Claimsdepartment I ’Ve Waited More Than a Decade to Do This Issue

ClaimsDepartment I ’ve waited more than a decade to do this issue. That seems to be a theme, and maybe it’s because I’ve finally got to the point where I can do the ones I’ve had ideas for because there’s time now. Kids are older, I’ve got more money so I can limit my need for contracts, and now, you might have heard, we’re sheltering-in-place. That’s instant time! The ideas of Abstract Expressionism is one of those things that you either love or hate. It is art that is about being art. It is art that is not meant to be about anything but itself, and the artist, honestly. It is the single most arrogant kind of art, and the kind of art that could only come from America. Which is funny because it never would have happened without the inspiration and teaching of a ton of Europeans. Like Hans Hoffmann. And Arshile Gorky. And Wassily Kandinsky. In other news, NASFiC was cancelled. I’m bummed. It was likely the one chance I’ll ever get at being an Editor Guest of Honor. Sigh. This issue features a lot of art by me. The majority of this issue is that, and there’s a lot more I’ve been doing. I’ve been really enjoying it during the lock-down, which has been OK with me, as far as I’m concerned. The family has been good, and we’ve been cooking a lot! Ultimately, we’re safe and while things might get hairy and on our nerves, we’re doing what we can. Anyhow, if you wanna lemme know what ya think, [email protected].

Clearer from the Other Side by Chris Garcia, Oil & Ink on Printer Paper, 2020 The Lesser Known Abstract Expressionists Mary Abbott more should. thanmore I work her love I context. down stripping and image with playing still was she 60s, early and 50s the from works those as powerful as nearly not was 70s the after work her while andcontemporaries, her of one every isthis a painting.” saying is specifically a “this MaryAbbott isn’t forest; seems easily,it here all an While painting. green all in is a it that though fact the but nothing about is a means it painting that honestly, anything, be can it means that and content,thus only context, is no there is There the canvas. a on on greenery green of color the impact of verdant but senses, the for stand to painting a not is This connotational. not is it that show to it within working her was this and idea, the as green about speaking is it if as feels work The well. so this shows Green All work Her color. a within working of mastery sive Mitchell Joan impres- that more a much shehad but later) her about lot a talk style was I’ll (and the of master the bit every ways many in was of heard never had I MaryAbbott. who artist wonderful a and era, the of vivors sur- few the of one was She me. to spoke works whose artist an found and in digging started I Museum. Art Denver the of people good the by together put them about exhibit HUGE aEx- was Abstract there of since Women pressionism for the about looking series a was did I I about. when talk to account works into took I something but concept, stated a it make to want didn’t also I but do, people of lot a something like my Just zine. about feelings. this and of art, hosabout effectswork talk it level. me an emotional on each atIn minute a episode,Modernist. single Minute three Three look I I

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Philip Guston s ’ and and

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Guston died in 1980. He had out And, And, somehow, as things started to go on, they became less and less Guston went to high school with Jackson Pollock, and the two of them

he he Anderson Collection has at least two two very good Philip Guston

t feel theylike were exploring the canvas, but collapsing into it. It ’ no other artist whose later works made me as happy. as me made later works whose artist other no has never been taken to as strongly as Pollock. I love the works after1968, and his 50s works. I can of of bread and a coat? But the coat is standing stiff, as if it is beingwork byan in- model.It visible thest leap. More than Diebenkorn, certainly, and the style Phil adapted as his own later work is almost as much without context as his abstract work. Loaves cartoony, cartoony, and not in the Lichtenstein way. They are new images, invading the academy, the gallery space. This was not well folks who left AbEx and wenton tofiguration, it was whoGuston made thefur- He He began painting hooded Klansmen figures, simpleforms like cigarettes loaves hands, and of bread, heads, and coats. At the Collection,Anderson theyhave feel the They of view SFMoMAofhas same.coat the backside paintings; his one sionist sionist style. These are super cool, and were basically a warning shot: he going back was to figuration.Not just figuration, morebut or lesscomic figuration. This This was accompanied by a slight change in his color palette, or maybeit the toTheyweight. more,seem started farfor simply lackaof car- better word, was toony. It was as if a comic book artist was trying topaint in an abstract expres- AbEx. Oh, in the late 1950s and early 60s, they were still abstract,but he doing was less and less of the central and more exploration of theentire canvas. way to limit the experience. It well. White Painting n stuff, and that limitedpalette is somuch smarter because itturns out to be a was a series of tightly grouped vertical and horizontal strokes,right in the cen- ter of the canvas. This gives this sense of claustrophobia, almost anti the idea of expansive AbEx. His works, like the masterful pieces uratist artist inthe 1940s, found academicgigs, and then Abstract Expression- ism hit. Guston took to it, and used the instantly recogniseable technique. It Detestable Illustrator, it was Phil Guston. wasPhil it Illustrator, Detestable even got expelled. He worked on murals through the Depression, was a fig- works, works, not to mention the Robert Arneson (All PraiseBe UntoHe!) Homage to Guston.Philip Phil was a guy who liked imagery, but he also liked being a working artist, and if ANYONEunderstood the idea of the Respectable Artist vs.the T W ikipedia is amazing. It’s the ultimate library browsing experience for those of us who like to lay under weighted blankets all day. I troll about, feeling for the bumps of links to other info that might take me to a new concept or person I’ve never encountered. This happens a lot with lists. There are THOUSANDS of lists, and my three favorite: List of Sandwiches, List of Reportedly Haunted Locations, and List of Abstract Ex- pressionist Artists. I probably visit each of them about monthly, and always come back with something great. One month, it was the Barro Luco sammich, but this month, it happened to be the artist John Opper. Opper was a great artist, and his work in the 30s was very geometric, certainly speaking from the same pulpit as Irene Rice Pereira, one of my favorite painters of the 1930s. it wasn’t quite Cubist, but perhaps leaning a bit that way. It was gorgeous work, and it holds up today. In the 40s, he moved more towards biomorphic forms, like so many of the other later Abstract Expressionists. After a while, at least partly because of his interactions with Hans Hoffman, he went full AbEx. Now, there’s a few reasons for this, but he summed it up pretty well - "the more I became aware of color and design the more I came in conflict with the object that I was painting. So it soon became a problem either I let the color go— and keep the composition as it should be, naturalistically or representationally— or I should take freedom with color and design." The connection between Abstract Expressionism and Design is not as clearly spoken of as the effect OF Abstract Expressionism ON design. Here, you can see it going the other way, showing that ultimately it was the rules of design, constantly be- coming more and more codified throughout the 20th Century, that helped to make Ab- stract Expressionism possible. The important thing is the idea of what made something draw the eye and the impact emotionally of design aspects that helped inform what Abstract Expressionism became. The piece that spoke to me from that Wikipedia page was an untitled work from 1950. At first glance, it is a representation of a jungle-like setting in white and green, but when you rearrange your vision, it is a piece of color invading a white field. It’s a painting making his marks on top of the color field, making the marks mean something, or better yet, the marks of white are showing up against and over the color, which is a statement almost of dominance of action painting over colour field. Some- thing like that, I think. A lot of his stuff is like Hoffman’s boxes, though a touch more like the Rothko concept of slightly fuzzed edges. It’s far smarter than the Hoffman stuff. Opper, like so many of the first wave of AbExers, studied under Hoffman, and he made good use of it. Works like Untitled #16 and Wyoming, bring folks like Norman Lewis to mind. John Opper is sadly under-known. He had a really long career, but much like Mary Abbott, he’s not a name that any but the deepest of divers would know to bring to mind! K enzo Okada is, without question, the greatest Jap- anese Abstract Expressionist. He was an amazing artist who was a master of not painting the image, but putting marks on the canvas. In many ways, his work reminds me of the Rauschenberg multi-media works, only without the text showing through, or many of the works of Bruce Conner. His works are gorgeous, in their way, and are only a part of a career that moved between heavy abstraction and figuration, and multi- ple variaties of each. The AbEx period of Okada’s work was amazingly fruitful. My favorite of his works was an untitled mixed media work that uses overlapping translucent paper as the forms. They spread across the page, and like Louise Nevelsen, they seem to suggest buildings, cities, but they’re not. Perhaps one of the secrets of Abstract Expressionists is forcing you to recognize that these forms are naturally going to force imagery ideas into your mind, and you’re going to force them into those boxes. That stripping away of context makes it a maddening task, because where forms are reconisea- ble, you’re going to try and put those forms into context, but the artist is denying such. Okada was a master of that, and his collage and mixed media pieces are phenomenal. The thing that got me from the go was the utter lack of stiffness of form. It’s easy for geometric AbEx works to feel stiff, even Pollock falls into that trap, but Okada is never stiff, largely because he is also never fluid. He’s static, frozen, captured. The most important idea in Abstract Expressionism is that moment in time, and it’s not that the thing is in motion, or feels like it could be, but that it’s no longer continuing, that it’s stopped, paused, forever grabbed and thrown against the canvas. Okada’s got that, without question. I know his work from the wonderfully avant garde short film Pull My Daisy, which features incredible stuff from Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, Alan Ginsburg, and narrated by Jack Kerouac. He was also a helluva Abstract Artist, and with the possible exception of David Salle, probably my favorite Contemporary Artist to go into film. And, oddly, he’s also still alive. His works of the 1950s were wonderful, and they were not as tied to the work of the other AbExers, but instead seem to flow from a place of structure. Like Rauschen- berg, he sometimes worked with paper and other materials which allowed text and image to poke through at points. His works weren’t stiff, but they seemed to have a less free- flowing sensation than most action painters, but list less about the presence of color as marker than the rest of the Color Field painters. It’s about the strength and the interactions between the pieces that comprise the image. In Roth- ko, and even moreso in Motherwell, it is about the intrusion of the image on the field. Leslie is about the combination of the pieces to form a stable image, and thus make a stronger form. By the early 1960s, he’d moved into a slightly less Ex- pressionist format, feeling a bit more like Stuart Davis and being bolder, and perhaps a bit more refined, in their imagery. By the mid-1960s, he was pretty much a Pop Art guy, leaving behind a solid career as an AbExer. He’s never quite given up working in the Abstract Expressionist mode, though. He’s done some stuff that would have been completely at home in 1950 New York. There was a series of striped canvases that really seemed to speak to the old days. T here is no question that Alma Thomas was a really impressive artist, and one with a long career that had twists and turns. Her work goes from what could easily be seen as speaking in the tongue of Minimalism to straight Abstract Expressionism. Her AbEx works are really impressive, notably two works in the Smithsonian, both called Red Abstrac- tion, one from 1959 and the other from 1960. These are amazingly beautiful works that fit in with the works of Franz Kline; Kline is to Action Painting as Thomas is to Color Field. She them moved on and started working in a somewhat more geometric, repetitive frame. Her strength was color, and specially the application of repetitive color. She has an incredible work called Stormy Sea from 1958. It’s a series of arcs in varying blues, and it draws the eyes around. It’s impossible to keep your eye on a single spot because she has given you a path, and it’s not an explicit path, but one that is clearly denoted. Her work from the 1970s, especially those from the early 70s, are slightly stiffer, but they scream of the ideas of Barnett New- man and Morris Louis. They use bold colors, though, and while I’d be hard-pressed to call them hard-edged, they are really clearly deliniated. It’s an impressive style. One really impressive work, from 1974, Before Autumn, is an incredible work that feels not as if it’s trying to recapture the 50s color field thing, but is going into new directions because it’s actually giving the eye a path as she had in her other works, but it’s so subtle. B old. It is a word that serves many Abstract Ex- pressionists, and two names that come to mind are Adolf Gottlieb and Franz Kline. One of the artists I discovered while trying to make my way into AbEx for this issue (when I made my first pass at it in 2012 or so) was Michael West. I realized I had heard of her, I think she had been featured on one of the podcasts I listen to, but it was a bit of a shock to see her work and realise that her line was as bold as Gottlieb and Kline, who I both consider to be the finest of the Abstract Expressionists for their under- standing of the mark. West’s mark is amazing. Her work Painting from 1955, out-Klines Kline. It’s an amazing piece, and the stark black on the white, and it’s movement and gesture and line. It’s a work that is clear, and clean, and understanda- ble as reaching. There is less control over this one than most of the works of Kline, and here it is so impressive because it feels like a statement that the gesture is what matters, but that it doesn’t have to be so formal and constrained, and if you know how planned Kline’s work was, it makes a lot of sense. Her later work was phenomenal, and seemed to stick with the black as the focus of the line among the color. Street at Night, also from 1955, shows that idea so firmly, especially as the stark black attacks the bold and vibrant colors. The same thing could be said of La Voir – After Juan Gris, where the color is more present, but it’s the black that forms the important elements. By the 1960s, her work is as deep, coming at things in a way that feels very much like Joan Mitchell, but with a stronger sense of geometry. The 1970s work had to have been an influence on Basquiat. There are so many commonalities that it had to be. M y jam, it is collage. It’s the idea of repurposing imagery into new forms that really turns my art crank. Anne Ryan was an older woman when she began making incredible work in the mode of the avant garde. She was a poet, and an exceptionally interesting one, and when she took to collage, it showed. Largely because she gave a bunch of her lyricism made it into her collage work. She had also painted, but it was her work in mixed media collage that really shows her genius. They’re not just cut outs from papers and magazines, but boxes, string, fabric, so many things of so many different materials. They have a sort of structure that you’re not expecting. Many feel like those over-top photos that have been so popular these days on Instagram. It’s a sensation that her work gives off that I’m into. Take, for example, Collage, 540. It’s a bunch of squares, taken from twenty feet, but step closer. It’s a bunch of fabric and paper squares from 8 feet, but step closer. It’s a bunch of squares and rectangles of various textures colors, mingling like a Hans Hoffmann painting, with ragged edges, threads askew. It’s a magnificent piece, and one that is utterly without context, but at the same time, it feels. What it feels like is what you find from it, of course, and in the collage realm that can mean a lot of different things. It could be that the texture moves you, or the lack of symmetry, or even the colors, which are pretty seriously muted here. Bruce Conner did a fair amount of work in a similar color palette, and so did Rauschenberg. When it gets fascinating is when you dig into Ryan’s other work and find that she does incredibly intelligent things like Abstract collages within obviously lined-out ovals. Michael Corrine West did a similar thing, and here it feels like a container for a junk drawer, and in a good way. She’s showing that within an orderly presentation that chaos can still rule, which I guess is the world today. M y jam, it is collage. It’s the idea of repurposing imagery into new forms that really turns my art crank. Anne Ryan was an older woman when she began making incredible work in the mode of the avant garde. She was a poet, and an exceptionally interesting one, and when she took to collage, it showed. Largely because she gave a bunch of her lyricism made it into her collage work. She had also painted, but it was her work in mixed media collage that really shows her genius. They’re not just cut outs from papers and magazines, but boxes, string, fabric, so many things of so many different materials. They have a sort of structure that you’re not expecting. Many feel like those over-top photos that have been so popular these days on Instagram. It’s a sensation that her work gives off that I’m into. Take, for example, Collage, 540. It’s a bunch of squares, taken from twenty feet, but step closer. It’s a bunch of fabric and paper squares from 8 feet, but step closer. It’s a bunch of squares and rectangles of various textures and colors, mingling like a Hans Hoffmann painting, with ragged edges, threads askew. It’s a magnificent piece, and one that is utterly without context, but at the same time, it feels. What it feels like is what you find from it, of course, and in the collage realm that can mean a lot of different things. It could be that the texture moves you, or the lack of symmetry, or even the colors, which are pretty seriously muted here. Bruce Conner did a fair amount of work in a similar color palette, and so did Rauschenberg. When it gets fascinating is when you dig into Ryan’s other work and find that she does incredibly intelligent things like Abstract collages within obviously lined-out ovals. Michael Corrine West did a similar thing, and here it feels like a container for a junk drawer, and in a good way. She’s showing that within an orderly presentation that chaos can still rule, which I guess is the world today. B allsy. That’s the best way to describe Grace Harti- gan.

“I didn’t choose painting. It chose me. I didn’t have any talent. I just had genius.” Yeah, she was that kind of artist. She was also one of those who discovered figuration, and much like deKooning, she made the transition between figuration and complete abstraction often. Her works like Salute on a Tar Roof are amazing in that it shows exactly how the AbEx movement influenced design, but decades after the 1961 painting. It’s straight up something you’d have seen as a cover for a magazine in 1989. Her 1950s works are a bit heavy. Paint is dense, forms are familiar, but also not an implication of anything other than themselves. It’s an amazing style, and one that she worked through, not in. She moved between ideas, and while she was neither an Action nor a Color Field painter, her work was a direct rejection of both while adopting the markers of both. She kept working into the 2000s, and while a lot of her stuff moved like Phil Guston into a representative yet non-realist mode. It kinda reminded me of the work Kate Kelton was doing when I first discovered her work. The drawing is clear, and the coloration is represented by a palette that screams design in the 1990s and 2000s. My favorite work from her is very much an influence on the Microsoft Paint software. It’s a proof from a 1953 folder that she created. It’s color, over-lapping and intersecting with forms that define empty space that feels as if it is the painting, and not the actual laid-on col- or. I adore it, and Grace Hartigan has a special place in my heart. B rooms. Famously, Ed Clark painted with brooms, which is awesome. His work is amazing because his brush strokes are the most distinct because at times, he used pushbrooms as his brush. If the main idea of Abstract Expressionism is to show the mark of the artist, then it’s Clark whose brush made the largest that was the most AbEx, and that required him to work monumentally. His work without the brooms was also impressive, The City, from 1952, is an excellent example of a piece that documents that moment between biomorphism and the color field/action painting forms of Abstract Expressionism. Some of his other work from that period include figuration, items like vases and so on among the purely abstracted forms. It’s a really interesting combination. But the broom works, which started in the late 50s, are the things that attacked my heart. He started making shorter strokes, apparent- ly working like the AbExers of the time, only with a broom. He’s also doing work with splatters, which is a nice effect. As time goes on, his brooms are sweeping across the larger canvases. These works, which demand the eyes move along, rushed and over-powering. The largest canvases are over- whelming, and I can’t think of another artist who has managed to bring out so much in the way of motion in a single path. In a way, it’s closer related to the works that Rothko was doing than Pollock, though his work is 100% action. The effect is a color field in motion. Ed Clark died in 2019, and I think might have been the last Three Minute Modernist I did before I got laid off. D utch Abstract Expressionist, and I was shocked to see that he’s still alive at 99! One of the things that really gets me about his work is the sense of time. The work of the 1950s, which was featured in the 1951 9th Street show,was biomorphic in a way that Pollock ap- parently had grown out of, and then he also went into an objectivist phase which was really amazing. There is a primal sense to much of Joop’s work, and when he goes into the 1960s, his work becomes more minimalist, Some of it has elements that would have been totally in the space of Barnett Newman, or later Mary Wetherall. The work seems to respond to POP and minimalism not by turning his back, or by going into it, but by appearing to make work that appears to be in conversation with the times. The work feels as strong as the 50s work, but it is Color Field work in the mode of the decade. It certainly shows in the 1980s, and his career isn’t over yet! It’s highly possible that Joop might make art in 9 different decades.

Art works

Pg. 4—All Green by Mary Abbott Pg. 5—The Tale by Philip Guston Pg. 6—Wyoming, 1947 by John Opper Pg. 7—Untitled by Kenzo Okada Pg. 8— Untitled, 1953 by Alfred Leslie Pg. 9— Red Abstraction by Alma Thomas Pg. 10— Green, 1958 by Michael Corrine West Pg. 11— Cover for the Collages folder set by Anne Ryan Pg. 12—Untitled, 1949 by Norman Lewis Pg. 13— Shinnecock Canal, 1957 by Grace Hartigan Pg. 14—Maple Red by Ed Clark Pg. 15— Untitled, 1956 by Joop Sanders II TakeTake MyMy TurnTurn atat AbExAbEx I ’m an abstract artist. Are you aware of it? I’ve spent my little art times working on little works of art. I’m not good at it, but I’ve learned a few things along the way, and when I started this issue, I know I would have to go about making some art.

My Materials I am limited by three things – the cost of materials, how cheap I can get materials, and not being able to spend money on materials. Those things combine to mean I have to use what I have around the house. I do have a few art notebooks of medium quality, but more importantly, I have a box of caligrapher’s ink of black, blue, and red, a nearly completely unused jar of Mod Podge glue, and a TON of paper towels, printer paper, and newspaper. This was my initial set of materials, and I went at it first with the idea of painting in styles of various artists. This was, of course, a terrible idea. I then altered my idea to try and work in forms. To try and make a color field work, one that explores the entirety of the canvas, and presents not a form, but an idea of color. I was going to make an action work, and attempt a biomorpic work, and then stuff that I would have trouble classifying if I came across it. Have no fear, I’m not going to quit my Day Hobby... I started switching it up! Vanessa had some oil paints and gauch downstairs, which I commandeered. I started to add those into my routine. Basical- ly, I started to do things with all of them. At first, I found that I really didn’t want to use brushes. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t, but really, brushes require control, and that’s something I don’t really have. I’m a clumsy oaf, really, so I came up with an idea. I would become a printer. I would put ink on a page, and then using a thing, I started with the easiest thing I had access to—paper. I would put a lot of ink one page, and then on top of that, either a piece of newspaper or a paper towel. On top of that, I’d use a second sheet of paper. Then, I’d run my hand over the top of the top page. The first time, I just set it on the table, ran my hand across the top and peeled them apart. The paper towel I had placed between the two pages was far more interesting than either of the paper pages. I wasn’t im- pressed with the technique, but like I always do, when something doesn’t work, I do the exact same thing again! And Again! AND AGAIN!!!! And a few of the experiments actually turned out some decent results. Sometimes, I would move my hands in circles, and sometimes I would have a wrinkle in the papertowel, or one of the pieces of paper. I started turning the pages, do two or through passes so that the images would to double-printed, but the second would be lighter, less intense than the first. It was a simple form, and when I started inking both pages, things got much more interesting. Then I started painting. After finding Vanessa’s paints, first the oils, then the gouache, I started by laying down ink, then accenting with oils. After a few of those, one of which turned out really nice, I moved to starting by laying down the oils, but within the dabs and rail-thin lines of paint, I’d drip ink, and then when I’d do the squish, the effect was akin to the Morris Lewis and Frankenthaler bleeds. Then I used a brush. I’d done a squish and there were four over-whelming patches of yellow, so I grabbed my kids’ paintbrush, a thing of red Crayola tempura paint, and went at it. The effect was garish, but not unpleasant, though I grabbed a painting I’d just done, and slapped it on top and the effect there made it my fave. The following 8 pieces are my fave of the experiment.

Abstract Expressionism

in Three Dimensions I used to never associate AbEx with sculpture. I’m not sure why, though it’s probably the fact that so many folks talk about Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell, Newman, and de Kooning that it just doesn’t have the space to pop its head up. It’s odd, because when I list my favorite artists, one is a sculptor largely associated with the movement, but not one I associate her with as a rule. That sculptor is Louise Nevelsen. I think I approach her work as more representational than many others. To me, her work is about the city, about the cast-offs. The forms seemed to suggest towers, skyscrapers, brownstone, townhouses. The thing that I failed to realise is that she’s removed all the context from the pieces she worked with. By painting them all black, or white, or gold, she made them uniform, and thus stripped them of any marker or meaning outside of who she used them. This is an utterly AbEx move, and I’d argue she was the finest practitioner of the style. Which brings me to John Chamberlain. I never quite came to understand his work, really. There was a nice exhibit on him at SFMoMA the last time I was there, a month before COVID, two months before it closed until this whole thing blows over. It was a lovely exhibit, but it’s all the same to me. The crumpled metal piles that once were cars, or trash cans, or who gives a fuck? It’s all kinda the same, but I see exactly what he’s doing; it’s exactly the same as Nevelsen, only without that final step. There are some that feature more vibrant colors, and they feel a bit more reachable, that the vibrancy somehow cuts through that unapproachable nature of his other work. It might have something to do with my almost instant personal sensation of approachabil- ity for much of the Abstract Expressionist art I’ve encountered, which makes it hard for me to come to artists who I don’t instantly fall in love with. I have seen some of his monoprints and studies for his works, and they’re far more my speed. David Smith is the one who get the most attention. Part of that is that he was probably the one creating work that wasn’t out of place in corporate art collections, or even public art displays. There’s a David Smith piece in front of a car dealership in Sunnyvale. He also died young-ish, not the first AbExer to die, but certainly one of the earliest. As a result, he never got lumped in with other movements that came after he died. He certainly would have been lumped in with the minimalists, no question, but he never got that. I do enjoy a lot of his work, especially the one that’s in The Anderson Collection that isn’t at scale, but instead is somewhat table-top sized. There’s an argument to be made about Robert Rauschenberg as an Abstract Expressionist sculptor. His combines have many of the marks that an AbExer would exhibit, but at the same time, there’s more there. I would say that things like Canyon and Monogram are AbEx sculptures, but mostly I’d say he’s playing with a lot more with image in the media landscape. One of the sur- prizes at the Rauschenberg exhibit at SFMoMA was a Chamberlain-line piece with stop signs that I kinda liked. One of the artists who gets mentioned is Louise Bourgeois. I never saw it until I saw work other than he figurative works. Mostly, I knew her for the spiders, but her work in the 50s certainly fees in line with Smith and company. Her work at that point was more than a little biomorphic, and very striking. Some of it certainly shows her as one of the finest eyes in the Abstract Expressionist sculpture realm. Seymour Lipton is another, and his work actually feels a bit like some Futurist work, as if trying to show movement. George Rickey is another whose work is sometimes moved into other movements, and much of his work has a sense of David Smith. Ande- line Kent’s biomorphic forms are marvelous, though she died in 1957. Claire Falkenstein was a California sculptural legend, and she often used metal and glass in her works, and also did some amazing jewelry. David Hare had a lot of works that were steel or found metals, like wrenches. They’re all working in the traditional sculptural forms, but what about an area that wasn’t often considered as an art medium. Ceramics. Peter Voulkos is often noted as the guy who led the new Clay Revolution. There are a lot of other folks who were instrumental, but honestly, he was one of the best examples of an artist who saw their medium as feeding into a more mainstream art movement. Looking at his works from the 1950s and 60s, they’re the clay versions of David Smith. They are ground- breaking in bringing ceramics into dialogue with a contemporary art movements. Paul Soldner was a student of Voulkos, and it would seem unlikely that an actual potter would be an Abstract Expressionist, but Soldner used the finish of his tall vases as a sort of canvas with odd burnings and scorches. It’s a marvelous style! Ron Nagle is an amazing ceramicist, and probably the best AbExer working in sculpture in the Bay Area. Overall, I’ve found myself looking at three dimensional works of Abstract Expression- ism and finding myself coming to it in a way that was part discovery, and part face-slapping re- alization that it’s been there all along.

The Big Names Y ou all already know the stories of Pollock and Rothko, can instantly recognize their work probably. They’re the ones most folks think of. There’s actually a bunch of big names, the kind who get major retrospectives of their work, who have museums battle to acquire, whose shadow many other artists are forced to live in. No, this isn’t going to be BIG NAME ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISTS, but it’s going to be a look at how they made me feel.

Pollock You walk into what I call the Pollock-deKooning room at MoMA in NYC and it’s there, on the far wall. Number 31. It’s massive. Huge. Enveloping. The effect of walking into the room is akin to my favorite Museum experience: walking up the stairs at The Anderson collection. The work changes. Each step makes things phase in and out. You want to think of it as chaos, but it’s so much more con- trolled, designed to bring the viewer in closer and closer, and as you move closer, it becomes more and more apparent that this is what Pollock was doing. He was putting the paint in layers, without clustering. I sensed a pattern, and then searched for it my first visit, and I found that it wasn’t there. It FELT like it was there, and it wasn’t. Other Pollocks, notably Lucifer and Number 5, have a similar feeling, but they lack the draw. Number 31 has on me.

Rothko There is a way to show Rothkos, and as far as I’m concerned, there is only one way. They must float off the wall. You should take wires, as thin as reasonable. Make it look like its floating off the wall. Then light them, from below. That’s the way to look at Roth- ko. Against a wall, it’s just a painting, it means nothing but another coat on a wall in a museum. When they are pulled off the wall, lit with a spotlight; they are magical floating fields, without form. They are no longer windows; they are actual fields that exist of themselves. I was lucky enough to see them hung like this once, and it was the magical realm that made me realise what Rothko was actually trying to do. deKooning. I can not stand deKooning; his work is about violence against women. This was hard to hear, but it also didn’t take much for me to come to that conclusion as well about some of his stuff. Woman, his most famous, and expensive, series of paintings are often cited as what brought figuration to Abstract Expressionism, but really it hard always been there (see Norman Lewis, for example). His women are painted with mangled expressions, and especially with violent reds and slashing brushstrokes. They always bothered me, for no good reason, and then I knew. Other deKooning works? Those were much different, with less a sense of some dark impulse being worked across the canvas. I rather love those at The An- derson, at the MFA. They fill me with a sort of question- ing wonder that Woman does not.

Morris Louis I will try my entire painting life to create even one piece that has the Morris Lewis Effect. A running, a staining. These are not brushstrokes, they are runs of color. I remember when I was working at the National Museum of American Art, now called the Smithsonian Art Museum, there was a giant Morris work. It was beautiful, stunning. It was called Beta Epsilon, and at more than 20 feet across, it was a massive work. And most of it was empty space. There were ribbons of color on the sides, down in a sort of dissected chevron. It’s so over-poweringly giant that it makes you question what it is about those stripes that made them so important to have on the piece. I think it was on one of my lunch Wednesdays after I’d finished my burger and chocolate chunk cookie, when I realized that this was a stand, it was an artist saying that his mark was what made this art, and it wasn’t about the amount of marks, one small portion of the canvas was enough, and it merely had to be recognizable. That is what art is, I thought: the mark of the artist.

Helen Frankenthaler The color is not the important thing; it is the spread of the paint. When I paint using oils, I tend to weight the front and the back of the work, because the back sees the oil of the paint spread, lighten, stain, soften. On a Frankenthaler, it indicates. The epicenter is not where the damage happens, it is in those ripple, those outlaying areas. That is what a Frankenthaler feels like when I encounter it – a series of shapes that are defined by the spread, then punctuated by the color.

Clyfford Still For a long time, walking into the main gallery space of the Anderson Collection at Stanford meant climbing up the stairs and coming face-to-face with a MASSIVE Still. It’s the best Still in the world, but more than that it was a marker. It was a marker of the Ander- son Collection. It was the design of the building that somewhat revealed that work on the first wall you encounter, rising to it’s level up the stairs. I’m not the biggest fan of Clyfford Still, but I am a massive fan of effect, and it is a work that hits, overpowers, entices, all at once. There’s so little to Still’s work beyond design, and it’s so damn obvious that every work is designed for a massive impact, and the placement of his works make them genius.

Joan Mitchell There are explosions. Mitchell’s work understands something about brushwork that other painters in the style don’t seem to understand. Her work is 100% about the brushstroke, it’s all they are, and they are not only confident, but precisely improvisational. That’s an incredible line to walk, the sensation of immediacy not over-powering the precision, but no other AbExer did it as well as Mitchell. I’ve only seen two of her works in person, one at the Anderson Collection, and one at SFMoMA, and they both feel as if they came to us today, this minute. They are works that make me feel as if I am viewing the cutting-edge, and they are decades old.

Lee Krasner If Pollock had understood form, he’d have been Krasner. If deKooning understood color expectation and adjacencies, he’d have been Krasner. If Kline were a technician, he’d have been Krasner. But they weren’t. Lee Krasner will never be as recognized as those folk, which is a shame, because I consider her to be the best example of weighed and measured Abstract Expressionism. Krasner understood form in a way that none of the others did, and when she re- jected form in favor of interaction between color, she somehow became more impressive. She applied technical painting in a way that so few managed. She was not a classicist, but a true expressionist. He work fed off technique, as opposed to Rothko and Pol- lock who thrived off of rejecting it. I’ve not seen nearly enough of her work in person, but there’s a piece at SFMoMA that beg you to stare at it, to come closer, to examine the origin of each stroke. I consider it to be SFMoMA’s AbEx masterpiece, even more so than the three-panel Joan Mitchell in the same room.

Franz Kline. If you think the AbExers didn’t weight and measure their works, you’ve never heard of Franz Kline. He sketched his works out, and then executed them, precisely, in a way that made them feel immediate. There is no work of action painting more impressive than Kline’s Figure 8, in the Anderson Collection. It is a painting of movement, about movement, and one that asks you to consider what is being defined as much as what it is defining. What it is defining is the captured white space, but what is defined is the form that is an 8, but the interaction between the black and the white makes it a powerful statement.

Adolph Gottlieb Bursts. They are sun over chaos, but so much more. They are the definition of Abstract Expressionism in every work. The sun, single-colored and promi- nent, but soft-edges, blurred, out-of-focus, bleed- ing. That is color field, simple, sounded. Beneath, dark mass of line, swoop, chaos-orders non- figurative earth bound in black paint. That is action painting. Together, they are telling the story of what AbEx was in the moment, and now, they should be the works we see as definition.