THE CRITICAL LITERATURE OE
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
by
Larry Whittaker
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OE- ART
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
the History of Art
.In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
19 6
?
STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This thesis has been submitted, in partial fulfill­
ment of requirements.for an advanced.degree at The Univer­
sity of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library
to be made available to borrowers under rules of the
Library.
Brief quotations from this thesis are allowable
without special permission, provided that accurate
acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permis­
sion for extended quotation from or reproduction of '.this
manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head
of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College
when in his judgment the proposed use of the material isin the interests of scholarship. In all other instances,
however, permission must be obtained from the author.
•SIGNED:
APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR
This thesis has been approved on the date shown below:
SHELDON REICH
Professor of Art History
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABS T R A C T o e o o o o o o e o o o o o o o o e o o
I
II
III
INTRODUCTION
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IV
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FORMAL HISTORICISM VERSUS REVOLUTIONISM . . . .
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REACTIONS TO ACADEMIZATION, DECLINE, AND NEW"
ART
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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
APBENDIY
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ABSTRACT
This thesis ■examines the art criticism which
emerged in support of a new painting.style,Abstract
Expressionism, in America during the forties and fifties.
This criticism broke with prevailing standards of objec­
tivity to provide partisan support for Abstract Expres­
sionism. •However, the critical literature comprised two
diametrically opposed philosophies.
Clement Greenberg, who
may be taken as representative of one concept, concentrated
upon analyzing the formal qualities of the painting.
More­
over, he insisted upon the close relation of the new
American movement to preceding modern art.
Harold Rosenberg,
who provided the most important counte.rconcept to the
historicist-formal philosophy felt an obligation to interpret
the content of the work of art in psychological and social
terms.
He also believed that Abstract Expressionism
embodied certain innovations which set it apart from pre­
vious modern art.
As Abstract Expressionism went through
a period of change during the late fifties, the accuracy
of each philosophy was revealed.
Critics who shared
Greenberg’s viewpoint believed that the artists’ activ­
ities fostered academism, and they championed new art.
Rosenberg and his supporters, by contrast, held Abstract
Expressionism, to be the last serious moment in art „
Herein, they established a critical principle which, being
conceptual, rather than visual, emerges as inflexible and
contradictory <,
I
INTRODUCTION
This thesis represents an effort to identify, class­
ify, and evaluate the dominant trends in critical writing
pertinent to the recent American painting style, Abstract
Expressionism.
It will be demonstrated that such writing
falls naturally into two categories, designated herein as
histori'Cist-formal and revolutionist.
These philosophies
may be exemplified by the criticism of Clement Greenberg
and Harold Rosenberg, who emerged as the leading critics of
the movement.
In this discussion, the historicist-formal
method, as represented by Greenberg, will be proved the
more instructive and less contradictory view of Abstract
Expressionism.
Such considerations as which painters can properly
be called Abstract Expressionists, what stylistic quali­
ties their paintings share, and whether the movement
should be known by a different title are still at issue.
It is not the-purpose of this study to answer these par­
ticular questions.
However, since consistent terminology
is essential in discussing the critical aspect of this'
period, certain assumptions must be made in order to pro­
vide a basis for commentary.
1
2
Abstract Expressionism is used here to refer to a
style of painting which a small number of artists in New
York evolved during and immediately after .World War II„
During the decade between 1950 and i960, Abstract Expres­
sionism became dominant in American painting and subse­
quently was accepted internationally.
The term itself was
first used in relation to American painting in 1946 by
- -
t_
Robert Coates, art critic for the New Yorker magazine.
It is by no means a popular designation among the artists
it identifies or the critics who supported them.
However,
Abstract Expressionism is at present the best-known title
and, if the misleading or pejorative labels appended to
past styles in art are any indication/ the most likely to
2
endure.
The major artists who are usually considered
Abstract Expressionists are Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky,
Willem de Kooning, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock,
Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Clyfford
1, See "The Art Galleries," New Yorker, March 30,
1946, p, 75,
2, The term New York School derives from an
exhibition of that name held at the Frank Peris Gallery in
Los Angeles in 1951 and for the purposes of this essay may
be considered synonymous with Abstract Expressionism,
Action painting refers to a personal inter­
pretation of the style and thus cannot be employed inter­
changeably with the other categorizations. The concept of
Action Painting will be considered in detail below, pp.
29-32,
3
Still, and Barnett Newman.
Somewhat later, but also a
part of the group, are Franz Kline, Philip Guston, and
Jack Tworkov.
This list is not complete; some important
artists who came to prominence late in the development of
the movement have been omitted.
Also missing are artists
who figured at an early date, but not prominently, and
others who figured only peripherally.
The painters listed
have in common the fact that they were dominant in the
critical literature which supported Abstract Expressionism
from its beginning until its decline.
With these broad definitions established, the
emergence of the new painting and criticism from the
milieu of American art in general may be observed.
Prior
to the popular acceptance of Abstract Expressionism avariety of styles and influences comprised the art world
of this country, and the critical apparatus was corres­
pondingly objective and catholic.
The magic realism of
■Andrew Wyeth, the geometric purism of Burgoyne Biller, and
the landscape abstractions of Karl Knaths exemplify only a
i
part of the variety which then existed in American paint­
ing.
Such work continued to share most of the pictorial
and literary space of Art News and Art Digest with that
of the modern European masters and their Surrealist and
School of Paris successors throughout the forties.
4
Museum officials conceived of their function as
primarily educational and endeavored to bring before the
public as wide a selection of styles as possible.
As late
as 1949, the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred H. Barr Jr.
still held this opinion:
T,I do not think there is a single
well-marked trend or direction in American art today „ . .
.freedom of choice among many styles I believe to be a
good, not a bad t h i n g . I n the same article, Lloyd
Goodrich of the Whitney Museum gave his affirmation to Sir
Herbert Read’s contention that both abstract and representa­
tional art may be practiced simultaneously —
same artist —
even by the
with equal validity.^
There is no better way to gain an overall .impres­
sion of the art criticism of the period than to survey the
’’box score of the critics” columns published in every
issue of Art News until early 1950.
.Arranged for compara­
tive purposes, these columns present diverse opinions on
important new shows in New York by such leading newspaper
critics as Howard Devree and Edward A. Jewell of the Times,
Henry McBride of the Sun, and Emily Gqnauer of the World
Telegramo
The tone of these reviews, as one scans through
them, whether criticizing Henry Varnum Poor, Josef Albers,
. .
3 o ”A Symposium: The State of American Art,”
Magazine of Art, XLII (February, 1949), 85.
4.
Ibid., p. 91«.
or Salvador Dali, invariably leaves an impression of toler
ance and restraint.
In the eyes of an English observer, Denys Sutton,
the audience for contemporary art in New York in the late
forties consisted of a small coterie centered around the
Museum of Modern Art,, which assumed the attributes of a
club or secret society.
A converse evaluation of the
Museum of Modern Art by an American critic writing at
.approximately the same time pictured it as an authorita­
tive index of prevailing taste, reflected by sales in the
fashionable 57th Street Galleries.^
What' sold best was Erench modernism; because of
its "official" position in the museums, galleries, a n d .
the eyes of collectors of contemporary art, the School of
Paris continued to flourish well into the early fifties
7'
out of proportion to its creative vigor.
Yet the task of
winning approval for modern European painting undertaken
by the Modern Museum and by the progressive galleries did
a positive.service to the young New York painters who were
5« "The Challenge of American Art," Horizon
(London), XX-(October, 1949), 278.
6. Clement Greenberg, "The Present Prospects of
American Painting and Sculpture," Horizon (London), XVI
(October, 1947), 28.
7 o See Hilton Kramer, "The New American Painting,
Partisan Review, XX (July-August, 1953), 421.
to establish.the American vanguard„ • As one of their
number, Jack Tworkov, pointed out, Abstract Expressionism
could never have, obtained a foothold without the sympag
thetic climate already prepared by those agencies.
Simul­
taneously, Tworkov deplored the educational mania of the
museums and the continuing lack of financial and critical
support for advanced American painting on the part of the
9
art establishment
To observe the incipient reaction to the situa­
tion in American art and art writing Just described is to
return to around 1941-1943 ■> During this time, Pollock,
Baziotes, Motherwell, and then a few others, began to show
pictures', which made-significant departures from. French ■
modern tradition and from American adaptations of it.
The focus, of, their activities in those years was
Eighth Street between Fourth and Sixth Avenues in downtown
Manhattan.
Hans Hofmann’s art school was in this vicin­
ity, and although none.of the painters who were t o .become
significant pioneers of Abstract Expressionism studied
with him, Hofmann is usually credited with preparing a
S. "Symposium: Is the. French Avant Garde Over­
rated?", Art Digest, XXVII (September 15, 1953), 2?.
9.
Ibid.
a sympathetic .and enlightened audience for 'experimental
10
painting through his students and admirers.-
One such student and admirer, Clement Greenberg,
11
became the first important critic to herald the New York
School as the true avant garde„
His, columns in The Nation
between 1941 and 1950 are an invaluable record of the
development of the styles of Pollock, Gorky, and do Kooning,
in fact, of almost all the creators of .the Abstract Expres­
sionist. style o. In supporting the new, he broke with pre­
vailing critical standards and declared abstraction to be
12
the only yalid artistic expression for our time. . As, a
participant in the symposium cited above which included :
Barr and Goodrich, he took exception to Read’s theory;
moreover, he condemned both the Modern and the Whitney
Museums for continuing to show ’’.spurious” modern art
instead of the paintings of the embattled minority he
championed.
.In 1947 he published what amounted to a
mandate for partisan criticism:,
10.
See, e.g., William C. Seitz, Hans Hofmann
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1963), p p . '8-9•
■11. For a briof biographical sketch .of Greenberg
and of all other, writers and critics pertinent to this
essay refer to Appendix A,, pp. 93,-4.
•12.
13.
’’Art,” The Nation, Decomber 6, 1947, p. 6.29.
Magazine of Art, XLII (February, 1949), 92.
Justness of 'spirit . , <, leads in this rather cor­
rupt .and declining age to an attitude which in the
eyes of the age itself must, seem hostile. 'Once
distinguished, the master-current, whether.in art
or in literature must seem an aberration - - t o
. point out which requires a quirkiness not at all
resembling justness of spirit.-*-^ .
Thomas B . Hess of Art News published his first
major article in support of the new painting, in January,.
1950
.In 1951 he wrote Abstract Painting, the first book
to deal with the style as a cohesive phenomenon.
Although
Hess used more than half of the work to provide carefully
ah art historical background, he arrived at a new inter­
pretation of then recent developments in American paint­
ing :
'
Yet something new in art history, it seems to me,
appears with these eighteen painters . . . .
In •
their work a new interpretation of nature... and. .. .
man.is made. -Paintings.epitomize the sensation
of the artist aware and at work; absorb.and..
reflect, it. as.human inspiration; its mysteries
and grandeurs become, the heroes. (Italics mine)
In other words, the process has become, the signifi­
cant, quality in the painting.
Hess is tendency .to stress
the physical act of creation was reinforced.and incorpor­
ated into a philosophical system, Action Painting, by
.. . 14° ."Art Chronicle:. The Situation at the Moment,n
Partisan. Review, XT (January, 1948), 81.
15o ,T8 E x c e l l e n t 20 Good, 133 Others,n Art News,
XLTTII (January, 1950), 34-5; 57-8.
_
16.
, Abstract Painting (New York: The Viking Press,
1951), p. -157.
.
.
Harold Rosenberg,.
Through a series of articles which
appeared in Art News in the fifties/Rosenberg expanded
Hess’s observations into a radical theory conforming to ,
his belief that "modern art has been a series of individual
explosions tearing at strata accumulated by centuries of
communal inertia."
17
Greenberg's viewpoint. ,pn, one hand and Rosenberg's on
the other- may be taken to represent the" split in opinion
that characterized the critical writing of Abstract Expres­
sionism, a schism that has often been the subject for
comment.
The development of opposed standards of judgment
was part of a general .crisis in criticism which took place
during the late forties and early fifties and was then
noted and elaborated by numerous scholars, and critics.
The aesthetician J. P. Hodin identified this crisis in
1950 as the old problem of whether objectivity or sub1£
jectivity is the desirable state of mind for the critic.
Hodin "stated that subjective criticism based upon a close
personal contact between artist and writer is the only
possible way to deal sympathetically with living art
I?. The Tradition of the New. (New York: Horizon Press,
Inc., 195977 P° 214.
,
Id.
87.
"Aft Criticism Now," Studio, CXL (September, 1950),
■
19.
"Art and Criticism," College Art Journal, XV
(Pall, 1955), 18.
:
.
10
■However, in order to be meaningful, the critic’s interpre­
tation must be based upon an aesthetic philosophy, which
Hodin identified for our time as "an empiric, .psychologi­
cally-founded orbit of knowledge with the emphasis on a
global consciousness of art forms and on creativeness
on
-itself (Klager, Jung, Freud, G e s t a l t p s y c h o l o g y ) T w o .
years earlier Nicolas Galas noted the division of criti­
cism in this country along subjectivist and objectivist
lines, but his solution was a synthesis which would sur21
mount the limitations of both methods»
Galas’ interpre­
tation, however, like Hodin’s, favored subjective criti­
cism and leaned heavily upon Freudian theories as an
22
interpretative tool„
Max Kozloff made the same distinction in relation
to the critical literature of Abstract Expressionism as
recently as 1966, stating: ’’.There seem to have been two
streams of criticism: on one hand faithfulness to the
optical data, a fidelity both descriptive and analytic,
and on the other, of evocative or poetic judgment, chafing
to find ’content', Sometimes cued by visual fact, but not
20.
Studio, CXL (September, 1950)., 8?.
21. ’’The Laocoon: An Approach to Art Criticism,”
College Art Journal., VII (Summer, 1948), 268.
22.
Ibid., pp. 269-77«
11
n e c e s s a r i l y o A l t h o u g h the. characterization of the
criticism as objective and subjective generally holds good
for the writers on Abstract Expressionism, it ,is not a
sufficiently fine net to separate ideas as they occurred
in participation.with the movement.
Also, the terms are
not sufficiently precise; they possess too many levels of
meaning and vary with the nuance of personal interpreta­
tion.
For example, since the supporters of Abstract
Expressionism, regardless of viewpoint, at one time
championed, the avant garde to the exclusion of preceding
or contemporaneous modes (until about 1.957) they.must be .
classified together as subjective in the larger sense.
People like Alfred Barr,' Lloyd Goodrich, or even Hilton
Kramer, who-was opposed to some, but not all aspects of .
the new style, would have to occupy the objective role in.
this case.
Nor does Ko.zloff’s attribution of the gradual
division of opinion to the active versus the passive phys­
ical presence of the painting itself seem all-inclusive.
While Kozloff makes a valid and important, point, 'the situ.ation he describes was a result and not a basic principle
of the critical dichotomy.
Furthermore, this, tendency
manifested itself fully only toward the end of critical
23., "Critical Schizophrenia and the Intentionalist Method ,'! The New Art, ed. Gregory, Battcock (New York
E. P.' Dutton & Co. y 1966), p. 120.
12
development and cannot be applied to all critics, even
like-minded ones.
The approach that seems the most instructive, flex­
ible, and comprehensive in dealing with the literature of
the period opposes a revolutionist to a formal historicist
position on the issue of Abstract Expressionism vis-a-vis
previous periods in the history of modern art.
Under this
broad and workable classification other aspects and atti­
tudes pertaining to both schools of opinion, including the
nature of form and content in the new art, the respective
roles of Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, and Expressionism in
influencing the critic's thinking, the use of subjective
and objective interpretation, and the question of an
American quality in the new painting,, can be compared in a
logical place and time sequence.
This dialectic is set
forth in Chapter II.
As the Abstract Expressionist movement passed
through a cycle of ascendancy, academization, and succes­
sion by other vanguard modes, the critics reacted to the
changes.i n .a manner wholly consistent with their original
Interpretations of the movement.
In Chapter III these
reactions are analyzed and compared. " The final chapter
attempts to evaluate the two critical philosophies in
light of the data presented in Chapters II and III.
II: FORMAL HISTORICISM VERSUS REVOLUTIONISM
Possibly the clearest insight into the critical
philosophy of Clement Greenberg was provided by Greenberg
himself in TTT „ S. Eliot: A Book Review,,f^ originally pub­
lished in 1950.
While this article for the most part
deals specifically with literary criticism, the opening .
paragraphs constitute a working postulate for all criti­
cism.
Greenberg considers Eliot the greatest literary
critic in history for this reason: Eliot’s method indi­
cates, as the critic’s central task, to describe the func­
tion, rather than to search for the meaning of the work
of art.
The critic stands or falls not by virtue of his
■
9
taste, but by his ’’loyalty to the relevant.”
By this
phrase, Greenberg means, an insistence upon logic; the
writer on art is under the same obligation in choosing his
3
data as is the scientist.
1. Art and Culture -(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961),
pp. 239-44.
2.
Ibid., p. 239.
3.
Ibid., pp. 239-40.
13
14
Applied to art criticism, this obligation requires
that the reviewer base his comments upon what may be per­
ceived by the senses in the work of art, in light of what
has been experienced in past works of art»
Indeed, the
writer on the visual arts is more compelled to restrict
himself to sense data than is the literary critic, ,Tsimply
because his digressions tend to stick out more; he deals
with a more opaque medium, and he cannot linger as plaus­
ibly On Mona Lisa’s smirk as the literary critic can on
Hamlet's neurosis.
Nevertheless, Greenberg believes that the ultimate
value of all art lies in its affective power, that "art
succeeds in being good only when it incorporates the truth
• time, the conviction that
about feeling.”5" At the same
the essential nature of a work of art is beyond discourse,
and that the critic is in error if he attempts to construct
a verbal equivalent for its subjective quality, is made
explicit:
I do not wish to be understood as saying that a
.. more enlightened connoisseurship will hold.that
what, as distinct from how, Rembrandt painted is
an indifferent matter. That it Was on the noses
and foreheads of his portrait subjects, and not on
.their ears, that he piled the juiciest paint of
4° •Ibid., p. 240.
5.
"Art," The.Nation, December 6, 1947, p, 629.
15
his last manner has very niuch to do with the
aesthetic results he obtained. But we still
cannot say why or how.°
This viewpoint places him, in critical practice
if not entirely in theory, within the formal tradition
descendant from Mallarme, Woelfflin, and Roger Fry, an
ancestry which, in the first and last cases, Greenberg
7
tacitly acknowledged in the Eliot essay.
In the opinion of some writers, the sculptural
tradition in modern painting —
Cubists —
Cezanne, Picasso, and the
lends itself particularly well to this type of
criticism, a circumstance responsible for what they see as
8
Greenberg’s Cubist fixation.
That Cubism is his point of
reference in dealing with the Abstract Expressionists is
undeniable.
His breakdown of the broad stylistic trends
in twentieth century art assumes a materialist and positivistic tradition in France against a metaphysical and
romantic creative tendency in Germany and America, the
former, in his opinion, having produced all the great
painters and.s c u l p t o r s . Following up his thesis, Greenberg
6.
Art and Culture, p.-138.
7<>
Ibid., p. 240.
8. See Hilton Kramer, ”A Critic on the Side of
History: Notes on Clement Greenberg,” Arts, XXXVII (October,
1962), 63.
;
9.
Horizon (London), XVI (October, 1947), 24-5.
16
applies a rigorous determinism -- apparently an aspect of
what he means by scientific relevance "—
and concludes that
only through. Cubism can important painting be. created:
The art of Pollock, DeKooning, and Gorky repre­
sents in my opinion the first genuine and compelled
effort to impose Cubist'order — : the only order
possible to ambitious painting in our time — on
the experience of the post-Cubist, post-1930 world.
q
The basis for this judgment is an aesthetic phil­
osophy grounded.in past experience and a faith in the
efficacy of the avant-garde as a culture-moving agent.
- . Thus, Greenberg’s position may be defined as formal­
ist, determini st, :empiricist, and dedicated to support of.;
a vanguard established by french modernism.
-However, the
qualifying factors which led him to champion paintings as
patently un-Cubist as those Gorky did after 1943 must not
be overlooked.
Max Kozloff has summed up what seems the
likely explanation for an attitude toward the new trends
in American painting that at first appears contradictory
to Greenberg’s own preferences:
for Greenberg, the great moment in twentieth
.century western art was 1907-1910, when the
space in Cubist painting oscillated between the
depicted flatness of the facet planes and an
affirmation of the. literal surface. Successive
developments, including ’’Synthetic Cubism, ” opted
for a flat, constructional and, in his opinion,
. . decorative solution.
10.
’’Art,” The Nation, November 25, 1950, p. 491.
11. ’’The Critical Reception of .Abstract Expression­
ism,” Arts, XL (December,1965), 31.
17
Greenberg himself wrote at an early date that
"for the abstract painter to degenerate into a mere decor-
12
ator is-. . . the besetting danger of abstract art.”
The problem for the young New Yorkers, as he saw it then,
was to retain Cubist fragmentation and to extend it in an
original way while somehow loosening up the shallow depth
and geometric regularity of late Cubism.
The fact that
they were able to accomplish such a transformation was
attributed to the esteem in which certain non-Cubist
masters were held in New York at this time (the late
thirties), when Paris largely ignored them; these painters
were Klee, Kandinsky, Miro, and most significantly,
Matisse.
Greenberg’s viewpoint which developed in relation
to the art of Gorky exemplifies his initial ambivalence
toward the new style and his exacting .concept of how it
was to relate to previous modern art. When Gorky turned
away from Miro in 1943 and 1944 to adopt the loose, fluid
handling of the early Kandinsky and the automatism of
Matta, the critic decried the change as a willingness to
settle for a lower order of success, for charm instead of
p o w e r T h r e e years later he was able to see Gorky as
12.
’’Art,” The Nation, April 19, 1941, p. 482.
■ .j ' 13 o- Horizon (London), XVI (October:, 1947), 20.
14.
’’Art,” The Nation, March 24, 1945, p. 343.
the only American artist to have assimilated "French art
a n d :to have made an original contribution to it.
The
latter review began to sound like faint praise, however,
when Greenberg pronounced Gorky’s style a "mannerist"
synthesis of KandinskyTs fluid brushwork and Miro’s
design — " an end product which begins nothing new in the
history of a r t , N o t
until the occasion of Gorky’s one-
man show at the Levy Gallery only four months prior to
the artist’s death was Greenberg willing to grant him the
stature of a major artist, ■ The specific quality by which
Gorky had taken painting around the Cubist impasse was !
identified and elucidated:
Gorky himself has gone beyond Miro by identify­
ing his background more closely with the pic­
ture’s surface, the immediate, non-fictive
plane on which the spots are placed. He does
this by scumbling in his pigment transparently
over large areas, or by varying color in narrow
gradations from one area to another, all of
which brings the canvas forward by compelling us .
to notice its saturation, physical complexion
and flatness,16
Since Gorky’s paintings between 1945 and 194$ show
a consolidation of ideas, rather than a progression toward
a culminating style marked by radical changes, obviously
the standards of the critic were changing,
Greenberg was
overcoming an instinctive distrust of painterliness and
15,
"Art," The Nation, January 10, 194$, p. 52,
16,
"Art," The Nation, March 20, 194$, p, 332,
il-lusionism as a basis for a post-Cubist style, in partic­
ular, those principles as interpreted by the Surrealists.
In a key article of 1944,
17
he distinguished carefully
between Surrealist and Surrealist-influenced painters who
follow a nschematic” pictorial approach —
Klee, and Picasso —
approach —
Mir6, Arp,
and those who utilize a "realistic”
Ernst, Dali,- Tanguy, and the other dream-
imagists associated with the style *
The criterion by
which the critic separated and evaluated the two modes is
this:
Does the painting require that its maker explore
new"possibilities of the medium itself in order to express
the idea?
In the case of the "schematic” painters, the
answer is yes; automatism is made the primary vehicle in
jd
realizing a self-contained object, the painting.
But for
Dali, Magritte, or Delvaux, -the imagery takes precedence
over the autonomy of the picture, paint becomes a vehicle,
and automatism is used purely to suggest fantastic or
irrational subject matter.'■19
Greenberg Was forced to admit
that even the veristic type of Surrealism had a beneficial
effect.on.the American painters through its lively,
17. "Surrealist Painting,” Part I, The Nation,
August -12, 1944, pp. 192-3; Part II, August 19, 1944, pp.
219—20.
18.
Ibid., p. 219.
19.
Ibid.
20disturbing quality»
Yet, in this essay, the Surrealist
who had already had profound effect upon Motherwell and
Gorky, Matt a, was .not even .mentioned«. ;
The belief that Abstract Expressionism restored
to modern art a fundamental plastic principle temporarily
submerged in the conceptual preoccupations of Dada and
Surrealism has been notably articulated by William Rubin,
a critic and art historian whose writings on the New York
School show the influence of Greenberg’s thinking.
Rubin
sees Gorky as a Janus figure, a painter whose work took
on new meaning after the reputations of Pollock, Motherwell, and others became securely established, and cer­
tainly not, as some wished to claim him, as a late Surrealist. •21
Of Surrealism proper, Rubin wrote:
.Eor the first time the continuity of the plastic
revolution, in which the two generations of the
first fifty years of modern art were merged, was
broken, to be resumed only with the advent of
Post-World War II abstraction . . . . It was
with Dada and Surrealism that originality as a
goal in itself was born — as well as with
American Regionalism — and that the quality of
painting in general fell off.22
The idea implicit in the above evaluations of
Surrealism,.that modern painting makes valid contributions
20.■ Ibid., p . 220.
21. ”Arshile Gorky, Surrealism and the New Ameri­
can Painting, t! Art International, VII (February 25, 1963),
27-38...
-.
22. Ibid., pp. 27-8.
21
to culture only through extensions of the medium, was
given art historical substance by-William C . Seitz in an
important 1953 a r t i c l e . S e i t z ,
one of- the first art
historians to take an interest in.Abstract Expressionism,
likened the shift in modern art away from illustrative
values to the transition that took place during the Early
Christian period, when a fundamental cultural and spirit­
ual change produced a reoriented concept of the real in
art.
Therefore, he reasoned, the innovations of twentieth
century art must also reflect a corresponding change in
culture, and in the artist’s conception of the quality of
the r e a l . ^
The contemporary artist’s preoccupation with formal
means was defended as ”a symbolic function of the entire
personality,”^
which attempts to seek out and give a
’’dynamic and structural” definition of the r e a l . T h i s
effort was compared to aspirations of the Medieval artist,
suggesting, presumably, that at the center of modern life
there.is a n .essential quality for which forms exist that
23. ’.
’Spirit, Time and ’Abstract Expressionism’,”
Magazine of Art, ZhVI (February, 1953), 00-8?.
24.
Ibid., p. SO.
25.
Ibid., p. 86.
26.
Ibid.
22
may symbolize .it. as effectively as did the cathedral for
Gothic times.
Seitz based these conclusions on the observation
that "it is a fundamental principle of modern painting
that its formal means and its content coalesce . . . .
27
Painting and subject matter must become one."
In link­
ing Abstract Expressionism to a deterministic conception
of a will in twentieth century art to formal, material­
istic solutions, Seitz, appears close in philosophy to
Greenberg.
The latter credits the chief influence on his
views, including those on Surrealism and the nature of
form and content in modern art, to Hans Hofmann,
whose .
art may be used to summarize the problematic relation to
Abstract Expressionism in which Greenberg's theory placed
him.
The ambivalent attitude manifested in the critic's
remarks upon Gorky finds a direct counterpart in the
stylistic dichotomy present in Hofmann’s work.
In the early forties Hofmann was working in an
unprecedented free and spontaneous idiom, described as
follows by Greenberg:
The first pictures I ever saw in which trickles
and splatters of paint became significant form
27.
Ibid., p. GO.
28.
''Art," The Nation, April 21, 1945, p. 4691
:
"
23
-
was a Hofmann done in 1943 > four years before .
Pollock found -his way to the technique-. Among
the first emphatically "all over" pictures I
oQ '
ever saw was a Hofmann of around -the same date.
But the above was written in 1959; here is his
opinion delivered on the occasion of the introduction of
some of the pictures done in that manner:
Perhaps .Hofmann surrenders himself too un­
reservedly to the medium - that is, to spon­
taneity - and lets color dictate too much: his
pictures sometimes fly apart because they are
organized almost exclusively on the basis of
color relations.30
In the late fifties, Hofmann introduced a new
style characterized by rectangular planes receding and
projecting, overlapping-yet remaining opaque.. Their
color, a reminder that Hofmann’s earliest association with'
Trench art was through Fauvism, remained pure and bright.
Greenberg found this manner rather unsatisfactory:
"It is-
when Hofmann tries to reinforce contrasts of color and
shape with taut contour lines, and when he trues his shapes
into a Cubistic but irrelevant regularity, that his art
tends.to go off in eccentric directions."
31
29. Introduction to catalogue for Hofmann exhibi­
tion at. Kootz gallery January, 1959, quoted in Dore
Ashton, The Unknown Shore, (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,
-1962), p. 195.
30.
The Nation, April 21, 1945, p. 467°
31°
Art and Culture, p. 193•
24
.' Hofmann1s 'inability to rid himself of Cubism as a
point of reference and to make full use of the. freedom
which he himself had so much t o .do with originating
30
Greenberg labeled "Cubist trauma,"^ a phrase remarkably
descriptive of the critic's.own love-hate relationship to
Cubism.
Just as Hofmann in GreenbergT's view, never really
synthesized his "free" and "Cubist" manners, GreenbergTs
ultimate sympathies were not invested with the successful
synthesizers of Cubist plasticity —
Gorky, Kline, and
De K o o n i n g H e championed other painters of the movement,
who made use of an-entirely different tradition, enabling
them to create what he saw as the first truly post-Cubist
style.
-
..
The interpretations of Abstract Expressionism byGreenberg., Seitz, and Rubin shared the same philosophical
basis. " Their criticism was historicist in nature, tend­
ing to view the new movement as part of a continuum of
modern tradition, rather than an essentially new mode of
thought and expression.
Seitz attempted to identify the
underlying principles of that tradition, finding similar
concerns in earlier periods of the history of art.
He
concluded that Abstract Expressionism had begun to recon­
cile certain antitheses present in modern painting since
3.2.. Ibid., p. 192.
.
25
its b e g i n n i n g S i m i l a r l y , both Rubin and Greenberg
assumed that Abstract Expressionism picked up the thread
of continuity after a temporary lapse (Dada and Surrealism)
in the historical progression of nineteenth and twentieth
century painting.
These critics shared, in addition to historicist
outlook, the use of formal analysis, applied to both indi­
vidual and group style, as their chief critical method.
This principle was again evident in both GreenbergTs and
Rubin's evaluations of Surrealism.
Seitz's contention
that modern painting's formal means and its content
coalesce is, in context, an inverted statement of Green­
berg's belief that subject matter derives from extension
of the medium alone.
For Clement Greenberg, the first and most impor­
tant historicist critic of Abstract Expressionism, these
attitudes resulted at first in a problematic position when
confronted with such painters as Gorky. •Cubism was the
focus of his criticism, and, in his opinion, the whole
point of postwar American painting was to overcome the
flat, constructional handling of Synthetic Cubism and thus
create a post-Cubist style.
Greenberg was forced to admit
that the automatist freedom of Surrealism (but not Sur­
realist ideas or.content) was a major factor in helping
■ 33°
See below, pp. 35-6.
26
the Abstract Expressionists achieve such a style.
How­
ever, he eventually championed painters within the move­
ment whose work, he felt, by making use of non-Cubist
examples embodied a correct .appraisal of where true modern­
ism lay, transcending Cubism altogether.
This readjust­
ment enabled Greenberg to resolve his Surrealist-Cubist
dilemma, evident in his remarks on Hofmann, and maintain
a continuous view of modern art.
The emphasis placed by Greenberg, Seitz, and Rubin
upon Abstract Expressionism as a link in the historical
and formal continuity of modern art represents a critical
philosophy radically different from certain of their con­
temporaries, who saw other values in the new painting.
The most important and influential of these critics in
providing a counterconcept of the essential importance of
the work of de Kooning, Gorky, Newman, and others was
Harold Rosenberg.
To appreciate fully the differences between
Rosenberg’s ideas and the point of view represented by
Greenberg, one must bear in mind that Rosenberg is a poet
and a literary intellectual who has been deeply involved
with every aspect of culture in general, including politi­
cal opinion, literary criticism, and social critique as
well as art criticism.
While the same interests and
27
involvement could have been pointed out in relation to
Greenberg, there is this crucial difference:
For
Greenberg, art is .plainly.a world unto itself, and the
critic need supply little or no historical or philosoph­
ical background for his remarks, other than the history
and philosophy of.art.
On the other hand, Rosenberg
believes that "criticism cannot divide itself into liter­
ary criticism, art criticism, and social c r i t i c i s m , b u t
must consider each area of social and cultural activity in
relation to the whole.
Rosenberg’s remarks on Hans Hofmann offer a ready
comparison of the conflicting opinions On the New York
School painters that characterize this split in critical
attitude.
Rosenberg observed that Dada and Surrealism
found no place in Hofmann's thought, work, or teaching.
He attributed this fact to the artist’s conviction that
modern art represents a revolution in thinking and that
Surrealism was a lapse in the continuity of that revolu35
tion.
On the other hand, Greenberg interpreted
Hofmann’s rejection of the interwar movements strictly in
terms'of formal continuity, paraphrasing Hofmann to the
34. The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon
Press Inc., 1959), p. 11.
35. The Anxious Object (New York: Horizon Press
Inc., 1964), pp. 252-3.
28
effect that the most significant modern artists derive
'
•36
their chief inspiration from the medium they work i n X
When commenting on individual pictures, the two
critics often corroborate each other.
For example,
.Rosenberg wrote:
Weakness, in Hofmann’s painting occurs when the
artist has moved so fast that the action on the
canvas is finished before he has been able to get
into it: compositions of this type lack develop­
ment and turn into more or less lucky swipes of
color.37
This is essentially the same reservation Greenberg
expressed as surrendering too much to spontaneity.
In
describing other pictures, however, Rosenberg is willing
to see a cosmic or poetic quality, which he identifies in
a subjective manner that Greenberg never employs.
Of
Hofmann’s ”Memoria in Aeterne” of 1962, Rosenberg wrote:
The impression of being inside the earth is
heightened by an upward movement toward a dome­
like mass that crowns the composition and which
is flanked on each side by blues of flowers and
of sky. . . . I cannot think of another painting
that intimates immortal,hopes by such strictly
abstract m e a n s . 38
Unlike Hofmann, Rosenberg himself saw in the
Dadaist and Surrealist movements ideological values
36.
Art and Culture, p. 7°
37.
The Anxious Object, p. 159®
38.
Ibid., p. 249-
29
important in themselves<, .
•He stated that to label Dada as
anti-art is beside the point, since "Dada itself helped to
revolutionise' the' sensibilities .by which modern art is
on
r e c o g n i z e d . A c c o r d i n g to.Robert.Motherwell, the central
point of Rosenberg’s theory of Action Painting .is based
directly upon a passage written by the Dada poet Richard
AO
"- •
Hulsenbeck.
Since other aspects of his criticism are
decidedly anti-aesthetic, Motherwell’s information seems
to indicate at least one source of Rosenberg’s rather com­
plex aesthetic formulations.
The key idea in.Rosenberg’s interpretation pf
Abstract Expressionism, as expressed in ’’The American
Action Painters” is this:
What is important in the work
of, e.g., Kline and De Kooning, is the spontaneous act of
painting and the- revelation contained within that act.
The .revelation consists of disclosing to the painter his
true identity; his act is one of self-affirmation through
■
"
•
i n
moral decision in the face of mass culture.
Since the event, and not the -resultant picture, is
of primary importance, conventional criteria no longer
apply.t o .the.new..art: ■ ”Eorm, .color, composition, drawing,
.39•
Tradition -. . .. , p., S3.
AO.
Quoted in Kozloff, Arts, XL (December, 1965),
Al.
Tradition . .
33.
pp. 23-9.
-
are auxiliaries, .any one of"which -- or practically all -ip
. . . can be dispensed with.
Logically extending his
thesis, Rosenberg maintains1that since the new art cannot,
be judged by old:standards, its value must be found apart
from art.^
Since traditional canons of judgment have been
.
,
-
discarded, what is to be the-role of the .critic; how is
he to evaluate an action painting?.
Having already defined
a work in this mode as T,a painting
. . which is insep­
arable from the biography, of the artist ,
Rosenberg
answers that a hew kind of criticism is necessary, one
that will distinguish the specific quality on each
artist’s act.
The critic is.thereby obligated to form a
close working relationship with the painter, by means of
which he earns his right to subjective interpretation of
his work.
This interpretation is based on a dramatic
interest.in which psychology, philosophy, history, or any
other discipline.relevant to action may be brought'into
play,.^
'
42.
Ibid, ," p. 26.
45 °
Ibid., PP
44.
Ibid, , p. 27.
45.
Ibid., p. 35.
46.
Ibid., P° 28.
.
28—9.
31
RosenbergTs writings on Abstract Expressionism
reflect his theory mainly in two ways:
The first is a
psychological tendency, based on first-hand knowledge of
the artist's personality, and the second is a social .
emphasis, derived from awareness of the artist's life situ­
ation,
The result is an extremely subjective way of dis­
cussing a painting, the appropriateness of which may or
may not be evident to the viewer in the work of art. . The
above description of "Memoria in Aeterne," by Hofmann, is
an excellent example of such criticism.
The point of view expounded in "Action-Painters"
sis obviously a radical one, and is usually the aspect of
Rosenberg's criticism singled out for credit or for blame.
But in the section of the essay subtitled "Apocalypse and
Wallpaper" the author made clear that critics could,
indeed, would have to judge the act by its representation
upon canvas.
A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt con­
cerning its reality as an action . . . .
Weak mysticism, the "Christian Science" side of
the new movement tends in the opposite-direction,
toward easy painting.- never so many unearned
masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the
dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated
with risk and willA7
In other words, an artist who has experienced a
genuine struggle with himself and his materials may
47.
Ibid., pp. 33-4.
32
produce a work of power, while any lesser effort must
result in glorified decoration lacking in the ’'tension” of
the authentic, act.
In one of the many writings by which he subse­
quently clarified, revised, defended, and restated the
basic Action Painting concept, Rosenberg identified the
tension in a successful Abstract Expressionist picture as
:2,^
deriving from its moral quality.
According to this .
.
.
explanation, the Action Painter is engaged in abstracting
not form, not tone, but decision; he is concentrating his
attentions on.the process of determining where to place
every stroke that will cumulatively add up to a picture.
In emphasizing this process, which Rosenberg defined as
moral in essence, the New York School painter differs
from all previous.artists and begins something new in the
history of art.
Rosenberg ultimately, designated as the crucial
task- for the Critic to recognize authentic newness and to
distinguish it from the falsely novel.^
He hoped that
the new, once identified as genuine, would be accepted as
-'are. scientific .discoveries - uncritically, and in terms
. .. . ,4$. "A dialogue with Thomas B. Hess,” Catalogue
of the Exhibition: Action Painting,.195&, The-DallasMuseum of Contemporary Arts, quoted in Rosenberg, Tradi­
tion . . . , p p . ,33t 34.
49. "Critic Within the Act,” Art News, LIX
(October, I960,), 2?.
33
;
•
of the possibilities engendered.
50
Underlying this vanguard philosophy is not a con­
ception of Western art as a single complex of developing
forms but, on the contrary, a belief that the history of
art today presents to the artist a situation of open pos-'
sibility, accompanied by risk and anxiety.
51
The purpose
of a work of art is not to" take a logical step in extend­
ing modern tradition, but to strike off radically from,
that tradition; in.fact, only when a work is revolutionary,
when- it is a shock and works to expand our consciousness,
can it be of full value.
52
Afterward, and only afterward,
does it lend itself to aesthetic valuation and classifi­
cation.
Rosenberg maintains that the key to understanding
'53
the new is the inseparability of form and content.
How­
ever, h-e defines form as that which predominates in a
picture or style after it has.become.familiar to u s . ^
There is obviously no relation here to Greenberg’s and
Seitz ’"s interpretation, of the tendency in modern art for
• '50.
-
•
The Anxious Object, pp. '233-4.
51.
Ibid., pp. 32-33.
5-2.
Ibid., p. 233.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid.
-
'
form and content to merge.
Ms
' 34
As applied to.Action Painting,
insistence'on the' unity of the two factors: means that
•"in -art, as in action, the final meaning of an idea is in
its concrete realization.
In other.words, thought cannot
be detached from form."55
'
. Clearly, for Rosenberg, newness and content are
synonymous; together they constitute the greatest value
' of a work of aft to its contemporary audience.
A critical
apparatus that would properly ...interpret the new upon its
'....appearance would be forced to relate paintings not in.
terms of preceding form but of preceding novelty, and this
56
is precisely what the critic proposes.
The. objection raised to Rosenberg’s analyses of
the New York School .contered around his insistence that
' Action Painting represented a revolutionary break with
modern tradition.
Many art historians favorably disposed
toward the new painting understandably shared this objec­
tion and offered their own interpretations of the nature
and origins of the new painting.
'
.
"Robert Goldwater was an active participant in
many of the activities of the. Abstract Expressionists,
notably i n .the artists’ discussion groups that were
55.
Ibid., p. 150.
56.
Ibid., pp. 234-5.
' 35
organized, in the late .forties, and.early fifties. • In .
GoldwaterVs opinion, Rosenberg allowed himself "to be- led
astray by the subjective nature of the painting, giving the
artist the.romantic status of existentialist hero and
inferring an angst in his creative personality which did
57
hot necessarily exist«
Regarding the artist's concen­
tration on "the element of decision as an emphatic break
with the past, Goldwater observed, that "the 'struggle with,
the canvas', is suitably Intensified phrasing of Cezanne's
'inability to realize.'"
In certain other considera­
tions, however, .Goldwater is less at odds with Rosenberg
than with his fellow art historians, and this aspect of
his criticism will be discussed below and within a differ­
ent context.
William. Seitz interpreted the new art as an attempt
to resolve the "common dichotomy" in modern painting com­
prised, on one hand, of an urge toward naturalist, expres­
sionist freedom, and a will to pure geometric forms on the .
59 .
other.
Since World War II, he theorized, painting in
general has attempted,to merge the two trends, symbolically
expressing a need - an unrealizable need - to reintegrate
57. "Reflections on the New York.School," Quadrum,
No. 8, I960, p. 28..
58.
Ibid., p. 27.
59o .Magazine of Art., XLVI (February, 1953), 80.
36
the fragmented experience of modern life.
,fThus it is
’ apparent that abstract expressionism, though concentrated
in New York, is not an invention of a local clique., but is
"
■
'
'
£ q
the present phase in the broad history "of modern style.”
■ A similar interpretation was elaborated at a some..what later date by Meyer Schapiro, whose support lent
prestige to the movement in the United States and in Europe
at a crucial time.
In 1957 Schapiro attributed the new,
free manner which characterizes much postwar painting,
including Abstract Expressionism, to a changed attitude in
our society toward the machine.
The new attitude was seen
as a reversal of the positivistic faith in the possibili­
ties of technology manifested in the art of such interwar
/
61
painters as Leger. '(Futurism, Neo-Plasticism, and Inter­
national Style architecture, as well as the Social Realism
.. that preceded .Abstract, Expressionism, might also be cited as machine-favoring styles, although Schapiro mentioned
only Leger.) .In this age when machines have, standardized
and stereotyped so much of our environment,, the writer
asserts,;the work of art.is to be valued for its handmade
quality:
" Hence the great importance of the mark, the stroke,
.the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance
• 6 0 . . Ibid., p. 62.
'. 61. ”The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,”
Art News, LVI.(Summer, 1957), 39.
37
of the paint itself, and the surface of the can­
vas as a texture and field of operation - all
signs of the artist’s active p r e s e n c e » o 2
In this sense, Abstract Expressionism is a contin­
uation of shifting attitudes that have characterized the
artist’s position since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution.
Therefore, the new art is indivisible from
the'development of the last hundred years, as Schapiro had
stated unequivocally in a talk for the British Broadcasting Corporation, 63
Possibly the most important observation of
.Schapiro’s radio speech was that Abstract Expressionist
tendencies in Europe were present before the new American
style became well known there and that only later did the
paintings of Pollock and de Kooning have an impact.
Such a position constituted an indirect attack upon crit­
ics who, late into the 1950’s, insisted upon the American
origin of the new painting.
William Rubin also attacked what he considered
artistic chauvinism without hesitancy, and in doing so
62.
Ibid.
. .
63.. See "The Younger American Painters of Today,”
The Listener, January 26,. 1956, pp. 146-7, for the text of
this broadcast.
64.
Ibid., p. 146.
3d
pronounced Art News the chief offender.^
Thomas B„ Hess
and.Harold Rosenberg were the principals behind the edi­
torial arid'polemical campaign in support of Abstract
Expressionism that Art News began in earnest -in 1952 and
did not. abate until .1960 or 1961.
Therefore, this allega­
tion of chauvinism, whatever its validity, must be borne by.
them.
.Rosenberg has been uncompromising in attacking as
a parody of history the tendency of Critics like Greenberg
to discuss Abstract Expressionism as a link in the devel.opment. of modern art.;He blames the formalist, historical
approach for trying to assimilate the new for the benefit
of the public at large, since in his philosophy, such.an
approach will only deprive the work of art of its chief
benefit to its audience self-awareness gained through the
AA
shock and dismay of being confrorited with a novel- idea.
. Moreover,,' he remains convinced that Action Paint­
ing grew out of a unique relation of the artist to American
society —
a relationship of crisis -- and that any system .
for dealing with the new art that ignores that context
67
"'
is meaningless.
His conception of the new painting
~ 6 ' 5 S e e "The, New York School - Then and Now,"
Part I, Art,International, Vol. 2 , Nos.,2-3 , 1956, p. 1 9 .
66b
The Anxious Object, p. 232.
6?.
Ibid., p.. 42.
39
as, an American phenomenon was spelled out in an essay
.
entitled ’’Parable of American Painting.
In that essay, the unique quality in American art
was described as non-Style, a quality which pervades the
work of such painters as Eakins, Homer, Marin, and de
Kooning.
In honor of Braddock’s defeat, Rosenberg called
this look or principle Coonskinism and opposed it to Redcoatism of, in this case, European tradition in painting.
According to the analogy, the Coonskinners were forced to
fall back upon their own resources, and consequently
achieved a profound originality.
,Although they remained
isolated, they still fared better than their countrymen
who succumbed to the ’’hallucination of displaced terrain”
69
and became Redcoats.
Coonskinism ceased to mean isolation from the main­
stream during World War II when, in the absence of new
styles coming from Europe, the ’’made-up” look, or nonStyle, won ascendancy.
However, at that point the danger
was of non-Style becoming Style, and Rosenberg observed
that ’’with most of the pioneers of 1946, the transforma­
tion of the Coonskinner into a Redcoat has already taken
70
'
place.”
Moreover, he continued,- a reversal of influence
68. , Tradition ....
, pp. 13-22.
69°
Ibid., pp. 14-15o
70.
Ibid., p. 21.
40
occurred, and Coonskinism -became the. Re.dcoatism of Europe,
The new Redcoats (presumably.Soulages, Bazaine, Manessier,
Tapies, and Burri) successfully achieved the look of non-,
art but lacked the pressure and vitality which make the
look valid,''7"*" At this point, it should be mentioned "that Rosen­
berg did not deny the influence of modern French painting
upon the Abstract Expressionists,
He simply believed the
new situation of the artist in America far outweighed the
importance of past art forms.
He. wrote that the fall of
Paris in 1940 represents a break in modern art and that ;
consequently, with the arrival of the exile artists, the
72
Americans had "much to learn but- nothing to- extend,"'
Clearly, Rosenberg, felt that the modern schools were
largely played out and it was up to "America to make a
new move,
- Thomas Hess seconded the contention that Abstract
Expressionism was an American development, although he
was initially very anxious to relate-the new painting to
the mainstream that stemmed from-Paris:
It seems -as though, after the beginning of World
War II, the matrix of pictorial invention was
■'magically .transferred to America, stimulating to
.71,
Ibid, -
72.. Arshile Gorky, (New York: Horizon Press Inc.,
1962), pp. 99-100.
the point of death our provincial tradition, and
evolving in its place styles that no longer
"look American,n but have the confident inter­
national air that is characteristic of modern
art.73.
Such a statement leaves no doubt as to what tradi­
tion Hess believed the impetus, for the new style to. be.
But, revealingly, the above opinion was written prior to
the. appearance of "The American Action Painters" in Art News;
Hess seems not to have assimilated Rosenberg’s
theories into his own--philosophy until somewhat later.
•In reviewing "The New Decade," an .exhibition held
at the Whitney Museum in 1955, Hess took the position that
although both•European and American painters had been
involved with the same problems, the basic discoveries
were made in America between 1942 and 1949, afterwards pro­
foundly influencing contbmporary work in Europe.
In I960, he reaffirmed his belief that Abstract
Expressionism represents a. new moment in the history of
art, pronouncing.it a philosophical revolution.
He also
declared that, despite the absence of a common style,
"what the .paintings had, and still have in common, is .what
the.artists hold in common: the experience of a breakthrough,
of a revolutionary movement in which all esthetic, and
73° "Is Abstraction un-American?", Art News,
XLIX (February, 1951), 41°
74. "Mixed Pickings from- Ten Tears-, " Art- News,
LIT (Summer, 1955), 30°
42
75
thus ethical, values and premises were re-invented,,T'y
Of the critics who subscribed to what may be
-thought of as the revolutionist views of Hess and Rosen­
berg, few have been as articulate or as consistent in
applying them as Dore Ashton,
She has frequently defended
the ideas and writings of both Rosenberg.and-Hess, decry­
ing the method of art criticism which restricts the
reviewer to sense data and Insisting upon the right to
speculative interpretation.
What this right means in
terms of her own criticism may bo illustrated by the fol­
lowing passage on Philip Gust on.’s painting:
Disquiet and even despair find their expression
in the.turbulence of these seas of wash and the
agitation.of queer-forms'that, never seem to find
their balance. These wildly disconcerted entities are.direct projactions of a troubled spirit.
Although she "reads" the painting in terms of the
artist’s situation,Ashton,unlike Rosenberg, makes no
■attempt to construct a general theory in relation to
Abstract.Expressionism on such.a basis, but prefers to
make the individual painting her touchstone for comment.
Indeed, in her estimation, any consideration which fails
to crystallize attention around,the work of art is to be
. . 75. "Editorial.The Many Deaths of -American Art,"
Art News", LIX (October-, I960) , 25.
76,
The Unknown Shore, p. 70.
.
,
.
43
HH
regarded as of secondary importance.''•
Nevertheless, -
•Ashton, like Rosenberg, has a well-defined conception of
the individual artist's relation to past art.
The question of whether or not Abstract 'Expres­
sionism is ah exclusively American innovation falls .into
the secondary category.
Probably -because of an early and
continuing affinity with developments in contemporary
European painting, Ashton was reluctant to become involved
in the matter.. But in relegating'the issue to the back­
ground", 'Ashton Was suppressing an admittedly fascinating
concern.
One of her early articles in Arts Digest offered
this definition of the movement:
In America we are in fairly good critical shape
since we have found a way to refer to the new
which doesn’t derive, directly from any of the
post-Cubist, Surrealist, or neo-plastic tradi­
tions. We, call much of the work of. the past
decade ’’Abstract Expressionism.”78
In The Unknown Shore, published nearly,a decade
later,. she maintained the same belief and unhe sit antly
identified the American note:
”1 believe the perfervid
romantic character of American painting [Abstract Expres­
sionism] has- peculiarities and historical precedents that
.
■
on
'...
make it distinct from similar tendencies in Europe.”
77.
Ibid., p. -15.
78. ’’Avantgardia, ” Arts Digest, ZXIX (May 15,
1955), 16-17.
79.-- The Unknown Shore, p. xi.
•
-
■ .
44
But she had already declared that both American
and European painting share the romantic tradition; our
time is seen as living out an experience begun in mid<5q
nineteenth century,
Furthermore, the shared experience
■
1 is one of continuing revolution, since by Ashton’s defini­
tion,- a romantic period is' one which does away with estab8l
lished values to create new ones of its own.
In fact,
the critic’s basic principle has its rationale in this .
interpretation of modern art; the individual work of the
artist must be the critic’s point of reference in con­
temporary art, ’’since there are no definitions of school,
d2
country and race,"
Ashton is thereby enabled to dis­
card the continuous-heritage concept of art history and to
substitute in its place a depiction of the.individual
artist romantically compelled to break away from tradi­
tion, ’’to put distance between all that is loved and past,
■'and'that; which must be created,”
•. '
,
' ■ '•
.With the need for an historical framework thus
...minimized-, in relation to the new art, she discerns a .
stylistic note.common to all postwar painting: the tendency
8Q,
'Ibid., p , ix.
-
-Bl. -Arts Digest,..XXIX, 16.
B2. .The- Unknown Shore, pp. vii-viii.
d 3 . ’’Art,” Arts-and ■Architecture, -L22CV (January,
1958)-, 6. '
45
toward expressionism, or — .for Ashton the two terms as
applied to contemporary painting are synonymous —
Action
P a i n t i n g T h u s the -art: informel of Soulages and
Mathieu, and the art'brut images of Dubuffet are interpreted
by Ashton as. an expressionist reaction against the supposed
prevailing classical tradition in French painting.
Although
her argument is stated in revolutionary terms, the critic
nevertheless seeks .historical precedent for-art informel,
taking to task nart historians and critics who.
.have
ignored"recurrent expressionist tendencies in the history
of French painting' in order-'to sustain a dubious thesis
>
'
*•.
$
of French.painterly logic."
She cited.as exemplary.of such tendencies "the extravagances of French-baroque and rococo.
To desig­
nate predominately classicizing French seventeenth century
painting, or even "the lighthearted- frivolity of the
Rococo, as indicative of an expressionist element in
French painting seems rather dubious theorizing in itself.
The fact that she did so possibly derived from a strong
sense of need to legitimize what many American observers,
including both.Greenberg and Rosenberg, felt to be an art
84.
The Unknown Shore,.p.. xi.
!85. • Ibid., p. 132.
-
86.
Ibid, p.. 133.
46
lacking; in the sort of moral pressure that is usually
identified with expressionism.
.,Although Rosenberg held a dissenting opinion of
the French' counterpart of Action Painting, he also was
able to discover an expressionist element in the new Amer­
ican painting and, in the paintings of Willem de Kooning,
to identify it with Nordic Expressionism:
,rIn reaction
against the calm of Cezanne and the Symbolists he [de
Kooning] now picked up the tradition of van Gogh and
Soutine, in which the artist remains in the picture as
gn
its emotional subject.”
Thus both Ashton and Rosenberg, while minimizing
the claims of past art on the Action Painter, felt it
necessary to point out historical precedent in Expres­
sionism.
Both critics stressed Expressionism as paint­
ing on a personal, individual basis which allows an
artist to identify himself, and not as a continuity of
formal tradition.
■ Expressionism was reconciled with the Action con­
cept through Rosenberg's carefully detailed qualification
as to the nature of the act-as-object which originally
appeared in 1958.
-
If the ultimate subject matter of all art is the
artist’s psychic state or tension.. . ., that
87«. The Anxious Object, p. 118.
47
state (e.g., grief) may be represented through an
abstract sign. The innovation of Action Painting
was to dispense with the representation of the
state in favor of enacting it in the physical
moment of painting.
The assumption that "the ultimate subject matter
is the artist's psychic state or tension," and "the artist
remains in the picture as its emotional subject" may have
been derived from de Kooning's famous remark, "I am always
dn
in the picture somewhere."
In any event, de Kooning was
the acknowledged model for the concept of Action Paint-.
ing,
and Rosenberg's discussions of his paintings provide
the perfect illustration, of the salient points of that
theory, even when art contradicts theorizing.
The monstrousness of de Kooning's famous "Woman
I" is a product of an irresolvable contradiction
' in the processes that brought her into being.
She is a prodigy born of a heroic mismating of
immediacy and will. In her, de Kooning endeav­
ored to give"himself to the flow of memories,
associations, present emotions, and changing
hypotheses, and at the same time to. drive this
formless and all-inclusive living toward a fore­
seen result, a female figure.
Painting the "Woman" was a mistake;1 it could not
be done. 91
. . .
S8.
Ibid., p. 158.
89. Quoted in Robert Motherwell, Bernard.Karpel,
and Ad Reinhardt, Modern Artists in America (1st Series;
New York: Wittenborn Schutz, 1951T7 P« 12.
90.
The Anxious Object, p. 117.
91.
Ibid., pp. 119-20.
4-8
In simple terms, Rosenberg thought the require­
ments of action to preclude foreknowledge of the result,
and in this sense he considered the nWomann doomed to
failure .—
as imagery, but not as action„
Clement Greenberg’s dissenting opinion regarding
the importance of expressionism in American painting,
particularly as evidenced in his comments on de Kooning,
provides a final basis for contrasting what developed as
two remarkably clear-cut critical interpretations of
•Abstract Expressionism.
Greenberg never departed from
the conviction that Motherwell, Pollock, Gorky, de Kooning,
Hofmann, and every other painter of the Abstract Expres­
sionist vanguard derived his notion of style from French
painting.
Conversely, he insisted that German and Central
92
European Expressionism remained a peripheral influence.
A personal lack of empathy with expressionist
purposes in general comes to light in the critic’s com­
ments on Rouault:
”1 myself must confess a real distaste
for the artistic personality I discern in his pictures.
. „ . Only guilt about emotional impotence could make one
accept uncritically such strident emotions of deep and
93
personal feeling as his art m a k e s . O f Soutine he said:
92„ -Art and Culture, p. 211.
93«
Ibid., p. 84.
49
"Perhaps he set too high a value on the unimpeded expres­
sion of f
e
e
l
i
n
g
,
J■
In his earliest evaluation of de Kooning’s paint­
ings, delivered on the occasion.of the artist’s first
important one-man show, Greenberg suggested that de
Kooning presented a more viable art than either Gorky or
P o l l o c k , T h e contradictions which Greenberg saw in de
Kooning’s work were recognized as indicative of, and not
the source of his seriousness and power.
But for Green­
berg these contradictions or ambiguities at the same time
were felt to be deficiencies; the crisis was not the hero
of the picture.
Ambiguity resulted from de Kooning’s
effort to suppress his extreme facility in drawing, and
this deliberate renunciation of will led to occasionally
forced mechanical realizations rather than to true spon­
taneity,
Greenberg thought the corrective a heightened
sense of consciousness, in itself an assentation of will,^
De Kooning’s failure, according to Greenberg, was
surrendering too much to the unconscious.
Rather than
finding value in the ambiguous and personal imagery result­
ing, from de Kooning's "deliberate renunciation of will,"
Greenberg felt that the painter failed to come to grips
94.
Ibid,, p, 115.
95.
’’Art," The Nation, April 24, 1948, p. 448.
96.
Ibid."
50
with the true issues of modernism.
Therefore, the critic
ultimately decided, de Kooning remained a kind of automa97
tist — Late Cubist
whose best pictures were done in the
98
late thirties.
By contrast, Harold Rosenberg believed that de
Kooning’s work suffered only when the painter attempted
to impose a conscious will to imagery upon an art Whose
true subject matter, the artist’s state of mind, can only
develop in the process of painting,
for Rosenberg, the'
strength of de Kooning’s painting lay in its ambiguities,
for they were seen as a graphic-record of ’’the flow of
memories, associations, present'emotions, and changing
hypotheses” which constitute the artist’s psychic state.
97. ..Art and -Culture, p. 195.
.. ... 98. ’’After Abstract Expressionism,” Art Inter­
national , VI (October 25, 1962), 24.
Ill
REACTIONS TO ACADMIZATION, DECLINE, AND NEW ART
The critics who were involved with the American
avant garde at its inception were at one in stressing the
atmosphere of crisis in which the new art was created.
But their separate interpretations of that crisis break
down clearly in accordance with their respective philoso­
phies.
Their attitudes on crisis are the first instance
of, what in retrospect, seem almost automatic reactions to
factors that modified the situation of the painters as the
style developed.
Clement Greenberg wrote of the crisis in terms
of the general decline of Western bourgeois society,
identifying the artistTs alienation from that society as
necessary for experiencing the true reality of our time.
i
Equating his own situation as an art critic with that of
the vanguard painter, he complained that in the eyes of
this uncomprehending age, "detachment, which is the
indispensable preliminary to justness, seems on the con­
trary eccentricity, and eccentricity means isolation,
2
and isolation means despair.n
As for the effect of
1.
Partisan Review, XVI (January, 1948), 82.
2.
Ibid., p. 81.
•51
52
isolation upon the art itself, he was equally pessimistic:
"That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this
situation is highly improbable.
What can fifty do against
a hundred and forty million?"^
That the critic expected or at least desired to
see a change in a situation he so obviously found deplor­
able is demonstrated by a declaration published in 1950.
In that declaration he pronounced the art of Gorky, de
Kooning and Pollock the best produced anywhere, not only
in comparison with contemporary Europeans, but with such
established masters as Picasso, Matisse, Klee, and Miro.^"
Furthermore, he suggested at a later time that the artists
themselves were confident from a very early date of gain­
ing eventual recognition.
In his view, the evolving
Abstract Expressionists were united above all by the
desire to make an American contribution to the mainstream
of art for the first time in history.
for example,
Pollock, by 1943,
"was taking it for granted that any kind of
American art that could not compete on
equal terms with
5
European art Was not worth bothering with."
Therefore,
Pollock, at least, did look forward to the day when his
immediate situation of Bohemian isolation and poverty
3.
Horizon, XVI (October, 1947), 30.
4.
The Nation, November 25,
5.
Art and Culture, p. 234.
1950, p. 491»
53
would be overcome and his contribution would be univers­
ally recognized.
Both Hess and Rosenberg spelled out a similar
definition of crisis in regard to the artistes position in
society.
Hess described the mood of the New York public
toward the new art as one of "aggressive indifference.
The final section of the original "Action Painting" arti­
cle was dedicated, under the subtitle of "Milieu - The
Busy No Audience," to lamenting the fact that advanced
painters work in a society which for the most part utterly
7
disregards their work.
But these writers drew apart
from Greenberg in that .they supposed alienation to be a
continuing situation.
This idea Hess implied in concert
with the observation on the public attitude cited above:
The artist must be satisfied with constant,
active misunderstanding and reproof - from
friend and foe alike.
A certain facile acceptance of avant gardism,
.a muzzy reliance on a style's direction instead
of its articulation, an overly-sympathetic
appreciation of personal conceits, are among
the unfamiliar traps for new cosmopolitans.
Rosenberg, in one of his first important
writings on Abstract Expressionism, had taken note of the
6.
V 7<>
8.
Abstract Painting, p. 98.
See Tradition. . . , pp. 35-9*
.Abstract Painting, p. 99•
54
New York artistTs solitude and had connected the notion of
crisis directly with the appearance of the paintings them­
selves :
Attached neither to a community nor to one another,
these painters experience a unique loneliness., . .
. From the four corners of their vast land they
have come to plunge themselves into the anonymity
of New York. . . •« Estrangement from American
objects here reaches the level of pathos. It ac­
counts for certain harsh tonalities, spareness of
composition, aggressiveness of statement.9
Taken jointly with other ideas held by Hess and
Rosenberg, notably that of the Action Painter as working
chiefly in the medium of decision, the concept of crisis
emerges as the heart of their aesthetic theory.
For
them, the crisis exists on two levels, the higher level
being the artist’s, problematic relation to society.
This
relationship they generalize into a second level of crisis
in which the artist transfers his alienation through moral
decision —
the struggle with the canvas —
into the work
of art.
Since, this viewpoint is predicated upon a continu­
ing rejection by the artist of society’s values, it fol­
lows that acceptance by society can mean only one of two
things:
Either the pictures and the purpose of the artist
9.
. ’’Introduction to Six American Artists,”
Possibilities, No. 1. Winter 1947-48, p« 75, quoted in
Maurice Tuchman (ed.) New York School (Los Angeles: L..A.
County Museum, 1965), p. 236.
have been.misunderstood, or the art itself has lost its
source of power, its moral tension, and has lapsed into
decoration.
The acceptance of Abstract Expressionism by
the art public at large during the course of the middle
and late fifties resulted in exactly those alternatives
for critics who adhered to such a theory,
Dore Ashton
saw the situation in this light:
Struggle as they might against the "crowd," the
American painters lived to see the crowd (or un­
truth as Kierkegaard puts it) accept them,
Kierkegaard had warned that the communication of
truth can only be a single individual:
"For it
often happens that a man thinks the crowd is un­
truth, but when it — the crowd — accepts his
opinion en masse, everything is all right again,
"10
.
However, it may be demonstrated that the artists
themselves were largely responsible for the nature of
their public .reception.
As opposed to Kierkegaard’s
individual communicator of truth, the Abstract Expres­
sionists consciously tried to present a common group
image.
A key figure in the events that contributed to
the establishment of the avant garde was the painter ,
Robert Motherwell.
Significantly, Motherwell was the sole
member of the original Abstract Expressionists to take a
serious interest in philosophical questions; it has been
written of him that "he draws apart from his contemporaries
10.
The Unknown Shore, p, SS.
. » o in his o o e intellectuality=n
In 1947, Mother-
well, with Harold Rosenberg, edited the magazine, Possi­
bilities.
The dominant theme of Possibilities was the
artist’s alienation from and need to combat, by totalcommitment to art, the desperate social and political
situation around him.
Motherwell’s views corroborate
Rosenberg’s theories in this respect; in fact, the former
may well have provided the model for some aspects of those
theories.
As early as 1944 Motherwell ascribed the crisis
of the modern artist to his rejection of the values of
12
bourgeois society.
Furthermore, Motherwell declared,
in .direct contradiction to what Greenberg quoted as
Pollock’s position, ’’When my generation of abstract paint­
ers began exhibiting ten years ago, we never expected a
general audience, not at least one that would make its
13
presence obvious to us.” v At the same time, Motherwell
was in agreement with Rosenberg in stressing the moral
pressure by which works of art are created and by. which
they must be apprehended:
Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only
a decorator.
11. Sam Hunter, ’’USA”, Art Since 1945 (New York:
Harry N. .Abrams, Inc., 1958),-pp. 304-5•
12.
Ibid., p. 304°
13. ’’The Painter and the Audience,” Perspec­
tives USA, No. 9, Autumn, 1954,. p« 108.
57
Without ethical consciousness the audience is only
sensual, one of a e s t h e t e s . '
Yet while Motherwell insisted on the anti-public
character of Abstract Expressionism, he was very much con­
cerned with creating a public image.
In .1948, in collabor­
ation with Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, the sculptor David
Hare, and, for a time, Clyfford Still, he organized an
art school which was located on Eighth Street and held
classes for one year.
It was from this school, according
to Motherwell, that the Friday evening discussion groups
of Studio 35 (which was open to the public) and "The Club"^
were organized, although other aspects of "The Club"
derived from other sources.
Dore Ashton has given Mother-
well credit for initiating the exploratory conversations
17
at the Eighth Street Club;
certainly, he must have been
one of the guiding lights in organizing the intellectual
activities which took place around that time.
14. ... Ibid., p. 112.
15. Very little has been published concerning
these activities. The most important distinction to be
made between the two artists' groups is that the Studio
35 sessions were discontinued in 1953, while "The Club"
flourished throughout the 1950Ts, on 10th. Street as well
as Eighth. It may still be in operation.
16. Quoted in Frank O'Hara, Motherwell (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1965), p. 58=
17= '"Art," Arts and Architecture, (July, 1957),
p. 4®
5B
Motherwell (together, with' Alfred Barr and the
sculptor Richard Lippold) served as moderator in one fam-•
ous three-day session at Studio 35 in 1950,
IS
The seminar
was attended by nearly all of the Abstract Expressionists
who had made names for themselves by that time, Jackson
Pollock being the one notable exception.
The theme that
dominated the session was that of identity: what to name
themselves; what, if anything, bound them together; and
how they related to tradition.
These concerns mark a
drastic change from previous years, which both Rosenberg
and Motherwell described as a time of solitary creation.
In banding together in common cause they were risking the
establishment of a foundation for a new academy.
Be.
Kooning must have sensed the contradiction between individ­
ual philosophy and group purpose when he, concluded, "It .
19
is disastrous to name ourselves."
These activities placed Rosenberg, Hess, and
Ashton in the paradoxical position of supporting in a situ­
ation of public acceptance a form of art whose vitality,
they believed, derived from anti-public attitudes.
Their
reaction to the change can be summed up by Rosenberg’s
declaration that "the famous ’alienation of the artist’ is
Id. See Motherwell, Karpel, and Reinhardt, Modern
Artists. . , , pp. 17-22, for an edited text of these
sessions,
19°
Quoted in Ibid., p. 22.
59
the result not of the absence of interest of society in
the artist's work but of the potential interest of all of
society in it.."
20
As Abstract Expressionism grew in popularity dur­
ing the 1950's, acquired a younger generation of practi­
tioners, and gradually relocated the focus of its activity
to Tenth Street, the evidence of academization of the
avant garde became all too apparent to other critics.
Per­
haps the man who sensed most keenly the dilemma of artists
whose affective power, in his opinion, lay in certain
anti-establishment, social attitudes being recaptured as
an asset by the establishment was Robert Goldwater.
Being an art historian with a particular interest in all­
modern art possibly offset his involvement with the
artists' activities and allowed him to make dispassionate
judgments of their collective intellectual stance.
The proceedings of the "Club" always had an air of
unreality. One had a terrible time following what
was going on. The assumption was that everyone
knew what everyone else meant, but it was never
put to the test. . ... Communication was always
verbal. For artists, whose first, (if not final)
concern is with the visible and the tangible,
this custom assumed the proportions of an enormous
hole.at the center.21
20.
Tradition.. . . , p. 73®
21. "Everyone knew.what everyone else meant,"
It Is, No. 14, August, 1959, p. 35, quoted in Tuchman.
TedTJ", New York School, p. 240.
60
Yet Goldwater saw in the new painting the.same con­
cern for social values as did Rosenberg, a concern which
he believed linked it with Expressionism, and he condemned
Greenberg for hot being able to infer that social commen22
tary was the force behind the work.
However, Goldwater
interpreted the expressionist element strictly in formal
terms and regarded as the great strength of the style its
materialistic sensuousness.
He cited the search for "emo­
tional honesty" and the social value thereof as the source
for the directness and lack of finish in .New York School
23
'
pictures.
He also pointed out:
This concentration upon sensuous substance is some­
thing new to American art: to the extent that the
Abstract Expressionist is a materialist (as he has
been called) and views his art as more., than pure
vehicle, to that extent he is simply not an Expres­
sionist.^4
In short, Goldwater wished to retain a social
morality as the force which gives the canvas its power,
but he did not make this view his basis for criticism.
He
insisted on looking at the result, in his own words, "art
historically. . . , from the outside rather than the
i n s i d e , a n d then found the greatest appeal of Abstract
2,2. "Art and Criticism," Partisan Review, XXVIII,
Nos. 5-6, 1961, 693o
23.
Ibid.
24.
Quadrum, No. 8, i960, p. 30.
25.
Ibid., p. 27.
.
61
Expressionism in its formal qualities»
Goldwater regarded
the production of the second generation as possessing
everything in the pioneer Abstract Expressionists1 work
26
T,except its revolutionary morality«”
On that basis he
judged such painting unexpressionist, unexpressive, occa■27
sionally handsome — and academic <,
,Others held the
artists’ concern with group-identification and consequent
loss of individuality responsible for academization, rather
than a slackening of revolutionary purpose.
William..Rubin
summarized this viewpoint:
In spite of the common liberation from the image
(not rigourously sustained) and a binding spirit
of adventure and daring there is not enough of a
common denominator in the work of these men to
link them all under such titles as AbstractExpressionism or action painting«
There was something powerful and compelling in
New York painting of 1943-50 which is no longer
in evidence, a vitality no doubt generated by
the challenge to transcend the heritage of the
image, and to break out into a really new world
of painterly action«
Thus Rubin equated the crisis responsible for the
thrust of the early creative period of Abstract Expression­
ism with -challenges presented by. the modern tradition, not
with.the artists’ collective rejection of society.
26. .Ibid*, p . 34 o
27.
Partisan Review, XXVIII, Nos. 5-6, I96I, .693.
28.
Art International, II (March-April, 1958), 24.
62
From the perspective of the early sixties, William.
Seitz was able to see the crisis as another instance of
the gap between the production of new art and its appre­
ciation by the public; a gap which has existed since
29
Manet„
Seitz explained that in our day the interim
period has been so effectively shortened that the avant
■garde no longer truly exists, since the new is now
accepted, publicized, and purchased as soon as it is
30
identified,^
But he did not consider the absorption of
the vanguard into society as beneficial to art; on the
contrary, he attributed the mannerism that overtook the
New York School to its members’ being ’’demoralized by
lionization,
Leo Steinberg had put forward essentially the
same thesis a little earlier.
However, Steinberg went
further to point out the mistake which such critics as
Rosenberg .(although Steinberg named no one specifically in
his criticism) made in assuming that the life cycle mani­
fested, in past movements in modern art did not apply to
Abstract Expressionism:
In the early 1950’s certain spokesmen for what was
then the avant garde, , . suggested that the raw
29. ’’The Rise and Dissolution of the AvantGarde,” Vogue^ CXLI1 (September 1, 1963), IS3 ,
30,
Ibid,, p «•I82 „
31c
Ibid,, p. 230,
63
violence and the immediate action which produced
these pictures put them beyond the pale of art
. appreciation — and as proof they pointed out,
with a satisfied gnashing of teeth, that very few
people bought these pictures. Today we know that
this early reluctance to buy was but the normal
time lag of ten years or'less.32
More specifically, another critic of Rosenberg’s
philosophy observed:
The point is that the social situation of vanguard
painting in New York has moved so swiftly that a
writer like Mr. Rosenberg, basing his definitions
of a style on the social and psychological predica­
ment of the artist, rather on the intrinsic char­
acter of the work of art, was bound to have the
whole premise of his criticism wiped out by events.63
These condemnations of the philosophy of Rosenberg,
his supporters, and his defenders may appear to be a case
of clear hindsight.
.At the time their concepts were being .
formulated, this country had never made a major contribu­
tion to the mainstream o f .art, and the certainty of the
New York School’s importance and success was not guaran­
teed, as will be seen, until its acceptance in Europe.
In short, Rosenberg, and the artists themselves, at one
time had good reason for dwelling upon their sensations
of loneliness and isolation from time and place, and for
supposing that.the situation might continue.
32. ’’Contemporary Art and the Plight of its
Public,” The New Art, p. 31°
33° Hilton Kramer, ’Month in Review,” Arts,
XXXIII (September, 1959), 59°
64
However, the critics who identified the power of
Abstract Expressionist style directly with the artist's
social situation must be faulted on this basis:
They
failed to interpret the activities of the fifties as a
basic change in the artists' objectives, in their rela­
tions with each other, and in their attitudes toward the
publico
The fact that..de .Kooning, Pollock, and most of
the others continued to produce the same kind of painting
in a more favorable public atmosphere, an atmosphere
created by the artists and their critics themselves, seems
to invalidate the entire social premise„
Thus while there
.is little reason to doubt that the artists' situation was
originally other than what Rosenberg described it, there
is reason to accept Greenberg's belief that they fully
expected the situation to change»
The conclusion must
be that the Abstract Expressionists based their art on
principles other than their own feelings of alienation. .
As shown above, writers whose philosophy did not
rest upon the belief that Abstract Expressionism directly
embodied alienation and protest saw the work of its large
following as academic and mediocre.
On the other hand,
Rosenberg and Hess were unprepared to admit of a lapse in
the creative power of the style in the late fifties.
Both were members of the artists' club at that time and
associated themselves .closely with Tenth Street activi­
ties.
In a feature essay for Art News in 1959 Rosenberg
wrote extensively on the artists' milieu, emphasizing its
lack of Bohemian accoutrements and offering the opinion
that the neighborhood provides a "no-environment" in
which the artist can find his true i d e n t i t y . E l s e w h e r e ,
he described the movement as conducive to acquiring a
heightened sense of individuality, one in which he stated,
even commonplace, talents share in and are inspired by the
general creative thrust.
Hess was even more emphatic in presenting Abstract
Expressionism as a movement of continuing vitality, while
simultaneously he noted a change of emphasis in the work
Q
of the second generation.
Z*
Identifying the innovators
as de Kooning,.Pollock, Kline, Gottlieb, and Hofmann,
Hess admitted that a certain loss of powerful effect was
visible in the work of their younger followers.
he did not necessarily consider this a bad thing:
However,
"With
this detente has come an astonishing increase in the
quantity of quality. . . . The peril inherent in the works
of.such artists as de Kooning or Pollock gives way to
34° "Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art,"
Art News Annual, No. 28, 1959, p. 188.
35°
The Anxious Ob.ject, pp. 242-3.
36 .
1954), p. 24.-
"New York Salon," Art News, LII (February,
66
impulse toward elegance and the civil elaboration of pos­
sibilities ,
Six years later, Hess could still cite
the activities of the s,econd-generation Hans a and Tanager
gallery groups as proof of the continuing "heterogeneity
and depth" of the Abstract Expressionist movement, in
which the. originators of the style and their younger col3S
leagues took places of equal eminence.
By contrast, Clement Greenberg regarded the pro­
duction of the second generation as indicative of the
■complete collapse of the style:
"It has produced some of
the most imitative, uninspired and repetitious art in our
tradition. . . . far from being formless, second genera­
tion Painterly Abstraction is overformed, choked with
39
form the way all academic art is."^y Greenberg placed
the blame for what he considered the reprovincialization
of American art squarely upon the artists themselves.
In his view, Tenth Street inherited from Eighth Street a
valid concern for culture, but changed it into an.obses­
sion with names, forms, and activities, such as the
artistsT club, irrelevant to either the culture'of painting
37.
3d.
Ibid., pp. 56-7.
.Art News, LIS (October, I960),25.
39.
Arts Yearbook, No. 7> 1964? quoted in
Tuchman (ed.), New York School, p. 241.
67
or to culture in general<A°
Going further, he dis­
tinguished between the painters who were responsible for
the new situation and those who were not:
On Eighth Street this question of breaking away
[from French tutelage] does not seem to have
been raised until much later, until Eighth Street
had turned into Tenth Street. And though the :
independence — and more than the independence,
the leadership — of American art began to be
proclaimed there in the early 1950Ts more loudly
than elsewhere, an implicit loyalty to what was
an essentially French notion of "good painting"
persisted on Tenth Street as it did not among most of the painters named in the preceding para­
graph [Motherwell,^-*- Pollock, Gottlieb, Newman,
Rothko, and Still]. Gorky, de Kooning, then
Bradley Walker Tomlin and the later Franz Kline
seem to stand for that notion, which was why,
as it seems to me, they were celebrated and imi­
tated downtown as Pollock never w a s A ^
Greenberg’s attitude reflects the trend in
criticism in the late fifties.
Concurrent with the
Abstract ExpressionistsT establishment of a group iden­
tity, the movement came under increasingly heavy adverse
criticism.
A great deal of the animosity seems to have
been directed as much at the literary protagonists of
t h e .style as at the painting, as notably exemplified by
40. Art and Culture, p. 235 =
41o Since a continuing complaint of Greenberg’s
in regard to Motherwell's painting ;in the late forties
was that it
sacrificed power to tasteand remained Late
Cubist, it seems reasonable to assume that the painter
would constitute an exception to the group in which he
is mentioned here.
42=
Art and Culture, pp. 2.34-5.
the protracted nSchmeerkunstTT controversy.
2o
nSchmeerkunstn was an epithet concocted by the art
critic of.The New Republic, Frank Getlein, to describe the
work of the New York School.
Getlein criticized the work
of Kline severely, yet at the same time was capable of
discovering that "order, elegance, and strength in vary­
ing proportion, survive in works by Soulages. . . .
It
may be inferred from this evaluation that what displeased
Getlein was not so much Kliners paintings as the claims
made for them.
Getlein verified this view in a'succeed­
ing article by stating that what he found disturbing was
not the Americans1 emphasis upon material and process,
but "the metaphysics constructed around the new paint-,
i n g . P a r t i c u l a r l y distasteful to him was the emphasis
upon Abstract Expressionism1s American qualities:
"The
frightful jingoist overrating of the American Scene twenty
years ago on purely nationalistic grounds is being repeated
43° See "Art Buccaneering," The New Republic,
December'15?'1958, p. 6; Frank Getlein, "The Same Old
Schmeerkunst,11 The New Republic, January 26, 1959, p. 22;
Thomas B. Hess,. "Art Criticism-Advanced or Retardataire?"
The New Republic, January 26, 1959, p . .8; Frank Getlein,.
"Schmeerkunst and Politics,11 The New Republic, February
9, 1959, p. 29.
44°
The New Republic, January 26, 1959, p° 22.
45°
The New Republic, February 9, 1959, p° 29°
today with abstract expressionism .on the same grounds, and
the result is even more dismal.
The chief target of Getlein and of The New Repub­
lic's .policy on art was. Art NewSo
An editorial to the
effect that the high .prices commanded by Pollock's pictures
were the result of artificial promotion and reputation.......
un
inflating, principally by Art News,
from Thomas Hess„
drew a strong reply
That a politically advanced journal
could take a retardataire position on modern art Hess
found a-disappointment typical of the times„
He charac­
terized Getlein's writing as "the standard cant of the
1930's about the style of the 1920's.
In fact, the subjective nature of Hess's interpre­
tation, led to a great deal of controversy, particularly
in the late 1950's, when Art News appeared to become a
source -for.any critic of the movement wishing to quote
what he considered an example of pretentious verbiage«
The magazine undeniably took a turn toward literary or
poetic interpretation during these years and, in 1958,
published a series entitled "Poets on Paintings."
Hess's
monograph on Willem de Kooning, published in 1959, is
46.
The New Republic,January 26, 1959, p. 22.
47o . The New Republic,December 15, 1958, p. 6.
48.
The New Republic,January 26, 1959, p . 8.
70
perhaps the best example of this type of criticism In that
it finds apt metaphors for many aspects of de Kooning’s
complex style, in particular, his color texture:
There is a sense of horror, a brutality about the
paint itself — an aristocratic lack of'squeamish­
ness, and also a sense of tragedy and hopeless­
ness . Paint will clot in lumps of dead or drying
matter.— a garbage-choked river. The moment of
despair in the studio, in the ”no-environment”
that grips a whole culture, is-fixed in the
scarred, over-used paints.49
To the more conservative Hilton Kramer, Hess’s
book constituted an insult to the intelligence.^^
Other
reviewers, however, notably Dore Ashton, thought Hess’s
literary translation of complex visual effects tended to
focus the readers’ perception upon the work of art.
Even the reviewer for the scholarly College Art Journal
found the paraphrasing in the de Kooning book .instructive,
commenting that statements which ”at first seem only
poetic double-talk . . . i f carefully reread , „ » help to
illuminate certain kinds of ambiguity which appear to be
the very,structure of this artist’s imagery.
49° Willem de Kooning .(New York: George Braziller,
1959), p. 26.
50. ’’Critics of American Painting,” Arts, XXXIV
(October,1959)5 26.
51. Thomas M„ Folds, Review of Willem de Kooning,
by Thomas B. Hess, College Art J ournal, XX (Fall, I960),
71
Hess’s writing, then, is an extreme example of
where the type of criticism advocated by Rosenberg in "The
American Action Painters" can lead.
Like Ashton’s remarks
on Guston, or Rosenberg’s criticism of Hofmann, Hess’s
comments on de Kooning may be instructive, provided the
reader is willing to grant that the critic’s interpreta­
tion is the correct one.
To make this assumption is
necessary because the observations of these writers are
rarely explicit in the actual work of art.
For example,
how may one be certain that clotted paint in a de Kooning
is indeed meant to evoke a "garbage-choked river?"
This
extreme subjectivity is what many critics, particularly
in the later stages of the movement, found so objection­
able.
Greenberg was opposed from the time of its incep­
tion to the concept of Action Painting and to the subjec­
tive criticism which it engendered.
He assumed the some­
what quizzical position that the original article was not
a brief for the new painting but was in fact a veiled
attack through misrepresentation.
52
This conclusion seems
difficult to sustain in view of the trouble Rosenberg took
to clarify and elaborate upon the concept.
According to
Greenberg, the painters who accepted the definition did
52.
Clement Greenberg, "How Art 'Writing Earns
its Bad Name," Encounter, XIX (December, 1962), 6$.
72
so because they were not selling at the time, and Rosen­
berg's thesis offered them a convenient .and flattering
rationale as to why their pictures were unacceptable to
53
the public» v
Greenberg established the 1952 exhibition,
"Jackson Pollock," held at the Paul Pacchetti Gallery in
.Paris, as the first indication of the ascendancy and
international acceptance of the New York School:
"From
that time the success,in America itself of the new Ameri­
can painting dates, at least as far as collectors and
museums and art journalism are c o n c e r n e d . W i t h the
acceptance of the new style in Europe, Greenberg contin­
ued, the Action Painting concept was adopted by Lawrence
Alloway, after which the prestige of "The American Action
Painters" rose in direct proportion to the success of the
55
painting itself.
53°
Ibid., pp. 67-8.
54°
Ibid., p. 67.
At least one critic expressed a contemporary
opinion which tends to corroborate Greenberg's opinion,
albeit in a somewhat offhand and facetious way. In late
19.52) upon the occasion of the Janis Gallery's "American
Vanguard Art for Paris" show, Robert Coates of the New
Yorker remarked that "since LAbstract Expressionism]
seems now to be attracting international attention, I sup­
pose it is time we began taking it more seriously here."
(See "The Art Galleries," New Yorker, December 29, 1951,
p ° 54 ®)
55°
Encounter,- XIX (December, 1962), 69°
73
Alloway, who publicized the new American style as
Action Painting, seems at first to have accepted the revo­
lutionary implications of Rosenberg’s definition:
Whatever terms go into the history books, here is
warning, .Action painting may be part of a gen­
eral increase in painterliness, but in its pure
form it is very much more than that. Remember:
action is not just a new word for painterly. It
involves a new idea about art.-^o
However, Alloway shortly afterward demonstrated
that he harbored real reservations about Rosenberg’s
concept of action:
the release of memories,.associations,
emotions, and hypotheses through a process of spontaneous
moral decision which result in a tension on canvas:
The term Action Painting, often used to describe
the New York School, has created confusion in
Europe, When I taxed Rosenberg, who coined this
term, about this he said that he hoped it had
been ’’fruitful confusion.”
The idea of a pure Action Painting, i.e., with­
out preconception, exists only in Rosenberg’s
1952 article. . . . Action was.not the end result
but a process in the discovery of aesthetic
order.57
In the face of increasing criticism of Abstract
Expressionism and of the Action theory both at home and
in Europe, Rosenberg and Hess adopted the only logical
56. ’’Background' to Action,” Art News and
Review, Vol. IX, Nos. 19, 20, 23, 26, October 12, 1957January 18, 1958, quoted in-Tuchman (ed.) New York School,
p. 239o
57« ’’Art in New York Today,” The Listener, LX
(October 23, 1958), 647«
-
74
stance their concept permitted: that the new painting had
never been appreciated for its trne value»
Its undoing,
they decided, had come about through the shifting rela­
tion of art to society in America, a shift which created
the Vanguard Audience.
Recently, Rosenberg declared:
Action painting solved no problems. 0‘h the con­
trary, at its best it remained faithful to the
conviction that the worst thing about the continu­
ing crisis of art and society were the proposals
for solving it. . „ . The content of Action Paint­
ing is the artist’s drama of creation within the
blind alley of an epoch which has identified its c&
issues, but has allowed them to grow unmanageable.
He went on to protest the de-emphasis of the
moral aspect of the artist’s alienation and the refusal
of critics and public to see the social implications
behind the paintings.
The result of this refusal, accord­
ing to Rosenberg, is that ’’society is deprived of the
self-awareness made possible by this major focus of
59
imaginative discontent.” y
Rosenberg used the term ’’Vanguard Audience” to
denote the establishment of an American public for con­
temporary art, comprised of collectors, gallery owners
and gallery goers, museum officials, university lecturers,
and art.magazine readers., all ready to welcome, to predict
58. ’’Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion,”
Art News, LXI.(December, 1962), 42.
59=
Ibid., p. 44=
75
and even to influence, the latest innovation in art,
5o
Rosenberg .acknowledged that Abstract Expressionism was
responsible for creating such a milieu, but argued that
the interest of the Vanguard Audience has not overcome the
6l
solitude of the artist, but merely contaminated it.
Fur­
thermore, the institutional buffer and devoted audience now
standing between the truly original work of art and public
contempt only serves to emphasize the artist's estrange-
62 Thus Rosenberg concluded that "the crisis that
ment.
brought Action Painting into being has in no wise abated.
It is to the growth of a similar appreciative but
misunderstanding body that Thomas Hess ascribed the downZ
1
fall of Paris as the international capital of art.
In
the New York of the I960's, Hess observed the same thing
taking place:
"An American vanguard audience has come
into being and it performs its historical parasitic role.
It patronizes new painting while attempting to contain
65
and.muffle.its subversive content."
60, See "After Next -What?", The Anxious Obiect,
pp. 257-263.
1 61.
The Anxious Object, p. 261
62.
Ibid., p.- 195.
63.
Art News, LXI (December, 1962), 62.
64.
"A Tale of Two Cities," The New Art, pp. 161-9.-
65.
Ibid., p. 174.
, •
76
The universal interest in art, according to Rosen­
berg, Hess, and Ashton, created a commercial atmosphere
which infected and degraded the values of the artist.
Not­
withstanding subsequent revisions of opinion, they greeted
modes of art which succeeded Abstract Expressionism as a
compromise with the Vanguard Audience.
Such styles, Pop
art in particular, they felt to embody a decline from the
high moral pressure which, in their opinion, had produced
the heroic quality in American art of the forties and
fifties.
Rosenberg explained the critical acceptance of
Pop art as a relief on the part of writers, faced with an
exhausted repertory of formal terminology for dealing
with abstraction, to return to a vocabulary of illusionism.
66 In this observation, he touched upon a basic
■
reason for the eventual critical dissatisfaction with the
New York School and the acceptance of new modes:
issue of humanistic content in painting.
the
Frank Getlein,
for example, based his objection to the new art, in part,
upon its emphasis on material and technique for their own
sake.
.He argued that in all previous art, e.g., German
Expressionism, this emphasis was subordinated to communi66.
The Anxious Object, pp. 63-4.
67
cative values c.
Critics sympathetic to the' movement,
however, felt that communication was not an issue, and
Meyer Schapiro found a positive value in the lack of it:
Yet it must be said that what makes painting and
sculpture so interesting in our times is their
degree of'non-communication, «, » . The artist
does not wish to create a work in which he trans­
mits ah already prepared and complete message to ^
a relatively indifferent and impersonal receiver.
Schapiro did not, however, equate non-objectivity
with non-communication, and he regretted the banishment
of the human figure from art.
He found that sensation
and automatism, while producing striking effects, were
not conducive to the development of profound ideas.
For
that development, he looked hopefully to painters of the
second generation, where he sensed a revived interest in
^)Q
natural image.
When de Kooning re-introduced the figure into his
work and first exhibited his "Woman" series in 1953,
Schapiro and other critics had taken the event as sign
of restlessness for a new human-oriented art.
The cul­
mination of a growing sentiment for the return of the
figure to painting was the "New Images of Man" exhibition
selected by.Peter Selz for the Museum of Modern Art in
67.
The New Republic, January 26, 1959, p° 22.
6$.
Art News, LVI (Summer, 1957), 40.
69.
The Listener, January 26, 1956, p. 147«
1959, which included works as diverse as the "Womant?
paintings by de Kooning, figure-in-landscape compositions
by Bay Area painters, Neo-Dada pictures by Larry Rivers„
A basic objection of pro-Abstract Expressionist
critics to the show and to the new humanist movement in
general was that they ignored the fact that the central
concern of Abstract Expressionism was the human being,
William Seitz made the original attempt to explain the
reconciliation of anthropocentrism with an essentially non­
objective art form:
"Ear from aiming at a programmatic
abstraction of de-humanization, human content, interpreted
in terms of a reality that is felt, rather than experi­
enced visually or tactilely, is a central concern of
American art today,"
70
To later critics it became clear that the desire
to preserve the human being as the subject of the picture
was responsible for trends which developed in Abstract
Expressionist style during the middle and late fifties.
Specifically, the large picture and the simplified com­
position were thought to achieve humanistic ends.
For
example, to Eugene Goosen? the large canvas, as exhibited
by Pollock and Newman, "contains inherently within it a
theory of human proportions which grows out of its scale
70,
Magazine of Art, XLVI (February, 1953), 86,
79
in relation to the artist or observer, endowing him with
71
the grander size it has taken unto itself„n
In the environmental picture, as such large pic­
tures have been called, Clement Greenberg saw the fulfill­
ment of his requirements for a post-Cubist stylee
His
earliest intimation of the essential character of such a
style came upon viewing the first totally non-objective,
non-symbolic pictures of Jackson Pollock, executed in
1946-47o
Greenberg pronounced them as a great improvement
over Pollock’s earlier work, which he had already chamfy2
pioned as the greatest art since Miro»
As Robert
73
Goldwater
has pointed out, it was not the spatial inno­
vation of Pollock’s paintings, simultaneous void and flat
surface, that interested Greenberg, but rather their
optical flatness and their emphasis on surface and tac­
tile qualities»
In the review of the painter’s tentative
steps toward an even, abstract surface, Greenberg wrote:
’’It is the tension inherent in the constructed, recreated
flatness that produces the strength of his art,’’^
Possibly through the revelations of Pollock’s
thrown-paint work, in
the mid-fifties
Greenberg beganto
71 o
’’The Big Canvas,” The New Art, p e 56 =
72.
’’Art,” The Nation, April 7, 1945, p. 397.
73°
Partisan Review, XXVIII, Nos. 5-6, 1961, 693°
74. ,’’Art,” The Nation, February 1, 1947, p. 137°
80
find validity in the late work of Monet.
Moving from an
earlier position in which he condemned the artist for 'sub75
stituting color texture for form,
he .came to credit Monet
with significant influence upon the emergent Abstract
Expressionists during the 1940!s:
Monet’s broad, slapped on daubs of paint and his
scribbles were telling them . . . that paint on
canvas had t o :be able to breathe, and that when it
did breathe it exhaled color first and foremost —
color in fields and areas rather than in shapes.
. . .76
As stated in Chapter II, Greenberg felt the over­
riding. danger in modern art was to lapse into decoration
through unrelieved flattening.Synthetic Cubism a failure.
Herein he considered
He gradually came to believe,
however, that the tendency to flattening is indeed the key
principle of
modern art.
abandon Cubism as a
Greenbergwas then forced to
basis formodernism,
and heturned
instead to the example of Monet and Matisse.
These
artists had produced, Greenberg maintained, some of the
flattest art of the twentieth century, but had overcome
decoration in two ways: by painting in large area hues
limited in value contrast
75.
77
and by painting large pictures.
"Art," The Nation, May 5, 1945, p. 526.
76. . Art and Culture, p. 45.
77.
Ibid.,p. 221-.
78.
Ibid., p. 45.
7$
31
Therefore, in Greenberg’s opinion, the aims of
Monet connect him with Matisse in a tradition of colorarea painting.
The Cubists, then, in rejecting these
color innovations, actually represent a step backward from
Impressionism, the Post-Impressionism of Gauguin, and
-'Fauvism.^
His interpretation of modern painting in
effect substitutes a colorist versus a sculptural styl­
istic category for the more traditional expressionist
go
.versus constructivist distinction.
By this system,
Greenberg was able to identify those Abstract Expression­
ist painters who, in his view, continued the formal
progress of modern art.
Greenberg believed that as the 1950’s wore on,
’’the hallmark of ’abstract expressionism’ became increas­
ingly an execution that involved the smearing, smudging,
slapping and dripping of paint. . „
Furthermore, he
stated, painterly execution hardened into a manner, par­
ticularly in the paintings of de Kooning, which he called
32
’’homeless representation.”
79-
This term means a use of
Ibid-, p. 221.
30. Priscilla Colt made this observation in
review of Art and Culture, by Greenberg, College Art
Journal, XXII W i n t e r 1962-63), 122.
LIU
31. ’’America Takes the Lead,” Art In America,
(August-September, 1965), 103.
82.
’’After Abstract Expressionism, ” Art Inter­
national, Yi: (October 25, 1962), 29-30.
82
representational means for essentially non-representational purposes,- and Greenberg considered such an approach
anachronistic.
On the other hand, he related the pictures of
Pollock’s middle period to the mature work of Still,'
Newman, and Rothko in their common effort to suppress the
83
contrast of light and dark. v This effort placed them, he
felt, squarely in the main current of modern color-area
painting as determined by Monet, Gauguin, and Matisse.
In
the work of the four Americans (which Rosenberg, in the
case of Still, Rothko, and Newman, considered Actioninspired adaptations of prewar modes) Greenberg noted the
creation of the first truly post-Cubist style. . He pro­
nounced such work the only way to high pictorial art in
the immediate f u t u r e . G r e e n b e r g believed it to be a
tradition already in the process of extension by the hardedge painters, e.g., Kenneth Noland, whom he judged the
logical heirs to the discoveries of the Abstract-Expres• i
85
sionists.
In summary, the philosophy which dealt with
Abstract Expressionism as a revolution in art was unable
83. Art and Culture, p. 169.
84o
pp. 29-30.
Art International, VI, (October -25, 1962)
.85. See "Post Painterly Abstraction," Art Inter­
national, VIII (Summer, 1964), 63.
to accept new modes which represented a different point
of 'view.
-Divorced from the circumstances of crisis which,
they felt, produced the radically new content in Abstract
Expressionism (i.e., the artist's process as a moral
gesture), new styles, according to Hess, Rosenberg, and
Ashton, could only represent a decline from the spiritual
grandeur of postwar Jtaierican painting.
Critics like Meyer
Schapiro and Clement Greenberg, by contrast, who based
their remarks upon an aesthetic philosophy of formal con­
tinuity, interpreted subsequent modes as an extension,
rather than a rejection, of various innovations- of Abstract
Expressionism.
In Greenberg's Case, one aspect of the
style, the color-area painting of Pollock, Still, Rothko
and Newman, suggested a basis for a revised interpretation
of the historical principles of modern art.
IV
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
A body of partisan criticism came .into being in
the late forties and early fifties connected with the emer­
gence of Abstract Expressionism,
The critics who sup­
ported the new painting assumed conflicting attitudes
based on two distinct aesthetic philosophies,
Clement Greenberg, William Rubin, William Seitz,
and Meyer Schapiro interpreted Abstract Expressionism not
as an exclusively American manifestation, but. as a logi­
cal step in the historical and formal continuity of modern
art.
Their concept is essentially Hegelian, in that they
believe art to be following an internal dynamic independ­
ent of social cause.
According to this viewpoint, content
derives from extension of the medium, and new styles build
upon formal discoveries of preceding movements.
Greenberg offers perhaps the purest example of
historicist-formal criticism; he was also the first critic
to recognize the new American pointing as a major contri­
bution to art.
His writings on Abstract Expressionism
originally centered on the modern influence then dominant
in America: Cubism.
Yet his philosophy embodies.a con­
stantly shifting empirical approach.
84
As the American
painters made use of other influences, Greenberg restruc­
tured his concept of modern tradition, finding in nonCubist forms of art precedent for, and even direct influ­
ence upon, their innovations,
■The historicist-formal method was emphatically
rejected by Harold Rosenberg, Thomas B„ Hess, and Dore
Ashton, all of whom subscribed to the revolutionist con­
cept of Action Painting, an interpretation by Rosenberg,
This concept treated Abstract Expressionism as a clear
break in the continuity of twentieth-century painting and
considered it an outcome of specifically American cir­
cumstances,
Its supporters thought revolutionary the
artist’s abstracting of the moral element in painting, the
element of decision.
This element is moral, they main­
tained, because it is born out of crisis, the crisis of
the artist’s alienation from society.
Their emphasis
upon the necessity for independent action and^the moral
nature of the act is related directly to Existentialist
philosophy.
In terms of actual criticism, the revolutionists
stressed two principles, both of which tend to result in
extremely subjective analysis.
First, there is a psy­
chological emphasis, based upon personal acquaintance with
the artist,
Second, a social emphasis, deriving from
86
knowledge of the artist’s attitudes and situation, is
usually present,
While critics of both philosophies agreed that form
and content merge in modern art, the ways in which they
realized the implications of the merger constitute another
fundamental point of difference0 For example, Greenberg
and Seitz observed an implicit principle that criticism
must center upon the form of the work of art.
On the other
hand, for the revolutionists, content was synonymous with
newness and the critic’s task was felt to be interpretative.
Nowhere is this difference in emphasis more evi­
dent than in their respective evaluations of the expres­
sionist element in Abstract Expressionism.
Rosenberg and
Ashton, while minimizing the debt which others felt the
Americans owed to the materialist tradition in modern
French painting, discovered a precedent in German Expres­
sionism.
Rather than suggesting a direct influence,
these critics pointed out what they considered similar
intentions..
They concluded that concern for self-identi­
fication above aesthetics links the two styles in a
history of content.
Greenberg, on the other hand, denied any important
connection with the Germanic tradition, claiming that
every Abstract Expressionist arrived at his style primarily
through French aesthetioism.
William Seitz, unlike
Greenberg, saw an expressionist quality in the painting,
but he described it as freedom of handling, i.e.,, in
formal terms, and did not mention any similarity of purpose
that might link, say, Soutine with de Kooning.
That the Abstract Expressionists possessed a
strong concern for expressive values was never demonstrated„
Frank Getlein, an unsympathetic critic, compared the move­
ment unfavorably with German Expressionism, pointing up
%
the Americans' lack of personal communication.
Rather,
he felt, the Abstract Expressionist's sole dialogue was one
between the artist and his materials.
A protagonist of
the style, Robert Goldwater, in contrast to Getlein,
insisted that social awareness links the New York School
2
with Expressionism.
Yet Goldwater, in what appears to
be a contradiction in his views, also stated that in
refusing to regard his art as a vehicle for ideas the
•
•
■
3
American painter is not an Expressionist.
Moreover, in
his own criticism.Goldwater stressed the formal and mater­
ialistic qualities of the style.
Goldwater's approach
would seem to be a tacit admission that expressive concerns
1.
See below, pp. 76-7°
2.
Ibid., p. 60.
3.
Ibid.
were not directly brought to bear in the Abstract Expres­
sionist canvas.
Developments within the movement itself brought
out strengths and inconsistencies in each philosophy, and
the first instance of change affecting interpretation was
the issue of crisis.
The avant garde artist’s situation
in the late forties was a bleak one, described by both
Greenberg and Rosenberg as Bohemian and totally alienated
from .society.
However, Rosenberg made this alienation
the heart of his aesthetic theory, while Greenberg clearly
anticipated an integration of advanced painting into
American culture.
According to Rosenberg, Hess, and Ashton, Abstract
Expressionism derived its compelling force from individual
reaction to crisis, based on a total rejection of, and
protest against, society.
To these critics, then, the
acceptance by society of such painting could mean only
that the art had lost its individuality and moral purpose,
or else that the public had suppressed its crisis content,
and thus divested the style of its power.
In the 1950’s the artists organized in certain
activities to determine a common group identity and to
present a unified front to the public.
they won widespread acceptance.
Subsequently,
To Greenberg and Rubin,
these' activities were indicative of a new academicism,
89
brought about by the artists’ sacrifice of individuality
to irrelevant concerns such as titles.
They did not
attribute academizing to a loss of crisis content, as did
Goldwater,
In .other words, they did not explain the
decline in terms of Action Painting theory.
By contrast, Rosenberg and his supporters, pos­
sibly because of their close involvement with Tenth Street
activities, did not feel that the second generation repre­
sented a decline.
Instead, they insisted that the
Vanguard Audience had suppressed or ignored the revolu­
tionary implications of Abstract Expressionism,
Even if this contention is granted, a contradic­
tion is present in the revolutionist position.
The
artists’ purposeful and successful attempts at rapproche­
ment with the public and with each other eliminated the
factor which Rosenberg had made the heart of his theory:
Attached neither to a community nor to one
another, these painters experience a unique
loneliness, , , , Estrangement from American
objects here reaches the level of pathos. It
accounts for certain harsh tonalities, spare­
ness of composition, aggressiveness of state­
ment,^
Therefore, whether or not academicism resulted from the ■
artists’ activities, their change in objective indicated
a dissatisfaction with existentialist isolation and
l+o
Ibid,, p, 54o
90
alienation.
This fact suggests that Abstract Expres­
sionist style was at no time founded on anxiety, aliena­
tion or protest as exclusively as Rosenberg supposed.
If the crisis concept may be thought of as the
social element in revolutionist criticism, the psycholog­
ical element' is apparent in discussions of individual
works'of art.
Descriptions of pictures by Rosenberg,
Hess, and Ashton were extremely speculative, both as to
subject matter and the artist’s psychic state as revealed
in the painting.
This aspect of their writing was respon­
sible for a great deal of the adverse criticism .which
occurred late in the movement.
Robert Goldwater was
particularly opposed to Rosenberg’s assumption that the
r
angst of the artist is presented in each canvas.
Thomas
. . . .
-
Hess’s book on de Kooning also drew fire from critics
otherwise sympathetic to the movement.
The great weakness of speculative criticism is
that discursive values are rarely, so explicit in the
typically non-objective New York School picture.
The
result is that, for critics like Hess and Rosenberg, any
conclusion may apply to any work of art.
Eor instance,
Rosenberg’s description of a Hofmann as an intimation of
’’immortal hopes’’^ may strike another viewer as completely
5.
Ibid., p. 35.
6.
Ibid., p. 28.
91
inappropriateo
In .short, there is no way to ascertain
that a subjective interpretation indeed reflects the
artist’s intentions or processes of creation.
Finally, in setting up the grandeur of Abstract
Expressionist purpose as a standard, the revolutionist
critics were, in effect, establishing a non-visual,
ideological basis for criticism.
Their standard proved to
be inflexible; not surprisingly, they were unable to
accept post-Abstract Expressionist painting, which evolved
outside the context of crisis.
Clement Greenberg, in relating his comments to
the appearance of the painting, rather than looking
’’through” the work to intuit the -situation of the artist,
appears to have followed a much more flexible critical
principle than Rosenberg.
Greenberg’s philosophy has been
shown to be extremely deterministic, specifying exactly
how new art must relate to tradition in order to keep
culture moving.
Nevertheless, his predictions— and more
than that, his prescriptions— have been substantially cor­
rect.
The influence.of de Kooning, so pervasive among
the second generation Abstract Expressionists, would seem
to be in decline.
Recent developments, both in painting
and sculpture, have borne out Greenberg’s insistence on
the importance of Pollock, Rothko, Still, and Newman for
the immediate future of art.
92
The chief fault of the historicist-formal method
is its relegation to secondary status•of any style which
does not constitute a formal innovation.
This tendency is
particularly evident in the historicist critics’ evalua­
tions .of Surrealism and Expressionism.
Apparently, there
can be no place in such a philosophy for art in which
gesture or strong emotional statement take precedence over
aesthetic considerations.
Of course these are exactly the qualities claimed
by Rosenberg as the vital elements of Abstract Expression­
ism.
But from the vantage point of the 1960’s, it is pos-.
sible to agree with William .Seitz and Leo Steinberg, who
did not believe that the style possessed inherent qualities
which placed it "beyond the pale of art appreciation."^
Today, the most striking attributes of Abstract Expres­
sionist pictures Of the forties and fifties are not the
raw violence and nihilistic gesture which Rosenberg felt
so strongly.
Rather, they are the aesthetic qualities
stressed by Goldwater and by Greenberg: the sensuous
emphasis upon color and material and the tendency toward
.simplification,
7«
Ibid., pp. 62-3»
APPENDIX
BIOGRAPHY OF LEADING CRITICS
CLEMENT GREENBERG, b. 1909. Received BA from
Syracuse in.1930;.later.attended Art Students League.
Editor of Partisan Review, 1940-43; associate editor of
'Commentary, 1945-57. Author of monographs on Miro
(1948) and Matisse (1953)» At present does not publish
regularly.
HAROLD ROSENBERG. Began publishing poetry, liter­
ary criticism in "little" magazines in the late.30 rs;
during the mid 401s his interests largely shifted to art
criticism. Has held positions as lecturer at the New
School of Social Research and the University of Califor­
nia. . His articles appear regularly in Vogue and New
Yorker.
THOMAS B. HESS. Received BA from.Yale.in 1942.
In 1946 became editorial associate with Art News.
Became managing editor in 1948; editor in 1945. Still
holds that position; his editorials appear regularly in
Art News.
ROBERT G0LDWATER. b . 190?. Received Ph.D. from .
New York University in 1937. Teaching career began in
1935; has taught at Queens College, Art Students League,
New York University. Author of numerous monographs and
articles in the field of 19th and 20th century art;
director of the Museum of Primitive Art.
WILLIAM C. SEITZ, b . 1914. Ph.D. awarded in art
history by Princeton, 1952-56. Became Curator at Museum
of Modern Art in A95 d . Publications, in addition to
monographs on Abstract Expressionists, included studies
of Monet and Mark Tobey.
WILLIAM S. RUBIN. Received Ph.D. in art history
from Columbia in 1959. Is presently an associate pro­
fessor of art history at Hunter College. Doctoral thesis,
on medieval architecture, was published by Columbia
University Press.
93
94
MEYER SCHAPIRQ0 b 0-Russia 1904» Ph.D. -Columbia
in 1936o Entire teaching career, with the exception of a
visiting lectureship at New York University, has been
spent at Columbia. Although known chiefly as a medieval
scholar, has published several monographs on modern artists.
DORE ASHTON, b. 192S. BA, Wisconsin; MA,
Harvard, 1950...Associate editor Art Digest, 1951-54; art
critic for New York Times, 1955-60. Lectures in philosophy
of art, contemporary.art.history... Her articles appear
monthly.in Arts, Studio International, and Arts and
Architecture.
LEO STEINBERG, b . Moscow. Came to United States
after World "War II. Received Ph.D. in art history
(Baroque) from New York University in I960. Presently
teaches at Hunter College.
EUGENE C. G00SEN. b. 1920. Currently is chair­
man of the art department at Hunter.College. Has.been,
writing, criticism since 1.94-$ for Arts, Art International,
and Art News. His monograph on Stuart Davis was published
in 1959.
MAX KOZLOEE. b. 1933. Majored in art history at
Chicago Institute of "Fine Arts. Has frequently con­
tributed to Arts, Partisan Review. .At present he is the
regular art critic for The Nation.
LAWRENCE ALLOWAY. b. London, 1926. Was director
of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in.London; came to
America to become a Curator of the Guggenheim Museum.in
1958. Alloway was one of the first European critics to
take a sympathetic interest in contemporary American
painting.
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