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Home , Modern art

“The Artist’s Perspective”

Painting, Process, and Subject Matter

Timothy Quigley

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Question

Recall a situation or time when you thought you knew what was , when you were confident in what you were doing. And then, somehow, everything changed and things didn’t turn out as you assumed they would. Everything has suddenly different.

What was that like for you? And how did you respond?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

About twenty-five years ago [1945] for me was dead. Painting was dead in the sense that the...world situation, was such that the whole enterprise as it was being practiced by myself and by my friends and colleagues seemed to be a dead enterprise.

There was the war and Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Britain, and painting, you might say, existed in three phases.

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970.

Photo: Winston Churchill inspecting bomb damage in Battersea, South London, 10 September 1940. (Getty Images)

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman

There was the kind of painting that was trying to make the world look beautiful....

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970.

Pierre Bonnard, Siene near Vernon, c. 1911

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman

There was also the kind of painting that was trying to be pure, based on , where the actual world didn’t exist and the so-called paradise of pure forms functioned. It seemed to me that these things were futile enterprises.... On the one hand, you had these cubist purists. On the other hand, you had the folklore artists who were doing the old oaken bucket: Tom Benton and all those fellows out west.

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970.

Georges Braque, Glass on a Table, 1909-10.

Thomas Hart Benton, Over the Mountains, 1924-26

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman

The surrealists were also kind of beating a dead horse, because they were creating an imaginary world, although it was actually more relevant than anything else in terms of my experience. They were at least painting or showing the possibility that you could paint something that was meaningful...

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970.

Max Ernst, Napoleon in the Wilderness, 1941

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman

What it meant for me is that I had to start from scratch as if painting didn’t exist, which is a special way of saying that painting was dead. I felt there was nothing in painting that was a source that I could use, and at the same time I felt that the whole situation was such that we had to examine the whole process.

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970.

Barnett Newman, Gea, 1944-45 Barnett Newman, Pagan Void, 1946

Barnett Newman, Euclidian Abyss, 1946-47 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman

I felt the issue in those years was: What can a painter do? The problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in painting. Not the technique, not the plasticity, not the look, not the surface: none of these things meant that much. The issue...was: What are we going to paint? The old stuff was out. It was no longer meaningful. These things were no longer relevant in a moral crisis, which is hard to explain to those who didn’t live through those early years. I suppose I was quite depressed by the whole mess.

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, 302f. The interview took place in 1970.

Beauty Form

Form Expressive Content

Meaning Subject Matter

Subject

Moral Crisis

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern

The “loss of the object” in abstract painting was celebrated by many artists during the first half of the — , Kasimir Malevich (for a time), and El Lizzitsky, to name just a few.

Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1921 Kasimir Malevich, Self-Portrait in Two Dimensions, 1915 , Proun 2 (Construction), 1920

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art

Other painters, such as , never left the figure.

Pablo Picasso, The Studio, 1927-28

Pablo Picasso, "Ma Jolie" , 1911 Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art

And still others worked both figuratively and non-figuratively throughout their lives. summed up his position in the following way:

[T]hey attacked me for that [painting the Women series], certain artists and critics. But I felt this was their problem, not mine. I don’t really feel like a non-objective painter at all…. In a way, if you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody’s nose with it, this is rather ridiculous when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing it or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I’ll have to follow my desires.

Willem de Kooning, Zurich, 1947 Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1952 Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1944

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art

The value of “representational art” and “the figure” was also challenged by critics, such as .

Shape, line, and color were all that mattered. Everything else was “literary”, not pictorial, and had no place in avant-garde painting.

Hans Hofmann, Delight, 1947 , Untitled, 1948 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art

But many abstract painters insisted that their non-representational work had meaning and content — a position eloquently defended by the art historian , who distinguished the subject of a work from the objects in it, and argued that expressive content depends on form.

Mark Rothko, Untitled,1949

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art

In addition to the internal struggles going on over abstraction, there were also attacks coming from the public and the cultural “rear- guard” who dismissed modern art entirely.

Afterall, the critic would ask, isn’t simply another way of avoiding the material realities of life?

Barnett Newman, Dionysius, 1949 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art We can no longer turn away from the significance of the subject-matter of art. America lies before us, stricken with economic pains, but eager for the voice of criticism, and in desperate need of spiritual consolations. Shall we face the situation like honest workmen; or shall we hide in the dark tower and paint evasive arabesques on an ivory wall? Again and again, with all the temper at my command, I have exhorted our artists to remain at home in a familiar background, to enter emotionally into strong native tendencies, to have done with alien cultural fetishes. And at this critical moment, I repeat the exhortation.

Thomas Craven, Modern Art, 1934.

"The principal ideologue of the American Scene" [Matthew Baigell]

Alexandre Hogue, Drouth Stricken Area, 1934

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism

Thomas Hart Benton, Over the Mountains, 1924-26

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism

Thomas Hart Benton, of the West, 1932

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism

Jackson Pollock, Going West, ca. 1934-1935

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art Regionalism

Reginald Marsh, 20-cent Movie, 1936

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art There were other competing artistic forces at work in the U.S. throughout the 1930s and ‘40s.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning, 1930

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art Realism

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art [Social Realism is a] term used to refer to the work of painters, printmakers, photographers and film makers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working classes and the poor, and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. [Source: Oxford University Press]

Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry, North Wall, 1932–33 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art Social Realism

Arnold Genthe, José Clemente Orozco, 1932

José Clemente Orozco, "The Struggle in The Occident", 1930-1931

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Introduction

The Subjects of Modern Art

[T]he official art form of the USSR, which was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934, and later by allied Communist parties worldwide. [Source: Oxford University Press]

Boris Vladimirski, Roses for Stalin, 1949

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

By the mid-1940s, artists in the U.S. were in the midst of a cultural crisis — searching for subject matter to express their common feelings. Several turned to what was then referred to as “primitive art”.

All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life.

That these feelings are being experienced by many people throughout the world today is an unfortunate fact, and to us an art that glosses over or evades these feelings, is superficial or meaningless.

That is why we insist on subject matter, a subject matter that embraces these feelings and permits them to be expressed.

Adolph Gottlieb, The Prisoners, 1947 and , "The Portrait and the Modern Artist," transcript of a broadcast on "Art in New York," Radio WNYC, October 13, 1943, in Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Archives, New York.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

Looking back during the late 1960s, Barnett Newman characterized the plight of the artist in the following way:

[W]e felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce World War, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of painting that we were doing — flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello.

At the same time we could not move into the situation of a pure world of unorganized shapes and forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And I would say that, for some of us, this was our moral crisis in relation to what to paint.

Barnett Newman, 1967, cited in Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, New York, 1977, pp. 27-29.

Mussolini and Hitler

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

For most people my age, the war and its aftermath were the most intense experiences of our lives. So many crises that overtook me were directly due to the war.

Telford Taylor Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg

Aftermath of the bombing in

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

Then there was the atomic bomb and later the Cold War to reckon with.

Tension between the Soviet Union and the and the threat of a nuclear war tended to offset the positive psychological effects of the post-war economic prosperity in the ‘50s.

Atomic Effects, Hiroshima, 1945

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

The Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, the Viet Nam war, and political assassinations — JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X — increased the complexity of the conflicts.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

It also posed it’s own questions to African-American artists, such as , Hale Woodruff, and Norman Lewis. In 1963 they formed the Spiral group to discuss the civil rights movement and the situation of the Black artist in America.

Norman Lewis framed the question: "Is there a Negro Image?" To which group member Felrath Hines responded, "There is no Negro Image in the twentieth century — in the 1960s. There are only prevailing ideas that influence everyone all over the world, to which the Negro has been, and is, contributing. Each person paints out of the life he lives."

Spiral sought to define how it could contribute to the civil rights movement and to what author Ralph Ellison called a "new visual order".

From The Art of Romare Bearden, website. http://www.nga.gov/education/classroom/bearden/lead1.shtm

Hale Woodruff, Blue Intrusion, 1958

Felrath Hines, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art J0001703. Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

Sadly...the problem for the plastic artist is not one of “telling” at all, but of revealing that which has been concealed by time, by custom, and by our trained incapacity to perceive the truth. Thus it is a matter of destroying moribund images of reality and creating the new.

Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Romare Bearden”, 1968

Norman Lewis, Phantasy II, 1946 Romare Bearden, Untitled, 1948

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

The Postwar Context

Jacob Lawrence, This is Harlem, 1943

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 The Cultural Crisis

Questions

1. How does the most compelling work of the avant-garde artists of the 1940s and ‘50s express human and social values?

2. Are these works relevant and accessible to the public today? 3. What role should the artist play and what responsibilities does the artist have to society as a whole?

4. How is all this related to the problem of subject matter? 5. To what extent do the artists discussed this week adequately address the problem?

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

Newman argues that the tragedy of artists today is comparable to tragedy as it was experienced by the ancient Greeks.

1. He starts out with the claim that of indigenous (“primitive”) cultures mean more to American artists (in the mid-1940s) than the objects produced in ancient Greece. (He has in mind primarily Greek .)

This is surprising given that the visual art of Greece is the foundation of western culture.

Male figure, Mangareva, Gambier Islands, 18th-early 19th century

Praxiteles, Hermes with the Infant Dionysus, Marble, 4th Century BC Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

2. from Poussin to David and Ingres, inspired by the Greeks, is a mere “presentation” of Greek , without its sensibility or substance.

Nicolas Poussin, The Carrying off of the Sabines, c. 1637-1638

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque and Slave, 1839 Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

3. The surrealists in the 20th century tried to recover the tragic element in Greek sensibility, but managed at best to extract its polished form.

They failed to express their “Freudian terror” and turned to the forms of Oceanic art as an alternative.

“In other words”, Newman says, “to express the tragic concept they sought, they had to go beyond the forgotten to the unfamiliar.” [166]

Paul Delvaux, Down Over the City, 1940 , Napoleon in the Wilderness, 1941

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

4. So the question Newman raises is the following: Why has the Greek achievement in the lost its power for us?

Exekias, Ajax and Achilles playing dice at Troy, 550-25 BCE

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

5. Newman also claims that the Greeks themselves, while looking back to ancient Egypt, lost the mystery, majesty, and meaning of Egyptian art and were left with nothing more than its beauty. Unable to penetrate the noumenal base of barbarian objects, they misunderstood the Egyptian symbols of purity, so that the Greek plasticity developed as an art of refinement of the pure shape. [166f]

Kroisos Kouros, Parian marble, Mycerinus and Queen, Giza, 2548-2530 B.C. Anavyssos (Greece), ca. 530 BC Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

6. But we know today that purity of form and beauty are fictions and “an embarrassment”, in spite of their being held up by art professionals as part of the great achievement of the “classical” age of western culture. [167]

Those who believe that is possible are the same who feel that art is the flower of society rather than its root. [168]

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Birth of Venus, 1863

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

7. While this analysis applies to the visual arts of ancient Greece, Greek tragedy, Newman claims, is another matter.

The Egyptian concept of tragedy expresses a sense of “inevitability, a personal statement of being”.

Greek tragedy, on the other hand, concerns “the chaos of individual action” and its social consequences.

Sophocles, Antigone

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

8. The Greek form also differs from the surrealist notion of tragedy — the terror of a hidden force imposed on us from the outside that prevents human action. [169]

Sophocles, Oedipus the King

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

9. But, in the wake of World War II, we know that terror is not a hidden but a visible force.

We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no longer, then, in the face of a mystery…. What we have now is a tragic rather than a terrifying situation. [169]

Margaret Bourke-White, Nuremberg, 1945

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Barnett Newman, “The New Sense of Fate”, 1948

Summary of the Argument

10. So our tragedy is comparable to the Greek fate — “a tragedy of action in the chaos that is society”…

In this new tragedy that is playing itself out on a Greek-like stage under a new sense of fate that we have ourselves created, shall we artists make the same error as the Greek sculptors and play with an art of overrefinement, an art of quality, of sensibility, of beauty? Let us rather, like the Greek writers, tear the tragedy to shreds. [169]

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Question

Why was tragedy the dominant subject for these artists?

Rothko & Gottlieb

There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

A response to remarks by the art critic Edward Alden Jewell on their in the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors exhibition held in New York at Wildenstein Gallery, June 1943. The statement was published in Mr. Jewell's column in the New York Times, 13 June 1943.

Newman

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness, and at his own helplessness before the void. [“The First Man Was an Artist”, 1947.]

Rothko “[Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy] left an indelible impression upon my mind and has forever colored the syntax of my own reflections in the questions of art”. [Mark Rothko, 1954]

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Questions

But in the end, asks the skeptical critic, aren’t we really just talking about stripes or color shapes on a flat, rectangular surface?

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

Mark Rothko, Untitled,1949 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Questions

What do you think?

Can the paintings by themselves support such dramatic claims?

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

Mark Rothko, Untitled,1949 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

The Metaphysics of Abstract Painting

In an interview with Frank O’Hara in 1964, Newman resisted the suggestion that his paintings are secular, religious, or entirely physical in nature. He said they’re “metaphysical” and added, “that’s what makes them human”.

This raises even more questions:

• What is the meaning of an abstract work of art? • How does meaning emerge from such modest material means? • Is the meaning determined by the artist’s intention? • What role, if any, does the spectator play? • What role does the context play? • What is “the metaphysics of abstract painting”?

• Can art transcend the physical? Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

The Metaphysics of Abstract Painting

Factors to consider:

• Material Objects • Minds • Meanings • Imagination • Worlds

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

The Metaphysics of Abstract Painting

Factors to consider:

• Material Objects • Minds • Meanings • Imagination • Worlds

Meaning — expressive content — emerges from lines, colors, and shapes in a context.

But the context is also part of a world.

Imagination is needed to enter into a world in which the lines, shapes, and colors make sense.

Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

The Metaphysics of Abstract Painting

Factors to consider:

• Material Objects • Minds • Meanings • Imagination • Worlds

Meaning — expressive content — emerges from lines, colors, and shapes in a context.

But the context is also part of a world.

Imagination is needed to enter into a world in which the lines, shapes, and colors make sense.

Newman’s writings are an attempt to open up a Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948 world for engaging with his work in a particular context.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

The Metaphysics of Abstract Painting

A similar approach can be taken to the work of Romare Bearden.

Romare Bearden, Spring Way, 1964

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Romare Bearden

Bearden studied mathematics at NYU in the 1930s and took classes at the Art Students League.

The artists in the 1930's were deeply conscious of social problems.... But what impressed, engaged and challenged me most were the corrosive line drawings and the watercolors of Grosz… The drawings of Grosz on the theme of the human situation in post World War I Germany made me realize the artistic possibilities of American Negro subject matter.

[Bearden, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings”, 11]

George Grosz, The Engineer Heartfield, 1920

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Romare Bearden

I think a quality of artificiality must be retained in a work of art, since, after all, the reality of art is not to be confused with that of the outer world. Art, it must be remembered, is artifice, or a creative undertaking, the primary function of which is to add to our existing conception of reality.

[Bearden, “Rectangular Structure in My Montage Paintings”, 18]

Romare Bearden, The Prevalence of Ritual: Baptism, 1964 Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Romare Bearden

How then, he [Bearden] asks himself, does even an artist steeped in the most advanced lore of his craft and most passionately concerned with solving the more advanced problems of painting as painting address himself to the perplexing question of bringing his art to bear upon the task (never so urgent as now) of defining Negro American identity, of pressing its claims for recognition and for justice?

He feels, in brief, a near-unresolvable conflict between his urge to leave his mark upon the world through art and his ties to his group and its claims upon him.

[Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Romare Bearden, 675f]

Romare Bearden, Southern Courtyard, 1976

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Postwar Art and Culture in the U.S.

Romare Bearden

By imposing his vision upon His mission is to bring a new visual order into the world, and scenes familiar to us all through his art he seeks to reset society’s clock by imposing Bearden reveals much of the upon it his own method of defining the times. The urge to do universally human which this determines the form and character of his social they conceal. Through his responsibility, it spurs his restless exploration for plastic creative assemblage he possibilities and it accounts to a large extent for his creative makes complex comments aggressiveness. upon history, upon society and upon the nature of art. [Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Romare Bearden, 675] [Ellison, 679]

Romare Bearden, The Block, 1971

Tuesday, February 21, 2012 Timothy Quigley, 2012

Tuesday, February 21, 2012