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Dec
30
2011

Art in San Francisco, 1940-1950

ART IN SAN FRANCISCO

1940-1950

San Francisco was the center of high culture on the West Coast, boasting an opera and art museums and art schools while Los Angeles was a provincial oil town.  Remarkably, the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, was established in 1871.The H. M. de Young Memorial Museum honored the de Young family in 1895.  The original building, which had been built for the California Midwinter International Exposition, was damaged by the Earthquake of 1906. The museum was rebuilt in 1929 and again in 2005.  The College of Arts and Crafts was established in 1907, which became California College of Arts and Crafts in 1936 and the California College of Art a few years ago, almost a decade before Otis College of Art and Design was opened in Los Angeles. The Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, brought the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts, designed by Bernard Maybeck, to the city on the Bay.  Maybeck went on to become the designer of the Los Angeles Public Library. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park was built in competition with the de Young family, the family of Adolph and Alma Spreckels. In other words by the beginning of the twentieth century, San Francisco was the major and only site for art on the Left Coast.

As Nancy Boas points out in her book, The Society of Six: California Colorists, the artists who made up the Society of Six: August Gay, Bernard von Eichman, Maurice Logan, Louis Siegriest, and William H. Clapp were exposed to Impressionism in the 1915 exhibition.  California produced its own “California Impressionists” or plein air painters who took inspiration from the colors of Monet and Renoir.  These kinds of landscape artists, working in the clear and strong California light, could be found up and down the coast, depicting the extraordinary landscapes with a combination of post-Realism and late-Impressionism.  Although we appreciate the Society of Six today, Boas mentions that these artists, like most of the landscape painters, were ignored in favor of more avant-garde art, which could actually be found in San Francisco.

In Painting on the Left. Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Francisco’s Public Murals, Anthony W. Lee points out that the Panama Pacific Exposition left an empty building behind, inspiring the idea of a San Francisco Museum of Art.  The founding families of San Francisco were devoted art patrons and the family of railroad baron, Charles Crocker supported the idea of a museum, just as the family of Mark Hopkins had founded and art school.  William Randolph Hearst also used the might of his newspaper to sponsor art in the city.  Equally prominent in the effort to establish museums and art galleries in San Francisco was the legendary Bohemian Club.  In fact the Galerie Beaux-Arts, founded by Beatrice Judd Ryan was a cooperative space and the first private gallery devoted to contemporary art, including artists who belonged to the Bohemian Club.  Not to be outdone, the famous collector, Galka Scheyer, showed the Blue Four (Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky and Feininger) at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1926–27.

While the twenties might be remembered as a decade of building art patronage and art museums for the city, the thirties is marked by the powerful presence of Diego Rivera who left three major mural projects in the city: The Allegory of California for The San Francisco City Club, located in the Stock Exchange, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City for The San Francisco Art Institute, and Pan American Unity for the San Francisco City College, located in the Diego Rivera Theater.  For a fuller account of Rivera’s impact on the city, read Lee’s Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and in San Francisco’s Public Murals but the arrival of the artist in San Francisco announced the arrival of social realism, the prevailing style of the Depression. As would be typical of Rivera’s career, his mere reputation as a Communist, set off waves of anxiety in the city.

A reporter from Time Magazine paid a visit in September 1931 to the California School of Fine Arts to write of Rivera disrespectfully as “famed, fat and 40.”  The article goes on to describe the artist’s “plump posterior squashed comfortably down on a plank” while he painted. Although the article was mostly descriptive and not entirely unfavorable, the reporter, who is not named, concluded his article, ”Art: Rivera in California,” with the final facts: “A huge, roly-poly man, he sometimes works 16 hours a day. Once he exhausted himself, fell off his scaffold, split his head.”  Diego Rivera also found time to do a mural for the dining room of the Sigmund Sterns (later transferred to Stern Hall at Berkeley) entitled Still Life and Blossoming Almond Trees, 1930-1931.

But the period of the art patronage of the Works Progress Administration and the age of murals with social content had arrived, so too was the antithesis, the European avant-garde in the person of Hans Hofmann who arrived at Berkeley, in the summers of 1930 and 1931.  Although Hofmann would go back and forth between Germany and America for the next few years, in 1934, he received his permanent visa and remained in America.  Hofmann pointed the way to the future direction of the painters in San Francisco, but there were other modernist contenders in the Bay Area.  Erle Loren, devotee of Paul Cézanne who had lived in his studio in 1927,would become famous for his formalist diagrams of Cézanne’s works, published in 1943.  In 1936, Loren established Cubism as dominant mode at Berkeley, but, as can be imagined but there was a gulf between the Berkeley School and the followers of Rivera.

By the time the Second World War broke out, San Francisco had a thriving art scene, with contending perspectives on art.  Presiding over what would be an important shift from European Modernism to American contemporary art, was the newly established San Francisco Museum of (Modern) Art.   Opening in 1935 with Grace L. McCann Morley as its first director.  It was unusual if not outright rare for a woman to have such an important and influential position and Morley made adventurous and farsighted important purchases, such as Arschile Gorky’s Enigmatic Combat (1941), which was exhibited in1943 and Jackson Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret (1943), exhibited 1945.  At that time, both artists were unknowns, but these two purchases would begin the foundation of what would become an important West Coast collection of Contemporary Art.

Indeed, Rivera returned to San Francisco to paint “art in action” mural to be displayed at World’s Fair on Treasure Island, 1940 and Gorky was in San Francisco the summer of 1941.  But the time of one of these artists was ending in America and a new day was dawning.  The California School of Fine Arts hired a new and ambitious director, Douglas MacAgy in 1945. MacAgy signaled that the old was out and that the new was in when he draped Rivera mural at the school.  Another signal that it was not only the end of mural era was Clay Spohn, who instigated what would later become a West Coast outpost of late, late Dada when he organized the “Museum of Unknown and Little Known Objects” in 1941 at CSFA. Some day this iconoclastic impulse would be known as “funk.”   The rest of the faculty included the famed photographer, Ansel Adams, and the painters David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Hassel Smith.  It was at the School of Fine Arts that East Coast Abstract Expressionism arrived and changed the artistic landscape of San Francisco.

The powerful and impressive artist and art teacher, Clyfford Still made his career between New York and San Francisco, teaching at CSFA until 1946.  He took an unlikely trip to Richmond Professional Institute, a vocational school in 1944 and    moved to New York in 1945. Still who did large, dryly painted abstract works had one of the last shows with Peggy Guggenheim in 1946 before she left for Europe. Still had a romantic notion of the role of the artist, who he saw as a persona set apart from ordinary people.   From 1947, he refused to allow his works to be shown in commercial gallery, but he allowed Betty Parsons to represent him.  He taught his students that museums should come to them for their art, not the other way around.  To make sure that his flock was beholden to no one, Still founded the Metart Galleries in San Francisco.  This was an alternative space, a co-op where he and twelve of his students, co-op could show their art.

Clyfford Still’s exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1947 marked the death of the School of Paris and established CSFA as the counterpart to the “Berkeley School.”  For his part, Loren was not impressed with Abstract Expressionism, about which he said, “We call it the drip school, even the shit school. It was pretty repulsive,” he continued. ”We saw it as a revolt as Hofmann’s and our teaching—which was very concrete, and based on real knowledge—Giotto and so on.”  In retrospect, this statement by Loren seems odd, given the impetus that Hofmann had given to Abstract Expressionism in New York.  However, Loren seems to have wanted the development of Cubism-Expressionism to be stopped at the point of synthesis seen in Hofmann’s work and not imaginatively extended to abstraction.

However, by 1950, Abstract Expression was an accepted style in San Francisco, As Thomas Albright pointed out in Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980, the “resistance” the style had been “exaggerated.”  Given the general acceptance and promotion of the style, it is odd that in the histories of Abstract Expressionism, San Francisco is often left out and its importance in developing the large-scale works of important artists is less well known than that of New York City.  One can assume the relative lack of emphasis is due to the fact that the Bay Area developed its own “brand” of expressionism, which was not abstract but figurative.

In other words, painting in the Bay Area did not follow the orthodoxy of Clement Greenberg who insisted that the proper destiny for avant-garde art was total abstraction.  Clyfford Still left San Francisco for New York permanently in 1949, but a more accessible and more congenial teacher, Mark Rothko, was on campus between 1947 and 1949.  Rothko was just emerging out of his figurative Surrealist phase when he began working with Still and it is during these important years in San Francisco that he made a definitive move to abstraction and he reduced the number of shapes on the canvas.

With Ad Reinhardt on campus in the summer of 1950, it seemed that CSFA was the place to be. “Under the leadership of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko it is absolutely true that a new trend in painting has been marked off…it recalls the group feeling that we have read about among the French Impressionists,” Loren admitted. But the moment had passed.  1950 was the year of Clay Spohn’s mocking last exhibition in which he left behind a book of “instructions” for Abstract Expressionism.  In other words, the style was rapidly becoming academic, a “kit” of painterly gestures.  Albright states that the Bay Area School was indeed academic.

Douglas MacAgy left CSFA, because, as the story went, he was not able to hire Marcel Duchamp.  Leaving aside for the moment the strange spectacle of Duchamp teaching in an art college, MacAgy denied this version of why he left the school.  He felt that the student body was changing from males wanting to be serious artists to females on the hunt for husbands and students who wanted to teach art rather than be artists.  In other words, instead of Richard Diebenkorn and Sam Francis (who attended Berkeley and hung around Clyfford Still) as students, the college would go into a decline.

With Still and MacAgy gone, other faculty followed.  Ed Corbett and Spohn left shortly after, then Hassel Smith was dismissed by the new director and David Park and Elmer Bishchoff resigned to protest the change in direction of the college. But in those short years of development, the Bay Area artists created a very different sort of Abstract Expressionism with figuration.  But the representational aspect is only part of the story.  The New York painters were engaged in formal play with the tradition of European modernism, but the Bay Area artists responded to the landscape of the West Coast. Even when painting abstractly, Diebenkorn always had a sense of sea, land, sky, and moved easily from the colored zones of thick gestures to the deeply colored interiors with lone inhabitants.  Bishchoff and Park showed more of the outdoor life of Northern California with figures on the beach—once again sky, sea, land—all painted with broad strokes of paint laid on with the strength of Still and the zones of Rothko.  In contrast Smith and Frank Lobdell were drawers not painters, in other words they were draw-ers who painted. In the end it was the approach of Bishchoff and Park that characterized the Bay Area Figurative School. These artists utilized the gesture as style and technique and the group more or less disbanded before the color school wing of the Abstract Expressionists in New York became prominent in the sixties.

 If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec
23
2011

Culture in Los Angeles, 1940-1950

CULTURE IN LOS ANGELES

1940-1950

The City of Angels has many names, or to be more correct, many variations of its Spanish name: El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula.  The locals have their own names for the city: “L.A.” and the “City of Lost Angels,” located in “Californication,” as the Red Hot Chili Peppers sing.  Lacking a locatable center, the city is a prime example of urban sprawl with 160 separate municipalities.  In its best years the city was growing by 2 million people per decade, with 500 people arriving each day.  The city grows and shrinks according to the economy for it is on a transcontinental highway between North, Central and South America.  Separated from the South—Mexico—by an unnatural boundary, the state of California runs on the usually illegal labor force that comes into the state when the times are good and abandons it when times are bad.

Mike Davis, the ironic historian of L. A., described Los Angeles as “eutopic,” not just anti-utopic but even worse, a “no place,” stripped bare of nature and history, he claims. But Los Angeles has its own history, a history of no traditions, but a history nevertheless.  The city has heritages brought into the site by the many immigrants, but what makes L.A. unique is that it is the Last Frontier, a place where people come to forget the past, to leave their old selves behind, and to start anew with a fresh identity. The City on the Hill, or Mike Davis’s New Jerusalem, is at the center of an “urban galaxy” dominated by Los Angeles, which is the size of Ireland with a GNP bigger than India.  If Los Angeles were a separate nation, it would have the ninth biggest GNP in the world, depending on the year. The sixth largest of world’s mega cities, Los Angeles was never anyone’s first choice destination for moving out west. San Francisco was the cultural mecca and commercial center for California, and L. A. was always an afterthought.

Founded by a mixed band of Spanish adventurers, natives of Latin American and individuals of African descent, the city was settled by Spanish soldiers and their families.  After the Gold Rush of 1850, California became a state and new settlers began moving in.  After years of legal skullduggery and nefarious governmental practices, the original Spanish land grants were pulled away from the rightful and original owners, the rancheros, and parceled out to the newcomers.  The names of the old soldiers lived on in the names of streets and boulevards, Pico, Sepulveda and so on.  The land grab set the tone for the city to this day, for Los Angeles was a city brought into being by real-estate developers and land speculators.  The potent combination of developers, bankers, transport magnates, who were able to take advantage of the transcontinental railroad, advertised sunshine for those who wanted to get healthy and an “open shop” for those who wanted cheap labor.

Unlike the East Coast cities, such as New York, which runs on finance and is ruled by bankers, Los Angeles and San Francisco are newspaper cities, controlled by mass media.  In San Francisco, it was the empire of William Randolph Hearst; in Los Angeles it was Colonel Harrison Gray Otis, owner of The Los Angeles Times and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler and Charles Fletcher Lummis, a city editor, who ran the City of Angels.  Otis and Chandler had their fingers in every conceivable pie, from oil to water to land.  Few people realize that Los Angeles, especially Beverley Hills, sits atop an oil field that rivals that of Saudi Arabia, but the city has no water source.  All water that comes to Los Angeles has been “appropriated” from elsewhere, the Owens Valley and the Colorado River.  Access to water and the exploitation of oil wrote the early history of Los Angeles.

So powerful and all controlling were the team of Otis and Chandler, it is quite possible that the character of “Noah Cross,” played by John Houston in Chinatown (1974) was probably based on that of Colonel Otis.  But the most obvious aspect of Los Angeles was the “industry,” by which one means the “film industry.”  Lured to Los Angeles because of the varying terrain, ocean, desert, mountains, and year around sunshine, the filmmakers moved out West, fleeing the patent restrictions Thomas Edison had placed on his movie camera.  Over time the business of making entertainment for the masses became one of the nation’s most profitable ventures.  At one time, one could drive down the major streets of the city and see sets left over from major Hollywood blockbusters.  The gate to Chinatown in Los Angeles is one of those leftovers still present today.  Movie stars lived and worked in Los Angeles and formed a separate circle of power brokers.

Los Angeles in the 1940s

Los Angeles by the Forties was a sleepy movie town, still a stepsister to San Francisco and scorned by New York, and not quite aware of what Hollywood really did. It took fresh eyes to see that the city was the “Capital of the Culture Industry,” a designation given by émigrés from Europe.  Los Angeles was always a city of immigrants, and during the Second World War that flow of newcomers included what Davis has termed the “mental labor” of European intellectuals who were fleeing Hitler’s Germany.  One is accustomed to reading of the exiles in New York City, but there was a sizable community of artistic and intellectual refugees in Hollywood, mostly from Germany.  These exiles all knew each other and spoke German to each other while trying to acclimatize to a town where C. B. De Mille was considered a master artist.  The author of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque found the city unbearable and left its “empty sidewalks, streets, and houses…” Theatrical producer, Berthold Brecht was stranded without his Communist environment and bored with Los Angeles.  Santa Monica, he complained, was “too pleasant to work in.” Although after the War was over, most of the émigrés became American citizens, Brecht got his wish to go to a less pleasant place and spent the rest of his life in East Germany, in the Soviet Zone.

In contrast, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, Lord Bertram Russell, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, and Clifford Odets rather enjoyed Los Angeles.  Christopher Isherwood never left and became a familiar figure on the art scene with his lover, artist Don Bachardy, and were joined in the sixties by another exile, their good friend, David Hockney.  Other great artists found the trivializing of their art in an uncultured land depressing.  Composer Arnold Schoenberg lived across the street from Shirley Temple and was offended when tour buses stopped to see her home and not his.  To earn money, he tutored studio composers.  Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was used for Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse movie, Fantasia (1940), which did more to popularize the once controversial music than all the concerts in Europe.

Watching these indignities with Jovian detachment were the philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.  German refugees of the Frankfurt School, these scholars had become fascinated with the use and abuse of mass media in Germany and in America.  They were the first to link modern philosophy and modern culture with mass media and its cultural production. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, they created myth of Los Angeles as crystal ball of capitalism’s future in a depersonalized “administered society” with no hope of liberation.  “The Culture Industry” was one of the key essays in this book and was an extremely significant post-war critique of how “culture” was produced by industrial methods for the purpose of quelling public dissent. A snob until the day he died, Theodor Adorno thought that Hollywood was the “mechanized cataclysm abolishing culture” and that “the term ‘culture’ will become obsolete….”

For those in the movie business from Europe, Hollywood literally saved their careers. Actors and directors in exile found success, some more than others: Edward Dmytryk, Marlene Deitrich, Max Reinhardt, Fritz Kortner, Alexander Grenach, Peter Lorre, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Erich von Stroheim, Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Cary Grant, and David Niven.  The directors, especially, imported the late German Expressionist film style to Hollywood and revived the “look” for crime films, later called Film Noir, by the French after the War.  The enrichment of local culture, both popular and intellectual mirrored the sudden surge of growth for the city during the Second World War.

Suddenly people who wanted to work for the military-industrial complex inundated a small city that had once advertised itself as a healthy place for white people to live. Los Angeles exploded in population and most of the newcomers came to stay.  Many military personnel came to Los Angeles while on duty, like the climate and the open and tolerant atmosphere and returned after the War.  Of course, Los Angeles had been an open-minded town when it was mostly white with small minorities of Latinos and African-Americans and Asians.  However, with the war came new tensions and, in one of the most shameful acts in the city’s history, its people stood by and allowed Japanese-American citizens to be removed from the city and shipped to “Internment Camps” in the East.  African-Americans moved into vacated Little Tokyo, which was renamed “Bronze Town.”  With the Japanese population “relocated” and with wartime tensions high, the negative energy of the public turned to a new target, the Mexican population, especially the young men who wore Zoot Suits.  In the 1940s there were two miscarriages of (in)justice, the Sleepy Lagoon Murders (1942) and the Zoot Suit Riots (1943).

Literature in Los Angeles

Although the Second World War made Los Angeles into a mega metropolis and a power based for military and aerospace research, the art forms of the city seldom dwelt upon these transformative experiences.  Only decades later did films, such as Zoot Suit a musical by Luis Valdez and Swing Shift, starring Goldie Hawn, investigate the ways in which the War changed peoples’ lives.  The native literature took up different themes, that of a Paradise Lost.  Although the city produced what could be termed “regional fiction,” like that of New York, these novels had significance and an audience beyond Los Angeles.  Although Hollywood threw itself into the war effort by cranking out propaganda films and “war movies,” these offerings are little remembered.  What was imprinted upon the collective consciousness was the nightmare of “El Dorado becoming hell,” as Mike Davis expressed it. The dark or noir mood of Los Angeles fiction expressed a culture wounded by a Depression and traumatized by War. The key writers of the thirties and forties were Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain and Dashiell Hammett.  Most of their books were made into movies in which ordinary people under unbearable pressure commit nasty little crimes.  The leading character is neither black nor white but a morally ambiguous shade of gray.  He is the hard-boiled detective or a man who had lost his place in society, a creature of the Depression, the time when American criminals were erecting Empires of crime upon the willingness of the upright citizens to break the law.

The idea of “Hard-boiled” is closely related to “Pulp Fiction,” or dime novels, so called because they were quickly written and cheaply printed on low-grade paper.  The archetypal “hard-boiled” detective was “Ben Jardinn,” the anti-hero of the 1930 serial, Black Mask Serial. Created by Raoul Whitfield, the appropriate style writing was brisk and no nonsense and to the point.  Always from a masculine point of view, these Los Angeles novels told stories of men down on their luck, struggling to keep their heads above water, only to be dragged under by a treacherous femme fatale who lured them into murder.  In the declining days of a once-proud community of Victorian homes, Bunker Hill, writers such as John Fante (Ask the Dust) and James M. Cain typed away in the sordid but inspirational surroundings in a declining neighborhood in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.  Like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, these men were tortured souls who were alcoholics.

But a new genre of novels emerged from these dark days:  The Maltese Falcon, 1930, by Dashiell Hammett, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?  The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934 by James M. Cain, 1935 by Horace McCoy, Double Indemnity, 1936, by Cain, The Day of the Locust, 1939 by Nathanael West, Farewell My Lovely, 1940 by Chandler, and Mildred Pierce, 1941, also by Cain.  All of these novels were made into films or “B movies” or the second feature of a double feature.  During the war, films had to be made economically and these small, cheaply made, masterpieces, given little respect in their time, were directed by some of the greatest German directors of their time, such as Edward Dymtryk, and starred “B” list actors, such as Fred McMurray and Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

The gloomy and fatalistic themes were combined with imported German Expressionist cinema in which there was no moral right or light, only dark shadows and dark characters.  While not making an overt comment upon the bankruptcy of capitalism, these novels were turned into films by leftist auteurs, including Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., Ben Maddow, Carl Foreman, and Dalton Trumbo, etc.   Not recognized as a form of Marxist cinema, these movies were a subversive realism, a critique that could have only come out of Los Angeles where corruption was rampant and Germany where morality had taken a holiday. The crime movies, featuring a gangster underclass as minor background characters, highlighted middle and upper class corruption.  The ugliness of humanity sprang horribly off the pages with the Black Dahlia case of 1946, a still-unsolved murder of a prostitute.

Strangely, instead of being stranded as period pieces, these throwaway “B” movies were greatly admired by French film critics after the War was over.  Unlike the American audience who saw these crime movies over time, the French could view these films as a single body of work and named them “film noir,” or dark film.  Few art forms, either literary or visual, have implanted themselves into the minds of such a large and international audience.  The strong chiaroscuro, the legendary voice-over, the dangerous woman, the wary detective, these devices have never gone out of style.  Beginning in the 1970s, a wave of “nostalgia” films re-visited the noir style for two decades: from Chinatown to Pulp Fiction to Devil in a Blue Dress in America to Hard-Boiled in Hong Kong, the regional style of writing recreated by the local “culture industry” converted the world to the homegrown indigenous art of Los Angeles. 

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec
16
2011

Events in Abstract Expressionism

EVENTS FOR ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, 1945-1955

In 1946, former British prime minister, Winston Churchill made his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in March at Fulton, Missouri.  According to Churchill, who had always been suspicious of Stalin, traditional fascism verses democracy had been replaced by a new confrontation between communism verses democracy.  The Cold War was on.  With the advent of Atomic Power, the world became used to the  “normalization” of the Bomb and accepted the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction.  After the Second World War, in 1947-48 a new identity for the avant-garde developed with the beginning of a New Liberalism and the beginning of a New Conservativism.  The rise of Nationalism in America impacted Abstract Expressionism.  On one hand, the style was touted by the American government as an expression of “Freedom” abroad, while being assailed as un-American at home.

That same year, 1946,  marked the end of Surrealist activity in New York and the Truman Doctrine introduced American aid to combat communism in Europe.  To combat Communism at home, the Employee Loyalty Program introduced the infamous “Loyalty Oaths.”  While the Marshall Plan began the “struggle for souls” in Europe, to make the continent safe from Communism, Americans at home were subjected to increasing surveillance. “Modern art equals communism,” thundered George Donders, the Pat Robertson of his day.  “..lazy, nutty Moderns,” grumbled President Harry Truman.  For American conservatives, “modern art” was equated with the avant-garde which was equated with Europeans which was equated with Communism.  In the first decade following the Cold War, modern art, particularly Abstract Expressionism, became a pawn in the political struggle with Communism.  As both Max Kozloff (193) and Eva Cockcroft (1974) pointed out, the Museum of Modern Art frequently played the role of go-between, negotiating between the United States government (the CIA) and European venues for American art.

Forty years later, their consternation seems a bit naïve, given the extent to which governments have always deployed art for political purposes.  As for the artists and their collectors, international showings and celebrations of their art could well have been welcome, regardless of the underlying motivations or sponsoring agencies.  After all, the entire modus operandi of the Abstract Expressionist artists had been to “breakthrough” the stranglehold of European art.  Indeed, the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist art had the word “American” in the titles: “Fourteen Americans,” 1946, “Fifteen Americans,” 1952, “Twelve Americans,” 1956, “The New American Painting,” 1958, “The New American Painting and Sculpture.  The First Generation,” 1969 and so on.   American government became involved with using art as propaganda:  “We will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City,” said one  U.S. Senator.

Under these circumstances in which American art was used to connote “freedom,” Peggy Guggenheim returned to Europe and gave away all but two works of her collection to “provincial” museums.  Pollock’s  Mural (1943) went  to the University of Iowa where it languished for years in obscurity.  For cautious artists, there was a new ideology, a third way, and a non-commital abstraction provided a way out of the vise of nationalism against the international avant-garde. In the MacCarthy era it was prudent to avoid political extremes and unwanted exposure with a political apoliticalism, while continuing the Modernist tradition of abstract art.

The New York intellectuals had already turned to psychoanalysis and to myth to avoid Marxist aesthetics, using the emergence of biomorphic art, linked to automatic writing and Surrealism, and the increased interest in primitivism to do work connected to contemporary events.  For the Abstract Expressionist artists, the violent and frightening content of primitive art, archaic art could express the contemporary fate of individual facing chaos and the horror of modern condition could not be represented figuratively.  To these artists, to represent is to accept the conditions. Recalling the censorship of Rivera’s murals, the head of Franklin Delano Roosevelt eliminated from mural in San Francisco as too “political.”  Even the Partisan Review moved to the right and stresses psychology, focused on the individual.   Greenberg, likewise, jettisoned his early Marxism for apolotical formalism as a means for analyzing art.

Meanwhile, Abstract Expressionism was taking hold, with “The Ideographic Picture” being presented at Betty Parsons’ gallery in 1947.   Parsons, the last of the amateur dealers, took over most of Guggenheim’s stable of artists, keeping Jackson Pollock but removing his wife, the painter, Lee Krasner.   In 1948 the  Subject is Artists School was set up by Motherwell and Newman with lectures on Friday evening. In contrast to pre-War informality and close friendships, the School formalized Abstract Expressionism and the debate scene mirrored the rifts among the artists. Friday night lectures at Studio 35 absorbed groups from the Waldorf Cafeteria and became known as the “Eighth Street Club.”  By 1949, the Eighth Street Club or “The Club” became the focal point of Abstract Expressionism.  And the Cedar Street Tavern became the hangout for all the artists who wanted to drink and argue about art.

“The Sublime is Now,” by Barnett Newman, 1948, was published in Tiger’s Eye and Clement Greenberg announced the end of the School of Paris and the ascension of American art in his article “The Decline of Cubism.”   In 1948  Arshile Gorky died by his own hand, and  Mark Rothko abandoned Surrealism under the influence of Clyfford Still in San Francisco.  Struggling to make ends meet, Jackson Pollock gave away Lucifer to settle a doctor’s bill, but a collector,  Alfonso Ossario, purchased Pollock’s  No. 5 for $1500.  Life Magazine ridiculed Pollock as “America’s Greatest Artist” in 1949, after it organized panel of experts to “Clarify the Strange Art of the Day” in October, 1948.  Pollock was photographed by Arnold Newman in February for his feature story in Life: “Jackson Pollock–Is he the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Pollock was pictured in a denim jacket and jeans and work books, aligning himself with the working class.  He exemplified “cool” with a cigarette dangling from his lips and his cocky attitude.  The artist, however, was broke and he offered to sell Newman one of his paintings.  The photographer declined the offer.

According to Elaine de Kooning, Pollock became “the first American artist to be devoured as a packaged by critics and collectors,” when he developed his “Drip Technique” from 1947 to 1950, finally abandoned in 1953.    He sold No. 4 to MOMA for $250 and had his second show with Parsons, from January to  February, 1949.  A year later, in 1950, Hans Namuth photographed and filmed Jackson Pollock at work. These famous images would prove to be as interesting as Pollock’s paintings to the new artists in the Fluxus group.  The sight of Pollock moving within and around canvases placed on the floor of his Studio, the Barn, evoked comparisons to “dance” from Jack Tworkov.

Performance art of the Fifties responded to Pollock as a performance artist and to the idea of art as an “act.”  In 1952, Harold Rosenberg wrote “American Action Painters,” an article often seen as a “companion piece” to the Newman photographs.  However, Rosenberg was more than likely writing about Willem de Kooning, widely respected as a lone artist who had given up a very lucrative and successful career as a commercial artist to suffer years of privation as a “fine artist.” Krasner was furious at the betrayal of her old friend, Rosenberg, who was now supporting the other side—de Kooning.

New York began to divide between the supporters of Pollock, led by Clement Greenberg and the supporters of de Kooning, led by Rosenberg.  In 1951 “The School of New York” exhibition was organized by Motherwell as the American counterpart to The School of Paris.  Italian dealer and businessman, Leo Castelli, was in New York with the intent to support contemporary American artists.  Everyone was waiting to see who he would select for his stable.  By 1952 the Ab Ex artists begin to disband and the term the  “New York School” gained ground as not really school of painting but as more diverse individuals in loose community of artists.

But over the decade following the Second World War, each of those artists had found his or her own style: Pollock the drip, Kline the slash, Newman the zip, Rothko the stacked rectangles, Gottlieb the Blast and Burst, Krasner the Little Image, and with these signatures the artists withdrew into the competitive corners of the Uptown group and the Downtown group.  Sculptor David Smith moved to Bolton Landing and created his own world of metal sculptures dispersed across his own fields.  Willem de Kooning summed up the dialectic of the New York art world with his signifiant black and white paintings of the late forties which contrasted with his colorful and figurative Woman series of the early fifties.

By the mid fifties, Abstract Expressionism as an impactful art movement was over; its time was passed and at the very moment when the artists began to find some form of museum and gallery recognition. Figuration returned in the work of Jackson Pollock as well in his last great series of the early fifties.  To some, representation was a retreat from the hard won victories of abstraction, but, Pollock’s shift to the figure was a portent of things to come.  It was de Kooning who would be most closely related to the up-coming challenge of Neo-Dada.  It was a drawing of his that would be “erased” by Robert Rauschenberg,  whose random collages inspired by what the art writer and artist Brian O’Doherty called the “vernacular glance,” another version of de Kooning’s famous “slipping glimpse.”  ”Content,” he said, “is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash.  It is very tiny—very tiny, content.” Art and Life would now intersect.

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Dec
09
2011

Abstract Expressionism: Redefining Art, Part Two

How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art:

Abstract Expressionism and Meaning

The Abstract Expressionist artists translated “meaning” from subject matter to the broader and deeper intent of the word.  For these artists, “meaning” had to be profound and transcendent so that art could rise above the rather minor role it played during the Thirties as handmaiden to politics. But first, this group of local New York artists had to go through the process of being schooled by the European masters. As mentioned in earlier posts on this website, what was interesting about this apprenticeship was not what was accepted by what was rejected by the New York School.  As the critic Harold Rosenberg later explained it in 1972,

“The legacy that New York artists inherited from Paris consisted of the tradition of overthrow of unlimited formal experimentation and parody and fragments of radical ideas.  It was on the basis of the consciousness of loss and renunciation of support by the past that a new creative principle was sought by the New York painters.”

The famous expatriate teacher from Germany, Hans Hofmann, presented a synthesis of Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism and taught the Americans to be distrustful of the figurative aspects of Surrealism.  The East European émigré, John Graham, taught the Americans to assimilate Surrealism through “primitive” art and the works of Picasso.  The Mexican Masters, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, taught the New York artists about mural painting and about working on a large scale, using experimental techniques.  However, Americans ultimately rejected the imagery of the Mexican painters as being too verbal, that is too message based.  The abstract Cubism of Piet Mondrian and the Surrealist techniques of André Masson and Matta were promising but the American artists proceeded cautiously. In addition, they were also wary of abstract or decorative art as being empty.

The Abstract Expressionist painters searched for a new kind of meaning, a transcendental meaning.  The artists were attempting to get beyond, not only the European tradition in painting but also the regionalism and localism of American art. It was important for these artists to free art from any parochialism and to establish art as an act of transcendence.  Content had to be not only personal but the individual style of one artist was only a vehicle for the expression of larger and more universal concerns.  Picasso’s monumental work, Guernica (1937) was hanging at the Museum of Modern Art.  The great work had been commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion and was shown in the Paris International Exhibition but had been stranded in New York City by the outbreak of the Second World War.  Here was a work that was large scale with a universal meaning that transcended any local events.  Picasso used the visual language of Cubism and the metaphorical approach of Surrealism and adapted fragmentation and dream to the nightmare of total war.

For each artist in the Abstract Expressionist movement, the journey towards a new, modern and universal meaning had to take them through an American tradition of realism and a European tradition of post-Cubist and post-Expressionsit art.  Guernica gave up his penchant for figuration based on the undulating line of Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres.  Jackson Pollock denied the folk ways of his mentor Thomas Hart Benton and traveled through a flirtation with Surrealist automatic writing married to vaguely understood Jungian theories.  Lee Krasner, the most promising young artist in New York, moved away from her mentors Hoffmann and Mondrian towards a cautious abstraction. Franz Kline shifted his attention from industrial landscapes to the possibilities of making a painting from brushstrokes alone.  These, and other journeys, were slow and sometimes painful and happened over a decade.

In order for the experience to be purely visual, traditional composition had to be jettisoned.  One of the breakthroughs of early Modernism was the introduction of the “all-over” composition in Cubism.  It was Piet Mondrian who took the suggestion of boundlessness beyond the frame to fruition by eliminating a centered composition and creating an asymmetrical composition that was also balanced.  But Mondrian’s paintings were small and precisely painted with a discipline and control that lacked spontaneity. Abstract Expressionism brought an end to relationships-as-content. Compositional relationships were either eliminated, as with Jackson Pollock, or simplified, as with Mark Rothko.  The resulting mass image implied an infinite expansion beyond the optical field, as in the way Mondrian brought black lines and primary colors to the end of the canvas.

Part of this break away from old traditions was a paradoxical return to artistic elements that were primal or, as the favorite term of the times expressed it, “primitive.”  It was the atavistic that allowed the New York artists to assert their American ways through Native American art.  The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb came the closest to understanding the essence of Native American culture.  During the Forties, the artist placed inscrutable symbolic forms within a grid with the conviction that symbolic language preceded written language.  Culture was an interruption or an interference with a more universal language.  In the same period, Pollock investigated the possibilities of Native American art in paintings such as She Wolf (1943).  Art should be able to communicate on the Jungian level of the collective unconscious.  As Gottlieb stated,

“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 the niceties of color and form seem irrelevant.  All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life.”

By the Fifties, Abstract Expressionist art and artists took up new positions in society and new roles in the making of culture.  Mythically, the artist became a medium between the mute public and the expression of the need of ordinary people to express their fears and longings. The artist as a human being was an extension of humanity, seeking universal knowledge through self-knowledge.  Making art was a journey of discovery.  The writings of André Breton suggested that any painting, any work of art, could be an “event,” a “revelation,” a risk,” thus rescuing abstract art from the shame of “mere (feminine) decoration.”  The personality of the artist became part of the content but that meaning remained ultimately unknowable or beyond understanding.

Understanding an Abstract Expressionist painting was an event for the viewer rather than an intellectual act of perception.  The abstract content of pure paint, pure line, pure color became a meaning that could only be felt, not spoken, undefined but discernible, incapable of being verbalized but nevertheless abstractly expressed. Freed from rules and conventions of art making, the artist could assert his (or her) personality through the unique signatory ‘touch.”  This ego-oriented art puts the artist above the subject matter; indeed, the artist becomes the subject matter. In an example of the “pathetic fallacy,” the work of art became the carrier of the artist’s soul, which was somehow embedded in the very pigment and the surface affects themselves.  The facture or “surface” became fetishized as a result of the belief that the pigment embodied the artist.

For the viewer as well as the artist, Abstract Expressionist art was pure experience.  The paintings were large and overpowering, often stretching beyond the viewer’s field of vision and activating the peripheral vision.  As Robert Hobbs pointed out in Abstract Expressionism. The Formative Years, the artists often wanted to control the lighting by diming gallery atmosphere to a quiet contemplative experience.  The painters also wanted the viewer to come close to the art to become enveloped by the purely visual experience.  Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950) by Barnett Newman measured 96 x 216 inches, stretching out horizontally, creating a journey for the overwhelmed viewer who paused here and there at the “zips.”  But for Newman, this transit was not simply an aesthetic one but a moral and ethical one as well.

“The self, ” he said, “terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting and sculpture…The artist emphatically does not create form.  The artist expresses in a work of art an aesthetic idea which is innovate and eternal.”

With Abstract Expression the primary moral act is the decision to paint, followed by the question of what to paint at the time of the end of painting.  In a world that has experienced an all engulfing war and a horrifying holocaust and a brilliant blast of annihilating light, painting becomes a moral activity, one of the last possible ethical gestures. Abstract Expressionism was an art of pure idea, considered to be sublime, even transcendent and thus reconnected with the early Romantic tradition of landscape painting in America.  Nineteenth century American painting had sough God in Nature, but in a universe that had be denaturalized and had been scourged of God, the only transcendence or saving grace was art itself, the last refuge of godliness.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Dec
02
2011

Abstract Expressionism: Redefining Art, Part One

How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art:

Abstract Expressionism and Content

To work as an artist in New York City during the 1940s was to work in what the Chinese curse called “interesting times. The Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York School struggled to make art during a catastrophic world war while the entire nation was engulfed in the effort to preserve and protect democracy.  For the past decade, art had been socially conscious and politically activist and its illustrative approach was well-suited to conveying informative content to the public in the Depression period.  But the events of the Second World War implied that art might have a new role—-to express a collective consciousness that transcended any one nation.

Art now has a serious role and a high purpose. The artist has a serious role and a high purpose.  The social responsibility of the artist is nothing less than the renewal of art itself.  The spiritual responsibility of the artist is to translate the felt experience into art.  The Abstract Expressionist artists lived through the Depression and the Second World War. For them, content and the aesthetic values of art were important, as opposed to the literary component or the illustrative role of traditional art.  Their social consciousness raised by the Depression, these artists asked, not just what should I paint but more importantly why should I paint?  What was the existential reason for making art? Moving away from the American Regionalists and from the Social Realists, these new painters turned from representation and looked towards a more ancient and more archaic form of human expression: myth. They scorned academic European art for a collective experience in symbol making, using the “primitive” and the “primeval” as sources of inspiration for a new art in newly terrible times.  The response to the crisis in subject matter was a new way of making art and of seeing a painting.

Abstract Expressionism re-defined subject matter in a time of a crisis in subject matter.  Art had been caught between specific content—representational art and and art that had no content but formal content—abstract art.  But as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko stated in 1943, ”There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.  We assert that the subject matter is crucial…”   The Abstract Expressionist artists were concerned with ancient myth and primitive art as way to question an insular European tradition and to show their opposition to Social Realism and American Scene.  Seeking a profundity that would respond to the shift in mood, Newman and Rothko were particularly interested in the tradition of tragedy from ancient Greek myth. The role that myth played in the painting of Jackson Pollock has been debated and discussed among art historians for decades and it seems likely that the artist picked up on the zeitgeist and used mythic themes in his art of the last thirties and early forties, such as She Wolf  (1943).  That said, Pollock dropped the crutch of myth as his subject matter and moved towards exploring new ways of making painting the content of painting.

Indeed,  the Abstract Expressionist artists also had to establish their own territory in New York City.  Pollock is often given the credit for a “breakthrough,” as Willem de Kooning expressed it, or a breaking away from European art.  But, for the New York artists, the process of discarding a tradition had to begin with the reexamination of Modernism.  To counter the American Modernism of the aging Alfred Stieglitz and his circle, which tended to be representational and local, the artists looked to the waning styles and movements of European art to see what they could salvage.  The American artists were less interested in the theories and philosophies of Dada and Surrealism and were more interested  in the possibilities of Dada’s use of chance and displacement  and in the neutral and innovative practices of automatism they learned from Surrealism.  The task was to wrest chance from the idea of “anti-art” and to appropriate automatic writing to the practice of painting, as seen in the work of Joan Miró.

For Mark Rothko, the goal was to eliminate figuration and to retain his vertical zones of stacked content.  During the 1940s, Rothko shunned the dream content of Surrealism in favor of multiple floating areas of color roaming a raw canvas.  For some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, the work of art was understood as a “duration,” supported by the  “directness” of art.  Derived from the “automatic writing” of Surrealism, Pollock’s “drip technique” shifted the content of art from an illustrated scene to an abstract kinetic process captured on his unprimed canvas and sealed beneath skeins of paint. To critics, such as Harold Rosenberg, the physical action of the artists’ mark-making was sufficient in and of itself for the art to become an “act.”  Rosenberg’s  American Action Painters of 1952 recreated painting as an existential act, the sole means of existence in a world without God. For other artists, such as Robert Motherwell, abstraction could be used to express the lingering sorrow over the failure of the Spanish Republic.  The hanging pendulous black figures slung against the raw blank white background  of Motherwell’s Elegy series evoke the black and white ethos of an era of great sadness and loss.

Abstract Expressionism re-defined the purpose of art from Social Consciousness to Human Consciousness, stressing the universal instead of particular.  Painting was seen as the elimination of past traditions to clear the way to return to primal means of expression.  The artists, alienated from society, attempted to devise a new language for mythic thought, a language that was non-discursive, expressing the deep truth of myth.  The artistic and conceptual gulf between illustrative nationalist art practiced by Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood and art that communicated through the collective unconscious of Jungian myth is vast and deep and unbridgable.  Abstract Expressionism marks the transition from lack of subject matter—abstract art—to abstract content with “meaning” as concept.  After not painting for years, Barnett Newman took up art again and began a remarkable and long-lasting series of “zip” paintings, in which, acting like a god, he cleaved the whole of his canvas into two separable worlds of color. Onement I of 1948 is a statement of oneness and division made by a Holocaust survivor. “I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone,” he stated, “as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”

Meaning is to be Felt rather than spoken or directly explained.  Art as Experience became one of the defining characteristics of Abstract Expressionism.   Art must be a response to modern life and thus, in order to move forward into the next half of the broken century, the New York School rejected the exhausted European tradition of Modernism in favor of a tradition more universal.  Willem de Kooning whose birth city of  Rotterdam was pulverized by Nazi bombers renounced figuration and began creating layers of shards of crashed paint, enhanced by painful attempts at rudimentary drawing.  The Dutch artist alternatively built and destroyed, constructed and excavated a series of mid-sized paintings that he was notoriously reluctant to finish as if no reconstruction would suffice.  As can be seen, the shift into totally abstract art brought formal elements and formal innovation to the fore as artistic statements to create a new way for art to communicate on a more profound level.  Adolph Gottlieb was deeply concerned with the state of the post-war world. As a Holocaust survivor, he spoke eloquently of the times he lived in:

The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. 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 our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.

The search for the atavistic roots of art led to a return to an almost Ur manner of painting.  The painters ended traditional European play between line and color by combining the two, thereby eliminating relationships among elements as content, such as seen in Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich. The act of painting was stripped down to its essence—marking the canvas and covering an expanse with colors. Once the idea of composition was pushed aside, Mark Rothko’s great fields of morphing colors obliterated the division between line and shape, implying a spreading atmosphere rather than a bounded easel painting.  Franz Kline swept large swarths of black paint crashing into chunks of white paint in an expression of clash and combat so characteristic of the era of the warrior.   What was left on the canvas was the artist’s experience—the marks of his making. He explained,

There is imagery. Symbolism is a difficult idea. I’m not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don’t decide in advance that am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me.

Over time, the mere mark of the artist, his touch, the slash of the loaded paint brush was the total content of the painting.  The personality of the artist replaced figurative content and the cult of the artist replaced tragic meaning or universal truths.  A 1948 statement by Barnett Newman: “Terror can only exist if the forces of tragedy are unknown” was replaced by the idea that painting was revelation, a revelation of the artist.  The critical shift, seen best in the formalist approach of Clement Greenberg, can be seen as a political neutralization of Abstract Expressionism.  Greenberg preferred and supported the apolitical work of Pollock and the anti-war messages of Gottlieb’s Blast and Burst series of the sixties were out of step with the increasing need to separate art from the conflicts of the Cold War.

By making the artist himself (women were usually not included in the ranks of the New York School) the content, Abstract Expressionism became more formal in its content and the very real need of many of the artists to come to grips with the tragedies of their century was covered over by a new discourse of “American triumphalism” over European Modernism.  To come full circle, in 2009, the art historian Irving Sandler recently published his own reevaluation of his 1970 history of Abstract Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation.  The period during which Abstract Expressionist artists were struggling with the problem of how to express an entirely unprecedented content was a complex one, fraught with political peril, roiled by critical rivalries, and marked by artistic camps.  A balance between the intentions of the varied group of disparate artists and the need of historians to define movements can perhaps be reached, but before we can get to that point, we need to have a fuller view of the landscape.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Nov
25
2011

Abstract Expressionism, The Definition

DEFINING ABSTRACTION EXPRESSIONISM

“Abstract Expressionism” was term coined by Alfred Barr in 1929 in reference to Vasily Kandinsky’s art.  “Abstract Expressionism,” as a term, was revived by Robert Coates in The New Yorker in 1946  to characterize work by American artists in the Fifties in New York.  Abstract Expressionism refers to the style used by a certain group of artists in New York, a style that is, as its name states, abstract, non-figurative, and expressionist, nonrepresentational.  The movement, called the New York School, dated from 1942 to 1952, according to some sources.  Stylistically, total abstraction was developed by different artists at different times in their art making.  Jackson Pollock became totally abstract by 1947, Willem de Kooning by 1949, but both de Kooning and Pollock returned to figuration by 1950. Therefore, “The New York School,” as a designation can encompass both abstraction and figuration as practiced by the artists. While de Kooning and Pollock went back and forth from abstraction to figuration, the other artists of Abstract Expressionism remained totally abstract for their entire careers.

Over time stylistic variations among the artists resulted in a division between the Gesture and Color Field branches of The New York School.  There was also a division between a downtown group and an uptown group that roughly coincided with the binaries of painterly and linear.  In the Gesture group were de Kooning and Pollock and Franz Kline with the possible inclusion of Robert Motherwell and Philip Guston.  In the Color Field Group were Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko with the possible inclusion of Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottileb.  As a group the artists knew each other well, but their friendships tended to fluctuate with the passage of time.  As the School became commercially successful, the support system became a group of rivals, all competing with each other.

Thanks to early and important exhibitions on Cubism, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the ironies of art history is that it was the rude, crude, ignorant barbarians of America, the lowly “colonials absorbed, adapted and advanced European avant-garde art years ahead of the Europeans.  During the years of the Second World War, the Americans reshaped and reformed European intellectual and spiritual and psychological abstractions into a more “American” idiom.  The painters, who were mature artists reaching the peak of their collective powers, sought to both use and to get beyond their European precursors and create work that expressed their unique contributions.  The New York School implicitly rejected the small (and feminine) size of the easel paintings favored by the market driven European artists.  They had been impressed by the mural of the Mexican artists and wanted to adapt the wall-sized works for portable paintings that would be as big as America.

During the War, most of the artists experimented with combining old traditions of European modernism into new forms.  Arshile Gorky seemed to take the early lead in rethinking the inherited tradition, but he committed suicide in 1948.  After the war, American artists were aware that Europe was in ruins and that they had momentum of European art had been broken by war.  Just as America had “won” the Second World War, Abstract Expressionism reveled in the American post-war spirit of “triumphalism” and celebrated yet another victory over the exhausted Europeans and their dead traditions.   Riding high in the Forties and the Fifties, the group of New York artist who came to be called the Abstract Expressionists revitalized a tiring European tradition by infusing abstraction with an idealistic desire to fuse and merge with a (Jungian) universal consciousness, replacing a Freudian neurosis with a Jungian dream of deep, trans-cultural connections common to all living culture-creating beings.  In other words, the New York School rejected a “local” European theory from Sigmund Freud from his erstwhile follower, Carl Jung, who had a far more universal approach to collective consciousness.

Jung, like Freud, worked with symbols that could be decoded as messages from a deep consciousness and although Pollock worked with Jungian archetypes, he ultimately abandoned figuration. When working on a large painting for Peggy Guggenheim’s hallway, fittingly called Mural of 1943, Pollock faced the difficulties of painting abstract forms that were energetic and spontaneous on an easel format.  Physically, such painting strokes were difficult and Pollock would mull over the final solution to the problem of how to paint freely on a large scale for the next four years.  Only in 1947, when he was removed (by his wife, Lee Krasner) from the hard-drinking artists in New York, did he solve the problem.  “Drip Painting” in which chance and accident became the raison d’être for his work, paintings that were now totally abstract.

From the beginning the members of The New York School coalesced around two leading figures, Willem de Kooning, respected by all, and Jackson Pollock, admired by many. It was Pollock who “broke through” the wall of European traditions when he fused Cubism and Surrealism and created a new form of painting as drawing and of kinetic accident as automatic writing.  In contrast to de Kooning’s continuation of the easel tradition, Pollock tossed a large cut of canvas onto the floor of his studio on Long Island and turned the paintbrush into a throwing tool.  It was de Kooning who managed to take the European tradition of Cubism and abstracted fragmentation and turned the idea of multiple points of view into multiple layers of paint.  De Kooning constructed or built up his paintings while Pollock flung his paintings through the air and dripped them off the end of a stiffened brush.

Suddenly, the art scene in New York was awakened to this new School that had at last overtaken the Europeans, beating them at their own game.  In contrast to Surrealism’s tastefully small home decoration-sized easel paintings that reeked of self-absorption, their works showed an ambitious desire to create huge, all-encompassing works of art to enfold, engulf, and envelop the artist in the creative process and to swallow up the viewer’s vision.  Perhaps because it ws a post-War movement, Abstract Expressionism was as high-minded as it was ambitious: genuine high culture at its best, seizing the falling torch of Western culture before the onslaught of totalitarianism, before the six years of Total War could extinguish it.  Aware that they were, in effect, Holocaust survivors, Newman and Rothko were especially sensitive to the need to make sure that art mattered, had power and majesty, that art inspired and moved the viewer as a bastion of humanity in an inhuman world.

Whatever their concern with abstraction as a transcendental art, the Abstract Expressionist artists were members of a boy’s club, an all male enclave, with  a “no girls allowed” attitude.   Wives, Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, were relegated to secondary status and their art was overshadowed by their husbands’ reputations.  The male artists were supported not just by the “wives,” but also by a coterie of male art critics, including Thomas B. Hess, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg.  Unfortunately for these artists, the New York art world may have inherited the European mantle of modern art, but this world had to recover financially from the war.  They would have to wait for some years for the evolution of a gallery system that supported contemporary American art.

Ironically, just as the artists were beginning to find gallery support, museum recognition, and a respectable level of income in a New York recovered from the Second World War, they were challenged by a new generation of artists, the Neo-Dadaists, Rauschenberg and Johns.   By 1955, Abstract Expressionism had been rejected by younger artists at the same time the style was finally achieving some acceptance.  After Pollock’s death in 1956, de Kooning assumed the mantle of leadership.  Unlike Pollock’s idiocyncratic style, de Kooning’s style or his touch or brushwork was easy to assimilate and his followers were characterized as having the “Tenth Street Touch,” after the de Kooning studio on Tenth Street.  At the moment Abstract Expressionism garnered the Second Generation, the older artists were eclipsed, much to their dismay, by the young upstarts of the Neo-Dada group.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Nov
18
2011

Abstract Expressionism: The Field of Cultural Production

The Historical Context of Abstract Expressionism

The historical context of Abstract Expressionism can perhaps best be mapped out according to the theories of Pierre Bourdieu who coined the phrase “the field of cultural production.”   What was the “field” which “produced” the culture of Abstract Expressionism?  One should also add the thinking of Giesele Freund who wrote of the “preparedness” or the “readiness” of society for photography.  Abstract Expressionism marks the shift of Modern Art away from Paris and towards New York, the movement of the avant-garde from Europe to America.  New York, as Serge Guilbault remarked, “stole the idea of modern art.”  The theft of modern art was the result of the preparedness of the artists in New York City in the 1940s to take advantage of the shift of the field of cultural production from the Old World to the New.

First, European politics stymied and stifled the free circulation of avant-garde art around the continent.  Fascism in Italy in the 1920s, Nazism in Germany in the 1930s and their totalitarian control of art was prefaced by the crushing of the vanguard Russian artists in the Soviet Union.  Totalitarian regimes cannot tolerate freedom in the arts and a political party that seeks absolute power will always move against the artists first.   Major sources of art making and art thinking were shut down and many of the artists impacted simply packed up and left.  Many artists came to America, bringing with them ideas of art theory and concepts of art practice to provincial shores.

Second, even in Paris, where there was open acceptance of avant-garde art, the art market had a dampening effect upon the development of new and innovative ideas.  The time between the wars in Paris was a conservative one, an era of consolidation of the pre-War avant-garde movements.  Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, et al. were now “historical” movements and their leaders were now Old Masters.  A tendency towards a conservative approach to art evidenced itself very early on, during the Great War, in the work of Picasso.  After the war the mood was one of “Return to Order” and restoring all that was classical in French art in The School of Paris.  Nostalgic conservatism after a devastating war is a common reaction and would be exemplified by the Ingres-esque classicism of Amedeo Modigliani.  After post-War economic recovery, French collectors were eagerly flocking to the revived and expanded art market.  The dealers sold their clients “a Picasso,” or  “a Matisse,” art done in the characteristic styles of the masters, but tamed down.  A case in point is Picasso’s 1921 Three Musicians, which is a painted collage, in other words, not innovative mixed media, but a conservative and salable painting.

Surrealism emerged in 1924 out of the ashes of the last provocative avant-garde movement, Dada.  Conservative Surrealism was an inward looking   movement that possessed no particular stylistic “look,” but was a placeholder for the avant-garde.  In contrast to the pre-war avant-garde movements which were stylistic change, Surrealism produced not so much new styles as new approaches to the process of making art, such as automatic writing.  Another historical footnote worth noting was the fact that the history of pre-War avant-garde movements was largely written by the art dealers, such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Léonce Rosenberg, thus legitimating their art and elevating the price.  During the Nazi occupation of Paris, avant-garde artists either sought safety in America—-Chagall, who was Jewish, moved to New York—-or were forced to keep a low and safe profile in France to survive the Nazi occupation.

Third, European artists immigrated to America over the course of ten years.  Some of these artists, such as the Bauhaus architects, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe, simply moved their practices to the American cities of New York and Chicago.  The coming of the Bauhaus architects to the United States paved the way for the International Style that would characterize architecture after the Second World War.   Indeed, Modernist architecture was a case in point of how inhospitable Europe had become to avant-garde architects.  While those in Russia were doomed to produce mostly “paper architecture” or models, other architects concentrated on domestic architecture, such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and the De Stijl architect Gerrit Reitveld’s Schröder House in the 1920s.  Thwarted by wars and oppression, Modernist architecture finally found itself in great works of public and corporate works only after the Second World War.  The Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe in New York was the achievement of the prosperous Fifties in America.

But architects weren’t the only Europeans to seek safe haven.  Even as Hitler was moving into power in Germany, Hans Hofmann was moving out to become an art teacher in New York in the winter and Providencetown in the summer.  Bauhaus faculty members, Josef and Anni Albers, found themselves at the famous Black Mountain College where they taught the next generation who would overtake the Abstract Expressionist artists.  Piet Mondrian, who had fled Holland for London, had to leave London for New York, where he died in 1945.   The American Dada photographer, Man Ray, came home and spent the next eleven years in Los Angeles.  These artists were joined by intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, who changed the climate and the quality of American thinking during the Second World War.

Fourth, the presence of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was of great significance in educating American artists on European avant-garde art.  Since Alfred Stieglitz had closed down his gallery, 291, in 1916, there had been no reliable gathering point were artists could see the cutting edge art of Europe.  And then MoMA opened in 1929, headed by Alfred Barr.  Barr ended the somewhat specious relationship between the dealers and the museums: dealers would organize and mount shows in museums, giving their art greater legitimacy, and subsequently raising the prices.  Like Christ in the Temple with the Moneychangers, Barr barred such practices and art was set apart from commerce.  The look of MoMA, the “pure” White Cube, gave the museum of modern art a sanctified air, where art and commercialism did not consort.  Most importantly, Barr was able to bring in avant-garde European art in a series of shows that would be hard to mount in many European countries.  It could be argued that, thought these important exhibitions, American artists had better access to this new art than did European artists, particularly those who were stranded in totalitarian countries.

Fifth, American artists were being brought together as never before during the Thirties.  Government programs employed artists as either easel artists or as mural artists for public buildings, granting them the status of professionals.   Many artists were able to take advantage of these employment programs, others, such as Willem de Kooning, who was not in American legally, or Newman, who had political qualms, did not take part.  Whether or not one participated or not, the result of the government programs was to bring artists together, to create an artist community that included art critics, such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. This community was ready to hear the new ideas of the European émigré artists and intellectuals.  Greenberg learned studio talk at the feet of Hofmann who gave his American audiences a synthesis of Cubist and Expressionist art theories.

Although in the post-war, art history glossed over the art commissioned by the New Deal, the murals and photographs and easel painting stirred up creativity and provided challenges to American artists.  In contrast the European artists who were essentially running in place, American artists were keeping active, forced into the innovation demanded by new conditions.  Sensing an opportunity, Americans watched closely as nation by nation, territory by territory, Europe shut art down.  American artists respected European art, but many felt that the avant-garde movements were played out. The best artists were old and long past their prime.  Surrealism was already twenty years old, for instance.  No new generation had emerged in Europe.

Sixth, Americans wanted to go beyond European art, but the question was how?  Painters in New York wanted to create a new avant-garde art that was uniquely “American,” being robust, reflective of the greatness of the nation.  The local artists liked the all-over effects of Cézanne and Mondrian, but found the easel art small and confining.  Mondrian, especially, seemed “effeminate” in the precise preciousness of his meditative approach to painting.  The New Yorkers were interested in the concept of the powers of the unconscious mind, suggested by Surrealism, but did not like the realistic dream paintings or Freudian theory.  They did, however, appreciate the freedom from convention that the practice of écriture automatique or automatic writing could give to artists.

The promise of the all-over effect expanded beyond the portable easel painting could be fulfilled by mural painting, as practiced and taught by the Mexican muralists.  The Mexican muralists were highly political and highly specific and many of them had an unfortunate track record of having their murals defaced: Rivera by the Rockefellers in New York and Siqueros by Christine Sterling in Los Angeles.  Wary of political content, the American artists preferred the universality of message combined with an impressive scale found in Picasso’s Guernica, temporarily housed at MoMA.

Seventh, as can be seen, it is as important to take note of what the younger generation of American artists rejected.  In addition to the Communist statements of the Mexican painters and the dream content of the Surrealists, American artists did not want to continue the nationalistic art of the Regionalist artists, such as Benton and Wood, nor did they want to continue the political art of the Social Realists, such as Ben Shahn and the other Depression artists.  During the Depression and the Second World War, much art was dedicated to propaganda which promoted the benefits of the New Deal and then the need to support the War.  The new artists appreciated abstract art, and, indeed there was an active group of abstract artists, the American Abstract Artists, but theirs was an old-fashioned abstraction of European formalism.  The American artists coming into maturity in New York wanted a new kind of abstraction.

And, last, there was one factor, seldom emphasized but often mentioned in passing—the age of the Abstract Expressionist artists.  They were all middle-aged men who had been developing their painting techniques and styles for years, working in obscurity.  Unlike their European counterparts, the painters of the New York School had uninterrupted careers, untouched by political oppression or war.  When America was drawn into World War II in 1941, these men were too old or too unfit or too ineligible to serve in the Armed Forces.  While younger men went to war, sacrificing their careers and sometimes their lives for their county, the Abstract Expressionists were able to remain in the safety of New York City.

These crucial war years were the very years that preceded their individual styles, which would emerge in the fifties.  When peace returned, the New York artists had benefited from a period of maturation that placed them at the forefront of the art world.  Much of Europe was in ruins, and the European artists had to endure a period of rebuilding and restoration.  In contrast, the American artists had to wait only for the emergence of a professional gallery scene   that could support their ambitions.  In ten years, it had become apparent that New York had inherited the idea of Modern Art.

What did the American artists in New York City want?  They wanted to take over the reins of avant-garde Modernist art.  They wanted to make modernist art American.  The artists, who would form (loosely) the New York School in the Fifties, were ready, they were prepared.  The field of cultural production had shifted to the East Coast of America.  The result would be Abstract Expressionism.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Nov
11
2011

“The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939 by Clement Greenberg

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

OF

The Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 1939

by Clement Greenberg

What is life?  If one paraphrases the painter, Ad Reinhardt, “Life is everything that is not art or art is everything that is not life…” which means that much has been excluded from art…an exclusion, which would please the New York critic, Clement Greenberg.  In 1939, against the backdrop of European Fascism, the American art critic wrote The Avant-Garde and Kitsch. The prevailing and popular art style, American regionalism, was waning when Greenberg set out to make the distinction between a true genuine culture and popular art.  From the very beginning of the essay, Greenberg was very clear that he would deal with a question of “aesthetics,” or how art is defined, and that he would do so by examining the experiences of a “specific” individual and the “social and historical contexts in which that experience takes place.”

Greenberg was writing at a very unique time indeed.  It was rare for contemporary art to be under the kind of attacks that had been underway for years in Europe.  In the Soviet Union, the avant-garde was completely suppressed.  In German, avant-garde art was defined as “degenerate.”  The Avant-Garde and Kitsch was published in the new intellectual journal, Partisan Review, a good place for an up-and-coming literary critic to further his career. For years Greenberg, an English major in college, wrote mostly as a literary critic, and his first published article was on Berthold Brecht, a Berlin theater producer.  Brecht, a devoted Communist, thought of popular entertainment as a means to raise the consciousness of the audience.  Using the “estrangement” strategy, Brecht broke the “fourth wall” by addressing the audience directly from the stage and thus also breaking the illusion of “reality.”

As his interest in Brecht’s use of popular theater would suggest, Greenberg was not necessarily opposed to popular culture per se and it is important to understand the context in which this essay was developed.  The entire world was poised on the edge of another world war and was witnessing the horrifying spectacle of a fascist war machine rolling over Europe.  During this fascist period in Europe, “culture” had been appropriated by the totalitarian powers in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy and turned into spectacle for the masses, resulting in mesmerizing entertainment and psychic manipulation.

The ability of Hitler and Mussolini to make war with little opposition from their own people who supported the aggression was the result of a years-long, carefully orchestrated campaign of propaganda.  Brecht understood all too well how “culture” both popular and unpopular could be mobilized to mesmerize the masses, which was exactly what happened in Germany. Any form of culture that could protest the philosophy of the Nazis had long since been shut down and dissident artists were brutally silenced.  German artists had fled to America or had retreated to an “inner exile” of non-confrontational art.  Indeed, Greenberg himself would later learn much about art from an émigré artist, Hans Hofmann.

Greenberg was repelled by the totalitarian seizure of “culture” in Europe. But the critic is an American living in New York.  If the examples of the demise of the avant-garde in Europe were extreme, the governmental use of American artists to its own end was also disturbing to an intellectual. Although many artists owned their careers to government patronage during the thirties, there was a cost to carrying on this kind of work.  The role of art under the New Deal was to communicate very specific messages to a public, which was largely illiterate about art and the artist’s freedom was often limited by the parameters of the project.  That said, in America, there was artistic freedom, and Greenberg equated the freedom to make art with the freedom to make avant-garde abstract art.  But there was also a small arena for avant-garde artists in America and the artists lacked the open playing field of art galleries that existed in France.

Writing at the end of the avant-garde in Europe, Greenberg explained the significance of the avant-garde tradition. He defined the avant-garde as a “superior consciousness” which coincided with the emergence of modern scientific thinking.  As a force for cultural critique, avant-garde art separated itself from the bourgeoisie.  This separation included the artists’ separation from subject matter and content and an adherence to art-for-art’s-sake. Greenberg made reference to the avant-garde artists,

“Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in,” and he adds, in a phrase which would be further developed in later essays, “…to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.”

But, as a Marxist, Greenberg saw problems within the avant-garde in that this “…culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome.”  Greenberg feared for the avant-garde artist, for this artist was dependent upon capitalism and wealthy patrons.  The artist was necessarily attached to bourgeois wealth by what Greenberg called “an umbilical cord of gold.”  He pointed to the paradox of artistic freedom being dependent upon an elite clientele, which is shrinking rather than growing. Greenberg wrote,

“…the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger, is becoming more and more timid every day that passes. Academicism and commercialism are appearing in the strangest places. This can mean only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on — the rich and the cultivated.”

Greenberg looked elsewhere and wrote that the avant-garde was threatened by the rear guard, which, to Greenberg, was the dreaded phenomenon—kitsch, which he defined as,

“…popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc…”

Later, Greenberg would disavow his definition of kitsch, and, indeed, his later discussion of kitsch indicates that he is less concerned about popular culture than with what would be better termed “academic art.”  It would be correct to assume that Greenberg despaired of a nation that thought it was receiving “art” every week with the Norman Rockwell cover of The Saturday Evening Post, but it is also important to recall that what was considered art in the 1930s was “academic.”

As the following quote from Greenberg would suggest, an example of “kitsch” would be Alexandre Cabanal’s Birth of Venus as opposed to avant-garde work of Édouard Manet’s Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe.  According to the critic,

The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

In other words, kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money — not even their time. And speaking of money, Greenberg noted that the avant-garde has not always “resisted” the “of temptation” to turn their art into kitsch.

Kitsch is popular or commercial form of high art, a product of the industrial revolution, manufactured for a middle class audience who had enough literacy to want “art” but not enough culture to understand the genuine article.  The urbanized proletariat was given an ersatz culture—fake art, kitsch, which used a debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.  Kitsch operated, according to Greenberg, as vicarious experience, as faked sensations, taking advantage of a fully matured cultural tradition for its own ends.  Kitsch loots real art, borrows what it needs, converts inventions into formulas, waters down experiments and turns out familiar art-like images mechanically.

Often overlooked in the numerous analyses of this essay is Greenberg’s lengthy and perceptive discussion of the relationship between kitsch and the regimes in Germany, Italy and Russia.  These totalitarian regimes reject the avant-garde for two reasons.  First, the dictatorial government must get close to the people in order to rule them and no government wishing to disperse propaganda would use avant-garde art to do so.  The public simply would not understand the language. In point of fact, that is precisely what happened to the Soviet avant-garde which was deemed inarticulate. Second, Greenberg considered the avant-garde to be inherently critical and unsuited for governmental manipulation. “It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and not so much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture,” he stated.

Greenberg was certainly prophetic in recognizing that kitsch would become an international language, taking over indigenous folk cultures; but he was wrong in assuming that avant-garde artists would succumb to actually making kitsch.  It is one of the ironies of art history that the kitsch-producing government commissions allowed financially marginal artists to become professional artists who would later become the center of the avant-garde. What Greenberg could not foresee was that, after World War II, a consumer society would be kicked into high gear, producing a generation of artists who grew up with kitsch or popular culture.

Greenberg may have repudiated his rather simplistic definition of “kitsch,” but his attitude that the public could not tell the difference between Tin Pan Alley and T. S. Eliot remained. Convinced of the serious mission that avant-garde art had to stand apart from society in order to critique it, the critic could not look upon Pop Art as “art.” This generation, called Pop artists (popular culture) used kitsch as raw material for their art and converted images from kitsch sources into artistic icons. Trapped by a self-imposed vocabulary of form and formalism, he simply did not have the concepts that would have allowed him to marvel—however cynically—at how kitsch became elevated to “high art.”  But Greenberg’s essay remains viable and perceptive in his analysis of the gulf between the elite and the general public.  The following words could have been written today:

Most often this resentment toward culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood’s health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Nov
04
2011

Abstract Expressionism and Meaning

How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art:

Abstract Expressionism and Meaning

The American artists had early training from Modernist masters in New York City that prepared the ground with the abstract Cubism of Piet Mondrian and with Surrealist ideas and techniques of André Masson and Matta.  The famous expatriate teacher, Hans Hofmann, taught a synthesis of Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism and taught the Americans to be distrustful of the figurative aspects of Surrealism.  The East European émigré, John Graham, taught the Americans to assimilate Surrealism through “primitive” art and through the works of Pablo Picasso.  The Mexican Masters, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, taught the New York artists about mural painting and about working on a large scale, using experimental techniques.  However, Americans ultimately rejected the imagery of the Mexican painters as being too verbal, that is too message based.  On the other hand, they were also wary of decorative art as being empty.  The Abstract Expressionist painters searched for a new kind of meaning, a transcendental meaning.

Picasso’s monumental work, Guernica, 1937 was hanging at the Museum of Modern Art.  The great work had been commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion of for the Paris International Exhibition but had been stranded in New York City by the outbreak of the Second World War.  Here was a work that was large scale with a universal meaning that transcended any local events.  The Abstract Expressionist artists were attempting to get beyond, not only the European tradition in painting but also the regionalism and localism of American art. It was important for these artists to free art from any parochialism and to establish art as an act of transcendence.  Content had to be not only personal but the individual style of one artist was only a vehicle for the expression of larger and more universal concerns.

With Abstract Expressionism, art and artists took up new positions and roles.  The artist as a human being was an extension of humanity, seeking universal knowledge through self-knowledge.  Making art was a journey of discovery.  The writings of André Breton were of help by suggesting that any painting, any work of art, could be an “event,” a “revelation,” a risk,” thus rescuing abstract art from the shame of “mere (feminine) decoration.”  The personality of the artist became part of the content but that meaning remained ultimately unknowable or beyond understanding.

Understanding an Abstract Expressionist painting was an event rather than an intellectual act of perception.  The abstract content of pure paint, pure line, pure color became a meaning that could only be felt, not spoken, undefined but discernible, incapable of being verbalized but nevertheless abstractly expressed. Freed from rules and conventions of art making, the artist could assert his (or her) personality through the unique signatory ‘touch.”  This ego-oriented art puts the artist above the subject matter; indeed, the artist becomes the subject matter. In an example of the “pathetic fallacy,” the work of art became the carrier of the artist’s soul, which was somehow embedded in the very pigment and the surface affects themselves.  The facture or “surface” became fetishized as a result of the belief that the pigment embodied the artist.

For the viewer as well as the artist, Abstract Expressionist art was pure experience.  The paintings were large and overpowering, often stretching beyond the viewer’s field of vision and activating the peripheral vision.  As art historian, Robert Hobbs, pointed out, the artists often wanted to control the lighting by diming gallery atmosphere to a quiet contemplative experience.  The artists also wanted the viewer to come close to the art to become enveloped by the purely visual experience.  The painting becomes the universe and universal.  But in order for the experience to be purely visual, traditional composition had to be jettisoned.

One of the breakthroughs of early Modernism was the introduction of the “all-over” composition in Cubism.  It was Mondrian who took the suggestion of boundlessness beyond the frame to fruition by eliminating a centered composition and creating an asymmetrical composition that was also balanced.  But Mondrian’s paintings were small and precisely painted with a discipline and control that lacked spontaneity. Abstract Expressionism brought an end to relationships-as-content. Compositional relationships were either eliminated, as with Jackson Pollock, or simplified, as with Mark Rothko.  The resulting mass image implied an infinite expansion beyond the optical field, just as the way in which Mondrian brought black lines and colors to the end of the canvas.

With Abstract Expression the primary moral act is the decision to paint.  In a world that has experienced an all engulfing war and a horrifying holocaust and a brilliant blast of annihilating light, painting becomes a moral activity, one of the last possible ethical gestures. Abstract Expressionism was an art of pure idea, considered to be sublime, even transcendent and thus reconnected with the early Romantic tradition of landscape painting in America.  Nineteenth century American painting had sough God in Nature, but in a universe that had be denaturalized and had been scourged of God, the only transcendence or saving grace was art itself, the last refuge of godliness.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Oct
28
2011

The Making of the New York School

THE ART SCENE SHIFTS FROM EUROPE TO AMERICA

In 1983, art historian, Serge Guilbaut, wrote a provocatively titled book, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. How, indeed?  While the first chapter of this book discusses the politics of the New York intelligentsia and the various stances and shades of Marxism, I wish to look to the cultural matrix between the wars that drove avant-garde innovation to the shores of America. Socially and politically, this was a period of isolation and appeasement in Europe. Artistically, the period between the wars was a Return to Order.  The result was a marketable and conservative version of avant-garde in Paris and a radical return to an unflinching realism in Germany.

After the Great War, European powers would have given away anything and anyone to avoid losing another generation of young men.  The result of the very natural desire to save lives was to allow a rising tide of Communism in Russia and Fascism in Italy and Germany and a continental drift towards totalitarianism.  The Great Depression of the 1930s made desperate people susceptible to the lure of a leader. Whether Communist or Fascist, both types of regimes were repressive to avant-garde art, which was banned by Hitler (collected by his henchmen) as “degenerate” and replaced by socialist realist art in Russia.  As Clement Greenberg pointed out art in the Soviet Union devolved into kitsch of which Nazi art, based upon debased classicism, was a perfect example.  Less well known is the position of Fascist art in Italy, which was based upon debased Modernism, appropriated by Mussolini in order to ally the new Roman Empire with modernity.

Artistically, the state of avant-garde art after the Great War was conservative.  In France this return to traditionalism was termed rétour à l’ordre and this New Classicism was the foundation of the School of Paris. Although Paris as center of international art scene, it was not as dynamic as it had been before the War.  The young artists were decidedly minor, compared to the maturing leaders, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.  The only overtly avant-garde movement was Surrealism.  Surrealism did not originate in the visual arts but in the psychology of Sigmund Freud, used by the poets of the movement to search for different sources for inspiration beyond or “sur” reality.  The visual artists, who came to the movement later, adapted and played with Surrealist ideas and techniques, some of which, such as écriture automatique, would have a life beyond the movement.

In Germany, the subject matter of New Objectivity was highly active and provocative and confrontational but the styles employed by the artists were deliberately old world.  The famous art school, the Bauhaus, was not innovative in the fine arts but was very avant-garde in the world of design and architecture.  In comparison to the acceptance of the French version of the avant-garde and its highly lucrative art market, the artists in German who were trying to challenge the establishment met with hostile reactions from the Weimar government.  The Bauhaus designers had ideas that were ahead of the technological and industrial capabilities, which would be achieved only after the Second World War.  At any rate this flowering of the avant-garde art scene in Berlin was brief, not well received in its own time and ended abruptly under Hitler in 1933.

Meanwhile, the situation in America was not one of a need for order no matter what the costs. America was not faced with a Hobson’s choice between totalitarianism versus the need for peace no matter what the costs or accommodation to the forces of “order.” Although the nation participated reluctantly in the Great War, America had traditionally been isolationist in its mindset towards European art, preferring its own utilitarian culture of necessity.  The idea of art-for-art’s-sake, so dear to Europeans, was alien to Americans.  Art was a useless luxury.  What art there was existed in New York.  Despite the brush with the avant-garde of Europe at the 1913 Armory Show, conservative and backward versions of outdated art styles from the Old Country, such as the regressive realism of the Ashcan School.

But the early twentieth-century artists of the Ashcan School suited American audiences who had always preferred realism and art about themselves.  Nevertheless, there were two small groups of avant-garde artists in New York, the group of artists around Alfred Stieglitz, the American Modernists: Paul Strand, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth.  Coexisting and crossing paths with the Stieglitz group were a more radical set circulating around the collectors, Walter and Louise Arensberg.  The New York Dada, consisting largely of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, was only tangentially related to the Dada groups in Europe and was arguably more significant for artists in the fifties than the artists of the forties.

At any rate, these early twentieth century movements were no longer coherent groups by the thirties and the members were scattered and had gone on to follow their personal interests.  The exhaustion of American Modernism and Dada left a space that was filled by nationalist art movements, the regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood and the political activism of Social Realists, such as Ben Shahn.  The decade of the thirties was a decade of “American” art, not the “American” art of Sheeler and Demuth and Stuart Davis and Ralston Crawford, all of which celebrated the industry of the nation, but the folksy, rural agrarian tradition of “Americana.” In contrast, Social Realism and versions of politically active art practiced by the Mexican muralists introduced content that attempted to reveal the grim truth of the Depression.

The Depression, however, was good to artists.  The United States government attempted to find work for all Americans who needed work and provided specialized jobs for specialized communities.  Artists and writers were allowed to remain artists and writers in an economic climate that would have ordinarily wiped out the careers of most of them.  For the first time, artists were recognized as “artists” and were mobilized by the government as professionals and given honest work.  Art history has tended to ignore the work done by artists under the New Deal on the basis of aesthetic judgment and because the artists were hired hands with little freedom to invent.  However, the New Deal projects were important to the future because New Deal spread art throughout a nation where art had never existed, where artists were unknown.  The New Deal kept artists actively making art, whether mural art or easel art and paid them a living wage.  Perhaps the Depression artists were given commissions and parameters to follow but their situation was far superior to that of artists under Hitler or Stalin.

Although not articulated at the time, it was clear to the avant-garde American artists involved with the tradition of European modernism, that the avant-garde overseas was exhausted.  The previous leaders, from Picasso to Breton, were aging and were intent upon consolidating their careers and reputations.  The steam had gone out of the European avant-garde and nothing had happened to take the place of Surrealism as the leader in innovation.  Because of the many interdictions on avant-garde art in nations under totalitarian rule, much of the work being done by European artists who could still make art was not widely circulated.  The international art scene that had existed up to the thirties no longer existed and the free flow of artistic ideas was dammed up.

But there was an island, and an unlikely island at that, where avant-garde art could be seen in its variety and entirety—New York City.  As early as 1921, there was an exhibition at Brooklyn Museum of Cézanne and Matisse and in 1926 very new and cutting edge artists, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and El Lissitzky.  And then in 1929 the Museum of Modern Art opened under Alfred Barr.  The Museum of Modern Art became a major site for introducing Modernist ideas and modern art to the American public. A number of exhibitions at the museum set up the history of Modernism with shows of the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Vincent van Gogh in 1929, Toulouse-Lautrec and Redon in 1931.  And to get the New York art audiences up to date Barr mounted a Survey of the School of Paris, Painting in Paris, a show featuring Léger in 1935, and the iconic exhibition, Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936.  Recent movements were also made available with the 1936 – 37 exhibition, Fantastic Art, Dada & Surrealism and the show of the Bauhaus 1919 – 1928 in 1930 to 1939.

Ironically when Barr mounted exhibitions of the art of Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, American artists became better educated in modernist art than their European counterparts.  The Museum of Modern Art used the decade of the thirties to give Americans a crash course and a history lesson (exemplified by his famous chart in the beginning of his catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art) on Modernism.  However, these exhibitions also served to convince the local artists that they had to break out of what was clearly an avant-garde that was now part of history.  American artists began seeing other sources for inspiration and other approaches to art, from the exhibition, African Negro Art in 1935, the exhibition Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and America of 1937, and a very influential exhibition of Native American art, Indian Art of the United States in 1941.

While of great importance, the Museum of Modern Art was symptomatic of the early evidence of the establishment of a genuine art world in New York.  Albert Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art in the library of New York University showed Neo-Plasticism and Constructivist art.  The Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim) opened in 1939. Under the leadership of Hilla Rebay, the museum began to collect the best examples of European modernist art, such as Kandinsky, Arp, Malevich, Léger, Delaunay, Giacometti.  A few American artists were included, such as David Smith but for the most part the Museum looked mainly to Europe.  Local artists were certainly receptive to modernist art.  Art collector, Katherine Dreier and Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp, founded the Société Anonyme in 1920 for avant-garde thinkers, and abstract painters came together when the American Abstract Artists was established in 1936.

Although artists in New York often complained that MoMA was biased towards European artists, half the museum’s exhibitions were of American artists and the range of art shown was astonishing, from photography to design to architecture.  As further evidence of the growing importance of New York as a cultural center was the large numbers of political refugees that arrived during the 1930s.  German artist, Hans Hoffmann, had a school of fine arts in Munich but he was among the many perceptive artists who saw the handwriting on the wall and closed the school in 1932 and came to America.  Hofmann opened his own school in New York City in 1934 and a summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1935.  The Bauhaus artists and architects, fleeing Hitler after the closure of the school in 1933, would join him in exile.  Josef and Annie Albers became teachers at the famous Black Mountain College and while their impact upon the New York artists of the forties was certainly less than that of Hofmann, the presence of experienced teachers of modernist art would shape a generation of artists.

For the first time, American artists could hear European art theories, taught by an artist who combined German Expressionism with French Cubism.  Clement Greenberg, largely a literary critic, began attending Hofmann’s lectures, learning studio talk and crafting himself as an art critic.  Hofmann joined other émigré artists already in place.  Arshile Gorky (Vosdanig Adoian) had arrived in New York ten years earlier and had assimilated the same traditions as Hofmann, but from visits to museums.  In what would be a typically American strategy of synthesizing European movements, Gorky added Surrealism to the mix.  John Graham (Ivan Gratianovitch Dombrowsky) came to the United States from Russian and never looked back, becoming an America citizen in 1927.  A decade later he wrote “Picasso and Primitive Art” and Systems and Dialectics in Art.  Writing in 1937, Graham, who was in touch with European art, suggested that American artists look to the “primitive” art forms and championed abstract art.  Graham was concerned with the development of an art that could be expressive

Graham was one of several figures that mentored the new generation of artists in New York, including the Mexican mural artist, David Siqueiros who experimented with airbrush and spray techniques in his painting.  Jackson Pollock, whom Graham knew well, visited this workshop twice, intrigued with the large scale of the murals and with the non-fine art tools.  The first mural done by a Mexican artist was produced in 1930 by José Clemente Orozco at Pomona College in the small town of Claremont, California, east of Los Angeles.  Jackson Pollock, who had grown up in Los Angeles, went out of his way to see the Prometheus mural on his way to New York. Diego Rivera was also in New York but sadly his mural for the Rockefeller Center was destroyed in 1934 but the concept of a wall scaled work of art would have a lasting impact on the New York School.

The last group of artists to arrive in America was the Surrealists from France. Like Piet Mondrian and Marc Chagall, they came to America in 1940 as a last resort.  As the irresistible wave of Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled over Europe and as London huddled under a rain of bombs, New York was the only safe place for an artist who was avant-garde or Jewish or both.  By the time the Surrealists arrived, the New York artistic scene was ready for the last dose of heady European art theory.  Although the Surrealists, led by André Breton, were not interested in communicating with the locals, Roberto Matta, a Chilean artist, acted as go-between and the ideas and techniques of the French artists were transmitted to the New York artists.   Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy circulated more than Breton and Tanguy and Ernst married American artists, Kay Sage and Dorothea Tanning, respectively.

The famous Peggy Guggenheim returned home, but with European booty, a treasure trove of avant-garde European from artists who were desperate to sell their works.  She tried to purchase “a work a day,” her motto.  This large and significant collection became the foundation of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, established when she returned to Venice in 1946.  In addition to collecting art, Guggenheim also collected the German artist, Max Ernst who had been interned as an enemy alien in Aix-en-Provence in 1940.  But when the Germans conquered France, Ernst, as a “degenerate artists” was still in danger and was arrested by the Nazis.  He escaped from the Gestapo and, with the help of Peggy Guggenhiem, was able to get to America through Portugal.  Ernst and the art collector married in 1941 and in 1942 she opened her gallery, Art of This Century.

Always competitive with her uncle, Guggenheim was now a full-fledged rival and became a major player on the New York art scene, presiding over her gallery, designed by Frederick Keisler. At the urging of Lee Krasner, Peggy Guggenheim began to sponsor Krasner’s boyfriend, Jackson Pollock.  Major questions faced the artists of the New York School to extend the European tradition of Modernism, now ossified, or stake out new territory and create their own art, a new American tradition.  Also up for discussion, what of this European tradition to retain and what to discard, what to take from the “American” scene and what to learn from the Mexican artists.  Now, with the arrival of so many European artists, the Americans were able to acquire not just new tools for painting but also the words, the language, which allowed them to talks about art.  The stage was now ready and the scene was set.  All the players were in motion and the art world had shifted the New York, which had “stolen” the idea of Modern Art.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

 

 

 

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