, fluid terms that pass between different realms of experience and material reality. They offer in themselves a sense of ambiguity and transition. In the second instance, above the M lies a reverse J in dark blue, partially obscured, probably once a double J form. Among its other actions, this mark articulates a seated figure's buttocks and thighs. In Woman in Landscape HI de Kooning has characteristically shifted the configuration of the spread (or drawn up) legs several times so that at least three "legs" remain visible—for him, a rather common motif. One leg reaches the left margin, while the other two end at the bottom in large high-heeled shoes, which have themselves been boldly contoured. In the third instance, above the reverse J is another wet-on-wet stroke of yellow and blue, taking the form of a curving W. Here, within the specific figurative context, this line indicates breasts, not buttocks, and reveals the possibility of a type of substitution (by analogy or contiguity) typical of the artist: he can transform painted eye into mouth, painted leg into arm, painted shoulders into breasts, painted breasts into buttocks. One or two strokes can accomplish the most dramatic shifts in a figure's orientation, sometimes compressing the anatomy, sometimes stretching it out. In each of its variations de Kooning's energetic "spread-leg" line—most often formed by a continuous but complex directional movement (imagine the action required of hand, wrist, and arm)—becomes an effective shorthand for describing the contour of buttocks, from which the painter usually extends a figure's legs outward to the left and right, with flexes at the knees (compare The Visit). (I will return to the question of de Kooning's preference for summary anatomical notations of this type.) The artist retained his W, M, and J forms late into his career as a favored motif, which, with effort, can be discerned in densely abstracted works of the later 19705 and even the tauter compositions of the early igSos ( Untitled I, 1977; Untitled XIV, 1977; Morning: The Springs, 1983; Untitled VI, 1983). It appears likely that de Kooning invented his spread-leg configuration in 1964 while composing pictures on the theme of Woman in a Rowboat, a subject inspired or at least influenced by something seen in Springs, where he moved permanently in June 1963. Several who knew the artist at the time testify to the depth of his investment in this particular image and his painstaking efforts to arrange its details.49 An example is a large charcoal drawing on vel598

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lum from the collection of James and Katherine Goodman. It generated other studies on vellum of the same width, with changes in the basic image sometimes resulting from the fact that bold linear outlining replaced nuanced passages of charcoal and erasure: compare the charcoal and oil version from the collection of Alvin Ukman, particularly the rendering of the figure's hair.50 In a small pencil drawing of the theme, presumably preceding the large charcoals, de Kooning extended his figure's legs downward from the torso, but in such a way (with foreshortening?) that one struggles to determine whether the woman sits upright or reclines. The Goodman charcoal sets the woman more emphatically into the rowboat's cradling frame, with the spatial relationship of the two elements (woman and boat) becoming even more ambiguous. To this end, the artist shifted the legs from vertical to horizontal orientation by analogy with the boat seat(s) and ribbing. Ribbing and boat frame seem to fix the position of the figure's head and arms as well. De Kooning erased and adjusted the boat rim where his figure's now horizontal legs met it, as if to reestablish a certain primacy for the woman's configuration and place. He also added broad curving strokes at the base of his drawing, recreating the boat's stern in correspondence to the pattern of the spread legs. In this image of cradled, floating weightlessness, boat frame and woman's body flow together as a set of analogous lines and shapes without hierarchy, while de Kooning's charcoal glides across his vellum. The spread-leg configuration may also derive from observations of women sitting or lying on grass, or in lawn chairs, or on the beach—all Long Island commonplaces. Women sunbathing, whether reclining (and seen from above) or perhaps extending their legs over the side edges of chairs, would be assuming poses much like the one de Kooning kept rendering.51 In 1968 Hess, who knew the artist's imagery as well as anyone, described a contemporary posture, women sitting with "their knees up to their chins."52 Hess' verbal image is sexually charged, but it also caricatures fashions in clothing and comportment of the late 19603—those exaggerated signs of a sexual revolution that had more to do with desire for liberties denied during the "conformist" 19505 than with sexual desire specifically. Hess acted not only as a critic of American conformism but as a journalist with a concern to report the peculiarities of the moment. The tone of his remark on body language is appropriate to de Kooning because he too had a caricaturist's eye for the fashions around him ("how summer clothes—shorts, shirts—fit on the body").53 He noticed the little things. If, as Hess implies, one could observe Long Island women with spread or 1990s

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drawn up legs, there are also pictorial precedents among artists de Kooning admired: Cézanne and Picasso, for instance.54 But the availability of sources in either contemporary life or the history of art cannot explain the prevalence or insistence and even stridency of this motif as de Kooning renders it. Critics, including very good ones, have repeatedly described de Kooning's women's legs as "splayed."55 Such characterization evokes specimens from the biology lab—dead things fixed in place, rather than active and reactive forces. It fails to attend to de Kooning's way of viewing and manipulating bodies and objects, and it misses much of the kinesthetic challenge of his art. To refer instead to "spread legs" seems more apt because spreading is an action applied not only to parts of the body but also to artists' materials—graphite, ink, oil paint, paper, canvas, even clay. De Kooning's long-legged types (such as Woman Accahonac) can be regarded as "spread" in the sense of having their legs stretched or extended, spread out. The concept of spreading collapses a distinction between acts of human posturing and the drawing or painting of images. De Kooning occasionally reasserted this very same distinction as if to defend the liberties he took with the real bodies (men's as well as women's) that viewers assumed were his models: "the drawing of a face is not a face. It's the drawing of a face."56 He meant both that drawing removes itself from mimetic representation and that figuration emerges from within drawing, whether or not a particular image, such as a face, is intended. His notion of the inevitability of figuration led him, as we know, to dismiss Clement Greenberg's remarks concerning a present historical demand for abstraction. How can the viewerinterpreter see and understand that "the drawing of a face is not a face"? The trick is to avoid projecting artists' configurations into an unbounded space of human action—action taking place at a distance and in ideal perspective, as Cartesian or Kantian minds habitually conceive. Conceptual abstraction was never de Kooning's mode ("A picture to me is not geometric—it has a face").57 He viewed things from within the personalized perspective of his studio manipulations. This is to see "intimately," from no farther than the end of one's arm, brush, or charcoal in hand. It is why the artist could succeed in drawing with eyes closed, as he sensed his hand "slip over the paper."58 To see from the end of an arm, intimately. De Kooning warned his viewers not to mistake representations for distanced projections of objects. The degree to which viewers have ignored his admonition underscores the seductiveness of a familiar analogy, one that surely affected him as much as anyone

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else. Since you draw out a line or a passage of paint just as you draw out (extend, spread) your arms or legs, to follow a movement of paint from a distance with the eyes induces a feeling of movement in the limbs. So if a line stretches a drawn limb too far, the naïve viewer may well feel a sympathetic pain, a violation. Think of spreading your own body to its maximum extension: it will help to imagine flattening yourself as much as possible against a resistant surface, such as a wall or a wooden panel, the same kinds of backings used by de Kooning in his studio to support his canvases and sheets of paper. This stretching or spreading makes a sentient body very conscious of its existence as physical matter. De Kooning had such awareness of his own body's compressed solidity in relation to his materials' contrasting fluidity; he could convert the one into the other through a flow of energetic drawing or painting. He could also perform the conversion through an act of imagination, as when he described a particular bodily gesture for the Museum of Modern Art symposium conducted in February 1951, "What Abstract Art Means to Me." In de Kooning's mind, things were never very abstract. For the symposium he established a concrete principle: "If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are—that is all the space I need as a painter."59 The resulting art becomes less a matter of representing other people's bodies as observed, projected, and abstracted, and more about coming to terms with the feelings of the painter's body, its specific physicality. It was de Kooning's custom to internalize things seen, trying to experience them in his own body as a stimulus to rendering: he would attempt to "feel" the distance between a hip and a knee, a waist and an armpit.60 What kind of body was he experiencing around the time of the 1951 symposium? De Kooning imagines himself assuming an oddly compact posture, with his physical alignment corresponding to the simplest kind of pictorialism: all figure, all materiality, all positive, centered, no negative space, no perspective depth or ground. The painter refers to stretching his arms not outward—in the typical gesture of an encompassing appropriation or an act of drawing—but "next to the rest of" himself within a single plane. The body may be extended as straight as possible, yet volumetrically it remains within a very confined area, flattened. To my knowledge, the specificity of de Kooning's description has never been noted by historians or critics, who either cite it without any qualification or mistake it for the more common image of a man with outstretched arms.61 In a case of self-assisted misinterpretation, one reviewer simply eliminated the essential qualifying phrase ("next to the rest of myself "), effectively transform-

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ing de Kooning's symposium statement into a reference to extended reach (arms horizontal), the very opposite of the position he was actually indicating (arms vertical, held tight in).62 Although the artist's image is of bodily containment, it nevertheless suggests, by virtue of its flattened state, the two-dimensional spread of paint on canvas, or perhaps the spread and yet compact enclosure of a compositional scheme like the Woman in a Rowboat. De Kooning's posture corresponds to an attempt to fit as much as possible into a small bounded area, as if to create an economy of copiousness (certainly a quality of his densely painted surfaces). As with many of his descriptions or explanations, he invoked this one more than once; its other instances confirm that it was intended to link an internalized experience of physicality to pictorial sensations, not to any real, volumetric body ("the drawing of a face ... not a face"). De Kooning actually performed the gesture in answer to David M. Solinger, when the collector asked toward what effect the painter was struggling as he labored over Woman I: "Like this," he responded intently, drawing his arms close into his sides, stiffening his body as if it were pressed flat or stretched taut.63 He made his body like paint.64 Later, during a 1968 interview, de Kooning used this same gesture to illustrate the effect of Alberto Giacometti's elongated figures, which existed not only as sculptural forms but also stretched out on paper or canvas surfaces. As he had done previously, he was acting out how the represented image should feel. He referred to his own custom of drawing the figure kinesthetically while watching television; Giacometti too, he noted, eventually had no need to look at a model.65 It seems that de Kooning identified so closely with the actual materiality of paintings and drawings that the imaginative space he required for a figure was never greater nor more abstract than the length and width of the working surface already facing him. To sense lines spreading across a unit of paper, even when blinded or in a distracted state, was analogous to the internalized bodily sense of the space from one joint to another. When de Kooning did actually reach out, spreading paint across the intimate space at the end of his arm—to spread, extend, or stretch a form or figure—his action amounted to a focusing or concentrating of attention. Spreading does not necessarily dissipate or diffuse materiality but can instead particularize and intensify the physical sense of a thing by involving hand and eye in its active production (or, if one thinks of working from a model of some kind, its independent reproduction in a second medium). Such insistence results in the unconventional perspective and proportion of de Kooning's 602

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figures, which require more than just one look and more than a single interpretation. Many of his women, for example, have broadened torsos that resemble faces, with the breasts becoming prominent eyes (Woman, 1952-1953; Woman, 1953; Two Women in the Country, 1954; Two Women, 1954-1955).66 This curious exchange of anatomical identities can operate in both directions since a shift in context converts a face back into a torso. Imagine de Kooning constructing a figure by focusing first on the torso; since that form in isolation would have no scale, it might indicate eyes with large pupils as much as breasts with large nipples. So a viewer discerns a face (or, better, "the drawing of a face"). By adding head and legs at either end of such a torso/face, de Kooning reorients the context and reestablishes the form as the trunk of a body. In the Fleischman collection's Woman the head and legs remain undersized and summarily articulated with respect to the more complicated torso, as if to distinguish between something the artist focused or concentrated on (spread out, extended, enlarged) and what he saw peripherally in the field of observation.67 Differentiation of scale and proportion within the figure implies that the viewer's position must lie extremely close to the central torso; otherwise the perspective would be less dramatic. As a result, the viewer feels drawn close to the paper surface, into the painting's materiality, as close as the painter worked to scrape and spread the paint along its knife-sharp edges. As with torsos, so with lips. When Elaine de Kooning kissed Willem de Kooning's drawing she performed a delicate but familiar act of focusing on a part of the body and spreading it out. She came up close to the drawing and pressed against its resistant surface, face to face, slightly flattening her lips to leave a spread of lipstick-red pigment. Willem directed Elaine to position the last of her six kisses on the torso, center of both the drawn figure and its paper support. The action drew Elaine and the implied viewer in close to figure and paper. This combination of kissing and drawing simulated the effect of the spread of parts of a body (or of its entirety). Such physical action can also be represented kinesthetically by spreading paint across a surface, extending it toward the margins. The last of the human features de Kooning privileges is itself an extension, which, within a tradition of representing the figure, is usually pushed to a pictorial edge: the foot. Outside the fine arts, however, and within a culture of commercial imagery, feet and their shoes often occupy a center. Some of the artist's paintings of the late 19605 focus on feet to the exclusion of anything else, probably because they derive from transfers of the lower part of works such as Woman Sag Harbor and Woman Accabonac, both of which had al1990s

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ready assigned to feet a disproportionately large part of the figure's pictorial field (see East Hampton XXII,iQ68). The artist often paints these female feet in stylish high heels, sometimes with ankle straps. Such is the case with Woman Sag Harbor, from which a number of independent transfer images were taken; some of them, naturally enough, show the shoes in reverse (see WomanTorso, c. 1964-1966). There are hints that shoes held more than casual aesthetic interest for de Kooning; they figure not only in his paintings but also, with a vague, nagging insistence, in anecdotes and biographical details. As I have implied, shoes were one of a number of themes—lipstick was another—that linked the painter to his years in New York as a commercial illustrator.68 Beyond that, like water, shoes may have evoked the artist's childhood. Asked by a journalist in 1968 about his observations upon returning to Holland, de Kooning remarked, "they wear better shoes": was he being facetious or were shoes a focus of old memories (or both)?69 Wooden Dutch shoes could be found in his studio during the 19603, but probably only because someone considered them a proper house gift for a Dutchman; still, he chose to demonstrate techniques of illustration by drawing them.70 One can easily image de Kooning fascinated by shoes as a child—many children are—and he had cause to remember them with pain as well since his mother once surprised the small boy on the floor with a strong and seemingly spontaneous kick.71 If shoes were something more than neutral objects for Willem, they were for Elaine de Kooning too; indeed they were a focal point of the couple's aesthetic agreement. Elaine appreciated shoe design, enjoyed its variety, and happened to wear types Willem like to depict: high heels, platforms, ankle straps.72 Both Elaine and Willem's mother (Cornelia Nobel Lassooy) were suspected to be imaginary models for Woman I—an imposing figure, seated, shown in high heels. In public statements Elaine de Kooning distanced herself from the elder Mrs. de Kooning, perhaps in recognition that the two might somehow be regarded as playing exchangeable roles in Willem's life. "That ferocious woman he painted didn't come from living with me," Elaine quipped, "It began when he was three years old."73 Whatever the associations with his personal history, de Kooning's images of women frequently connote contemporaneity (American more than Dutch) because of keenly observed elements of fashion—not only styles of shoes, but dresses, lipstick, and even nail polish.74 In this respect he represented the women and men of his generation as they saw themselves, following social codes of gender identity that appear exaggerated by today's standards. The 604

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painter's interest in women's dress and the brilliant colors of cosmetics was quite genuine, a nuanced aesthetic appreciation directed toward men's clothing as well.75 Like Baudelaire—who argued that great classical painters had always represented their own contemporaneity, "from costume and coiffure down to gesture, glance, and smile"—de Kooning saw his artistic heroes, a Rubens or Bernini, as observers of body language and fashion.76 His own art combines the classical tradition of female nudity with passing styles in advertising and popular imagery. De Kooning remained proud of his expertise in illustration and took his aesthetic pleasure beyond clothes and cosmetics into the realm of commercial layout, lettering, and cartoons (both on television and in the comics).77 His engagement with mass visual culture did not originate in bourgeois chic, camp, or elitist ironies but in his vocational education and the working-class identity he preferred to maintain, despite increasing wealth ("I like Springs [as opposed to East Hampton] because I like people who work").78 He enjoyed explaining studio "secrets" in terms of popular culture, converting the ordinary into the ingenious and back again. "I got an idea for preparing colors ... at Howard Johnson's, the ice cream makers," he said, referring to the restaurant's famous display of twenty-eight different flavors. To his painter's eye they were twenty-eight colors, just like the colors he would arrange in common glass bowls on his studio table.79 The convergence in de Kooning's painting of what is now loosely referred to as the high and the low was for many years a theme in reviews by Hess and Rosenberg, who sometimes described the pop generation of artists as shallow followers of their friend's initiative.80 De Kooning's yoking of timeless Woman-in-art (elite culture), to fashionable woman-on-the-beach (bourgeois culture), to sexually stylized pinup-with-lipstick (mass culture) combined conflicting features without pretending to mediate between them or transcend their differences. De Kooning worked toward all-inclusiveness, toward the pleasure of an anarchic dissonance, not utopie harmony. To his supporters, he not only flouted the "high" academic tradition's conventions and intellectual self-importance but also parodied "low" culture's inducements to conformism (mass culture being no more liberating for the working and consuming middle class than products sanctioned by elite institutions).81 Hess, parading his own broad knowledge and experience, often linked chains of references to de Kooning's paintings in which high and low, erudite and popular, follow one another in impressively random order: "the Theban goddess Nut and Marilyn Monroe, Aztec dolls, Kali, Artemis-Isis, Willendorf, Jigg's Maggie."82 He fantasized that de Kooning's Women should replace the 1990s

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cloying models covering highway billboards and the sides of delivery trucks. The advertisers' paper confections shared the blankness of the well-mannered "girl at the noisy party who ... simply sits, is there, and smiles, because that is the proper thing to do in America."83 Hess' biting commentary appears in a gender-specific form but was intended to extend to all Americans: he was making a statement against mindless conformism ("the proper thing to do"), for which artists like Willem and Elaine de Kooning represented the antitypes. Placing Woman I on signboards would challenge the mainstream American ethos with a countercultural "ugliness" that could not be consumed. Woman I sits and even smiles, but would hardly do "the proper thing." From its first public appearance de Kooning's Woman /raised questions of the artist's personal attitude toward women because it seemed to render its subject as aggressively unappealing or to treat it with violence so that detached aesthetic analysis became impossible.84 In consequence, journalists repeatedly asked the artist about his "true" feelings toward women, as if the women in the pictures were intended to be transformations of the real, and as if the public had a need to know. Was the problem the mother, the wife, or all women in the artist's life? De Kooning's replies always seem a bit dumbfounded, as if, for an artist, to fix the counterpart for an image in a living individual is itself a kind of violation, a betrayal of the independent image and its right to live and grow in the paint apart from other realities. Elaine de Kooning put it this way: "They [the Woman paintings] do have a certain ferocity, but that has to do with paint."85 De Kooning himself admitted to no more than being "irritated" at times by women, whom, he stated, he actually like very much (no doubt, genuinely).86 He also deflected the issue by alluding frequently to the woman or feminine in himself: "I was painting the woman in me? As stated in 1956, this remark is a recognizable derivation of Jung's popular theory of the anima, the inherited unconscious feminine in all men, no matter how masculine.87 De Kooning seems to have worried, at least during the 19505, that if he were regarded as a misogynist, he would also appear to be homosexual: "If I painted beautiful women, would that make me a nonhomosexual?"88 Ever wary of journalists and even photographers, he may have intended his odd question to ridicule an interviewer's visual literalism and stiff deduction. It is not my aim to reach de Kooning's deepest psychological motivations, despite the existence of abundant documentary material to support speculation. In referring to Elaine de Kooning's kisses I chose to introduce the topic

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of sexuality, because a certain sexuality has already become part of the public meaning of de Kooning's imagery, whether he intended it or not.89 When Elaine "kissed" Willem's drawing, this was hardly a matter of sexual gratification: instead she participated in a playful act of figuration appropriate to the environment of an artist's studio. She also contributed to Willem's curiously obsessive material practice. Its private side is de Kooning's emotional development, his feelings about the women and men he knew, and reasons why their presence might have found its way into his representations: its public side is something we can call, in the 19605 spirit of Susan Sontag and others, not sexuality but eroticism. In "Against Interpretation," an essay quite characteristic of its moment (1964), Sontag opposed "an erotics of art" to "a hermeneutics"; she was contrasting the liberating pleasure of sensory experience to the distancing process of intellectual understanding.90 Her position suits de Kooning well. He had already made this opposition the theme of his statement for the 1951 symposium on "What Abstract Art Means to Me." At that time de Kooning was known as an abstract artist (Excavation, 1950) as well as a figure painter but would not accept this or any other designation easily. In his statement abstraction becomes something intellectual and therefore detrimental; it results not from an immediate act of painting, but from an artist's pondering what has been done, giving it a name, allowing it to become a doctrine and finally dogma. De Kooning sustained his points with irony and double entendre. Consider these thoughts: during the nineteenth century painters "were not abstract about something which was already abstract"; that is, painters were guided by intellectual theories (something "already abstract") but did not yet use abstraction to represent them. "When they got those strange, deep ideas, they got rid of them by painting a particular smile on one of the faces in the picture"; that is, they countered their own intellectual pretensions ("deep ideas") with a bit of surface cartooning.91 De Kooning's ultimate message is this: he paints whatever he feels like painting at the moment (high, low, whatever); the important thing is to paint, "paint so fast you couldn't think."92 In fact, Sontag regarded de Kooning's painting as an obvious promotion for erotics and turned to another of his statements to begin her argument against the intellectuals'practice of interpretation. The epigraph to her essay read: "Content is a glimpse "93

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Note s

33. Thomas В. Hess, in De Kooning Recent Paintings (New York: Knoedler, 1967), 39. 34. Lippard 1965,29. Compare Willem de Kooning, "The Renaissance and Order" [1950], trans/formation i, no. 2 (1951), 86 ("Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented"); Thomas B. Hess, introduction to Recent Paintings by Willem de Kooning [exh. cat., Sidney Janis Gallery] (New York, 1962), n.p. ("the moving flesh of pigment"). 35. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," Evergreen Review 8 (December 1964),

9336. Christie's auction catalogue, "Contemporary Drawings, Watercolors, and Collages," New York, 8 November 1989, note to cat. 136. Edvard Lieber (letter to author, 28 August 1993) confirms that Elaine de Kooning wrote this note in August 1985. The drawing also contains traces of pink pastel in the figure's torso and hair. 37. According to Conrad Friend (AI), Elaine de Kooning recalled that Woman— Lipstick had been produced in a spirit of play; Fried attests to Elaine's practice of leaving lipstick imprints on notes. AI: author interview, 1993. 38. Introducing some of the kinesthetic drawings he made during the 19608 with eyes closed, de Kooning wrote: "The drawings often started by the f e e t . . . but more often by the center of the body, in the middle of the page"; see Willem de Kooning, De Kooning Drawings [facsimile reproductions] (New York, 1967), n.p. A July 1963 photograph by Hans Namuth shows the artist drawing with eyes closed, maintaining his orientation, as Judith Wolfe noted, "with one finger held to the center of the paper"; see Wolfe's Willem de Kooning: Works from 1951-1981 [exh. cat., Guild Hall Museum] (East Hampton, 1981), 14. Compare Elaine de Kooning, in Fox 1984: "he knew exactly where, he remembered where his hand had been." 39. John McMahon, AI. Conrad Friend (AI) stresses how much de Kooning liked every sensory aspect of paint, including its smell and touch. 40. On de Kooning's "intimate proportions" and the association of "intimate" with "commonplace" and "ordinary" see Hess, "De Kooning," 1953, 32, 64, 66. De Kooning stated that he wanted his "big" paintings to look "small" and "intimate" (Rosenberg 1972,56), and he was fascinated by the use of a reducing glass (Joan Ward, AI; Hess 1959,27). On preferring things small see also de Kooning, letters to Joseph and Olga Hirshhorn, 13 May 1965 and undated [January 1969?], in Washington 1993,159,167. On "tiny" see the text. 41. Harold Rosenberg, "Painting Is a Way of Living," New Yorker, 16 February 1963, 136. 42. See Hess, "De Kooning," 1953,66; Hess 1959,2i; Hess in New York 1968,77-79. Hess' numerous essays and reviews of de Kooning are quite repetitious, although his accounts of the painter's characteristic practices vary somewhat—often, it seems, in subtle response to changes in the art world, particularly the emergence of pop art in the early 19605 (see my note 80 below). Over the years there were shifts in Hess' facts as well as in his interpretations: 608

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in 1953 he incorrectly identified the "T-zone" advertisement with Lucky Strike cigarettes; in 1959 and 1968 it became Camel (the two brands actually had somewhat different connotations, since Camel was traditionally targeted at a male consumer, whereas Lucky Strike often pitched its advertising to a female consumer). In 1959 Hess suggested Life as the source magazine; in 1968 it became Time. In the remainder of this essay I will not necessarily indicate such variations but will cite only the most relevant of Hess' statements, given the issue under immediate consideration. I will apply the same principle to the writings of Harold Rosenberg and Elaine de Kooning, which exhibit analogous patterns of repetition and variation. Comparison of the writings of the three makes it evident that they freely borrowed both information and formulations from one another. It also seems evident that the three freely elaborated on or adjusted whatever statements de Kooning may have made in their presence. They were close enough to him personally to have done so without believing they were violating his intentions. Moreover, it is likely that aspects of de Kooning's writings and his statements to various other interviewers derived from formulations reached in conversations with Hess, Rosenberg, and Elaine de Kooning. De Kooning himself warned interpreters to attend to the context in which he made his various recorded remarks and not to regard any one statement as definitive (Bibeb 1968,3). 43. Willem de Kooning, interview by David Sylvester, "Painting as Self-Discovery," BBC broadcast, 3 December 1960, published in David Sylvester, "De Kooning's Women," Sunday Times Magazine (London), 8 December 1968, 57. The actual interview took place in March 1960. Parts of it (including material not in the Sunday Times version) appear, but with editorial changes, as Willem de Kooning, "Content Is a Glimpse ...," Location i (Spring 1963), 45-53 (Location was headed by Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg; Hess edited de Kooning's statement). In the Sunday Times de Kooning states, "Maybe it's even sexual," whereas in Location he says, "Maybe it's sexual." The Times version, presumably the more accurate, better captures de Kooning's irony and mockery of his public's probing seriousness. In a later interview de Kooning said: "I find that everyone has to have a mouth, and I put the mouth where I want" (Bibeb 1968, 3). Hess, "De Kooning," 1953, 66, prefigured de Kooning's thoughts concerning a collaged mouth as "a point of rest, the center," "a center of realism," or, in the painter's words, "something to hang on to." See also de Kooning's variant account of 1970 ("a point of reference ... something to hold on to") in de Antonio and Tuchman 1984, 53. De Kooning's own commercial illustration during the early 19405 had qualities similar to the kind of imagery he cut from magazines a decade later; for instance, mouths figure prominently in his Model pipe tobacco advertisement for Life magazine, i February 1943, 97 (identified by Conrad Fried, letter to author, 5 September 1993). With the mouth de Kooning was indeed on familiar ground. 44. Hess 1959,30. See also Thomas B. Hess, "Pinup and Icon," Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 [Artnews Annual 38], ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972), 229.

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45- Bibeb 1968,3. De Kooning continues, "A man has something else, a fascinating thing." 46. Some of de Kooning's sculptures show the same pose, for example, the small bronze of 1969, Untitled VI, Collection of the Artist. 47. De Kooning [1970], in de Antonio and Tuchman 1984,53. Compare de Kooning, in Hunter 1975,70: "Many of my paintings of women have been self-portraits. I never thought very much about what sex they were" [my translation]. De Kooning expressed fascination with (male) figures on horseback, generic cases of spread-leggedness, both painted and sculpted: see William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals (New York, 1982), 142; and Peter Schjeldahl, "De Kooning's Sculptures: Amplified Touch," Art in America 62 (March-Apr il 1974), 61-62. 48. The ambiguity here is a result of a creative and apparently very natural play of language for which the most relevant rhetorical term is metonymy (and secondarily, catachresis). Metonymy occurs when an active cause is substituted for its effect, as in regarding lipstick traces as actual lips or a kiss; metonymy also occurs when a thing is identified by what is contiguous to it (what touches it, what shares in its action), as in calling the part of the chair on which one seats oneself its "seat." For application of such rhetorical analysis in ways relevant to the present essay, compare my "Cezanne's Physicality: The Politics of Touch," in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds., The Language of Art History (Cambridge, 1991), 129-180. 49. Susan Brockman (AI), John McMahon (AI), Allan Stone (AI), and James Goodman (dealer, friend of de Kooning, especially during 19608, AI) all recall that this image obsessed the artist more than any other of the moment. According to Brockman, he was not involved with it until 1964, sometime after moving into his new studio (Hess 1965,64, had dated the image to 1963-1964). Brockman remembers that in spring 1964 or shortly thereafter de Kooning told her of having viewed a specific scene at Louse Point—most likely a woman and man together in a rowboat, possibly also a child—which he wished to develop as a theme for painting: she remembers as well his interest at the time in outdoor nativity scenes and other popular religious images, which involve a sense of the enclosing, sheltering, or cradling of a woman or child. It is entirely characteristic of de Kooning to combine references and associations in a single image, letting the complexity develop as it will; in addition to alluding to cradling and floating, the Woman in a Rowboat evokes the form of Dutch shoes, another kind of protection from water. One thinks as well of the cagelike or riblike structures of early Giacometti sculptures, which the artist admired (this suggested by Joop Sanders, AI). It may or may not be relevant that de Kooning had an adult fear of open water and boating and had also had a frightening childhood experience that involved his being forced by other children into a manhole or sewer (Conrad Fried, AI). 50. The addition of a foot at the right in the Ukman version became possible because de Kooning shifted the entire image to the left. A transparent layer of oil paint, perhaps transferred from one or more other surfaces, covers the charcoal.

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51. Some of the positions assumed by women's arms in de Kooning images also seem related to sunbathing—arms held in front of the face, raised and folded in back of the head, or stretched along the torso or the sides of chairs. De Kooning himself was not a sunbather (see Hess in New York 1968,122). 52. Hess in New York 1968,124. 53. Hess in New York 1967,30. 54. "I can open almost any book of reproductions and find a painting I could be influenced by" (de Kooning, in Rosenberg 1972,54). 55. Although I find the term "splayed" misleading, it does succeed in connoting an ungainliness that de Kooning found preferable to conventional beauty; with similar effect, a number of critics have referred to his figures as "squatting." For an example of "splayed," see Schjeldahl 1974,62; for "squatting," Andrew Forge, "De Kooning in Retrospect," Artnews 68 (March 1969), 44. The two descriptive terms appear in a single paragraph in Hess in New York 1967, 21, but applied somewhat differently. 56. Rosenberg 1972,56. 57. Willem de Kooning, in Robert Goodnough, éd., "Artists' Sessions at Studio 35" [1950], Modern Artists in America, ed. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1951), 20. 58. De Kooning, quoted in Hunter 1975, 69. At Black Mountain College, where de Kooning taught during summer 1948, Josef Albers expressed a similar interest in demonstrating that "drawing is kinetic rather than visual"; see Elaine de Kooning 1983,394. See also de Kooning [facsimile reproductions] 1967, n.p. 59. Willem de Kooning, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 18 (Spring 1951), 7. It was de Kooning's custom to explore an idea through mimicking something seen: "He could take an idea only as a visual image" (Barrett 1982,141). 60. Susan Brockman (AI) states that during the 19608 de Kooning talked about understanding the body by means of such inner feeling. 61. The latter tendency derives from Hess' allusion to "the arms-spread gesture of man" in Hess, Recent Paintings by Willem de Kooning, 1962, n.p.: compare also T.B.H. [Thomas B. Hess], "Six Star Shows for Spring," Artnews 61 (March 1962), 61; and Thomas B. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (New York, 1951), 100. 62. David Rosand, "Proclaiming Flesh," Times Literary Supplement, 17 February 1984,167. 63. The exchange took place in de Kooning's studio during the period of his work on Woman I (1950-1952), that is, around the time of the Museum of Modern Art symposium (David M. Solinger, early collector of the artist's works, beginning in the late 19408, AI). It may be significant that Woman I shows arms tight against the figure's torso and bordered by parallel strokes of paint, an effect of both compression and spreading. 64. Conrad Fried (AI), familiar with de Kooning's studio practice at the time, confirms that the artist wanted the image of Woman I to lie on its fictive picture 1990s

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plane the way paint lies flat on a surface; de Kooning believed that vigorous brushwork kept the viewer's eye concentrated on the surface. 65. De Kooning, in Bibeb 1968,3. According to Elaine de Kooning, her husband's admiration for Giacometti was sparked by a 1948 exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery; see Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning: The First Twenty-Six Tears in New York, 1927-1952 (New York, 1986), 181-182. 66. Compare Forge 1969,61. 67. Hess, apparently alluding to conversations with the artist, described de Kooning's figure style in a closely related way, as conveying the "wide, concave ellipse" of natural vision (Hess, De Kooning's Drawings, 1972,19). 68. Joop Sanders (AI) recalls de Kooning's having worked on advertisement layouts for both shoes and lipstick. An untitled de Kooning charcoal on paper (c. 1975) combines a pair of slip-on shoes, rendered in the style of commercial illustration, with a figure drawn in an irregular, "artistic" manner. 69. See Frisco Endt, "Royal Welcome for Prodigal de Kooning," Life International, 28 October 1968,72.1 thank Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan for this reference. 70. Lisa de Kooning, AI; John McMahon, AI; Susan Brockman, AI. De Kooning's illusionistic rendering of the Dutch shoes exhibits a combination of angularity and curvature characteristic of his abstract linear style. Those close to the artist believe he would not himself have sought out a nostalgic item like Dutch shoes. Joan Ward (AI) recalls, however, that during the early 19705, for whatever reason, de Kooning wanted to find an old-fashioned shoeshine box. 71. According to Robert Dash (AI), de Kooning recounted the incident in 1986. De Kooning remembered his mother as stern and unwilling to let him do things in his own way or at his own pace when he was a child (Conrad Fried, AI). The artist's sister and half-brother regarded their mother as a "tyrant"; see Ken Wilkie, "Willem de Kooning: Portrait of a Modern Master," Holland Herald 17, no. 3 (March 1982), 24. 72. Connie Fox, longtime friend of Elaine de Kooning, AI. According to John Powers, de Kooning once referred to posing nudes as if they were elevated by highheeled shoes; see John G. Powers, Pop Art, Op Art: 12 Paintings from the Powers' Collection (Aspen, n.d.), n.p. De Kooning also told Peter Schjeldahl that he had considered making a monumental sculpture based on the form of women's shoes (Schjeldahl 1974,61). Among the many sensory details that fascinated the painter in Michelangelo Antonioni's film UAvventura was the click of actress Monica Vitti's high heels (Susan Brockman, AI). 73. Elaine de Kooning, in Pepper 1983, 70. The de Koonings were visited by Willem's mother during summer 1954 (Elaine de Kooning, unpublished interview by Ann Gibson, 3 October 1987): this afforded Elaine a first-hand experience that may be the basis of her remarks in the Pepper interview ("That was no pink, nice old lady. She could walk through a brick wall"). Willem de Kooning once stated that Woman I "reminded [him] very much of [his] childhood, being in Holland near all that water," an association that might link the figure to the painter's mother. He added that his friend Joop Sanders showed he understood

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74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

the relevant allusions by singing a Dutch song about a brook (Rosenberg 1972, 57). Sanders (AI) states that the folk song in question concerned a woman sitting by water and had no hidden implications for Woman I. Elaine de Kooning stated that her nail polish had inspired the corresponding feature (rendered in oil paint) in Willem de Kooning's Woman, c. 1944 (Edvard Lieber, letter to author, 28 August 1993). Susan Brockman, AI;John McMahon, AI. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life" [1859-1860], in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964), 13. De Kooning, in Rosenberg 1972, 54: "Rubens is an illustrator too." On Bernini see de Kooning quoted in Bert Schierbeek, "Willem de Kooning," in Willem de Kooning [exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum] (Amsterdam, 1968), n.p. De Kooning was also fond of the figurai poses in Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard (Susan Brockman, AI). Rosenberg's account of de Kooning's Woman /as (among other things) an attractively dressed Fourteenth Street shopper and a "madonna studied in a reproduction" recalls the Baudelairean formula for modern beauty, a combination of transitory and eternal; see Harold Rosenberg, "De Kooning," Vogue, September 1964,186. On cartooning see Hess in New York 1967, 30; Hunter 1975, 70; Rose C.S. Slivka, "Willem de Kooning" Art Journal 48 (Fall 1989), 220. Rosenberg 1972,57. De Kooning, in Amsterdam 1968, n.p. John McMahon (AI) tells of the purchase of a large number of bowls in 1964. See Thomas B. Hess, "Pop and Public," Artnews 62 (November 1963), 23,59-60; Hess 1965, 36; Rosenberg 1964, 186. De Kooning and his critic-friends were sensitive on the topic of pop art because they believed it had attracted undeserved attention, drawing the art market away from the older generation (Allan Stone, AI); de Kooning himself thought pop art had "no innocence" (Susan Brockman, AI). Hess particularly resented the claim that abstract expressionism amounted to little more than a passing style, as implied by Robert Indiana, in "What Is Pop Art? Interviews by G. R. Swenson—Part i," Artnews 62 (November 1963), 27. He argued that de Kooning led the way in introducing popular imagery into postwar American painting (Hess in New York 1967,17, 20). Robert Rauschenberg, however, noted a telling difference: de Kooning found materials for collage within his own studio, whereas the younger pop generation looked outside to the urban environment (Rauschenberg, interview by Catherine Bompuis, Ann Hindry, and Claire Stoullig, 1983, in Stoullig 1984, 222). Among pop artists, Tom Wesselman derived "content and motivation" from de Kooning: see Wesselman's statement (sometimes incorrectly attributed to Andy Warhol) in "What Is Pop Art? Interviews by G. R. Swenson—Part 2," Artnews 62 (February 1964), 64. See, as an example, Rosenberg's critique of American intellectuals and political militants who adopt the exaggerated signs of sexual difference associated with mass-culture gender identities. He concludes, rather like de Kooning, that "true 1990s

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82.

83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

89.

maleness is never without its vein of femininity"; see Harold Rosenberg, "Masculinity: Real and Put On," Vogue, November 1967,159. Hess 1959, 29 ("Maggie" is a comic-strip character). De Kooning's eclecticism allowed him to admire the art of Norman Rockwell along with that of his abstract expressionist friends; see Avis Berman, "Willem de Kooning: 'I Am Only Halfway Through,' " Artnews 81 (February 1982), 71. Hess, "De Kooning," 1953,66; compare Hess in New York 1967,20. Reviewing the Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition, for example, James Fitzsimmons, "Art," Arts and Architecture 70 (May 1953), 6, described Woman I as "fantastically gross and ungainly" and regarded Hess' stylistic analysis as inappropriate. On the history of response to Woman I and related issues of gender see Eleanor Kathryn Siegel, "Willem de Kooning's 'Woman' Paintings of 1950-1953" (master's thesis, University of Texas at Augtin, 1990). On "violence" in de Kooning's paintings of the 19605 see Forge 1969,44,62. See also Sylvester 1968,48 (woman as both violator and violated). Elaine de Kooning, recorded in the film De Kooning on de Kooning, directed by Charlotte Zwerin, produced by Courtney Sale, 1981. Compare Hess, De Kooning Drawings, 1972,45. Willem de Kooning [1956], in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York, 1961), 102. On de Kooning's "enjoyment of women" see Slivka 1989,220. De Kooning, in Rodman 1961,102. See also Shirey 1967, 80; Bibeb 1968,3. On the anima, a concept first developed in 1916, see C. G.Jung, "The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious," Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New York, 1966), 188-211. Jung stated that "an inherited collective image of woman exists in a man's unconscious, with the help of which he apprehends the nature of woman" (p. 190). De Kooning's knowledge of Jung probably had multiple sources, including the painter John Graham, a friend from early years in New York. See Irving Sandier, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York, 1970), 22-23; and Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge, 1991), 43~47- See also my note 81 above. De Kooning [1956], in Rodman 1961,102. Since Rodman worked from memory, his quotation may only be approximate; his general reliability was challenged by Herman Cherry, "U.S. Art Confidential," Artnews 56 (April 1957), 36-37, 61-63. Concerning de Kooning's sensitivity to suggestions of homosexuality see also de Hirsch 1955, i; and Potter 1985,214. Carol Duncan's essay, "The MoMA's Hot Mamas," Art Journal 48 (Summer 1989), 171-178, represents a recent stage in the gradual process of the public sexualization of de Kooning's art; for analysis of this process see Siegel 1990. De Kooning's images of women also suggest the painter's own immersion in materiality and hence a primitive infantilism; Fitzsimmons 1953, 6, saw in Woman I "the female personification of all that is unacceptable, perverse, and infantile in ourselves." See also Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, 1987), 348-350.

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go. Sontag 1964, 93. Lynne Cooke, building on an important review by Andrew Forge (see Forge 1969), has similarly focused on the eroticism of de Kooning's work, relating it to the writings of Sontag and especially Norman O. Brown; see Lynne Cooke, "De Kooning and the Pastoral: The Interrupted Idyll," in Washington 1993,89-109. 91. De Kooning, "Abstract Art," 1951,5. 92. De Kooning's words as recalled by Garner Tullis, printmaker who worked with the artist in the 19605 and 19705 (AI). Harold Rosenberg made a similar argument in "The American Action Painters " Artnews 51 (December 1952), 48. 93. Sontag 1964,76.

MATTHEW . AI G ELL

Barnet t Newman' s Stripe Paintings and Kabbalah : A Jewish Take

Barnett Newman's (1905-1970) famous stripe paintings are based on the esoteric teachings of mystical Judaism known as Kabbalah. We know this from Thomas Hess's account of Newman's career published in 1971. Since then, this startling piece of information has barely been mentioned and, equally startling, never been explored further.1 I want to ask here one question: Just how Jewish was Newman's use of Jewish sources? My conclusions will suggest that neither the artist nor his biographer used Kabbalah from a normative Jewish point of view, or, to say it differently, neither used Jewish sources in a way acceptable to traditional Jewish thought. I use the term normative Judaism to imply acceptance of Jewish interpretations of one's relationship with God. Equally important in my analysis are esoteric kabbalistic interpretations of the creation of the universe. Most professing Jews, however, rarely study and know little of the mystical Jewish writings collected under the rubric of Kabbalah, and if they did, they might not accept very much of it. But, at the same time, normative Judaism and kabbalistic writings share certain assumptions about one's relationship with God Thomas Hess, no doubt with Newman's full cooperation, based his analysis of the vertical stripe on Gershon Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, particularly Scholem's discussions of Rabbi Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-

SOURCE: American Art (Spring 1994), 32-43. Reprinted with the permission of Matthew Baigell.

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century mystic from Safed, a community now part of modern-day Israel. According to Scholem (and Hess), Rabbi Luria explained how the world was created from nothing by postulating the concept of Tsimtsum. To create a primordial space for the universe, God contracted into himself. Tsimtsum is the contraction, the withdrawal, the shrinkage of God. Next, God sent out a ray of light in which he revealed himself as God the Creator. This act set the "cosmic process in motion." Subsequently, "the first being which emanated from this light was Adam Kadmon, the man.... He is the first and highest form in which the divinity begins to manifest itself after the Tsimtsum"2 Newman's stripe paintings accord with Scholem's explanation of creation up to this point. The single stripe may be understood as representing the first ray of light and the first man. But Scholem goes on to say that from Adam's eyes, mouth, ears, and nose, the lights of the divinity burst forth in an undifferentiated mass. This image calls to mind the random and diffused focal points of Mark Tobey's white-writing paintings. Clearly, Newman preferred to visualize the moment immediately before light multiplied, that is, the space into which depth had not yet been introduced. In a virtually perfect match of style and content, Newman suggested a pictorial surface in which all forms seem to be on the same plane. To achieve this surface, Newman manipulated depth cues based on the size and color intensity of the forms. Normally, we read both large shapes and intense colors as projecting toward us, and small shapes and weak colors as receding into the distance. But in his stripe paintings, such as Dionysius, Newman deemphasized the color intensity of the larger rectangular shapes and, by contrast, emphasized the color intensity of the stripes so that the size cues of the large shapes are balanced by the intense color cues of the stripes. The stripes, then, seem to lie on the same plane as the larger rectangular fields, which, despite their size, are held in check because of their more subdued color. Thus, color intensity cues and size cues for suggesting depth cancel out each other. By making the stripes and the rectangular fields appear to be on the same plane, Newman captured on the pictorial surface the very moment of creation that Rabbi Luria described—the moment of the first ray of the light of creation, before matter, and therefore space, became differentiated. This was a brilliant formal solution on Newman's part to a spatial conundrum— how to make forms without suggesting depth. But it had nothing to do with Jewish influences on Newman's thinking. Hess described Newman's OnementI, the first stripe painting, as

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a complex symbol, in the purest sense, of Genesis itself. It is an act of division, a gesture of separation, as God separated light from darkness with a line drawn in the void. The artist, Newman pointed out, must start like God, with chaos, the void.... Newman's first move is an act of division, straight down, creating an image. The image ... reenacts God's primal gesture He [Newman] has taken his image of Genesis, of the creative act, of the artist as God. In normative Judaism, however, Jews do not try to act like God, except in the sense of leading holy lives, nor do they merge with him. There is instead a clear distinction between humans and God. Hess understood this key distinction between Jewish and Christian mysticism when he acknowledged that, in Jewish mysticism, there is no union with God.3 What kind of Jewish artist would violate a basic tenet of Judaism by confusing his own creative powers with those of the deity? A Jew might answer, one possessed by a dybbuk (a demon) or, far more likely, one who read and thought about Jewish writings very selectively. The latter possibility gains credibility if we examine Newman's thinking as it evolved in the years just before he began to make the first stripe paintings in 1948. To see Newman assuming a God-like role in the creation of art, we need go back no further than 1945. By that time, Newman had already begun to speak of himself and of his fellow artists, including Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Rufino Tamayo, as creating a new American religious art, a modern mythology concerned with numinous ideas and feelings The present movement in American art transcends nature. It is concerned with metaphorical implications, with divine mysteries. These new painters have brought the artist back to his original primitive role as the maker of gods.4 This is a very immodest statement, as Newman is asserting that the artist possesses transcendent power. But Newman also implies a distinction between humans and divine beings, between humans and forces or energies in the universe. By early 1947, Newman began to identify the artist with those forces, specifically with a vaguely identified sense of nature. In his review of an exhibition of Theodoros Stamos's paintings, Newman appeared to be drifting toward a secular pantheism. Stamos, according to Newman, "redefines the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural

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phenomenon." Of such communion with nature, "one might say that instead of going to the rock, he comes out of it."5 Here, Newman seems to be saying that the artist is either on equal terms with nature's creative forces or at least an intimate part of them. But by the end of 1947 or the beginning of the next year, Newman began to foreground the artist to the exclusion of all else. Writing about an exhibition of Herbert Ferber's sculpture, Newman said: By insisting on the heroic gesture, and on the gesture only, the artist made the heroic style the property of each one of us, transforming, in the process, this style from an art that is public to one that is personal. For each man is, or should be, his own hero.6 By becoming his own hero, Newman asserted, each man emphasizes his own centrality in the universe and, by implication, his need for self-realization. In this statement, communion with whatever is out there is replaced by a defiant need for self-aggrandizement and self-assertion. The artist now, according to Newman, creates, or recreates, himself. In 1948, Newman's evolving thought achieved its definitive formulation when he wrote "The Sublime Is Now": We are asserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our feelings. The key phrase here—"making cathedrals . . . out of ourselves"—is an extraordinary assertion of self-willed strength that has no precedent in the history of American art. Earlier artists clearly distinguished their creative acts from the divine, their paintings from God's handiwork in nature. Thomas Cole, for example, a deeply religious artist associated with the Hudson River school, wrote, "Art is in fact man's lowly imitation of the creative power of the Almighty."7 Newman's idea of the artist as creator can be positioned with the individualism, self-worship, and self-creation associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Newman had great respect for Emerson, whose home he visited in 1936. He may well have been familiar with Emerson's essay "Cir618

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cíes," which claims, "No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back." Newman may also have known these lines from Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest."8 But the ideas of Emerson and Whitman do not explain why Newman began to make stripe paintings in 1948. I think, rather, that three important books published in 1946 and 1947—Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism, Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, and Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism help us better understand Newman's developing sense of self-exaltation.9 In the aftermath of World War II, conventional morality and public values were being called into question. By the late 19405, Sartre and his philosophy were widely discussed in the periodical literature. As a high school student at the time, I remember clearly the interest that Sartre generated, and I assume that Newman, too, was familiar with Existentialism's exhortations to independent action and personal responsibility, modified by an accountability to society. Quite possibly, Newman was moved by passages such as this: "Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is nothing else than the ensemble of his acts; nothing else than his life."10 It would seem a short step from these words to "making cathedrals ... out of ourselves," but to get from Sartre's secularism to the Jewish elements in Newman's stripe paintings, we must pass through the books of Martin Buber and Gershon Scholem. As with Sartre's book, I cannot confirm that Newman read Buber's account of the early history of the pious and ultrareligious Hasidim, whose mysticism has strong kabbalistic roots, but by recalling the response to Buber by Newman's contemporary and acquaintance, the critic Harold Rosenberg, we might find some explanation for Newman's desire to make cathedrals out of the self. Reviewing Tales of the Hasidim for Commentary, Rosenberg found—quite mistakenly I believe—confirmation for the seeking of self-fulfillment. For Rosenberg, Hasidism turned out to be a quite modern religious movement that "was primarily a training of individuals in the direction of an infinitely extended subtilized discovery and recreation of the self." According to Rosenberg, one of the principal tenets of Hasidism was to claim one's own identity. As an example, he cited a passage from Buber about a certain Rabbi Zusya. When near death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the world to come they will not ask me 'why were you not Moses?' They will ask 'why were you not Zusya?' " For 1990s

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Rosenberg, the "Hasid reached toward his highest possibility ... through the world itself, through his way of appropriating concrete things and relations into his subjective experiences."11 The modern secular reader, following Rosenberg, might imagine that making cathedrals out of the self has roots in Hasidism. But it does not. My own studies indicate that Rosenberg misunderstood the movement and totally misread Buber's account of Hasidism, missing entirely Buber's insistence both on finding personal fulfillment within religious channels and on discovering the right paths to God. In addition, Rosenberg ignored the fulfillment that members of the various Hasidic groups find in community religious worship, their service to God, and, as an ideal, their efforts to be Godlike in their behavior. Self-fulfillment comes through service to God, not to the self. Rosenberg also singled out the one anecdote in Buber's entire book—the deathbed statement by Rabbi Zusya—that, removed from context, lent itself to a secular, existential interpretation. A more typical anecdote from Tales of the Hasidim concerns Rabbi Dov Baer, an early major figure of the movement. Rabbi Dov Baer is reported to have said: I shall teach you the best way to say Torah [the first five books of the Bible]. You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear which hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, you must stop. Rosenberg also gave scant regard to Buber's exhortations in his introduction concerning one's relationship to God, which Buber claimed was above and beyond all individual experience.12 In effect, Rosenberg interpreted Buber's concern for personal fulfillment at the expense of religion. Almost twenty years later, Rosenberg explored the same issues in an article for Commentary entitled "Is There a Jewish Art?" He held that the most serious theme in Jewish life was the problem of identity, but he noted that this problem was as much a modern dilemma as it was a Jewish one. Rosenberg believed that Jewish American artists asserted "their individual relation to art in an independent and personal way." They and other American artists who retained their ethnic identities were creating, Rosenberg proposed, "a genuine American art by creating as individuals." This enterprise amounted to an "aesthetics of self." Rosenberg then came full circle in his argument by saying that this type of independent creativity amounted to "a profound Jewish expression."13 For Rosenberg, the Jew was a modern everyman searching for identity in the modern world, an identity based on the self as the source of its 620

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own creation—through, as Newman would have it, making cathedrals out of the self. As a Jew, Rosenberg undoubtedly had some knowledge of Jewish culture. But in sorting out his identity he recognized himself also as an acculturated, though not fully assimilated, American and as a citizen of the world. To reinvent himself as a citizen of the larger American and world communities, he had to exalt his independent self at the expense of his parochial Jewish cultural and religious identity. Rosenberg and Newman belonged to the generation of my parents, a generation that knew it was Jewish but at the same time wanted, desperately sometimes, to transcend its origins and gain access to those larger communities. I should also add that Buber was immensely popular among Jews of that generation because he wrote within a Jewish milieu but demanded minimal responses and responsibilities from his largely secular Jewish readers. Traditional Jews, on the other hand, do not respond favorably to Buber.14 Just as Rosenberg misread Buber in 1947, Newman misread Scholem the following year. For Newman, the misreading was in assuming a God-like pose of creativity, a pose foreign to normative Judaism. In addition, in his stripe paintings Newman disregarded one of the most important parts of Rabbi Luria's cosmogony—the concept of Tikkun, which completes the process of creation, of Tsimtsum, by restoring the harmony that existed before the creation of the universe. According to Rabbi Luria, in the creation just after the great contraction, some divine sparks were lost. Mankind was responsible for their restitution. That is, every Jew shared responsibility to prepare the way for the final restoration of all the scattered and exiled lights and sparks. The Jew who is in close contact with the divine life through the Torah, the fulfillment of the commandments, and through prayer, has it in his power to accelerate or to hinder this process.... The individual's prayers, as well as those of the community, but particularly the latter, are under certain conditions the vehicle of the soul's mystical ascent to God.15 This responsibility of the Jew was not a part of Newman's vision. Newman, a secular person, happened upon a concept of creation in a book by Gershon Scholem that allowed him to visualize the moment of creation. The artist's connection to Kabbalah was nothing more and nothing less. Newman was consistent in his misreading of Rabbi Isaac Luria. In 1963, while explaining the kind of ritual that might take place in a synagogue he had designed, Newman echoed Rosenberg's misreading of Buber by asserting that 1990s

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personal fulfillment equaled religious exaltation. But Newman's description of the latter bears little resemblance to the true nature of kabbalistic ecstasy: [In the synagogue] each man sits, private and secluded in the dugouts [along the side walls] waiting to be called, not to ascend a stage, but to go up on the mound, where, under the tension of that "Tzim-Tzum" [sic] that created light and the world, he can experience a total sense of his own personality before the Tor ah and His name. This is the existentialist in Newman talking. But then, wanting to connect to that sense of exalted spiritual ascendance one can find in Kabbalah, Newman said: "My purpose is to create a place, not an environment, to deny contemplation of the objects of ritual for the sake of that ultimate courtesy where each person, man or woman, can experience the vision and feel exaltation of 'His trailing robes filling the Temple.' "16 In Judaism, one cannot experience that vision by exalting oneself. Only through God can one begin to approach the fulfillment of the self. Newman's thoughts and ultimate sources here seem to lie not in normative Judaism or even in Buber's religious existentialism but in nineteenth-century Romanticism, in Emerson and Whitman and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, who portray the artist as a God-like creator. In addition to the discussions of Rabbi Luria, Hess found a possible source for Newman's stripe paintings in Scholem's discussion of the hymn "Zoharariel, Adonoi, God of Israel," derived from the Greater Hekaloth (sixth century C.E.), a compilation of texts that includes apocalyptic writings. Hess cites these two lines as the likely genesis of Newman's stripe: With a gleam of His ray he encompasses the sky And his splendor radiates from the heights.17 But the hymn "Zoharariel" describes God on his throne surrounded by attendants, not God in the act of creation. And as all of the hymns in the Greater Hekaloth celebrate God, not man, they are an unlikely source for Newman's stripes. Hess found justification of his claim for Kabbalah as the source of Newman's stripes in another book by Scholem—On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, published in 1965, long after the first stripes were painted in 1948. The passage that Hess found relevant comes from Scholem's discussion of the Book ofYetsirah, or Book of Creation (third through sixth centuries C.E.), concerning Abraham's presumed ability to imitate God's powers to create human 622

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forms. But Scholem's discussion is about the creation of a golem, the humanoid figure made from clay that has a long history in Jewish esoteric literature and folklore.18 The golem, always a flawed creature, can hardly stand as a model for Rabbi Luria's version of the creation of the world and of the Adamic figure. And Newman would hardly have wanted to exert God-like powers to make cathedrals out of the self that would be imperfect. Yet this book by Scholem includes a passage that might help explain Newman's frame of mind in 1948, if not the image of the stripe. Considering medieval interpretations of the legend of the golem, Scholem wrote: The members of the strong esoteric movements that sprang up among Jews in the age of the crusades were eager to perpetuate, if only in rites of initiation which gave the adept a mystical experience of the creative power inherent in pious men, the achievement attributed to Abraham ... and other pious men of old in apocryphal legends.19 I take this passage to mean that in times of stress—and here stress includes the pogroms of the Crusaders—people imagine mythical or mystical powers that can overcome the oppressor. In the late 19405, as Newman began his stripe paintings, Jews throughout the world remained profoundly affected by the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. No Jew could have remained unmoved or neutral to either event. Even today, as Donald Kuspit has suggested, "every Jew has a Holocaust within him; in his innermost heart he has gone up in smoke or been starved to death, after being castrated by society."20 Newman's stripes, then, might be understood as an act of resistance as well as a celebration of renewal and rebirth, an affirmation of life during a time of Jewish trauma and national revival. Nourished by his cultural rather than his religious identification as a Jew, Newman created the stripes as one person's single and solitary gesture, a raw assertion of the self against a society and a god that did not merit his full respect. His desire to make "cathedrals ... out of ourselves" is a reproach as well as a universalizing gesture that reaches beyond his Jewish identity to all humanity. It is an affirmation of individual strength and spirit in a world he wanted metamorphically to recreate.

Notes

Thomas Hess, Bamett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971). See also Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 209; Annette Cox,Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research 1990s

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Press, 1977), p. 69; and Avram Kampf, Jew ish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), p. 197. 2. Gershon G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1946), pp. 263,265; see, generally, pp. 260-76. 3. Hess, pp. 56,71; see pp. 52-61,83. 4. Barnett Newman, "Memorial Letter for Howard Putzel" (1945), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed.John O'Neill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 97-98. 5. Barnett Newman, "Stamos" (1947), in ibid., p. 109. 6. Barnett Newman, "Ferber" (1947), in ibid., p. in. 7. Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now" (1948), in ibid., p. 170; Thomas Cole, "Thoughts and Occurences" (ca. 1842), quoted in Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture in American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 10. 8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" (1841), in Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 412; and Walt Whitman, preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, in Walt Whitman (New York: Library of America, 1982), pp. 24-25. See also Matthew Baigell, "The Emersonian Presence in Abstract Expressionism," Prospects 15 (1990): 91-108; and Baigell, "The Influence of Whitman on Early Twentieth-Century American Painting," Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts, ed. Geoffrey M. Sills and Roberta Tarbell (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 121-41. 9. John Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947); Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidim: The Early Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1947); and Scholem, cited in n. 2. 10. Sartre, pp. 37-38. See also the following articles published in the New York Times Magazine (section 6): John L. Brown, "Chief Prophet of the Existentialists," 2 February 1947, pp. 20-21, 50-52; Simone de Beauvoir, "An Existentialist Looks at Americans," 25 May 1947, pp. 19, 51-53; and Paul F.Jennings, "Thingness of Things," 13 June 1948, pp. 18-19. n. Harold Rosenberg, "Mystics of the World" (1947), reprinted in Rosenberg, Discovering the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 239, 240, quoting Buber, p. 251. 12. Ibid., p. 240, quoting Buber, pp. 107,2,4. 13. Rosenberg, "Is There a Jewish Art?" (1966), reprinted in Rosenberg, Discovering the Present, p. 230. 14. For this reading of Buber, see Gershon G. Scholem, "Martin Buber's Interpretation of Hasidism," in Scholem, The Messianic Idea of Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 240-45. 15. Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 274,276. 16. Barnett Newman, Recent American Synagogue Architecture (1963), in Newman, ed. O'Neill, pp. 181-82. Newman quotes Isaiah 6:1. 17. Hess, p. 52, quoting Scholem, Major Trends, p. 59. 18. Ibid., p. 61, quoting Gershon G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism 624

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(New York: Schocken, 1965), pp. 159-204. See also Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 69,75,99,127,138,145. 19. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, p. 173. 20. Donald Kuspit, "The Abandoned Nude: Natán Nuchi's Paintings," in Kuspit, Matan Nuchi (New York: Klarfield Perry Gallery, 1992), unpaginated.

JOAN M. MARIER

Arcadian Nightmares: The Evolution of David Smith and Dorothy Dehner's Work at Bolton Landing

David Smith and Dorothy Dehner and their years together at Bolton Landing rival the dramatic accounts of many artist-couples, given the volatile temperament of Smith, the physicality of his work, Dehner's determination to survive, and her vital imagery.1 Marriages far less tumultuous have been fodder for books on the Abstract Expressionists. The De Koonings have been discussed in several publications: their drinking habits and romantic liaisons exposed, while no attempt was made to explore the relevance of their personal lives to their artistic achievements.2 In Andrea Gabor's Einstein's Wife, Lee Krasner's physiognomy and Jackson Pollock's alcoholism and psychological problems are discussed with virtually no references to paintings by either artist.3 In this investigation of Dorothy Dehner and David Smith, my purpose is not to document the violence, threats, and reconciliations, but to consider the creative interaction of this couple. The intention is to probe beyond the circumstances of their lives to the impact of each artist's work on that of the other. Attempts must be made to dismantle stereotypes about the interrelationships of artist-couples. Questions of aesthetics, theories that explain concepts of femininity and masculinity, and the social conditions that support or impede creativity must be explored.4 Investigation of works by women married to modernists have contradicted assumptions that "significant others" are typically derivative of their husbands' works, and never achieve a personal aesthetic. The intimacy of a sexual involvement is far more profound than the interaction of friends. Smith's connections with artist-friends such as Robert Moth-

SOURCE: Unpublished lecture, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1995 (revised 2002). Reprinted with the permission of Joan M. Marter. 625

erwell and Kenneth Noland have repeatedly been acknowledged. For example, Smith's friendship with John Graham—who was a neighbor in Bolton Landing during the 19305—has been considered in essays on Smith.5 Kenneth Noland's camaraderie with Smith in the 19505 and 19605 probably resulted in the sculptor's Circle constructions, which parallel Noland's Target series.6 But in previous literature on David Smith, his marriage to Dorothy Dehner has not been examined to determine how that relationship affected his work. What impact did their twenty-three years of shared intimacy have on changes of medium and approach, and the search for a personal style? For Dorothy Dehner, who never ceased making drawings and paintings from her student years in the 19205 until her death in 1994, the shadow of David Smith loomed large. Her sculpture has been compared to Smith's despite their divorce in 1952, three years before she began to make sculpture. While it was not the case during Smith's lifetime, since 1970 critics seldom fail to mention Dehner's marriage to Smith when reviewing her exhibitions.7 Smith's divorce from his second wife in 1961 and his death in 1965 meant that Dehner became directly connected with his personal and artistic legacy.8 Can women artists measure up to the genius of their celebrated husbands? The answer is frequently no, but then many male artists among the Abstract Expressionists do not parallel the achievements of a few stellar individuals. Somehow the "second string" status of white males in the artworld varsity has not been held against them. But certain critics express outrage that a woman consort to a renowned male artist was anything more than a disciple. And the idea that the wife may have had something important to contribute to her husband's creative achievements causes hostile reactions.9 Unlike the "action widows," as B. H. Friedman has characterized Lee Krasner after Pollock's death, and others married to Abstract Expressionists,10 Dehner survived Smith's death by almost thirty years, but was never the official widow. Having been divorced from Smith after twenty-five years of marriage, she was superceded by a second [estranged] wife, who became the mother of Smith's daughters. These young girls, Rebecca and Candida Smith, who were ten and eleven at the time of their father's death in 1965, became the sole heirs to the Smith estate.11 Any career assistance Dehner could have received from her ambitious ex-husband, Smith offered only in the decade following her departure from Bolton Landing. At this time David Smith was establishing himself as a renowned artist of his generation, and his help was limited to mentioning Dehner to critics or giving her advice about dealers. Marian Willard showed the work of Dehner and Smith separately during the 626

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1950s. But Dorothy Dehner, unlike Lee Krasner, never experienced the career advantages (or disadvantages) of being the heir to Smith's substantial body of work—the sculpture, drawings, and paintings which remained after his death. Significantly, despite the presence of a second wife, and their shortlived cohabitation (Smith and Jean Freas spent less than five years together), Dehner remained "Dave's wife" to the Cedar Bar crowd. Her artistic identity was constructed by colleagues as well as critics and dealers to include David Smith on a permanent basis. Contributing to the misunderstanding, admittedly, was Dehner herself, who was eagerly interviewed by art historians, writers, and curators seeking information on David Smith. With her sharp mind, and impressive recall, she interlaced facts with interpretations of David Smith, serving inevitably as the main repository of Smith's creative legacy, without the financial security resulting from stewardship of the objects themselves. As the author of an article on David Smith's Medals for Dishonor12 as well as texts on John Graham and Jan Matulka,13 Dehner was consulted for virtually every book on Smith, beginning in the 19705 with those of Rosalind Krauss and Garnett McCoy, and continuing with monographs by Stanley Marcus and Karen Wilkin in the following decade.14 Yet David Smith's artistic identity and reputation have never been bound to her or to any other of his relationships. Although the importance of John Graham to his early years and an association with Clement Greenberg are always mentioned, these friendships are not seen to detract from Smith's creative genius. Most monographs on David Smith parallel those for other male artists by presenting the myth of a solitary struggle for self-expression; and the complexity of partnership with another artist has not been an issue. Typical stereotypes have been constructed for this artist-couple, and they focus on the alliance of two very different individuals. David Smith, an aggressive, even violent man born in Decatur, Indiana in 1906, who spent his teenage years in Paulding, Ohio, and Dorothy Dehner, the far more sophisticated young woman who studied art, dance, and drama. Smith had limited opportunities to see works of art in his youth. Art instruction during his adolescence came via a correspondence course in drawing from the Cleveland Art School. He spent two semesters at Ohio University in Athens, and a summer working at the Studebaker factory in South Bend before entering Notre Dame University. There he remained only a few weeks before leaving for Washington, D. C. and New York. Smith was a deeply troubled man subject to fits of jealousy, who eventually sublimated his anger by making direct metal 1990s

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constructions. He created sculptures in a studio Dehner dubbed "The Iron Woman," denoting a place where Smith could beat metal rather than his partner. Dehner was born in 1901 in Cleveland, where her father was a pharmacist. Her youth was spent in Cincinnati and her teenage years in Pasadena, California. Dehner was raised by an affluent family, given art and ballet lessons from an early age, taken to museums, and sent to Europe in the 19205. While David Smith was exploding dynamite to impress teenage girls, Dehner was studying drawing and painting, performing at the Pasadena Playhouse, and in off-Broadway productions in New York. Their life can be viewed as the joining of a cultivated, talented, and attractive young woman with a blustery young artist doggedly ambitious, arrogant, and often crude. Smith's childhood and adolescent memories focused on the place of twentieth century technology in his life, in particular, railroads and automobiles. In retrospect, his summerjob at a Studebaker factory in 1925 was most important to him. Contrary to his later invented persona as a blue-collar worker, and a heavy drinker in a workshift, after dropping out of Notre Dame, Smith returned to the Studebaker Company, not to the assembly line, but to the finance department. He was transferred to a bank in Washington and took poetry courses at The George Washington University before moving to New York in 1926, where he met Dorothy Dehner. She encouraged him to take art classes at the Art Students League, where she was enrolled. Dehner had intended to study sculpture at the League, but after seeing instructor William Zorach's sculpture, she decided to study drawing and painting. Smith initially took night classes at the League while working during the day at the Industrial Acceptance Corporation on West 57th Street. Dehner must have seemed the perfect partner for Smith; she was four years older, attractive, with a family income at her disposal.15 Dehner had decided to become an artist after some disappointing experiences as an actress. She already had been to Paris, and was familiar with the most avant-garde art, music, and literature. Smith was enchanted by this young woman whom he married in December of 1927. Their drawings of similar subjects at the League indicate shared directions. Even more important than their classes together with Jan Matulka and Kimon Nicolaides was the influence of Dehner herself. Her intelligence and creativity supported Smith's own prodigious energies as a painter. Her unorthodox, intellectual background and leftist politics provided the intellectual stimulation that his own background had failed to offer. Smith's immediate assimilation of modernism can be attributed to Dehner 628

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and certain associates at the League. From the beginning of their relationship, Dehner encouraged Smith's artistic productivity. Through the sale of family bonds, she arranged two trips for Smith and herself: one to the Virgin Islands in 1931 for ten months, and in 1935 another ten months in Europe and Russia. Smith, of course, resigned from his part time jobs during these sojourns abroad. By the 19305 the Smiths were part of a coterie of artists in New York, which included Adolph Gottlieb, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Willem De Kooning. The male artists formed a shortlived group in 1935 which included Smith, John Graham, de Kooning, Gorky and Edgar Levy, and these men proclaimed their intention to exhibit together at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dehner was not invited to join in this ambitious goal. However, earlier in his private life with Dehner, Smith had begun to find a new direction for his art in his experimentation with constructions. When the couple journeyed to the Virgin Islands in 1931, they both made paintings of still life subjects. Dehner worked on gessoed crates, introducing textural effects by adding sand to the pigments in the manner of Jan Matulka. Their paintings were accomplished abstractions, still indebted to synthetic cubism, but with organic forms predominating—particularly shells and marine life. The lumps of coral David Smith brought back to New York resulted in his first sculpture. He did not adopt welding with the oxyacetylene torch, a factory process, until 1933, when he began an association with the Terminal Iron Works in Brooklyn. Throughout the early 19305, Smith and Dehner were living in Brooklyn Heights. When Smith began welding initially in their apartment, Dehner had to stand by with a watering can to douse the sparks from the equipment. During the Depression, Dehner and Smith divided their time between apartments in Brooklyn Heights and the Fox Farm, which they purchased in Bolton Landing, New York in 1929. By 1940 they had moved to Bolton Landing permanently. Their property near Lake George was 86 acres, including a farmhouse dating to 1820 and a barn. The house was drafty with neither electricity nor running water. A well outside the house would run dry in the summer. Nevertheless, the couple lived in this old farmhouse until 1949, when their new house was constructed adjacent to it. Regarding the purchase of the Bolton Landing farm for $3,000.00, Dehner never acknowledged that it was she who wrote the check for the initial deposit, probably from the sale of family property. The mortgage, dated April i, 1930 lists only Dorothy Dehner Smith as the principal.16 She was never forth1990s

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coming with a full accounting of their financial situation, including the regular income from Dehner family investments that gave both artists some financial security. Smith's freedom to remain in Bolton Landing after 1940 was facilitated by the steady support of Dehner's income. For example, Smith turned down a teaching position offered by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Chicago in 1944, and also refused many invitations to lecture in other parts of the country.17 Although Dehner's art has been acknowledged only in recent years, the full range of Smith's achievement has been explored for several decades. A complex artist emerges—an artist with a lifelong interest in polychromy. Smith said that he "belonged with painters" and it is therefore as an artist of the Abstract Expressionist generation that he is considered.18 Karen Wilkin has stated: "Smith's insistence that he 'belonged with painters' may be open to interpretation, but what is unequivocal is that he was a painter before he was a sculptor."19 Noting that some of the most successful modern sculpture was made by painters, he attempted to fuse the two—teaching himself sculpture and working on polychrome examples. Smith refused to be bound to traditional categories of painting and sculpture, and often fused pictorial elements with sculptural techniques. Dehner was his collaborator in the exploration of experimental methods, beginning with her paintings on gessoed crates, to her monoprints and pressed-paper reliefs. Wilkin observed about Smith: "Fundamental aspects of his life as an artist are full of contradictions. He is generally thought to have been exclusively a sculptor in steel . . . yet he saw himself as an artist who could do anything, as someone who transformed whatever he turned his hand to by the force of his individuality. He was always ready to explore new media, new approaches, and new techniques."20 Dehner and Smith both drew and painted throughout the 19305 and 19405, and therefore the competitiveness was always present—even though, as noted, Dehner did not begin to make sculpture until after their divorce. David Smith's paintings and drawings show a change from a cubist-constructivist interest to abstract expressionist gesturalism, and the themes of his early sculpture are related to painters and other sculptors associated with Abstract Expressionism, including Jackson Pollock and Ibram Lassaw. Smith's close association with painters in the 19305 can be acknowledged, and for both Dehner and Smith these interactions were essential. When Smith turned to making sculpture— as one of the first Americans to use the oxyacetylene torch—he found Picasso, Gonzalez and Gargallo as influential precedents.

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The major portion of Dehner and Smith's creative activity took place during the 19405 in Bolton Landing, an isolated site in the Adirondack Mountains. During the decade spent together and in subsequent years apart, they both developed themes, explored abstract imagery, and used improvisational methods that can be identified with Abstract Expressionism. These interests include Smith's use of prehistoric imagery and atavistic references. Smith found himself not only using Dehner as a model (the traditional role of an artist's wife), but urging her to come to his studio, where she was asked for advice about his sculpture. She suggested where certain elements should be added, provided visual judgements, and eventually titled the works. Using her literary background, knowledge of mythology and other active intellectual interests, she provided titles for virtually all of Smith's sculpture during their years together.21 The extent of Smith's competitiveness with Dehner and his need to control her artistic production during the Bolton Landing years must be considered, but first the politically charged, war-related themes found in the works of both Dehner and Smith are important to discuss to establish the ferocity of their political activism. Both artists were active in leftist politics of the 19303. A trip to Greece in 1935, where they met emigres from Nazi Germany who had been forced into exile after release from concentration camps, introduced them to Hitler's suppression of political dissidents. Because of their friendship with expatriate John Graham (born Ivan Dabrowsky), and their growing curiosity about socialism, Dehner and Smith visited the Soviet Union in 1936. After returning to New York, David Smith became active with the American Artists Congress, the Artists Union, and the United American Artists-CIO. In 1937 Smith began work on his Medals for Dishonor. In a letter to William Blake, who was to write the introduction to an exhibition catalogue for these medals, Smith described them as "a series of bronze medallions depicting the horrors of war, its causes, those who inspire it and lead it, its resulting destruction."22 Marian Willard, Smith's dealer, wrote to him in June 1941, "Seven of your medals were on display at an anti-war show which the Congress of American Artists gave at the Hotel Commodore."23 After Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war by the United States, Smith found more difficulties in showing his medals. In other correspondence to curators and critics, Smith always emphasized that their conception was anti-fascist and pro-democratic. In actuality, from his choice of steel and his disdain for elitist artforms to

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his political views, Smith was anti-authority and anti-establishment. In his Medals for Dishonor he attacked not only the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, but also American clergy, the New Deal, and the rich. Dehner, who shared his political views, acknowledged their interest in the Communist Party and sympathy for its goals during the 1930s.24 Drawings and sculpture produced by both Dehner and Smith during that volatile period suggest an anti-imperialist, decidedly leftist position. Dehner came from a politically liberal family; her mother was an active suffragist, and her father had socialist sympathies. In the 19303 both artists attended May Day celebrations in Union Square, and Dehner recalled on a number of occasions not only their involvement with the Communist Party, but also the experience of being questioned about communists among their artists friends. Dehner and Smith shared private symbols, including the use of a prehistoric creature, a photo of which they had purchased at the American Museum of Natural History. In her ink drawings Country Living, Bird of Peace and Threnody for the Royal House, both of 1946, Dehner, like Smith, used the image of a prehistoric hesperonis regalis, presenting it as a predatory bird flying over a war-torn landscape or, in Threnody, a medieval castle. The image of this prehistoric reptile appears in the work of both artists. In Dehner's ink drawings the soft contours of the Adirondack Mountains become ominous, jagged peaks, with the spectral bird hovering above. Smith constructed large-scale renditions in welded metals of this airborne predator: Jurassic Bird, 1945, and Royal Bird, 1948. David Smith's other war-related scenes include the Spectre of War, 1944, and War Landscape, 1947. Images of women violated by phallic-cannons, or lying prostrate on the ground while threatened by menacing soldiers, can be found repeatedly in Smith's drawings and prints of the early 19405. Smith was an inveterate photographer of his own work, but he made other camera studies, including details of the body of his wife. Dehner recalled that when Smith was working on the Medals for Dishonor and other war-related sketches of the early 19405, he asked her to pose naked atop a large pillar that was turned on its side.25 The pillar used for sketching Dehner was changed into a cannon in several of sculptures. When Smith's war themes are compared with similar depictions of victims of war created by Dehner herself—haunting images of women with emaciated bodies, crying out in pain—it seems clear that Dehner's presentation of the horrors of war is joined with a personal narrative of psychic turmoil. The "Arcadian Nightmares" of my title can be found most explicitly in her "Dam632

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nation Séries" of the mid-i94os. Among the most provocative drawings of Dehner's career, this series consists of skillfully-rendered pen and ink studies of nude figures, accompanied by vultures, bats, and other animals. One example, "Suite Moderne," 1947-48, includes ghoulish figures dancing gigues, fandangos, and gavottes, all of which become "dances of death." Such images, although they relate to postwar tensions, may have more to do with her state of mind in these final years of her marriage to David Smith. Smith is known to have been a violent man.26 He was obsessed with guns, mortars, cannons, and other weapons, and he exploded dynamite charges as a teenager. Later he owned a cannon, and carried guns which he sometimes fired in anger. Dehner recalled several incidents including one from his early twenties—when he emptied a gun into the floor of a bank. Later he fired a gun repeatedly into the back of a vehicle outside a Bolton Landing bar. When Dehner and Smith traveled abroad in 1935, he forced her to tape a Browning pistol under her brassiere so they could pass through customs with a weapon.27 In addition to gun imagery, other images of violence towards women appear in Smith's art. These not only relate to war, but express an ambivalence about the opposite sex. Smith, a known womanizer, could also be unnecessarily volatile in his relationship with Dehner.28 His images of Dehner range from graceful dancer to controlled victim. Self-sufficiency was the order of the day for both artists in the early 19405. During the war years, Smith worked in the design department of the American Locomotive Company in Schenectady, New York. When he was finally called up for military service, he was judged unfit to serve.29 Until 1945, drawings were more frequent than sculpture due to the scarcity of materials and the distraction of his alternative war service. Home of the Welder, 1945, and other sculptures produced in 1945 and '46 herald his new-found freedom from the necessity of locomotive work, as well as the completion of his new studio, dubbed Terminal Iron Works. This was a prolific period, when his art was rife with allusions and variety. In works such as Reliquary House and Pillar of Sunday, both of 1945, Smith made this complex imagery, rich with private metaphors, to deal with personal torments. Messages were hidden, but often his drawings are a clue to his state of mind. Art historical quotations range from Egyptian funerary maquettes and canopic jars, to Pieter Bruegel's Sloth and other Northern Renaissance sources, to Picasso's The Dream and Lie of Franco. Several shared themes can be found in the work of both artists in these years, specifically in their joint exploration of nature and the figure to create 1990s

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organic abstractions in sculpted and painted form. Beginning with their Virgin Island landscapes, and continuing through Smith's polychrome constructions of the 19305 and landscape themes in three dimensions of the 19405, Smith and Dehner explored organic forms such as shells and marine life. Both had been students of Jan Matulka, who was inspired by Cubism, and encouraged the use of disparate materials and varied textural effects. Dehner and Smith introduced collage elements and mixed sand with their pigments to create a rich and varied surface. Smith incorporated not only pieces of coral, but also bits of wood, wire and small stones in his small constructions. Dehner recalled her earliest abstractions in the "Virgin Island Series" as filled with biomorphs and marine creatures. Smith's expansive landscape-sculp tures of the forties were decidedly innovative in their presentation of abstract imagery in three dimensions. Of Smith's growing involvement with abstract imagery in his sculpture, Dehner judged that abstraction was a vehicle he adopted for self-expression. From his Interior., 1937, with figurative and abstract elements combined, to the more famous Home of the Welder, 1945, Smith explored private symbolism and a full range of emotions. By the late 19405, Smith had invented a new vocabulary of structure and form in part derived from the nature of the medium, rather than directly from natural forms. Wilkin notes: "Dehner subscribed to the idea that abstraction appealed to Smith as a disguise, a subtle way of making use of his strongest feelings without revealing himself completely—an idea borne out by recurring images of masked figures in Smith's early work."30 After leaving Smith for five months in 1945 because of a violent incident, Dehner stayed in New York City, where she returned to making abstract compositions in two dimensions. These drawings were inspired by the art of Paul Klee, Mark Rothko, and William Baziotes. In addition, Dehner acquired a copy of Ernst Haeckel's 1904 Kunstformen der Natur?1 and she began to introduce diatoms [unicellular organisms] into her abstractions on paper. Using improvisational methods, and engaging in a "wet on wet" approach, she combined "gestural" passages with areas of tightly interlaced structures delineated in pen and ink. Dehner exhibited her work only a few times in the 19405. In 1944, for example, Smith wrote to her while she was in California, "I'm glad you are getting reception with your work. It adds zest to working doesn't it."32 She was in a number of group exhibitions in these years, and in 1949 the Audubon Artists awarded her a first prize for drawing. By the late forties, Dehner was determined to devote more of her efforts to her artistic career. She gained confidence in a new direction for her art, and created many 634

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successful abstractions in gouache and ink. Unlike the surrealists, Dehner, who adopted biomorphic imagery, did not emphasize its disquieting aspects; rather, she celebrated the animate energy of unicellular life forms. The art department at Skidmore College organized a solo exhibition of her drawings and paintings in 1948, and David Smith wrote the following introduction for the exhibition catalogue: When I first met Dorothy Dehner she had been a successful dancer, she had been to Europe and studied art for a year, and though younger, she was the most sophisticated student I had met at the Art Students League where we both were studying. Throughout our rough times and the good times, she has painted seriously, and has been my most encouraging critic. I have always intended that her career be as important as mine, whether it was in our student days when I drove a taxi or when we lived in St. Thomas, Brooklyn, Athens or Bolton Landing. In her work there are qualities of the dance, delicacies, refinements, and harmonies which I greatly admire because they are so far from my own world. Certainly her paintings show the distinction of her personality and direction.33 This statement represents a generous moment on Smith's part, for when Dehner finally began to show her work more regularly in New York City, their relationship fell apart. On one occasion Smith threatened to tear up all of her drawings when she was transporting them to New York for consideration in the Whitney Annual Exhibition.34 Both Dehner and Smith experimented with wax as a method of threedimensional construction in the 19405. But Dehner worked in secret, destroying her attempts to make sculpture before Smith could see them because she was worried about his reaction. Yet her desire to make sculpture—dormant since her disappointment with the sculpture instructors at the Art Students League more than a decade earlier—became a burning necessity by the final years of the decade. Making sculpture became an obsession—as indicated by the dialogue that ensued when Smith admired one of her drawings. In 1949, Dehner produced Star Gage, a watercolor of vividly-hued washes punctuated by dots of bright yellow and streaking diagonals. Jagged lines in the composition evoke the constellations of the evening sky. Dehner recalled that Smith came into her studio, spoke favorably of the drawing, and said that he would like to make a sculpture related to it. When Dehner proposed a collaboration, Smith declared himself "too jealous" for that.35 Three months later, Smith made a painted steel sculpture also entitled Star Cage that was undoubtedly 1990s

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indebted to Dehner's drawing. Although Smith never acknowledged the connection, clearly the illusion of interpenetrating planes was transformed into linear elements of steel punctuated by small rectangles. Nineteen-fifty was a crucial year for the personal and artistic lives of Dehner and Smith. They had already moved into their newly-constructed house in Bolton Landing with many conveniences, such as hot and cold running water. In 1950 Smith was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the first time, and it was renewed the following year, giving him a measure of financial freedom. His works were beginning to sell. During his previous years with Marian Willard Gallery, there had been few sales. He was 44 years old and no longer so reliant on Dehner's money. And he was having an affair with Jean Freas, a student at Sarah Lawrence College, where Smith began teaching in 1948. By November of 1950 Dehner left Bolton Landing after a violent outburst which left her with several broken ribs. Two years later Dehner and Smith were divorced. It is not easy to understand why Dorothy Dehner remained with David Smith for 23 years; reading her letters provides some insight. In an unpublished note of 1947 Dehner wrote: David ... today is your birthday—happy birthday David—creator—genius is the vulgar word—I watch you make and I watch you do—and I am filled with wonder ... and pride—it is rare to watch that quality—so few have it—and I am privileged. Thank you David. With the creation of your work comes life to the world.36 When Dorothy Dehner left their home due to a violent episode (though there had been previous incidents) Smith realized that her departure was a permanent one. Within months he wrote sadly to Dehner: Dear Dorothy, So many times I feel so sorry for the hurts I've been guilty of in your life. I truly hope you have happiness and tranquility in your new way. Just keep painting, you've found your stride.37 In May of 1952, Smith wrote to Dehner: "I saw your show Tuesday when I was down [to New York City] for the one day.... It was very fine. I'm sure you will get very good reviews and I hope sales too 1 hope your breaks are better than mine."38 In April 1953, Smith married Jean Freas. The following year Rebecca was born, and fifteen months later a second daughter, Candida. The time spent to636

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gether with his young wife was not to be much longer; Smith and Freas were not divorced officially until 1961, but there was a permanent separation from 1958, when Freas returned to Washington, B.C. The two daughters remained with their mother, although they did visit their father in Bolton Landing. What was the effect of Dehner and Smith's separation on their work? For Smith, the 19508 was a time of great productivity; this might additionally be attributed to the stimulation of a romance with a woman more than twentythree years his junior, the birth of two daughters, as well as his growing financial success. The work become large, less deliberate and less cumbersome, more abstract and bold. Smith's abstract constructions of the 19505 began to feature "found objects." His "line drawings in space" replace the heavyhanded symbolism of 19405 pieces with more attention to geometric forms. Breaking from the planarity of earlier constructions, he produced threedimensional totems that result from the incorporation of machine parts and address the methods and materials of their creation. Smith's concerns with the spatial environment expand beyond those of the late 19405. Like such Abstract Expressionists painters as Willem de Kooning, he removed the focal areas from the center of the composition, and transferred biomorphic elements out to the periphery. Open frameworks were fully explored. In addition, the welding of steel satisfied a psychological need for Smith, responding to the work ethic of his Midwestern family, and also affirming masculine associations by identifying with industrial workers, and seeking their acceptance. It might be necessary to challenge such traditional notions of masculinity in dealing with Smith, who sought in fact to "masquerade" as a blue-collar worker who made art. Smith's sculptures soon came to occupy the viewer's space rather than being isolated on a pedestal, thereby asserting their psychological separation— or otherness. By the mid 19505, however, Smith's vision began to involve proliferation of his work. He started to install his sculptures on bases of cast stone, welding them to their bases, and distributing them throughout the rolling hills surrounding his home. On a practical level, these installations can be seen as a necessity because of lack of storage space. But the dispersal all over his property recognized a need to compensate for his loneliness. On a 1958 visit by Dehner to Bolton Landing, after his breakup with Jean Freas, Smith referred to these sculptures in the fields as "girls" who would never run away.39 Titles suggest that among the sculptures of the last decade of his life many should be viewed as female. For example, Smith produced a totemic work he called The Iron Woman, 1954-58, referencing the name given decades earlier 1990s

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by Dehner to his studio at Bolton Landing. In 1957, Smith also created a totemic figure in silver he called Lonesome Man. This was constructed the same year as a major retrospective of his work at The Museum of Modern Art, when he should have been satisfied with the attention he was receiving. By the time of his death in 1965, sculpture covered the Adirondack foothills surrounding his house and studio in Bolton Landing. In the final decade of his life, Smith achieved the recognition he had sought throughout his artistic career.40 His personal life was still troubled, however, and it was in these late years that Smith turned to Dehner again as a friend. He saw her solo exhibitions, and encouraged art critics to see her work.41 She visited him at Bolton Landing and they corresponded, primarily concerning their art, but Smith commented on the loneliness he felt in these final years. Smith wrote to Dehner on April 24,1961, "I'm working tonight because I'm lonely and art is my only friend."42 Dehner wrote back six days later: "Hope the mood of lonliness [sic] has passed. I am lonesome too ... in the middle of 10,000,000 people."43 Dorothy Dehner in the early 19505 realized that her departure from Bolton Landing would be a permanent change. She also knew that she would finally be able to pursue her art with freedom from the taunts of Smith.44 In 1952, she had her first solo exhibition in New York, and began to study engraving at Atelier 17. Dehner never completed any sculptures until after her divorce from Smith, but by the mid 19505 she began to create small sculptures in wax, adopting Smith's "drawing in space" approach. In 1955 Dehner started working at the Sculpture Center, and had a few pieces cast in bronze. Dehner remarried in 1955, and in her second husband, Ferdinand Mann, she found a partner supportive of her creative identity. Sculpture dominated Dehner's interest after 1955, complemented by drawings and prints. Reviews of her first New York exhibitions were very positive. In 1959, for example, James Mellow wrote: "Cast by the lost-wax process, these sculptures in bronze have a sturdy visual elegance."45 Although they were not together, Dehner's works from the late 19505 and 19605 still share Smith's interest in totemic forms. Landscape and still life subjects are also present (as they were for Smith) but Dehner's approach and imagery take more personal directions. In particular, the surface of the bronze became all important. At times Dehner even incised hidden messages into her sculpture, and worked the surface both before and after the casting. By the late 19503, her work had increased in scale, and her personal imagery, with mythological and organic references, was developing. In

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contrast to Smith, Dehner never welded steel. Few women of her generation worked in direct metal, and Dehner preferred to work in wax as a preliminary to bronze casting.46 In practical terms this method limited the potential scale of her sculptures. Only when she engaged a fabricator in the mid 19805 did Dehner's scale increase dramatically, and welded steel and eventually aluminum sculptures were constructed. Even from the first, Dehner's works had a monumental aspect. What parallels can be found with David Smith, and what do they reveal about artistcouple relationships in general and theirs in particular? The monumentality of Smith's sculpture is at times an illusion. Photographs of Smith's work made by the artist himself were often take from below eye level to give them a powerful and heroic quality, exaggerating their flatness and their industrial antecedents. In actuality his works are seldom larger than human size and often, like Abstract Expressionist paintings, record the hand of the artist, suggesting an intimacy that has rich associations with his life. Formal concerns, some of them arising out of his working methods, are combined with intensity, sensuality, and a search for the metaphorical image of the self. As Smith himself said, "The work is a statement of identity."47 Although initially working smaller in scale, Dehner also demonstrated how the appearance of monumentality can combine with intimacy and spatial complexity. After a decade her work approached human proportions, and her later heroic sculptures in fabricated steel stood up to twenty feet high. Like Smith's her sculptures balance formal issues with self-referential, personal, and metaphorical imagery. The serenity and inner harmony that came to Dehner's life and art are amply reflected in her achievements of the 19605 and 19705, particularly in her productivity and ambitious exhibition history. Dehner's sculptures shared with those of Smith an interest in contour rather than mass. She assembled her works of disparate parts, and approached the use of wax as a constructivist using planar elements. Bronze casting provided a certain elegance and refinement to her work. Beginning with her use of sand in her compositions of the 19305, textural effects were explored by the artist in order to bring attention to the surfaces of her works. In the 19605, she braised and drew on wax slabs, introducing other textures by adding small pieces of metal. To create a lively visual effect, she used faceted elements forming planes that shimmer when reflecting light. Dehner's abstract sculptures represent a personal iconography that recurs over the decades. Imagery of circles, moons, ellipses, wedges, and arcs abounds.

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Like other artists of the New York School, Dehner made sculpture that acknowledges that abstract symbols could communicate content that is private, but holding universal implications. In 1965, a major retrospective of Dehner's art was held at the Jewish Museum in New York City. The coherence of her artistic achievements was a tribute to her progress in a medium48 she had only seriously explored for a decade, and outside the direct influence of David Smith. Dehner now had mastered the technical skills of creating sculpture, and had begun to make larger pieces of singular presence and power. The scale of her works increased as well as its monumentality. She evoked architectural forms, and some of the totems became human-scale. David Smith visited the exhibition and wrote proudly to Dehner: Dear Dorothy, Thanks for the catalog. I had gone to St. Thomas for 9 days, returned on a Sunday night, went to Museum saw your show on Monday. It was great—you had so many pieces ... you have sure been working hard and prodigiously.49 Certainly Smith's comment, "I have always intended that her career be as important as mine" (quoted previously) is affirmed by his messages to critics regarding Dehner's work, and his correspondence with her offering advice and encouraging comments. For example, after her departure from Bolton Landing, Smith wrote to Dehner in 1951: "Don't worry Dorothy—you can get another show if this falls thru."50 In April of 1965—weeks before his death in a truck accident—Smith wrote to Dehner about her intention to find a new dealer: "Don't leave [Willard] until you locate better—Don't announce anything in advance My own feeling about your work is to hold to the importances— don't elaborate—don't art it up—don't put things in to design it ... such things detract from the raw essence of content."51 In 1944, Smith had written to Dehner, "I owe my direction to you." The twenty-three years Dehner and Smith spent together were mutually productive and critical. For Smith his marriage to Dehner coincided with the formative period and maturation of his sculpture, and his development of a personal style, which would later be fully shaped by his years in the Adirondack Mountains. Landscapes and figures were his constant themes, and Dehner was his companion in this search for significant form. For Dehner there was much to learn: Smith encouraged taking risks; he stimulated their discussion about new directions for abstract sculpture and painting. Both emerged from their years together as mature artists. But Dehner had not realized the sculp640

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tur al implications of her previous explorations with abstraction. After she left Smith, and grew in confidence, her sculpture surpassed the human scale favored by Smith during the 1950s, taking on the heroic proportions found in the work of younger artists of the 19703 and 19805. With the intention of dismantling stereotypes about artist-couples, this study has demonstrated how a woman artist who was often viewed as a follower of a creative genius was actually a full-fledged collaborator. There is no question that David Smith's relationship with Dorothy Dehner was equally significant for his art as vice-versa. Their life together is specifically reflected in their shared imagery and the direction taken in their drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Artistic issues of gender and identity were deeply intertwined in their marriage of more than two decades.

Notes

1. I wish to thank the late Dorothy Dehner for many interviews dating from 1978 to 1993 that form the basis of this essay. Special thanks to the staff of the Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Research Council of Rutgers University. A grant from the Getty Research Institute enabled me to use Special Collections and library resources, for which I am grateful. 2. See, for example, Lee Hall, Elaine and Bill, Portrait of a Marriage: The Lives of Willem and Elaine de Kooning (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). 3. Andrea Gabor, Einstein's Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995), 35~99- The exception is Ellen Landau, who wrote numerous essays on the art of Pollock and Krasner, including one in which she explores Krasner's collages made from fragments of Pollock's discarded works. See Ellen G. Landau, "Channeling Desire: Lee Krasner's Collage of the Early 19505," Woman's Art Journal 18 (Fall 1997Winter 1998): 27-30; Ellen G. Landau and Sandor Kuthy, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock: Kunstlerpaare, Kunstlerfreunde, dialogues, d'artistes, resonances (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1988). See also: Ellen G. Landau, "Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner: The Erotics of Influence," in Pollock's America (Geneva: Skira, 2002), 173-188. 4. For other artist-couples discussed in this context see Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle De Courtivron, eds., Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993). 5. For example, Dehner herself wrote: "About 1931 John Graham and his wife Elinor, both artists, bought a farm a few miles from ours, and we saw them constantly in summer and developed a close relationship. Graham had a profound influence on our thinking about art, and David had credited him often for the importance of that friendship." Dehner's statement in David Smith ofBolton Landing: Sculpture and Drawings (Glens Falls, New York: The Hyde Collection, July i1990s

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September 30,1973), n.p. Also see Garnett McCoy, éd., David Smith (New York: Praeger, 1973), 19-20. 6. E. A. Carmean states: "The literature on these three Circles makes continued reference to their relationship to the target paintings of Kenneth Noland who was a close friend of Smith's." See E. A. Carmean, David Smith (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982), 133-137. 7. John Yau, for example, in reviewing Dehner's exhibition at A. M. Sachs Gallery noted: "During their marriage Dehner continued to paint but only occasionally exhibited in group shows. One can sense even from these bare facts how dominant a force Smith must have been in Dehner's life. Fortunately the story does not end here. For the last three decades Dehner has been making sculpture. And while connections between Dehner's sculpture and Smith's can be made in terms of their frontality and figurative allusions, the comparison tends to diminish her own considerable accomplishments." John Yau, "Dorothy Dehner at A. M. Sachs," Art in America 69 (April 1981): 145-146. 8. Grace Glueck wrote in 1970: "A shift to pure abstraction, now, in the work of Dorothy Dehner (first wife of the late sculptor David Smith). In her spare, yet spirited cast bronzes at the Willard Gallery, she continues her explorations of abstracted landscape themes and totemic upright forms.... So 'shaped' and decisive and eminently collectible is the work of Miss Dehner (who's had at least forty one-man [sic] shows, including a ten-year retrospective at the Jewish Museum in 1965)." Grace Glueck, "Collectible versus Conceptual: New York Gallery Notes," Art in America 58 (May 1970): 32. This review is the first I have located that mentions the connection of Dehner to David Smith. At the time of her 1965 retrospective at the Jewish Museum no reviews mentioned Dehner's marriage to Smith. 9. For a discussion of the critical reactions to women artists among the Abstract Expressionists see, for example, Joan Marter, "Identity Crisis: Abstract Expressionism and Woman Artists of the 19508," in Women and Abstract Expressionism (Baruch College, City University of New York, 1997), 3-8. 10. В. Н. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 24511. Three trustees were arranged to manage the estate until Candida and Rebecca were 25. Clement Greenberg, Robert Motherwell, and the attorney Ira Lowe were selected by Smith. 12. Dorothy Dehner, "Medals for Dishonor: The Fifteen Medallions of David Smith," ArtJournal 37 (Winter 1977-78): 144-150. 13. John P. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971) (Introduction by Dorothy Dehner, first published as "John Graham: A Memoir,"Leonardo 2 [1969], 287-293). Dorothy Dehner, "Memories of Jan Matulka," in Patterson Sims, Merry A. Foresta et ú.^Jan Matulka (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), 77-80. 14. See Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Ironworks: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971); Garnett McCoy, éd., David Smith (New York: Praeger, 1973); Karen Wilkin, David Smith: The Formative Years (Edmonton, Alberta: 642

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Edmonton Art Gallery, 1981); Stanley Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Karen Wilkin, David Smith (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984). 15. In an interview Dehner spoke of the $2,000 a year income she had from her family. In the early years of her marriage to Smith she also earned money by making small illustrations for the New Yorker magazine, interview with Dehner, January 7,1992. 16. See David Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Roll NDi, frames 9,14-16. 17. In a letter to Moholy-Nagy dated c. April i, 1944, Smith wrote, "Dear Moholy, I want to thank you for your interest, but I have decided that from now on I will do only my own work; at least as long as I am financially able." See Garnett McCoy, éd., David Smith (New York: Praeger, 1973), 195. 18. Smith said in an interview, "I talked with painters and I belong with painters, in a sense, and all my early friends were painters because we all studied together." McCoy, David Smith, 174. 19. Karen Wilkin, David Smith: Two into Three Dimensions (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 2000), 13. 20. Ibid., 10-11. 21. David Smith wrote to Jean Paul Slusser of the University of Michigan Museum of Art: "I have been thinking about Tahstvaat.... Actually the name was given to it by my wife, who paints under the name of Dorothy Dehner." David Smith to Slusser, April 1950 from the David Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, quoted in McCoy, David Smith, 204. 22. David Smith to William Blake, c. 1940, David Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, NDi, frame 212. For additional discussion of these medals see: Jeremy Lewison, David Smith: Medals for Dishonor 1937-1940 (Leeds City Art Galleries, 1991); and Dore Ashton and Michael Brenson, David Smith Medals for Dishonor (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1996). 23. Marian Willard to David Smith, June 12,1941, David Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Roll NDi, frame 240. 24. In various interviews with the author and others, Dehner spoke of the couple's involvement with the Communist Party in the USA during the late 19305. For example, Paula Wisotzki writes of David Smith: "Ample evidence exists to confirm the influence of communist thought on his life and art. Smith's letters and notebook entries from 1935 to 1946 indicate that he regularly sought out the writings of communists and fellow travelers.... At issue, however, is not only the depth, but also the longevity of Smith's allegiance to the Communist Party." Paula Wisotzki, "Strategic Shifts: David Smith's China Medal Commission," The Oxford Art Journal 17 (1994): 63. 25. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, October 5,1983. 26. "Smith's violent temperament grew over the years, and Dorothy became unable to cope with it." Marcus, David Smith, 81. 27. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York, December 13,1981. 1990s

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28. In interviews with Dehner she spoke of incidents where David Smith severely criticized her work, and later would seek forgiveness declaring her the "best woman artist" around. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York City, June 13, 198529. Contrary to the reasons given in the David Smith literature, Dehner later acknowledged that military physicians questioned Smith about his violent tendencies, and ultimately declared him unfit to serve. Interview with Dehner, October 5,198330. Wilkin,27. 31. Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen de Natur (Leipzig and Wien: Verlag des Bibliographischen, 1904). 32. Letter from David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, June 19, 1944. Archives of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. 33. Statement by David Smith in Dorothy Dehner: Drawings and Paintings, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, December 6-14,1948, n. p. 34. Interview with Dehner, December 9,1979. Dehner repeated this story in many subsequent interviews. 35. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York, October 5,1983. 36. Unpublished note of 1947, Dorothy Dehner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Roll N0298, frame 882. 37. Quoted from David Smith letter to Dehner, c. 1951 in Dorothy Dehner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Roll N0298, frame 1709. 38. Letter from David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, May 7, 1952, Archives of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. 39. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York City, December 6,1979. 40. David Smith had regular solo exhibitions, he represented the United States at the Sâo Paulo Biennial, and twice at the Venice Bienniale. Smith was chosen for the second Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany and in 1957 MOMA organized a 25-year retrospective of his work. By 1958 he had begun to make sculptures in stainless steel and the Cubi joined with the Zig series and the Voltri's to acclaim. 41. In a letter to Irving Sandier dated January 26,1959, Smith wrote: "Also enclosed 2+ announcements of Dorothy Dehner—See her show at Willard, may have better photos and you might like her work. Her work quite small. And she has her own nature, regards, David D." Irving Sandier Papers, Special Collections, The Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43, box 30/20. 42. David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, April 24,1961. Archives of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. 43. Letter from Dorothy Dehner to David Smith, April 30, 1961. Archives of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. 44. In 1950 Dehner enrolled at Skidmore College, and quickly obtained a degree; then came to New York City where she taught art at various private schools. 45. James R. Mellow, "New York Exhibitions: Dorothy Dehner," Arts Magazine 33 (February 1959): 57. 644

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46. Claire Falkenstein may be something of an exception to this—and apparently Gertrude Greene experimented with welding in the 19305. 47. Wükin, David Smith, 9. 48. David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, April 9,1965 in archives of Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. 49. David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, 1951. Archives of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. 50. Letter from David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, April 13, 1965, archives of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts. 51. Smith wrote: "Dottie, your letter of last Saturday night about how I had made you a better person was very touching. You've made me too—I owe my direction to you." Letter to Dorothy Dehner, June 11, 1944 in Dorothy Dehner Papers, Archives of American Art, Roll N0298, frame 1638.

ROSALIND E KRAUSS

The Crisis of the Easel Picture

I remember the expression on Lee Krasner's face that afternoon in her apartment. It was late spring of 1982. We were meeting over our shared consternation at E. A. Carmean's efforts to link Jackson Pollock's black paintings not just circumstantially but thematically—liturgically—to an abortive church project by Tony Smith. Carmean's essay, published in French in the catalogue of the big Pollock exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, was now to appear in Art in America, and the magazine's editor, Betsy Baker, aware of Lee's as well as my own vigorous objections, had asked me to write an accompanying reply.1 As we settled into our chairs Lee exploded. "First it was Carl Jung and now, and now," she said, "it's Jesus!" The opening syllable of that name was given as a protracted moan; but the second snapped the word shut: Je-e-e-zus. It was not Jewish rage that sounded behind her pronunciation—although there was some of that—but high modernist exasperation. As with so many other artists and intellectuals who had developed in the 19305, modernism was for her a creed, a belief, a deepest form of commitment. It was both a politics and a religion; and Lee, in the closeness of her relationship with Clement Greenberg from those days, would have agreed with the kind of thing he was

SOURCE: Pepe Karmel, éd., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (Museum of Modern Art, 999X 155~79- Reprinted with the permission of Rosalind E. Krauss.

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expressing when he wrote, "The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch," with the result that "today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture"—by which he meant avant-garde culture —"we have right now."2 That scene returns to me as I puzzle over The Museum of Modern Art's Pollock exhibition, in all its gorgeousness, its generosity, and its perversity. I imagine Lee's response: "First it was Jung, then it was Jesus, but now it's ..." who shall we say? Leonardo? Michelangelo? Raphael? The climax of Pepe Karmel's essay in the catalogue makes the connection, and the claim, in its barest form. Having tracked Pollock's working process by means of digitized composites built up out of Hans Namuth's complete inventory of still and cinematic photography, and having shown the occurrence of vertical, figurelike constellations at various levels of the work (both at the beginning, where Pollock is marking bare canvas, and at intermediary stages, where they are superimposed over the developing web), Karmel freely identifies these vertical bundles as a form of human figuration and characterizes the line with which Pollock executed them as "a controlled and deliberate" mode of drawing. And from this presentation of Pollock as a draftsman, with the necessary control and deliberation that drawing's access to the representation of the figure requires, Karmel slips over into the domain of the Renaissance. Quoting William Rubin's remark that "Pollock's drawing derives from a tradition in which space is not thought of as an autonomous void but in reciprocity with solids," and further that Pollock's lines still carry "the connotations of dissolved sculptural conceptions," Karmel asks triumphantly, "Need it be said that the kind of space that exists 'in reciprocity with solids' is precisely the illusionistic space of Renaissance art?"3 Karmel does not of course just leave this characterization—in all its counterintuitive strangeness—at that. The notion that Pollock's space is nothing but another version of Renaissance illusionism would certainly play havoc with the idea of his work as revolutionary, or as having broken through to some new level of cultural experience. So the last three paragraphs of Karmel's essay hedge this a bit, reshaping this space according to something akin to late Monet or early Cubism. "Up close," he says, "each line reasserts itself as a potential contour, or a sculptural shape in its own right," yet as our eyes move over the surface, "new contours emerge as old ones merge back into the web."4 Now, although Greenberg also sometimes used Analytic Cubism as a metaphor for what was happening in Pollock's work, from 1947 on he consistently saw Pollock's importance as pointing "a way beyond the easel, beyond the 646

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mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps."5 This idea of escaping the tradition of the easel painting not only became Greenberg's central critical model for explaining Pollock's radicality in the years between 1947 and 1950, but would be the support for everything he saw as valuable in painting after Pollock. In 1948 he linked the attack on the framed, illusionistic picture to a kind of "allover, polyphonic" address which, in its "hallucinated uniformity," went even beyond Arnold Schoenberg's notion of compositional equivalence.6 This is to say, he focused his critique on what he saw as the conventions arising from the scale of the easel picture, its portability seeming to call for a choreography between centers of interest inside the field and the frame that bound or enclosed it. The allover picture dispersed those centers, just as it suggested the dissolution of the specific medium of easel painting into a larger category that would include architectural friezes and oriental scrolls or carpets.7 It was not just the shared flatness of these objects that he found satisfying but the openness of their surfaces to inspection—what he called their "positivity."8 By 1955, however, Greenberg had refined this idea of the repetitiveness or polyphony of the allover picture to what he had begun to see as the deep source of its transgressiveness, which was the elimination of value contrast: the abrogation of that linear armature of dark against light that had formed the structure of easel painting from the Renaissance onward. Saying that Cubism's parody of shading had nonetheless sustained the importance of light and shadow, Greenberg saw in the total suppression of value contrast "a new kind of flatness, one that breathes and pulsates," one in which lines might divide "but do not enclose or bound," and, further, one that creates "an environment" more than a picture. Pollock's great works of 1950, he said, had participated in just this radical condition. Looking back to 1955, Greenberg wrote, "In One and Lavender Mist Jackson Pollock had pulverized value contrasts in a vaporous dust of interfused lights and darks in which every suggestion of a sculptural effect was obliterated."9 If I am going over this all-too-familiar ground, it is to underscore the stakes involved in promoting the idea of Pollock as a draftsman, of deciding to read his line as contour rather than its dissolution, of tying Pollock back into traditional practice through any one of the number of strategies that one finds in the context of this exhibition. One of these strategies occurred in the placement of the three drawing cabinets within the exhibition, the middle one grouping work from a threeyear period, from 1944 to 1946, and presenting it as though it were a sketchlike prelude to the onset of the classic drip pictures of 1947. Indeed this fore1990s

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grounding of the sketch—with all its connotations of the possibility of exploration and variation, as an idea is moved through the successive phases of its development—is central to the picture of the traditional artist's deliberation and control, which is to say the picture of the artist as an intentional being. That Pollock would have produced variations on essentially the same sketchlike armature—with changes rung on what is limited to its stylistic decor, now more of André Masson, now of Wols—implies just such a picture. It is only when we ask what it means that this same armature recurs periodically over three or more years, rather than in a single run of work, that it begins to feel more like a rote formula to which he had recourse, even unconscious recourse; like the repeated looping constellations that had, by 1943, become so automatic a formal pattern for him that he could paint the twenty-foot-long Peggy Guggenheim mural during a furious one-night stand of work.10 The emphasis on drawing not as this kind of device but as a form of controlled variation, as the very vehicle of intentionality, is carried in the exhibition to the curious display of a group of conservators' failed attempts to imitate Pollock's line. In the catalogue it is to be found in the repeated illustration of sumptuous life-sized details of the drip pictures, as though in the very gamut that the building up of the web can run, we will encounter—now displaced to the technique of depositing the paint itself—the controlled variability that drawing brings to a given conception. Thus through the twelve details of the drip pictures (there are only two for work after 1950 and only four for what precedes 1947), we are invited to explore at leisure the brushed scumbles of wet-into-wet, the high-sitting ropes of tube-squeezed paint, the scabbing and lifting of pockets of coagulation, the pulled surface of aluminum deposit, the tarry pocketing within the matte graphics of pigment seeping into its ground, the rivulets and spatters, the blurring, the marbleizing, the staining, the running, the bleeding. It would be churlish not to be grateful for details such as these; but it would be naïve not to understand their gravitational pull. For the way they work, along with the arguments in the catalogue texts and everything else to which I've alluded, is to present Pollock as a draftsman, beginning—as one could claim is true for the whole tradition of Western art—with line as the foundation of expression and representation, indeed, of art's very claim to seriousness. But Greenberg had lodged Pollock's claim to seriousness in negating this tradition, or rather in transcending the oppositions on which it was founded. If he spoke of Pollock's line as malerische—invoking Heinrich Wolfflin's word,

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which went beyond the "painterly" to encompass the idea of "color"11—it was because he saw this line not just paradoxically turning against itself but dialectically sublating itself, becoming one with its opposite in a way that moved both line and color beyond the physicality of their material substance and into that particular phenomenological condition—or mode of address— he would call first "hallucinated ," then "optical."12 Two other major lines of attack on the idea of Pollock as a draftsman followed Greenberg's. One was produced by the action painting model, which continued into the choreographic or "Happenings" idea of Pollock's legacy promoted by Allan Kaprow, among others.13 Since in this model the work is acting between art and life, it relegates line to nothing but the residue of an activity of marking real space, rendering the whole question of drawing simply irrelevant. The other line of attack was the "anti-form" or informe interpretation first laid out by Robert Morris in the ig6os14 and further theorized by myself and Yve-Alain Bois in the iggos.15 Since this position has been reductively and misleadingly presented in the Pollock catalogue—as in the critical literature generated by the exhibition—and since it will form the basis of what I have to say here, it is (alas) necessary to summarize it. Briefly, it is the idea that Pollock's line, in undoing the traditional job of drawing (which is to create contour and bound form, thereby allowing for the distinction between figure and ground), struck not only against drawing's object—which is form—but against form's matrix, which is verticality. Pollock's line produced the unheardof condition of burrowing itself into the domain of the horizontal. That the import of the work should be this newly vectored horizontal dimension was testified to by what we could call a series of strong misreadings that developed in the ten years following Pollock's death. The "strong misreading"—the concept of the critic Harold Bloom—is not a misunderstanding on the part of a younger artist in his or her relation to powerful older one, but rather something more like a perverse, but very canny, deep understanding, which liberates from within the target work a potential (often anarchic or transgressive) that had been hidden or obscured by the official, even self-professed, idea of the older artist's meaning.16 In accordance with this, one could notice that artists as seemingly different as Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Morris were drawing the same interpretive conclusion, based on the singularity of Pollock's stroke and the way this stroke testifies to its own conditions of production: that Pollock's importance was lodged in an axial rotation of painting out of

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the vertical domain of the visual field and onto the horizontal vector of what I began to call (with one eye riveted on the stunning analyses of Georges Bataille) formlessness. Thus, though the particularities of the interpretive connection to Pollock might differ—Twombly reading the aggressiveness of Pollock's stroke as graffiti; Warhol recoding its liquidity as peeing; Morris understanding its performative implications as unmaking or cutting—and though the mediums used to instantiate these readings might range from painting to sculpture, all three comprehend the horizontal itself as the condition of defeating form. As Twombly develops the graffiti mark—from a mid-1950s expression of it as violence done to the creamy body of the pictorial surface by scoring and lacerating this physical ground, to a late-19505 implication of it as a scatter of genital organs, to the early-igoos production of it as the scatological result of the corps morcelé—the attack that graffiti consistently performs is on the bodily gestalt: its visuality, its verticality, and its Prágnanz (or hanging-together ness).17 It is the failure of this unity that allows for the axis of instinctual behavior—a horizontal axis—to preside over the body, now reconsidered as the domain of the part object. For Warhol, on the other hand, the testimony of the liquid puddles and stains on Pollock's canvases (combined of course with the commentary of Hans Namuth's photographs) renders these surfaces horizontal from the very beginning, redoubling the implications of Pollock's process as choreographic (as it is so often described in the critical literature). Further, his assumption that the horizontal simply is the scatological (an assumption expressed in the 1961 "piss painting" and the later Oxidation series, 1977-78) liberates a different form of violence from within this vector. Freud, in "Civilization and Its Discontents," describes this kind of violence as homoerotic rivalry enacted by peeing on the fire, in an unfettered instinctual drive that will subsequently be sublimated into the cultural obligation to protect the fire—the verticality of its flames now mirroring the erect posture of the civilized being.18 In Morris's case the nature of Pollock's stroke connected the "phenomenology of [its] making" to the pull of gravity, a force that produced the condition of the horizontal simultaneously with the scatter of formlessness. Morris himself baptized this mode "anti-form." His own way of miming its operations was to follow the steps of Pollock's process by laying great rolls of felt on the floor of his studio and veining their surfaces with an organized pattern of cuts. Greenberg had explained that the brilliance of Pollock's line was its avoidance of the hard edges that cut into space, thereby separating figure from 650

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ground. Morris, by taking the idea of line-as-cutting right to the limit, pushed it past the possibility of figuration, since as he lifted the felt from the floor, gravity wrenched apart the very continuum of the vertical field within which the gestalt could cohere, thereby cutting into the fabric of form. The characterizations that have greeted this discussion have been, as I said, reductive and caricatural, isolating the Warhol example as a way of inoculating the entire analysis against its possible aesthetic relevance. Recoded as an interpretation literalized around "abjection," "bodily excretion," and "defilement," the complex structural issues of horizontality and the formless have been read out simply as an argument for "anti-art."19 Rather than complaining, however, what I propose to do here is to make theoretical use of this reductiveness by tying it to another, parallel reflex that has played an extremely important—and, I might say, increasingly destructiverole in the development of the art of the last thirty years. This was the decision to produce the most hypostatized possible reading of the outcome of what Greenberg called the "crisis of the easel picture" by understanding the modernist idea of medium specificity as the radical contraction of specificity itself into a physical characteristic (flatness) that would coincide with a material object: the painting, which could now be seen as equivalent either to a sculpture —Donald Judd's term was "specific object"—or to a readymade (Joseph Kosuth's reading of the monochrome).20 This literalized understanding emptied out the idea of an aesthetic medium by simply making that medium synonymous with its material support. The outcome of this understanding has been double. Either the very idea of the medium is cashiered, since, contracted to the condition of a real object in real space, the objectified work becomes the locus for operations on that space in the mixture of mediums that defines the nature of the real world itself—Judd's specific object now turned into the international practice of installation art. Or—in another way of declaring our current inhabitation of what I would call a postmedium condition—the exploded concept of the medium is simply folded into the fact of media, which is to say the complex vehicles of broadcast, communications, and information technology.21 The result of this semantic slippage between medium and media is that the loss of specificity is presented as a natural outcome (after all the media, in the sense of "communications media," are already "mixed," the inevitable combination of word and image); which means that the slide from the physical resistance of the aesthetic medium to the virtuality of the image world of media somehow goes without saying.22 1990s

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That this reductive reading of the idea of a medium—of painting's specificity as a medium—was done in Greenberg's name is particularly ironic. Because at the very moment when he was seeing that the modernist logic had led to the point where "the observance of merely the two [constitutive conventions or norms of painting—flatness and the delimitation of flatness] is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture,"23 he had dissolved that object in the fluid of what he was sometimes calling "openness," at others "opticality," and ultimately, though perhaps least satisfactorily, "color field." Which is to say that no sooner had Greenberg seemed to isolate the essence of painting in flatness than he swung the axis of the field 90 degrees to the actual picture surface to place all the import of painting on the vector that connects viewer and object. In this he seemed to shift from the first norm (flatness) to the second (the delimitation of flatness), and to give this latter a reading which was not that of the bounding edge of the physical object but rather the projective resonance of the optical field itself—what in "Modernist Painting" he had called the "optical third dimension" created by "the very first mark on a canvas [which] destroys its literal and utter flatness."24 This was the resonance he imputed to the effulgence of pure color, which he spoke of not only as disembodied and therefore purely optical, but also "as a thing that opens and expands the picture plane."25 Four things are to be observed in this axial rotation organized under the rubric of "opticality." The first is that there is a shift from the object to the subject, as the emphasis is displaced from a material surface to a mode of address, namely viewing. The second is that the phenomenology of this mode of address becomes the matrix out of which might be generated a new set of conventions or norms, based not on the properties of the object but on the categories of the subject—such as Michael Fried's notion of a "primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld."26 The third is that insofar as opticality is a visual vector, it is always subtended by a sense of verticality; that is, the transcendental object it intends is something like the condition of possibility of form, or of the gestalt, and thus a kind of abstract matrix that is always organized as "fronto-parallel" to its viewer, the verticality of the field that receives the gaze mirroring the posture of the upright subject.27 The fourth and last feature of this rotation is that, historically, it was meant to sustain a continuation of painting not only beyond the crisis of the easel picture but beyond the grip of the specific object. It was meant to allow something "powerful enough"—as Fried once put it—"to generate new conventions, a new art."28 And this would mean that opticality was not simply afea652

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ture of art, but had become a medium of art. It was, one could say, a supportive matrix, the internal logic of which could be seen to generate its own expressive possibilities or conventions. That neither Greenberg nor Fried explored the optical as a new medium, but instead concentrated on color field painting as something like a new possibility for abstraction, meant that a variety of these expressive conditions were never theorized.29 The seriality uniformly resorted to by the color field painters is a case in point. Another is the sense of the oblique generated by fields that seemed always to be rotating away from the plane of the wall and into depth, such that a perspectival rush in their surfaces caused critics like Leo Steinberg to speak of their sense of speed: what he called the visual efficiency of the man in a hurry.30 I will return to these issues later on. At this point, however, I want to look at Pollock's own reaction to the crisis of the easel picture, something that is possible to gauge from the two different statements to which he was the signatory in the fall of 1947. Although both of these located his work in relation to such a "crisis," they imagined this situation in diametrically opposite terms. This opposition underscores the difficulty of seeing one person as the author of both declarations, and leads to the locution about Pollock's merely being their "signatory." But then, at the various junctures where he made any pronouncement about his work—including these two—Pollock functioned as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy for the opinions of others. In the two cases—Pollock's application for a Guggenheim grant in 1947 and his statement for the magazine Possibilities in 1947-48—the ventriloquists in question were Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The former is clearly responsible for Pollock's announcement to the Guggenheim Foundation that he intended "to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel and mural," as well as for his stated belief that "the easel picture [is] a dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural."31 The latter, Rosenberg, acted as the goad to a quite different description of what a rejection of easel painting might entail; for in Possibilities, Pollock's declaration is stripped of the earlier statement's sense of art-historical imperative and located more in the domain of process. In separating his work from the easel, Pollock speaks of tacking his unstretched lengths of canvas on the floor, where he can work on them from all sides. Concluding that "this is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West," he strikes out into an entirely different—what shall we call it?—dimension? modality? vector? from Greenberg's verticalized notion of the wall picture.32 Instead he declares 1990s

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a connection to the horizontal, which Rosenberg would famously go on five years later to elaborate as the arena of "action painting" but which the critic was already groping his way toward in the late 19405 in relation to Existentialism's analysis of acts themselves. So the difference between the two statements could just be chalked up to the effect of Greenberg and Rosenberg arguing with one another over the back, or out of the mouth, of Jackson Pollock, were it not for two additional things. First there is the echo in the Possibilities statement—where Pollock announces his distance from "the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes," stating instead his preference for "sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added"—of quite a different attack on the status of easel painting, this one aligning the easel picture with class interests and locating alternatives to it in relation to labor practice. The source for this vein of analysis is David Siqueiros, with his famous slogans "Death to easel painting" and "Out with the stick with the hairs on its end." It was Siqueiros, that is, who first made the connection in Pollock's mind between easel painting as an elitist medium and the floor as the locus of a practice that would defeat that medium.33 The second is that the example of Indian sand painting names as a medium something as distinct from the easel picture as one can imagine producing at that moment; and that this new medium, to which Pollock fully oriented himself beginning in January of 1947, is horizontal. Nothing about what Pollock went on to do in his four-year-long campaign of working on the floor, pushing to engage with ever larger formats that would strain all customary forms of address to something like an easel picture both during the time of the works' making and, by extension, over the course of their viewing, has much to do—needless to say—with the precision and figurative character of Indian sand painting. It is only the phenomenology of the axis of address that links the one practice with the other. In fact Pollock would code horizontally into his surfaces as the sand painters would never do. In constituting this code, the puddling and scabbing that both result from and register the fact that the canvases were prone on the floor announce their difference from the celebrated liquid runoffs that marked the other Abstract Expressionists' surfaces with an index of their pictures' assumption of verticality, in process as well as in viewing. Pollock's decision to throw trash onto the surfaces of some of the works, most famously Full Fathom Five (1947), is another declaration of horizontality, as are the palm prints of Number iAy 1948. Ironically these palm prints have encouraged many recent Pollock scholars to reinstate his work's relation 654

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to the figurative (itself always conducted within the vertical field of the visual and of the gestalt), some projecting standing figures underneath the picture's web, the palm prints the visible evidence of their need to escape.34 But the strong misreading here was undoubtedly Jasper Johns's, as he expresses the body registered in Number lA, 1948 via the response he himself makes in the drawing Diver (1963), insisting thus on the falling body, the body submerging itself within a medium that is horizontal.35 But can the horizontal itself be a medium, or are there insuperable difficulties in referring to the horizontal axis in these terms? To speak of the horizontality of Diver's medium is, of course, to enter the domain of metaphor and to re-create the material surface over which Johns's hands passed as a horizontal plane that is obdurately figurative in nature, transmuting the ashen velvet of its charcoal into the transparency and flow of water. Does this mean that to admit this is to find ourselves in the position where either the horizontal is simply a metaphor (which is to say just another form of figuration) nestled within the vertical axis of another medium, such as painting (which would be the position T. J. Clark takes in the discussion following his original presentation of "Pollock's Abstraction"),36 or— as a function of Bataille's formless or Morris's anti-form—the horizontal is so dedicated to the annihilation of all categories and all structures that it cannot be linked to the redemptive aspirations of a medium? Further, does a medium not have to have a technical, material support, such as canvas in the case of painting? The point of thinking about two of the interpretive models of Pollock's art in tandem—that of color field or opticality and that of formlessness or the horizontal—becomes clear in relation to these questions. Just as opticality dislodges the idea of the medium from a set of physical conditions and relocates it within a phenomenological mode of address that can itself function as the support for the medium, horizontality becomes such a phenomenological vector once it articulates itself as a condition of the gravitational field, which is to say, once its address can be felt to engage a distinct dimension of bodily experience and thus a specific form of intentionality. It is only from within this dimension that the horizontal, as a medium, can be disengaged from other horizontalized practices (like the flatbed picture plane, or the written field of inscription) that nonetheless continue to base themselves within the figurative. Similarly, only from within the phenomenological assumption that bodily vectors are horizons of meaning will the horizontal-as-medium differentiate itself from practices that assume the horizontal as real space, and thus as the field within which to declare the suspension of the medium altogether— 1990s

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practices such as installation art, but not, as we will see in relation to the early work of Richard Serra (below), earth or process art. When I thought about horizontality as a medium in writing about Pollock in the context of The Optical Unconscious, I saw it as something like a newly isolated phenomenological vector that supported or enabled practice—not only the practice of those 19605 artists who rang extraordinary changes on the idea of horizontality by their own creative "misreadings" of Pollock's art, but (moving into the tricky business of trying to determine Pollock's elusive intentions) of Pollock as well. This, alas, was more of a negative demonstration than in the cases of Twombly, Warhol, or Morris, since it turned on showing that when Pollock lost touch with the import of the medium that had sustained him for three and a half years, he utterly lost contact with his own ambitions as an artist, entering a state of near paralysis. My argument was that a horizontality that managed to escape the field not only of the figurative but of the cultural—a horizontality that was in this sense below culture—came to be associated for Pollock with the unconscious. If Pollock saw himself over the course of the drip period working this field as no one else could do, not even Picasso; if its elaboration meant that the figurative could surge up within the oceanic pull of the skein only to be obliterated by the powerful undertow of the formlessness that would wash over it in successive waves; if it meant that in the end, attacking Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950, Pollock had no recourse to lifting the work up during its execution—no need for the famous "get acquainted" periods in which the painting would be viewed vertically, hanging on the studio wall (since on this occasion he was content to leave the work attached to the heavy roll of canvas from which its length had been unfurled)—all of this was because horizontality had become the medium through which he could experience the unconscious as an attack on form. After whatever happened to Pollock on November 28,1950 (the day he finished making his second film with Namuth, and suddenly started to drink again), he not only lost touch with his medium but explicitly declared that the medium he had now entered, or to which he had returned, was drawing. Writing to Alfonso Ossorio in January of 1951, he characterized his work on the Japanese paper Tony Smith had given him as "drawings," and again in June he spoke of his black paintings as "drawing on canvas." That such drawing now promoted his "early images coming thru" meant that he now understood his field as vertical.37 The result of this was that when he tried to return to the import of the drip technique his access was resolutely blocked. The verticality within which he now thought and worked is attested to both by the runoff that 656

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appears everywhere in Blue Poles: Number 11, ig$2 and by the figurative insistence of the poles themselves, or again by the figurative nature of the web that overlays the black and white ground of Convergence: Number 10,1952, a frieze of rudimentary stick figures that Matthew Rohn's gestaltist analysis of Pollock had pounced on some years ago, intuiting—without the need of a computer— the pictogrammatic sign for the human figure that Karmel is now asking us to see as the import of the drip paintings themselves from the classic period of 1947-50-38 Insofar as horizontality enabled Pollock, sustaining and compelling his greatest work, it functioned—I am arguing—as a medium. And "medium" is meant here not in some kind of reductive sense in which medium and physical support are collapsed into one another such that the medium of painting is read baldly as flatness, or horizontality-as-a-medium is understood simply as the real space of the floor. Rather, if a medium is taken as meaning a support for practice, then it is a sustaining matrix generative of a set of conventions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly "specific" to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity. It was Richard Serra, in the midst of his own creative misreading of Pollock and his own exploration of horizontality, who first and most directly stated those conventions. They are given in the list he drew up in 1967-68 in which he understood the new medium in which he found himself working to be articulated in the form of predicates rather than substantives—which is to say of verb forms rather than objects or their attributes. Further, his list attaches those predicates (or predicate events) to the idea of series, not only through repetition—underscored by the recurrence of the grammatical prefix "to" ("to roll, to crease, to fold," etc.)—but through an assembly of references to conditions of perpetual modulation or periodic flux, as when he writes, "of waves, of tides, of electromagnetic, of ionization," and so forth. Thus as Serra extends Pollock's gesture of throwing paint onto floor-borne canvas into one of throwing molten lead against the crease between floor and wall (in Casting, 1969), he repeats the material conditions of the medium: the horizontality of the field, with its gravitational pull; the literal fact that matter will settle onto that field as the residue of an event; the residue itself taking the form of an index or trace, the physical clue to its having happened. These material conditions, however, are not in themselves enough to make something into a medium or expressive form. The tire tracks a car leaves on a snowy road are certainly an index of its passage, but they are not thereby organized into a work of art. 1990s

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The conceptual artist would say that to so organize them it is enough merely to frame them in any one of the number of ways that have become fully available within the course of modernist practice. They could be photographed, for example, or stanchioned off in some way that would fold them into one of art's institutional spaces. Whatever one did would be tantamount to supplying them with the enunciative label: "This is a work of art." And this strategy of the ready-made would be enough to inaugurate the one convention that turns anything whatever into an object of another order of experience. The option of the frame, however, is not the one Serra is taking, since that would be to defeat the pull of gravity and to reorganize the index as an image, the picture or metaphor of an event rather than its resistant, literal occurrence, a picture that, needless to say, would align itself with the vertical field of the gestalt. Rather, for the horizontal conditions to stay in place, for gravity to maintain its hold on the index such that it continues to operate as the mark of an event rather than its picture, the work must find the syntax internal to the event itself, and this is the syntax that it will then formalize. Such is the syntax registered both in Serra's verb list and in a piece such as Casting, where it is to be located not only in the transformation of the object produced by the gesture into a form of serialization but in the understanding of series itself as wavelike or periodic. The event, of which the cast is the index, Serra seems to be saying, belongs to the logic of the series, which is not that of stamping out identical objects, as in industrial production. Rather it is the series (or series of series) in which the lead is heated to its molten state, in which the propulsion of the sling around the body of the standing artist assumes an elliptical orbit, in which falling metal is shaped by the barrier of wall and floor as it cools, and, most important, in which all of these different series are seen as converging toward the specific point of the event. Thus it is in repetition itself that the event's internal frame is discovered, and the index that marks that event is exfoliated as series. In a piece like Casting, I am claiming, Serra is reading the horizontalized field of Pollock's work as a network of traces, each the index of an event, the internal logic of which is serial or repetitive: wave after wave of looping falls of paint. Further, he is expressing that logic as gerundive, or wholly unfolding in the present tense, a quality captured by his own title, Casting, but echoed as well in the lexicon consistently applied by critics to Pollock's line—as in Greenberg's "whipping," "trickling," "dribbling," "blotching," and "staining," or Rubin's "pouring," "spattering," "criss-crossing," and "puddling." That the gerund form is not just a present tense but a present progressive, one 658

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that actively connects past to present and opens present to future, once again displays the resistance of this form to enclosure, to the completion of a frame. The index framed is the index as the picture of an event, which is distanced from itself by having entered the condition of representation. It is only unframed that its openness to the variation of the series continues to be in play. The gerund thus expresses a perspective on the series from the moment of the present, since the series, parabolic in nature, is part of a continuing flux.39 If seriality and repetition are the syntax with which to formalize the event within the field of the object, the gerund's perspectival nature, its character as an axis or point of view onto the series, becomes the formal expression of the subject's relation to variation. Theorizing the concept of the event, Gilles Deleuze points to the fact that "a needed relation exists between variation and point of view," which means that there is "not only variety in points of view but every point of view is a point of view on variation." Arguing that "this is not relativism as a variation of truth according to the subject," Deleuze says, "rather it is the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to be the subject."40 This, then, is the importance of the shift that occurs generally in the aftermath of the "crisis of the easel picture" as, whether in the practice of color field painting or in that of process, the medium within which artists understand themselves to be working becomes a phenomenological dimension, an axis onto a field, rather than the physical limits of the field itself. In opticality, that dimension involves the upright body, yet it also unleashes a relationship between perceiver and canvas which seems to call for the illusion that the pictorial field is turning, receding, speeding away, is in a relation to its viewer that reinforces the perspectivalism of the viewer's relation to it. In process art, such as Serra's or Carl Andre's or much of Eva Hesse's, the dimension is the horizontal, which these artists continue to reinforce and work as a medium, even when, as in Serra's prop pieces, they activate gravity in relation to standing elements. But more than anything else Serra's cutting pieces demonstrate that the new medium he was inhabiting must also be recognized as one of an utterly reorganized sense of drawing, drawing not as the boundary of a form but as the expression of an event, a predicate, a serial variation. So the issue of drawing is indeed at stake in our present understanding of Jackson Pollock, just as it was at stake, I am arguing, in his own felt relationship to his work. To recode the import of Pollock's drawing as having been oriented all along to some notion of the figure, and to disqualify other characterizations of it as merely "abject" or "anti-art," is not only to lose touch with 1990s

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the inner logic of Pollock's medium, as it first sustained and then withdrew from him, but is seriously to denigrate the work of all those whose achievement it was to engage with Pollock's greatness in the dimension within which they experienced its impact for art.

Notes

1. E. A. Carmean, Jr., "The Church Project: Pollock's Passion Themes," Art in America 70 no. 6 (Summer 1982): no-22; Rosalind Krauss, "Contra Carmean: The Abstract Pollock," in ibid., pp. 123-31. 2. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," 1939, reprinted in Perceptions and Judgmentsy 1939-1944, vol. 1 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 14,22. 3. Pepe Karmel, "Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth," in Kirk Varnedoe with Karmel, Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 31. 4. Ibid. 5. Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock," February 1947, reprinted in Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, vol. 2 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, p. 125. 6. Greenberg, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," April 1948, reprinted in ibid., p. 224. 7. See, for example, Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting," 1955, reprinted in Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, vol. 3 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, p. 235. 8. Greenberg, "The Role of Nature in Modern Painting," 1949, reprinted in Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, PP- 273-74. 9. Greenberg, " American-Type' Painting," 1955, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 221,226,228. In the version of the essay edited for Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956 Greenberg excised these sentences. 10. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro (in Karmel, Jackson Pollock, p. 118) demonstrates the impossibility of Pollock's having painted the Guggenheim mural with the desperate speed claimed by the artist and reported by his friends. But Pollock's own sense of semiautomatism as he drove himself to make this very large work is registered in that claim, no matter how mythically and at variance from actual fact. 11. In his review of Pollock in 1949, Greenberg characterizes No. 1 (1948) (now usually called Number lA, 1948} as "baroque" (Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, p. 285). This idea of the baroque is something Greenberg associates with the notion of painterliness, or malterische (as used by Heinrich Wolfflin), in "After AbstractExpressionism," 1962, reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, vol. 4 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays, p. 123. 12. In "Contribution to a Symposium," 1953 (reprinted in Affirmations and Re660

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fusais, 1950-1956, p. 156), Greenberg links the new openness of color in some Abstract Expressionist painting to "optical illusions difficult to specify"; in "Sculpture in Our Time," 1958 (reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance, 19571969, p. 60), opticality is given its earliest full-blown theorization; in "Louis and Noland," 1960 (reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969., p. 90), the idea of opticality is fully in place. 13. Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," Art News 57 no. 6 (October i958):24-25,55-57. 14. Robert Morris, "Anti-Form," 1968, and "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making," 1970, both reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, and New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993), pp. 41-49,7l~9315. See chapter 6 of my Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. 243-329, and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide, exh. cat. (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 16. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 30. 17. Cy Twombly's exploitation of graffiti was, from the outset, focused on what the semiologist would call its expressive form—namely that it is a defiling of a surface of inscription (by cutting, smearing, spraying, or any other form of marking). His interest was therefore in its violence rather than its image content. Thus although graffiti is often marked onto vertical walls, and although its figuration is often representational, this content of the image was not what Twombly initially used. Rather he was drawing a parallel between Pollock's gesture, or mode of marking, and the violence of the graffiti gesture, its "criminal" overtones, so to speak. See my discussion in The Optical Unconscious, pp. 256-60. 18. Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and Its Discontents," 1930, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1953-73), 2i: 90. 19. Varnedoe speaks of the analysis of formlessness in art as "associated, psychically, with bodily excretion," going on to say, "Krauss and Bois see the drip paintings as generating a scatological lineage of staining, as in Andy Warhol's 'oxidation' paintings, made by urinating onto a metallic-paint ground" (Jackson Pollock, pp. 54-55); Adam Gopnik links my position with Harold Rosenberg's as a call for "anti-art" and speaks of my "praise of Pollock's art as 'abject' " ("Poured Over," The New Yorker LXXIV [October 19,1998]: 76,80). 20. Thierry de Duve gives an account of this process in "The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas." See de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 199-27921. I began to speak of a postmedium condition in "And Then Turn Away? An Essay on James Coleman," October no. 81 (Summer 1997): 5-33. 22. See my "Welcome to the Cultural Revolution," October no. 77 (Summer 1996): 83-96. 23. Greenberg, "After Abstract-Expressionism," p. 131.

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24- Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," p. 90. 25. Greenberg, "Louis and Noland," 1960, reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, F- 9726. See Michael Fried's discussion of this in "An Introduction to My Art Criticism," Art and Objecthood (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998),

P.48.

27. See my Optical Unconscious, pp. 246-47,324. In discussing color field painting, Stanley Cavell expresses his own assumption that the axis called for in the transaction between the viewer and this kind of art is verticality: "For example, a painting may acknowledge its frontedness, or its fmitude, or its specific thereness— that is, its presentness; and your accepting it will accordingly mean acknowledging your frontedness, or directionality, or verticality toward its world, or any world." Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking, 1971), p. no. 28. Fried, "Shape as Form," Art and Objecthood, p. 88. 29. It is not that nothing was addressed to the question of the medium; rather, the medium continued to be organized in the field of the object. For example, in ibid., p. 77, Fried raises the question of a medium, tying it to the relationship between literal and depicted shape in Frank Stella's irregular polygon paintings of 1966: "By shape as such I mean not merely the silhouette of the support (which I shall call literal shape), not merely that of the outlines of elements in a given picture (which I shall call literal shape), but shape as a medium within which choices about both literal and depicted shapes are made, and made mutually responsive." In the context of the exchanges between Fried and Cavell in the mid-Kjoos, Cavell addresses color field painting by arguing for an idea of the medium that is closer to something like a phenomenological axis. Claiming that what a given color field painter is inventing is a new automatism (Morris Louis's "pours" being modeled here on the example of Pollock's automatized dripped lines), he understands these automatisms as supplying not just new instances of art but new mediums of art. See Cavell, The World Viewed, pp. 104-8. 30. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 79. Fried too speaks of the speed of Kenneth Noland's striped pictures: "Approached from the side (their length makes this inviting) what is striking is not their rectangular ity but the speed with which that rectangle—or rather, the speed with which the colored bands—appear to diminish in perspective recession." "Shape as Form," p. 83. 31. The Guggenheim application is published in Francis Valentine O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 4:238. 32. Jackson Pollock, "My Painting"Possibilities no. i (Winter 1947-48): 79. 33. Pollock worked in David Siqueiros's Manhattan studio/"laboratory" in 1936. His use of gray enamel in works of the early 19403, like The She-Wolf, to mask around shapes, thereby producing figures as the effect of a kind of stenciling, may be an 662

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adaptation of a technique of poster-making that was employed in Siqueiros's studio, where stencils and spray paint were applied to lengths of paper laid on the floor. 34. See Charles F. Stuckey, "Another Side of Jackson Pollock,'Mrf in America 65, no. 6 (November-December 1977): 81-91, and Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), p. 9. 35. In the discussion following the presentation of this paper, it was objected that Pollock's palm prints in Number lA, 1948 might have been applied to the canvas once it was vertical rather than during its making, so that they would register the upright body rather than the falling one. This seems counterintuitive since the prints appear under passages of white dripped skein, and thus would most likely have been applied while the canvas was on the floor. It was also objected that Jasper Johns's Diver, referring to Hart Crane's suicide (by jumping overboard during an ocean voyage), is about a falling body that is therefore oriented vertically, even though inverted head-to-foot. This seems a perverse reading of Johns's space, in which the plunging body is rendered vertiginous precisely because it is precipitating itself into a watery medium that is itself horizontal and toward which the body must project a downward fall. Further, it ignores the point that since Johns's field is in any case metamorphic, its charcoal surface constituting the image of, the illusion of, water, the work ultimately relocates itself within the terms of the easel picture, or vertical medium. 36. T. J. Clark, "Jackson Pollock's Abstraction," in Serge Guilbaut, éd., Reconsidering Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 241-42. 37. O'Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné, 4: 094, p. 257, and D99,p.26i. 38. Matthew L. Rohn, Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock's Abstractions (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 48. 39. Gilles Deleuze formulates the connections between the predicate event, series, variation, and point of view in his discussion of Leibniz's and Whitehead's concept of the event, to which I am indebted here. See Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Ton Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 40. Ibid., pp. 19-20.

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Selected Bibliography Bibliography entries are organized by decade in accordance with the divisions in the introduction and the anthology section. Entries within each decade are sorted by the author's last name (or title if no author is specified). Author's name is followed by the date, and entries by the same author are listed in chronological rather than alphabetical order to facilitate locating endote citation references. Information on where articles, chapters, and catalogue essays have been reprinted is given in endnotes unless required for citation location. The 1930s Graham, John. 1937. "Primitive Art and Picasso." Magazine of Art 30 (April): 236-39, 260. . 1939. System and Dialectics of Art. New York: Delphic Studios. Greenberg, Clement. 1939. "Avant-garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review 6 (Fall): 34-49Schapiro, Meyer. 1937. "The Nature of Abstract Art." Marxist Quarterly i (JanuaryMarch): 78-97. The 1940s Baziotes, William. 1947-48. "I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory." Possibilities i (Winter 1947-48): 2. . 1949. "The Artist and His Mirror." Right Angles (June): 3-4. Davenport, Russell, ed. 1948. "A Life Round Table on Modern Art." Life, 11 October, 56-79, especially "Young American Extremists," 62-63. Ellsworth, Paul. 1949. "Hans Hofmann: Reply to Questionnaire and Comments on a Recent Exhibition." Arts and Architecture 66 (November): 22-28. Gorky, Arshile. 1941. Interview by Malcolm Johnson. New York Sun, 22 August. Reprinted in Tuchman 1965. Gottlieb, Adolph. 1948. "Unintelligibility." Mimeographed script of talk given 5 May in Forum: The Artist Speaks, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Copy in MoMA Library.

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Gottlieb, Adolph, and Mark Rothko. пдаа. "The Portrait and the Modern Artist." Dialogue broadcast over radio station WNYC, 13 October. Published in Alloway and MacNaughton 1981. . I943b. "Letter to the New York Times" Quoted in slightly edited form in Jewell I943b. Published in Alloway and MacNaughton 1981. Greenberg, Clement. 1940. "Towards a Newer Laocoon." Partisan Review 7 (JulyAugust): 296-310. . 1945. "Review of the Exhibition A Problem for Critics" Nation, 9 June, 657-59. . 1947. "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture." Horizon (London) 16 (October): 20-30. Hofmann, Hans. 1948. The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy. "The Ides of Art: Six Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art." 1948. Tiger's Eye i (December): 51-53. "The Ides of Art: The Attitudes of ю Artists on Their Art and Contemporaneousness." 1947. Tiger's Eye i (December): 42-46. Janis, Sidney. 1944. Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. New York: Reynal &, Hitchcock. Jewell, Edward Alden. 1943a. "Modern Painters Open Show Today." New York Times, 2 June, 28. . I943b. " 'Globalism' Pops into View: The Realm of Art; A New Platform." New York Times, 13 June, sec. 2,9. . 1943C. "Globalism: Of Windmill Tilting and Cheshire Cats." New York Times, 27June, sec. 2,6. . 1945. "Toward Abstract, or Away?" New York Times, i July, sec. 2,2. Kootz, Samuel M. 1941. "Letter to the Editor." New York Times, 10 August, sec. 9,

p. 7. . 1943. New Frontiers in American Painting. New York: Hastings House. Kootz, Samuel M., and Harold Rosenberg. 1949. The Intrasubjectives. New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery. Motherwell, Robert. 1944a. "The Modern Painter's World." DYN(November): 9-14. . I944b. "Painters' Objects." Partisan Review 11 (Winter): 93-97. . 1948. "A Tour of the Sublime." Tiger's Eye i (December): 46-48. Motherwell, Robert, and Harold Rosenberg. 1947-48. "Editorial Statement." Possibilities i (Winter): i. Newman, Barnett. 1944. Adolph Gottlieb. New York: Wakefield Gallery. . 1946. Northwest Coast Indian Painting. New York: Betty Parsons Gallery. . I947a. "The First Man Was an Artist." Tiger's Eye i (October): 57-60. . I947b. The Ideographic Picture. New York: Betty Parsons Gallery. . 1948. "The Sublime Is Now." Tiger's Eye 6 (December): 51-53. Pollock, Jackson. 1944. Interview. ^4rfo and Architecture 61 (February): 14. . 1947-48. "My Painting." Possibilities i (Winter): 79. 666

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Porter, David, éd. 1945. Personal Statement: A Painting Prophecy, 1950. Washington DC: David Porter Gallery. Putzel, Howard. 1945. A Problem for Critics. New York: 67 Gallery. R[iley], M[aude]. 1944. "Whither Goes Abstract and Surrealist Art?" Art Digest 19 (i December): 8,31. . 1945. "The Mythical Rothko and His Myths." Art Digest 19 (15 January): 15. Rosenberg, Harold. 1947. "Introduction to Six American Artists." Paris: Galerie Maeght. Reprinted in Possibilities i (Winter 1947-48): 75. . 1947-48. "The Shapes in a Baziotes Canvas." Possibilities i (Winter): 2. Rothko, Mark. 1946. Clyfford Still. New York: Art of This Century Gallery. . 1947-48. "The Romantics Were Prompted." Possibilities i (Winter): 84. . 1949. "A Statement on His Attitude of Painting." Tiger's Eye i (October): 114. Sieberling, Dorothy. 1949. "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" Life, 8 August, 42-43,45. "Spring Salon for Young Artists." 1943. Nation, 19 May. Sweeney, James Johnson. 194.3. Jackson Pollock. New York: Art of This Century. . 19443. "Five American Painters." Harper's Bazaar, April, 76-77,122,124, 126. . I944b. Robert Motherwell. New York: Art of This Century. . 1945. "Art Chronicle." Partisan Review (Spring): 240-42. "A Symposium: The State of American Art." 1949. Magazine of Art 42 (March): 82-102. Tyler, Parker. 1945. "Nature and Madness Among the Younger Painters." View, ser. 5, no. 2 (May): 30-31. The 1950s Alfieri, Bruno. 1950. "A Short Talk on the Pictures of Jackson Pollock." U Arte Moderna (Venice), 8June. Alloway, Lawrence. 1958. "Some Notes on Abstract Impressionism." In Abstract Impressionism, 4-8. London: Arts Council Gallery. Ashton, Dore, and Bernard Dorival. 1959. New York and Paris: Painting in the Fifties. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts. Barr, Alfred H., Jr. 1950. "7 Americans Open in Venice: Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock." ArtNews 49 (Summer): 22-23. . 1959. Introduction to The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries iQSS-igsg. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Baur, John I. H. 1958. Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth Century American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Baziotes, William. 1959. "Notes on Painting." It Is, no. 4 (Autumn): 11. Black or White: Paintings by European and American Artists. 1950. New York: Kootz Gallery. Breton, Andre.1959. "The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky." It Is, no. 4 (Autumn): 56-57. Selected Bibliography

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Brustein, Robert. 1958. "The Cult of Unthink" Horizon (New York) i (September): 38-45,134-35. Celentano, Francis. 1957. "The Origins and Development of Abstract Expressionism in the United States." M.A. thesis, New York University. Crehan, Hubert. K)59a. "Barnett Newman." Art News 58 (April): 12. . I959b. "Clyfford Still: Black Angel in Buffalo." Art News 58 (December): 58-60. Coates, Robert M. 1951. "The Abstract Expressionists and Others."New Yorker, 29 December, 58-59. de Kooning, Elaine. 1950. "Hans Hofmann Paints a Picture." Art News 49 (February): 38-40,5^-59. 1951. "David Smith Makes a Sculpture." Art News 50 (September): 38-51. . 1957. "Two Americans in Action: Franz Kline, Mark Rothko." Art News Annual 27 (November): 86-97. de Kooning, Willem. 1951. "The Renaissance and Order." trans/formation i, no. 2: 85-87Ferren, John. 1958. "Epitaph for an Avant-Garde: The Motivating Ideas of the Abstract Expressionist Movement in America as Seen by an Artist Active on the New York Scene." Arts Magazine 33 (November): 24-26,68. Finkelstein, Louis. 1950. "Marin and de Kooning." Magazine of Art 43 (October): 202-6. . 1956. "New Look: Abstract Impressionism." Art News 55 (March): 36-39, 66-68. Friedman, В. Н. 1954. "The New Baroque." Arts Digest 28 (15 September): 12-13. Goldwater, Robert. 1959. "Everyone Knew What Everyone Else Meant." It Is, no. 14 (Autumn): 35. Golub, Leon. 1954. "A Critique of Abstract Expressionism." Art Journal 14 (Winter): 142-47. Goodnough, Robert, ed. 1950. "Artists' Sessions at Studio 35." Modern Artists in America, edited by Bernard Karpel, Robert Motherwell, and Ad Reinhardt, 9-22. New York: Wittenborn Schultz. . 1951. "Pollock Paints a Picture." Art News 50 (May): 32-38,61. . 1952. "Kline Paints a Picture." Art News 51 (December): 36-39,63-64. Goossen, Eugene C. 1958a. "The Big Canvas" Art International (Lugano) 2 (November): 45-47. . I958b. "The Philosophic Line of Barnett Newman." Art News 57 (Summer): 30-31. . 1959. "Robert Motherwell and the Seriousness of Subject." Art International (Lugano) 3 (January-February): 33-38,51. Gottlieb, Adolph. 1951. "My Painting." Arts and Architecture 68 (September): 21. Gray, Cleve. 1959. "Narcissus in Chaos: Contemporary American Art" American Scholar 28 (Autumn): 433-43.

668

Selected Bibliograph y

Greenberg, Clement. 1950. "The European View of American Art" Nation, 25 November, 490-92. . 1952. "Feeling Is All." Partisan Review 19 (January-February): 97-102. . 1955. " 'American-Type' Painting." Partisan Review 22 (Spring): 179-96. . 1956. "New York Painting Only Yesterday." Art News 56 (Summer): 58, 84-86. . 1956-1957. "David Smith." Art in America 44 (Winter): 1956-57. . iQSJ.Adolph Gottlieb. New York: Jewish Museum. . 1958. Barnett Newman: First Retrospective Exhibition. (Bennington, VT: Bennington College). Heron, Patrick. 1956. "The Americans at the Tate Gallery." Arts Magazine 30 (March): 15-16. Hess, Thomas B. I95oa. "Introduction to Abstract.'Mrf News Annual 49, pt. 2 (November): 158,186-87. . I95ob. "Seeing the Young New Yorkers." Art News 49 (May): 23-60. . 1951. Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. New York: Viking Press. . 1953. "De Kooning Paints a Picture." Art News 52 (March): 30-33,64-67. , ed. 1958. "Is Today's Artist with or Against the Past?'Mr¿ News 57 (Summer): 26-46 ff. . 1959. Willem de Kooning. New York: George Braziller. Hess, Thomas В., and Harold Rosenberg. 1958. "Some Points about Action Painting." In Action Painting... 1958. Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, pp. 2-5. Hofmann, Hans. 1951. "Space Pictorially Realized Through the Intrinsic Faculty of the Colors to Express Volume." In Hans Hofmann. New York: Kootz Gallery. . 1955. "The Color Problem in Pure Painting—Its Creative Origin." In Hans Hofmann. New York: Kootz Gallery. Reprinted in Arts and Architecture 73 (February 1956). . I959a. "Space and Pictorial Life." It Is, no. 4 (Autumn): 10. . I959b. "Statement." It Is, no.3 (Winter-Spring): 10. Hunter, Sam. 1954. "Painting by Another Name.'Mrf in America 42 (December): 291-95. "The Irascible Eighteen." 1950. New York Herald Tribune, 23 May. "Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Lead Fight Against Show."L¿f^ 15 January, 34. Jackson Pollock et la nouvelle peinture américaine. 1959. Paris: Musée nationale d'art moderne; Éditions des musées nationaux. Jarrell, Randall. 1957. "The Age of the Chimpanzee: A Poet Argues as Devil's Advocate Against the Canonization of Abstract Expressionism." Art News 56 (Summer): 34-35. Kaprow, Allan. 1958. "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock." Art News 57 (October): 24-26,55-56.

Selected Bibliography

669

Kramer, Hilton. 1953. "The New American Painting." Partisan Review 20 (JulyAugust): 421-27. . 1959. "The Critics of American Painting." Arts Magazine 34 (October): 26-32. Louchheim, Aline B. 1951. "Betty Parsons: Her Gallery, Her Influence." Vogue, i October, 140-41,194-97. Motherwell, Robert. 1951. The School of New York. Beverly Hills: Frank Perls Gallery. . 1959. "Statement." It Is, no. 3 (Winter-Spring): 10. O'Hara, Frank. 1950. Jackson Pollock. New York: George Braziller. . 1958. "Franz Kline Talking." Evergreen Review 6 (October): 58-64. Paintings ofClyfford Still 1959. Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Pollock, Jackson. 1950. Interview by William Wright. Published in O'Connor and Thaw 1978,4:230. Rexroth, Kenneth. 1959. "U.S. Art Seen Across Time and Space: 22 Americans Seen Abroad." Art New s 58 (Summer): 30-33,52,54. Rodman, Selden. 1957. Conversations with Artists. New York: Devin-Adair. Rosen, Israel. 1959. "Toward a Definition of Abstract Expressionism." Baltimore Museum of Art News 22 (February): 3-13. Rosenberg, Harold. 1952. "The American Action Painters." Art New s 51 (December): 22-23,48-50. . 1953. "The New American Painting." Partisan Review 20 (July-August): 421-27. . 1957. "Hans Hofmann: Nature into Abstraction." Art New s 56 (May): 34-35, 55-56. . 1958. "Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art." Art News Annual 28:120-37,184-92. . 1959. The Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon Press. Rubin, William. 1958. "The New York School—Then and Now." Parts i and 2. Art International (Lugano) 2, nos. 2-3,4-5 (March-April and May-June): 23-26,19-22. Rudikoff, Sonya. 1957. "Tangible Abstract Art." Partisan Review 24 (Spring): 275-81. . 1958. "Space in Abstract Painting." Partisan Review 25 (Spring): 297-304. Sandier, Irving, ed. 1959. "Discussion: Is There a New Academy?" Parts i and 2. Art News 58 (Summer/September): 34-37,58-59; 36-39,58-60. Sawin, Martica. 1958. "In the Galleries: Franz Kline." Arts Magazine 32 (September): 57-58. Schapiro, Meyer. 1952. "Rebellion in Art." In America in Crisis, edited by Daniel Aaron, 203-42. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. . 1956. "The Younger American Painters of Today." Listener (London) 60, no .1404,26 January, 146-47. . 1957. "The Liberating Quality of American Art." Art News 56 (Summer): 36-52. 670

Selected Bibliography

Schwabacher, Ethel. 1951. Arshile Gorky, Memorial Exhibition. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. . 1957. Arshile Gorky. New York: Macmillan and Whitney Museum of American Art. Seitz, William. 1953. "Spirit, Time and Abstract Expressionism." Magazine of Art 46 (February): 80-87. . 1955. "Abstract Expressionist Painting in America: An Interpretation Based on the Work and Thought of Six Key Figures." Ph.D. diss., Princeton University. Sieberling, Dorothy. 1959a. "Baffling U.S. Art: What It Is About." Life, 9 November, 68-80. . I959b. "The Varied Art of Four Pioneers." Life, 16 November, 74-83, 85-86. Smith, David. K)52a. "The Language Is Image.'Mrfo and Architecture 69 (February): 20-21,33-34. . I952b. "Who Is the Artist? How Does He Act?" Everyday Art Quarterly (Walker Art Center) no. 23:16-21. . I954a. "Thoughts on Sculpture." College Art Journal 13 (Winter): 97-100. . I954b. "Second Thoughts on Sculpture." College Art Journal 13 (Spring): 203-7. Still, ClyfFord. 1952. "Statement." In 15 Americans, edited by Dorothy Miller, 21-22. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Sweeney, James Johnson. 1954. Younger American Painters: A Selection. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Tyler, Parker. 1950. "Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth." Magazine of Art 43 (March): 92-93. "What Abstract Art Means to Me." 1951. Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 18 (Spring), !5PP. Wight, Frederick S. 1957. Hans Hofmann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. "The Wild Ones." 1956. Time, 20 February, 70-75.

The 1960 s Alloway, Lawrence. 1960. "Sign and Surface: Notes on Black and White Painting in New York." Quadrum, no 9: 49-62. . I96ia. Jackson Pollock: Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours from the Collection of Lee Krasner Pollock. London: Marlborough Fine Art. . K)6ib. "Notes on Pollock." Art International (Lugano) 5 (May): 38-41,90. . 1962. "Notes on Rothko.'Mrf International (Lugano) 6 (Summer): 90-94. . К)6за. "The American Sublime." Living Arts i, no 2 (June): n-22. . К)6зЬ. "Gorky." Artforum i (March): 28-31. . K)65a. "The Biomorphic Forties." Artforum 4 (September): 18-23. . K)65b. William Baziotes: A Memorial Exhibition. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Selecte d Bibliograph y

671

. 1966. "Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross and the Subjects of the Artists." In Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani, 11-16. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. . 1968. "Melpomene and Graffiti: Adolph Gottlieb's Early Work." Art International (Lugano) 12 (20 April): 21-24. Anderson, Wayne. 1967. "American Sculpture: The Situation in the Fifties." Artforum 5 (Summer): 60-67. Armstrong, Richard. 1964. "Abstract Expressionism Was an American Revolution." Canadian Art 21 (September-October): 262-65. Arnason, H. H. 1961. American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. . 19663. "On Robert Motherwell and His Early Work" Art International (Lugano) 10 (20 January): 17-35. . K)66b. "Robert Motherwell: 1948-1965." Art International (Lugano) ю (20 April): 19-45. . 1969. "Motherwell: The Window and the Wall." Art News 68 (Summer): 48-52,61-62,64,66,68. Ashton, Dore. 1961. "Franz Kline." Cimaise 8 (May-June): 70-83. . 1964. "Robert Motherwell: Passion and Transfiguration." Studio International 167 (March): 100-105. Bannard, Walter Darby. 1968. "Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, David Smith." Artforum 6 (April): 22-32. . 1969. "Hans Hofmann's Rectangles." Artforum 7 (Summer): 38-41. Baro, Gene. 1966. "David Smith: The Art of Wholeness." Studio International 172 (August): 69-75. Battcock, Gregory. 1969-1970. "Re-evaluating Abstract Expressionism." Arts Magazine 44 (December-January): 46-48. Calas, Nicholas. 1967. "Subject Matter in the Work of Barnett Newman." Arts Magazine 42 (November): 38-40. Campbell, Lawrence. 1968. "Of Lilith and Lettuce." Art New s 67 (March): 42-43, 61-64. Chipp, Herschel B. 1968. "Contemporary Art: The Autonomy of the Work of Art." In Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics, 501-89. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cone, Jane Harrison. 1966. David Smith: A Retrospective Exhibition. Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. David Smith. 1966. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. David Smith, igo6-ig6^. 1966. London: Tate Gallery and Arts Council of Great Britain. Dawson, Fielding. 1967. An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline. New York: Pantheon Books.

672

Selected Bibliograph y

de Kooning, Elaine. 1962. Franz Kline Memorial Exhibition. Washington, DC: Washington Gallery of Modern Art. de Kooning, Willem. 1963. "Content Is a Glimpse." Location i (Spring): 45-53. Dillenberger, Jane. 1969. "The Stations of the Cross by Barnett Newman." In Secular Art with Sacred Themes, 99-116. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. Donnell, Radka Zagaroff. 1964. "Space in Abstract Expressionism." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23 (Winter): 315-19. Dorothy Dehner: Ten Years of Sculpture. 1965. New York: Jewish Museum. Doty, Robert, and Diane Waldman. 1968. Adolph Gottlieb. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Du Plessix, Francine, and Cleve Gray. 1967. "Who Was Jackson Pollock?"Jr¿ in America 55 (May-June): 48-51. Franz Kline. 1963. Brussels: Palaix des beaux-arts société auxiliare des expositions. Fried, Michael. 1965. "Jackson Pollock." Artforum 4 (September): 14-17. Friedman, B. H. 1969. "An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock." In Jackson Pollock: Black and White, 7-10. New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. Friedman, Martin. К)6за. Adolph Gottlieb. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. . К)6зЬ. "Adolph Gottlieb: Private Symbols in Public Statements." Jri JV^if s 62 (May): 5,32-35,52-53. Fry, Edward. 1969. David Smith. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Geldzahler, Henry. 1969. New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970. New York: E. P. Dutton in association with Metropolitan Museum of Art. Glaser, Bruce. 1967. "Jackson Pollock: An Interview with Lee Krasner." Arts Magazine 41 (April): 36-39. Goldwater, Robert. 1960. "Reflections on the New York School." Quadrum no. 7-8: 17-36. . 1967. "Franz Kline: Darkness Visible." Art News (March): 39-43,77. Goossen, Eugene C. 1960. "Painting as Confrontation: Clyfford Still.'Mri International (Lugano) 4 (Summer): 39-43. Gordon, John. 1968. Franz Kline: 1910-1962. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. . 1969. Franz Kline, 1910-1962. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Gray, Cleve, ed. 1968. David Smith by David Smith. New York: Holt, Rinehart &: Winston. Greenberg, Clement. K)6ia. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press. . I96ib. Hans Hofmann. Paris: Editions Georges Fall. . K)62a. "After Abstract Expressionism." Art International (Lugano) 6 (25 October): 24-32. . I962b. "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name." Second Coming i (March): 58-62. . 19б4а. "The 'Crisis' of Abstract Art." Arts Yearbook 7:89-92. . I964b. "David Smith's New Sculpture." In David Smith: Sculpture and

Selecte d Bibliograph y

673

Drawings. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. . 1965. "America Takes the Lead, 1945-1965." Art in America 53 (AugustSeptember): 107,112-13. Heller, Ben. 1963. Black and White. New York: Jewish Museum. Hess, Thomas B. 1965. "De Kooning's New Women." Art News 64 (March): 36-38, 63-65. 1968. Willem de Kooning. New York: Museum of Modern Art. . 19693. Barnett Newman. New York: Walker & Co. in association with M. Knoedler & Co. . i969b."The Outsider" [Clyfford Still]. Art News 68 (December): 34-37,67-69. Hunter, Sam. 1963. Hans Hofmann. New York: Harry N. Abrams. . 1964. "Abstract Expressionism Then-and Now." Canadian Art 21 (September-October): 266-68. . 1967. "American Art Since 1945." In New Art Around the World, 9-58. New York: Harry N. Abrams. "Jackson Pollock: An Artist's Symposium." 1967. Parts i and 2. Art News 56 (April-May): 29-30,64-67; 27-29, 69-71. Janis, Harriet, and Rudi Blesh. 1960. De Kooning. New York: Grove Press. Judd, Donald. "Mark Rothko." Arts Magazine 37 (September): 57-58. . 1964. "De Kooning." Arts Magazine 38 (March): 62-63. . 1967. "Jackson Pollock." Arts Magazine 41 (April): 32-35. Kavolis, Vytautas. 1963. "Abstract Expressionism and Puritanism." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21 (Spring): 315-19. Kozloff, Max. 1964. "The Impact of de Kooning." Arts Yearbook 7:76-88. . 19653. "An Interview with Robert Motherwell." Artforum 4 (September): 33-37. K)65b. "The Critical Reception of Abstract Expressionism." Arts Magazine 40 (December): 27-33. . 19б5с. "The Problem of Color-Light in Rothko." Artforum 4 (September): 38-44. Kramer, Hilton. 1962. "A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement Greenberg." Arts Magazine 3® (October): 60-63. Krauss, Rosalind. 1968. "The New de Koonings." Artforum 6 (January): 44-47. Kroll, Jack. 1961. "American Painting and the Convertible Spiral." ArtNews 60 (November): 34-37,66-69. . 1962. "Some Greenberg Circles." A rtNews 61 (March): 35,48-49. Kuh, Katherine. 1962. The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists. New York: Harper & Row. Langsner, Jules. 1963. "Franz Kline, Calligraphy and Information Theory." Art International (Lugano) 7 (March): 25-29.

674

Selecte d Bibliograph y

Levine, Edward. 1967. "Mythical Overtones in the Work of Jackson Pollock." Art Journal 26 (Summer): 366-68,374. Levy, Julien. 1968. Arshile Gorky. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Lichtblau, Charlotte. 1969. "Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman." Arts Magazine 43 (March): 28-37. McDarrah, Fred. 1961. The Artist's World in Pictures. New York: E. P. Button. Motherwell, Robert. 1963. "A Conversation at Lunch." In An Exhibition of the Work of Robert Motherwell, 10-19. Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of

Art. . 1966. "David Smith: A Major American Sculptor." Studio International 172 (August): 65-68. Muías, Ugo, and Alan Solomon. 1967. New York: The New Art Scene. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Myers, John Bernard. 1960. "The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School." Evergreen Review 4 (March-April): 75-85. Newman, Barnett. 1962. "Frontiers of Space: An Interview with Dorothy Seckler." Art in America 50 (Summer): 82-87. . 1965. "The New York School Question: Interview with Neil A. Levine." Art News 64 (September): 38-41,55-56. . 1966. "The Fourteen Stations of the Cross." Art News 65 (May): 26-28,57. O'Connor, Francis V. 1964. "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock, 1912-1943 Г Artforum 57 (May): 16-23. . 1965. "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock, 1912-1943." Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University. . 1967. Jackson Pollock. New York: Museum of Modern Art. O'Hara, Frank. 1963. Franz Kline. Turin: Galleria civica d'arte moderna. Circulated by MoMA International Council. . 1965. Robert Motherwell: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Pavia, P. G. 1960. "The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism." It Is, no. 5 (Spring): 8-11. Pavia, P. G., and Irving Sandier, eds. 1960. "The Philadelphia Panel." It Is, no. 5 (Spring): 34-38. Rago, Louise. i96o."We Interview Lee Krasner." School Arts 60 (September): 31-32. Read, Sir Herbert, and H. Harvard Arnason. 1960. "Dialogue on Modern U.S. Painting." Art News 59 (May): 33-36. Reiff, Robert Frank. 1961. "A Stylistic Analysis of Arshile Gorky's Art from 1943 to 1948." Ph.D. diss., Columbia University. . 1966. "The Late Works of Arshile Gorky." Art Journal 22 (Spring): 148-52. Reinhardt, Ad. 1965. "Reinhardt Paints a Picture." Art News 64 (March): 39-41,66. Reise, Barbara. 1968. "Greenberg and the Group: A Retrospective View." Parts i and 2. Studio International 175 (May-June): 254-57,314-16. Robertson, Bryan. 1960. Jackson Pollock. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

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675

. ig6i. Rothko. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery. Rose, Barbara. 1967. American Art Since 1900: A Critical History. New York: Frederick A. Praeger (rev. 1975, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston). , ed. 1968. Readings in American Art Since igoo: A Documentary Survey. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. Rose, Bernice. 1969. Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper. New York: Museum of Modern Art in association with The Drawing Society. Rosenberg, Harold. 1960. "Critic Within the Act." Art News 59 (October): 26-28. . K)62a. "Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion." Art New s 61 (December): 42-45,62-63. . Щ^Ъ. Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea. New York: Grove Press. . 1963. "Hans Hofmann and the Stability of the New." New Yorker, 2 November, 100,103-5,108-10. . 1966. The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience. New York: Horizon Press. . 1967. "The Art World: The Mythic Act." New Yorker, 6 May, 162-71. . 1969. "The Art World: The Icon Maker." New Yorker, 19 April, 136-42. , and Paul Goodman. 1962. "Gorky and History: An Exchange." Partisan Review 29 (Fall): 587-93. Rosenblum, Robert. 1961. "The Abstract Sublime." Art News 59 (February): 38-41. Rubin, William. 1963. "Arshile Gorky, Surrealism and the New American Painting." Art International (Lugano) 7 (25 February): 27-38. . 1967. "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition." Parts 1-4. Artforum 5 (February, March, April, May): 14-21,28-37,18-31,28-33. Sandier, Irving. K)65a. "Baziotes: Modern Mythologist." Art News 63 (February): 28-30,65-66. . I965b. "The Club." Artforum 4 (September): 27-31. . 1968. "John D. Graham: The Painter as Aesthetician and Connoisseur." Artforum 7 (October): 50-53. Schuyler, James. 1968. "As American as Franz Kline." Art News 67 (October): 30-33, 58-59. Seitz, William C. 1962. Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies. New York: Museum of Modern Art. . 1963. Hans Hofmann. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Selz, Peter. 1961. Mark Rothko. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Sharpless, Ti-Grace. 1963. Clyffbrd Still. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. . 1966. Clyffbrd Still: Thirty-three Paintings in the Albright-Knox Arts Academy. Buffalo: Albright-Knox Arts Academy. Simon, Sidney. 19б7а. "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: Interview with Peter Busa and Matta." Art International (Lugano) 10 (December): 17-20.

676

Selecte d Bibliograph y

. 1967!). "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943: Interview with Robert Motherwell." Art International (Lugano) 10 (December): 20-23. Smith, David. 1960. "Notes on My Work" Arts Magazine 34 (February): 44-49. . 1964. "The Secret Letter" [Interview by Thomas B. Hess]. In David Smith, 3-9. New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery. . 1969. "Notes for 'David Smith Makes a Sculpture.' " Art News 43 (January): 46-48,56, Still, Clyfbrd. 1963. "An Open Letter to An Art Critic." Artforum 2 (December): 32. . 1964. "Letter to the Editor" Artforum 2 (February): 4. Sylvester, David. 19бза. "Adolph Gottlieb: An Interview with David Sylvester." Living Arts 1 (June): 2-10. . 19бзЬ. "Franz Kline 1910-1962: An Interview with David Sylvester." Living Arts i (Spring): 3-13. Townsend, Benjamin J. 1961. "An Interview with Clyfford Still." Gallery Notes [Albright-Knox Art Gallery] 24 (Summer): 8-16. Tuchman, Maurice. 1965. New York School, the First Generation: Paintings of the 1940s and 1Q50S. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Valliere, James T. 1967. "De Kooning on Pollock: An Interview." Partisan Review 34 (Fall): 603-5. Waldman, Diane. 1968. "Gottlieb: Signs and Suns." Art News 67 (February): 26-29,65-69. Wasserman, Emily. 1968. "Lee Krasner in Mid-Career." Artforum 6 (March): 38-43.

The 1970 s Albright, Thomas. 1976. "A Conversation with Clyfford Still." Art News 75 (March): 30-35. Allentuck, Marcia Epstein, ed. iQji.John Graham's System and Dialectics of Art. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Alloway, Lawrence. 1972. "Gesture into Form: The Later Paintings of Barnett Newman." Art News 71 (November): 42-44,112,115. . 1973. "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism." Artforum 12 (November): 36-43. . 1975a. "De Kooning: Criticism and Art History." Artforum 13 (January): 46-50. . i975b. Topics in American Art Since 1945. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Anderson, Wayne. 1975. American Sculpture in Process, 1930-1970. Boston: New York Graphic Society. Arnason, H. H. 1977. Robert Motherwell. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Ashton, Dore. 1971. "The Rothko Chapel in Houston." Studio International 181 (June): 273-75.

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677

. 1973- The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. New York: Viking Press. Baker, Elizabeth C. 1971. "Hans Hofmann: Abstract Expressionism and Color in New York, 1945-65."^^News Annual 37:105-16. Bannard, Walter Darby. 1971. "Touch and Scale: Cubism, Pollock, Newman, and Still."Artforum 9 (June): 58-66. . 1975. Hans Hofmann. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts. Barkley, Lisa. 1977. Graham, Gorky, Smith, and Davis in the Thirties. Providence: Daniel Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. Battcock, Gregory. 1974. "It Is." Arts Magazine 48 (April): 31-33. Buettner, Stewart. 1976. "Arshile Gorky and the Abstract-Surreal." Arts Magazine 50 (March): 86-87. Busignani, Alberto. 1971. Jackson Pollock. London: Hamlyn. Carmean, E. A., Jr. 1972. The Collages of Robert Motherwell: A Retrospective Exhibition. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts. . 1976. "Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegies." Arts Magazine 50 (June): 94-97Carmean, E. A., Jr., and Eliza Rathbone. 1978. American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Cavalière, Barbara. 1977. "An Introduction to the Method of William Baziotes." Arts Magazine 51 (April): 124-31. . 1979. "Early Abstract Expressionism: The 19405." Flash Art (Milan), nos. 86-87 (January-February): 26-32. Cavalière, Barbara, and Robert C. Hobbs. 1977. "Against a Newer Laocoon." Arts Magazine^i (April): 110-17. Clyfford Still. 1976. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Cockcroft, Eva. 1974. "Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War." Artforum 12 (June): 39-41. Cummings, Paul. 1979. David Smith: The Drawings. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Davis, Mary R. 1977. "The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb: A Synthesis of the Subjective and the Rational." Arts Magazine 52 (November): 141-47. Dehner, Dorothy. 1977-78. "Medals for Dishonor—The Fifteen Medallions of David Smith." Art Journal 37 (Winter): 144-50. Diamonstein, Barbaralee. 1979. Inside New York's Art World. New York: Rizzoli. Fineberg, Jonathan. 1978. "Death and Maternal Love: Psychological Speculations on Robert Motherwell's Art." Artforum 17 (September): 52-57. Foster, Stephen C. 1975. "Clement Greenberg: Formalism in the '405 and ^os.^Art Journal35 (Fall): 20-24. . 1976. "Making a Movement Modern: The Role of the Avant-Garde Critic." Art International (Lugano) 20 (October-November): 59-61. Freke, David. 1972. "Jackson Pollock: A Symbolic Self-Portrait." Studio International 184 (December): 217-21.

678

Selected Bibliography

Friedman, В. H. 1972. Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible. New York: McGraw-Hill. . 1978. " The Irascibles': A Split Second in Art History." Arts Magazine 53 (September): 96-112. Fuller, Peter. 1979. "American Painting Since the Last War." Parts i and 2. Art Monthly (London) ю (May-June, July-August): 6-13,6-12. Gagnon, François-Marc, Lise Lamarche, Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin, and René Payane. 1979. Jackson Pollock: Questions. Montreal: Musée d'art contemporain. Gaugh, Harry F. 1974. "Kline's Transitional Abstraction." Art in America 62 (JulyAugust): 43-47. . 1975. "Franz Kline's Romantic Abstraction" Artforum 11 (Summer): 28-37. Glazer, Penina M. 1972. "From the Old Left to the New: Radical Criticism in the 19405." American Quarterly 24 (December): 584-603. Golding, John. 1976-77. Arshile Gorky Paintings and Drawings. Oxford, UK: Museum of Modern Art. Goldwater, Robert. 1971. "Rothko's Black Paintings Г Art in America 59 (MarchApril): 58-63. Goodman, Cynthia. 1979. "Hans Hofmann as a Teacher.'Mrts Magazine 53 (April): 120-25. Greenberg, Clement. 1973. "Influences of Matisse.'Mrf International (Lugano) 17 (November): 28-30,39. Hadler, Mona. 1977. "William Baziotes: A Contemporary Poet-Painter.'Mrfo Magazine 51 (June): 102-10. Haftmann, Werner. 1971. Mark Rothko. Dusseldorf: Stàdtische Kunsthalle. Harrison, Charles. 1973. "Abstract Expressionism." Parts i and 2. Studio International 185 (January-February): 9-18,53-60. Hauptman, William. 1974. "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade." Artforum 12 (June): 39-41. Herrera, Hayden. 1976. "John Graham: Modernist Turned Magus." Arts Magazine 51 (October): 100-105. Hess, Thomas B. 1971. Barnett Newman. New York: Museum of Modern Art. . 1972. "Pinup and Icon." Art News Annual 38:223,228-33. Higgins, Andrew. 1971. "Clement Greenberg and the Idea of the Avant-Garde." Studio International 183 (October): 144-47. Hobbs, Robert C. 1975. "Motherwell's Concern with Death in Painting: An Investigation of His Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Including an Examination of His Philosophical and Methodological Considerations." Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. . 1976. "Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic? In Jiirgen Harten, Robert Motherwell. Dusseldorf: Stàdtische Kunsthalle. . 1979. "Re-review Possibilities? Art Criticism 1:96-103. Hobbs, Robert C., and Gail Levin. 1978. Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.

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679

Imdahl, Max. 1971. Barnett Newman: Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue HI. Stuttgart: Reclam. Johnson, Ellen. 1973. "Jackson Pollock and Nature." Studio International 185 (June): 257-62. Jordan, Jim. 1976. "Arshile Gorky at Crooked Run Farm." Arts Magazine 50 (March): 99-103. Jordan, Jim, Harry Rand, Isobel Grossman, Karlen Mooradian, Arshile Gorky, Hayden Herrera, and Alice Butler. 1975. Arshile Gorky: Drawings to Paintings. Austin: University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin. Judd, Donald. 1970. "Barnett Newman." Studio International 179 (February): 66-69. Kagan, Andrew. 1975. "Paul Klee's Influence on American Painting: New York School." Arts Magazine 49 (June): 54-59. . 1979. "Improvisations: Notes on Jackson Pollock and the Black Contribution to American High Culture" Arts Magazine 53 (March): 96-99. Kambartel, Walter. 1970. Jackson Pollock: Number32,1950. Stuttgart: Reclam. Karp, Diane. 1976. "Arshile Gorky's Iconography." Arts Magazine 50 (March):

82-85.

Kligman, Ruth. 1974. Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock. New York: William Morrow. Kokkinen, Eila. 1976. "John Graham During the 19405." Arts Magazine 51 (November): 99-103. Kozloff, Max. 1973. "American Painting During the Cold War." Artforum и (May): 43-54Krauss, Rosalind. I97ia. "Jackson Pollock's Drawings." Artforum 9 (January): 58-61. . I97ib. Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. . 1974. "Issues and Commentary: Changing the Work of David Smith." Art in America 62 (September-October): 30-34. . 1977. The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Garland Publishing. Kuspit, Donald. 1977. "Clyfford Still: The Ethics of Art." Artforum 15 (May): 32-40. . I978a. "Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still." Arts Magazine 52 (March): 120-25. . I978b. "Two Critics: Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg." Artforum 17 (September): 32-33. . I979a. Clement Greenberg: Art Critic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. . I979b. "To Interpret or Not to Interpret Jackson Pollock." Arts Magazine 53 (March): 125-27. Lader, Melvin P. 1978. "Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the 'Ingres Revival' in America." Arts Magazine 52 (March): 94-99. Landau, Ellen G. 1976. "The French Sources for Hans Hofmann's Ideas on the Dynamics of Color-Created Space." Arts Magazine 51 (October): 76-81. 680

Selected Bibliography

Langhorne, Elizabeth. 1977. "A Jungian Interpretation of Jackson Pollock's Art Through 1946." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. . 1979. "Jackson Pollock's ''The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle]" Arts Magazine 53 (March): 128-37. Levine, Edward M. 1971. "Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical Experience." Art Journal (Fall): 22-25. Macmillan, Duncan. 1979. "The Outsider: Gorky and America." Art International (Lugano) 23 (Summer): 104-6. MacNaughton^ Mary Davis. 1979. Adolph Gottlieb Pictographs, 1941-53. New York: Andre Emmerich Gallery. Mathews, Jane De Hart. 1976. "Art and Politics in Cold War America." American Historical Review 81 (February-December): 762-87. McCaughey, Patrick. 1970. "Clyfford Still and the Gothic Imagination." Artforum 8 (April): 56-61. . 1971. "Interpreting Abstract Expressionism." Jr¿ International (Lugano) 15 (April): 71-72. McClintic, Miranda. 1979. David Smith: The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. McCoy, Garnett, ed. 1973. David Smith. New York: Praeger. Moffett, Kenworth. 1972. Review of The Triumph of American Painting, by Irving Sandier. Art Quarterly 35, no. 3:313-15. Mooradian, Karlen. 1971. "The Philosophy of Arshile Gorky." Armenian Digest (USA). (September-October): 52-74. . 1978. Arshile Gorky Adoian. Chicago: Gilgamesh Press. Nemser, Cindy. 1973. "Lee Krasner's Paintings: 1946-49Г Artforum 12 (December): 61-65. . 1975. "The Indomitable Lee Krasner." Feminist Art Journal (Spring): 4-9. O'Connor, Francis Valentine, and Eugene Victor Thaw, eds. 1978. Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, 4 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. , eds. 1978. Jackson Pollock: New Found Works. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery. O'Doherty, Brian. 1973. American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art. New York: E. P. Dutton. O'Neill, John P., ed. 1979. Clyfford Still. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Harry N. Abrams. Polcari, Stephen. 1979a. "The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Mark RoUiko." Arts Magazine 54 (September): 124-34. . I979b. "Jackson Pollock and Thomas Hart Benton." Arts Magazine 53 (March): 120-24. Preble, Michael, Mona Hadler, and Barbara Cavalière. 1978. William Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition. Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum. Putz, Ekkehard. 1975. Jackson Pollock: Théorie undBilder. Hildesheim: G. Olms. Selected Bibliography

681

Quick, David Marvin. 1978. "Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman and Three of His Contemporaries: A Study of Content in Abstract Expressionism." Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa. Rand, Harry. 1976. "The Calendars of Arshile Gorky" Arts Magazine 50 (March): 70-80. . 1977. "Adolph Gottlieb in Context." Arts Magazine 51 (February): 112-36. Reiff, Robert. 1977. A Stylistic Analysis of Arshile Gorky's Art from 1943-1948. New York: Garland Publishing. Reise, Barbara. 1970. "The Stance of Barnett Newman." Studio International 179 (February): 49-64. Richardson, Brenda. 1979. Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, 1944-1969. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art. Robert, Henry Flood, ed. 1979. Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings, 1921-1956. Omaha: Joslyn Art Museum. Robert Motherwell: Choix de peintures et de collages: 1941-1977.1977. Paris: Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris. Robert Motherwell: Récent Work. 1973. Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum. Robertson, Bryan. 1973. "The Nature of Lee Krasner." Art in America 61 (November-December): 83-87. Rose, Barbara. 1975. American Art Since 1900: A Critical History, rev. ed. (1967; reprint: New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston). . 1976. "Arshile Gorky and John Graham: Eastern Exiles in a Western World." Arts Magazine 50 (March): 62-69. . 1977. "Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism." Arts Magazine 51 (February): 96-100. , ed. 19783. L'Atelier de Jackson Pollock. Paris: Macula/Pierre Brochet. . I978b. "Hans Hofmann: From Expressionism to Abstraction." Arts Magazine 53 (November): 110-14. . 1979. "Hans Namuth's Photographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth; Part i: Media Impact and the Failure of Criticism; Part 2: Number29,1950" Arts Magazine 53 (March): 112-16,117-19. Rosenberg, Harold. 1970. "The Teaching of Hans Hofmann." Arts Magazine 40 (December): 17-19. . 1971. Barnett Newman: Broken Obelisk and Other Sculptures. Seattle: Henry Art Gallery in association with University of Washington Press. . 1972. "Interview with Willem de Kooning." Art News 71 (September): 54-59. . 1974. Willem de Kooning. New York: Harry N. Abrams. . 1978. Barnett Newman. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Rosenblum, Robert. 1975. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. New York: Harper & Row. Rosenzweig, Phyllis. 1979. Arshile Gorky: The Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection, Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 682

Selected Bibliography

Rubin, David. 1979. "A Case for Content: Jackson Pollock's Subject Was the Automatic Gesture."ArtsMagazine 53 (March): 103-9. Rubin, William. 1979. "Pollock asjungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological Criticism." Parts i and 2. Art in America 67 (November-December): 104-23, 72-91. Sandier, Irving. 1970. The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism. New York: Praeger. . 1973. "Hans Hofmann: The Pedagogical Master." Jr¿ in America 61 (May): 48-57. . 1978. The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties. New York: Harper &, Row. . 1979. "The Influence of Impressionism on Jackson Pollock and His Contemporaries.'Mrfo Magazine 53 (March): 110-11. The Sculptures of De Kooning with Related Paintings, Drawings and Lithographs. 1977. London: Arts Council of Great Britain. Seldes, Lee. 1977. The Legacy of Mark Rothko. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Shapiro, David, and Cécile Shapiro. 1977. "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting." Prospects: An Annual of American Culture Studies 3: 175-214. Still, Clyfford. 1971. William Baziotes: Late Work, 1946-1962. New York: Marlborough. Stuckey, Charles S. 1977. "Another Side of Jackson Pollock.'Mrf in America 65 (November): 80-91. Sylvester, David. 1972. "Newman, in Conversation with David Sylvester." Listener (London) 88 (10 August): 169-70. Tagg, John. 1976. "American Power and American Painting: The Development of Vanguard Painting in the United States Since 1945." Praxis i (Winter): 56-79. Tucker, Marcia. 1973. Lee Krasner: Large Paintings. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Waldman, Diane. 1978a. Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: A Retrospective. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. . I978b. Willem de Kooning in East Hampton. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Wechsler, Jeffrey. 1977a. Surrealism and American Art, 1931-1947. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Art Gallery. . I977b. "Surrealism's Automatic Painting Lesson." Art News 76 (April): 44-47Welch, Jonathan. 1979. "Jackson Pollock's The White Angel and the Origins of Alchemy." Arts Magazine 53 (March): 138-41. Whitney Independent Study Program. 1975. Subjects of the Artists: New York Painting, 1941-1947. New York: Downtown Branch, Whitney Museum of American Art. Selected Bibliography

683

Wilkin, Karen, igyya. "Adolph Gottlieb: The Pictographs." Art International (Lugano) 21 (December): 27-33. . i9Jjb. Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs. Alberta: Edmonton Art Gallery. Wolfe, Judith. 1972. "Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery." Artforum 11 (November): 65-73. Wolfe, Tom. 1975. "Greenberg, Rosenberg and Flat." In The Painted Word, 44-71. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Wysuph, C. L. 1970. Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings. New York: Horizon. Yard, Sally. 1978. "Willem de Kooning's Women." Arts Magazine 53 (November): 96-101. The 1980s Abadie, Daniel, Dominique Bozo, William Rubin, Barbara Rose, and Hubert Damisch. 1982. Jackson Pollock. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou. Alloway, Lawrence, and Mary Davis MacNaughton. 1981. Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective. New York: The Arts Publisher in association with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Arshile Gorky (1904-1948). 1989. Madrid: Fundación Caja de Pensiones. Ashton, Dore. 1980. "On Harold Rosenberg." Critical Inquiry 6 (Summer): 615-24. . 1983. About Rothko. New York: Oxford University Press. Ashton, Dore, and Jack Flam. 1983. Robert Motherwell. New York: Abbeville Press in association with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Auping, Michael, ed. 1987'. Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Ausfeld, Margaret Lynne, and Virginia Mecklenberg. 1984. Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946-48. Montgomery, AL: Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. Baker, Kenneth. 1980. "Reckoning with Notation: The Drawings of Pollock, Newman, and Louis." Artforum 18 (Summer): 32-36. Barrett, William. 1982. "The Painters' Club." Commentary 73 (January): 42-54. Berger, Maurice. 1981. "Pictograph into Burst: Adolph Gottlieb and the Structure of Myth." Arts Magazine ьь (March): 134-39. Berkson, Bill. 1986. "Kline's True Colors" Art in America 74 (October): 38-45. Bowness, Alan. 1987. Mark Rothko, 1903-1970. London: Tate Gallery. Breslin, James E. B. i986."The Trials of Mark Rothko." representations 16 (Fall): 1-41. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 1984. "A Concrete History of Abstract Expressionism." Art in America 72 (March): 19-21. Buck, R. T. 1983. Robert Motherwell. New York: Abbeville Press. Buettner, Stewart. 1981. American Art Theory: 1954-1970. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Carmean, E. A., Jr. K)82a. "The Church Project: Pollock's Passion Themes." Art in America 70 (Summer): no-22. 684

Selected Bibliograph y

. igSsb. David Smith. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Cavalière, Barbara. 1980. "An Interview with Lee Krasner." Flash Art (Milan) nos. 94-95 (January-February): 14-16. . igSia. "Barnett Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimis: Building the 'Idea Complex.' " Arts Magazine 55 (January): 144-52. . K)8ib. "Possibilities II." Arts Magazine 55 (September): 104-7. Cernuschi, Claude R. 1986. "Mark Rothko's Paintings: A Question of Content." Arts Magazine 60 (May): 54-57. Champa, Kermit, Judith E. Tolnick, Ellen Lawrence, and Nancy R. Versaci. 1985. Flying Tigers: Painting and Sculpture in New York, ig^g-ig46. Providence: Daniel Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University. Chave, Anna C. 1983. Mark Rothko's Subjects. Atlanta: High Museum of Art. . I989a. Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction. New Haven: Yale University Press. . K)89b. "Mark Rothko—Subjects in Abstraction." Aspects of Modern Art 5 (November-December): 43-49. Clark, T.J. 1982. "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art." Critical Inquiry 9 (September): 139-56. . 1983. "Arguments about Modernism: A Reply to Michael Fried." In W. J. T. Mitchell, The Politics of Interpretation, 239-48. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Trinkett. 1985. The Drawings of David Smith. Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation. Clearwater, Bonnie. K)84a. Mark Rothko: Works on Paper. New York: Hudson Hills Press. . I984b. "Shared Myths: Reconsideration of Rothko's and Gottlieb's Letter to The New York Times? Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 1:23-25. Cogswell, James A., Jr. 1981. "The Figure as Affecting Presence in Abstract Expressionist Painting." New Mexico Studies in the Fine Arts, no. 6:12-20. Collins, Bradford R. 1984. "The Fundamental Tragedy of the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, or Robert Motherwell's Dilemma." Arts Magazine 59 (September): 94-97. 1987. "Clement Greenberg and the Search for Abstract Expressionism's Successor: A Study in the Manipulation of Avant-Garde Consciousness." Arts Magazine 61 (May): 36-43. Corlett, Mary Lee. 1987. "Jackson Pollock: American Culture, The Media and the Myth" Rutgers Art Review, no. 8:71-108. Cox, Annette. igSz.Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Craven, David. 1985. "The Disappropriation of Abstract Expressionism." Art Journal 8 (December): 499-515. Cummings, Paul. 1983. Willem de Kooning: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture. New

Selected Bibliography

685

York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Prestel-Verlag, Munich. Davies, Hugh, and Riva Castleman. 1983. The Prints of Bamett Newman. New York: Barnett Newman Foundation. De Duve, Thierry. 1983. "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?" Artforum 21 (September): 30-37. Dillenberger, John. 1983. "Theology and Abstract Expressionism." Religion and Intellectual Life 1 (Fall): 64-67. Duncan, Carol. 1989. "The MoMA's Hot Mamas." Art Journal 48 (Summer): 171-78. Exposition Willem de Kooning. 1984. Paris: Musée nationale d'art moderne. Firestone, Evan R. 1980. "Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick''and the Abstract Expressionists Г Arts Magazine 54 (March): 120-24. . 1981. "Color in Abstract Expressionism: Sources and Background for Meaning." Arts Magazine 55 (March): 140-44. . 1982. "James Joyce and the First Generation New York School." Arts Magazine 56 (June): 116-21. Foster, Stephen C. 1980. The Critics of Abstract Expressionism. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Frank, Elizabeth. 1983. Jackson Pollock. New York: Abbeville Press. Frascina, Francis, ed. 1985. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. New York: Harper & Row. From the Life of the Artist: A Documentary View of David Smith. 1982. Washington, DC: Archives of American Art and Smithsonian Institution Press. Fry, Edward F., and Miranda McClintic. 1982. David Smith: Painter, Sculptor, Draftsman. New York: Braziller in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Gaugh, Harry F. 1984. "De Kooning in Retrospect." Arts Magazine 58 (March): 90-95. . 1985. "Franz Kline—The Man and the Myths." Art News 84 (December): 61-67. . 1985-1986. Franz Kline: The Vital Gesture. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum. . 1986. "Reappraising the New York School." In An American Renaissance: Painting and Sculpture Since 1940, edited by Sam Hunter, 28-61. Fort Lauderdale: Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Gibson, Ann. 1981. "Regression and Color in Abstract Expressionism: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still." Arts Magazine 55 (March): 144-53. . 1983. "Painting Outside the Paradigm: Indian Space." Arts Magazine 57 (February): 92-104. . 1984. "Theory Undeclared: Avant-Garde Magazines as a Guide to Abstract Expressionist Images and Ideas." Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware. . 1987. "The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism." In Auping 1987,64-93.

686

Selected Bibliography

. K)88a. "Abstract Expressionism's Evasion of Language." Artjournal 47 (Fall): 208-14. . K)88b. "New Myths for Old: Redefining Abstract Expressionism: Editors' Statements I: Introduction." Art Journal 47 (Fall): 171-73. . ig88c. "Retracing Original Intentions: Barnett Newman and Tiger's Eye? Art International (Paris) 5 (Winter): 14-23. . 1989. "Norman Lewis in the Forties." In Norman Lewis: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction, 9-50. New York: Kenkelaba Galleries. Gibson, Eric. 1986. "Figures and Abstractions: The Work of Franz Kline." Studio International 199 (September): 20-25. Goodman, Cynthia. 1980. Hans Hofmann as a Teacher. Provincetown: Provincetown Art Association. . 1986. Hans Hofmann. Berkeley: University Art Museum in association with Abbeville Press, New York. Gordon, Donald. 1980. "Pollock's 'Bird^or How Jung Did Not Oner Much Help in Myth-Making." Art in America 68 (October): 43-53. Graham, F. Lanier. 1987. The Spontaneous Gesture: Prints and Books of the Abstract Expressionist Era. Canberra: Australian National Gallery. Green, Eleanor. igSj.John Grahan: Artist and Avatar. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection. Greenberg, Clement. 1980. "Clyfford Still." Arts Magazine 55 (October): 114-17. Guilbaut, Serge. 1980. "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America." Translated by T. Repeneck. October 15 (Winter): 61-78. . 1983. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Halasz, Piri. 1983. "Art Criticism (and Art History) in New York: The 19403 vs. the 19805." Parts 1-3: "The Newspapers"; "The Magazines"; "Clement Greenberg." Arts Magazine 57 (February, March, April): 91-97,64-73,80-88. Harris, Jonathan. 1988. "Mark Rothko and the Development of American Modernism 1938-1948." Oxford Art Journal 11, no. 1:40-42. Herbert, James D. 1984-85. "The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism." Telos (Winter): 178-97. . 1985. "The Political Origins of Abstract-Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Theoretical and Critical Writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg." Stanford Honors Essays in Humanities, no. 28. Hills, Patricia. 1984. Review of Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War. Archives of the American Art Journal 24, no.1:26-29. Hirsch, Sanford. 1981. Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective. New York: Arts Publisher in association with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Hirsch, Sanford, and April Kingsley. 1985. Adolph Gottlieb: Works on Paper. San

Selected Bibliography 687

Francisco: Art Museum Association of America in association with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Hobbs, Robert C. 1985. "Early Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism." Art Journal 45 (Winter): 299-302. Jordan, Jim, and Robert Goldwater. 1982. The Paintings ofArshile Gorky: A Critical Catalogue. New York: New York University Press. Kingsley, April. K)85a. "Adolph Gottlieb in the Fifties: Different Times Require Different Images." Arts Magazine 60 (September): 80-83. . K)85b. Adolph Gottlieb: Works on Paper. San Francisco: Art Museum Association of America. Kramer, Hilton. 1985. "American Art Since 1945: Who Will Write Its History?" New Criterion 3 (Summer): 1-9. Krauss, Rosalind. 1982. "Contra-Carmean: The Abstract Pollock." Art in America 70 (Summer): 121-31,155. Republished as "Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly" in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 222-42. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. "Jackson Pollock's Milky Way." Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts: 34-39. Kuspit, Donald. 1980. "Abstract Expressionism: The Social Contract." Arts Magazine 54 (March): 116-19. . 1987. "Arshile Gorky: Images in Support of the Invented Self." In Auping 1987,49-63. Kuthy, Sandor, and Ellen G. Landau. 1989. Lee Krasner-Jackson Pollock: Kunstlerpaare-Kunstlerfreunde. Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern. Lader, Melvin P. 1981. "Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century and the Surrealist Milieu in America, 1942-1947." Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware. . 1982. "Howard Putzel: Proponent of Surrealism and Early Abstract Expressionism in America." Arts Magazine 56 (March): 85-96. . 1984. "Arshile Gorky's The Artist and His Mother: Further Study of Its Evolution, Sources, and Meaning." Arts Magazine 58 (January): 96-104. . 1985. Arshile Gorky. New York: Abbeville Press. . 1988. "David Porter's Personal Statement: A Painting Prophecy" Archives of American Art Journal 28, no. 1:17-25. Lader, Melvin, and Fred Licht. 1987. Peggy Guggenheim's Other Legacy. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Landau, Ellen G. 1980. "The Fifties: Aspects of Painting in New York." Art Journal 40 (Fall-Winter): 387-89. . I98ia. "Lee Krasner: A Study of Her Early Career (1926-1949)." Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware. . K)8ib. "Lee Krasner's Early Career," Parts i and 2: " 'Pushing in Different Directions'"; "The 19405." Arts Magazine 56 (October-November): 110-122, 80-89.

688

Selected Bibliography

. 1983. " 'Space and Pictorial Life': Hans Hofmann's Smaragd Red and Germinating Yellow'." Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 72 (September): 310-22. . 1984. "Lee Krasner's Past Continuous" Art News 83 (February): 68-77. . 1988 "Jackson Pollock—l'équipée sauvage." Les Cahiers du musée national d'art moderne (Paris) 23 (Spring): 7-28. . 1989. Jackson Pollock. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Langhorne, Elizabeth. 1989. "Pollock, Picasso, and the Primitive.'Mrf History 12 (March): 66-92. Langhorne, Elizabeth, Irving Sandier, William Rubin, and David Rubin. 1980. "More on Rubin on Pollock.'Mrf in America 68 (October): 57-67. Leja, Michael. 1987. "The Formation of an Avant-Garde in New York." In Auping 1987,13-33. Lieberman, William, ed. 1982. The Last Sketchbook: Jackson Pollock. New York: Johnson Reprint. Lubar, Robert S. 1984. "Metaphor and Meaning in David Smith's Jurassic Bird" Arts Magazine 59 (September): 78-86. Mackie, Alwynne. 1989. Art/Talk: Theory and Practice in Abstract Expressionism. New York: Columbia University Press. Mándeles, Chad. 1981. "Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Structural Par aliéis Г Arts Magazine 56 (October): 139-41. Marcus, Stanley E. 1983. David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mark Rothko: The Seagram Mural Project. 1988. Liverpool, UK: Tate Gallery Liverpool. Mark Rothko's Harvard Murals. 1988. Cambridge, MA: Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard University Art Museums. Marter, Joan M. 1980-81. "Dorothy Dehner." Woman's Art Journal i (Fall-Winter): 47-50. . 1984. "Dorothy Dehner and David Smith: Their Decades of Search and Fulfillment." In Joan M. Marter and Judith McCandless, Dorothy Dehner and David Smith, 4-19. New Brunswick: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. Mattison, Robert S. 1981. "Two Decades of Graphic Art by Robert Motherwell." Print Collector's Newsletter 11 (January-February): 197-201. . 1982. " The Emperor of China: Symbols of Power and Vulnerability in the Art of Robert Motherwell During the 19403." Art International (Lugano) 25 (November-December): 9-14. . 1985. "A Voyage: Robert Motherwell's Earliest Works.'Mrfo Magazine 59 (February): 90-93. . 1987. Robert Motherwell: The Formative Tears. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. C . 1988. "Robert Motherwell's First Collages: A11 My Life I Have Been Obsessed with Death.' " Studies in Iconography 12:171-86.

Selecte d Bibliograph y

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Meier, Anthony P. 1984. "Jackson Pollock's Prints." Arts Magazine 58 (Summer): 136-37. Merkert, Jôrn. 1983. "Stylelessness as Principle: The Paintings of Willem de Kooning." In Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings, Sculpture, 115-31. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Metzger, Robert. 1989. Franz Kline: The Jazz Murals. Lewisburg, PA: Center Gallery, Bucknell University. Motherwell, Robert, Robert Bigelow, and John E. Scofield. 1980. Reconciliation Elegy. Geneva: Skira; New York: Rizzoli. Murry, Jesse. 1981. "Hans Hofmann's Use of Nature as Aesthetic Norm" Arts Magazine 55 (February): 105-109. Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith. 1989. Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. O'Brian, John, ed. 19863. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. i. Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. , ed. igSob. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O'Connor, Francis V. 1980. Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings: 1951-1953. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art. . 1988. "Two Methodologies for the Interpretation of Abstract Expressionism." Art Journal 47 (Fall): 222-28. O'Doherty, Brian. 1985. Rothko: The Dark Paintings, 1969-70. New York: Pace Gallery. Orton, Fred, and Griselda Pollock. 1981. "Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed." Art History 4 (September): 305-27. Phillips, Lisa. 1984. The Third Dimension: Sculpture of the New York School. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Polcari, Stephen. 1982. "The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Clyfford Still." Art International (Lugano) 25 (May-June): 18-35. . I988a. "Adolph Gottlieb's Allegorical Epic of World War II? Art Journal 47 (Fall): 202-207. . K)88b. Lee Krasner and Abstract Expressionism. New York: State University of New York at Stony Brook Gallery. . igSSc. "Mark Rothko: Heritage, Environment, and Tradition." Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2 (Spring): 32-63. . K)88d. "New Myths for Old: Redefining Abstract Expressionism: Editors' Statements II: Abstract Expressionism: 'New and Improved.' "Art Journal 47 (Fall): 174-79Potter, Jeffrey. 1985. To a Violent Grave: An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Rand, Harry. 1980. Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols. Montclair, NJ: Allanheld & Schram. 690

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Robert Mother-well: The Collaged Image. 1985. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. Robson, A. Deirdre. 1985. "The Market for Abstract Expressionism: The Time Lag Between Critical and Commercial Acceptance."Archives of American Art Journal 25, no. 3:19-23. . 1988. "The Avant-Garde and the On-Guard: Some Influences on the Potential Market for the First Generation Abstract Expressionists in the 19405 and Early 19505."Art Journal 47 (Fall): 215-21. Rodgers, Paul. 1980. "Towards a Theory/Practice of Painting: Abstract Expressionism and the Surrealist Discourse" Artforum 18 (March): 53-61. Rohn, Matthew L. 1987. Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock's Abstractions. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Rose, Barbara. К)8оа. "Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Lee Krasner." Partisan Review 47, no л: 82-92. . К)8оЬ. Photographing Pollock. New York: Agrinde. . 1981. Krasner/Pollock: A Working Relationship. East Hampton: Guild Hall and Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University. . 1983. Lee Krasner: A Retrospective. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; New York: Museum of Modern Art. . 1985. "Life on the Project: Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, and the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration." Partisan Review 52, no. 2:74-86. Rosenblum, Robert. 1981. Mark Rothko: Notes on Rothko's Surrealist Years. New York: Pace Gallery. Rosenzweig, Phyllis. 1980. The Fifties: Aspects of Painting in New York. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Roskill, Mark 1989. "Jackson Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, and Cubism: A Note." Arts Magazine 53 (March): 144. Rubin, William, and others. 1980. "Department of Jungian Amplification." Parts i and 2. Art in America 68 (October): 43-67. Rushing, W.Jackson. 1986. "Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism." In The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985, edited by Maurice Tuchman, 273-95. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum ofArt. . 1988. "The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea of Redemption in the Abstract Sublime." Art Journal 47 (Fall): 187-95. Sandier, Irving. 1983. Mark Rothko Paintings. New York: Pace Gallery. . 1988. "The Irascible Eighteen." In The Irascibles, n.p. New York: CDS Gallery. Sawin, Martica. 1988. " 'The Third Man,' or Automatism American Style." Art Journal 47 (Fall): 181-84. Schimmel, Paul, John Bernard Myers, Robert Rosenblum, В. Н. Friedman, and Robert M. Frash. 1984. Action/Precision: The New Direction in New York (1955-1960). Newport Beach, С A: Newport Harbor Art Museum. Selecte d Bibliograph y

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Golding, John. iQQO.Arshile Gorky, 1904-1948. London: Trustees ofWhitechapel Art Gallery. Goodman, Cynthia. 1990. Hans Hofmann. Munich: Prestel. Graham, F. Lanier. 1991. The Prints of Willem de Kooning: A Catalogue Raisonné. Paris: Baudoin Lebon éditeur. Guilbaut, Serge, ed. 1990. Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. . 1996. "L'avant-veille américaine: Barnett Newman, le Mexique et Part moderne." In Les "Vies" d'artistes, 253-70. Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Hadler, Mona. 1994. "World War II: Reverberations." Art Journal 53 (Winter): 6-14. . 1995. "Jazz and the New York School." In Representing Jazz, edited by Krin Gabbard, 247-59. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Lee. 1993. Elaine and Bill: Portrait of a Marriage; The Lives of Willem and Elaine de Kooning. New York: HarperCollins. Harris, Jonathan. 1993. "Abstract Expressionism and the Politics of Criticism." In Paul Wood, Francis Frascina, Jonathan Harris, and Charles Harrision, Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties, 42-73. New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Open University, London. Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood. 1993. Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing I deas. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Revised in 2000 as Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Harten, Jürgen, ed. 1995. Siqueiros/Pollock. Vols. 1-2. Dusseldorf: DuMont Verlag in association with Stàdtisches Kunsthalle Dusseldorf. Haskell, Barbara. 1999. "New American Abstraction: 1940-1999." In The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900-1950, 362-84. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art. Heller, Ben. 19903. Clyfford Still: Dark Hues/Close Values. New York: Mary Boone Gallery. . \§§ъЪ. Jackson Pollock: Black and Enamel Paintings. New York: Gagosian Gallery. Henderson, Harry. 1996. "Norman Lewis: The Making of a Black Abstract Expressionist, His Achievements and His Neglect." International Review of African-American Art 13, no. 3:58-64. Hirsch, Sanford. 1994. The Pictographs ofAdolph Gottlieb. New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Hobbs, Robert C. 1993. Lee Krasner. New York: Abbeville. . 1994. "Abstract Expressionism Rehamed." Art Journal 53 (Fall): 106-7. . 1999. Lee Krasner. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated. Jachec, Nancy. 1991. " 'The Space Between Art and Political Action': Abstract Expressionism and Ethical Choice in Postwar America, 1945-1950." Oxford Art Journal 14, no. 2:18-29.

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-. 1998- "Surrealism in the Americas." Oxford Art Journal 21, no.1:157-56. -. 1999-2000. "David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period" Third Text, no. 49 (Winter): 108-10. Jenkins, Janet, and Siri Engberg, eds. 1995. Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings; The igSos. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Jones, Amelia. 1998. "The Tollockian Performative' and the Revision of the Modernist Subject." In Body Art: Performing the Subject, 53-102. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jones, Caroline A. 1993. "Finishing School: John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego." Critical Inquiry 19 (Summer): 628-65. . 1996. "The Romance of the Studio and the Abstract Expressionist Sublime." In Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, 1-59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Karmel, Pepe. 1998. "Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth," in Varnedoe and Karmel 1998,87-137. . I999a. Jackson Pollock—Interviews, Articles, and Reviews. New York: Museum of Modern Art. . I999b. Jackson Pollock—New Approaches. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Kellein, Thomas. 1992. Clyfford Still, 1904-1980: The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections. Munich: Prestel. Kertess, Klaus. 1998. Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing. Santa Fe: Arena Editions in association with the Drawing Center. Distributed byD.A.P. Kimmelman, Michael. 1994. "Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War." Studies in Modern Art 4:38-55. Kingsley, April. 1992. The Turning Point: The Abstract Expressionists and the Transformation of American Art. New York: Simon &, Schuster. Kramer, Hilton. 1999. "Jackson Pollock and the New York School." Part 2. New Criterion 17 (February): 14-19. Krauss, Rosalind. 1993. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Landau, Ellen G. 1993. "A Rediscovered Drawing by Jackson Pollock." Drawing 15 (November-December): 78-79. . I995a. "Jackson Pollock und die Mexikaner." In Harten 1995,38-54. . I995b. Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Harry N. Abrams. . 1997-1998. "Channeling Desire: Lee Krasner's Collages of the Early 19505." Woman's Art Journal (Fall-Winter): 27-30. . 1999. "Jackson Pollock: Number 13,1950? In Classics of Modern Art, edited by Kyriakos Koutsommalis, 140-47,163. Turin: Umberto Allemandi in association with the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros, Greece.

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Prather, Maria, éd. 1994. Willem de Kooning: Paintings. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Przyblyski, Jeannene M. 1994. Review of Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 19405, by Michael Leja. Art Bulletin 76 (September): 349-51Puniello, Françoise S. 1996. Abstract Expressionist Women Painters: An Annotated Bibliography. London: Scarecrow. Rampley, Matthew. 1996. "Identity and Difference: Jackson Pollock and the Ideology of the Drip." Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 2:83-94. Ratcliff, Carter. 1996. The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art. New York: Farrar, Straus &, Giroux. Robson, A. Deirdre. 1995. Prestige, Profit, and Pleasure: The Market for Modern Art in New York in the 1940s and 19505. New York: Garland Publishing. Rosand, David, Arthur C. Danto, Stephen Addiss, and Mary Ann Caws. 1997. Robert Motherwell on Paper: Drawings, Prints, Collages. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University. Ross, Clifford. 1990. Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Rushing, W.Jackson. 1995. Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism. Austin: University of Texas Press. Saltzman, Lisa. 1998. "Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting." In Eric M. Rosenberg, Lisa Saltzman, and Timothy McElreavy, Friedel Dzubas: Critical Painting, 9-24. Medford, MA: Tufts University Gallery. Sandier, Irving. 1993. "Abstract Expressionism: The Noise of Traffic on the Way to Walden Pond." In American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1913-1993, 77-83. Munich: Prestel-Verlag in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Sawin, Martica. 1995. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schjeldahl, Peter. 1998. Willem de Kooning: Drawings and Sculptures. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery and Mitchell, Innés &, Nash. Schor, Gabriele. 1996. The Prints of Barnett Newman, 1961-1969. Translated by Melissa Thorson-Hause. Stuttgart: Hatje. Distributed by D.A.P. Shapiro, David, and Cécile Shapiro. 1990. Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shiff, Richard. 1994. "Water and Lipstick: De Kooning in Transition," in Prather 1994,38-50. Siegel, Jeanne. 1999. Painting After Pollock: Structures of Influence. New York: G&B Arts International. Sims, Lowery Stokes. 1992. "Myths and Primitivism: The Work of Wifredo Lam

Selected Bibliography

701

in the Context of the New York School and the School of Paris, 1942-1952." In Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952, 71-88. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem. . 1999. Hans Hofmann in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Smith, Candida N., Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Irving Sandier. 1999. The Fields of David Smith. Mountainville, NY: Storm King Art Center in association with Thames &, Hudson, New York. Solomon, Deborah. 1991. "Barnett Newman's Big Ideas." New Criterion 9 (March): 17-21. Spender, Matthew. 1999. From a High Place: A Life ofArshile Gorky. New York: A. A. Knopf. Spender, Matthew, and Barbara Rose, eds. 1994. Arshile Gorky and the Genesis of Abstraction: Drawings from the Early 19305. New York: Stephen Mazoh & Co. Distributed by University of Washington Press. Steiner, Robert. 1992. Toward a Grammar of Abstraction: Modernity, Wittgenstein, and the Paintings of Jackson Pollock. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz, eds. 1996. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Strick, Jeremy. 1994. The Sublime Is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman, Paintings and Drawings, 1944-1949. New York: PaceWildenstein. Sylvester, David. 1995. "The Birth of Woman 1Г Burlington Magazine 137 (April): 220-32. , ed. 1998. Arshile Gorky: Paintings and Drawings, 1929-1942. New York: Gagosian Gallery. Tashjian, Dickran. 1995. A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism ana the American Avant-Garde, 1920-1950. New York: Thames & Hudson. Terenzio, Stephanie. 1992. The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell. New York: Oxford University Press. Thistlewood, David, ed. 1993. American Abstract Expressionism. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press in association with the Tate Gallery Liverpool. Varnedoe, Kirk, and Pepe Karmel. 1998. Jackson Pollock. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Distributed by Harry N.Abrams. Wagner, Anne Middleton. 1993. "Krasner's Presence/Pollock's Absence." In Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, edited by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, 223-53. London: Thames & Hudson. . 1996. Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Waldman, Diane. 1994. Rothko in New York. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Wallis, Jonathan. 1999. " 'What's the Story?' Searching for Narrative in Abstract Expressionism." Oculus 2, no. 1:54-65. 702

Selecte d Bibliograph y

Weiss, Jeffrey, Mark Rosenthal, Jessica Stuart, John Gage, and Barbara Novak. 1998. Mark Rothko. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press. Wilkin, Karen. 1991. "Abstract Expressionism Revisited." New Criterion 9 (February): 28-34. Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet: The Women. 1990. New York: Pace Gallery. Winkenweider, Brian. 1990. "Art History, Sartre, and Identity in Rosenberg's America.'Mrf Criticism 13, no. 2:83-102. Yard, Sally. 1991. "The Angel and the Demoiselle: Willem de Kooning's ''Black Friday? " Record of the Art Museum of Princeton University 50, no. 2:2-25. Zilczer, Judith. 1993. Willem de Kooning: From the Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Insttitution; New York: Rizzoli. . 1998. "Identifying Willem de Kooning's Reclining Man" American Art 12 (Summer): 26-35. Zweit, Armin. 1999. Barnett Newman: Paintings, Sculpture, Works on Paper. Translated by John Brogden. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Distributed by D.A.P. 2000-2004 Baigell, Matthew. 2002. Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Barnett Newman: Cathedra. 2001. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum. Barnier, Aurélie. 2000. "Une revue de l'expressionisme abstrait Américaine: Possibilities (1947-1948)." Les cahiers du musée national d'art moderne (Paris) 71 (Spring): 105-21. Butler, Cornelia, and Paul Schimmel. 2002. Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art in association with Princeton University Press. Carmean, E. A., Jr. 2002. Coming to Light: Avery, Gottlieb, Rothko, Provincetown Summers, 1957-1961. New York: Knoedler. Carrier, David. 2002. "Willem de Kooning: The Artist as Artwriter." In Willem de Kooning, 30-53. Madrid: Institut Valencia d'Art Modern and Fundación "la Caixa." Caws, Mary Ann. 2003. Robert Motherwell: With Pen and Brush. London: Reaktion. Cohn, Marjorie B. 2002. Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art. Edited by Sarah B. Kianovsky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums; New Haven: Yale University Press. Corral, Maria, and Santiago B. Olmo. 2000. Guerrero-De Kooning: La sabiduría del color. Granada: Centro José Guerrero, Disputación de Granada. Demetrion, James T., éd. 2001. Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960. Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in association with Yale University Press. Selected Bibliography

703

Dessins de David Smith: Un choix de Alain Kirili. 2003. Paris: Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. Dijkstra, Bram. 2003. American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920-1950. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Columbus Museum of Art. Engberg, Siri. 2003. Robert Motherwell: The Complete Prints, 1940-1991; Catalogue Raisonné. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. Distributed by Hudson Hill Press. Fineberg, Jonathan. 2000. Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Frank, Elizabeth. 2002. Adolph Gottlieb: Vertical Moves. New York: PaceWildenstein. Franks, Pamela. 2002. The Tiger's Eye: The Art of a Magazine. New York: Yale University Press. Frascina, Francis. 2000. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. 2d ed. London: Routledge. Galenson, David W. 2002. "Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest Modern American Painter? A Quantitative Investigation." Working Paper 8830. National Bureau of Economic Research, Washington, DC. http://www.nber.org/papers/w883O. Golding, John. 2000. Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harris, Jonathan. 2000. " 'Stuck in the Post?' Abstract Expressionism, T. J. Clark, and Modernist History Painting." In History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art, edited by David Green and Peter Seddon, 18-29. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Harrison, Helen. 2000. Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. Helfenstein, Josef. 2002. Louise Bourgeois: The Early Works. Champaign, IL: Krannert Art Museum. Distributed by University of Washington Press. Herrera, Hayden. 2003. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Herskovic, Marika. 2000. New York School: Abstract Expressionists: Artists Choice by Artists; A Complete Documentation of the New York Painting and Sculpture Annuals, 1951-1957. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New York School Press. . 2003. American Abstract Expressionism of the 19505: An Illustrated Survey. Franklin Lakes NJ: New York School Press. Hills, Patricia. 2001. "19405 to Mid-1950s." In Modern Art in the USA: Issues and Controversies ofthezoth Century, 140-75. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Hilton, Tim. 2000. "Clement Greenberg."New Criterion 19 (September): 12-18. Hirsch, Sanford, ed. 2OOia. Adolph Gottlieb. Madrid: Fundación Juan March: Arte y Ciencia. . 20Oib. Adolph Gottlieb: Una retrospectiva [a survey exhibition]. Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio González in association with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.

704

Selected Bibliography

. 20O2. The Beginning of Seeing: Tribal Art and the Pictographs ofAdolph Gottlieb. New Britain, CT: New Britain Museum of Art. Hoving, Kirsten A. 2002. "Jackson Pollock's Galaxy: Outer Space and Artist's Space in Pollock's Cosmic Paintings Г American A rt 16 (Spring): 82-93. Humblet, Claudine. 2003. La nouvelle abstraction américaine, 1950-1970. Milan: Skira and Paris: Seuil. Jachec, Nancy. 2000. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940-1960. New York: Cambridge University Press. Karmel, Pepe. 2002. "Arshile Gorky: Anatomical Blackboard." Master Drawings 40 (Spring): 9-23. Kertess, Klaus. 2000. Willem de Kooning: In Process. Fort Lauderdale, FL: Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. Landau, Ellen G. 2OO2a. "Jackson Pollock: The Body and Nature." In Maroni and Bigatti 2002,73-90. . 20O2b. "Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner: The 'Erotics of Influence.' " In Maroni and Bigatti 2002,173-88. Lee, Janie C., and Melvin P. Lader. 2003. Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of Drawings: New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams. Lieber, Edvard. 2000. Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio. New York: Harry N. Abrams. MarkRothko. 2000. Barcelona: Fundaciójuan Miró. Mark Rothko. 2001. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz in association with the Fondation Beyeler. Mark Rothko and the Lure of the Figure: Paintings, 1933-1946.2000. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art. Mark Rothko: The Realist Years, Selected Works. 2001. New York: PaceWildentstein. Maroni, Monica, and Bigatti, Giorgio, eds. 2002. Jackson Pollock, the Irascibles, and the New York School. Milan: Skira editore in association with Centro Italiano per le Arti e la Cultura and Musei Civic i Venezia. O'Connor, Francis V. 2001-2002. "The Scholarly Potential of Jackson Pollock's Studio Floor." IFAR Journal 4, no. 4; 5, no. i: 41-43. On the Sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell. 2001. Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim; New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications. Peggy and Kiesler: The Collector and the Visionary. 2004. Venice, Italy: Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Preble, Michael, ed. 2004. William Baziotes. Milan: Skira. Richardson, Brenda. 2001. Willem de Kooning Vellums. New York: Mitchell-Innes 8c Nash in collaboration with Matthew Marks Gallery. Sims, Lowery Stokes. 2002. Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982. Austin: University of Texas Press. Shiff, Richard, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, and Heidi Colsman-Freyberger. 2004.

Selected Bibliography

705

Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, edited by Ellyn Childs Allison. New York: Barnett Newman Foundation and New Haven: Yale University Press. Stevens, Mark, and Annalyn Swan. 2004. De Kooning: An American Master. New York: A. A. Knopf. Temkin, Ann, Richard Shiff, Suzanne Penn, and Melissa Ho, eds. 2002. Barnett Newman. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art. Tenenbaum, Stacy. 2001. "The Triumph of'The New American Painting': MoMA and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy." In Artists and Patrons in Post-war Britain: Essays by Postgraduate Students at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. White, Anthony, ed. 2002. Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia. Distributed by Thames 8c Hudson. Wilkin, Karen. 2000. David Smith: Two into Three Dimensions. Miami Beach: Grassfield Press. . 2003. Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective. Naples, FL: Naples Museum of Art in association with George Braziller, New York. William Baziotes: The Poetic Spirit. 2000. Youngstown, OH: Butler Institute of American Art. Williams, Reba White. 2001. "The Prints of Lee Krasner." Print Quarterly 18, no. 4: 396-413. . 2002. "Abstract Expressionist Prints." Print Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June): 212-14. Yohe, James, ed. 2002. Hans Hofmann. New York: Rizzoli. Zucker, Steven. 2001. "Confrontations with Radical Evil: The Ambiguity of Myth and the Inadequacy of Representation." Art History 24 (June): 379-400. Zweit, Armin, and Volkmar Essers. 2003. Jackson Pollock: Works from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and European Collections. Dusseldorf: Kherer Verlag Heidelberg, in association with Kunstsammlung Norderheim-Westfalen.

706

Selected Bibliography

Index Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (Ross), ix, 1-2 "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments" (Albright-Knox), xi, 3,50,52-53,59,83-84П9 Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record (Shapiro and Shapiro), ix, 1-4 "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years" (Whitney), 34-37 "Abstract Expressionism: Idea and Symbol" (University of Virginia), 37 "Abstract Expressionism: Other Dimensions" (Rutgers), 56,69 Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (Gibson), 62,69-70,115-116, Ш1286-88 Abstract Expressionist dissertations, 5, 12-13,34,59,98-99Ш35, 10111165, 112П258,120П328 Abstract Imagists, 20,33,50,52,245,248 Abstract Painting—Background and American Phase (Hess), 13,230-31 "Abstract and Surrealist Art in America" (Mortimer Brandt Galleries), 7,86n28, 87пзо, 150 Action Painting, 8,13,16-18,21,66, 74-75,93n8o, 199,214,22i, 225, 246-47,565,654 Adorno, Theodor, 470-71 African American artists, 69-70,510, 514-23 Alfieri, Bruno, 17-18,92-93nn69 and 75 Allentuck, Marcia Epstein, 35

Alloway, Lawrence, 7,24-25,28,47-48, 295,303,313,375 Alston, Charles, 70 American Abstract Expressionism (Thistlewood), 59,69,8зп4 "American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists" (Guggenheim), 22,30,32, 97ni23,245,248 "American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist" (National Gallery of Art), 33,39-43 passim Anderson, Wayne, 40 Anfam, David, 59-60, Ю9П233,580 Arnason, H. H., 20,22,30,32,48,97Ш23,

245 Art of This Century Gallery, 2,17,62, ИОП245,416-17,584 "Art of This Century: The Women" (Pollock-Krasner House), 62, non245 Ashton, Dore, 9-10,34-35,47,244,517, 520,523 Asian influence on Abstract Expressionism, 207 Auping, Michael, xi, 3-4,50,53,59, 72-73,84ШО automatism, 36,131,183,219,265,283, 334,564 Baigell, Matthew, 50,72-73, Ю5~6п202,

615 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 113^64,512 Balakian, Peter, 73-74 Bannard, Walter Darby, 48 707

Barber, Fiona, 65 Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 19,45-46,10311181, 164,220,254,384,393,395,543,546, 550 Bataille, Georges, 68,78,11411278,650, 655 Battcock, Gregory, 31 Baziotes, William, xi, 6,33,36,81,152, 155,161,251-255 passim, 264-65, 269-70,273,281-82,285-88 passim, 416-19 passim, 443,446,450,461,467, 469,493,5^2-23,634; Works: Night Mirror, fig. 2 Beats, 16,19,92067 Belgrad, Daniel, 69 Benedict, Ruth, 61,429-33 Benton, Thomas Hart, 35,113^67,132, 286,306,446 Betty Parsons Gallery, 21-23,50,63, 306-7,315,320,417-18,423,427,434, 455,468,544 biomorphism, 24,32,49,250-55,321,428,

495,635 Bloom, Harold, 584,649 Bois, Yve-Alain, 68,649 Bolton Landing, 11,29,63-64,165, 626, 629-40 passim Bourgeois, Louise, 42-43,64, Ю2пш6871,164,180-81,447,450,460-61,473; Works: Quarantania, fig. 18 Breton, André, 35,270,385 Brooks, James, 164,403-4 Brown, Milton, 72 Brustein, Robert, 16-17 Buber, Martin, 619-22 Budnick, Dan: photo of D. Smith, fig. 5 Buettner, Stewart, 56 Bultman, Fritz, 402,428 Burke, Edmund, 137,240-41,318-19,462 Burke, Kenneth, 443,462-66 passim Busa, Peter, 24,36,280-83 Butler, Judith, 65 Byzantine art: parallels with Abstract Expressionism, 26-27,95nio6 Campbell, Joseph, 61,447,493~94 708

Index

Carmean, E. A., Jr., 33,40-42,55,645 Cassirer, Ernst, 47,361,372,447 Cateforis, David, 65 Cavalière, Barbara, 33 Cedar Bar, 30,166,627 Centre Georges Pompidou, 53-54,68,

645 Cernuschi, Claude, 48,51 Champa, Kermit, 61 Charles Egan Gallery, 17,389,417,517 Chave, Anna C., 50-51,67, io6n2O5, 11Ш249 Chipp, Herschel В., 2,567 С.LA. and Abstract Expressionism, 75 Clark, T. J., 44,57-58,65,77-79, io8n224, 119ппз25-2б,535,б55 Club, The, 30,90П54, H5n286,166,229, 232-33,236 Coates, Robert M., 7,86n28,199 Cockroft, Eva, 45,75-76 Cold War politics and Abstract Expressionism, 45,62,78, ЮЗПШ77-78, 104Ш84,338-44,391-95 passim, 415, 511-12,516,535,537,561 College Art Association 1986 Abstract Expressionist panel, 3,50,56 Collins, Bradford, 46-47,77, H9n3i8 color in Abstract Expressionism, 47-49, Ю4Ш88,322,362,465,649 Color Field Painters, 20,32,47,49,321, 573 Communism, n8n3O9,384-90,520-21, 632 Cone, Jane Harrison, 29, дбппз, Conwill, Kinshasha Holman, 70 Corn, Wanda, 58 Cox, Annette, 45-46,56,72 Craven, David, 70,75-76,510 Crehan, Hubert, 71, n6n290 Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, 19, 26-28,35,40,65,201-14 passim, 248, 257-63 passim, 367,583,634,646-47

Dabrowsky, Ivan. See John Graham Dali, Salvador, 251,255,266-67,277,280

Damisch, Hubert, 470-71,474 Davis, Stuart, 12,154,166,213,264-65, 416,418-19, 629 De Kooning, Elaine. See Kooning, Elaine de De Kooning, Willem. See Kooning, Willem de De Man, Paul, 63, ИШ249,454,457,472 De Saussure, Ferdinand. See Saussure, Ferdinand de DeCarava, Roy, 70 Dehner, Dorothy, 42,63-64,10211167, 111-12, n25i, 166,625-41; Works: Abstraction, pi.8, Country Living (Bird of Peace), 632, fig. 22 Delaney, Beauford, 70 Dewey, John, 8 Dijkstra, Bram, 119-20, n327 Dinesen, Isak, 572-73 Downtown Gallery, 417-18 Duncan, Carol, 64-65 Z>yn,44,50 Dzubas, Friedel, 567-68 Echaurren, Roberto Matta. See Matta Ehrenzweig, Anton, 366-68,370,374-75 Elderfield, John, 562 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 314,374,618-19 European literature: influence on Abstract Expressionism, 47-48,173, 326-33,336,399-410,446,466,493 European philosophy: influence on Abstract Expressionism, 48-50,137,194, 334,422-36,520 Existentialism, 32,221,334,619,622 Exquisite Corpse, 284,467 Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, 44,146-47 Ferber, Herbert, 40, Ю2Ш70,313,444, 447-48,454-55,459,461,464,470-71, 618 Fergusson, Harvey, 62 film noir, 62,64, Ю9П240,531 Fineberg, Jonathan, 38

Finkelstein, Louis, 11-12,14,89^7 Firestone, Evan, 48,399 Flam, Jack, 47 "Flying Tigers: Painting and Sculpture in New York, 1939-1946" (Brown University), 61, Ю9П236 Foster, Stephen, 56-57 Foster, Susan Leigh, 499-500 Foucault, Michel, 61,77,113^69,531-32 Francis, Sam, 223-24,567-68 Frankenstein, Alfred, 68 Frankenthaler, Helen, 23,67,107n2i6, И4П273,562-73 passim Frascina, Francis, 1-2,56-57,75,8зп4 Frazer, James, 61,432,435,496, 501, 584-85 Freke, David, 37-38 Freud, Sigmund, 61,68, 9911151, 252,294, 336,350,356,374,399,401,447-50, 460,467,494,650 Fried, Michael, 27-28,47~48, 57~5$, 67, 95Ш09,9бппз, ю8п224,256,316, 569,652-53 Friedman, В. H.,32,9in66,294,402,626 Fuller, Peter, 46 Galerie Maeght, 9,14 Geldzahler, Henry, 30-31,115^85 gender issues in Abstract Expressionism, 62-63,65-71 passim, 79, ii4nn27i-73, 115Ш1286-87, ii6n288,549-50,56075,625-26 Gibson, Ann, 3-6,48-49,52-53,58, 62-63,69-71, ii5nn286-87,11611288,

515 Goldwater, Robert, 18,42,232,320,544 Goodnough, Robert, 10,12,14,42,66,159 Goossen, E. C., 56,316,461,563-64,566 Gorky, Arshile, 7,35,39,41,73-74, iomi58, Ю7П216, и8пзо7,125,151, 166,183,201-2,206,224,253,255,265, 269-73 passim, 286-87,346,352-58, 393,447-48,460,469,564-66,629; Works: Artist and His Mother, 39,74, 353, fig. 17; Plow and the Song, 39, pi. 6

Index

709

Gottlieb, Adolph, 32,155,204-5,245~54 passim, 287,344,388,405,422,428, 447,459-61,471,473,490-95 passim, 502-5,523,527-30 passim, 540,543, 617,629; joint letter with Rothko to New York Times, 5,9,22-23,44,72, 871132,94*196,11711301,146,450,452, 530; other statements on art, 5,7,9,33, 44,49,61,72,75,160; pictographs, Ю5П207,151,208,315-16,405,450, 453,492-93,501,504; Works: Alkahest of Paracelsus, fig. 9; Thrust, 29, pi. 3 Graham, John (Ivan Dabrowsky), 35-36, 50,283,298,346-58,429,459; "Primitive Art and Picasso," 298; relationships with Abstract Expressionist artists, 35,166,299,626-31 passim; System and Dialectics of Art, 35,49, 142-46,346-49,355; Works: Apotheosis, fig. 16; Two Sisters, 40,348-51,

356 Graham, Martha, 61,489-505 Graves, Morris, 8,155,213,450 Greenberg, Clement, ix, 6-8,19-21,24-30 passim, 32-36 passim, 42-48 passim, 57-58, 61, 67,70-78 passim, 8зппз-4, 84nio, 95-96nio9, дбппз, 316,338, 343,365-70 passim, 383-87,390-96, 404,442,469-71,513,546,564-65, 569,600; Art and Culture, 20,93п8з, 552,561; " 'American-Type' Painting," 20-21,24,94n88,198,263,341,514, 550-52; "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," 20, 57,90П72,386-87; Je wishness of, 72, 93п8з, Ii6-i7n295; on de Kooning, 17, 65,202-3,213,549; on Newman, 21, 71,206,210-12,315; on Pollock, 10,20, 88n40,205-6,212,304,307,315,393, 550,554,653,658; ; on Post-Painterly Abstraction, 23,67 84nio; rivalry with Rosenberg, 9,16-21, допбб, 93n8o, 214,654; on Rothko, 365,370; on D. Smith, 29-30,9бшш6-П7,97nii9, 363,393 Grippe, Peter, 40,444,447,450,453

710

Index

Grohmann, Will, 222 Gubar, Susan, 572-73 Guggenheim Museum, 20,28,32,35,41, 301 Guggenheim, Peggy, 2,7,17,62-63,66, 77,1Ю-ПП245,138,201,265,272, 282-87 passim, 300,389,416,584,648 Guilbaut, Serge, 44-45,59~6o, 75~76, I03ni8i Guston, Philip, xi, 233 Haftmann, Werner, 72 Halpert, Edith, 418 Hare, David, 33 Harris, Jonathan, 59 Harrison, Charles, 2-3,46,95ШО5 Harrison, Jane, 584-87 Hartigan, Grace, 220,223,249,562 Hauptman, William, 45 Hayter, Stanley William, 42 Hegel, Georg W. E, 28,129,137,194,370, 374,425,462,465,535-36 Henderson, Joseph L., 37,293,298,302, 304-5 Hess, Thomas В., 27,256,406; Abstract Painting—Background and American Phase, 13,230-31; on de Kooning, 14, 40,65,90nn57-58,172-80,517,594, 597,599,605; on Newman, 50,401, 615-17; panels at The Club, 229,233,

235 Hobbs, Robert, 33,73, non243,324 Hofmann, Hans, xi, 7,10,85n26,86n28, 93-94n84,155,159,184,200,203,205, 246,258,389,416-19 passim, 522, 536-37,540,543,548,552-54; as teacher, 20,34,9911140,282,467,617 Hook, Sidney, 530 Hudson, Andrew, 32 Hunter, Sam, 56,408 Iconograph, 5,460 Impressionism: influence on Abstract Expressionism, 21,28,35,8gn47,208-9, 248-49,550

Indian (Native American) art: influence on Abstract Expressionism, 49-50,54, 136,299,302-4,314,422-36,458,460, 493,520 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 40,173, 203,346-58 "The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism" (Newport Harbor), 56, Ю7~8п223 "Intrasubjectives" (Kootz), 8,88пз6, 154-55, i64 Irascibles, 2,32,34,97^26,99^39; %i It Is, 13,81,232 Jachec, Nancy, 75-76 Jakobson, Roman, 52 Janis, Sidney, 7,77,86n29,87пзо, 150-52, 420,545 Jewell, Edward Alden, 8-9,23,44, 870132-33,136,395,530 Jewishness of Abstract Expressionism, 15, 29,50,71-72, ii6nn294-95,615-23 Jones, Amelia, 66 Jones, Caroline, 10,76-77 Jorn,Asger,548,553 Joseph, Ronald, 70 Joyce, James, 48,58,61,399~4Ю, 492,494 Julian Levy Gallery, 267,280 Jung, Carl Gustav, 5-6,32,35,293-310, 350,399,423-46 passim, 435,447~48, 496; influence on Abstract Expressionism, 5,32,35,37-38,49-50,52,54, 60,85П25, ЮОШ51,293-312,426,428, 435,449,467,493-94,606,645 Kagan, Andrew, 68-69 Kamrowski, Gerome, 36,264-65,269-70, 273,280-81,283 Kandinsky, Wassily, 35,189,200-1,203, 205,208,212,223,229,232,251,259, 287,324,362,418,465,564-65 Kant, Immanuel, 137,240-41,324,462 Kaplan, Louis, 72 Kaprow, Allan, 10-11,13,181,649 Karmel, Pepe, i, 68,82ni, 646,657

Kline, Franz, xi, 9,59,67, допбб, 188, 206-7,224,233,248,269,321-22,500, 521,540,544,570; Works: New York, New York, fig. 3 Kooning, Elaine de, 11, nonn243~44, 165-71,233,517,522-23,595,597, 603-7 passim; fig. 23 Kooning, Willem de, 12,22,35,41,54, 67-71 passim, 84-5Ш9, допбб, И9П324,155,159,163, i84,223,233, 247-50,258,281,283,352-58 passim, 372,392,396,419,444,447,46i, 469, 473-74,499,516-20,548,594-607, 629,637; fig. 23; "De Kooning Paints a Picture," 13-14,172-80; Greenberg on, 17,65,202-3,213; Rosenberg on, 13,16; Works: Black Friday, 70, П2П254, fig. 25; Woman 1,14,64-65, 9on58,i72-8o, 460,540; pi. i; Woman series, 14,39,53, iomi62,112,172-80, 257-58,448,472,539,596-6o6 Kootz, Samuel, 8,77,87^3,88пз6, 154-55,287,393,521 Kozloff, Max, 18-19,44-45,344,368, 372-73 Kramer, Hilton, 20,34,46 Krasner, Lee (Lee Krasner Pollock), x, 28, 34-37 passim, 41,53,63-64,73,75,79, 9опб5,93п84,9бпш, 9901137-39, иоп245, итп248-49,3б-39,282, 294,306-7,402,447,4бо, 465,467, 471-72,495,499-502,562,625-27, 645-66; fig. 4; Works: Eye Is the First Circle, fig. 27; "Little Images," 34, 55-56,73,473-74; Untitled (Little Image), fig. 14 Krauss, Rosalind, 78,9бппз, 11401274 and 279, Ii5n28o, 405,627; on Pollock, 55,67-68,645-60; on D. Smith, 4i,45i Kuspit, Donald, 46-48,54,56,73, 10401189-90, Ю5П195,361,623 Lader, Melvin, 40,346 Landau, Ellen G., 55, ШП245

Index

711

Langer, Susanne, 445,447-49 Langhorne, Elizabeth, 37-38,54 Lassaw, Ibram, 40,447,630 Latin American art and Abstract Expressionism, 75,510-14 Leen, Nina, 2,32,9811127,99Ш39 Leja, Michael, 59,61,63,66,71,75, Ю9П238,1ЮПП239 and 243-44,527 Levin, Gail, 34-35 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 52,58,61,403 Levy, Julian, 263,266 Lewis, Norman, 69-70,75,104ni84, 115П286, n6n288,133,10Ч, 514-16, 521-23; Works: Klu Klux, 69; Mumbo Jumbo, 69,515, fig. 24 Life magazine, 2,10,32,77,88n40, П2п253,549,5б2,5б5 Lippard, Lucy, 407,594 Lipton, Seymour, 40,444,447~48,453, 460,499,501 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 38,326-33,336, 399 Louis, Morris, 23,67,94n85,257,368,

565-69 Lubar, Robert, 449 Luria, Rabbi Isaac, 50,615-16,621-23 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 50 Mainardi, Patricia, 80 Manheim, Ralph and Mary, 307,402 Marian Willard Gallery, П5П286,626, 636,640 Marter, Joan M., 63-64, ШП250,625 Marxism, 15,20,35,43,46,57,75,78, Ii8n309,11911325,129,192,267, 383-87 passim, 390 Marxist interpretations of Abstract Expressionism^, 61,75,78, io8n226, 543-57,546 Masson, Andre, 131,200,205,208,251-52, 268,274,282,285-87,648 Matisse, Henri, 11,47,161,177,200, 203-4,211,238,305,309,391,418,422, 469,543,550,553,587 Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren), 24,36, 201,252,263-85 passim, 467 712

Index

Matthews, Jane de Hart, 45 Mattison, Robert, 46-47 Matulka, Jan, 627-29,634 Maxwell Galleries, 37 McCarthy, Joseph, 45,339,343,538,547, 554 McCaughey, Patrick, 33,98ni3i Melville, Herman, 15,48,330,399 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 30,32,40,

99Ш39,340,419,527 Mexican art and Abstract Expressionism, 35,205,285-86,296,298 Michelson, Annette, 19 Minturn, Kent, 64,1ЮП24О, П2П257 Miró, Joan, 35,37,39,131,133,150-53, 184,189,200-2,212,232,251-54 passim, 273,284-85,289 Modern Artists in America, 5,42,159,164 Modern Man literature, 61-62,527-33 modernism, 26-28,57,59,72,8зпз, 95Ш05,9бпю9,535~3б, 539,541, 556,561,587,652 Moffett, Kenworth, 28,33,568 Molleda, Mercedes, 220 Mondrian, Piet, 21,138,162-63,177,197, 200,208,211-14 passim, 232,244,347, 443,469 Monet, Claude, 21,35,208-9,365 Mooradian, Karlen, 74, ioini58 Morris, Robert, 67,649-51,655-56 Mortimer Brandt Gallery, 7,86n28, 150-51,389 Motherwell, Robert, 5-7,12,24,29,33, 36-37,41,44,47-49,53,75-76,79,81, Ю4Ш88,151,155,160,163-64,184, 204,245-52 passim, 267-70,276-88, 300,324-37,385,400,404,410,417, 446-47,465,471-73,521,529,563, 625-26; "Modern Painters'World," 44, ЮЗШ74,129,514,530; Possibilities editorial statement, 6,9,434-44, Ю2-ЗШ73,153-54; Works: Elegies to the Spanish Republic, 29,38,46-47, Ю4Ш84,224,324,326,328-37,519, fig. 13; Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 38,47; pi. 5

Murray, Gilbert, 584-85 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 12,27, 45,49-50,64,80,10511199,135,257, 305,314,296,340-43,396,416,419, 493,601,638; "15 Americans," 6,171, 308; International Council, 18-19,342; "New American Painting," 18-19,45; Pollock retrospectives, i, 28,68,80, ЮО-1Ш54,646,649; " Trimitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," 49, Ю5Ш99 Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 35, 265,301 Myers, John Bernard, 24 myth, 5,47,58,60-61,127-28,139, l6 252-53,3 -i7,321,422-25 passim, 428,435-36,493-94,501-2,504,529 "Myth-Making: Abstract Expressionist Painting from the United States" (Tate Liverpool), 59-6o, 69,8зп4 Naifeh, Steven, 54,60 Namuth, Hans: photo of W. and E. de Kooning, 64, fig. 23; photo of B. Newman and B. Parsons, fig. 7; photo of J. Pollock and L. Krasner, fig. 4; photos ofJ. Pollock, 10,16,53-54,68,76, Ю6-7П213,550,565,646,650,656 New Iconography 5 Newman, Arnold, ю Newman, Barnett, 20-23,28,32-33,37, 41,44,48-49,53-54,61,84nnio and 19,99Ш39,244-48,251,273,288, 313-22,388-89,394,400-1,408, 422-36,447,453,460-63,468-70, 495,527-30,545,55i; %• 7; Greenberg on, 21, 71,206, 210-12,315; "Ideographic Picture," 23-24,50,135, 314-15,427,455-48 passim; Jewishness of, 29, 50, 71-72; 105-6П202, n6n290, И7П299,615-23; "Northwest Coast Indian Painting," 50,423,427, 432; other statements on art, 6-7,22, 30-31,76,85-86п2б, 94П96, юзш75, 12Ш332,159,54,530; "Sublime Is Now," 95Ш02, Ю5П200,137,545,618;

Works: Broken Obelisk., 71, fig. 26; Gea, 428,435,456; Onement 1-Й, 50,243, 317,435,461-62,616; Stations of the Cross, 28,50,319-21, fig. 12; Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 23-25,52,71,243, 462-63, pi. 2 "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970" (Metropolitan Museum of Art),30,ii5n285 "New York School: The First Generation" (LACMA),30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ю, 48,50, io6n205, 423-36 Noguchi, Isamu, iomi63,490,493~95, 503 Noland, Kenneth, 23,27-30 passim, 67, 94n85,95-96nio9,257,565,567,626

O'Connor, Francis V., 28,35,38,55, 851123 O'Hara, Frank, 14,550 Oldenburg, Claes, 54,66,9in65 Olitski, Jules, 27-28,95Ш09,257,567 Onslow-Ford, Gordon, 36,279 Ortega y Gasset, José, 8,154,460 Orton, Fred, 45,74-75, n8n309 Ossorio, Alfonso, 69,307-8,402-3,550, 656 Paalen, Wolfgang, 50,279 "Paints a Picture" series (ArtNews), 10-11, 13-14,76,9511108,172 Parsons, Betty, 77,136,389,391,402,434, 52i; fig. 7 Partisan Review, 15,341,384-87,392, 550-52 passim Pavia, Philip, 13,229 Peirce, C. S., 52-53,458-61,470 Perchuck, Andrew, 65-66 "Personal Statement: Painting Prophecy 1950" (Porter), 42 Picasso, Pablo, 32,35,38~39,74,126-27, 131,133,138,150-53 passim, 175,179,184, 200-6,232,238,249-50,254,264,28586,295-300 passim, 347,357-58,392, 416,422,469,490,54,553,587,646; Index

713

Picasso, Pablo (continued) influence on Abstract Expressionism, 32,35,74,133,232,254,264,285-86, 295-97,582-83,600,630; Works: Demoiselles d'Avignon, 40,64, 112П254,297-98; Guernica, 47,155 Piper, Rose, 70 Polcari, Stephen, 3-4,49,58-6i,io8n226, 489 Pollock, Griselda, 45,65 Pollock, Jackson, x, 10,12,15-16,22,

26-27,35-37,4i, 55,60-63,66-71,75, 78,81,ii4nn272-73,152,155,181-87, 220-23 passim, 230,242-49 passim, 253-75 passim, 280-88,293-310,366, 372,383,389-96 passim, 400-8 passim, 416-19,422,444,447-53,460-61, 464-74 passim, 490,493,499~504 passim, 519,521,529,536-54 passim, 563-65,569,617,625-26,645-60; catalogue raisonné, 37-38,79; exhibitions, i, 17,28,55,68,80; Greenberg on, 10,20,88n40,205-6,212,304,307, 315,393,646-50,653-54; Jungian influence on, 37-38,99Ш51, iooni5i, 443, 645-46; Namuth films and photos of, 10,16,53-54,76,550,646,650, 656, fig. 4; "Pollock paints a picture," 10,95nio8; retrospectives, i, 28,68, 80, ЮО-1Ш54,646,649; Rosenberg on, 16, доппбз and 66,653-54; statements on art, 5-7,10,33,51, io6n2O3, 1ЮП2Ч, 132-33,139-40,252,654; Works: Autumn Rhythm: Number30, 53,68,307,419,656, fig. n; Cut-Out, 27,260-62,560-61; Full Fathom Five, 243,306,401-3,539,654; Gothic, 450-51,453,456; Guardians of the Secret, 296,300-1,445,450,456; Lavender Mist, 307,516,647; Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, 37,303, pi. 4; NumberlA, 7 P4#, 27,257-59,261, 654-55; Pasipháe, 270,296,301-2; Portrait and a Dream, 53,55,472-73, fig. 19; She-Wolf, 86n29,302,417;

714

Index

Shimmering Substance, 275,306,309, 466; Totem Lesson I-II, 270,307,309 Pollock, Lee Krasner. See Lee Krasner Pollock Pop Art, 30-31,344,605 Porter, David, 42 Possibilities, 5-6,9-10,14,43-44,81, 85П21,153,653-54 Post Painterly Abstraction, 23,27,67, 84nio "Primitive Art and Picasso" (Graham), 298 primitivism, 35,43,49,62,70,127-28, 136,149,298-99,34,422-49 passim, 457-58,528-32 "Problem for Critics" (Putzel), 7-8, 87П31,152 Putzel, Howard, 7-8,77,87n3i, 152 race issues in Abstract Expressionism, 68-69, И5ПП286-87, n6n288,i34,543 Rand, Harry, 39 Rathbone, Eliza, 39-40 Rauschenberg, Robert, 12,250,275 Read, Herbert, 302-3,446 Reiff, Robert, 39,99Ш35 Reinhardt, Ad, xi, 12,75,159,233~35,34, 388,400,406-10 passim, 447,455~56, 461-65 passim, 471,473,514,516, 520-23 passim Rexroth, Kenneth, 19,92n67 rhetoric and Abstract Expressionism, 51-54,442-44,462,474 Ricard, René, 68 Riley, Maude, 150 Riviere, Joan, 65 Robertson, Bryan, 47,301,9in66 Robson, A. Deirdre, 77,415 Rohn, Matthew, Ю7П217,657 Rose, Barbara, 2,30,54~55,9^66,9бппз Rose, Bernice, 304 Rosenberg, Harold, ix, 9,14-16,27,32, 34,39,43,50,57-58,61,66,72-75 passim, 81,9on6o, 9inn6i-66,199,233, 256,315,326,341,394-95,459,

469-71,523,564-66,619-21; "American Action Painters", 8,13-16,31,43, 73,9onn65-66, Ii8n309,i89,34i, 529; on Gorky, 39, Ю1Ш58,564; "Intrasubjectives," 8,155-56; on Pollock, 16, 9Onn 63 and 66,653; on Tenth Street, 9On6o, 91п6з; rivalry with Greenberg, 9,16-21,90n66,93n8o, 214,654 Rosenblum, Robert, 25-26,51,239 Rosenzweig, Phyllis, 21,57 Ross, Clifford, ix, 1-2,56,60 Roszak, Theodore, 40, ioini63, Ю2пшб7 and 170,444,447,449,454,461 Rothko, Mark, 22,33,35,47-53 passim, 59-61,71,75,81,47-48,151-52,184, 211-12,222,224,241-48,252-54, 287-88,34-22,361-76,388,394,408, 417,419,423,428,442,444-48 passim, 450,452,455-56,459-60,463,468, 470,490-92,495,498,501-4,545, 554-55,634; joint letter with Gottlieb to New York Times, 5,9,22-23,44,72, 87П32,94П96,11711301146,450,452, 530; religious imagery, 50-51,72-73, H7-i8n302,367,617; Rothko Chapel, 319-21; statements on art, 5,7,9,33, 44,125-29,140-42,315,317,529-30, 586; Works: Number 18,1948, fig. 6; Syrian Bull, 23,147-48, fig. 8; Untitled (1949), pi. 7 Rubin, William, 13,28,35~36,38, iooni54,316,646,658 Rushing, W.Jackson, 49-50,422 Saltzman, Lisa, 67,560 Samuel Kootz Gallery, 8,417-18,420 Sandier, Irving, 31-35 passim, 41,44,46, 48,56,72,9611114,98ni3i, I03ni8i; Triumph of American Painting, 31, 33,98ni3i Saussure, Ferdinand de, 51-52,114П274 Sawin, Martica, 9,188 Schapiro, Meyer, 12,22,72,75,77,89^8, 172,215,277,384-85,388,396,5Ю, 54 Schimmel, Paul, 56

Schlessinger, Arthur, 393-95 Scholem, Gershon, 50, io6n202,615-16, 619-23 passim School of Paris, 189,416,418 Seiberling, Dorothy, 10 Seitz, William C., 12-13,32,56,59,64, 891151 Seligmann, Kurt, 277-79 semiotic interpretations of Abstract Expressionism, 51,53,61,63,105n2o6, П4ПП274 and 278,331,460,538 Serra, Richard, 67,656-59 Shapiro, Cécile, 1-4,45,56,58,60,338 Shapiro, David, 1-4,45,56,58,60,338 Shiff, Richard, 53,594 Sidney Janis Gallery, 173,188 Simon, Sidney, 24,36-37,263,276 Sims, Lowery Stokes, 70 Siquieros, David, 205,654 Siskind, Aaron, 59 Smith, David, 11,28-29,35,40-42,59,63, 165-71,363,393,399,404-6,443-47 passim, 449-56,460-61,466,469,471, 473,491,504; ng. 5; Greenberg on, 29-30,9611116-17,97Ш19, П4П274, 363,393; Works: The Cathedral, 167-71; Jurassic Bird, 63,449,456, 632; Medals for Dishonor, 63, H2n25i, 627,631-32; Royal Bird, 63,632, fig. 21; sculpture series, 29-30,470,472, fig. 14 Smith, Gregory White, 54,60 Smith, Roberta, 34,37 Smith, Tony, 55,298,400,402,408-10, 656 Sontag, Susan, 471,594,607 stain painting, 27,5^3-75,650 Stamos, Theodoros, 72,223,251-54 passim, 315,389,427,455,504,617 Stella, Frank, 27,77,95-96^1109 and 113, 257,318 Sterne, Hedda,32, И2П253,159 Still, Clyfford, 21-25 passim, 47-49, 59-61,72,78,208-12,272,287-88,315, 317,361-76,389-92 passim, 453-55,

Index

715

Still, Clyfford (continued) 460,465-73 passim, 473; statements on art, 6-7,171-72,184,239-45,247, 391,540,545-46,550-54 passim, 580-88; Works: 1Q46-H (Indian Red and Black), fig. 10; Unfitted (SelfPortrait), fig. 20 Stodelle, Ernestine, 491-92,497,500-1, 504-5 Streat, Thelma Johnson, 70, ii6n288 Stuckey, Charles R, 402,517-18 Studio 35,7, И5П286,159,164,232,514 "Subjects of the Artists" (Whitney Downtown), 33,99Ш36 Sublime, 25-26,37,50,53,78-79,137-39, 239-44,318-21 passim, 422,436, 461-62 Surrealism: influence on Abstract Expressionism, 5,8,23,28,32,35-37, 40,42,74,85П25,86n29,87пзо, 1078n223,130-31,150-51,183-84,250-52, 265-72,277-78,280-83 passim, 287, 29б,358,4бо,490,493,634 Sweeney, James Johnson, 151,301 Sylvester, David, 50 System and Dialectics of Art (Graham), 35, 49,42-46,346-49,355 Ta

hn

gg,J° ,45 Tenth Street, 14,20,23,30, допбо Thistle wood, David, 59,8зп4 Tiger's Eye, 5,317,402,426-27,430,436, 46i,527 Time magazine, 17,40,88n40,92n6g, 93П93,549,5^2 Tobey, Mark, 8,155,205,207,450,616 Tomlin, Bradley Walker, 8,155,164,400, 501,539 Triumph of American Painting (Sandier), 3i,33,98ni3i

Tuchman, Maurice, 30-31,49,8зп5 Tucker, Marcia, 34,73 Twombly, Cy, 649-50,656 Tyler, Parker, 544~45,550 unconscious, 36,49,52,55,62,131,133, 142-48,252,298,355,434,448,472, 489,532,656 Varnedoe, Kirk, 49 Veneciano, Jorge Daniel, 70 vulgarity and Abstract Expressionism, 78-79, И9ПП324-25,538-56 passim Wagner, Anne M., 63, ninn248-49 Warhol, Andy, 67-68,77,649-51,656 Wechsler, Jeffrey, 56,69 Weiss, Jeffrey, 49 Whitman, Walt, 194,213,223,365,550-51, 618-19 Whitney Museum of American Art, 33-34,37,81,151,629 Wilkin, Karen, 627,630,634 Willard, Marian, П5П286,626,631,636, 640 Wolfe, Judith, 37-38,293 Wollen, Peter, 66 "Women and Abstract Expressionism: Painting and Sculpture, 1945-1959" (Mishkin Gallery), 62-63, ПШ246 Wood, Paul, 2-3 Woodruff, Hale, 70,522 Worringer, Wilhelm, 50,423,425-28,

435 W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration), 15,32,192,264,268,278,516 Wye, Deborah, 42 Wysuph,C.L.,37 Yard, Sally, 40

Trotskyism, 15,43~44,72-73,11811309, 263,338,383-87,551

716

Index

Zakian, Michael, 50