The critical literature of abstract expressionism

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Authors Whittaker, Larry, 1941-

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/317997 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 is- in 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 TRACToeooooooeooooooooeoo eo IV I INTRODUCTION ...... 1 II FORMAL HISTORICISM VERSUS REVOLUTIONISM .... 13

III REACTIONS TO ACADEMIZATION, DECLINE, AND NEW"

ART 00900000.0OO.o'.00.0000 31

IV SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION o , . . S4

APBENDIY 000000.00.00.000000 000 03 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY o...... o. 95

iii 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 a-

variety 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 thing.In 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 — even by the

same artist — 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 o f 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, and. 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 sympa- g 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 to.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.- 11 One such student and admirer, Clement Greenberg, 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. ’’Art,” The Nation, Decomber 6, 1947, p. 6.29.

13. 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 --to . 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 Excellent20 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 17 communal inertia." 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 sub- 1 £ 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. "Aft Criticism Now," Studio, CXL (September, 1950), 87. - ■

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, Gestaltpsychology)Two.

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 sur- 21 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 necessarilyoAlthough 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 Intention- alist 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.in.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 about feeling.” 5" At the same • time, the conviction that 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 — Cezanne, Picasso, and the

Cubists — 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 posi- tivistic 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.sculptors. 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 q the experience of the post-Cubist, post-1930 world.

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

powerThree 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

and: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 KandinskyT s fluid brushwork and Miro’s

design — " an end product which begins nothing new in the

history of art,Not 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. 17 In a key article of 1944, he distinguished carefully between Surrealist and Surrealist-influenced painters who follow a nschematic” pictorial approach — Mir6, Arp, Klee, and Picasso — and those who utilize a "realistic” approach — 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. 20-

disturbing 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, Mother- well, and others became securely established, and cer­ tainly not, as some wished to claim him, as a late Sur- realist. •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 article.Seitz, 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 real.^ 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 real.This effort was compared to aspirations of the Medieval artist, suggesting, presumably, that at the center of modern life there.is an.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 31 tends.to go off in eccentric directions."

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, GreenbergT s ultimate sympathies were not invested with the successful synthesizers of Cubist plasticity — Gorky, Kline, and

De KooningHe 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 by-

Greenberg., 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 beginningSimilarly, 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 criticism,but 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 revolu- 35 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 '• 3 6 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 recognized.According 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

■ " • in 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. to. the. new..art: ■ ”Eorm, . color, composition, drawing,

.39• Tradition -. . .. , p., S3. -

AO. Quoted in Kozloff, Arts, XL (December, 1965), 33. Al. Tradition . . 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 p l a y , . ^ '

42. Ibid, ," p. 26.

45 ° Ibid., PP . 28—9. 44. Ibid, , p. 27.

45. Ibid., p. 35.

46. Ibid., P° 28. 31 RosenbergT s 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-Dallas- Museum of Contemporary Arts, quoted in Rosenberg, Tradi­ tion . . . , p p . ,33t34.

49. "Critic Within the Act,” Art News, LIX (October, I960,), 2?. 33

; • 50 of the possibilities engendered. 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-' 51 sibility, accompanied by risk and anxiety. 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, 52 can it be of full value. 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. - ' ' 34 form and content to merge. As applied to.Action Painting,

M s 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 in.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

• 60.. 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 presence»o2

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 Broadcast-

ing 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 1 9 6 1 . 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 A A 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

~ 6'5See "The, New York School - Then and Now," Part I, Art,International, Vol. 2 , Nos.,2-3 , 1 9 5 6 , p. 1 9 .

6 6 b The Anxious Object, p. 2 3 2 .

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 Red- coatism 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 non-

Style, 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 enti- ties 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 estab- 8l 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

PaintingThus 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 makes.Of 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 feeling,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

Pollock,The 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 automa- 97 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 i necessary for experiencing the true reality of our time.

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. Pollock, by 1943, for example, "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, 1950, p. 491» 5. Art and Culture, p. 234. 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. Abstract Painting, p. 98.

V 7<> See Tradition. . . , pp. 35-9*

8. .Abstract Painting, p. 99• 54 New York artistT s 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 total- commitment 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 aesthetes.' 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-• IS ous three-day session at Studio 35 in 1950, 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 20 society in it.." 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 commen- 22 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 inside,and 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 Abstract- Expressionism 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 . 34o

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 Avant- Garde,” 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 of .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.

3 2 . ’’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 identity.Elsewhere, 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 Z* of the second generation. 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. However, he did not necessarily consider this a bad thing: "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.

3 6 . "New York Salon," Art News, LII (February, 1954), p. 24.- 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 col- 3S 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. Ibid., pp. 56-7. 3d. .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

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 1950T s 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 wa 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 the.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 taste and 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. 2 o the protracted nSchmeerkunstTT controversy.

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-, ing.Particularly 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, drew a strong reply from Thomas Hess„ 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 . . . if 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 52 attack through misrepresentation. 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 concerned.With 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, 1957- January 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 5o and even to influence, the latest innovation in art,

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 ment. Thus Rosenberg concluded that "the crisis that 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 down-

Z 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 6 5 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 illusion-

ism. 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: the

issue of humanistic content in painting. 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 communi-

66. 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 70 American art today," 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 the grander size it has taken unto itself„n71

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 cham- fy 2 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 began to

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 'sub- 75 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.- Herein he considered

Synthetic Cubism a failure. He gradually came to believe, however, that the tendency to flattening is indeed the key

principle of modern art. Greenberg was then forced to

abandon Cubism as a basis for modernism, 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 77 7$ limited in value contrast and by painting large pictures.

75. "Art," The Nation, May 5, 1945, p. 526.

76. . Art and Culture, p. 45.

77. Ibid., p. 221-.

78. Ibid., p. 45. 31

Therefore, in Greenberg’s opinion, the aims of

Monet connect him with Matisse in a tradition of color- area 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.” This term means a use of

79- Ibid-, p. 221. 30. Priscilla Colt made this observation in review of Art and Culture, by Greenberg, College Art Journal, XXII Winter 1962-63), 122.

31. ’’America Takes the Lead,” Art In America, L I U (August-September, 1965), 103.

82. ’’After Abstract Expressionism, ” Art Inter­ national, Yi: (October 25, 1962), 29-30. 82

representational means for essentially non-representa- tional 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 Action-

inspired 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 future.Greenberg believed it to be a

tradition already in the process of extension by the hard-

edge painters, e.g., Kenneth Noland, whom he judged the

logical heirs to the discoveries of the Abstract-Expres-

sionists.• i 85

In summary, the philosophy which dealt with

Abstract Expressionism as a revolution in art was unable

83. Art and Culture, p. 169.

84o Art International, VI, (October -25, 1962) pp. 29-30.

.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. As the American

84 painters made use of other influences, Greenberg restruc­ tured his concept of modern tradition, finding in non- Cubist 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. Subsequently, they won widespread acceptance. 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 A95d . 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. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Battcock, Gregory (ed.). The New Art. New York: E„ P. Dutton & Co., 1966.

Galas, Nicolas. "The Laocoon: An Approach to Art Criti­ cism," College Art Journal, VII (Summer, 1948), 268-77. Coates, Robert M. "The Art Galleries," New Yorker, March 30, 1946, p. 75.

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