Jackson Pollock's Industrial Expressionism
Author(s): Barbara Jaffee
Source: Art Journal, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 68-79
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134506
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Thomas Hart Benton. Illustrations from
"The Mechanics of Form Organization in
Painting," published in The Arts, 1926-27.
@T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton TestamentaryTrusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed
by
VAGA, NewYork, N.Y.
In 1957 the art historian Meyer Schapiro suggested that the significance of avantgarde art lay in its positing of an alternative to the technological extremes of
corporate capitalism, observing that, within the developmental logic of modernity, the realm of the historically fine arts of painting and sculpture was the
last refuge from total instrumentality. Schapiro asserted further that American
avant-garde painting, i.e., Abstract Expressionism, addressed this charge more
vigorously than had any avant-garde art movement before it, by formulating
techniques that seemed to wed intention more closely to expression. Among
these, according to Schapiro, were spontaneity and an innovative use of line,
exemplified by the allover, linear "signature" of Jackson Pollock's poured canvases of the late 1940s.' But the question of the relationship between technique
and intention turns out not to have been trumped by Schapiro's proximity to the
artists. A generation of social historians of art, examining closely the relationship
between Abstract Expressionism and power, has concluded
that the movement owed its success to its usefulness to the
Barbara jaffee
ideological interests of the then ruling class. Even David
Craven's recent recovery of a reception of Abstract Expressionism more closely in line with what he, following
Schapiro, has argued were the artists' intentions, seems to
fall short of the demand of Schapiro's essay.2Techniqueseven those as celebrated for their originality as Pollock's
or as reviled for their repetitiveness as American industrialism's-have histories.
And Schapiro's claim, that "the consciousness of the personal and spontaneous
in the painting and sculpture stimulates the artist to invent devices of handling,
processing, surfacing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely
made," does not preclude the possibility that the social facts of industrialism
determine the limits of that invention.3
What Schapiro's essay demands is a thoroughgoing interrogation of the
relationship between Abstract Expressionist technique and the techniques of
industrial production. In the case of Pollock, that technique or, more precisely,
its origins, presents something of a problem to the inquiring mind. Pollock's
art studies were uneven at best-most famously with Regionalist realist Thomas
Hart Benton in the 1930s. Much art-historical hay has been made over the
question of Benton's influence. Pollock himself described it as a negative. But
Pollock scholar FrancisV O'Connor argued that Benton's example was crucial
to Pollock's development. His May 1967 article "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock:
1912-I 943" both rehabilitated Benton's credentials as a modernist (of admittedly
complex genealogy) and offered a historically contextualized antidote to thenMoMA director William Rubin's epic formalist cycle "Jackson Pollock and the
Modern Tradition" Parts I-IV (which had linked Pollock to Cubism through retinal evidence alone).4 In the March 1979 issue of Arts,Stephen Polcari and Mark
Roskill revisited the question by comparing Pollock's later work to Benton's
"Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting," a series of optimistically titled
with diagrammatic
essays on the theory of pictorial composition-complete
in
Benton
These
illustrations-published by
essays outlined the major
i926-27.5
tenets of a conceptual structure that the artist was by then employing to secure
the formal coherence of his own figurative subjects; Benton addressed them to
readers more objectively, however, as a "preliminary effort to develop a system
Jackson Pollock's
Industrial Expressionism
I. Meyer Schapiro, "The LiberatingQuality of
Avant-Garde Art," Art News 56, no. 4 (Summer
1957): 36-42.
2. David Craven, AbstractExpressionismas Cultural
Critique:Dissent duringthe McCarthyPeriod
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
3. As in Michael Baxandall'sconcept of a "period
eye," the development of distinctive visual skills
and habits that become identifiable elements in a
painter's style. Michael Baxandall,Paintingand
Experiencein Fifteenth-Century
Italy:A Primerin the
Social Historyof PictorialStyle (London: Oxford
University Press, 1972).
4. William Rubin, "JacksonPollock and the
Modern Tradition,"Parts I-IV,Artforum5
(February 1967): 14-22; (March 1967): 28-37;
(April 1967): 18-3 1; (May 1967): 28-33; and
FrancisV. O'Connor, "The Genesis of Jackson
Pollock: 1912-1943," Artforum5 (May 1967):
16-23. Denounced by the artist Stuart Davis as
fascist in 1935 and pronounced philistine by
Meyer Schapiro in 1938 (Meyer Schapiro,
"PopulistRealism,"PartisanReview4 [January
1938]), Benton long was considered representative of an antimodernist tendency in American art.
The reconsideration that began with O'Connor's
1967 essay now includes Matthew Baigell, The
AmericanScene: AmericanPaintingof the 1930s
(New York: Praeger, 1974), ErikaDoss, Benton,
Pollock,and the Politicsof Modernism:From
Regionalismto AbstractExpressionism(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 199 I), and James M.
Dennis, Renegade Regionalists:The Modern Independence of GrantWood, ThomasHart Benton, and
John SteuartCurry(Madison, Wisc.: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1998).
69 art journal
68
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2004
Thomas Hart Benton. Arts of the West,
from The Arts of Life in America, 1932.
Mural cycle, tempera with oil glaze.
8 x 13 ft. (243.8 x 396.2 cm). Harriet
Russell Stanley Fund, New Britain Museum
of American Art.Art ?T. H. Benton and R.
P.Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank
Trustee/Licensed byVAGA, NewYork, N.Y.
5. Thomas Hart Benton, "The Mechanics of Form
Organization in Painting,"Parts I-V, TheArts
(November 1926): 285-89; (December 1926):
340-42; (January 1927): 43-44; (February 1927):
95-96; (March 1927): 145-48. Polcaridiscussed
Benton's essays and their role in the development
of Pollock's style while Roskillcontributed a note
crediting the initialinsightto Robert Goldwater
(who, according to Roskill,had referred to the
Benton diagrams in unpublished lectures many
years before). Stephen Polcari,"JacksonPollock
and Thomas Hart Benton," ArtsMagazine 53
(March 1979): 120-24. MarkRoskill, "Jackson
Pollock, Thomas Hart Benton, and Cubism: A
Note," ArtsMagazine 53 (March 1979): 144.
6. Rosalind E. Krauss,The OpticalUnconscious
(Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1993).
7. Pepe Karmel,"Pollockat Work: The Filmsand
Photographs of Hans Namuth," inJacksonPollock,
exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1998), 87-137.
of teaching composition and comparative analysis of structure."As visual evidence, the diagrams are striking: it is as though Benton's at times luridly sentimental subjects have been "stripped bare" to reveal their modernist heart. No
less a figure than Rosalind Kraussaccepted the comparison of Pollock's work
and Benton's theorizing as orthodoxy when she used it as a visual aid to her
1993 argument about the "unconscious anxieties" at the core of modernism (in
general) and Pollock's painted performances (in particular).6 Somewhat more
cautiously, Pepe Karmel offered an elaborate demonstration of the effect, insisting in the catalogue produced by the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction
with its 1998-99 Pollock retrospective (and thereby updating Rubin) that what
Pollock "did" in his classic poured paintings was to transform the graphic flatness of Benton's diagrams into optical flatness through an obsessive layering.7
For my own part, I am perfectly willing to accept the comparison, not in
the sense that it tells us everything we might ever want to know about Pollock's
technique, but in that it does tell us something worth considering. The question,
it seems to me then, is not, is there a connection, but what does the connection
mean.8 To answer, Benton's essay must first be considered on its own terms,
within the context of its own historical moment. The five installments of "The
Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting" appeared between November 1926
and March 1927 in TheArts,a popular magazine for artists and art amateurs published in NewYork from 1920 to 1931.Their author was then a young instructor
of composition at the Art Students League, some three years away from the commission that would make his reputation-his mural paintings at the New School
for Social Research-and five years away from interaction with his most famous
70
WINTER
2004
8. Polcari'sessay (see n. 5) is exhaustive in its
treatment of the visual aspects of the comparison. Meaning, on the other hand, clearly is
Krauss'sinterest, and her provocative treatment
of the Pollock/Benton case inspires my own
investigation.
9. Yet as ErikaDoss has pointed out, Benton
defended the style of his new pictures in 1928 in
unabashedly modernist terms. See Doss, 13.
10. Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition:A Series of
Exercisesin Art Structurefor the Use of Students
and Teachers(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page,
1920). Dow was rewarded for his efforts with a
position on the faculty of Columbia University's
Teachers College, and a generation of American
modernists includingGeorgia O'Keeffe and Max
Weber came of age under the guidance of his and
similar systems.
student. Benton, once an eager student of European modernism (the result of
friendships formed in Paris in 1909 with such stylistic progressives as the coinventor of Synchromism, Stanton Macdonald-Wright), was on the cusp of a dramatic transition in his own work, from aspiring abstractionist to rustic realist.9
What Benton proposed in his article, pointedly in the text and vividly in the
diagrams (the diagrams were commissioned originally by the collector Albert
Barnes to illustrate his 1925 book TheArtin Painting,a project that fell through
when Benton objected that the Impressionist painting with which Barnes was
concerned was ill suited to diagrammatic treatment), was to create for an old
topic-the art of composition-a new aura of scientific rationality.
In Part I of his "Mechanics" Benton focused on relationships of line and
mass in two dimensions. These consist of the qualities of equilibrium (in which
"static" horizontal and vertical lines and "dynamic" diagonal lines are deployed
across the picture in carefully calculated juxtaposition), sequence (arranging
lines and shapes so that there is the appearance of paths that, to the empathetic
viewer, imply movement into and around the fixed rectangle of the canvas), and
rhythm (an equilibrium achieved by using measured intervals between dynamic
sequences, suggestive of repeating patterns). The next three parts are concerned
with techniques for suggesting depth. Benton's greatest enthusiasm was reserved
for the least stable forms of construction. Regarding equilibrium, Benton recommended compositions be built asymmetrically. In terms of sequence, he emphasized that the artist should capitalize on a viewer's "natural"tendency to imagine
incomplete forms (like arcs) as complete and to reconcile even the most dramatically opposed elements into singular movements. In his discussion of rhythm,
Benton called particular attention to a form he described as "centrifugal." Unlike
more common, "centripetal" forms, in which the intervals between opposed
elements are designed to lead a viewer imaginatively into the center of a composition, centrifugal designs coerce the viewer's eye away from implied surfaces.
The most demanding of these are compositions that extend horizontally, necessitating the clustering of rhythms into a series of loosely interwoven sets. PartV,
the concluding section, is devoted explicitly to the analysis of paintings in which
rhythmic composition appears to be acting in deep space.
In their treatment of the "inspired" art of composition as an educable skill
(in sharp divergence from the European academic tradition), Benton's diagrams
were far from unique. The systematic teaching of composition had been popular
in American art schools at least since the turn of the twentieth century, and
Benton certainly was familiar with the best-known practitioners. In his hugely
successful and widely disseminated 1899 book Composition,
educator Arthur
Dow
of
Pratt
in
Institute
New
York
created
Wesley
compositional formulae based
on his analyses of Japanese design and encouraged art students to explore what
he called a picture's "line idea"-an intuitive division of the canvas that was to
precede and make possible the subject of representation. "A picture," Dow wrote,
may be said to be in its actuality a pattern of lines. Could the art student have
this fact in view at the outset, it would save him much time and anxiety. Nature
will not teach him composition."'' By the 1920s, illustrator Jay Hambidge's
more scientistic Dynamic Symmetry had replaced Dow's in popularity. Based on
a mathematical theory of proportion (the laws of which, Hambidge claimed,
had been distilled by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks from their observations
71 art journal
DYNAMIC SYMMETRY
135
tom of the enclosing rectangle, which proportion the details of the foot and the
lip, do not need explanation, beyond mention that AB is a square in the center
of CD, this area being a whirling square rectangle.
The red-figuredlekythos, G. R. 589, Metropolitan Museum, New York, Fig.
16, supplies the ratio 1.528 (compare Amphora, Fig. I, page 91, Chapter VIII).
This form may be subdivided into two 1.309 shapes, 1.528 divided by two
PRINCIPLES
OF COMPOSI.
TION
III
Fig. 14. LekythosG. R. 540, MetropolitanMuseum,New York.
(Measuredand drawnby the MuseumStaff.)
Jay Hambidge. Illustration
from Dynamic Symmetry:The
GreekVase(New Haven:Yale
University Press, 1920), 135.
Arthur Wesley Dow.
"Principles of Composition
IIl,"from the book Composition:A Series of Exercises in
Art Structure for the Use of
Students and Teachers (1899;
repr. Garden City, N.Y.,
Doubleday, Page, 1920), 25.
George Wesley Bellows.
Elinor, Jean and Anna and Old
Lady in Black, ca. 1920. Studies
for paintings; pen and black
ink over graphite on tracing
paper. Sheet: 1256X 18'" 6 in.
(31.3 x 47.8 cm). Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, Seth K.
Sweeter Fund. Photograph @
2004 Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.
72
WINTER
2004
Walter Smith. Pages
from Teachers'
Manual for Freehand
124
TEACHERS' MANUAL.
PRACTICAL DESIGN.
125
and Intermediate
Drawing in Primary
Schools (Boston:
James R. Osgood,
1875), 124-25.
CARD-EXERCISEVI.
HORIZONTAL
REPE•TITION.
Guillocho. Leaves and Berries, Conventionalized.
,,. FoRlt.
Draw
five
squares, touching one another
horizontally. Fill them with
an endless band, as a, inl the
last canrd-exercise, was tilled.
Add the parallel side-lines.
Foi:u.tb.- J)raw live squares,
touclhing each other horizontally. Fill them with repeated
leaves like those inllb, last cardexercise. Add the parallel side-lines.
Foum c. - Draw three squares, touching horizontally. Add their vertical di:amneters,as construction
lines, and then fill the squares with repeated flowers,
as shown in the copy.
CARD-EXERCISEVII.
Simple and Compound Abstract Curves, Balanced.
The curves 3 2, and 4 2, those
which end nearest 1, and the
spirals at the bottom, are all
compound. The other two pairs
are simple curves. Remenmber
this when drawing the curves.
Draw 1 2. and divide it into
four equal parts. Make 334, 5 6,
equal to three-fourths of 1 2.
Draw, first, the longest curves 32, 4 2, balancing them
I I. See Jay Hambidge, DynamicSymmetry:The
GreekVase (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1920), The Parthenonand OtherGreekTemples:
TheirDynamicSymmetry(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1924), DynamicSymmetryin
Compositionas Used by Artists(New York:
Brentano's, 1923), and PracticalApplicationsof
DynamicSymmetry(New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1932).
12. Robert Storr discusses the Pollock-Orozco
connection in his essay "A Piece of the Action,"
inJacksonPollock:New Approaches,ed. Kirk
Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1999), 33-69.
13. See Isaac Edwards Clarke, Artand Industry:
Educationin the Industrialand FineArtsin the
UnitedStates (Washington, D.C.: Government
PrintingOffice, 1885).
14. Enhancingtheir own country's competitiveness in emerging world markets had been the
goal of art educators in Englandsince at least the
1830s. The practicaloutcome of this inquirycame
following the Great Exhibitionof 185 1 (and concern over the poor reception of Britishapplied
arts), with the development of the complex of
museums and schools known in the nineteenth
century as South Kensington (the core of today's
Victoria and Albert Museum). In France as well,
there was an increased appreciation for the goals
of popular drawing instruction such as was
offered at the Ecole du dessin, the Frenchgovernment's industrial-artschool. Pedagogicalreforms
initiated duringthe Second Empireand directed
equally on each side of the vertical line. Draw the
simple curves springing from 5 and 6 to join the curves
Divide 1 3 into four equal parts, also
firstdran.
14. From tile central points of division, draw the
simple curves to the centre of the vertical line; and,
from the points of division nearest 1. draw the tulipshaped curves terminating at the lowest point of division on the vertical line. Draw the spirals, with
their ends joining the ends of a horizontal line drawn
two-thirds of one part of the vertical line above 2.
See that all the lines run gracefully into one another.
CAltD-EXEICISE VIII.
Bimple and Compound Abstract Curves, Balanced.
It will be seen that this is a
slight variation of the last exercise, the spir:ls being d(rawn
near the centre of lthe vertical
linle, and the long comlpound
curves, terminating near 1, being drawn from the bottom of
the vertical line. Draw, first,
the lines on the left, and then
those on the right to ialance.
TIlE SPIIRAL.
There are two varieties of the conlpound curve
called the spiral. In tile first variety, the distance
between the different spires is the same, as shown
at I. This is called the equable spiral, because its
had been distilled by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks from their observations
of the organic growth of shells and the sequence of leaf distribution in plants),
the sequential diagonals of Dynamic Symmetry provided the abstract scaffolding
secreted within such pictorial works as George Bellows's Elinor,
Jean,andAnna
muralist
Clemente
an
artist
Pollock
admired
Mexican
Orozco,
(1920)."
Josei
and
mechanical
forms
chose
the
prescribed by Dynamic
enormously,
angular
Symmetry to organize his own frescoes for the New School-a commission
executed at the same time and for the same purpose as Benton's.'2
This interest in technologically sophisticated systems for composition was
part of a relentless standardization and self-conscious modernization of artists'
methods that began in the United States immediately following the Civil Waraimed ultimately (and with increasing urgency) at assisting industry by establishing the teaching of art on a more practical basis.'3 In Massachusetts, the Free
Instruction in Drawing Act of 1870 had provided a mandate for instruction in
industrial or mechanical drawing for any citizen of that state over fifteen years of
age and established compulsory public-school drawing education in the British
style that emphasized the flattening of natural forms based on geometric convention.'4 Educators reached a new consensus following the poor reception of
American decorative and applied-arts products at the Paris Exposition in 1889,
arguing that an education in broader principles would enhance a student's
appreciation of and, ultimately, ability to produce objects of beauty." In order to
satisfy what was essentially a pragmatic need, to provide drawing education for
industry, advocates of industrial-arts education in the United States exploited
73 art journal
HenryTurner Bailey.
Plate X from Sixty-First
189,.]
AnnualReport of the
PUBLIC
Board of Education ...
1896-1897. (Boston:
Wright and Potter, State
Printers, 1898), 346-47.
strenghtt or grce.
No. 2.
317
A,,t
eisui,,eei
1. Both opposition
andl ilow of line are,
to a dciree, inevitable
in every wo,rk of art;
yLt ion, or the other is
likely to, predominate,
:ant.give to the picturo
type of Cne tyle of line
n te
tmioen oI.- s4n)A:r,, -- n-mow. In Itnek
w!k low
tO,'ownon.
In ,'t',N nos:
n
tfr .Sp!Ic:nl-.ic
an,tu , e ,%!.v(ao, fonrrxmp:.a
0c:ud',"
In
I.,V7. "',r:YA)),-'pT'
i
lCTe rhyithM tf
hirmoney19ipctbitbrv,t
agrhyhivmIc# .;%wdiInln na.I"0.-M(tlng."
no
t
o Intcnltlej. TLe
ithitn
uun
ilelt andtki
nluh caroi.i tlcloenint uion area. rather
to thi
In a Fcriel frm thr
imrillest,
IrOv!
ntad h0.
linghts mlzhotbiarrtngol
lotncpal
in r,,ti!:cr(jrrF.gl. 6).
I , toks
aO,,thnle wind,•.
d
StT", O•t Is frbowthe Mznc,-, te cu,fnmow
PLateX.
toward traininga new generation of industrial
designers (both by makingfine artists responsive
to industry and by educating a wider population in
the basic principlesof design) resulted, according
to Albert Boime, in the FrenchAcademy's adoption of abbreviated methods of instructionin 1863.
See Stuart Macdonald, The Historyand Philosophy
of Art Education(New York:American Elsevier
Publishing,1970), 169-70, 181-82, and Albert
Boime, TheAcademyand FrenchPaintingin the
Nineteenth Century(New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1971) and "The Teaching Reforms of 1863
and the Origins of Modernism in France,"TheArt
QuarterlyI, n.s. (1977): 1-39.
Annual
15. Henry T. Bailey,"Report," in Sixty-First
Reportof the Boardof Education... 1896-1897
(Boston: Wright and Potter, State Printers, 1898),
332-61.
16. See Framingthe Past:Essays on Art Education,
ed. Donald Soucy and MaryAnn Stankiewicz
(Reston, Va.: National Art EducationAssociation,
1990), especially Paul E. Bolin, "The Massachusetts Drawing Act of 1870: IndustrialMandate or
Democratic Maneuver?"59-68, and PatriciaM.
Amburgy, "Culturefor the Masses: Art Education
and Progressive Reforms, 1880-1917," 102-14.
17. LangdonS. Thompson, "Report of the Committee of Ten on ElementaryArt Education,"
Proceedingsof the NationalEducationalAssociation,
Minneapolis,Minnesota(1902): 594-614.
18. Professional art schools responded to the
pressure to offer students more "practical"train-
DoCUMENT--
Ilunt" .1I ne, Clouds," Breton's "lecoall , the GleIaners,"
'' The Sower" and '' The \Water ('arrier," ),y.Millet,
:re
good examples~ of Iharmn tlhrough contrnet.*
3. A third element in Irmonyv i. what i. kntiown amon•g
i of line.
The decoretive artists have
artist s • ,, q
an
de W ,,if :ll oorts of
groupei of lines to fill
01''
eg:tgreehdl',
but thev are reducilnle
to two tylt,
which we
may call, fir convenience, the fret (Fig. 5)
In ,e,
and the wirl ( Fig. 61
nrllMony, or repose, is ec-cured
In the
in theotther, throughi
,/f 'line.
throug.h oppiion
:t right angle ;
-i ftr :as po,.ibl',
fret, lines meet onea:other.
in the swirl, the lines foriii, so fra poible, ta:lngentialcurve.
In the firt, the vyve in
arreted
oi•tinually
nnd tficed labout; in
the second, one line
passe. ttihe eeye along
graceftilly to the next.
The law of the fret in
competitition; the law1
of the swirl, co-oper-
cultivated habits of neatness and accuracy, taste, imagination, and the powers of
invention.'6 In 1902, the largest educational organization in the United States, the
National Education Association (comprising members from every level of education, kindergarten teachers to university presidents), adopted design, defined as
the fundamental elements of color, tone, and their harmonious composition, as
the goal of art education for the whole country." As a result of this conflation of
the utilitarian and the ideal, the effects of modernization may be traced in the
professional practices of painters and sculptors, so-called fine artists, at least as
much as in the vocational contexts for which it was intended. '
Benton encountered "modernized" art education as a student at the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) between 1907 and 19o8. According to
Benton, what he learned at SAICwas his
first insights into the art of designing-of consciously planning, or composing, pictures before attempting to execute them. Japanese prints were, very
largely because of James McNeill Whistler's influence, much in favor at this
time. Fredrick Oswald, my favorite teacher at the Institute, was enthusiastic
about these and encouraged continuous study of the way they were put
together. Through continued observation of the prints I learned to arrange
my pictures in definite patterns and acquired a taste, from such artists as
Hokusai, for flowing lines which lasted all my life...'9
Despite its reputation as a conservative, Beaux Arts academy (due in no
small part to anecdotes such as Georgia O'Keeffe's disastrous encounter there
with academic figure-drawing teacher John Vanderpoel in 19go, and various
74
WINTER
2004
ing in composition as well. In 1899, for example,
the popular mural painter Will Low accused the
traditional art academies of "glutting"the art market with too many ill-preparedyoung hopefuls
(he named the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago in particular).According to Low, art students needed training in composition-what he
described as the art of "welding"together the
raw materials of representation into articulate
expression-in order to be competitive: "As at
present constituted our schools serve principally
to enable a student to draw and paint, more or
less correctly, a figure from life .... He advances
through various grades of the school, and at
last steps out into the world to find that he has
learned how but not what to do. . ." Low laid out
his argument in practicalterms. Art schools, he
claimed, were producing more artists than the
market reasonably could be expected to absorb.
Only a tiny proportion of these possessed the
genius to operate ahead of trends and tastes. It
was therefore the duty of the art school first to
be more selective about admitting only students
likelyto succeed at their profession, and second
to provide those students with the tools to practice within the mainstream world of commercial
art. The perfect school, Low argued, would be
similarto the workshops of the ItalianRenaissance,
where students imbibed the secrets of their art
through the pragmatics of its execution. Absent
this possibility, Low recommended that more significance be attached to such courses in composition as already existed in some art schools. W. H.
Low, "The Education of the Artist, Here and
Now," Scribner'sMagazine 25 (June 1899): 766-67.
19. Thomas Hart Benton, An Americanin Art
(Lawrence, Kans.:University Press of Kansas,
1969). When his name first appears in SAIC's
1902-03 catalogue, Oswald is listed as an
advanced student acting as assistant teacher in
the juvenile classes held on Saturdays-this at
a time when course work in Arthur Dow's methods was required of all student teachers by the
School's Normal department.
20. See listings in TheArt Instituteof Chicago,
SchoolCatalogue(Chicago: Art Institute of
Chicago, 1886 and 1890). I discuss the earlytwentieth-century tradition of integrated fineand industrial-artseducation and the case of
the Art Institute of Chicago in particularin my
article "Before the New Bauhaus:From Industrial
Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago,"
Design Issues 21 (Winter 2005).
21. TheArt Instituteof Chicago,School Catalogue
(Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 190 1).
22. TheArt Instituteof ChicagoTwenty-Second
AnnualReportof the Trusteesfor the YearEnding
June I, 1901 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago,
1901).
accounts of reactionary students and faculty during the 1913exhibition of the
Armory Show), SAICwas from the beginning an eclectic and pragmatic institution.20 Chicago was one of the nation's largest centers for commercial printing,
including binding, lithography, photoengraving, and electrotyping-industries
that employed large numbers of artists and craftsmen-and SAICoffered technical training to working-class men as early as 1882. Composition courses were
introduced in I897, in the context of the school's new program in the "modern
arts" of illustration and advertising.2' SAIC'scatalogue for 1901 notes that academic life- and antique-drawing classes were restricted to mornings only; afternoons featured more progressive fare-including still-life painting, courses that
concentrated on drawing geometric forms from solid blocks, composition, illustration, and figure classes for beginners that emphasized sketching and memory
practice.22 In fact, SAICso enthusiastically embraced the latest trends in pedagogy that, upon the occasion ofVanderpoel's death in 1911,Art Institute director
William M. R. French was moved to observe that, in line with the trend of the
time, the school had become a "modern school of color and composition."
It is no coincidence that the question of how best to train young artists
had acquired its urgency at the same moment that the emphasis in America's
factories was on increasing industrial output through the rationalization of the
processes of production. Taylorism, the system of time management originated
in the late nineteenth century in the United States by Frederick Winslow Taylor
and publicized in his 1911book ThePrinciples
of Scientific
encouraged the
Management,
idea that there was a "science" for the efficient implementation of every joband art was no exception. YetTaylor not only did not eschew spontaneity in his
initial formulations, his system actually depended on a certain amount of it. As
Taylor observed and analyzed both the laboring body and the processes of production, breaking down tasks into their constitutive parts and assigning each
an ideal time for its execution, he made no prescriptions as to how (that is, by
what techniques) a worker was to satisfy the increased demands of the new
schedule. Taylor simply dismissed anything less than ideal performance as "soldiering"-his term for intentional malingering or laziness. In 1957, however,
Meyer Schapiro was able to offer the simple fact of Abstract Expressionist spontaneity as self-evidently critical of the culture of work. (Craven, though not
Schapiro, fingers the ideology and restrictive practices of Taylorism by name.)
This is because the efficiency movement in American manufacturing escalated
in the increasingly competitive and profit-driven climate of the 192os, as concerned Taylorites moved to redress the absence of direct demonstration in their
founder's system. For Taylor,who understood human efficiency as analogous
with that of a machine, it had been enough to link the analysis of work processes
with ideal times for their execution. The problem for Taylor'sfollowers and
rivals, notably the contracting engineer Frank B. Gilbreth and his wife, the psychologist Lillian M. Gilbreth, was that this left the exact motion required subject
to interpretation-more a matter of art than science.
The Gilbreths devoted themselves to the study of motion-literally to the
quest to find each task's perfect execution-by concentrating their attention on
talented individuals and the specific tasks at which they excelled. Marshaling the
to record ideal motion as exactly as possible,
technology of the chronocyclograph
the Gilbreths later "fixed" the results of their photographic motion studies in the
75 art journal
Frank B. and Lillian M.Gilbreth. "MovementTranslated into Wire Models,"
ca. 1912, from Applied Motion Study:
A Collection of Papers on the Efficient
Method to Industrial Preparedness (New
York:Sturgis and Watson, 1917).
!"c.
23. FrankB. and LillianM. Gilbreth, Applied
MotionStudy:A Collectionof Paperson the Efficient
Method to IndustrialPreparedness(New York:
Sturgisand Watson, 1917). While it is difficultto
imagine their demonstrations worked well in actual practice, the Gilbreths achieved minor celebrity
on the basis of personal efficiency-documented
in the classic memoir about them (and 1950
movie of the same title), Cheaperby the Dozen
(New York:Crowell, 1948), authored by two of
their children, FrankB. Gilbreth,Jr.,and Ernestine
Gilbreth Carey.
24. Referencing perceptual psychology, Benton
criticizes its practitioners for their too willful
obscurity: "What can actually be seen to work
and what can be diagrammaticallyexpressed is
alone valuable,"he writes, "The rest is verbal
inference good for people more interested in theories than in the study of constructive facts." He
rejects WilliamJames explicitly as "vague"and
"sentimental,"comparingJames's work unfavorably to his own, presumably more rigorous indictment of color as of only secondary importance.
11;
Fio. 17
form of three-dimensional wire models that carefully calibrated movement
against axes representing time and space. In theory, these could then be studied
by other workers (in this example, the model illustrates successive attempts to
perform a specialized task by a retired, though once expert, worker).2" The
Gilbreths' Darwinian determinism, with its codification of what was once individual ingenuity and initiative, triumphed in the 1920s over Taylor'sless obviously
hierarchical or exacting methods. So did Benton's mechanics, themselves an
escalation of earlier, more or less spontaneous approaches such as Dow's. Not
only was Benton's compositional system more demonstrative and less technical
than others, it was more directly concerned with metaphysics-with understanding the new paradigms of time and space posited in the psychological theory of empathy, for example.24 In their foray into the all-important case of deep
space-for Benton, the expressive apotheosis of painting (he notes that in composition two forms of diagrammatic representation are necessary, one that fol-
76
WINTER
2004
Thomas Hart Benton. Page from "The
Mechanics of Form Organization, Part IV,"
The Arts II (February 1927): 95.Text @
T. H. Benton and R. P.Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB BankTrustee/Licensed by
VAGA, NewYork, N.Y.
MECHANICS
OF FORM ORGANIZATION
IN PAINTING
BY?
EIDiwroui
NaOITE: •s
this essay enters
NT()ON
BE,
THOMAS
fI.
:esthetic perceptionsl as the results of changes in
physiological functions which produce feelings of
exhilarationi,keenness, expansion; or negatively, depression,weariness, disgust, which are automatically
projected back into the object originally engaging
the perceptive activitivities
causing us to like or dislike it, to resptondto it or turn away from it.
Like most theories which attempt to explain the
(tIont-
paratively newJifield int hich there is much to be
ditscovered,the author iouldbe Iveryglad toIrecive
suggestions or criticisms from readers.
The first three parts of this essay appearedin our
N'ovember, December and January issues.
PRTi IV.
first figures of this paper were devoted
T rhythmical
arrangementsof lines and masses; it
H-E
to
will be necessarynol w to show that the same principle of mtovement and counter-movemrentholds
good ior the relations of convexities and concavities.
A simple demonstration of this can be found very
readily in the lhuman body. Take for instance an
arm stripped to the shoulder (Fig. J). There are
here a series of masses which bulge and hollows
which recede. These are organized around a central vertical, the bone, and are so distributed that
there is no possibility of collision between the bulga
when a change in the arm's position
ing masses
causes them to shift. This shifting takes place alongt
the lines of the hollows -which are filled, emptied
and refilled with the chanigingpositions of the arm.
For everycmoavementof a mass there is an equilibrating counter-movement whicth finds "expression"also
in a new alignment of the hollows (Fig. K). It.
will be noticed that the arrangement of these hollows andtbulges forms a very clear rhythmical pattern, that is, thear are rlpetitions at alternate intervals of similar movemenfts,different in the different
positions of the arim.
During the Renaissance in Italy beginning withi
Siginorelliiandfinding consummate expressiionin the
sculptures and single figiures of Michael Angelo,
this phytiiological principle was consciously appliedt
in a form of direct transference to the building tup
of plastic structures. Muscular shift and countershift as visible external phenomena became a specific
compositional determinant. Facts of direct muscular experience were projected into the actual building process.
'his finds an interesting sort of theoretical
parallel in the Einffihlung Theory of Lipps andt
Groos, paraphirasedin England under the inameof
Empathyivby Lee and Thompson and later in this
country used tfor esthetic evaluations byWtn . H.
Wright.
Simply stated, the theory presents
J
K
whole oft art on the basis of some single principle, it
fails by omission. The physiological facts on which
the theory is based accotmpany every perceptive
activity and could hardly be sufficiently descriptive
or explanatory of the special form ofatsthetic experience to be worth their isolation for the purpose.
tm sthetic responses but are no
They accompany our
more determining factors than many other psychophysiological concomitants of such experience.
In the practical field of actual construction, howetver, observation of the rich and intricate field of
mutscilar action is responsible for much fine compositional work:. Engaging developments of the
principle as applied to "color construction" were
madeIby the neo-C'ezannists. In this country the
work of S. Macdonald Wright from 1916t to 1918
grew very richly from such interests.
The whole development of Renaissance form in
its material aspect, blossomed one might say ftrom
an interest in anatomy! The strictly mechanical
values of all Renaissance compositionirom
Signorelli to Rubens can be traced to an extension of
muscular action patterns, Had the theories of
Lipps and his followers been limited to a simple
95
lows superficialrhythmicrelationshipsand anotherthattranslatesthese patterns
into their cubic equivalents)-Benton's diagramsdo more than providethe generativeframeworkof Dow's two-dimensionallyorientedline-idea or Hambidge's
flexible triangles.Likethe Gilbreths'wire models, Benton'sdiagramsinsist upon
the priorityof a "one best way."
Line,for Benton,signaledintellectualactivity(thus his diagrammatictreatment) but also remainedrooted in the immediacyof bodily performance.In
fact,Benton'smechanicsemphasizeddeep space,a spacedistortedfor maximum
psychologicaland expressiveeffect.Moresignificantly,he arguedthatall compositionalorganizationis basedon a sharedexperienceof embodied movement:
"Inthe 'feel' of our own bodies,"he wrote,
25. This, of course, had always been the goat of
Taylor's methods; what the Gilbreths add is the
means.
in the sight of the bodies of others,in the bodies of animals,in the shapes
of growing and moving things, in the forcesof natureand in the engines of
man, the rhythmicprincipleof movementand counter-movementis made
77 art journal
Jackson Pollock. Number 10, 1949. Oil,
enamel, and aluminum paint on canvas
mounted on board. 18Y x 107Y in.
(46 x 272.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston,Tompkins Collection and Sophie
M. Friedman Fund.@ Pollock-Krasner
Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS),
NewYork. Photograph @ 2004 Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston.
26. Benton, February 1927, 96.
27. Choreographed, to use the suggestive terms
of Andy Warhol's 1962 series Dance Diagrams.
28. Howard Singermantraces the interweaving of
these threads in his Art Subjects:MakingArtistsin
the AmericanUniversity(Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of CaliforniaPress, 1999). Lisa Fellows
Andrus has argued further that all American art
schools have their origin in technical educationeven when teaching art traditionally,through
exclusive emphasis on figure drawing and anatomy. See Lisa Fellows Andrus, Measure and Design
in AmericanPainting,1760-1860 (New York:
Columbia University, 1976), especially Chapter
Five, "The Development of a PracticalBasis for
InstitutionalizedArt Education."
29. My book Diagrammatics:Industrialism
and
the Modernizingof AmericanArt (University of
Chicago Press, in progress) will explore this point.
manifest. But in our own bodies it can be isolated and understood. This
mechanical principle which we share with all life can be abstracted and
used in constructing and analyzing things which also in their way have life
and reality. 6
The illusion of depth, according to Benton, whether it appeals to the visual
sense (through such devices as the overlapping of flat planes) or to the tactile
(through perspectival projections of cubic forms), is always a function of analogy-always, in his word, inferred. Human anatomy, he insisted, is the basis of
that analogy: the characteristic action of muscular movement, with its succession
of rippling bulges and recessions organized around a fixed center of bone,
Benton told his readers, is "responsible for much fine compositional work."
What Benton's mechanics do,in other words, is to aestheticize the country's
industrial-age obsession with efficient movement.
No one learned this lesson better than Jackson Pollock. To be sure, Pollock's
concept of allover composition closely follows Benton's recommendations-but
the connection between Pollock's technique and Benton's pedagogy is deeper
than surface similarity.What Pollock did certainly lookslikeBenton's diagrams
(obsessively layered or not); it is also deeply, ideologically implicated with them.
What Pollock did, I suggest, was to invert his mentor's system, using it to reconceive the relationship between the schematic representation of the gesture or
pose of the human figure in action and the representation of his own embodied
gesture. In this sense, the image of human motion visualized in the early twentieth century by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth may serve as a model for reading
Pollock. I'll remind you that the Gilbreth models represent successive attempts to
recapture past performance by a once-expert worker-not simply the "one best
way," but the incremental progress through which perfection was to be achieved.
Under the force of the comparison, the artist's gestures appear not so much
spontaneous as mechanical-repetitive marks arrayed diagrammatically within
the flattening of time and space that is the (presumptive) perspectival grid of the
canvas.27One imagines that as Pollock flailed somewhat awkwardly toward the
elusive goal of mastery, covering his tracks (so to speak) as he went, his faith in
the ideology of the "one best way" was sorely tested. The pathetic beauty of the
78
WINTER
2004
work that resulted dramatizes the uneasy relationship between movement and
mechanization, the individual and the assembly line, becoming, paradoxically
(or perhaps I should say, as the Gilbreths would have hoped), the model for
successive generations of mannered performance.
Produced under the standardizing imperative of industrialism, Pollock's
work is more like work-ordinary work-than art history has been able to
acknowledge. At the very least, recognizing this similarity restores to Pollock's
project an aspect of its ambivalent sociability. At the same time, the recognition
serves to dispel the kind of reactionary logic that has posited the "mechanical"
art of the i96os as a reaction to the "manual" art of the I9gos. Celebrated for its
physicality, Pollock's innovative line (to use Schapiro's term) signifies within a
tradition of scientifically managed production the lossof spontaneity that such
systems as Taylor'smade inevitable. The ironic substitution of terms (mechanical
for spontaneous, ordinary for heroic, standardized for original) gives the case
of Benton and Pollock its particular pleasures. But my argument has larger implications. The tangled trajectory of fine- and applied-arts education in the United
States-the conflation of the utilitarian and the ideal in progressive-era movements such as manual training and industrial arts-ensures that most earlytwentieth-century American artists had some form of technical education.28
Pollock's own first brush with progressive education came several years before
he met Benton, at, as it turns out, approximately the same moment that Benton's
essays were appearing in print: between the fall of 1926 and spring 1927, when
Pollock was enrolled at the ManualTraining School in Riverside, California, and
immediately after, through fall 1929, when he attended Manual Arts High School
in Los Angeles. If this troubles our understanding of what modernist painting
was (in my own late-modernist art-school education we learned to paint as if it
were a natural act), then all the better.With due apologies to Schapiro, making
visible the effects of this largely invisible history on the "advent" of American
modernism (and abstraction in particular) must be part of the project to reconceptualize modernism's developmental contexts in their full complexity.29
BarbaraJaffee is assistant professor of art history at Northern IllinoisUniversity, DeKalb. Her work on
American modernism and design has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies.
79 art journal