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Feb
03
2012

“Modernist Painting” by Clement Greenberg

THE MODERNISM OF MODERNIST PAINTING, 1960/1 

Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting,” originally given as a radio broadcast in 1916 for the Voice of America’s “Forum Lectures,” was printed in 1961 in the Arts Yearbook 4 of the same year, reprinted in 1965, ’66, ‘74, ’78, and 1982.   The article achieved a canonical status and served as one of the definitive statements of formalism as a mode of visual analysis and of formalism as a critical stance, and possibly, of formalism as a mode of making art.   In his 1961 essay on “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) defined “Modernism” as the period (in art) roughly from the mid-1850s to his present that displayed a self-critical tendency in the arts.

Greenberg considered Immanuel  Kant the first Modernist.  The essence of Kant’s thesis was the employment of the characteristic “methods” of the discipline to “criticize the discipline itself.”  According to Greenberg, Kant used logic to establish “the limits of logic.”  The Modernist goal of self-criticism grows out of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment philosophical system which was based upon the belief in the power of rational thought and human reason. “Critique,” as a method, analyzes from the inside, from within the object being examined and does not judge from the outside, according to external criteria.

Painting must analyze itself to discover its inherent properties. Painting, according to Enlightenment methodology, must be interrogated according to its inherent purposes.  The key term here would be “inherent,” for analyzing an object according to its essential definition must preclude bringing forward any non-essential or external criteria. In other words, a painting telling a “good story” is not necessarily a good painting.   In this article, Greenberg carries on his attempt to “save” and to define “high art,” and “Modernist Painting” of 1960 can be compared to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939.  Two decades had passed and Greenberg had progressed from being an up-and-coming art writer to being the arbiter of fine arts in New York, enjoying a truly hegemonic position.  His crusade was all the more urgent in 1961, as territory of the avant-garde was being invaded by popular culture and the forces of disrule, exemplified by Neo-Dada and Pop Art and Fluxus.  Greenberg had also shifted his political position, from being an intellectual Marxist, to being a Kantian formalist, a far safer situation which removes the critic and art from current cultural considerations.

Greenberg stated that art can “save” itself from being entertainment by demonstrating that the experience it provides is “unobtainable from any other source.” It is the task of art to demonstrate that which is “unique” and “irreducible”, particular or peculiar to art and that which determines the operation peculiar and exclusive to itself.  All effects borrowed from any other medium must be eliminated, rendering the art form pure.  “Purity” becomes a guarantee of “quality” and “independence” of avant-garde art.  All extrinsic effects should be eliminated from painting.

One could say that it is not the essential to the definition of a painting that it re-create the world realistically.  Today, that role can be fulfilled by photography or film.  Film and theater are defined by storytelling and narrative, enhanced by illusions of everyday reality.  Following Greenberg’s line of reasoning, realism and story telling and illusionism should be eliminated from painting.   For Greenberg, art was used to call attention to art.  Clement Greenberg logically worked out the limitations and peculiarities of painting, which are a flat surface, the shape of the support and the properties of the pigment. These physical and material limiting conditions became positive factors.

Once suppressed by artists through under-painting and glazing, these material aspects of painting were now acknowledged by Modernist painters.  Because he appeared to have considered and taken into account the limitations of painting as the application of paint upon a flat surface, or a stretched canvas, Édouard Manet is designated by Greenberg as the first Modernist artist.  Manet “declared the surface;” his follower, Paul Cézanne, fit the drawing and design into the rectangle of the painting.  In Modernist painting, the spectator is made aware of the flatness and sees the picture first, before noting the content.

Modernist painting abandoned the principle of representation of Renaissance illusionistic space inhabited by three-dimensional objects, giving the effect of looking through the canvas into a world beyond. Modernist painting resists the sculptural, which is suppressed or expelled.  The question is that of a purely optical experience.  With Greenberg, flatness alone is unique to painting.  For this critic, “art” carries within itself its own teleology.  As art seeks self-definition and determines its own uniqueness, it becomes more pure, more reductive in its means.  More is eliminated—subject matter, content, figuration, illusionism, narrative—and art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract.  Content becomes completely dissolved into form.  Greenberg, in looking back selectively at the history of art, presented a map of progress and evolution of painting, away from representation and toward purity, abstraction, reductiveness; to flatness, to pure color, to simple forms that reflected the shape of the surface.

The essay noted that Modernism “resists sculpture” or three-dimensionality and reminded the reader that this “resistance” was by no mean recent. The critic pointed to Jacques-Louis David as an example of an artist whose work was flat and surface based.  Greenberg insisted that the scientific method justified the demand that painting (and art) limit itself to “what is given in visual experience.”   Greenberg equated the artist to the scientists, both of whom “test” and experiment.  The equation of art with science, replaces his earlier equation of the avant-garde with politics:  “…a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture.”  One can “only look” at a work of visual art, which is discernible only to the “eye.”  Poetry is “literary,” art is not and should not attempt to be, for as Greenberg reminded us, any translation of the literary into the visual “loses” the literary qualities.

Like Avant-garde and Kitsch, Modernist Painting, had a subtext, Enlightenment philosophy, especially that of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  The 1939 article concerned itself with aesthetics but more with the “experience” of the aesthetic.  In Avant-garde and Kitsch, it is possible to believe that Greenberg was writing of the experience of the aesthetic in terms of the placement of art in the culture, in other words, it is not so much the “how” of the experience but of the “where” of the aesthetic.  In Modernist Painting, the experience of the aesthetic is located in the realm of the how one looks at a work of art.

The proper attitude of the spectator was important to Kant who recommended a posture of detachment from personal desire and indifference to artistic content in search of a universal means of judging the efficacy of art.  The Enlightenment philosophy cherished the idea of the universal or the absolute, for some kind of standard had to be erected to replace the all-knowing presence of the now-banished God.  Kant was not interested in defining what “art” was but in establishing the ground for the judgment of art.  Working in the new philosophical field, aesthetics, Kant attempted to establish the epistemology of art, based, not in individual works but in a method of knowledge.

Greenberg’s understanding of Kant led him to use the methodology of critique but the critic took “critique” in a rather different direction.  Writing two centuries after the German philosopher, Greenberg looked backwards in time and implied another favorite Enlightenment idea, that of progress.  Modernist art, if one understands the essay correctly, seems to “progress” and move forward in time, away from manifestations of extrinsic properties and towards a purity of means.  “Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up, it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art.”

The ground has shifted away from a means of judgment (Kant) to a theory of the evolution of art along telelogical lines with a goal in mind: purity.  Even though as Greenberg pointed out, “The first mark made on the canvas destroys its virtual flatness,” purity seems to imply a historical rejection of representation and a validation of abstraction. The point of noting Greenberg’s development of Kantian theory and its application toward Modernist Painting is that, without the notion of progress, the critic’s theory of artistic development would have to include some of the masters of flatness, such as William Bourguereau and some of the masters of the surface such as Thomas Kincaide, both of whom Greenberg would have excluded from the family tree of modernism.

While Kant would at least judge these two artists (and perhaps find them wanting), Greenberg seems to imply a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde and establish ground for exclusion of the unworthy. The oppositions of the dialectic are implied: those who did not follow the path of Modernist reductionism were, like dinosaurs, left behind.  If one reads in a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde, even if only through the names of the canonical artists Greenberg mentioned and thought his previous articles, then the conflation between the continuity of art and the avant-garde, which supposedly breaks with the past, becomes rather awkward.     Indeed, Greenberg does not mention the avant-garde, he uses the term “authentic art,” instead.

“Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity.  Art is, among many other things, continuity.  Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as modernist art would be impossible,” Greenberg stated.

However, as pointed out in his earlier work, Greenberg refused to connect the avant-garde with a rejection of the past: “…the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to ‘experiment’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving…” (Greenberg’s italics).  The underlying continuity of the two articles can be seen in the precursor remark in the 1939 writing on the role of the avant-garde artist: “’Art for art’s sake’ and ‘pure poetry’ appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague.” Given the openness of the construction of this essay and the plurality of texts mobilized by Greenberg, it is no wonder that “Modernist Painting” lent itself to so many causes, whether as a rallying point or as a bête noir.

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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Jan
27
2012

Neo-Dada

NEO-DADA—1950-1960

Neo or new Dada was named after Marcel Duchamp who, in the fifties, began to emerge from the underground to the surface of cutting edged art in New York.  Neo-Dada did not come neatly “after” the leading movement, Abstract Expressionism, instead the new approach to art appeared suddenly in the midst of the celebration of America’s seizure of European modernism.  The reason for the clash of these two styles was the generational lag experienced by the Abstract Expressionist artists.  At the very moment when they were experiencing success, these artists were near or close to retirement or “master’s” age—forties or fifties—-but their careers had been retarded by the slow development of an art scene in New York.  After the decade of recovery after the war, money entered into the art world, just in time for investors to snap up the newest art—-not Abstract Expressionism but Neo-Dada.  And keep in mind that the Color Field group had yet to emerge.  The Abstract Expressionists were angered but, suddenly, their time had passed.

Neo-Dada was a New York phenomenon of the underground art world consisting of a group of performers, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and painters, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.  Neo Dada can be dated from late 1940s to late 1950s, from the early works of Cage and Rauschenberg, who worked together at the famous Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Cage and Rauschenberg were influenced by Marcel Duchamp and by his idea of redefining.  The younger artist inspired the musician with his “redefinition” of painting.  Rauschenberg covered four canvases with white paint and put them together into a four part square that changed and altered according to changing light and shadows and interactions with the shadows of passing viewers.  The result was a painting that changed through ambience.  Rauschenberg’s white painting is less famous than what it inspired: Cages’ experiment in ambient sound, 4’30” a piano recital in which the performer allowed the sounds of the environment to become a new kind of sound or “music.”

Upon return to New York, Rauschenberg and Cage continued their collaboration, such as the print of an inked tire driven over sheets of paper.  The idea was that of Rauschenberg and the driving was that of Cage and the resulting new definition of “print”—Automobile Tire Print (1953).  Then Rauschenberg met Jasper Johns who had come to New York after a stint in the army of occupation in Japan, unsure of whether he wanted to be an artist or a writer. Although Johns did not know him well in the beginning of his career, Duchamp’s ideas were circulating in New York at the time and he probably absorbed Duchampian thought from Rauschenberg who did know Duchamp.  Johns was not well educated in art history and later he destroyed some of his early works when he learned that they resembled the Merz collages of Kurt Schwitters.

Using the inspiration of Duchamp, Johns and Rauschenberg began to challenge the rules of High Art.  Cage re-defined music as sound and silence, Cunningham re-defined dance as movement through space, Rauschenberg re-defined art as life, Johns redefined art as an intellectual proposition, art as language according to the ideas of philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.   Like the original Dada, Neo-Dada challenged the separation of art from life, so important to the definition of a Modernist work of art.  At a time when abstract art dominated, Neo-Dada reintroduced the ordinary object and the figurative image and cultural or social meaning back into art.  The significant contribution of Neo-Dada was the return to representation.  But the representation of Neo-Dada artists was of a new kind: they did not copy what they saw, instead they simply appropriated, borrowed, or quoted images already available and already circulating in the culture.

Neo-Dada incorporated what the art historian and artist, Brian O’Doherty, called “the vernacular glance”—a kind of casual scanning of random glances. Inspired by the concept of the found object, Rauschenberg literally picked up objects he found discarded on the streets of lower east side New York and put them into collaged paintings or “combines.”   The result of Rauschenberg’s collection of pre-made images from popular throw-away images and the way he pasted or posted them onto an upright canvas was termed “the flat bed picture plane” by art historian Leo Steinberg.  Johns also used what he called “things the mind already knows” but these “things” were infinitely more banal and more famous than the discards picked up by Rauschenberg.  Johns appropriated Flags and Targets and turned them into paintings, which had an ambiguous and hybrid nature. Was it a flag or a painting of a flag or a painted flag?

The result of the strategy of Rauschenberg and Johns, to borrow rather than to create, was a work of art that was hybrid on many levels, blurring the boundaries between sculpture and painting and art and life, and also an object in its own right.  Unlike a Modernist work of art, which was pure, a Neo-Dada work is impure.   Not only does the Neo-Dada artist use non-art materials and non-art images, the meanings of each object are non-art meanings.  In addition to its anti-modernist hybridity, Neo-Dada was deeply involved in Performance Art, due to the presence of Cage and Cunningham. The most famous artists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both performed with Cage and Cunningham and lived in the Pearl Street studios in New York, sharing space with performance artist, Rachael Rosenthal.

Performance Art is not theatrical in the sense of a traditional play, which is scripted and acted and performed regularly as repeated performances.  Performance Art is planned but not scripted, cannot be repeated precisely, and, in contrast to the “theater,” involved the audience as participants.   During the Fifties, performances were called “Events” or “Happenings,” many produced by Allan Kaprow.  Kaprow was interested in the experiments of John Cage of the late 1940s and early 1950s, which foregrounded unplanned situations and audience participation.  The development of art out of action, related back to the principles of collage, construction, and assemblage in that the Happenings were simple events that used everyday situations, just as a collage used everyday materials.  Cage’s experiments re-examined the nature of art, for he saw art not as separate objects in museums but as an experience in any physical or social context.   Happenings stressed audience over artistic experience and audience participation and interaction, joining the artist, life, and society.

Neo-Dada was also referred to as Proto-Pop, from 1955 to 1960.  Other artists who could be termed Neo-Dada included the elusive and legendary, Ray Johnson and Larry Rivers, both in New York, and Jess, from Long Beach, who was working in San Francisco as an important gay artist.  That said, the art history of Neo-Dada is usually focused on the work of Rauschenberg and Johns, both of whom were in the gallery of a new dealer named Leo Castelli, who would make them both famous or infamous.  Although it was a secret at the time, the two men were lovers and were a well-known couple on the New York art scene.  Their relationship was put under stress when Leo Castelli, who preferred the work of Jasper Johns, gave Johns the first show in his new gallery.  Rauschenberg, an older, more experienced and better known artist than Johns, was hurt that he had to come second to his lover whom he had discovered working in a book store.  Rauschenberg, who died spring of 2008, spoke only once of the “affection” he and Johns had of each other; Johns never spoke of their relationship at all.  The two went their separate ways by 1963 and never spoke to each other again.

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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Jan
21
2012

Post-War Culture in America

FROM MODERNISM TO POST-MODERNISM

POST-WAR ART IN AMERICA

After the Second World War, the art world was characterized by “triumphalism” in New York and a feeling of having won, not just a military war but also a cultural war.  The French and their School of Paris had been routed.  Also defeated was American Scene painting and its nativist illustrations of a naïve nation.  Now, the triumphant society would be represented by works of art that expressed America metaphorically, through sheer size or potent symbols.  American art, like American culture, was a global phenomenon with New York at its core. There were “secondary” and usually ignored centers in the Midwest (Chicago) and on the West Coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco), but New York seized the lead, consolidating major art critics, major artists, major art dealers, and major art nstitutions, from museums to art departments, and, perhaps most important of all—important art collectors.  Until the 1970s, this scene was the site of rival movements, co-existing and reacting dialectically—Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Fluxus, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, Photo-Realism, Op Art, and so on, until the great seventies dissolve into incoherent Pluralism.  It can be said that, after Abstract Expressionism, most of these movements defined and positioned themselves against the aging artists of the New York School and their continuation of the European tradition.

This cacophony of movements was presided over by art critics and art historians who wrote for a small number of magazines that fulfilled the function of legitimation and validation of artists, their art reputations and careers.  As a financial town, New York provided the support system willing to invest in contemporary art, but only the art went through the system of approval from what Arthur Danto called “the art world.”  Danto and the aesthetician, George Dickie, conceived of the “institutional theory of art,” meaning that “art” was designated, not on an aesthetic basis, but upon the basis of institutional acceptance.   From Neo-Dada onwards, the traditional definition of art was in a state of crisis, brought on by the acceptance of Marcel Duchamp’s alternative concepts of art.

Instead of an attractive object, characterized by “taste,” a work of art was a concept.  Instead of an artist who worked with hands and heart, the creator was a conceptualist who conceived of art as language.  Far more challenging than Duchamp’s insistence that art should be put “in the service of the mind,” was the logical consequences of Dada’s new artistic freedom.   If art was a thought manifested by an arbitrarily found object, then any item from the world outside of the confines of fine art could be termed “art.” Once “art” announced itself with its significant presence, its beauty, its grandeur, its profound intentions, by the Sixties, Danto pondered the difference between a “real” Brillo box and a Brillo box by Andy Warhol.

What is the difference between a mural sized field of glorious color titled Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950), a painting hanging on the wall, where it belongs, and Monogram (1955) a stuffed goat with a tire girdling its middle, standing proudly on a canvas, laid down like a “field” on the floor?  The gap between the two is the distance between generations, the gulf between America before and after World War II.  What happened during the fifties and the sixties to produce such a schism between the nobility of “Man, heroic and sublime” and the ignobility of an abandoned goat, straddling a painted arena, where the heroic artist once did battle with the forces of art and tradition?

The Fifties seemed to be Clement Greenberg’s nightmare of popular culture come true, with the invasion of kitsch—Rauschenberg’s goat and stuffed chickens in the museum just one room away from the abstract purity of Newman’s absolute spiritual state.  Life had invaded art in a most unexpected way. Newman’s piece is all about the human spirit at its most glorified, idealized, spiritualized form.  Rauschenberg’s work is about life, the quotidian, the overlooked, the ignored.  But life in all its inglorious aspects, Rauschenberg is asserting, is worthy of our attention.  The distance between Newman and Rauschenberg is the long delayed consideration of Duchamp’s challenge to high art and all its serious pretensions.  Instead of the involvement of gesture, we have the detachment of gesture.   Instead of the triumph of art, we have the success of art’s acceptance of anything and everything as art.

The ground was fertile for the ideas of Duchamp by the 1950s because of the need to debunk Abstract Expressionism and because of the commercial success of American art.  The burgeoning demand allowed the artists scope and freedom to defy rather than to extend and re-define tradition.   The success of American art was inseparable from the tragedy of Jackson Pollock.  Pollock took a deep breath about 1947 and managed to hold it and his life together for about three years. During this dry spell, Pollock produced some of the most sublime images of the century, and then willfully, capriciously, childishly, he exhaled.  His life’s breath drifted out and his art drifted away, and one August night in 1956, Pollock drove his car into a tree, killing himself and a passenger.  Great story.  American art now had its martyr.  The New York School now had its Grand Récit, complete with the tragic arc.   Greenberg would recall Pollock’s “run” of about ten years, leaving behind a cult of personality and a Studio full of relics and a keeper of the flame, “the art widow,” Lee Krasner.

In order for the art world to move on, this hagiography had to be combatted.  Piece by piece the vaunted characteristics of Abstract Expressionism would be attacked and discredited and discarded, and by the Eighties, the movement was consigned to a Modernist history. Ironically, the “triumph” of the New York School was immediately followed by the challenge of Neo-Dada.  Neo-Dada eschewed originality for appropriation, bringing the jewel in the crown of modernism—creativity—to an end. It is here that Modernism ends and Postmodern begins. The art world’s continuing challenges to Modernism and its defenders, Clement Greenberg and his followers, would be expanded to that of a critique of Enlightenment and all that it had wrought.  That critique was Postmodernism.  Postmodernism was a re-examination of Modernism and was based in philosophy and literary theory, rather than in the visual arts or aesthetics.  Therefore, postmodernism could not generate a style or a movement.

As a philosophical critique, postmodernism or post-structuralism was a European phenomenon, dating from the decade of the mid to late Fifties to Sixties.  Fueled by the collapse of the Left, following “May, 1968” in France, postmodernism was a re-reading of Enlightenment philosophy, a philosophy that had proved inadequate to the challenges of the Twentieth Century.  In Germany, postmodernism was really a form of post-Marxism, again, generated by the inadequacy of traditional Marxism to social and cultural changes, especially mass media.  As an exercise of re-examination, postmodernism took the stance of “belatedness,” everything had already been done, all had been said, and the kind of historical progress promised by the Enlightenment was unlikely to occur.

For years, most Americans in the art world paid little attention to postmodern theories, whether out of philosophy or literary theory.  The reason for this neglect are various and include American self-satisfaction with the leadership position in visual culture, the slowness of translation, and the entrenchment of traditional art historical methods.  When Americans became aware of the significance of postmodern thinking in the 1980s, most of the important works had either been written or were well underway.  Suddenly belated, American art could only try to respond and to catch up to European thinking.  The visual arts shifted into “theory” and language and philosophy, as artists began to critique Modernist art and to reject or re-examine its precepts.

With the occasional exception excluding women and people of color, the post-war art world was an all male, all white enclave.  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Women’s Movement of the 1970s challenged the art world and revealed the racism and the sexism that favored the production of white men.  After the Stonewall Uprising in 1968 and especially after AIDS, the gay and lesbian community also demanded more visibility.  Coincidentally or not, postmodernism became prominent in America during the Reagan presidency, which was characterized by attempts to roll back the gains of women and people of color and by neglect of the AIDS epidemic.  Because postmodernism re-reads traditions of the past, it is an inherently conservative study, re-examining the work of white males, mostly dead.  That said, “theory,” especially post-Marxist theory provided women, gays and lesbians, and people of color a theoretical basis to challenge the more reactive elements of postmodern theory.

For the visual arts the consequences were profound: there was freedom and anarchy and lack of a center.  Without an avant-garde, postmodern artists seemed doomed to reactiveness to the past.  But folded into the postmodern period, were Late Enlightenment adaptations of social theories, co-existing with postmodern assertions that revolution was now impossible. The so-called “minorities” had the tools to resist the hegemony of the status quo.   The question that begs to be asked is, if late modernism and postmodernism co-mingle, when did postmodernism begin or when did modernism end?  The answer depends upon where you are, which culture you come from—the Sixties in Europe, the Eighties in America—in terms of response to Enlightenment philosophy.  But if one uses another criteria, “the postmodern condition,” then the shift is more cultural, rooted in mass media, and therefore global.  This “condition” that is Postmodernism is a post-war response to the loss of mastery and the disillusionment in a disenchanted world.

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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Jan
13
2012

Post-War Art in California

 POST-WAR ART  IN LOS ANGELES AND SAN FRANCISCO

At first glance, California would seem to be an exceedingly unpromising place for major art to emerge in the second half of the Twentieth Century.  A new state with a throwaway culture without a history, California had small pockets of local art scenes, more or less picturesque and more or less obscure, with most of the available money going to architectural development and occasional decorative embellishments, with the bulk of the financing going to film. Art was often allied to these enterprises, acting as a pictorial inducement to move to the Golden State or as a partner to movies. Unlike New York City, which had Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 as the gathering place for local and European avant-garde art, California tended to be geographically isolated and culturally limited.

There was a small group of individuals who supported avant-garde in their own diverse ways: Walter and Louise Arensberg and Galka Scheyer.  Hollywood attracted artists and the oldest art schools, Otis and Chouinard, had an internationally known faculty: Alexander Archipenko, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Hans Hofmann. In San Francisco, the California School of Fine Arts dominated the San Francisco scene and was the site of important works by the Mexican Muralist, Diego Rivera.  In 1940, Rivera created a mural, Pan American Unity, (today located at the San Francisco City College, for the World’s Fair on Treasure Island in San Francisco.  California, like other American states, benefited from the WPA mural program and, even today, murals by Maynard Dixon and Millard Sheets and Helen Lundeberg remain in Los Angeles from those days.

The main avant-garde scene in Los Angeles could be characterized as a Surrealist scene, both European and home grown, supported by collectors from the movie colony, such as Sterling Holloway, Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price.  Man Ray lived in Los Angeles from 1940 and showed in San Francisco at the de Young and at San Francisco Museum of Art.  Ray married Juliet Browner in a double wedding with Max Ernst (now divorced from Peggy Guggenheim) and Dorothea Tanning in 1946.  The art of Ernst did not necessary please all Angelinos.  Indeed, the famous actor, John Barrymore, got drunk and urinated on one of his works at an art opening.

The remnants of Dada lived on with the Arensberg, in their important Duchamp collection, and from the occasional visits of the famous artist himself.  While New York City contemplated Surrealism as painting or as “plastic automatism,” Los Angeles understood Surrealism from the standpoint of the found object and in relation to anti-art subversive forces.  While New York City artists extended Modernism along formalist lines and were forced into de-politicizing their art from the late Forties on, artists in California, alone and neglected, were able to be engaged and political, producing content-saturated art.

This local Los Angeles taste for meaning and content in Los Angeles art existed in large part because of the Surrealist sunset in L. A.  Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim had visited the city in 1941 and their colleague Julian Levy rented space next to the (Frank) Perls Gallery.  Other gallery owners included Guggenheim associate Howard Putzel, Stanley Rose, and Earl Stendahl. Of particular importance to the conceptual trend in the art of post-war Los Angeles was the trace of Man Ray who lived in Los Angeles until 1951 and had an important retrospective there in 1966. In contrast to the lingering influence of Surrealism, artists in Los Angeles, now the dead center of a post-war military industrial complex, were impacted by the experience of being at Ground Zero during the Cold War.

The aging Surrealists arrived in a land of continuous boom and mass suburbanization on an unprecedented scale.  Between 1940 and 1960 no fewer than 60 new cities were incorporated, many of which served highly specialized constituencies in greater Los Angeles. Despite the apparent clash between the past and the future, the artists of Los Angeles embraced the nostalgia of the found object in a culture that threw everything away.  As will be discussed later, the artists of the fifties were witnesses to the possibility of immanent nuclear destruction, because this center of the defense industry would be ground zero for any atomic attack.

Los Angeles had been “made” by the Second World War.  An important port city, LA was ideally situated on the Pacific Rim, a jumping off point for the Pacific Theater.  People streamed into the city from all over America to work in the war industries and the boomtown bustled with the constant presence of service personnel.  The region’s prominence did not end with the fighting.  California had recovered quickly from the war, thanks in no small part to the large petroleum production.  The vast defense industry that emerged during the Second World War and remained intact for the Cold War continued the prolonged economic prosperity and population growth.

But for  artists, the prosperity had a dark side.  It seemed probable that at any moment a button could be pushed and everyone and everything would be blown away.  The assemblage works of Ed Kienholz and the casual craft of Wallace Berman was a mute testimony to their alienated state of mind—one gathered detritus and made comments upon a society that could not last in the shadow of constant atomic threat.  Art, for these artists, could not be permanent or universal or humanistic, as it was in New York.   Art could only be fleeting and ephemeral for tomorrow all could vanish in a mushroom cloud.

While artists contemplated an uncertain future in Los Angeles, the movie business or  “the industry,” bounced back from wartime restrictions and stringencies and remained the largest filmmaking center in the world.  In short, California was developing industries for the late Twentieth Century and becoming a high-tech industrial base while the East Coast was still dependent upon the fruits of the Industrial Revolution and heading towards a post-War future as the Rust Belt.  Without much fanfare the United States government shifted federal largesse to the West Coast, the site of the race to the future—outer space.

Art in California was very different from New York in the post-war era, but these distinctions were complex, ranging from the mindset of the artists to the realities of the art scene.  While New York was a single focused center, California had two art sites, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  In contrast to the relatively homogenous scene in New York, the two cities had entirely disparate traditions.   In San Francisco, the heritage European expressionist painting established a firm foothold; while in Los Angeles, the artists were more responsive to the lingering influences of Dada and Surrealism.  In New York, the impact of Duchamp could become Neo-Dada, which is rather different from the influences of Surrealism in Los Angeles. These two movements, Dada and Surrealism, could not be comfortably accommodated to the Modernist line of art development and was termed the “Other Tradition” by art historian, Rosalind Krauss.

The father of the Other Tradition, Marcel Duchamp was an active presence in Los Angeles and was well known in San Francisco, long before his work was remembered in New York City. The Dada tradition, an old one, dating back to the First World War, is both preserved and reawakened in the two major sites for art, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Art in California is essentially a post-World War II experience, in the sense that the region emerges as a particular site for art forms that would have international impact.

If one disregards, for the purposes of discussing contemporary art, the California Impressionists and contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement, then serious avant-garde art is a product of the wartime environment.  Before the Second World War, California was best known for its thriving scene in photography to the North and for its role as the movie capital of the world to the South. Less well known was the region’s importance for architecture.  Some of the most innovative early Modern architects practiced in the Los Angeles area, from Charles and Henry Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra.

With ample opportunity for building single-family homes and small housing units, these architects, several of them immigrants, could forge forward into modernism.  Modernism in California, especially in Los Angeles is worth discussing in relation to the barriers of politics and war in Europe.  In contrast, the West Coast with its polyglot non-tradition of many styles was a fruitful site for experimental architecture.  Irving Gill’s now-destroyed Dodge House was built as early as 1916, predating Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, 1929.  While Frank Lloyd Wright and the Greene Brothers were descended from the arts and crafts tradition, but Neutra and Schindler produced very important examples of what would be called The International Style.  Both Neutra (Lovell Health House, 1929) and Schindler (Lovell House, Newport Beach, 1926) built houses for Philip Lovell, which were two of the best examples of modernist white walled architecture outside the Bauhaus.

As this international group of architects suggests, California was a land of migrants and immigrants of many cultures and ethnicities: an uneasy mixing bowl where Anglos insisted on maintaining a cultural, political, and economic domination.  The history of Los Angeles, for example, can be written in terms of the movement of ethnic groups around the city, shifted at the will of the Anglos.  Their voices will not be heard until the Sixties, making the Watts Towers constructed by Simon Rodia one of the rare public monuments asserting diversity and ethnicity and personal commitment to a sense of place.  But the Watts Towers were more than a statement of one person’s determination, they became, over time, a symbol of art in Los Angeles and the peculiar direction art in Los Angeles has taken.  Rodia worked as a bricoleur, a hunter and a gatherer, who worked with the objects found in his environment. Like the artists of Los Angeles who would begin their mature careers shortly after Rodia mysteriously left in the early fifties to return to his native Italy, he worked in isolation, without support or audience or appreciation, except by the few who were open-minded. Under such circumstances, without major museums, without patrons, with few galleries, the artists were in a curiously “pure” situation, making art for art’s sake alone, showing art for a truly elite audience–themselves.

In summation, both Los Angeles and San Francisco and their two very different art scenes have traditionally been ignored in favor of art in New York.  Broadly speaking, regardless of brief deviations, New York has always been a painting town, as was San Francisco, until the sixties.  Although people have always painted in the City of Angles, Los Angeles has always been an object making town.  To repeat, a very important factor the artists in Los Angeles was the shadow of the Cold War.  Acutely aware of the militarization of the nation, the artists of Los Angeles expected the world to end at any time.  There seemed no purpose to make art that was lasting, much less archival.  The LA artist has always worked with stuff, junk, detritus, and objects without history, without recognition, only to find out—over time—that something important had been wrought and their art was validated after the fact.

In contrast to this homegrown culture of the found object in Los Angeles, the artist in San Francisco was in a considerably more traditional milieu that of European painting and modern art, imported by artists from New York City, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko.  The impact of their influence as teachers and as artists was the famous Bay Area Figurative School, which evolved out of abstraction on the East Coast.  The New York aura was a short lived phenomenon, however, and the San Francisco period of Figurative painting soon gave way to something more home grown: object-based “funk art” created in a Dada frame of mind.  Indeed, Dada and Surrealism have an extended, albeit it American, life in California, north and south.

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

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Jan
06
2012

The Beats, Art and Literature

BEAT CULTURE

1950s

Most cultural movements are large-scale shifts in thinking due to a collective action on the part of many people.  Beat Culture is unusual in that the concept of what it meant to be a Beat was based upon the writings and activities of a very few people who had an extraordinary impact upon America. Despite their small numbers, the original Beats tapped into something beneath the surface of American society in the 1950s, giving voice to unspoken feelings.  The term “beat” comes from black culture and from jazz.  However, “beat” does not refer to a musical beat, but to the way those who were black in America felt: “beat.”  “Beat” means “beat down,” “beaten up by life,” down and depressed, in a state of despair.

When a black person said, “I am beat,” s/he was making a profound statement, not of fatigue, but of alienation and of hopelessness.  Whites, in the segregated Fifties, would come into contact with blacks on the musical scene, coming to black jazz clubs to listen to the music.  To whites, outsiders and spectators of a culture they could hardly understand, blacks were the ultimate “cool” cats, possessing an impressive machismo that whites could only admire.  The coolness of the “hep cats” was copied by the whites to the extent that the famous author, Norman Mailer, wrote an essay in 1957 called, “The White Negro” about wanna-be coolness.

White men wanted to be as cool as black men because the black culture seemed to offer a freedom from the conformity of the Fifties.  Whites did not realize that the “freedom” from behavioral rules was the result of enforced segregation and exclusion from the larger mainstream society.  But the reason for the cool freedom was not important to the white admirers of black culture.  What the Beats wanted was freedom from the Fifties.  Writer Gore Vidal once characterized the Fifties as “the worst decade in the history of the world.”  If one was gay, like Vidal, the Fifties was catastrophic, and the only place society offered to someone who was “queer” was in the closet.  Being gay was grounds for dismissal from jobs and many gay men “passed” into straight society through marriage and children.

The plight of gays and lesbians who were forced to live a stunted and inauthentic existence was an extreme version of the life society demanded you live.  There were few choices in that decade, but the proscribed lifestyle was possible only for middle class whites.  Thanks to huge government programs, the white middle class prospered in suburbs, in a single-family home with a white picket fence, with a husband and wife, two children, a dog, a cat, a station wagon.  After a horrible Depression and a frightening war, suburbia and a lawn to mow seemed like paradise, but with paradise came a price.  Many people felt that their options were too limited and strained against the conformity and the conservative, even retrograde, attitudes of the Eisenhower years.

The Beats were those who rebelled against the complacency and the materialism that marked the years that Eisenhower was the President.  There were two Beat centers, New York and San Francisco, and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles.  The attraction for the Beats was the Jazz scene and black musicians had migrated to the West Coast where they hoped they would find less hostility. In his book Art After 1940, Jonathan Fineberg writes as though the Beats and the Neo-Dada artists were part of the same culture in New York.  They actually were not.

The only thing these two groups had in common was that both the Beat and the Neo-Dada figures were part of the New York underground.  There is little evidence that the groups had any impact upon each other’s art.  They would have known of each other but their differences would have kept them apart.  The Neo-Dada artists were underground because they were not yet accepted into the mainstream, an event that happened in 1958 when Leo Castelli debuted Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in his gallery.  The artists’ time in the underground ended.

The term “Beat” would have been applied to them long after the fact and not during the Fifties.  The Beats were not visual artists, but literary artists and were few in number. The Beats never wanted to be part of the mainstream, never sought success or acceptance.  The main “leaders” were a novelist, Jack Kerouac, who wrote On the Road (published 1957) and Allen Ginsberg, a poet who wrote Howl.  The two had met at Columbia University where neither fit in.  Kerouac was a nonconformist and Ginsberg was gay.  Although the University recognized their gifts, these rebels could not be absorbed into a formal system.  The third member of the literary trio was William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, published in 1959.  But the first of the three to achieve literary notoriety was Ginsberg, who debuted his famous poem Howl in San Francisco in 1955.

Fineberg stresses the New York art world and completely leaves out the significance of the West Coast.  This kind of neglect is common for East Coast art historians, but in the case of the Beat culture, leaving out the importance of San Francisco leaves a large blank space.  The visual artist who had the most connection with the literary Beats was a photographer, Robert Frank, who published his seminal, The Americans (1958).   Jack Kerouac wrote the preface for Frank’s book, which became the most famous book of photography of the Twentieth Century.  Frank took a road trip across America, photographing the country from his perspective as a Swiss expatriate and was in San Francisco for the first reading of Howl.

Howl is a great American poem—an updating of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  At the time, it was considered “obscene,” but today, like all Beat literature, it is considered a “classic” and is part of the American literary canon. Ginsberg read his poem at the Six Gallery in San Francisco to shouts of “Go!” from Kerouac.  Also present was local poet, Michael McClure, who introduced Ginsberg, and Los Angeles artist, Wallace Berman, a Beat artist from L. A., who had far closer ties to the New York Beats than did the artists in New York itself.  Most publishers would refuse to publish a poem with “dirty words,” but one brave publisher and bookstore operator dared.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the famous City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, published the poem and was promptly tried for obscenity in 1957.  Defended by the ACLU, Ferlinghetti was allowed to publish the book and continued his career as a poet and as a defender of civil liberties, including the Chicano Civil Rights movement. Once a place of scandal, City Lights Bookstore is located at the corner of Broadway and Kerouac Alley, one of several streets in San Francisco named after writers, including via Ferlinghetti.

Ironically, the year that Howl got the seal of approval, one of the attendees at the reading, Wallace Berman, was also accused of obscenity for a show he did at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Tried and convicted and humiliated, Berman left Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, a more open-minded town where he lived for years before returning to L. A. where he died in 1970.

The year Howl was published, On the Road appeared.  Kerouac had written the autobiographical novel from a road trip he took in the 1940s.  Although the book claimed to be about one journey, it was actually composed of three separate trips.  He was accompanied on the primary road trip by Neal Cassady.  The Beat movement was all male with a few women on the fringes.  As a result of the sexual repression of the Fifties, the sexual torments and yearnings of the confused men are present in this book.  Written in 1951 on twelve-foot strips of paper, linked into a one hundred twenty foot scroll, the novel was finally published, with name changes, to instant success.

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs followed.  With a keen ear for the language of drug culture, Burroughs tapped into the lingo and introduced white American readers to key terms, still in use today.  Burroughs had much experience with drugs, having operated a marijuana farm in Texas, and with death, having accidentally shot his wife to death.   One of the most interesting terms to come from the novel was the name of a dildo, “Steely Dan,” taken up twenty years as the name for a famous avant-garde rock ‘n’ roll group, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.  The real underground Beat artists were the artists in San Francisco scene, such as Bruce Connor, Jay de Feo and her husband, Wally Hedrick, and in the Los Angeles scene, such as Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz.  The movement of the Beat artists in San Francisco’s North Beach evolved into the “funk”’ movement in the next two decades.

These Beat writers of the Fifties awoke something in American readers, who, despite the quietude of the decade, apparently yearned to hear dissident voices. Beats became famous and were renamed when the Soviet Union launched a tiny satellite named “Sputnik” in 1957.  Americans were alarmed, to say the least, and reacted by getting into the space race and by reinforcing math in school curriculums.  Beats were renamed “Beatniks,” perhaps to make them appear less threatening.  Mainstream Americans were horrified at the attire of male Beatniks: beards, black clothing, and sandals.

In order to absorb this dire invasion from the coffee houses, Hollywood invented its own tame Beatnik, “Maynard G. Krebs,” a character on a television show.  But an unknown group of young teenage musicians took the Beats as role models.  Wearing long hair, another establishment no-no, and black leather jackets, the leader of the band decided their new name would be the BEATles.  It is often said that the Beats inspired the Counter-Culture movement, but the connection seems to be questionable.

Certainly the Beats served as an inspiration for the Sixties youth culture.  But the original Beats were social critics did not want to be part of the mainstream culture; however, they were not social dropouts.  Kerouac scorned the hippies and disapproved of their “turn on” and “tune out” attitudes.  The counter-culture was politically active and the Beats preferred to stay outside of the political realm.  That said, Ginsberg was one of the first Americans to take LSD and Burroughs was a part of the East Village Scene in the Eighties that included Jean-Michel Basquiat who was a great admirer of the old druggie.  For a black, being “beat” meant being alienated for racial reasons, for a white being “beat” meant being alienated for social reasons.  Beatniks were literary artists who refused to enter the establishment and, despite their success, were never part of the mainstream.  Unlike the artists of the New York underground, they stayed underground, anti-heroes to the counter-culture, even today.

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

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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. 

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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.

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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