Reading Abstract Expressionism

Reading Abstract
Edited and with an Introduction by Ellen G. Landau
Expressionism

ContexadCrique
Yale University Press New Haven &: London
Published with the generous support of grants from the College of Arts
and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University and the Dorothy Dehner
Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Copyright © 2005 by Yale University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reading abstract expressionism : context and critique /
edited and with an introduction by Ellen G. Landau.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-10613-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Abstract expressionism—United States—Sources.
2. Art, American—2Oth century—Sources. I. Landau, Ellen G.
N6512.5.A25R43 2005
7og'.04f052—dc22 2004061583

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

¡x Preface
Introduction
1 Abstract Expressionism: Changing Methodologies for
Interpreting Meaning

The 1940s: Mythologizing the Movement

ARTISTS' STATEMENTS
125 Arshile Gorky, Excerpt from Letter to His Sister Vartoosh, 1942
125 Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, Excerpt from "Art in New York," 1943
129 Robert Motherwell, Excerpts from "The Modern Painter's World," 1944
132 Jackson Pollock, "A Questionnaire," 1944
133 Norman Lewis, "Thesis, 1946"
135 Jackson Pollock, Application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1947
135 Barnett Newman, "The Ideographic Picture," 1947
137 Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now," 1948
139 Jackson Pollock, "My Painting," 1947-1948
140 Mark Rothko, "The Romantics Were Prompted," 1947-1948

CRITICAL REACTION
142 John Graham, Excerpts from System and Dialectics of Art, 1937
146 Edward Alden Jewell, Excerpt from "The Realm of Art: A New Platform;
'Globalism' Pops into View," 1943
150 Maude Riley, Excerpt from "Whither Goes Abstract and Surrealist Art?" 1944
152 Howard Putzel, "A Problem for Critics," 1945
153 Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, "Editorial Preface," 1947-1948
154 Samuel M. Kootz and Harold Rosenberg, The Intrasubjectives, 1949
 The 1950s: Establishing Authority

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

159 Robert Goodnough, éd., Excerpts from Artists' Sessions at Studio 35,1950
165 Elaine de Kooning, "David Smith Makes a Sculpture," 1951
171 Clyfford Still, "Statement," 1952
172 Thomas B. Hess, "de Kooning Paints a Picture," 1953
180 Louise Bourgeois, "Artist's Statement," 1954
181 Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy ofjackson Pollock," 1958
188 Martica Sawin, "In the Galleries: Franz Kline," 1958

CRITICAL REACTION
189 Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," 1952
198 Clement Greenberg, " American-Type' Painting," 1955
215 Meyer Schapiro, Excerpt from "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde
Art," 1957
220 International Reaction to Alfred H. Barr Jr., "The New American
Painting"
220 Mercedes Molleda, Revista (Barcelona), 1958
221 L. D. H., La Libre Belgique (Brussels), 1958
221 Unsigned, Le Phare (Brussels), 1958
222 Will Grohmann, Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), 1958

The 1960s: Consolidating the Canon

229 P. G. Pavia, "The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism," 1960

236 Louise Elliott Rago, "We Interview Lee Krasner," 1960
239 Robert Rosenblum, "The Abstract Sublime," 1961
245 H. H. Arnason, Excerpt from American Abstract Expressionists and
Imagists, 1961
250 Lawrence Alloway, "The Biomorphic '405," 1965
256 Michael Fried, "Jackson Pollock," 1965
263 Sidney Simon, "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School,
1939-1943: An Interview with Peter Busa and Matta, Conducted in
Minneapolis in December 1966," 1967
276 Sidney Simon, "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School,
1939-1943: An Interview with Robert Motherwell Conducted in New
York in January 1967," 1967

vi Contents
The 1970s: Emerging Contexts and Closer Readings

293 Judith Wolfe, "Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery," 1972

313 Lawrence Alloway, "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism,"
1973
324 Robert C. Hobbs, "Robert MotherwelPs Elegies to the Spanish Republic"
1976 (revised 2004)
338 David Shapiro and Cécile Shapiro, Excerpt from "Abstract Expression-
ism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," Part3,1977
346 Melvin P. Lader, "Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the 'Ingres Revival'
in America" 1978
361 Donald B. Kuspit, "Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and Clyfford
Still," 1978

The 1980s: Reading New Significations

383 Serge Guilbaut, "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America:

Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the
'Vital Center,'" 1980
399 Evan R. Firestone, "James Joyce and the First Generation New York
School," 1982
415 A. Deirdre Robson, "The Market for Abstract Expressionism: The Time
Lag Between Critical and Commercial Acceptance," 1985
422 W.Jackson Rushing, "The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast
Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea of Redemption in the Abstract
Sublime," 1988
442 Ann Gibson, "The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism," 1989

The 1990s: Re(de)fining Abstract Expressionism

CONTEXTUAL STUDIES
489 Stephen Polcari, "Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism," 1990
510 David Craven, "Introduction," "Abstract Expressionism and Afro-
American Marginalisation," and "Dissent During the McCarthy Period,"
1991
527 Michael Leja, "Modern Man Discourse and the New York School," 1993
535 T. J. Clark, "In Defense of Abstract Expressionism," 1999
560 Lisa Saltzman, "Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New
York School Painting," 1998

Contents vii
 CLOSER (RE)READINGS
580 David Anfam, " 'Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated':
Aspects of Clyfford Still's Earlier Work," 1993
594 Richard Shiff, Excerpt from "Water and Lipstick: De Kooning in
Transition," 1994
615 Matthew Baigell, "Barnett Newman's Stripe Paintings and Kabbalah:
A Jewish Take," 1994
625 Joan M. Marter, "Arcadian Nightmares: The Evolution of David Smith
and Dorothy Dehner's Work at Bolton Landing," 1995 (revised 2002)
645 Rosalind E. Krauss, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," 1999

665 Selected Bibliography

707 Index

viii Contents
 Preface

This book came about as a result of my own pedagogical needs. Each time
I taught a graduate seminar on Abstract Expressionism at Case Western Re-
serve University during the past several decades, I deplored the lack of a
comprehensive overview of the varied and extensive discourse that has sur-
rounded this important twentieth-century movement from its inception to the
present. Having an explanatory key with readings and a selected bibliogra-
phy, it seemed to me, would be extremely beneficial for students and scholars
at all levels. I mentioned this problem to numerous colleagues teaching at
public as well as private colleges and universities and found widespread agree-
ment that the existing anthologies of Abstract Expressionist writings were out
of date, too slanted toward a specific viewpoint, or did not incorporate sub-
stantively useful methodological explanation.
My first thought was to collect into one volume a selection of essays and ar-
ticles published since 1990, the year that David Shapiro and Cécile Shapiro's
Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record and Clifford Ross's Abstract Expres-
sionism: Creators and Critics both appeared. After much discussion with peers
and editors, I came to the conclusion that, in order to show in depth the more
recent revisionist approaches to Abstract Expressionism, it makes greater sense
to have access in the same volume to primary source material and preceding
critique as well. Although recent scholars have increasingly challenged the
canonical view of who and what Abstract Expressionism represents, reconfig-
uring our understanding of the movement in a variety of exciting postmodern
directions, the newer contextual interpretations depend for their full meaning
on statements made by the artists, criticism written during the heyday of the
movement (especially by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg), and the
work of intervening art historians and authors. I came to realize that not only
art history professors and students but also cultural historians, curators, art

ix
 dealers, and collectors could gain a more sophisticated perspective from an in-
clusive, updated source book that summarizes and annotates a half-century of
explanation and (often heated) rhetoric.
Once I began to survey the existing literature (I consulted more than four
hundred catalogue essays, articles, and books on Abstract Expressionist art),
I further concluded that providing a general introduction and then summa-
rizing and annotating republished texts—the typical format for a book of read-
ings or an anthology—would not accomplish this goal at the level I desired.
Instead, relying on my years of experience teaching undergraduate and grad-
uate students how to "read" art and to understand traditional art historical
methodologies and the application of newer theories to the analysis of art-
works, I set out to assemble a detailed historiography that explains the major
critical approaches to Abstract Expressionism and its ongoing post-history.
It has not been my intention, as in an Art Bulletin book review, for exam-
ple, to make value judgments about right or wrong interpretations; rather, I
have tried to present the major arguments about Abstract Expressionism that
have appeared in each decade and to connect preceding and subsequent cri-
tique, comparing and contrasting methodologies and conclusions from the
point of view of content. Differing directions are explained, but I have not
added my own qualitative assessments. Also, although this is not intended to
be a book about the development of Abstract Expressionist art in and of itself
—rather, an examination of trends in writing about the critics, art, and artists
—the introductory essay, read in tandem with the sources reprinted in the an-
thology, does constitute another take on the aesthetic history of the movement:
one seen through a lens that is more discursive than visual. Several disserta-
tions have been written with this charge (none during the past fifteen years),
and some recent authors have included historiographie sections in larger stud-
ies; this book applies a more inclusive focus to supplement and supplant ex-
isting endeavors.
Some may disagree with what appears to be a continuing emphasis on "the
usual suspects" associated with the New York School, but as a chronicler of
the literature on the movement, I have analyzed the major players authenti-
cated as such by prior writers whose commentary I explicate. Because I es-
tablished my own expertise primarily by writing about Jackson Pollock and
Lee Krasner (and also because so many of the central arguments have been
played out in the arena of Pollock studies), I have used my extensive knowl-
edge of the literature on these two artists as a touchstone for analysis of argu-
ments connected to the careers of their colleagues. Expanding the canon has

x Preface
been an agenda shared by many scholars beginning in the 19905, and much at-
tention is devoted to that topic in appropriate divisions of the introduction
and anthology. The decision to leave out or downplay such important artists
as Hans Hofmann, William Baziotes, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, and Ad Rein-
hardt, for example, was a difficult one, but space considerations precluded ex-
haustive treatment of every artist associated with the New York School.
One of my key goals for this book was not merely to duplicate text se-
lections already in print in other sourcebooks, and I have endeavored to pro-
vide access to many readings not readily available elsewhere. A representative
sampling of key texts appropriate for discussion in a history of directions in
Abstract Expressionist criticism constitutes the anthology. Material added or
revised by the original authors for the present work is enclosed in square
brackets. Texts reprinted in the anthology are compared and contrasted with
other related sources and placed in a wider, more comprehensive context in
the historiographie essay. With the help of a Smithsonian American Art Mu-
seum Short-Term Visiting Fellowship in 2001,1 searched through Abstract
Expressionist artists' papers, scrapbooks, and other sources in the Archives of
American Art and, wherever possible, I have included reference to documen-
tary materials unearthed in that process. Another key goal of this volume is to
provide an up-to-date bibliography that augments source lists published in
such venues as Michael Auping's 1987 catalogue Abstract Expressionism: The
Critical Developments. The bibliography is organized by decade for ease of
consultation in conjunction with information provided in the introductory
essay, the endnotes, and the chronological anthology divisions.
Although I had no doubt of its ultimate usefulness, what I expected might
be a straightforward, fairly dry project turned out to be a rewarding scholarly
experience. Though I already knew quite a bit about the topic, I learned an
enormous amount by immersing myself in the wide-ranging literature about
Abstract Expressionism and trying to make sense of the discoveries, discus-
sions, theories, and controversies, then classifying them so as to develop a co-
herent pattern for subsequent study. It is my hope that the explanations pro-
vided here will be useful for further expansion of the varied aesthetic, critical,
and contextual directions already taken.

I acknowledge and thank numerous individuals and institutions without

whom this book would not have been possible. I thank John Bassett, Sam Savin,
and Sandra Russ, former deans and interim deans of the College of Arts and
Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, for their appreciation and sup-

Preface xi
 port, moral as well as financial. I am particularly grateful for course release
time to work on this project and subvention for the permissions and illustra-
tions provided by the college to Yale University Press. Additional subvention
for color plates was provided by the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Vi-
sual Arts, and I thank its board of directors. I appreciate the encouragement
from Henry Adams and David Carrier, colleagues in my department who read
this manuscript in draft and made helpful suggestions (as did the anonymous
peer reviewers secured by Yale). Many thanks are due to Judy Metro, who sup-
ported my proposal and initiated the process of its acceptance by Yale Univer-
sity Press, and especially to Patricia Fidler, who, undaunted by my unexpected
expansion of the original project, convinced her colleagues of its merits and
then helped me see it through to completion in a vastly amplified format. Jane
Zanichkowsky has been a helpful and demanding copy editor, and John Long
has worked tirelessly to secure complicated rights and permissions for essays
and illustrations; I thank both for their heroic efforts in making this book a re-
ality. I also appreciate the attention to details contributed by associate editor
Michelle Komie and production manager Mary Mayer and the superior de-
sign abilities of Barbara Williams. While writing, I frequently thought about all
I learned from the late Phyllis Freeman, editor of my two previous books.
I thank Virginia Mecklenburg of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
for sponsoring my short-term fellowship, the staff at the SAAM library and
Archives of American Art for facilitating my research there, and staff in the
New York AAA office, which I also visited during preparation of this text.
The efforts of Ann Abid and Lou Adrean of the Ingalls Library at the Cleve-
land Museum of Art and of Arlene Sievers at Kelvin Smith Library at Case
Western Reserve remain vitally important to my ability to research and write.
For ongoing access to Pollock and Krasner material, I thank Helen Harrison,
director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center; I also thank Joan
Banach of the Dedalus Foundation for allowing access to some hard-to-get
Motherwell sources.
Staff support at Case Western Reserve University for which I am eternally
grateful includes the super good humor and organizational abilities of the
Department of Art History and Art Assistant Debby Tenenbaum (especially
important during the initial research stages of this project, when I was also
serving as department chair) and the hours devoted to locating, ordering
from OhioLink, and photocopying newspaper and magazine articles, cata-
logue essays, and books put in by my research assistants Amy Reed Frederick,
Siobhán Conaty, and Michael R. Weil Jr. I thank Michael in particular for his

xu Preface
cheerfulness in face of the tedium of fact-checking the endnotes and helping
compile source information for the bibliography. With his assistance, I was
able to configure the endnotes to provide an extra layer of useful information.
I also thank Frank W. Spicer III and Margaret Otzel for help in creating the
index. The final stages of this book were completed at the Institute for Ad-
vanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was appointed the Agnes Gund
and Daniel Shapiro Member for 2003-2004.1 appreciate assistance provided
by staff at the IAS and Princeton libraries. I am very grateful to Agnes Gund
and Daniel Shapiro for their wide-ranging philanthropy to the arts and for
their support of scholarship through a generous grant to foster art historical
research at the IAS, and I especially wish to acknowledge the late Kirk Varne-
doe, who encouraged and endorsed my application for IAS membership.
I should mention that numerous colleagues advocated my undertaking this
kind of book and gave me good advice as I was preparing it. Over the past sev-
eral decades, many have made important contributions to Abstract Expres-
sionist studies, a relatively small field in which most scholars know (or at least
know of) each other. I approached with some trepidation the daunting task
of writing objectively about the scholarship of peers and friends, and I hope
that I have done justice to explaining their contributions. Last, but definitely
not least, I credit my family: my parents Ida and Joe Gross, who believed in
me from the start and invested in my education; my husband Howard, who,
in many ways, has made it possible for me to pursue my intellectual interests
and who loves me for who I am (as I love him); and my children, Jay and Julie,
who likewise provide the emotional nourishment in my life that makes cre-
ative achievement possible.

Preface xiii
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Reading Abstract Expressionism
This page intentionally left blank
Plate i. Willem de Kooning, Woman 1,1950-52. Oil on canvas, 75 7/8 x 58 in. (192.7 x 147.3
cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. © 2004 The Willem de Kooning
Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Digital Image © The Museum of
Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York
Plate 2. Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51. Oil on canvas, 953/8 x 213 */4 in.
(242.3 x 542.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. © 2004
Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Digital Image
© The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York
Plate 3. Adolph Gottlieb, Thrust, 1959. Oil on canvas, 108 x 90 in. (274.5 x 228.5 cm). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1959. Photograph by Malcolm Varón,
Photograph © 1987 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb
Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Plate 4. Jackson Pollock, Moon Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943. Oil on canvas, 42 x 40 in. (106.7 x
101.6 cm). Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. © 2004
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / CNAC /
MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, New York
Plate 5. Robert Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 1943. Gouache and oil (with
collage elements including wrapping paper and rice paper) on cardboard, 28 x 357/s in.
(71.1 x 91.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art / Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY
Plate 6. Arshile Gorky, The Plow and the Song, 1947. Graphite, charcoal, crayon, pastel, and
oil, 477/s x 593/s in. (122 x 150.3 cm). National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Avalon Foundation.
Image © Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. © 2004 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
Plate 7. Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1949. Oil on canvas, 8i3/8 x 663/8 in. (206.7 x 168.6 cm).
National Gallery of Art, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc. Image © Board of
Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2004 Kate Rothko Prizel &
Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Plate 8. Dorothy Dehner, Mirage, Bolton Landing, 1949. Watercolor on paper, 18 l/4 x 23 in.
(46.4 x 58.4 cm). Courtesy of Kraushaar Galleries and Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the
Visual Arts
Fig. i. Nina Leen, The Irascibles, 1950. Gelatin silver print. © Time Inc.
Fig. 2. William A. Baziotes, Night Mirror, 1947. Oil on canvas, 48 7/i6 x 59 «/l6 in. (123 x 151.8
cm). Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Gift of Mrs. John
D. Rockefeller III (Blanchette Hooker, class of 1931)
Fig. 3. Franz Kline, New York, К Т., 1953. Oil on canvas, 79 x 50 уя in. (200.6 x
128.3 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Gift of Seymour H.
Knox,Jr., 1956. © 2004 The Franz Kline Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York
Fig. 4. Hans Namuth, Lee Krasner Watching Jacbon Pollock Paint, 1950. Gelatin silver
print. Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, © 1991 Hans
Namuth Estate
Fig. 5. Dan Budnik, Primo Piano 3,1963. © Dan Budnik / Woodfin Camp & Associates
 n
Fig. 6. Mark Rothko, Number 18,1948-49. Oil on canvas, 67 /i6 x 55 чд6 ¿ n> (17фбхЧ1 д
cm). Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Gift of Mrs. John D.
Rockefeller III (Blanchette Hooker, class of 1931). © 2004 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher
Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Fig. 7. Hans Namuth, Barnett Newman and Betty Parsons, 1952. Gelatin silver print.
Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, © 1991 Hans Namuth
Estate
Fig. 8. Mark Rothko, The Syrian Bull, 1943. Oil and graphite on canvas, 39 3/s X
2713/16 in. (100 x 71 cm). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH.
Gift of Annalee Newman in honor of Ellen H.Johnson, 1991. © 2004 Kate Rothko
Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Fig. 9. Adolph Gottlieb, A Ikahest of Paracelsus, 1945. Oil and egg tempera on canvas, 60 x 44
in. (152.4 x 111.76 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tompkins Collection. Photograph ©
2004 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / Licensed
by VAGA, New York
 Fig. 12. Barnett
Newman, The
Stations of the
Cross, First
Station, 1958.
Magna on canvas,
77 7 /8x6o 1 /2Ín.
(197.8 x 153.7 cm).
National Gallery
of Art, Robert and
Jane Meyerhoff
Collection. Image
© 2004 Board of
Trustees, National
Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC.
© 2004 Barnett
Newman
Foundation /
Artists Rights
Society (ARS),
New York

(facing) Fig. 10. Clyfford Still, щб-Н (Italian Red

and Black), 1946. Oil on canvas, 78 г/4 x 683/8 in.
(198.8 x 173.7 cm)- Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Museum purchase from the Vincent Melzac
Collection through the Smithsonian Institution
Collections Acquisition Program

(facing) Fig. 11. Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm

(Number30), 1950. Enamel on canvas, 105 x 207 in.
(266.7 x 525.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. George A. Hearn Fund, 1957. © 2004
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York
Fig. 13. Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34, 1953-54. Oil on canvas,
80 x 100 in. (203.2 x 254 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Gift of
Seymour H. Knox, 1961. Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York,
NY
Fig. 14. View of David Smith Zig sculptures. Art © Estate of David Smith / Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY
Fig. 15. Lee Krasner, Untitled (Little Image), 1949. Oil on composition board, 48 x 37 in.
(121.9 x 94 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Alfonso A. Ossorio. © 2004
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Digital Image
© The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York
Fig. 16. John Graham, Apotheosis, 1955-57- Oil, pencil, and stumping on ivory paper, 49 l/s x
35 ya in. (124.7 X 9°-2 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, The Lindy and Edwin Bergman
Collection. © The Art Institute of Chicago
Fig. 17. Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, ca. 1926. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 in. (152.4 x
127 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Julien Levy for Maro and
Natasha Gorky in memory of their father. © 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Fig. 18. Louise Bourgeois, Quarantania, 1947-53. Bronze, painted white with blue and
black, 80 */2 x 27 x 27 in. (204.4 x 68.5 x 68.5 cm). Collection of the Artist, courtesy of
Cheim & Read, New York. Photograph by Christopher Burke
(above) Fig. 19. Jackson
Pollock, Portrait and a
Dream, 1953. Oil on
canvas, 58 y2 x 1343/4 in.
(148.6x342.3 cm).
Dallas Museum of Art,
gift of Mr. and Mrs. Algur
H. Meadows and the
Meadows Foundation,
Incorporated. ©2004
The Pollock-Krasner
Foundation / Artists
Rights Society (ARS),
New York

Fig. 20. Clyfford Still,

Untitled (formerly Self-
Portrait), 1945. Oil on
canvas, 70 7/8 x 42 in.
(180 x 106.7 cm)- San
Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. Gift of
Peggy Guggenheim.
© Estate of Clyfford
Still
(top) Fig. 21. David Smith, Royal Bird, 1947-48. Steel, bronze, and stainless steel, 22l/s x
5913/i6 x 8 */2 in. (56.2 x 152.1 x 21.6 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Gift of
the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1952. Art © Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA, New
York, NY

Fig. 22. Dorothy Dehner, Country Living (Bird of Peace), 1946. Ink on paper, 111/4 x 15 x/4 in.
(29.6 x 38.7 cm). Courtesy of Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts
Fig. 23. Hans Namuth, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, 1953. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy
Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate

(facing) Fig. 24. Norman W. Lewis, Mumbo Jumbo, 1950.

Oil on canvas, 50 ya x 26 % in. (128.3 x 66.7 cm). The
Estate of Reginald Lewis, Courtesy of landor Fine Arts,
Newark, New Jersey. Photograph by Frank Stewart
Fig. 25. Willem de Kooning, Black Friday, 1948. Enamel and oil on pressed wood panel,
49 74 x 39 x 23/4 in. (125 x 99 x 7 cm). Princeton University Art Museum. Gift of H. Gates
Lloyd, Class of 1923, and Mrs. Lloyd in honor of the Class of 1923. © 2004 The Willem de
Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Bruce White, © 1996
Photo: Trustees of Princeton University
Fig. 26. Barnett Newman, Broken Obelisk, 1963-67. Cor-ten steel, 26 ft. (7.9 m). The Rothko
Chapel, Houston, Texas. © 2004 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York
Fig. 27. Lee Krasner, The Eye Is the First Circle, 1960. Oil on canvas, Q23/4 x 1917/8 in.
(235.6 x 487.4 cm). Courtesy Robert Miller Gallery, New York. © 2004 The Pollock-
Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
introduction ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM:
Changing Methodologies for Interpreting Meaning

Anthologizing Abstract Expressionism

Despite continuing references in the scholarly and the popular press to

the lasting artistic and cultural relevance of Abstract Expressionism, no com-
prehensive collection of essays related to this movement has been published
since David and Cécile Shapiro's Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record
and Clifford Ross's Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics appeared in
1990. Francis Frascina's Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (second edi-
tion) and Pepe Karmel's Jackson Pollock: New Approaches are the only antholo-
gies with any direct relation to art of the New York School produced after
1995. Each is a specialized endeavor that does not aim to reflect the complete
range of recent critical opinion.
Karmel's New Approaches, published in conjunction with a 1998 Pollock
retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), compiles statements
and essays about the artist widely considered to be Abstract Expressionism's
paradigmatic practitioner.1 Whereas the title of Frascina's revised anthology
(originally published in 1985) likewise signals Pollock's preeminence, the es-
says in it do not merely analyze and react to the work of one artist. In fact,
none are devoted to Pollock's work per se; rather, Frascina re-presents a series
of texts in which "critical debates on Pollock's legacy" center around "the
social history of art." With the addition of affiliated contemporary commen-
tary, Frascina further underscores this original purpose in the book's latest
version.2
The newer essays that Frascina added in 2000 extend certain "issues, de-
bates, and relationships" instigated in the 19705 and early 19805 that are still
being "fought over."3 As he acknowledges, quite a bit has happened in the dec-
ade and a half that separates his two editions to alter the direction of art his-
tory as practiced in the United States and Britain; the pretexts and contexts
 by means of which Abstract Expressionism can be examined have been en-
larged accordingly. By virtue of having been assigned in countless university
classes, the readings in Frascina's book have achieved their own canonical
status.4 Professors teaching about this movement might also assign entries
from either the Shapiros' or Ross's anthology or else direct their students to
more encyclopedic modern art compendiums in which Abstract Expression-
ism is presented as an example of American artistic achievement (albeit a crit-
ically important one) at the mid-point of the twentieth century.
Beginning with Barbara Rose's Readings in American Art Since igoo: A Docu-
mentary Survey and Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source
Book by Artists and Critics (which both appeared in 1968), representative ex-
cerpts from the writing of key critics and artist's statements, mostly by the
painters included in Nina Leen's 1952 photograph in Life magazine titled
"The Irascibles" (fig. i), have been readily available to aid curators, students,
and scholars in examining the formal and technical characteristics, goals,
themes, history, intellectual concerns, and theoretical apparatus underpin-
ning Abstract Expressionism.5 Because Rose's book was issued as a compan-
ion to one of the first surveys of modern American art, she included only a
brief introduction to clarify Abstract Expressionism's putative status as the
"art of this century." Rose borrowed this phrase, which she used as a chapter
title, from Peggy Guggenheim's famous Manhattan gallery, whose 1942-1947
exhibition schedule featured (in many cases for the first time) figures associ-
ated with the still-nascent movement. Showing them alongside more estab-
lished Cubists and Surrealists, Rose explains, Guggenheim significantly ele-
vated the stature of relative unknowns whose styles had begun to subsume
European modernist innovations into a new American mix. Chipp also fo-
cuses on the way "the 'emergence' of modern art in America followed corre-
sponding European movements . . . with great impetus and with reverbera-
tions that carried away many of the stagnant conventions and ideals that had
restrained it." Like Rose, he takes a celebratory position emphasizing the way,
with Abstract Expressionism, American art finally "extricated itself from a
debilitating provincialism" and "prepared to join the mainstream of Western
painting."6
Whereas Chipp included Abstract Expressionist statements and critique
in a section he called "Contemporary Art: The Autonomy of the Work of
Art," for the more recent compendium Art in Theory, igoo-iggo Charles Har-
rison and Paul Wood used many of the same entries but classified them under

2 Introduction
"the individual and the social," a significantly different rubric. The opposing
nature of these two sets of categorizations reflects in a nutshell the redirection
of two decades of thinking about the aims and accomplishments of Abstract
Expressionism, while also revealing the Marxist slant on mid-century Ameri-
can cultural developments favored in England, where the latter authors teach.
Recognizing patterns of meaning already associated with these texts and map-
ping a more particularized matrix for understanding them, Harrison and Wood
make the following observation: "[A] s the American experience itself became
quintessentially 'modern,' the art that resulted had few of the trappings of the
narrowly national and was able to aspire, both with some success and some le-
gitimacy, to international standing. The relations of the provincial and the
cosmopolitan are clearly fraught, and their resolution will be bound up with
social and political priorities, not least in respect of the implication of the aes-
thetic in the social. Be that as it may, such a perception seems to have ani-
mated the ambition of the artists themselves." Only when "the inner and the
mythical were made to coincide as expressive resources with which to face a
modern world otherwise beyond description," they explain, could the (seem-
ingly) depoliticized American prioritizing of individualism—rooted in the un-
conscious and the idea of "art itself as a solitary act"—trump the (somewhat
paradoxically tradition-bound) European drive toward aesthetic innovation.7
Authors of a groundbreaking essay from the 19705 aimed at exposing some
of the "social and political priorities" to which Harrison and Wood refer,
David and Cécile Shapiro made a surprisingly short-sighted pronouncement
in their 1990 preface to Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record. Because
"the responses to Abstract Expressionism when it was fresh and evolving have
been written," they suggest, "the major critical works are all in."8 But the fi-
nal entry in the Shapiros' anthology, Ann Gibson's "Abstract Expressionism's
Evasion of Language," reprinted from the summer 1988 issue of Art Journal,
signaled that a broader frame of reference, affording the movement an excit-
ing new afterlife, was already under way.
The special number of Art Journal in which Gibson's text first appeared
was assembled from a panel that she and Stephen Polcari co-chaired at the
1986 annual meeting of the College Art Association. Its appearance roughly
coincided with the first big Abstract Expressionist museum show in twenty
years, organized in Buffalo, New York. In a substantial catalogue accompany-
ing the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's exhibition, "Abstract Expressionism: The
Critical Developments," curator Michael Auping also provided a compen-

Introduction 3
 dium of revised ideas. In addition to publishing an up-to-date chronology list-
ing and annotating relevant exhibitions, important artists' and critic's state-
ments, and "Abstract Expressionist events" (who meets whom, who joins what
gallery, who adopts what new method when, and so on), as well as an exten-
sive bibliography for each artist on view in order to demonstrate the extent to
which the movement remained "one of the more dynamic subjects of interest
for art historians," Auping commissioned new essays from an international
roster of well-known authorities and from up-and-coming younger scholars.9
His view that works by major practitioners of the movement's first generation
"are by no means so distant from us that they can be considered a closed his-
torical episode" contrasts with the Shapiros' conclusion that, as a vital artistic
movement, Abstract Expressionism had "come and gone." Writing that "our
analysis of the types of content suggested in Abstract Expressionist paintings,
and their place in the context of modern art is, in fact, still formative," Au-
ping, like Gibson and Polcari, judges that "the legacy of Abstract Expression-
ism remains a subject of considerable debate."10
Not only has the interpretive history of the New York School reflected
"the dialectical sweep of [its] sources," but the intensity of the debates sur-
rounding it has not been generated solely by the art. As Auping points out, the
"multidirectional character of the remarks and writings of the artists," added
to the differing agendas of reviewers and historians whose reputations were
built in conjunction with its rise, has produced a "rather knotted history of in-
terpretations [that] has not choked our desire toward further speculation and
investigation."11 In other words, in a fairly unique manner, the rhetoric con-
cerning Abstract Expressionism has both actuated and perpetuated its dis-
tinctive cultural relevance.
Questioning of the validity of basic issues and rethinking of accepted as-
sumptions continued to accelerate long after the heyday of the movement had
passed. One of the assumptions frequently referenced in explanations of Ab-
stract Expressionism was the main topic of Gibson's essay in the Shapiros'
book of readings. She argues that the artists' seeming reluctance to explain
their own creations became a primary factor in fostering the "battleground"
mentality of disputation about the meaning and merits of their work.12 Prior
to any further assessment of the writing generated by and concerning Abstract
Expressionism, it is useful to examine carefully the pros and cons associated
with this position.

4 Introduction
The 1940s: Mythologizing the Movement

As Gibson clarifies in Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Pe-

riodicals (the published form of her 1984 dissertation), the first "anthologies"
associated with the movement were produced by its practitioners and earliest
critical proponents. In particular, the contents of Iconograph, The New Icono-
graph, The Tiger's Eye,13 Instead, and especially Possibilities—all short-lived
specialty publications issued between 1946 and 1949—firmly established the
themes, assumptions, intellectual ambience, and contextual parameters that
were of interest to a specific group of New York artists and writers during and
immediately after World War II. (Gibson also includes Modern Artists in Amer-
ica, which appeared in 1951.) Most prominently featured in these little maga-
zines were shared expressions of a heroic belief in the centrality of the indi-
vidual unconscious and the concomitant desire, in the words of the painter
Robert Motherwell, to originate a "style whose characteristics derived from
immediate spontaneous decisions" rather than "reliance on learned proce-
dures."14 Motherwell's assertion reflects his and his colleagues' reconceptual-
izing of art as a nonprogrammatic mode of action and discovery.
During the 19405, the most important artists' statements and other critical
writings related to the development of Abstract Expressionism were located
in these avant-garde periodicals, although some of what are now considered
indispensable primary source documents did appear in wider-circulation
publications, as in the case of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb's 1943 de-
fense of their style, sent to the New York Times, or Pollock's Arts and Architec-
ture magazine interview, published a year later.15 Though often purposely
vague, taken as a group, these texts clarify that there were certain mutually ac-
cepted issues and intentions. Looking back at them now, we can discern, for
instance, that the European philosophical model of existentialism, nuanced
by American pragmatism and Jung's promotion of the generative role of primi-
tivism and myth, guided a distinct cadre of young New York-based artists to
an aesthetic that valorized emotion, authenticity, and risk. Pollock, for exam-
ple, writes in Possibilities that "when I am in my painting, I'm not aware of
what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of'get acquainted' period that I see what
I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the im-
age, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through."16
Such statements indicate a belief that technical refinement and recognizable
content would only impede expressive potential. The drive to merge Cubist
and Surrealist innovations, generally noted as one of Abstract Expression-

Introduction 5
 ism's primary characteristics, thus registers as having been motivated in no
small part by a seemingly contradictory desire: to use distinctly personal
means (automatism and improvisation) as a way to attain "universal" mean-
ings. Exactly what these meanings were, many—although not all—of the artists
declined to fully explain.17
As Gibson makes clear, a number of the Abstract Expressionists, endors-
ing a concept advanced by Jung, were disposed to link universality and unin-
telligibility as "twin indicators of artistic integrity."18 Verbal demonstration of
communal concerns throughout the little magazines notwithstanding, a cer-
tain kind of ambiguity (the refusal to provide distinct interpretive clues) be-
came central to the ongoing elaboration of movement "mythology." (ClyfFord
Still's 1952 statement for the Museum of Modern Art catalogue 15 Americans
is a case in point.) Moreover, the evasiveness of so many of Abstract Expres-
sionism's practitioners when it came to defining precisely their stylistic and
thematic ambitions (Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell, whose exten-
sive collected writings have been published, are the most obvious exceptions)19
opened the way for other spokesmen with their own agendas—most notably
the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg—to step into the breach.
For example, on its initial page the editors oí Possibilities (Rosenberg and
Motherwell) assert, "This is a magazine of artists and writers who 'practice'
in their work their own experience without seeking to transcend it in aca-
demic, group or political formulas."20 By way of illustration, in the journal's
very first entry the artist William Baziotes (fig. 2) alleges his intention not to
have any intention, writing, "I cannot evolve any concrete theory about paint-
ing. What happens on the canvas is unpredictable and surprising to me." Im-
mediately following Baziotes's declaration, Rosenberg proceeds to interpret
a motivation that underpins (and legitimates) this avoidance of theory: "In-
spired by a concentration upon that which is either absent or scarcely able to
make itself noticed, Baziotes becomes the vehicle of singular movements to-
ward him from the world stirred at a point in its depths. These movements
put will and intellect to rest."21
To differing degrees, evident in a variety of catalogue statements and other
writings such as those in Possibilities, a significant contingent of the develop-
ing Abstract Expressionist artists appeared averse to defining their motives
too precisely. Motherwell's grand philosophical pronouncements that art's
function is to produce "the felt expression of modern reality" and that "paint-
ing is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself,"22 Pollock's formulas
"Experience of our age in terms of painting—not an illustration of—(but the

6 Introduction
equivalent)" and "Painting is self-discovery ... every good artist paints what
he is,"23 and Rothko and Gottlieb's epic definition of art as "an adventure into
an unknown world explored by those willing to take the risks"24 are about as
specific in terms of articulating intentionality as the majority were willing to
get.25 Moreover, as Lawrence Alloway has observed, when the Abstract Expres-
sionists did choose to speak about inspiration, their utterances and aphorisms
often tilted toward the messianic. Alloway cites Clyfford Still's "Let no man
under-value the implications of this work or its power for life;—or for death,
if it is misused" as an example of this, but numerous other statements by
Motherwell, Arshile Gorky, Hans Hofmann, and Barnett Newman in particu-
lar could just as easily illustrate the identical point.26
Note also that these same artists were generally disinclined (as appears
painfully obvious in the "Studio 35" discussion sessions transcribed in 1950)
either to give a name to what they were doing or even to conceive of themselves
as a definable group.27 But, here again, from the very start there were others—
not only critics writing for both the art press and the popular press but cu-
rators and art dealers as well—willing to assume the task of demarcation. As
early as 1945, the New Yorker's art reviewer, Robert M. Coates (who is gen-
erally credited with first use of the term "Abstract Expressionist" in its now
accepted context), observed, "A new school of painting is developing in this
country. It is small as yet, no bigger than a baby's fist, but it is noticeable if
you get around to the galleries much."28 The previous year Sidney Janis had
produced an exhibition and book attempting to summarize the situation
without giving it a new name. Indeed, the eclecticism of Janis's "Abstract and
Surrealist Art in America," an ambitious survey mounted at the Mortimer
Brandt Galleries, and his admittedly arbitrary binary arrangement of artists
in the accompanying text, served to demonstrate the insufficiency of existing
categorizations.29 As one critic reviewing the show noted, the "forty-year-
old" stylistic terms Janis retained "are Cinderella slippers and there's no use
pretending they fit all of the new generation."30
That same year, Peggy Guggenheim's former assistant Howard Putzel,
now operating his own gallery, staged an exhibition controversially titled "A
Problem for Critics." Putzel tentatively styled the burgeoning tendency in
New York art "a new metamorphosism," while challenging others to come up
with alternative designations. Although rejecting Putzel's cumbersome title
and the largely biomorphic pedigree he advanced for its practitioners, in his
appraisal of "A Problem for Critics" Clement Greenberg confirmed that there
were certain shared stylistic characteristics among the Americans included in

Introduction 7
 the show. Agreeing that "there is no question that Mr. Putzel has hold of some-
thing here," Greenberg wrote in June 1944: "Until recently abstract painting
in this country and elsewhere was governed by the structural or formal or
'physical' preoccupations that are supposed to exhaust the intentions of cu-
bism and its inheritors. Now there has come a swing back toward 'poetry' and
'imagination,' the signs of which are the return of elements of representation,
smudged contour lines, and the third dimension. Images, no longer locked to
the surface in flat profile, reappear against indeterminate, atmospheric depths.
Exhibited emotions give the spectator something to hang his interest on." Al-
though some of the best painters in PutzePs show, Greenberg observed, did
accept elements of Surrealism (an influence he himself considered retarda-
taire), for the most part they "advance their art by painterly means without re-
laxing the concentration and high impassiveness of true modern style."31
While others continued to propose names and definitions for these emerg-
ing trends during this period ("globalism" was New York Times critic Edward
Alden Jewell's somewhat condescending suggestion),32 the most percipient
in terms of directions for future Abstract Expressionist discourse were ad-
vanced in association with a fall 1949 group show mounted at the Samuel
Kootz Gallery.33 Citing the existentialist philosopher José Ortega y Gassett as
his inspiration, Kootz designated Motherwell, Pollock, Baziotes, Gorky, Gott-
lieb, Hofmann, Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Morris Graves, Ad Reinhardt,
Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Mark Tobey as a new group of intrasubjectives.
Kootz began his remarks with a quotation from Ortega's recently published
The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature:
"The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing sim-
plicity. First things are painted; then sensations; finally ideas. This means that
in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then on the
subjective; finally on the intrasubjective. These three stages are three points
on a straight line."34
Most important to Kootz was his perception that the intrasubjective artist
"creates from an internal world rather than an external one." Reflecting John
Dewey's idea of "art as experience"35 and providing an early rehearsal for his
seminal 1952 essay "The American Action Painters," Harold Rosenberg, in
additional comments on the show, elaborated on this point. "The modern
painter," Rosenberg concludes in his brief text for the brochure for The Intra-
subjectives, "is not inspired by anything visible, but only by something he
hasn't seen yet In short, he begins with nothingness. That is the only thing
he copies. The rest he invents."36

8 Introduction
 In a longer set of remarks written two years earlier for a Paris exhibit that
included, among others, Gottlieb, Baziotes, and Motherwell, Rosenberg had
taken greater pains to counter Greenberg's emphasis on providing a Euro-
pean stylistic lineage for the developing Abstract Expressionists. "They are
not a school," he writes in a statement for the Galerie Maeght reprinted in Pos-
sibilities. "They have no common aim, not even the common tension that
comes from rejecting the validity of the same art-history." Although he did not
disagree with Greenberg that young Americans such as these "have appropri-
ated modern painting," this has only been for the exploratory purpose of abet-
ting an "individual sensual, psychic and intellectual effort to live actively in
the present."37
These alternate interpretive positions presented by Greenberg and Rosen-
berg, already evident in the formative years of the movement, articulated a
basic polarity that would continue to influence significantly both Abstract
Expressionist artistic practice and the greater elaboration of contexts for its
reception throughout the following decades.

The 1950s: Establishing Authority

Drawing on by-now-standard rhetoric, in her fall 1958 review of a solo ex-

hibition by the Abstract Expressionist Franz Kline, Martica Sawin described
"motion, the force that brings light out of dark and substance out of void," as
the essence of Kline's style of painting (fig. 3). In her judgment of Kline's
achievements Sawin decisively downplayed the "heroism" of undecidability,
which seemingly had held such high currency in art criticism of the previous
decade. (Motherwell and Rosenberg expressed its core when they wrote in
Possibilities that "the question of what will emerge is left open. One functions
in an attitude of expectancy. As Juan Gris stated: you are lost the instant you
know what the result will be.") Sawin's much more confident assertion that
"when Franz Kline draws his brush across the canvas, the gesture is automati-
cally associated with authority" offered a different take on "heroic" achieve-
ment, one that had become increasingly commonplace in the igsos.38
By the time Sawin wrote her review, fifteen years had passed since Gottlieb
and Rothko's combative assertion to Jewell that "it is our function as artists to
make the spectator see the world our way—not his way," and Kline, like many
other major artists by now associated with the nexus of ideas underpinning
Abstract Expressionism, could clearly be identified by an instantly recogniza-
ble "signature" style (in his case, large, slashing calligraphic black forms on
a white background). As Dore Ashton has pointed out, the introduction of

Introduction 9
 Nietzschean concepts into existentialist discourse in New York in the late 19405
is only one of several factors that helped stimulate the desire to cultivate rec-
ognizable artistic personae. For many of the Abstract Expressionists-to-be,
the license that ideas such as those of Nietzsche provided to "reinterpret"
their doubt as "the consequence of self-confidence" led to a quest for greater
mastery.39 Without question, commentaries on their work written in the 19505,
such as Sawin's, began to reflect and applaud this trajectory.
Most often mentioned as representing (perhaps initiating) this trend in
criticism is Dorothy Seiberling's "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living
Painter in the United States?" Published in August 1949 in Life magazine, its
title is a reference to the "steady drum roll" of accolades bestowed on Pollock
by Greenberg in his capacity as "high-brow" art critic for The Nation.40 Jux-
taposing a somewhat facetious text41 that quotes glibly from a statement by
Pollock in Possibilities ("When I'm in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm
doing") with Arnold Newman's now-iconic portrait of the artist in the guise
of a glowering rebel in jeans, Life introduced the average American to an un-
deniable artistic phenomenon. For the art cognoscenti, the more worshipful
tone of "Pollock Paints a Picture," written in 1951 by Robert Goodnough, a
younger Abstract Expressionist artist on the New York scene, provided sup-
port for the increasingly popular argument that "the private drama of the Ab-
stract Expressionist canvas" could also embody wider relevance. A selection
of Hans Namuth's extraordinary photographs, taken as Pollock created one
of his classic poured paintings (fig. 4), illustrated Goodnough's Art News es-
say. Exposing the emancipated dimensions of Pollock's new painting tech-
nique, which were without precedent, these provided visual documentation
for the venerable teacher Hans Hofmann's assertion that "in this country, it
should be understood that modern art is the symbol of our democracy."42
(Hofmann, who had escaped to the United States from Nazi Germany, seemed
to possess impeccable credentials for making a statement of this nature.)
Also increasingly emphasized in the early 19505 were the myriad ways in
which this simultaneously private and public production was being enacted
in the "sacred precinct" of the Abstract Expressionist studio, by now seen as
the locus (as Caroline A.Jones has fully analyzed) of both struggle and pres-
tige.43 Goodnough explained to his Art News readers, for example, that "to
enter Pollock's studio is to enter another world, a place where the intensity of
the artist's mind and feelings are given full play," and he focused the rest of
his article on showing how "a Pollock painting is not born easily."44 After Pol-
lock's untimely death in a car crash five years later, Allan Kaprow—another

10 Introduction
artist writing in Art News, the journal most clearly predisposed to applaud
Abstract Expressionism—attempted to define his importance to the next gen-
eration. In terming Pollock "the embodiment of our ambition for absolute
liberation," Kaprow, a founder of the Happenings movement, expressed a
sentiment shared by many of his peers: "To grasp a Pollock's impact properly,
one must be something of an acrobat, constantly vacillating between an iden-
tification with the hands and body that flung the paint and stood 'in' the can-
vas, and allowing the markings to entangle and assault one into submitting to
their permanent and objective character. This is indeed far from the idea of
a 'complete' painting." By "complete," Kaprow seems to mean European. As
he explains, because the artist, the spectator, and the outer world are so "in-
terchangeably involved," a potent combination of extreme individuality and
selflessness indicating "a larger frame of psychological reference"45 is promoted
in Pollock's most innovative "signature" works.
In February 1950, a new variation on the popular "Paints a Picture" series,
which had begun nine years earlier with Henri Matisse, appeared in the pages
of Art News. Here, Elaine de Kooning, also a young artist-critic, was given the
opportunity to showcase the sculptor David Smith's authenticity as a three-
dimensional equivalent of painters such as Pollock. Not surprisingly, she pre-
sents Smith's "authority" as likewise tied both to Romantic isolation and to
innovative methods of industry. (Pollock created his allover poured and
dripped canvases in a barn on rural Long Island; in 1940 Smith relocated his
Brooklyn studio, "The Terminal Iron Works," to Bolton Landing in the Adi-
rondack Mountains.) In "David Smith Makes a Sculpture" Elaine de Koon-
ing situates her subject as yet another representation of a new, muscular brand
of American genius "on guard against intellectualism and virtuosity" (fig. 5).
An image of power infused by pragmatism, which quotes the artist directly,
initiates her argument: "Hot-forging a piece of metal with a trip-hammer, flame-
cutting with an acetylene torch or welding his forms together, David Smith
says, 'the change from one machine to another means no more than changing
brushes to a painter or chisels to a carver.... Michelangelo spoke about the
noise and the marble dust in our profession, but I finish the day looking more
like a grease-ball than a miller.' "46
Thus, while Smith conclusively claimed his heritage in the great traditions
of Western art, it is equally clear that he also accepted (even flaunted) his out-
sider status. Borrowing words written by Louis Finkelstein in a related con-
text, one could say that Smith's attitude and the techniques he developed to
express it reveal "insight into the nature of American culture: that it is inher-

Introduction 11
 ited from Europe but must work in a different way." Rather than retaining a
focus on making precious objects like his predecessors and prototypes, and
akin not only to Pollock but also to Abstract Expressionist painters such as
Elaine's husband Willem (about whom Finkelstein was actually writing), what
Smith was creating was not simply an aesthetic object but an artistic "situa-
tion." Finkelstein employed that very term, writing, moreover, that "not only
the content of the picture [or, in Smith's case, sculpture], but the observer as
well is invited to participate in the drama."47 Meyer Schapiro summed up the
radicality of the relationship thus set up between Abstract Expressionist art-
work and spectator when he wrote in 1957 that presently the "work of art is
an ordered world of its own kind, in which we are aware, at every point, of its
becoming."48
As indicated by responses to an Art News inquiry directed in the following
year to a dozen artists, ranging from the venerated abstractionist Stuart Davis
to newcomer Robert Rauschenberg (and including Goodnough, Reinhardt,
and Willem de Kooning), the conundrum "Is today's artist with or against the
past?" continued to underline Abstract Expressionist criticism throughout
its second decade. In his response, the Dutch-born de Kooning quipped, "The
idea that art can come from nowhere is typically American—I call it 'paint-
ing made out of John Brown's body'—like Frank Lloyd Wright, and you can
quote me." Reinhardt, sometimes (then and now) ambiguously categorized
with the Abstract Expressionists, took pains to deplore the "I-don't-know-
where-I'm-going, I-don't-know-where-I-am, I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing,
or I-don't-know-when-I'm-done-kind-of-attitude" associated with the move-
ment. "At one time," Reinhardt commented, "such attitudes meant a reaction.
But it soon became a gimmick—talking about or against or for the past."49
These glib replies diverged somewhat from answers given by some of the
same artists and their closest colleagues to a related topic, "What abstract art
means to me," published in the spring of 1951 in the Museum of Modern Art
Bulletin. In his reaction to MoMA's query, Motherwell offered a prototypical
characterization of recent abstraction (that is, Abstract Expressionism) as "a
fundamentally romantic response to modern life—rebellious, individualistic,
unconventional, sensitive, irritable."50 Although here (as elsewhere) declaring,
"Personally, I do not need a movement," Willem de Kooning nevertheless pro-
ceeded to voice opinions about styles and movements that affected him, rang-
ing from Mesopotamian figures to Cubism, Futurism, Neo-Constructivism,
and Dada.
Such ideas formed the empirical basis for William C. Seitz's 1955 Prince-

12 Introduction
ton University dissertation, "Abstract Expressionist Painting in America: An
Interpretation Based on the Work and Thought of Six Key Figures," the first
to be written on this style. Although unpublished until the 19808, Seitz's the-
sis circulated in dog-eared copies, and its central tenets were repeated in shorter
printed articles that he also authored in the 19505. Seitz emphasized Abstract
Expressionism as a quintessential representation of the "Zeitgeist" of postwar
America, while affirming that its increasing stature also emanated from the
myriad ways in which it constituted a "present phase in the broad history of
modern style."51 In a two-part 1958 essay, "The New York School—Then and
Now," William Rubin, in opposition to the chauvinistic desire of some to ar-
gue the "virgin birth" of Abstract Expressionism, foreshadowed ideas that he
would elaborate during the 19605 in his influential six-part series, "Jackson
Pollock and the Modern Tradition."52 Writing "Then and Now" for the cos-
mopolitan audience of Art International, Rubin counteracted the Art News-
fostered idea that the movement's visual language embodied an "essentially
inimitable American jargon," stressing instead its Parisian roots.
Most of the articles that likely aroused Rubin's disapprobation (in par-
ticular, ten installments of the "Paints a Picture" series, featuring first- and
second-generation Abstract Expressionists) were commissioned for Art New s
by editor Thomas B. Hess, a close associate of Harold Rosenberg.53 In the
estimation of the sculptor Philip Pavia, a founding member of The Club, an-
other important Abstract Expressionist meeting place for exchange of ideas,54
Hess's 1951 Abstract Painting—Background and American Phase was "the first
substantial book on abstract painting in New York, and in the eyes of the art-
ists easily a prime mover of the Fifties." In this text Hess "was not entirely
optimistic," Pavia comments in 1960 in It Is (the last of the Abstract Expres-
sionist little magazines), "but he sought an idea that would tie together all the
variegated personalities of the then young abstract art, and thus would free
aesthetics from personalities."55 The highly influential "Paints a Picture" se-
ries, of course, as well as other feature articles that Hess subsequently ran,
including Kaprow's "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" and Rosenberg's "The
American Action Painters," effectively reversed the program Pavia describes,
bestowing the status of "art stars" on Pollock and de Kooning in particular.
Hess's own articles in Art News stressed the bohemian nature of the New
York School enterprise ("Only nineteenth-century Paris has been as tough on
its artists as our equally smug civilization," he wrote in 1950), delineating the
"primary distinction between the innovating personalities in American ab-
stract art and the relative newcomers" as based on how the former "decided

Introduction 13
 to make (or were forced to make) their break from Europe."56 A strong sup-
porter of the preeminence of de Kooning, Hess penned the latter's 1953 "Paints
a Picture" article, second only to Pollock's in its influence. A somewhat lyrical
delineation of the stages of Woman /—the work most strongly identified with
de Kooning's artistic personality (plate i)—this essay provided the basis for
a monograph on de Kooning that Hess subsequently published in George
Braziller's "Great American Artists" series; it came out in 1959, the same year
as poet-curator Frank O'Hara's volume about Pollock in the Braziller series.57
In "De Kooning Paints a Picture," Hess writes that Woman (not yet num-
bered) "appears inevitable, like a myth that needed but a quick name to be-
come universally applicable." But (echoing Goodnough's treatment of Pol-
lock) Hess explains, "Like any myth, its emergence was long, difficult and (to
use one of the artist's favorite adjectives) mysterious." Comparing the two
years it took for de Kooning to realize this spontaneous and impulsive-looking
work to "a voyage ... one of those Romantic ventures which so attracted po-
ets," Hess concludes that the artist's "exploration for a constantly elusive vi-
sion; the solution to a problem that was continually being set in new ways"
was actually far more "relevant" than the work he produced.58 In essence, de
Kooning's first canvas in the Woman series is presented by Hess as an explicit
case study of Rosenberg's reconceptualization of gestural Abstract Expression-
ism into the more experientially based category dubbed "Action Painting."
In April 1951, eighteen months before Rosenberg's article "The American
Action Painters" appeared, Hess had boasted that, although the pictures of
de Kooning "have an air of authority-in-crisis," the artist's personal solution
to that problem involved "making the crisis itself the hero of the painting."59
Rosenberg's manifesto-like essay, summarizing the exaltation of crisis pro-
moted in his own earlier writings (which by now had become even more fa-
miliar because of similar pronouncements by other critics including Hess and
Finkelstein), appeared in Art News in December 1952. It became an instant
lightning rod for heated discussion in artists' studios and gathering places,
particularly in and around Manhattan's Tenth Street, the downtown address
Rosenberg identified two years later as both "locale and metaphor" for the
"new" American art.60
As already noted, in his 1947 Galerie Maeght statement, reprinted in Possi-
bilities, Rosenberg hailed painting that aspired "not to a conscious philo-
sophical or social ideal, but to what is basically an individual, sensual, psychic
and intellectual effort to live actively in the present." In making this statement,
he referenced both his admiration for the nineteenth-century French poet-

14 Introduction
critic Charles Baudelaire's well-known dictum "One must be of one's own
time" and an increasingly felt impulse to reject his own radical Jewish Trot-
skyite beliefs of the 19305. This rejection was tied to feelings of regret about
how American art of the Depression and early war years, much of it beholden
to government financing, had too frequently been created in the service of
politics.61 Using one of his favorite buzzwords, Rosenberg clarified his current
position in "The American Action Painters" when describing general char-
acteristics of the (never explicitly named) American artists whose change of
approach he now applauded.

Their type is not a young painter but a re-born one. The man may be over
forty, the painter around seven. The diagonal of a grand crisis separates him
from his personal and artistic past.
Many of the painters were "Marxists" (WPA unions, artists' congresses);
they had been trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art
(Cubism, Post-Impressionism)—it amounts to the same thing.
The big moment came when it was decided to paint... just to PAINT.
The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political,
esthetic, moral. [...]
The American vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas
as Melville's Ishmael took to the sea.62

Providing an archetypal American pedigree for his artist-heroes by com-

paring them with the doubt-ridden protagonist of Moby-Dick, Rosenberg
further explained that the action painter is heir to both the pioneer and the
immigrant, New World identities for which continual self-redefinition is a pri-
mary requirement. (Elsewhere, he hailed the unconventional fighting meth-
ods of American Coonskinners who prevailed during the Revolutionary War
over General Braddock's tradition-bound Redcoats, and in 1961 he would
analogize Jackson Pollock with Daniel Boone.)63 Like the lawyer he had trained
to be, Rosenberg advanced his arguments in "The American Action Paint-
ers" passionately and rhetorically, operating within a matrix defined by the
Marxist dialectical polemics honed during his earlier years writing for Parti-
san Review. Completely eschewing formalist analysis—not one specific work
of art is described or cited—Rosenberg discounted style and valorized pro-
cess. The most frequently quoted statement of his essay summarizes this the-
sis: "At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter
after another as an arena in which to act—rather than a space in which to re-
produce, re-design, analyze or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What

Introduction 15
 was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event." Subsequently, in what
appears to be another jab at Greenberg's formalism, Rosenberg repeats, "Call
this painting 'abstract' or 'Expressionist' or 'Abstract-Expressionist,' what
counts is its special motive for extinguishing the object," maintaining that
form, color, composition and drawing are nothing more than "auxiliaries"
easily discarded: "The apples weren't brushed off the table in order to make
room for perfect relations of space and color. They had to go so that nothing
would get in the way of the act of painting."64
Finally, referring to critical activity, Rosenberg reasons, "if the picture is
an a c t . . . its value must be found apart from art." Those who want to write
about the new painting, he states, should recognize this assumption and be-
come connoisseurs of "gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous,
the evoked" as opposed to connoisseurs of quality. By connecting a painting
that is an act with the biography of the artist, its metaphysical (as opposed to
merely aesthetic) substance can be discerned. He writes, "With traditional es-
thetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is
. . . the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he
were in a living situation." In what is probably his most disputatious state-
ment, he concludes that, when creating Action Paintings, the vanguard artist
succeeds in breaking down "every distinction between art and life."65
Although most readers (including Pollock himself, as well as Greenberg)66
assumed Pollock to be the prototypical American Action Painter, Rosenberg
later claimed that he had been creating a hybrid of de Kooning (his favored
artist), Pollock, and Kline. Pollock's increasing association—which only in-
tensified after his death—with the alienation and the improvisational, perfor-
mative spontaneity of 19503 Beat culture, in which art and life were deemed
inseparable, served to strengthen his connection. Indeed, "the Beat credo of
the individual, of self-discovery and realization as a metaphor for implicit
truth"67 was visually confirmed by Namuth's films and photos of Pollock at
work and received theoretical affirmation in "The American Action Paint-
ers," one particular line of which, "The discipline of the Open Road of risk
... leads to the farther side of the object and the outer spaces of the conscious-
ness," with its echoes of Ginsberg and Kerouac, was much admired by the
Beats. At the same time, the approach Rosenberg promoted was reviled in
more conservative circles. The drama critic Robert Brustein, for example,
excoriated Action Painting as yet another example of the lack of discipline
championed by Beat poets and musicians, as well as by such adepts of method

16 Introduction
 acting as Marlon Brando and James Dean; all, Brustein lamented in 1956, were
dangerous examples of "the cult of unthink."68
The first widely publicized international assessment of Pollock, written in
1950 by the young Italian critic Bruno Alfieri and excerpted for an American
audience in Time magazine, predated Brustein's contempt. Issued in con-
junction with Pollock's recent inclusion in the twenty-fifth Venice Biennale
and with the more comprehensive July-August 1950 Venetian showing of
works by Pollock owned by Peggy Guggenheim, Alfieri's laundry list of faults
attained a certain currency. The most notorious section of his review (which
Pollock hotly contested in a telegram to Time magazine) read as follows:

In any case it is easy to detect the following things in all of [Pollock's]

paintings:
- chaos
- absolute lack of harmony
- complete lack of structural organization
- total absence of technique, however rudimentary
- once again, chaos.69

Many of the Pollock works on view that summer in Italy dated to 1947, the
year Guggenheim left New York for retirement abroad. Greenberg, in his re-
view of Pollock's final solo exhibition at her gallery, Art of This Century, had
advanced a quite different opinion of the same early drip paintings. Unper-
turbed by the "absence of assignable definition" in Pollock's recent style, Green-
berg proclaimed that the young painter he so admired "has gone beyond the
stage where he needs to make his poetry explicit in ideographs," a conclusion
that also ran counter to Rosenberg's developing thesis about Action Painting.
"As is the case with almost all post-cubist painting of any real originality,"
Greenberg intoned, "it is the tension inherent in the constructed, re-created
flatness of the surface that produces [Pollock's] strength."70 The following
year Greenberg assessed de Kooning's "magnificent first show" at Egan Gallery
through the lens of related criteriajudging the latter's "insistence on a smooth,
thin surface" as a "concomitant of his desire for purity, for an art that makes
demands only on the optical imagination."71 When appraising the two Abstract
Expressionists whose influence dominated the 19505, Greenberg continually
countered his rival's (over)valuation of crisis, risk, action, and process, fore-
grounding instead the "high art" qualities of flatness, opticality, and purity
that he believed to be more truly representative of avant-garde thinking.72

Introduction 17
 The 1960s: Consolidating the Canon
In a 1965 article in Arts Magazine, the critic Max Kozloff, referring to the
oppositional attitudes of Greenberg and Rosenberg on the merits of Abstract
Expressionism, made the following astute observation: "Some of the polem-
ics which arose, as much with us now as then, have to do with the work of
art as self-expression, and as vehicle of historical consciousness; the nature of
aesthetic crisis and moral content in art; and finally, overarchingly, the func-
tion and identity of criticism itself. It is a tribute to the New York School that
it enormously heightened the relevance of all these questions."73 Kozloff s at-
tempt to assess the reception of the movement, the first to be published, fol-
lowed by five years the art historian Robert Goldwater's "reflections" on two
decades' worth of New York School art. In the Belgian journal Quadrum, Gold-
water observes of Abstract Expressionist art:

It has had time to change and develop, to evolve and alter and expand, to
spread and succeed, to attract followers and nourish imitators. It has lived
a history, germinated a mythology and produced a hagiology; it has de-
scended to a second, and now a third artistic generation. This history, whose
superficial aspects are those of other twentieth century styles, has in many
ways contradicted the image of the New York School—the image it has had of
itself, and even more the image the exegetes have given to the public—and so
has presented it with peculiar and poignant problems. One of the results has
been that recently, coincident with its notoriety, and in the midst of multiply-
ing adepts, its old masters have begun to declare that it is not, nor indeed ever
was, a school, perhaps not even a movement, and certainly not a style.74

Giving an abbreviated history of developments in Abstract Expressionism,

Goldwater further deplores the "unfortunate emphasis" of Rosenberg's term
"Action Painting" as an oversimplification that fails to distinguish between
artist and subject (and indeed insists that they are identical). He is willing to
admit that, "since the [New York School] artist identified with his work, in-
tention and result were fused, and he who questioned the work, in however
humble a fashion, was taken to be doubting the man." Goldwater, writing for a
foreign readership, points out that criticism in the United States and espe-
cially abroad often seemed to overemphasize "the 'unfinished' character of
this art." Both points were demonstrated, for example, in Alfieri's 1950 criti-
cism of Pollock. Reviews of "The New American Painting," an exhibition cir-
culated in 1958-1959 by the International Council of the Museum of Modern

18 Introduction
Art to eight major European cities, further highlighted (as one Milanese critic
wrote) "the charge of violence and of personal fury which each of these paint-
ings conveys." A Brussels newspaper termed works on view by Gottlieb, Kline,
de Kooning, Motherwell, Newman, Gorky, Pollock, and ten others, mere "form-
less scribblings." Another continental reviewer, although labeling American
Abstract Expressionism "an esthetic terrifying for its excess .. . frenetic and
hallucinatory," nevertheless admitted that "our own abstract painters, all
the 'informal' European artists, seem pygmies before the disturbing power of
these unchained giants."75
Branding these and other verdicts from afar a "parade of busted clichés
and demoralized preconceptions" by journalists "under the impression the
pictures were painted by Wyatt Earp and Al Capone and Bix Beiderbeck [sic]"
—and suggesting that many of the critics did not bother to see the show—the
Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth judged European critique of "The New Ameri-
can Painting" as having more to do with politics than art.76 (Alfred H. Barr Jr.,
who prepared the exhibition's introduction, probably encouraged this line of
thinking with his red-flag statement that the American artists on view "are not
politically engagés even though their paintings have been praised and con-
demned as symbolic demonstrations of freedom in a world in which freedom
connotes a political attitude.")77
Debate about exactly how free of outside influence these cocky New York-
ers actually were was a thread connecting many assessments of the exhibition,
both good and bad. Greenberg had already proposed an answer focusing on
aesthetic innovation in "The European View of American Art," published in
late 1950: "The kind of art that Pollock, de Kooning, and Gorky present does
not so much break with the Cubist and post-Cubist past as extend it in an un-
foreseen way, as does all art that embodies a new 'vision.'"78 Annette Michel-
son, writing from Paris at the end of that decade, noted local dismay about
Greenberg's yet more boastful claim, reworded in a headline for the French
weekly Arts, that "American painting was ten years ahead of what was being
done in Paris." (She called it "an archreactionary paper's Machiavellian way
of giving both Mr. Greenberg and the entire 'New York School' enough rope
to hang themselves with.")79 In any case, in London and in the United States,
more and more attention was being paid to such pronouncements from Green-
berg's pen. By 1965, when Kozloffs essay on Abstract Expressionist criticism
appeared, Greenberg's preeminence was well established in English-speaking
• &fi
countries.
The rise in Greenberg's reputation in the 19603 (as Rosenberg's began to

Introduction 19
 wane) was based in no small part on the publication in 1961 of Art and Cul-
ture: Critical Essays, a compendium of Greenberg's most important reviews,
some newly revised to read more theoretically.81 These texts include "Avant-
Garde and Kitsch" (1939), in which Greenberg had first pronounced what
constitutes "high art," and " 'American-Type' Painting," a 1955 essay in which
he countered Rosenberg's existentialist adulation of the "late Cubist" gestural
painters by promoting the color-field Abstract Expressionists, particularly
Newman, Rothko, and Still, as a source of fresher aesthetic innovation. Green-
berg firmly believed that, in comparison with works by these artists, the facile
"Tenth Street touch" seemed tiresomely academic and solipsistic.82
In his strongly positive review of Art and Culture, the conservative com-
mentator Hilton Kramer lauded Clement Greenberg as a writer who, "unlike
Mr. Harold Rosenberg, for example ... has never been tempted to make rheto-
ric do the work of analysis." Pointing out that Greenberg's "critical intelli-
gence was formed in the crucible of Marxian dialectics," Kramer observes
that, long after he had eschewed the illusions and commitments of Marxist
ideology, Greenberg's habits as a writer and intellectual attitudes continued to
be based on the more salutary aspects of this education. "Foremost among
these," he points out, "was the assumption that criticaljudgments, if they are to
carry the authority and force of something more than a merely personal taste,
must be made in the name of history." As Kramer explains, in Greenberg's tele-
ological (and Eurocentric) analyses, "the impersonal process of history ap-
pears in the guise of an inner artistic logic, which has its own immutable laws
of development and to which works of art must conform if they are not to end
up on the historical ash heap."83
Increasingly opposed to the impurity fostered by the "expressionist" as-
pects of art of the New York School (a change in direction from the days when
he had learned from Hofmann and championed Pollock),84 Greenberg was
using "painterly" as a pejorative term by the time Art and Culture appeared.85
He now advocated for the redemptive influence of works by artists (most no-
tably Newman, Rothko, and Still) for whom the art historian and curator
H. H. Arnason, in organizing a 1961 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggen-
heim Museum, coined the term "Abstract Imagists." In their art, formal means
and content (not a synonym for "subject" in Greenberg's mind) are more in-
delibly fused. Against the openness and emotion that bastardized the "neo-
Baroque" aspects of Abstract Expressionist style, and opposed to the "vul-
gar" literary slant he ascribed to Surrealist influence, Greenberg militated

20 Introduction
more stridently during the 19603 for a return to Apollonian classical stan-
dards like those of High Cubism.86
In "Complaints of an Art Critic" (1967) Greenberg would write, "You can-
not legitimately want or hope for anything from art except quality, and you can-
not lay down conditions for quality. However and wherever it turns up, you
have to accept it."87 But his own brand of criticism had been prescriptive from
the start, and this tendency increased in the context of his contest with Rosen-
berg over who had the better formula for understanding the art of the New
York School. Upping the ante in their dispute, in the introductory section of
" 'American-Type' Painting," Greenberg had observed, "There is good and
bad in abstract expressionism, and once one can tell the difference he discovers
that the good owes its realization to a severer discipline." This set the stage for
his assertion in the same 1955 essay that Barnett Newman (born in 1905) "has
replaced Pollock as the enfant terrible of abstract expressionism."88
Three years before publishing "'American-Type' Painting," despite the
virtually unanimous critical rejection of Newman's first two solo exhibitions
at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Greenberg had already declared him "a very im-
portant and original artist," one who "has little to do with Mondrian, even if
his pictures do consist of only one or two (sometimes more) rectilinear and
parallel bands of color against a flat field." Newman "took a chance," Green-
berg concludes in "Feeling Is All" (1952), "and has suffered for it in terms of
recognition."89 In " 'American-Type' Painting," he placed Newman in a larger
evolutionary matrix with Clyfford Still ("perhaps the most original of all paint-
ers under fifty-five, if not the best") and Mark Rothko, praising all of them as
artists who had learned not only from Cubism but from the "unity and power"
of the late Impressionism of Monet. In their works, "color breathes from the
canvas with an enveloping effect" (fig. 6). This outcome is achieved by sup-
pressing value contrasts and favoring warm hues, a tactic that also helps em-
phasize the flatness of their paintings; and, as Greenberg clarifies in his pen-
ultimate paragraph, such testing of "the limits of the inherited forms and
genres, and of the medium itself" ("self-critical awareness of being in the main-
stream of modern art," as opposed to existential self-discovery) is the true
hallmark of "advanced art—which is the same thing as ambitious art today."90
During the 19505, when Action Painting (by foregrounding "signs of the
artist's active presence") had set the standard for excellence, Newman's paint-
ings "appeared empty and meaningless, the antithesis of the prevailing aes-
thetic."91 Numerous reviewers, Phyllis Rosenzweig notes, panned the paint-

Introduction 21
 ings included in Newman's first two Betty Parsons Gallery exhibitions (fig. 7),
using arch phrases such as "subtle to the vanishing point" and accusing him
of perpetrating "an intellectual game."92 By 1956, Meyer Schapiro felt a need
to explain that, although "beside the restless complexity of Pollock or de Koon-
ing" works by artists such as Newman and Rothko might seem "inert and
bare," despite their obvious stylistic dissimilarities, the gestural and color
field painters did share certain goals. "Each," he wrote, "seeks an absolute in
which a receptive viewer can lose himself, the one in compulsive movement,
the other in an all-pervading, as if internalized, sensation of a dominant color.
... The result in both is a painted world with a powerful immediate impact."93
Although Arnason's 1961 exhibition "American Abstract Expressionists and
Imagists" was organized around the idea that "a single all-encompassing label
for painting whose essence is the expression of the individual" must be re-
jected, it was his stated curatorial judgment that the influence of the "Imagist"
wing appeared to be "continually increasing."94
In his introduction to American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists,
Arnason explains that he chose the latter term as "a gloss and criticism" of
the former.

It is a fact that from the late Forties to the present day certain painters, loosely
grouped with the Abstract Expressionists, have ... been concerned through
extreme simplification of their canvases—frequently to the dominant asser-
tion of a single overpowering element—in presenting an all-encompassing
presence. This "presence" could be described as an "image" in the sense of
an abstract symbol rather than as a reflection or imitation of anything in na-
ture. The paintings of Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, and frequently
Still and Motherwell, all very different, all have in common this sense of sym-
bolic content achieved through dramatic statement of isolated and highly
simplified elements.95

Recognizing that the labels "Expressionist" and "Imagist" are "arbitrary

and in some degree interchangeable," Arnason specifically references the
painters' own statements about their goals and aspirations. In particular, al-
though without crediting them, Arnason repeats in his description of the
Imagists quoted above parameters first put forth by Gottlieb and Rothko in
their 1943 letter (edited by Newman) to the New York Times. One of their most
important claims is that "it is a widely accepted notion among painters that
it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the
essence of academicism. There is no such thing as a good painting about

22 Introduction
nothing."96 This claim specifically contradicted Greenberg's art-for-art's-sake
approach.
This declaration is the last and most aggressive of five major points of au-
tonomy made by Gottlieb and Rothko that New York Times critic Edward
Alden Jewell quoted in his art column of June 13. ("To us art is an adventure
into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take
the risks" and "It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world
our way—not his way," previously cited, were points one and three.) In point
four Gottlieb and Rothko describe their style in terms that would seem to en-
dorse Greenberg's predilection for medium purity (a notion already intro-
duced in his 1940 essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon"). The two men declare:
"We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large
shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the
picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal
truth." Professing "spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art" (a general
explanation of their motivations for The Rape of Persephone and The Syrian
Bull [fig. 8], mythologically titled paintings Jewell had professed not to un-
derstand), however, they also assert that "the subject is crucial and only that
subject-matter is valid which is tragic and timeless." They thus admit to an
emotional and symbolic (as well as Romantic and Surrealist-influenced) im-
pulse for reductiveness that directly contradicted Greenberg's Lessing-inspired
paradigm for abstraction, the "pure form" of music. In "The Ideographic
Picture," his essay for an exhibition held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947,
Barnett Newman openly declared that he and his friends, "although working
in what is known as the abstract style," were "not abstract painters."97
Nevertheless, by 1965 Greenberg was citing pictures by Still, Rothko, and
Gottlieb, and especially Newman's geometric-looking stripe (or "zip") paint-
ings, as achievements that provided a "more advanced" pedigree for a new
artistic trend he termed "Post-Painterly Abstraction." (In the works of artists
such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, Green-
berg's new favorites, the sloppiness, mannered design, and accentuation of
value contrasts characterizing the despised "Tenth Street touch" were, he
said, replaced by a more progressive "self-critical" emphasis on hue, physical
openness of design, linear clarity, and the integrity of the picture plane.)98
This assertion involved a willful eradication on Greenberg's part of the
metaphoric and metaphysical intentions for painting that Newman, Rothko,
Gottlieb, and Still consistently had claimed throughout the two previous de-
cades. (The title of Newman's most famous canvas, Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Introduction 23
 [Man, Heroic and Sublime, 1950-51, plate 2] encapsulates this shared moral
impetus and signals that Newman's anarchist political ideals also played a key
role in his artistic motivations.)
Indeed, Greenberg's congratulatory statement in "Feeling Is All" (1952)
that Newman's works "constitute, moreover, the first kind of painting I have
seen that accommodates itself stylistically to the demand of modern interior
architecture for flat, clear surfaces and strictly parallel divisions" (in " 'Ameri-
can-Type' Painting" he wrote of Still, Newman, and Rothko that "in effect
their art asserts decorative elements and ideas in a pictorial context") contra-
dicts every word Newman ever uttered about the theoretical and philosophi-
cal values he attached to artistic creativity." The most succinct expression of
Newman's credo, his 1947 remarks for The Ideographic Picture, illustrates this
point. After presenting dictionary and encyclopedia definitions for the terms
"ideograph" and "ideographic," Newman follows with an unequivocal rejec-
tion of decor ativeness and purity as goals of (masculine) abstraction:

The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the
inconsequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest
Coast Indian scene; nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the
living world for the meaningless materialism of design. The abstract shape
he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward
metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers,
the pleasant play of nonobjective pattern to the women basket weavers. To
him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex,
a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable.
The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal "abstraction"
of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a
purist illusion with its overload of pseudoscientific truths.100

Other authors writing in the 19605 took a less blinkered, more historically
aware look at the artists' own priorities than Greenberg ever did. These in-
cluded, for example, Lawrence Alloway ("The Biomorphic Forties"), John
Bernard Myers ("The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School"), and
Sidney Simon, who published extensive interviews in Art International titled
"Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943," with Moth-
erwell, Peter Busa (a colleague of Pollock), and Roberto Matta Echaurren, the
Chilean Surrealist who had befriended and tutored all three. In 1965, in Art-
forum, Alloway detailed the emergence of psychosexually oriented biomor-
phic imagery during the early days of Abstract Expressionism, highlighting

24 Introduction
the works of New York-based artists, most prominently Baziotes, Pollock,
Gorky, Rothko, and Gottlieb (fig. 9). Alloway styled their preference for creat-
ing analogues of human form and other organisms in the early forties as "the
result of a cluster of ideas about nature, automatism, mythology, and the un-
conscious."101 Two years earlier he had written about the American Sublime,
a topic already addressed in 1961 by the art historian Robert Rosenblum. Un-
like Greenberg, both Alloway and Rosenblum analyzed the mature works of
the Abstract Imagists (also including Pollock) from the perspective of their
own statements.
Rosenblum, adopting a term used by many of these artists, explained best
how the Sublime, an aesthetic category originating with Longinus that was
especially popular with Romantic painters and poets of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, "suddenly acquires fresh relevance in the face
of the most astonishing summits of pictorial heresy attained in America in the
last fifteen years." Describing the Sublime (with characteristics considered
opposite in form to the Beautiful) as "a flexible semantic container for ... ex-
periences of awe, terror, boundlessness, and divinity," Rosenblum compares
Rothko's lightly brushed hovering rectangles of color (plate 7), for example,
with famous Romantic landscape paintings by Friedrich and Turner. In as-
sessing Newman's master visual statement of this concept—referencing the
artist's definitive written commentary on the subject, "The Sublime Is Now"
—Rosenblum adopts the artist's own hyperbolic mystical tone:

In its all-embracing width (114 1/2 inches), Newman's VirHeroicus Sublimis

puts us before a void as terrifying, if exhilarating, as the arctic emptiness of
the tundra; and in its passionate reduction of pictorial means to a single hue
(warm red) and a single kind of structural division (vertical) for some 144
square feet, it likewise achieves a simplicity as heroic and sublime as the pro-
tagonist of its title. Yet again, as with Still, Rothko, and Pollock, such a rudi-
mentary vocabulary creates bafflingly complex results. Thus the single hue
is varied by an extremely wide range of light values; and these unexpected
mutations occur at intervals that thoroughly elude any rational system. Like
the other three masters of the Abstract Sublime, Newman bravely abandons
the securities of familiar pictorial geometries in favor of the risks of untested
pictorial intuitions; and like them, he produces awesomely simple mysteries
that evoke the primeval movement of creation.102

Although forced to admit that Clyfford Still's vertical compositions, remi-

niscent of flames and geological fissures (fig. 10), "were the first abstract pic-

Introduction 25
 tures [he] ever saw that contained almost no allusion to Cubism," Greenberg
continually insisted, against visual and spoken evidence left by the artist, that
Pollock's art "turns out, in fact, to have an almost completely Cubist basis."103
By contrast, Rosenblum contended that all four masters of the Abstract Sub-
lime decisively rejected the classical bent of the Cubist tradition. Seen from
the autobiographical point of view of Action Painting, Pollock's intricately
layered allover poured paintings (for example, fig. 11) did not meet Alloway's
stipulation that the physiognomic expression of the Abstract Expressionist
Sublime be achieved by compounding "maximum area with minimum diver-
sity." Rosenblum reconciled this discrepancy by describing how Pollock's
"gyrating labyrinths re-create in the metaphorical language of abstraction the
superhuman turbulence depicted more literally" by nineteenth-century Euro-
pean and American landscapists. Furthermore, since "like the awesome vistas
of telescope and microscope, his pictures leave us dazzled before the imponder-
ables of galaxy and atom,"104 Pollock, like Rothko and Newman, could be lauded
for updating these Romantic metaphors in terms of the twentieth century.
Although Greenberg essentially lost interest in him when he returned to
disturbing figurative imagery using black enamel stained into unprimed can-
vas, after Pollock's death a critical rethinking of the classic poured paintings
began to form. Not surprisingly, Greenberg now crafted his praise of these
compositions to fit the self-definitive blueprint he espoused more strongly
than ever. This schematic was given a new title, "Modernist Painting," in 1965.
In an essay printed in Art and Literature that spring, Greenberg gave his full-
est explanation to date of how, to qualify for Modernist purity, "each art had
to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and
exclusive to itself." He confirmed once more that "the unique and proper area
of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of
the medium," stressing that, considered as such, Modernism represents conti-
nuity, not rupture, with great art of past centuries.105
By 1958, only two years after Pollock's fatal accident, Greenberg had al-
ready found a way to reconcile Pollock's more tonal gestural style with the pri-
macy of flatness valued by his newly endorsed color field artists. In compar-
ing certain of Pollock's key effects to Byzantine mosaics, Greenberg gave the
suppression of value that he deemed critical to Modernist painting a crucial
art historical precedent:

Neither Byzantine nor modernist art has rested with the mere dismantling of
sculptural illusion. Byzantine painting and mosaic moved from the beginning
toward a vision of full color in which the role of light-and-dark contrast was

26 Introduction
 radically diminished. In Gauguin and in Late Impressionism, something simi-
lar had already begun to happen, and now, after Cubism, American painters
like Newman, Rothko and Still seem almost to polemicize against value con-
trasts. They attempt to expel every reminiscence of sculptural illusion by
creating a counterillusion of light alone—a counterillusion which consists in
the projection of an indeterminate surface of warm and luminous color in
front of the actual painted surface. Pollock, in his middle period, worked to-
ward the same effect, and perhaps achieved it more unmistakably with his
aluminum paint and interlaced threads of light and dark pigment. This new
kind of modernist picture, like the Byzantine gold and glass mosaic, comes
forward to fill the space between itself and the spectator with its radiance.106

Greenberg's likening of this phenomenon to "optical mirage"107 opened

the way for Pollock's work to be presented as an even more definitive proto-
type for Post-Painterly Abstraction in an essay prepared by one of his talented
Harvard University graduate students, Michael Fried. The section about Pol-
lock in Three American Painters—Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank
Stella, written by Fried to accompany an exhibition he organized in 1965 at
Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, was reprinted for a wider audience in Artforum.
In it, Fried consciously downplays action and process, specifically rejecting
"the tendency of art writers such as Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess to
regard Pollock as a kind of natural existentialist." Instead, following lines of
thought developed by Greenberg, Fried promotes "a nexus of formal issues"
deemed central to both Pollock's art and the most advanced Modernist paint-
ing. Disagreeing with Greenberg's ascription of an Analytical Cubist basis to
the classic allover poured canvases, Fried wanted instead to credit Pollock with
the creation of homogenous optical fields, addressed to eyesight alone. Pol-
lock achieved this, Fried claims, by aggressively purging line of its figurative
character: in works such as the Museum of Modern Art's Number lA, 1948,
line "is entirely transparent both to the non-illusionistic space it inhabits but
does not structure and to the pulses of something like pure, disembodied en-
ergy that seem to move without resistance through them." The result is "a
new kind of space—if it still makes sense to call it space—in which conditions
of seeing prevail rather than one in which objects exist, flat shapes are juxta-
posed or physical events transpire."108
Fried reconciles Pollock's eventual (albeit equivocal) return to figuration
by lauding a small group of transitional paintings in which cut-out sections
allow imagery to be perceived as absence, and he pegs the future potential of
Pollock's staining method as a harbinger of the direction of contemporary

Introduction 27
 work. The Hegelian inevitability built into Modernism by critical adherents
such as Greenberg and Fried sent auto(bio)graphic interpretations of Pol-
lock's work into a near-total eclipse during the mid-to-late 19603.109 Indeed,
by 1973, the curator Kenworth Moffett could write, without blinking an eye,
that "both Olitski's sprayings and Pollock's drippings are relatively imper-
sonal applications."110
Pollock's fortunes continued to rise during the 19605 as a result of the
historian-critic William Rubin's six articles in Artforum on the subject of
Jackson Pollock and the modern tradition. Acknowledging and correcting
Greenberg's judgments, Rubin decisively links the varied aspects of Pollock's
production not only with Cubist but also Impressionist and Surrealist prece-
dents. The exchange of letters in that journal between Rubin and Francis V.
O'Connor (author of the first monographic dissertation study of an Abstract
Expressionist painter, "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock, 1912-1943"), a huge
retrospective (for which O'Connor provided a detailed documentary chronol-
ogy) held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967, and newly published inter-
views with the artist's widow, Lee Krasner, also helped revive and restyle Pol-
lock's importance.111 The preeminence of Newman and David Smith in this
decade was likewise confirmed by major exhibitions, at the Guggenheim and
the Fogg, respectively.
Unlike his two colleagues (both deceased by the time of their shows), New-
man's The Stations of the Cross: Lama Sabachtani, was not a full retrospective
but a close look at a group of stylistically and thematically related paintings
created between 1958 and 1966, the year of the exhibit. In the catalogue, Law-
rence Alloway analogized the achievements of the by-now recognized leaders
of two ostensibly diametric directions in Abstract Expressionist painting.
First pointing out that "Newman's Stations [fig. 12] were arrived at through a
process of self-recognition," Alloway writes:

This method of learning from the initial stage of the work is parallel to the
kind of responsiveness that Jackson Pollock revealed in single paintings. He
would make a mark and then develop or oppose it by other marks until he
reached a point at which he had exhausted the work's cues to him to act fur-
ther. Newman has demonstrated the possibility of such awareness operating
not in terms of visual judgment and touch within one painting, but as a
source of structure for a series.112

Alloway notes that the production of a thematic series might seem an un-
expected development in Newman's work, but this tactic is presented as be-

28 Introduction
ing inseparable from Newman's continuing interest in promoting metaphysi-
cal (in this case, hybrid Jewish-Christian) iconographie meanings. Jane Har-
rison Cone, another of Greenberg's students, registered no such surprise at
Smith's seriality in the essay she wrote for "David Smith 1906-1965: A Retro-
spective Exhibition," which traveled from Harvard to the Washington Gallery
of Modern Art in igGy.113 Whereas the subjective signature styles of the Ab-
stract Expressionists sometimes incorporated or resembled the production
of visually related works (Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic [fig. 13]
are examples of the former, and Gottlieb's Thrust [plate 3] might represent
the latter tendency), all of the younger painters favored by Greenberg and his
followers in the 19605 provided concrete evidence of an objectively analytical
internal dialogue by systematically working out their formal problems in a se-
rial for mat.114
By 1947, mentioning him with Pollock as "the only other American artist of
our time who produced an art capable of withstanding the test of international
scrutiny," Greenberg had declared David Smith not only "the best sculptor this
country has produced" but "already one of the great sculptors of the twentieth
century anywhere" (his emphasis). Nonetheless, almost ten years later, Green-
berg was still making excuses for Smith's "inability or unwillingness to ex-
ercise self-criticism."115 By the time of his unfortunate death at age fifty-eight,
(like Pollock, in a road accident), this deficiency was seemingly erased. Cone,
in fact, credits Smith's "taking a single idea or theme and developing it by
means of a series of closely related sculptures" as fundamental to his working
method, although, at the cost of formal coherence, he might be working in two
or three quite distinct sculptural styles at once.116
Furthermore, Smith had openly declared that he did not recognize aes-
thetic divisions between the goals of his early career as a painter and his
"sculpture-work," writing in 1960, "My sculpture grew from painting. My
analogy and reference is with color. Flash reference and afterimage vision is
historied in painting. I chew the fat with painters." In his last interview, given
to Katherine Kuh, Smith described his overlapping Zig (from "ziggurat"),
Tank Totem, and Agrícola works as "continuous parts of my concept," rather
than variations on a theme.117 The fact that Smith often "crossed the state line
from Bolton Landing over to Vermont to visit the painter Kenneth Noland"
was pointed out by Robert Motherwell in a laudatory "personal apprecia-
tion" published in Studio International after his close friend's passing.118 One
of the illustrations for Motherwell's article is a dramatic outdoor close-up
"cubistically" framed by shooting through several of Smith's brightly col-

Introduction 29
 ored, predominantly circular, flat cut-out Zigs made of painted sheet metal
(fig. 14). Closely approximating the look of Noland's "post-painterly" targets,
this photograph underscores Smith's position as a Greenbergian archetype
whose artistic contributions spanned three generations.119

The 1970s: Emerging Contexts and Closer Readings

In her influential survey American Art Since 1900, first published in 1967
and revised and expanded in 1975, Barbara Rose included the following "epi-
taph for an avant-garde":

If the end of a style may be marked by the moment when no young painters
of the first rank choose to work within it, then 1960 constitutes such a date
for Abstract Expressionism. The physical destruction of the original neigh-
borhood in which it flourished—the tearing down of Tenth Street, the clos-
ing of the original Cedar Bar, and the dissolution of the Club—were only the
external events that paralleled a general shift in sensibility within the art
world. In the sixties, the remaining members of the first generation would
continue their development, and gifted members of the second generation
would make significant contributions. However, Abstract Expressionism as a
style would not serve as a point of departure, but as an established tradition,
as the new Academy—perhaps the first Academy worthy of the name in the
history of American art—to be attacked in terms of its own limitations and
contradictions.120

Like Arnason's "Abstract Expressionists and Imagists," a show held earlier in

the decade, Maurice Tuchman's "New York School: The First Generation,"
mounted in Los Angeles in 1965, and in particular Henry Geldzahler's "New
York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970," a blockbuster hit at the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art four years later, also provided significant opportunities for
critics—and artists—to weigh in on the continued pertinence (or lack of same)
of the movement. At the time of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art show
and before Rose's pronouncement that 1960 marked the movement's termi-
nus, Greenberg had proposed a slightly later date for the "sudden collapse,
market-wise and publicity-wise, of Abstract Expressionism as a collective
manifestation." Noting the impact on Abstract Expressionism's viability of
the instantaneous success of Pop Art in the spring of 1962, he (not unexpect-
edly) preferred to attribute its diminishing importance to the superior efforts
of post-painterly abstraction.121
Irritated by the Los Angeles County Museum project, Barnett Newman

30 Introduction
complained in Art News that "the 'New York School,' I find, exists only in
California. It is curious that the only shows so titled have taken place there."
He further deplored what he took to be Tuchman's implication in organizing
this show, namely, that Abstract Expressionism was now just another histori-
cal installment. While admitting that "it is only natural that those who are try-
ing to put the label on the bottle will also try to put the cork in, too," Newman
insisted that the story of Abstract Expressionism, which was "still continu-
ing," had not yet adequately been told.122 Quoting Rosenberg's equivocal as-
sertion in "The American Action Painters" that "what makes any definition
of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the
movement," a few years later Gregory Battcock slyly referenced the Pop art-
ists' obsession with food in order to belittle not only the Met's exhibition but
the central philosophical premises of Abstract Expressionism as well. In "Re-
evaluating Abstract Expressionism," Battcock observes somewhat meanly:

"Letters in art are letters," wrote Ad Reinhardt. Other Abstract Expressionists

referred to their paintings as: "it is."
Today we are much more likely to say, "Lettuce in art is lettuce." Instead of
"it is" we are more likely to ask: "So what?"

Battcock, whose Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology had been published the
previous year, terms Abstract Expressionism "an art style of extravagance,
waste, emptiness." Although he notes that it provides exquisite sensual stimu-
lation, he nonetheless comes to a contemptuous conclusion: "According to to-
day's needs, definitions, expectations and questions, [the movement] appears
to have been a big to-do about very little indeed."123
Battcock's opinion ran directly counter to Geldzahler's assertion that both
"national pride and international acclaim recognize that something mag-
nificent has happened" in New York art produced since World War II.124 In-
tended to confirm proclamations beginning as early as 1947 that New York
had replaced Paris as the epicenter of vanguard art, Geldzahler's exhibition
also provided an opportunity to see how Abstract Expressionism seeded cur-
rent developments. Its optimistic tone paved the way for an even more re-
sounding affirmation implicit in the title of Irving Sandler's full-length 1970
study, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism.
Sandler's book, the first attempt by an art historian to provide a definitive his-
torical account of the movement that had so recently put America on the art
world map, clearly aimed at laying to rest any lingering charges of aesthetic
parochialism on this side of the Atlantic. Its frontispiece (repeated on the out-

Introduction 31
 side back cover), a reproduction of "The Irascibles" (fig. i), reintroduced the
cast of characters who had achieved this remarkable feat.
Referring to the so-called Irascibles incident, Adolph Gottlieb, one of its
organizers, told Andrew Hudson in 1968 that "there's a certain myth about
[the Abstract Expressionists'] being a group." But, Gottlieb pointed out, ac-
tually "the one and only time we acted as a group" was a protest. "Otherwise,
there was no sense of solidarity."125 Documenting what В. Н. Friedman has
termed "a split second in art history," the picture of the Irascibles, shot by Life
magazine staff photographer Nina Leen in November 1950, was thrust into
even greater prominence by Sandier. In it, a "monumental" posed group
of fourteen male artists (the major living Abstract Expressionists and others
from the second tier) and an equally well-dressed female painter, Hedda Sterne,
stare somberly into Leen's camera. Readers of the January 15,1951, issue of
Life learned that these individuals, with four additional painters and ten
sculptors, had signed a joint letter the previous May. This petition (drafted
by Gottlieb) objected to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's inattention to "ad-
vanced painting" in organizing a "monster national exhibition" purporting to
survey contemporary trends in art.126 (Barnett Newman, who hand-delivered
a copy of the letter to the New York Times, had solicited the signatures; unbe-
knownst to him at that time, his choices were to play a decisive role in eventual
delineation of the Abstract Expressionist canon.)127
Like William Seitz, whose dissertation was still not yet published, Sandier
had the advantage of being personally acquainted with many of the artists
whose pictures and styles he set out to explicate. And both authors, as their
reviewers pointed out, perhaps fell into the understandable trap of taking at
face value what the artists said about their intentions and their works. Focus-
ing on the "heroic years" 1942-1952, Sandier chose to take the middle road in
his interpretation of the goals and achievements of the movement, stating, for
example, that "there was not one 'truth' but many, each determined by the
vantage point from which an artist viewed developments."128 After describing
"a common aesthetic evolution" that involved primarily the Great Depres-
sion, the WPA, World War II, and the influences of Picasso and Surrealism,
as well as delineating an early shared interest in Jungian myth, existentialism
and biomorphism, in organizing the rest of his book Sandier basically re-
tained Arnason's Expressionist and Imagist categories. He preferred, how-
ever, the synonyms "gestural and color-field painting," denominations gener-
ated from the editorializing of Rosenberg and Greenberg, respectively.
In his 1961 Guggenheim essay, Arnason had explained that he was inten-

32 Introductio n
tionally using the term "Imagists" as "a gloss and criticism of the phrase 'Ab-
stract Expressionists.' "129 As noted, he also made it clear that he believed that
artists who fit the Imagist category should be considered the most progres-
sive. By contrast, almost a decade later, while professing greater neutrality,
"for all his reasonableness and his posture of art-historical distance and re-
spectability, Sandier ends by coming out clearly in favor of the expressionist,
'content' side of the debate."130 Kenworth Moffett (who made that assessment)
and Patrick McCaughey, another contemporary reviewer, both judged this a
purposeful strategy on Sandler's part to "correct the errors of the present
critical climate," still dominated by the formalism of Greenberg and his ad-
mirers. Thus, individuals highlighted in The Triumph of American Painting
were selected to provide "specific instances" of a shared propensity for epic
subjective themes.131
Indeed, the fact that Baziotes, Motherwell, Newman, Rothko, and the
sculptor David Hare chose to call the art school they operated at 35 East
Eighth Street in 1948-1949 "The Subjects of the Artists" was highlighted by
Alloway in Artforum in 1974, provided the title of an Abstract Expressionist
show held at the downtown branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art
in 1975, and was the topic of a diatribe directed at Greenberg, "Against a
Newer Laocoon," published in Arts Magazine a year later by Barbara Cavalière
and Robert Hobbs (two of the Whitney Downtown show's organizers). Im-
mediately afterward, the school's name was adopted by E. A. Carmean Jr. as
the subtitle for "American Art at Mid-Century," an influential exhibition held
at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.132 In all of these sources,
comments by Pollock ("I'm very representational some of the time and a little
all of the time. But when you're working out of your unconscious, figures are
bound to emerge"), Gottlieb ("The role of the artist, of course, has always
been that of image-maker. Different times require different images"), and
Rothko ("We seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than their
graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we
must redescribe their implications through our own experience"),133 among
others, were utilized to prove that the Abstract Expressionists' "compelling
desire" was "to communicate significant and evocative ideas in an abstract
format."134
The Whitney Downtown's "Subjects of the Artists" exhibition concen-
trated on the years 1941-1947, before each of the major Abstract Expressionist
painters developed a signature style. Its curators (who, like Cavalière and
Hobbs, were all graduate students in the Whitney Independent Study Pro-

Introduction 33
 gram) stated their belief that it would be a mistake to consider the early-to -
mid 19405 as merely a transition or prelude to "full-blown" artistic maturity
for the New York School pioneers. This revisionist view—counter to the po-
sitions of both Rosenberg and Greenberg—was widely promulgated in the
1970s, forming the basis not only of thesis and dissertation topics for a new
crop of scholars working on Abstract Expressionism and its commentators135
but also prompting reassessments by venerable critics such as Dore Ashton.
Ashton's The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (1972) exposed a more
synoptic social, political, and intellectual context for this crucial develop-
mental period. The principal and most contentious venue in the 19705 for test-
ing the validity of Greenberg's proscription of content as a major ingredient
of aesthetic innovation was "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,"
the Whitney's larger follow-up exhibition, со-organized in 1978 with the Her-
bert F.Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.136
Training an eye on what had often been dismissed as a mere interim phase
in order to "deepen interpretive understanding" of the movement as a whole,
Robert Hobbs, by this time working with Gail Levin, gathered together paint-
ings created in New York between 1935 and 1949, some well known, many
obscure. Most were by the recognized innovators of Abstract Expressionism,
with the significant addition of Lee Krasner, previously considered (for exam-
ple, in "We Interview Lee Krasner," published in School Arts in 1960) to be
more important in her role as the widow of Jackson Pollock than as an artist
in her own right. Krasner's paintings in the Little Image series of 1946-1950
(fig. 15), on view in the exhibition, were remarked on by critics as disparate
in their approaches as Roberta Smith and Hilton Kramer as "a big surprise"
and "a revelation."137
After a retrospective at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1968 that oc-
casioned renewed interest in her work by a number of British and American
(particularly feminist) critics, the 19705 became a crucial decade for the reha-
bilitation of Krasner's reputation.138 Although not present in the photograph
of the Irascibles (Newman did not request her signature),139 Krasner's inclu-
sion with the men in "Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years" was
perhaps inevitable in light of the Whitney's prior validation of her career with
a solo exhibition. "Lee Krasner: Large Paintings," organized in 1973 by Mar-
cia Tucker, and Krasner's well-received Pace Gallery showing four years later
of authoritative new collages reusing powerful drawings she had done much
earlier at Hans Hofmann's art school,140 provided undeniable proof of her on-
going artistic viability.

34 Introductio n
 One of the key premises of "Formative Years" was tying the theoretical and
aesthetic interests of the nascent Abstract Expressionists in the late 19308 and
early 19405 to a more expansive set of sources than Cubism, sources ranging
from cave art to Mexican muralism, American Indian pictographs, and sand
paintings, and highlighting the contributions of Surrealism. William Rubin
had already demonstrated the extent of Pollock's formal and thematic links to
earlier modernism, especially to Picasso, Miró, and the late Monet (although,
to O'Connor's consternation, Rubin scanted the also considerable importance
of Pollock's teacher, the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton).141 Sandier
and Ashton broadened the sphere of these and other influences to a larger
group of New York painters.142 In particular, Hobbs and Levin now drew at-
tention to the impact of a substantial number of influential works by Wassily
Kandinsky on view during the 19405 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
(then called the Museum of Non-Objective Painting) and to the catalytic role
played by another Russian, the cosmopolitan artist and entrepreneur Ivan
Dabrowsky, known as John Graham in New York in the 19305 and 19405.
In his writings Sandier had already introduced the fact that Graham was
an important mentor to many of the Abstract Expressionists, and the anno-
tated republication in 1971 by Marcia Epstein Allentuck of Graham's highly
idiosyncratic 1937 aesthetic primer System and Dialectics of Art was followed
by numerous additional studies of Graham as an artist and theoretician whose
ideas and eccentric style (fig. 16) had a critical impact on Gorky, de Kooning,
Pollock, Krasner, Rothko, and Smith.143 Graham's perspicacious observations
about the metamorphic power of primitive artifacts and their influence on Eu-
ropean modern art,144 the fact of his having exhibited in the late 19203 in Paris
(where he knew personally such Surrealists as Paul Éluard and André Bre-
ton), and his sale of African and Oceanic sculpture out of a Greenwich Avenue
studio-gallery called "The Primitive Arts" greatly excited his acolytes. Also
critical to the scene was Graham's organization of "French and American
Painting," a show held in early 1942 at the New York design firm McMillen
Inc., where new works by Pollock, Krasner, and de Kooning were hung in the
company of such luminaries as Picasso and Braque. Graham's passionate ad-
vocacy of Marxist and Jungian psychological motivations for art, risk, and the
development of "automatic écriture" (defined as personal technique, a combi-
nation of training and improvisation) were now considered crucial and clari-
fying for the development of Abstract Expressionism.
Speaking of Hobbs and Levin's curatorial choices for "Abstract Expres-
sionism: The Formative Years," one reviewer pointed out, "The most frequent

Introduction 35
 complaint has been that the paintings are weak, derivative, ugly. Instead of re-
vealing themselves as budding giants (shades of Hercules wrestling with lion
cubs), the Abstract Expressionists come off as mortals after all, struggling
painfully for self-definition."145 Hobbs's introductory essay, "Early Abstract
Expressionism: A Concern with the Unknown Within," set up the premise
that many of the artists subscribed to Graham's belief that "the purpose of art
in particular is to re-establish a lost contact with the unconscious ... and to
keep and develop this contact in order to bring to the conscious mind the
throbbing events of the unconscious mind."146 Their paintings might appear
weak because motifs at this time were more important as "signposts" mark-
ing an inward journey, and aesthetic quality (as defined and prized by Green-
berg) was not yet the foremost consideration. Hobbs asserts that the most
critical model these artists adopted in their quest for self-knowledge was psy-
chic automatism, a stream-of-consciousness strategy borrowed from Surreal-
ism, a style of art Greenberg intensely disliked. In this context, it was evident
that another heretofore underappreciated figure, the Chilean painter Roberto
Matta Echaurren, also required greater recognition as an inspiration and
stimulation for an important nucleus of future Abstract Expressionists.
In "An Aspect of Automatism," the final segment of his series of essays ti-
tled "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition," William Rubin mentioned
Matta in passing, comparing his Psychological Morphologies with the pourings
of the British painter Gordon Onslow-Ford, sometimes advanced as putative
prototypes for Pollock's mature style. This installment was published in Art-
forum in May 1967, one month before Art International ran two interviews
conducted by Sidney Simon, under the shared title "Concerning the Begin-
nings of the New York School: 1939-1943." In these, Simon questioned Moth-
erwell, Pollock's close friend Peter Busa, and Matta about the study sessions
held in the fall and winter of 1942-1943 at the latter's studio on Ninth Street
and attended by all four, as well as Baziotes and Gerome Kamrowski. The
purpose of these meetings was to show each other work, discuss ideas, partic-
ipate in projects to expand their various automatic abilities, and to create, as
Busa described it, a "travelogue of the unconscious." This practice was ulti-
mately intended to lead to a group exhibition that would "show up" the older,
more established Surrealists, many of whom, having escaped Hitler, were
temporarily residing in New York147 As Motherwell recalled, he and his bud-
dies "worked more directly and violently, and ultimately on a much larger
scale physically than the Surrealists ever had"; Matta's sessions, he asserted,
were "the germ, historically, of what later came to be called Abstract Expres-

36 Introduction
sionism." Motherwell provided Simon with the following summation of U.S.
connections to European modernist art: "What, in my opinion, happened in
American painting after the war had its origins in automatism that was assim-
ilated to the particular New York situation—that is, the Surrealist tone and lit-
erary qualities were dropped, and the doodle transformed into something
plastic, mysterious, and sublime. No Parisian is a sublime painter, nor a mon-
umental one, not even Miró."148 Otherwise, much of both conversations with
Simon highlighted recollections about Pollock.
Indeed, as Roberta Smith remarked in her review, that the "Formative
Years" exhibition was "dominated by Jackson Pollock's ferocious talent was
a confirmation of what we know, but even so, the degree and variety of that
domination was a surprise."149 Whereas Newman's impact had seemed more
commanding in the formalist sixties, by the time of the Whitney exhibition
new arguments swirling around the issue of Abstract Expressionist subjectiv-
ity thrust Pollock firmly back into the limelight. (Because many of Newman's
early works were destroyed, he played only a minor role in "The Formative
Years") The publication between 1972 and 1978 of a full-scale biography of
Pollock, a memoir of his final years, and a four-volume catalogue raisonné of
his complete oeuvre (the first for an Abstract Expressionist painter) disclosed
a great deal of new visual and documentary information useful for reanalyzing
his contributions.150 A new controversy began when, against the wishes of
his widow Lee Krasner, a cache of eighty-three drawings created by Pollock
in 1939-1940 as an aid to sessions with his Jungian therapist Joseph Hender-
son was acquired by the Maxwell Galleries in San Francisco. The psycho-
analyst C. L. Wysuph organized these sketches into a traveling exhibition that
stopped at the Whitney in the fall of 1970. Two years later, Judith Wolfe and
David Freke published virtually concurrent articles describing Pollock's most
important pre-1947 works (for example, plate 4) as constituting a specifically
self-therapeutic Jungian search for individuation.151
An even more precisely Jungian reading of Pollock's early imagery, which
extended to his subsequent development of the allover style and poured tech-
nique, was advanced by Elizabeth Langhorne in her doctoral thesis, the major
points of which are summarized in "Jackson Pollock's ''The Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle? " part of a 1979 special Pollock issue of Arts Magazine.1^ Wil-
liam Rubin's historical-formalist protest against this type of explication (con-
sidered by many a broad-scale attack) was first delivered at a symposium
organized by Langhorne titled "Abstract Expressionism: Idea and Symbol,"
held at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in October of that year. The

Introduction 37
 full text of Rubin's lecture appeared in Art in America over the next two months
under the title "Pollock as Jungian Illustrator: The Limits of Psychological
Criticism."153 In brief, he dismissed as mere speculation Pollock's capability
or intention of using Jung's ideas as either an intellectual or a visual source for
archetypal imagery dredged from the unconscious. Rubin furthermore re-
jected any implications that figurative imagery lay "veiled" or buried under-
neath the artist's most abstract poured paintings and suggested alternative
sources, especially in Picasso, for effects that prompted the younger scholars'
Jungian interpretations.154
Despite slightly differing analyses of the psychological meanings of Pol-
lock's iconography, Freke, Wolfe, and Langhorne basically agreed that the
artist's anxieties (many of them sexual) were tied to what Jung termed a nega-
tive anima complex, or fear of the "Terrible Mother." Pollock's problems with
his mother Stella were well documented in letters and interviews quoted in
his biography and published in full in the extensive chronology prepared
for his catalogue raisonné by Francis V. O'Connor. By the mid-1970s, psycho-
analytical explanations of Motherwell's art likewise based on facts about his
life—including the seemingly dysfunctional relationship the young Robert
had with his mother and father—were also being developed. In his 1975 dis-
sertation dissecting Motherwell's patent concern with death in his paintings
and a more concise catalogue essay written for the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf,
Hobbs established that a biographical approach is also essential to uncover-
ing the meaning of Motherwell's creative urge, explaining how such personal
factors are especially evidenced in the artist's signature series, The Elegies to
the Spanish Republic.155
Hobbs relates castration imagery detectable in key early works by Mother-
well, such as Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943; plate 5), to the painter's
charged relationship with a father who did not want his son to pursue an artis-
tic career. Jonathan Fineberg, establishing that the initial version of the stan-
dard format for the Elegies was painted by Motherwell about the time his first
wife left him, construes Motherwell's later admission that he was incapable
of love as reflecting the residue of his mother's neglect of her child's emotional
needs, as well as the artist's repressed oedipal feelings. That the black ovoid
forms that predominate in the Elegies are readable as bull's cojones—ап asso-
ciation promoted by Hobbs—prompts Fineberg to interpret the depressive
mood of these pictures (the prototype for which was influenced by a Garcia
Lorca poem describing the death of a bullfighter) as signaling a combination
of castration anxiety and anger about maternal abandonment.156

38 Introductio n
 In other close readings of Abstract Expressionist iconography produced
during the 19705, Harry Rand saw Gorky's The Calendars (1946) as also en-
coding private family imagery, though more abstractly than the two versions
of his well-known early masterpiece The Artist and His Mother (1926-1929),
works based on a photograph from his sad childhood (fig. 17). Rand points
out that Gottlieb and Pollock also created psychologically meaningful family
portraits in the 19305, symbolic implications from which carried into works
of their Abstract Expressionist periods. Gorky's tragic death by suicide in
1948, just as the movement was becoming solidified (his note ambiguously
read "Goodbye my Loveds"), prompted a new call for clarification of his ide-
ological and artistic "bridge" status in regard to the parallel careers of certain
colleagues, in particular, Graham and de Kooning. In keeping with an impor-
tant tenet of American Action Painting ("A painting that is an act is insepara-
ble from the biography of the artist"), Harold Rosenberg, in an evocative
monograph of 1962, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, had already
typified Gorky's aesthetic "crisis" in urgent autobiographical terms.157
In it Rosenberg tells how Gorky, born Vosdanik Manoog Adoian in 1904
in Van, Armenia, moved to the United States in 1920, adopting the (also ficti-
tious) last name of a famous Russian writer. Gorky then embarked on a search
for artistic style by taking on the personal characteristics of exemplars he ad-
mired as a way to build confidence in his own identity. Remarking that, for
Gorky, "imitation was a learning to be, as well as a learning to do," Rosenberg
cast his hero's unashamed early emulation of such famous painters as Cézanne,
Miró, and Picasso as a series of "psychic partnerships" necessary to advance
into artistic maturity.158 In addition to Rosenberg and Rand's studies, Eliza
Rathbone's essay in American Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artist,
which centered on Gorky's enigmatic 1946 mixed-media painting The Plow
and the Song, in the National Gallery of Art's collection (plate 6), provided a
model for interpreting his highly evocative later imagery on a similarly experi-
ential basis.159
Following Rosenberg's monograph and the publication in the mid-1970s
of Robert ReifTs 1961 dissertation, the important friendship between Gorky,
Graham, and de Kooning became a subject ripe for increased exploration by
critics and art historians. New information about their aesthetic give-and-
take (and the advent of feminism, which produced widely read books on the
plight of the woman in the 19505 such as Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mys-
tique, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch)
also led to revisionist views of de Kooning's Woman series of 1950-1953. In

Introduction 39
 1972 Thomas Hess updated his discussion of these works by superimposing
an anthropological context. He situated de Kooning's still-controversial can-
vases at the intersection of three sociological developments that converged at
the time of their making: growing recognition by women of the need to re-
configure their role in American society in the aftermath of World War II, the
popularity of the pin-up cutie ("a docile and manipulatable godlet") as a way
to assuage resultant male anxieties, and Abstract Expressionism configured—
primarily by Greenberg and his followers—as a high-art alternative to mass-
marketed kitsch.16°
In fact, Hess proposed that we consider de Kooning's "discordant-threat-
ening, passionate" Women as "violent intellectual and emotional criticism, in
visual form, of the contemporaneous situation of the American woman."161
Over the space of a few years, Hess, Lader, Carmean, and Sally Yard all placed
new emphasis on de Kooning's admittedly eclectic prototypes, ranging from
Sumerian sculptures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Rembrandt, Ingres,
Cézanne, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Picasso's later Surrealist-
inspired Synthetic Cubist nudes. John Graham's cross-eyed Two Sisters (1940)
and a Camel cigarettes "T-zone" ad clipped from Time magazine were also
cited as influential. It was synthesizing these sources—rather than working
his way through them like Gorky—that allowed de Kooning to "follow [his]
desires" and create psychologically charged images that read as alternately hi-
larious and ferocious.162 Carmean's essay for American Art at Mid-Century fur-
ther underscored de Kooning's artistic use of the Woman theme for the revela-
tion of personality.
Not unexpectedly, the only sculptor included in Carmean and Rathbone's
1978 National Gallery exhibition was David Smith. During the late 19605,
summarizing critical regard for sculpture of the previous decade, Wayne An-
derson drew attention to the fact that, whereas Greenberg had noticed in 1949
that "the number of promising young sculptors in this country was propor-
tionally much larger than that of young painters," by 1956 he had "canceled
out all the Americans except Smith, with the criticism that the rest had suc-
cumbed to artiness and fanciful improvisation."163 According to Anderson,
aside from Smith, sculptors at work during the most critical period of Ab-
stract Expressionist innovation never developed a clear counterpart in qual-
ity or style to the "fairly well-defined" achievements of the painters. Despite
Smith's interest in biomorphism and use of direct-metal techniques shared by
others including Theodore Roszak, Peter Grippe, Herbert Ferber, Seymour
Lipton, and Ibram Lassaw, as a group their three-dimensional works exhib-

40 Introduction
 ited few if any definable themes or signs of belonging to a stylistic category.
Although he had not been included in Sandler's book, which was limited to
painting, Smith's avowed identification with his painter friends and the simi-
larity of his expressed motivations to theirs (a fact reiterated by the publica-
tion of his preparatory notes for "David Smith Makes a Sculpture" and a ma-
jor retrospective of his two and three-dimensional works at the Guggenheim)
justified Smith's inclusion in the National Gallery's undertaking.
In his introduction to the catalogue for "American Art at Mid-Century,"
Carmean explains that the choice of artists and works for this show was based
on the issue of concentration. Either a series centering on a particular theme
was represented (the case with Gorky, de Kooning, Motherwell, and Newman)
or "the results of an exceptionally focused period in the artist's work" were
revealed (the case with Smith, Rothko, and Pollock). "We found it necessary,"
Carmean writes, "in examining only a small segment of an artist's work—here
thirteen out of Smith's total oeuvre of 676 works of sculpture, for example—to
use a process akin to connoisseurship."164 The depth of the National Gallery
of Art's study of Smith's hieratic, classically themed works of 1962 (cleverly
crafted from pieces of abandoned machinery in Voltri, Italy, for the Spoleto
Festival of Two Worlds) was made possible by Rosalind Krauss's recently
published catalogue raisonné of Smith.165 As many authors were also doing
with Pollock (whose own complete catalogue of works appeared one year
after Smith's), Krauss was interested in interrogating the myths associated
with Smith's artistic persona. Earlier, in Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of
David Smith, Krauss had observed: "A Colossus astride the scrap pile of
heavy industry, Smith was pictured as the artist-welder who could bend steel
to the dictates of his individual will. He was a Titan. He was Vulcan. He was
whatever mythological personage journalists could find to announce the new-
ness, the vitality, and most of all, the independence of postwar American
art."166
Whereas Smith was sometimes contemptuous of such portrayals, Krauss
points out that in other instances (again, not unlike Pollock) he encouraged
their elaboration. By refusing to explicate specific meanings for individual se-
ries or pieces, spouting all-encompassing romantic exhortations and procla-
mations, and "choosing to make public only certain details of his life" (espe-
cially those emphasizing personal struggle), Smith elaborated a consciously
mythic stance. When these strategies are connected to his "narrowly repeti-
tive set of images," the overarching idea that his work was his identity seems
an apt conclusion. Note also, not unlike Krasner, Smith's former wife, the print-

Introduction 41
 maker and sculptor Dorothy Dehner, had begun by the mid-1970s to help his-
torians fill in the gaps left by his purposeful evasions. Dehner's testimony pro-
vided additional evidence that expressing his "resentments and passions" was
basic to the development of Smith's aggressively modernist vocabulary.167
In discussing Abstract Expressionist sculptors, apparently Greenberg,
Anderson, and Carmean did not consider including the work of Louise Bour-
geois, though Bourgeois (who also produced artwork in two and three dimen-
sions during the 19405 and 19503) shared a number of formal and thematic
concerns with the canonical Abstract Expressionists. Bourgeois exhibited
with many of them, most notably in 1945 in "Personal Statement: Painting
Prophecy 1950," organized by David Porter in Washington, DC. For this
show, Porter chose artists whom he believed to demonstrate "personal sym-
bolism" and "evidence of an unique blending o f . . . Romantic and Abstract
Painting."168 Like Pollock and others, Bourgeois made prints at Stanley
William Hayter's New York Atelier 17, and she participated in the Studio 35
panel discussions moderated by Motherwell in April 1950, the transcripts of
which, edited by Robert Goodnough, were published in Modern Artists in
America.169
Frequently mislabeled a Surrealist because of her French nationality (she
married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and moved from Paris
to New York in 1938), like her Abstract Expressionist peers and colleagues,
Bourgeois was stimulated during the war years by the Europeans in exile in
Manhattan. As Deborah Wye has clarified, however, ultimately Bourgeois
would choose a differently focused aspect of their influence to explore:

Through emphasis on the technique of automatism, most New York School

painters moved in the direction of a pure abstraction involving large format,
allover composition, atmospheric fields, and sublime and mystical content.
Bourgeois, in contrast, moved toward a greater psychological literalness
through representational work of a symbolic nature In effect, Surrealism
encouraged her to tap the complex texture of her personal life as a source
for art.170

Whereas Bourgeois has herself explained that "people misunderstood my

work. I am not a surrealist, I am an existentialist," her focused examination of
"the existential situation of woman in modern western society" (frequently
productive of depression and alienation) and the subjective emphasis she
placed on the interconnectedness of childhood memories, female eroticism,
trauma, and aggression separated her trajectory and reputation from those of

42 Introduction
male colleagues such as Smith.171 Drawing equally on primitivism (a field in
which her husband was expert), Bourgeois (fig. 18) was more attracted to its
fetishistic possibilities than to the abstract formalism of primitive art that so
stimulated Barnett Newman.
While admitting the primacy of subject matter to its most original innova-
tors, many essays written in the 19705, especially those accompanying "Amer-
ican Art at Mid-Century," the biggest Abstract Expressionist event of the
decade, continued to exhibit a formalist bent for identifying historic sources
and discussing artistic parallels, thus correcting Greenberg but not letting
go of all of his values. Around the same time, other authors began to express a
stronger critique of Greenberg's concept of a disinterested avant-garde while
also addressing the implications of comments made by Rosenberg in regard
to the relation of artists in the movement to political circumstances coincid-
ing with their development of mastery. What it meant to make advanced art,
these writers suggested, did not remain the same from the Depression through-
out World War II and the subsequent cold war era. Those who adopted this
more historical-materialist approach (many hailing from the United King-
dom) generally considered that Greenberg (an ardent Marxist turned Stalin-
hater) was wrong in asserting the complete independence of art from politics
by the Abstract Expressionists. They often employed as their straw man a
provocative statement made by Greenberg in a memoir first published in
1957: "Abstract art was the main issue among the painters I knew in the late
thirties. Radical politics was on many people's mind, but for these particular
artists Social Realism was as dead as the American Scene. (Though that is not
all, by far, that there was to politics in those years: some day it will have to be
told how 'anti-Stalinism,' which started out more or less as 'Trotskyism,' turned
into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to
come.)" Also ripe for reappraisal was Rosenberg's 1952 assertion in Art News
that "the [American Action Painter's] refusal of Value did not take the form of
condemnation or defiance of society, as it did after World War I. It was diffi-
dent. The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his can-
vas to be a world."172
Five years earlier than that, in Possibilities, Rosenberg and Motherwell
had expressed the reluctance of advanced American artists, in the aftermath
of World War II, to allow themselves to be pressured into the kind of empha-
sis on political engagement that characterized (and weakened aesthetically)
both 19303 Social Realism and early to mid-i940s propaganda for the war
effort. They were, however, less rigid than Greenberg, who came to reject all

Introduction 43
 motivations for creativity that were extrinsic to formal considerations. In their
joint editorial statement for Possibilities, published in the winter of 1947-
1948, Rosenberg and Motherwell left the situation a bit more fluid:

Naturally the deadly political situation exerts an enormous pressure. The

temptation is to conclude that organized social thinking is "more serious"
than the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms which that
experience has made possible.
Political commitment in our time means logically—no art, no literature.
A great many people, however, find it possible to hang around in the space
between art and political action.
If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close
upon him he must perhaps have the extremist faith in sheer possibility.173

Motherwell had made prior directed observations about the issue of artistic
alienation when, for instance, he wrote in "The Modern Painter's World,"
published in DYNin 1944, "Criticism moves in a false direction, as does art,
when it aspires to be a social science. The role of the individual is too great."
He added that the modern artist has "no vital connection to society save that
of the opposition"114 His connected assertion in the same text that "modern
art is related to the problem of the modern individual's freedom" was cited by
Max Kozloff, who wrote the first of seven major articles and one book pub-
lished by various authors between 1973 and 1983 on the subject of Abstract
Expressionism's "misrepresentation" in previous art history and criticism as
apolitical painting.
Kozloff and Serge Guilbaut (whose 1978 UCLA dissertation, written under
the direction of T. J. Clark, was published as How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War) took to task
the "self-congratulatory mood" of previous books such as Irving Sandler's
The Triumph of American Painting. Kozloff and Guilbaut pointed out that
adherence to Greenberg's taste for purity seemingly kept Sandier from recog-
nizing the wide-ranging implications of statements by Motherwell and other
Abstract Expressionist artists (another good example is Newman's "What
About Isolationist Art?" of IQ4¿)175 that indicated a larger engagement with the
world. For example, Guilbaut's interpretation of Gottlieb and Rothko's 1943
letter to the New York Times (which prompted Jewell to mock them as "global-
ists") reorients its impetus from a manifesto of aesthetic principles to a Trot-
skyite "action" of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors' Cul-
tural Committee.176

44 Introduction
 Guilbaut focuses his "social study of Abstract Expressionism" on reevalu-
ating New York School artists' prime motivations for creativity during the
period from 1946 to 1951, which he characterizes as a "silent interval" sand-
wiched between the more overtly political Depression and cold war eras. By
contrast, Kozloff, Eva Cockcroft, Jane de Hart Mathews, William Hauptman,
John Tagg, and David and Cécile Shapiro wrote essays in the 19703 that ex-
amined varying implications of a heretofore surprisingly underanalyzed his-
torical fact: that the triumph of American art "occurred during the same pe-
riod as burgeoning claims of American world hegemony" in the aftermath of
this country's critical role in securing an Allied victory. All agreed that "a de-
tailed knowledge of the history of the Cold War is crucial for understanding
our subject and decisive for the analysis of the movement's artistic style."177
Most of these authors built on or contested points introduced by the oth-
ers. Cockcroft, for instance, took issue with a remark by Kozloff: "That [the
Abstract Expressionists] heroicized their tasks in a way suggestive of Ameri-
can Cold War rhetoric was a coincidence that must surely have gone un-
noticed by rulers and ruled alike."178 She demonstrated that this was no co-
incidence given the role played by the Rockefellers in grooming several
secretaries of state and in running the Museum of Modern Art, whose inter-
national art programs supported CIA policy. Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s catalogue for
"The New American Painting," which traveled in Europe in 1958-1959 and
his earlier article "Is American Art Communistic?"179 are described as influ-
ential apologias for the politically useful concept that American artists' free-
dom to be abstract provided a necessary counterbalance to the tight control
over artistic style (limited to Realism) exerted by the likes of Hitler and Stalin.
Mathews points out the irony of the ascendancy of this view of Abstract Ex-
pressionism as reinforcing the nationalistic goals of the United States in light
of the attempted congressional repression (on nativist grounds) of nontradi-
tional art and an allied condemnation of the leftist sympathies of modern art-
ists. These were orchestrated, respectively, by Michigan Republican George
Dondero and rabid anti-Communist Joseph McCarthy during the late 19405
and early 19505.
The Shapiros, Guilbaut (who is French-Canadian), and later the British art
historians Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock have been more directly critical
of Greenberg's position in this drama.180 In particular, the non-American writ-
ers perceive Greenberg's defection from radical socialism to promotion of
radical purity as having played into the hands of U.S. capitalist-imperialists,
and details exposed in Annette Cox's Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expression-

Introduction 45
 ist Avant-Garde and Society seemed to confirm Greenberg's critical route to
McCarthyist leanings. By the time he wrote his introduction to Defining Mod-
ern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1986), Irving Sandier felt
compelled to defend Barr against charges by these "Neo-Marxists" that he had
been a principal architect of the conversion of authoritarian Greenbergian
Modernism into a Cold War "complaisant accessory."181 Uncovering the "con-
cealed" motivators of New York School success became a prime impetus for
more than a decade's worth of revisionist art history.

The 1980s: Reading New Significations

In his 1973 overview of the movement for a popular-market book on the

concepts of modern art, Charles Harrison suggests, "One wants to establish a
view of Abstract Expressionism which is broadly heuristic rather than dog-
matic."182 This mandate was not to be fulfilled during the 19705. Responding
to the continued proliferation of disparaging comments, in particular those
made by the British reviewer Peter Fuller, in 1980 Donald Kuspit suggested
how new directions might still be possible for Abstract Expressionist critique:

Despite the air of an arbitrary diatribe verging on the preposterous—

confirmed by Fuller's gross ignorance of the American scene, his posses-
sion of the worst of clichés about it—Fuller does restore an earlier sense
of Abstract Expressionism as a controversial art. This is valuable, for it
puts the art sufficiently in doubt for us to feel compelled to renew our
faith in it. Perhaps more is at stake than had been previously assumed,
in a dimension previously unexplored yet signaled by the art.183

Subscribing to a Marxist view still recognizably popular in the United King-

dom, Fuller was indeed long on criticism and short on praise for what, as
Kuspit points out, he termed the American Abstract Expressionists' descent
into a "dubious fantasy world of ineffectual feeling." He did acknowledge that
Motherwell, at least, managed to transcend petty subjectivity and achieve "a
new way of expressing an individual response to history." As Hilton Kramer
pointed out, MotherwelPs Elegies to the Spanish Republic apparently repre-
sent "the only explicitly political avowal to be found in the entire history of
Abstract Expressionist painting."184
Interest in MotherwelPs more social bent continued in the work of younger
art historians during the 19805, most notably Robert Mattison and Bradford
Collins. Mattison's in-depth study of the artist's development and especially
of MotherwelPs fascination with "images of power and vulnerability" as seen

46 Introduction
in Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, The Emperor of China, and The Homely Prot-
estant (smaller-scale works of the early 19405) demonstrated anew the the-
matic and stylistic inevitability of his signature series, the Elegies.1^ Ex-
ploring the ramifications of the artist's somewhat cryptic statement that "the
Spanish Elegies are not 'political,' but my private insistence that a terrible
death happened that should not be forgot," Collins considers the more than
150 paintings that Motherwell had created on this theme by 1984 as allegories
of his ethical consciousness. He points to the contradictions inherent in
Motherwell's Guernica-inspired use of "modern art as a vehicle for public dis-
course" since the "format and subject matter attempt to keep alive a tradition
which the subject, on a metaphoric level, claims is dead."186 Although the art-
ist's desire to see himself as Picasso's rightful heir is counted as inherently fu-
tile, Motherwell, in Collins's judgment, maintained his integrity via through a
valiant attempt to synthesize formalist and expressionist motivations.
Other authors of the 19805 who were interested in Motherwell include Jack
Flam and Dore Ashton, both of whom pointed to the modernist terms by
means of which he manipulated traditionally symbolic artistic language, par-
ticularly the language of color. That Motherwell's work "shuttles back and
forth between two moods: the darkly monstrous in which mythic undertones
reside, and the brightly ecstatic, which confirms the vicissitudes of material
daily life,"187 and that these polarities were expressed by either a restriction
to black and white or the Matissean exuberance of sensual, fully saturated
ochres, blues, and reds, was deemed by Ashton and Flam to be a manifesta-
tion of the artist's singular attraction to allusive nineteenth-century French
poetry. Motherwell's extensive verbal commentary on the associations and
materiality of color (telling Bryan Robertson, "I think of color as a thing, not
an abstraction"),188 juxtaposed with quotations from his admired literary, ar-
tistic and philosophical sources, formed the basis for an influential 1980 solo
exhibition.
As early as Lawrence Alloway's trail-blazing essay "Residual Sign Systems
in Abstract Expressionism" (1973), fresh interest in significant connotations
of color as a perceptive phenomenon began to replace praise for the purely
syntactical properties of hue represented by Fried's notion of opticality. Five
years later, Kuspit invoked Ernst Cassirer's concept of "symbolic pregnance,"
defined as "the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains
at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and
concretely represents," in a philosophical study of color field paintings by
Rothko and Still.189 Like Alloway, Kuspit comes to radically different conclu-

Introduction 47
 sions about their pictures than did those (such as the artist-critic Walter Darby
Bannard) who continued to adhere to Greenberg and Fried's more reductive
and "aestheticizing" form of analysis. Kuspit locates Rothko's and Still's pro-
duction of metaphysical meaning by abstraction (a declared intent typically
ignored by the formalists) in their evident oscillation between "contradictory
impulses" of the sensual and the spiritual as denoted in ambiguities of form
and color. He concludes that "the sensation of suspension—of indeterminate
hovering—generates the momentum of Rothko-Still pictures, and is the source
of their lovely incomprehensible and esoteric implications." In general, it is
Kuspit's view that "the best Abstract-Expressionist painting never resolves
itself"; the more open the situation, the greater the suggestive quality.190
Alloway's argument that color associations were critical signifiers of con-
tent for the first generation, especially for color field practitioners, increas-
ingly interested scholars writing throughout the 19805. Eschewing "a program-
matic or consistent use of color symbolism," such authors as Evan Firestone,
Ann Gibson, and Claude Cernuschi—in addition to Kuspit—explored how
and why a number of painters in the mid-i940s began calling on color to bear
the primary burden of conveying specific inner experience (representing,
in Rothko's words, the "basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom").191
Firestone marshaled a wide variety of early and later statements as evidence,
including a 1959 avowal by Still ("I never wanted color to be color; I never
wanted texture or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse into a
living spirit") and an admission by Motherwell (who had been grouped with
the color field painters by Arnason and Sandier) that "my Spanish Elegies are
also free association; black is death, anxiety; white is life, éclat."192
In accord with his other explorations of the New York School (elsewhere
he analyzes the artists' attraction to stylistic and thematic suggestions in the
writings of Herman Melville and James Joyce),193 Firestone attributes a strong
component of their desire to use color to communicate significant content to
the Abstract Expressionists' admiration for European literary and philosoph-
ical prototypes (in particular, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche). This did
not align with Alloway's appraisal of Newman's 1948 comment that "here in
America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding
the answer by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem
of beauty and where to find it" and Still's (somewhat more paranoid) 1952
statement that "the fog has been thickened, not lifted, by those who, out of
weakness or for positions of power, looked back to the Old World for means to
extend their authority in this newer land."194 In "Residual Sign Systems,"

48 Introduction
Alloway identified in remarks such as these a typology of binary contrasts
including "dedication (America) and exhaustion (Europe), vitality and ele-
gance, honesty and learning" that pointed to an ethical connection between
American creativity and primitivist energy.195
Gibson continued this argument, asserting that the color field artists' stated
intention of including philosophical and psychological content in works
whose structure privileged color instead of form implies "a substantial con-
nection" to the concept of regression. She borrowed this "two-pronged" no-
tion, which involves "the idea of going back in either personal time (to infancy
or further) [or] that of going back in cultural time (to a more primitive societal
state)" from The Apocalyptic Vision (1979), a book about Franz Marc by Fred-
erick Levine. Under the influence of Graham's System and Dialectics of Art,
Gibson points out, Newman, Gottlieb, Still, and Rothko came to believe that
"color was best suited to undertake the role of generating an intuitive, primal
union of self and environment." She establishes the centrality to these artists
of connections made by John Graham between primitive culture and creative
potential originating in the collective unconscious.196
By the time Gibson wrote her article, Stephen Polcari had already pub-
lished his investigation of the intellectual roots of Mark Rothko, in which the
Jungian archetypal components of this artist's early 19405 biomorphic recon-
figurations of primordial nature figure prominently. After expressing "kinship
with primitive and archaic art" in the letter that he and Gottlieb sent in the
summer of 1943 to the New York Times, Rothko, on a radio show the following
fall, expounded on their idea (also shared with Newman) that identification
"with the primeval and atavistic" had to be redescribed "through our own ex-
perience."197 As Polcari firmly established and Jeffrey Weiss detailed further,
for the color field painters this experience included formal study, or at least
informal interest in anthropology and science, and reflected the residual ef-
fects of wartime fears and trepidations, especially about the atomic bomb.198
In addition to a survey of primitivist tendencies and imagery in Abstract Ex-
pressionism written by Kirk Varnedoe for the Museum of Modern Art's con-
troversial show " Trimitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and
the Modern,"199 1985 saw the publication of W.Jackson Rushing's "Ritual and
Myth: Native American Art and Abstract Expressionism" in "The Spiritual
in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985," an exhibition spearheaded by Maurice
Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum.
In "Ritual and Myth" Rushing postulates explicit prototypes in Indian
tribes of the Northwest Coast and elsewhere and details fully a nexus of

Introduction 49
 Native American mythic sources for both color-field and gestural Abstract
Expressionists, especially Pollock. These sources include Jung, Graham, the
Surrealist Wolfgang Paalen (in exile in Mexico), and the December 1943
Amerindian issue of Paalen's influential magazine DYN, as well as exhibi-
tions held in New York in the 19405 at the Museum of Modern Art and the
American Museum of Natural History. Rushing also highlights Newman's cu-
ratorial efforts for the Betty Parsons Gallery, especially "Northwest Coast In-
dian Painting" (1946) and "The Ideographic Picture" (1947). Newman's essay
for the latter has already been cited as a crucial document for identifying the
goals of Abstract Imagism, especially the attainment of Sublimity. This topic
was explored further by Michael Zakian and by Auping in an essay on New-
man's continuing influence included in "Abstract Expressionism: The Criti-
cal Developments."200
Two years later Rushing published a probing study of the impact of North-
west Coast tribal art on Newman based on a lecture that Rushing presented
in the 1986 College Art Association panel that reconsidered meaning in Ab-
stract Expressionism. In this study he explains how the highly intellectual art-
ist's attraction to theories of Nietzsche (on Apollonian-Dionysian duality),
Jung (on the rejuvenating powers of myth), and the art historian Wilhelm
Worringer (on abstraction and empathy) coalesced to create an attitude to-
ward pictorial content that considers "tragedy as the artistic redemption of
chaos." Others writing in the 19805, including the British critic David Syl-
vester the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, renewed attention (first
paid by Hess and Rosenberg) to the possibility that sources for Newman's
mature paintings were also rooted in his Jewish background.201 On the basis
of Gershom Scholem's discussion of the esoteric ideas of Rabbi Isaac Luria, a
sixteenth-century mystic from Tsfat (located in present-day northern Israel),
in 1971 Hess postulated that there was a basis in the Kabbalah for Newman's
vertical stripe "imagery." According to Matthew Baigell, Hess described New-
man as having "captured on the pictorial surface the very moment of creation
that Rabbi Luria described—the moment of the first ray of the light of cre-
ation, before matter, and therefore space, became differentiated." Read thus,
Newman's Onement I, his first "zip," or stripe, painting, is "a complex sym-
bol, in the purest sense, of Genesis itself."202 This understanding provided a
basis for Hess's humanistic (as opposed to Christian theological) interpreta-
tion of Newman's Stations of the Cross.
During the 19808 Anna C. Chave similarly proposed the presence of
innately religious "imagery" in Rothko's apparently non-objective signature

50 Introduction
paintings, which were composed of lightly brushed hovering rectangles of
color (see plate 7). In Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction, Chave argued that
the canvases Rothko painted after 1949 "keep alluding to received pictorial
codes, even as he set about effacing them." In 1952 he commented that "ab-
stract art never interested me; I always painted realistically. My present paint-
ings are realistic." This predates a similar assertion that Pollock made not long
before his death in 1956.203 Rejecting what was regularly being written about
him, Rothko told another critic in the 19505, "You might as well get one thing
straight. Pm not an abstractionist . . . Pm not interested in relationships of
color or form or anything else."204 What he was interested in, according to
Chave, was intensifying expression of universally meaningful subjects—such
as birth and death—by providing visual analogues to the pictorial conven-
tions of sacred imagery. To provide a typical example of how this was done,
Chave compared the blurry shapes in Rothko's Number rj (1947) with those
of a characteristic Renaissance Madonna ana Child by Giovanni Bellini and
his workshop. She found similar "oblique and nearly effaced" parallels be-
tween other Rothko compositions and traditional Christian depictions of the
entombment and the pietà. Notwithstanding the fact that he was born Mar-
cus Rothkowitz to a Russian Jewish family, Chave considered Rothko to be a
religious man without a doctrine; his fundamentally pessimistic outlook, which
eventually led to suicide, certainly ran counter to Judaism's primary injunc-
tion to "choose life."205
Whereas Chave shifts Rosenblum's suggestion that Rothko's works update
the mysticism invested in landscapes by nineteenth-century Romantic paint-
ers to the implication of traces of a more figurative religious vocabulary, Claude
Cernuschi, although agreeing that there is subjective content in Rothko's sig-
nature canvases, rejected the notion of a relation of the artist's forms to any
fixed symbols or conventions. Rather, Cernuschi likened Rothko's private vi-
sual grammar to the arbitrary nature of the sign as delineated in Ferdinand de
Saussure's Course in General Linguistics.™ According to Saussure, unlike the
way a symbol works to evoke recognition, the association of a linguistic sign
with a specific object is abstract and therefore acquires meaning by repetition,
not imitation. Cernuschi postulated that the sacred nature of the pictorial
dramas that Rothko desired to re-create was achieved solely by tonal and po-
sitional manipulations that take on their own signification, not by oblique ref-
erences to traditional renderings of subjects of a religious nature.
The type of semiotic interpretation that Cernuschi advanced for under-
standing Rothko was broadened to encompass additional painters207 and

Introduction 51
 ancillary points made by Saussure, С. S. Peirce, Roman Jakobson, Claude
Lévi-Strauss, and other structuralist linguists and anthropologists in Ann
Gibson's essay for "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments," or-
ganized by Auping. Her text, she explains, was written specifically to demon-
strate that "an old tool (rhetoric) may be adapted to a new purpose (looking
at the ways in which subject matter and form are related in Abstract Expres-
sionism)."208 Gibson documents the successive employment by a variety of
artists in the 19405 and 19503 of the rhetorical devices of symbol, metaphor,
icon, mystic oxymoron, and narrative allegory. She explains that although not
every artist used each of these devices, in one way or another references to
these diverse literary tropes were critical to the Abstract Expressionist elabo-
ration of content by abstract means. Rothko, for example, refused certain as-
pects of the latter two (or rejected them outright) but capitalized on implica-
tions of all of the others.
Gibson details the way meaning in Abstract Imagist works such as Roth-
ko's can be understood more fully by applying visually the linguistic cate-
gories established by C. S. Peirce; especially critical is his differentiation be-
tween symbol and icon. Symbols refer by virtue of social agreement, whereas
icons are linked to the thing represented by "exhibiting that thing." According
to Gibson "So defined, Peirce's metaphoric icon is most similar to Newman's
'living thing'—a conception of painting in which the work of art embodies
in various ways that to which it refers, rather than merely standing for it in ab-
sentia." A sign, of course, is recognized as iconic only by viewer agreement.
Thus, by the time Rothko arrived at his "multiforms" (transitional between
the earlier explicitly biomorphic imagery and his mature style), his paintings
"could be said to collapse the traditional dichotomy between sensual experi-
ence and representation" (fig 6). Rothko achieved this synthesis by moving
past forms that alluded, however obliquely, either to the Jungian "sea of the
unconscious" or to traditional religious subject matter and creating instead
"forms that seemed themselves to float and refract light rather than to refer to
things that do." Gibson clarifies this idea: "As Peirce's definition indicates,
real iconic status is only achieved when the distinction between the real and
the copy, the signifier and the signified, coalesces in the viewer's mind. In
other words, when one can no longer distinguish between the art and what it
means, when the art is what it means, then it is iconic."209
In her discussion of Newman's masterwork VirHeroicus Sublimis, Gibson
highlights the ambiguity of the figure-ground relation (which metaphorizes
void and solid) as indicative of the artist's adoption of the mystic oxymoron in

52 Introduction
order to create meaning. Thus, one way Newman achieved the Sublime was
deliberately to construct his paintings so that they could only be understood
in contradictory ways, reversing the regularity and limits imposed by the clas-
sical category of the Beautiful. Likewise, Gibson describes how Rothko ap-
preciated the suggestiveness of irony, which involves saying less than one
means, or even its opposite. She sees de Kooning, Krasner, and Motherwell—
all of whom used the recycling techniques of collage with great distinction—
as applying the intertextuality characteristic of allegory, which "redeems the
past for the present," in order to elaborate Abstract Expressionist content.
Pollock's return to figuration in the 19505 is described as replacing his earlier
"progression away from ways of referring in which the sensory properties
of the art look like (are mimetically, or metonymically related to) those of
the referent" with "qualities that functioned like those of a model outside the
work."210 By 1953, when he created his painting titled Portrait and a Dream,
in which a "not sober" self-portrait is juxtaposed with a savage and erotic
confrontation that reprises his earlier Moon Woman fixation,211 Pollock was
integrating metonymy and metaphor in the allegorical sense (fig. 19).
Another essay commissioned by Auping for "Critical Developments" also
investigates the signature works of Pollock from a semiotic point of view. The
authority of these 1947-1950 canvases had recently been confirmed once
again in a hugely influential retrospective held at the Centre Georges Pompi-
dou in Paris. Richard ShifPs "Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of
Abstract Expressionism" suggests that we re-view the marks made by ges-
tural Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock as "markings," taking them
more " 'literally' as actual physical imprints or impressions." In order to do
this, a "nuanced theoretical vocabulary" is again required; especially impor-
tant is an understanding of the difference between Peirce's icon and index.
"An iconic sign," Shift0points out, "works by resemblance; it shares some dis-
cernible quality with its object," whereas "an indexical sign works by causal
connection; it refers to its own origin by 'representing' or indicating the
physical process that brought it into being."212 Iconicity (one image resem-
bling another) is therefore the opposite of indexicality, a matter of perform-
ance rather than appearance.
After a short discussion of the coexistence of iconicity and indexicality in
de Kooning's Woman series, Shiff describes Pollock as the "ultimate painting
performer," an interpretation encouraged by the more than five hundred black
and white still photographs taken by Hans Namuth of the artist in the process
of painting such classic poured pictures as Autumn Rhythm. Visitors to the

Introduction 53
 1982 Pompidou exhibition were assaulted by gigantic blow-ups of some of
these in which Pollock, under the spell of his creativity, seems to move around
his canvas like a matador or dancer, wholly engaged in an intense dialogue
with the drips and spatters he is making. "It was great drama," Namuth said
of his first glimpse of Jackson Pollock in the studio: "the flame of explosion
when the paint hit the canvas; the dancelike movement; the eyes tormented
before knowing where to strike next; the tension, then the explosion again.
My hands were trembling."213 Barbara Rose's 1978 publication in France of
L'Atelier de Jackson Pollock reproduced a larger number of Namuth's photos
than any previous text. In a two-part article appearing in the March 1979 issue
of Arts Magazine, Rose suggested that Namuth's use of high-speed film and
the style of motion photography common for stalking wild animals "capture
Pollock's spontaneity in images that freeze the artist's frenzied movements
into a blur of urgency," arguing further that these characteristics had "attached
themselves as additional meanings to his works to a degree that they began to
color the perception of his paintings."214
Shiff points to what is obvious in Namuth's images: that "Pollock's manner
of tracing a line from above, which resembled that of the Indian painters,
transferred his gesture from hand to body"; as a result, the artist's poured
pictures obviously index his successive movements through space.215 (New-
man's use of masking tape, pulled off the canvas to create his "zips," is cited as
another example of how one of Abstract Expressionism's major practitioners
"performed an appearance.") Furthermore, Shiff establishes that in works by
artists influenced by Pollock—such as Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who
imitated Pollock's drips in papier-mache—the markings of Pollock's indexi-
cality were subsequently converted (often employing parody or irony) into
recognizable iconic signs. The idea that Pollock and Newman opened up new
ways of thinking for their followers (rather than, as in de Kooning's case,
merely providing an example to imitate for gestural painters of the 19505) pro-
vided a categorical impetus to réévaluation of Abstract Expressionism during
the 1980s.216
Numerous book-length studies of Pollock's art appeared at about this
time,217 the most notorious of which, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, advanced interconnected theories
that the innovative techniques of "Jack the Dripper" had been inspired by
watching his father urinate on a rock and that Pollock's personal and artistic
anxieties were caused by latent homosexual tendencies. Elizabeth Langhorne
further elaborated her Jungian theories, and Kuspit, as well as Francis V.

54 Introduction
O'Connor, weighed in with their own psychoanalytic interpretations. O'Con-
nor's exhibition "Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings 1951-53," held at the
Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1980, zeroed in on the underval-
ued period of Pollock's return to more recognizable images dredged from his
unconscious. These he "drew" (the artist's own word) with black enamel on
unprimed canvas, either by pouring directly from a can, letting paint drip off
a loaded brush, or squirting with a basting syringe (as seen in Portrait and a
Dream). O'Connor considers the psychosexual implications of these (ejacula-
tory) methods as well as "the archetypal fact of Pollock's birth trauma: choked
by the cord and, according to his mother, born 'as black as a stove.'"218 Car-
mean provided an alternate explanation of this series, connecting the draw-
ings in black enamel on canvas to a little-known architectural collaboration
between Pollock and the sculptor Tony Smith, the design for a never-built
Catholic church destined for somewhere on Long Island. Carmean's opinion
that these works also reference traditional Christian iconography was hotly
contested by Rosalind Krauss.219
Two other notable exhibitions, one held at the beginning of the decade in
East Hampton and Manhattan and the other mounted in 1989 at the Kunst-
museum Bern in Switzerland, focused on the fact that, all the while he was
creating his prototypical works, Pollock's wife Lee Krasner had been trying,
with varied success, to have an important painting career of her own. Barbara
Rose, in a show seen at Guild Hall and the Grey Art Center at New York Uni-
versity in 1981, promoted the idea that Pollock's and Krasner's was "a work-
ing relationship," in which each contributed to the other's progress (although
Krasner had apparently suppressed this information because it did not square
with the accepted view of Pollock). Rose augmented this thesis in her cata-
logue for Krasner's first retrospective in the United States, which traveled
from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to three additional venues, cul-
minating in a joint presentation in 1985 in Brooklyn and Manhattan.220 In
two articles based on my dissertation, which examined Krasner's career up
to Pollock's death, and in "Lee Krasner—Jackson Pollock: Künstlerpaare—
Kimstlerfreunde," the first joint showing of their work in Europe, a somewhat
more complicated view of their interaction emerged. Based on interviews
with Krasner and other artists, critics, dealers, and friends who knew them as
a couple, another picture develops, one that reveals "a charged web of de-
pendence and autonomy."221
As already established, most critical to Krasner's inclusion with the first-
generation male pioneers were canvases of the 1946-1949 series she called her

Introduction 55
 Little Images. Using a paint tube top or a stiff brush, or pouring from a small
can of enamel, to create these Krasner worked on a flat surface as Pollock did,
but on a table top, not on the floor. She, too, designed allover compositions
with no focal point; however, because none was larger than three feet on any
side, there was no question of walking around or into these paintings as Pol-
lock had begun to do. Whereas, as Seitz, Eugene C. Goossen, and others have
established, the impact and quite often the "heroic" contextual meanings at-
tached to the New York School have relied to a significant degree on a shared
tendency to work on oversized canvases, a 1989 traveling exhibition organ-
ized by Jeffrey Wechsler demonstrated that Krasner was not the only artist
for whom Abstract Expressionism also had "other dimensions." Moreover,
Wechsler's enterprise was one of the first group shows to challenge the usual
roster of participants.222 Discussions with Irving Sandier and Sam Hunter
that were published in the catalogue centered largely on the need to redefine
the movement as a "coherent stylistic entity" with broader stylistic bound-
aries and a larger cast of characters than those included in prior books and
exhibitions.
Paul Schimmel's 1986 show "The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism
into Abstract Expressionism," provided an interesting, slightly different look
at an even wider selection of earlier works associated with the budding Ab-
stract Expressionists, including some of their colleagues who had not so far
made the final cut. This show, which started out at the Newport Harbor Mu-
seum in California and made appearances at the Walker Art Center and the
Whitney, presented a range of works on paper from 1938 to 1948 by both
Americans and European exiles in New York in order to demonstrate the ex-
tensive and catalytic effect of borrowings and transformations of European
vocabulary and technique.223
The urge to provide an overview of Abstract Expressionist innovation and
to expand its cultural breadth produced, all within a few years of each other,
Auping's "Critical Developments," Gibson and Polcari's session at the Col-
lege Art Association and the related issue of Art Journal, the anthologies
edited by Clifford Ross and David and Cécile Shapiro, and Frascina's com-
pendium Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. At intervals throughout the
early 19803, Donald Kuspit, editor of the UMI Research Press series "Studies
in the Fine Arts: Art Theory," fostered publication of three doctoral dis-
sertations that focused on articulating the polarities inherent in Abstract Ex-
pressionist criticism. In these, Annette Cox, Stewart Buettner, and Stephen

56 Introduction
Foster expanded material (primarily on Greenberg and Rosenberg) that Phyl-
lis Rosenzweig had surveyed in "The Fifties: Aspects of Criticism in New
York," an essay that accompanied a 1980 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden exhibition.
Two years after Rosenzweig's summary was published, a differently moti-
vated investigation of Greenberg's partisanship appeared in a special issue
of the magazine Critical Inquiry. The British art historian T. J. Clark, now
teaching in the United States, had employed that magazine's subtitle, The Pol-
itics of Interpretation, in a symposium paper sponsored by the University of
Chicago's Center for Continuing Education. Clark's socially based reconsid-
eration of "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art" was followed by Michael
Fried's verbal response. Both were reproduced in Critical Inquiry, and Frascina
added Clark's subsequent 1983 rejoinder to Fried in Pollock and After. As
might be expected, Clark declared up front that he was primarily interested in
"pressing home a Marxist reading of texts which situate themselves within the
Marxist tradition." At issue were Greenberg's 1939 and 1940 essays "Avant-
Garde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Laocoon," in which, as we have
seen, key arguments were introduced that would later be amplified when
Greenberg discussed works by artists associated with Abstract Expression-
ism. In each of these early articles, Greenberg declared the thrust of the avant-
garde to be a causal reaction to bourgeois materialism and the "leveling down
of culture" that occurred during the rise of late capitalism. Clark interpreted
the formal logic of Greenberg's resultant call for purity as bound up with
"practices of negation" (re)presented by the extreme valorization of flatness in
Greenberg's recipe for Modernism. Clark did not agree with Greenberg's ve-
hement belief that "art can substitute itself for the values capitalism has made
valueless."224
In his rebuttal, Fried challenged Clark on the basis that he had fallen prey
to "certain erroneous assumptions" about Modernism expounded by Green-
berg; despite Fried's belief that Greenberg should be considered "the fore-
most critic of new painting and sculpture of our time," he claims the right to
advance his own "alternative conception of the modernist enterprise." Fried
takes Clark to task for never discussing specific instances of the so-called ne-
gation that Modernist art represents and for his refusal "to accept the propo-
sition that with the advent of modernism art becomes or is revealed to be
c
a provider of value in its own right.'" Modernism, Fried avers, does not dis-
card the essential in order to reflect "the incoherence and contradictoriness of

Introduction 57
 modem capitalist society" because, optimistically "establishing his work's non-
trivial identity as painting," the Modernist artist is first and foremost inter-
ested in art, not in social critique.225
In "Abstract Expressionism: 'New and Improved,'" his 1988 Art Journal
editorial statement, Stephen Polcari disagreed with both Clark and Fried; he
and his co-editor decided to question such an exchange of "new myths for old"
in "redefining Abstract Expressionism." Polcari's assertion that the movement
"is a historical product of a unique moment" dismisses Fried's self-sufficiency
theory, but he is equally unconvinced by any "critical scheme [that] presents
Abstract Expressionism as responding to and participating in the political,
critical, and economic events of the late 19305 through 19503." In Polcari's esti-
mation, clinging to, maintaining, even (like Clark) continuing to argue about
"fundamentally flawed" interpretations first formulated by Greenberg and Ro-
senberg decades earlier manifests naïveté and arrested critical development.
"An art as rich as Abstract Expressionism, which at times aspires to the layered
complexity and content of Joyce, cannot be reduced by its alleged 'Imperialist'
supporters or its opponents to either a formalist search for flatness or a vehicle
for political sloganeering." Polcari asserts that a "responsible, informed socio-
political history of the movement" had not yet been written.226

The 1990s: Re(de)fining Abstract Expressionism

What avenues did Polcari and Gibson's call for reassessment propose in
order to provide fresh directions for Abstract Expressionist criticism that
would not result in a mere placement of new wine in old bottles? Gibson, rec-
ognizing that all interpretations eventually, in turn, become fodder for ad-
ditional revisions, acknowledges, "In calling this issue of Art Journal 'New
Myths for Old,' Stephen Polcari and I recall Claude Lévi-Strauss's comment
on his own The Raw and the Cooked: 'this book on myths is itself a kind of
myth.'"227 Both editors advocated for a more synthetic approach that would
incorporate to a greater degree newer tendencies in art history that so far
"have only nibbled at Abstract Expressionism." In her more generally focused
review of the field essay, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in Ameri-
can Art," contemporaneously published in the Art Bulletin, Wanda Corn pro-
posed that the key to innovative hermeneutics might simply depend on "what
questions you ask."228 Beginning in the early 19905, the nature and substance
of questions about Abstract Expressionism took a number of turns that, build-
ing on Polcari's recipe and Gibson's prophecy, involved re(de)fining inter-
actions, both contextual and artistic.

58 Introduction
 The final decade of the twentieth century began with the appearance of
a number of serious monographs intent on assessing the movement anew.
The first of these were produced between 1990 and 1993 by David Anfam,
Polcari, and Michael Leja (whose doctoral work on Abstract Expressionism
had first been introduced in Auping's Critical Developments).229 Nineteen
ninety-three also saw the publication of David Thistlewood's American Ab-
stract Expressionism, produced to accompany the Tate Gallery Liverpool ex-
hibition "Myth-Making: Abstract Expressionist Painting from the United
States," as well as Modernism in Dispute: Art Since the Forties, an entry in Yale
University Press's Modern Art Practices and Debates series, produced in con-
junction with London's Open University. Jonathan Harris's chapter in the lat-
ter, "Modernism and Culture in the USA, 1930-1960," included an extensive
analysis of Abstract Expressionism and the politics of criticism.
In 1990 Anfam, a British expert on Clyfford Still who would subsequently
edit Mark Rothko's catalogue raisonné, was charged with presenting Abstract
Expressionism to a lay audience (his book is one of Thames & Hudson's
"World of Art" paperback surveys). Anfam first rehearses various prior ac-
counts of the movement, ranging from the popular and satirical (including
Tom Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word and Norman Rockwell's Saturday
Evening Post cover for January 13,1962, Abstract and Concrete: The Connois-
seur, which depicts an elderly gentleman with umbrella and hat staring in
wonder at a Pollock drip painting) to Greenberg's Modernism and Guilbaut's
polemics. Anfam concludes: "Our problem now seems less that these various
accounts ring true or false than that they remain too exclusive for art and art-
ists who above all strove to be all-inclusive. Few artistic phenomena this cen-
tury push us further towards Coleridge's quixotic wish for "one central per-
spective point" where all the fragments of truth will knot together. Few also
elude it so consistently"230 Anfam not only chooses to include David Smith
with the painters because of shared formative influences and themes but he
also adds the photographer Aaron Siskind, whose pictures of urban city walls
often resemble the black-and-white gestural compositions of Kline. At promi-
nent points throughout his text, Anfam expounds his belief (which puts a
somewhat different spin on Seitz's primary thesis) that "a traumatic Zeitgeist
is discerned easily enough in Abstract Expressionism's daemonic figures and
fractured forms." The "sombre ritualistic atmosphere, unsparing surfaces,
and exacerbated drawing" produced by its major practitioners result in "a
more brutal aesthetic norm than the spiritual and sometimes Utopian abstrac-
tion" of European precursors.231

Introduction 59
 In a separate study of Clyfford Still's early career published in Burlington
Magazine, Anfam sees this pessimism and darkness of vision as exemplified
in Still's statement that his paintings of the mid-i94Os ( just beginning to take
on their mature form) were "of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated"
(fig. 20).232 Writing for the Tate Liverpool catalogue, Anfam emphasizes that
such narrative tendencies coexisted with the iconic throughout Abstract Ex-
pressionism, an aporia that significantly problematizes any attempt to estab-
lish clear-cut boundaries for discussing it as a style. As he describes it, a "po-
tent desire to embody meaning while riven by the sense of its undoing" was a
prime creative motivation not only for Still but for a significant number of the
Abstract Expressionists.233
In "Of War, Demons, and Negation," a lengthy review article for the fall
1993 issue of the British journal Art History, Anfam weighed in with his opin-
ion of recent books about Pollock, a new edited volume by Guilbaut, Ross's
and the Shapiros' anthologies, and Polcari's Abstract Expressionism and the
Modern Experience. Because it has been so well researched, Anfam observes,
Abstract Expressionism "is not a field likely to be transformed in the near
future by any sudden abundance of new facts," and the outcome of this situa-
tion has been the escalation of subsidiary issues. Moreover, he notes, as a con-
sequence of critical or scholarly ambition and other reputational concerns,
writing with the notion that "the Authorized Version of Abstract Expression-
ism is the story that, ipso facto, exposes the fictiveness of its rivals" has been
prevalent since the movement's beginnings. Polcar i is deemed by Anfam to have
"leapt boldly" past such problems as Naifeh and Smith's overdetermined in-
terpretations of Pollock's compositions angled to prove that "they represent
(psychological) alter egos."234
Anfam shares with Polcari a distinct attraction to the oeuvres of Rothko
and Still, as well as to the identification of a crisis mentality as being signifi-
cantly formative not only for these two artists but also for the larger group. In
earlier essays on the intellectual roots of Rothko and Still's paintings, Polcari
introduced major themes that he would elaborate and apply more compre-
hensively in his 1991 monograph. These include the convictions that art his-
tory must encompass a close study of the ideas that underpin visual forms,
that a core of (Jungian) mythical themes (birth, death, and regeneration) re-
mained vital throughout the Abstract Expressionist movement, and that the
most seminal of its practitioners were "children of their time." Polcari re-
stated his opposition to accepting the versions of the story propagated by

60 Introduction
Greenberg and Rosenberg and remained skeptical of the highly politicized
Cold War interpretations still being generated in Britain.235
In their stead, Polcari applies a perspective that encompasses both greater
attention to interdisciplinary cultural parallels with figures such as the mod-
ernist dance pioneer Martha Graham and a more synthesizing analysis of
Abstract Expressionist art as a reaction to the overall cultural climate of the
interwar years and the World War II era. (Its artists, he states, were seeking a
secular form of spiritual "redemption through modern form and thought")
"Flying Tigers: Painting and Sculpture in New York, 1939-1946," organized
in 1985 by Kermit Champa and his students at Brown University, was the only
prior study to bracket out for such intense scrutiny the impact on the move-
ment of the "cosmic struggle" over the fate of civilization represented by
World War II.236 Abstract Expressionism, Polcari contends, "constitutes a sa-
cred and profane allegorical epic, a biblical and ritual drama and romance for
the modern age."237
Michael Leja took an equally ambitious approach in his book-length study
Refraining Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1Q4OS, but
his arguments are based on a narrower set of premises grounded in Fou-
cauldian and Althusserian theory.238 Another doctoral student of Clark's, Leja
favors historical context and, following his professor, takes a more socially
premised (although not strictly Marxist) point of view. It is Leja's stated intent
to examine the bourgeois roots and effects of the individualism for which Ab-
stract Expressionist painting stands as symbolic and to expose its fictive, some-
what less than fully triumphant nature. Although he devotes the first part to
the formation of the New York avant-garde and in another section concen-
trates on the "mythmakers" (Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman, and Still), Pollock
is Leja's primary protagonist. In his most important chapter, "Narcissus in
Chaos: Subjectivity, Ideology, Modern Man and Woman," Leja wraps up his
major themes by means of analysis of the reception of Pollock's signature
works as an essential case study.
Popular culture, especially the "middle-brow" variety (which Greenberg
abhorred), plays a much greater role in Leja's speculations than original ideas
propagated by intellectuals, thinkers, and writers of the 1930s, 19305, and
19405, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, James
Frazer, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Ruth Benedict, and Joseph Campbell, all impor-
tant to the '"propaedeutics" explained by Polcari. Instead, Leja locates the
erosion of the self as a centered subject in the polarities exposed by "Modern

Introduction 61
 Man" literature, a pop psychology genre of the same era. (Pollock and Kras-
ner owned a prime example, Harvey Fergusson's Modern Man: His Belief and
Behavior of 1936.) Leja also examines another reflection of this discourse in
Hollywood's fixation with "vestiges of barbarism" as seen in contemporane-
ous masterpieces of the film noir genre. These influences and parallels allow
for a more anxious and irrational interpretation of reverberations of primi-
tivism and unconscious instinct on the collective psyche of the Abstract Ex-
pressionist generation.239 He clinches his argument by comparing contempo-
raneous descriptions of the effects of Pollock's allover paintings to the staple
metaphor of the individual being drawn into a web, vortex, or labyrinth not
of his own making so common in film noir and "Modern Man" literature.240
Thus, Pollock was not the isolated "naïve poet" or Romantic genius so many
critics and art historians, in one way or another, have had such a stake in pro-
moting; his neuroses (expressed in paint) were, rather, a symptom of the post-
atomic era.241
In an important subsection titled "Gender and Subjectivity," Leja acknowl-
edges that his primary thesis—the way in which Abstract Expressionist paint-
ing correlated with the "Modern Man" master narrative of the 19405 and early
19503—incorporates and perhaps instantiates gender bias. Averring that the
movement's aura of masculinity was "a crucial component of cold war U.S.
national identity, differentiating the nation politically and culturally from a
Europe portrayed as weakened and effeminate,"242 Leja judges this masculin-
ist thrust as having discouraged women from attempting to align themselves
with it.243 Ann Gibson, in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, published a
few years later, advances a more extreme proposition—that the movement's
model for supposedly universal subjectivity was actually white, heterosexual,
and male—arguing that its distinguishing aspects, as represented stylistically
in works by its key practitioners, were subtly (and sometimes quite clearly)
gendered masculine. Whereas Leja acknowledges that the "heroic" model of
Americanism that the Abstract Expressionist painters helped shape in the
19405 "seems not to have been easily extended to women," Gibson posits that
a significant number of women artists who attempted to show their works dur-
ing this period should be credited with a different kind of heroism, one forged
in the face of male discrimination.244
As Gibson did in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, two complemen-
tary exhibitions, "Art of This Century: The Women" (shown at the Pollock-
Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton and the Peggy Guggen-
heim Collection in Venice) and "Women and Abstract Expressionism:

62 Introduction
Painting and Sculpture, 1945-1959," organized by Joan Marter for the Sidney
Mishkin Gallery at Baruch College in New York City, also exposed the 19405
tendency to separate art made by women into a noncompetitive category, calling
attention to the less-than-credible criteria frequently used for women artists
whose work did garner consideration.245 Marter, a feminist art historian
intent on reexamining circumstances that inhibited success for women in the
early to mid-twentieth century, points out that most of the Abstract Expres-
sionist painters and sculptors of the first and second generations who were
presented in her exhibition were either dismissed by critics as derivative of
the men, praised for their comeliness rather than their talent, or damned with
faint, gender-biased praise.246 Krasner, of course, is an archetype for several
aspects of this "profoundly social predicament."247
In "Lee Krasner as L. K.," first published in 1989 and incorporated into
Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and
O'Keeffe (1997), Anne M. Wagner details Peggy Guggenheim's lack of interest
(actually disdain) for Krasner's artistic talents and quotes from reviews that
either accused Krasner of "tidying up" her husband's paintings or minimized
the works in her first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery by describing
them as " 'quiet,' 'discreet,' 'harmonious,' 'restrained and pacific,' 'majestic
and thoughtful,' 'quietly innocuous,' 'sweetly cultivated,' and, yes, 'worked
out with feminine acuteness.'"248 Like Leja and Gibson, Wagner draws on
theory in her analysis of Krasner's dilemma. Much of the chapter called "Kras-
ner's Fictions" in Three Artists (Three Women) is devoted to defining Krasner's
"scripted" role as Pollock's ideal viewer, using the ideas of Paul de Man as a
template.249
Some of Wagner's arguments about Pollock and Krasner also appeared in a
compendium of essays about literary and artistic couples of the twentieth cen-
tury, Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership. The interper-
sonal and interaesthetic dynamic of another Abstract Expressionist duo not
included in that anthology, David Smith and Dorothy Dehner (plate 8), has
become a focus for Marter's scholarly attention. Her 1995 lecture at the Cleve-
land Museum of Art, "Arcadian Nightmares: The Evolution of David Smith
and Dorothy Dehner's Work at Bolton Landing"250 revealed that Smith's cele-
brated World War II imagery (his Medals for Dishonor [1939-1940], Jurassic
Bird [1946], and Royal Bird [1947-1948], in particular) exhibited images and
symbols being explored simultaneously by Dehner in prints and drawings
(figs. 21-22).251 Moreover, some of these themes of violence, sexual aggres-
sion, and victimization had personal immediacy for Dehner, as they did for

Introduction 63
 Bourgeois. As Motherwell pointed out in his eulogy in Art International,
Bolton Landing, where Smith and Dehner lived together until their divorce in
1952, "was not an especially comfortable place, especially for women." (When
Dehner visited there in 1958 after Smith's second marriage had also dissolved,
he referred to his sculptures, dispersed throughout the fields, as "girls" who
would never run away.)252 Marter exposes the extent to which the competi-
tiveness and sometimes the physical volatility of the couple's complex rela-
tionship (unlike Krasner, Dehner modeled for her husband) became a source
of artistic expresson for each.
In Reframing Abstract Expressionism, Leja analyzes the psychodynamic
potential of a 1953 photograph taken by Hans Namuth of Willem de Kooning
posing in his studio with his wife Elaine (fig. 23). Flanking an early state of
one of the more belligerent paintings in his Woman series, Elaine is seated in
the middle ground on a stool, and Willem stands with arms folded in the fore-
ground. Leja's discussion of this image illuminates how neatly it "juxtaposes
the two kinds of female presence that occupied the [masculinist] space of
Abstract Expressionism."253 Carol Duncan's "The MoMA's Hot Mamas,"
published in 1989, had ventured a related though more broadly conceived
opinion that placement in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art of de
Kooning's Woman I and Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, two of recent art his-
tory's most important female images, served to guide the viewer's perception
of modernist artistic achievement as a males-only enterprise. In particular, de
Kooning's Woman I, "a big, bad mama—vulgar, sexual, and dangerous,"
hanging at the threshold to MoMA's presentation of the Abstract Expression-
ists' collective breakthrough to "pure, abstract, nonreferential transcendence,"
seemed to catalyze the virile "triumph of art and a self-creating spirit."254
In making his comparisons to film noir, Leja points out that de Kooning's
Women interconnect comedy and tragedy in a way not dissimilar to Holly-
wood movies of this type. Kent Minturn has since shown that de Kooning
was indeed an ardent fan who admitted to being inspired by the cinema and
sometimes referred to his figures as "big city dames," a moniker used by hard-
boiled, misogynistic film noir characters.255 As Minturn points out, by 1955
Seitz had already recognized parallels between de Kooning's Women and sexy
Hollywood femmes fatales with their "devious smiles and protruding breasts":
"De Kooning's heroine is not wife, mother, or even mistress but darling of the
bar stool and barber-shop magazine, ideal of a million cinema-going males,
the indulgent strumpet, a carnal product of wish fulfillment and commercial-

64 Introduction
ism, frightening in her orgiastic gaiety. Excoriated with blood reds and ugly
slashes of charcoal, her effect is unprecedented."256
Of course, as Hess recognized in calling de Kooning's iconic Women "fero-
ciously idolic mother-goddesses,"257 such matriarchal prototypes (the kind that
caused so much patriarchal anxiety in the 19405 and 19505) reflected prehis-
toric, biblical, and mythological sources as well (e.g., Eve, Clytemnestra). As
detailed by David Cateforis, with the exception of Greenberg, who steadfastly
critiqued these canvases in a Late Cubist formal context, "many of their initial
viewers already perceived their meanings in highly gendered terms."258 This
reference was reinforced by the artist's suggestion in 1956 that "maybe I was
painting the woman in me."259 Fiona Barber proposes, however, that there
may be other ways of reading de Kooning's Women than Carol Duncan's
(and Griselda Pollock's) negative assessment of their emphasis on mouths,
spread legs, and genitalia as complicit with the terms of pornography.260 (De
Kooning famously pronounced flesh to be "the reason why oil paint was in-
vented.")261 Perhaps, however, the "marginality to feminism" of de Kooning's
admittedly "convulsive" paintings is not so absolute.262 Instead of seeing the
Women as "tropes of aggressive male sexuality," Barber suggests that Judith But-
ler's concept of the performative, which implies "a dramatic and contingent
construction of meaning,"263 might be applied to reinterpret them: "A paint-
ing such as Woman I thus becomes the site of a gender identity that is enacted
rather than pregiven, one whose active construction by feminist spectators
has been given stability through the existing terms of feminist art history."264
Views such as Butler's that gender is socially constructed and performed
rather than biologically innate, a perspective that obtained great urgency
in the 19803, also affected scholars studying Jackson Pollock. When Andrew
Perchuk and Helaine Posner organized "The Masculine Masquerade: Mas-
culinity and Representation" at MIT's List Visual Arts Center in 1995, Per-
chuk pronounced "certain processes of masculine display" to be at the core of
Pollock's creative urge. Perchuk suggested that a masculine form of the syn-
drome of "womanliness as masquerade" (that is, role-playing for purposes of
overcompensation), identified by the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere, was "an ir-
reducible component of [Pollock's signature] works' acceptance by the cul-
ture during the social and political era in which they were produced and later
canonized."265 He points out that, five years earlier, T. J. Clark had already
made explicit certain connections that were basic to this point of view: "For
the drip paintings are clearly implicated in a whole informing metaphorics

Introduction 65
 of masculinity: the very concepts that seem immediately to apply to them—
space, scale, action, trace, energy, 'organic intensity,' 'being in the painting,'
being 'One'—are all, among other things, operators of sexual difference."266
As we have seen, both ejaculatory and urinary interpretations of Pollock's
urge to paint (the latter seemingly reinforced by his having relieved himself
in front of guests in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace) have been rife.267 Overdo-
ing physicality, taking risks, and perpetrating violence are taken to authenti-
cate manliness in the same way that the display of glamour and passive behav-
iors fulfills socially scripted womanhood. What Amelia Jones designates the
"Pollockian performative" refers to a set of athletic behaviors seemingly docu-
mented in Namuth's films and photographs (which play down the meditative
phase of Pollock's artistic process) and underlined by their extensive "cap-
tioning" by Goodnough, as well as being supported by the macho bullfight
metaphor at the heart of Rosenberg's concept of Action Painting (the canvas
as arena).
Whether or not Pollock actually was Rosenberg's model American Action
Painter, Amelia Jones sees him as the primary exemplar of "a profound philo-
sophical shift in conceptions of artistic subjectivity (and subjectivity itself)"
that prefigured the postmodern.268 Not only did his indexical privileging of
process lead to the Happenings of Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow,
and others, but as Jones explains, "the author-function" Pollock (not the "in-
dividual" Pollock)269 can also be seen as the progenitor of an entirely new per-
formative genre beginning in the 1970s. His working methods provided a
prototype for body art—developed over the course of that decade by male and
female artists ranging from Vito Acconci to Hannah Wilke—that continues to
be efficacious for artists today. (Its ongoing fecundity is seen, for example, in
the works produced in the 19805 and 19903 by Cindy Sherman and Matthew
Barney.) Body artists, Jones points out, "perform rather than suppress the dis-
location of the subject, and this, indeed, could be said to be what constitutes
'postmodernism.' " They demonstrate "the awareness of the impossibility of
determining meaning or identity in any final way and of the contingency of the
subject (here the artist as well as the interpreter) on the particularities of the
interpretive exchange."270
In contrast to a prior generation of critics who, despite prodigious evi-
dence of his troubled (or even emasculated) self-image, promoted the myth of
Pollock as a virile creative genius, many recent male writers, including Leja,
Perchuk, and Peter Wollen, have exposed a different Pollock, one who better
emblematizes postwar masculine impotence.271 Along associated lines, some

66 Introduction
feminist art historians, most notably Anna Chave and Lisa Saltzman, have
drawn attention to the fact that Pollock not only spurted and dripped pigment
in a series of "explosions" on his canvas, but he also allowed it to bleed and
stain. (And, both authors explain, Pollock felt the need to defend this aspect
of his technique: he plaintively told one interviewer that he could "control
the flow of the paint.") Pollock's witting or unwitting appropriation of this in-
dex of femininity, as well as other strategies and configurations "coded as 'fe-
male'" (most prominently a decentered allover field) are read by Chave as
potentially promoting, or at least participating in, a "critique of phallocen-
trism."272 Certainly, as Saltzman points out, Pollock's staining inspired women
artists such as Helen Frankenthaler (who, in turn, influenced men such as
Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland) to develop the techniques that enabled
"Post-Painterly" flatness.273
Greenberg never would have admitted such extra-artistic criteria into his
advancement of the qualitative superiority of Post-Painterly Abstraction in
the 19605. He also would not have been likely to accept another theory, ad-
vanced by former acolyte Rosalind Krauss, that Pollock's true originality was
based on an urge toward desublimation.274 In her 1993 book The Optical Un-
conscious, Krauss signaled her intent to challenge Greenberg's position:

[Namuth's] photographs had placed [Pollock] on the road, like Kerouac,

clenching his face into the tight fist of beat refusal, making an art of violence,
of "howl." Clem's mission was to lift him above those picturesjust as it was
to lift the paintings Pollock made from off the ground where he'd made them,
and onto the wall. Because it was only on the wall that they joined themselves
to tradition, to culture, to convention. It was in that location and at that angle
to gravity that they became "painting."275

According to Krauss, whereas the strokes made by other action painters—

such as de Kooning and Kline—register the pull of gravity, because he used
gravity as a tool (much as he used a paintbrush or a turkey baster), Pollock's
strokes instead index "the prone position of the canvas in relation to the artist
who had worked above it." Rather than one of marking transcendence, his
was therefore a more violent process of bassesse, or lowering, "going beneath
the figure into the terrain of formlessness."276 Krauss demonstrates this con-
clusion largely by studying the works of later artists (particularly Robert Mor-
ris, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol, ) who understood and revealed not only
"the importance of horizontalization" in Pollock's work but also the abject
erotics inherent in its base materiality. Their productions oppose the high

Introduction 67
 value placed on Pollock's "optical shimmer" by Greenberg and Fried, a quality
that ostensibly motivated the Post-Painterly Abstractionists.
To back up her interpretation, Krauss cites Freud's gender-biased praise
in Civilization and Its Discontents of primal man's ability to put out a fire
with his stream of urine (a feat no woman could perform)277 as a préfiguration
of visual cultural achievement defined as sexual sublimation. (Thus Warhol's
"piss" and Oxidation paintings of 1961 and 1976-1977 make explicit what was
only implicit in Pollock's classic poured canvases.) Krauss's philosophical crit-
icism of Pollock has also referenced the critic René Ricard's definition of mi-
metic rivalry. She uses Ricard's concept to explain the artist's so-called veiling
of the figure as a motivating factor in his de-privileging of the vertical. The
Surrealist writings of Georges Bataille provided Krauss with the doctrine of
bassesse, which "sought to vanquish the fetishizing (or ontologizing) of mat-
ter" by idealists obsessed with ideal form.278 The 1996 exhibition that Krauss
and Yve-Alain Bois organized for the Centre Georges Pompidou produced
their handbook Formless: A User's Guide, which fully clarified these concepts
and explained their sources.279
Krauss's belief in Pollock's bassesse led her to reject outright the primary
conclusions drawn by Pepe Karmel in his essay for the Museum of Modern
Art's 1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective. Based on physical evidence discov-
ered by conservators and on "digitized composites built up out of Hans Na-
muth's complete inventory of still and cinematic photography,"280 Karmel
identified—even in some of Pollock's most classic abstractions, such as Au-
tumn Rhythm—an initial laying-in of stick figures, hidden by subsequent pour-
ings but later reiterated in finishing touches. This prompted Karmel to reem-
phasize the value of draftsmanship for Pollock, despite the fact that in these
classic allover compositions he appears to have replaced traditional iconogra-
phy with "an arrangement of signs."281 Krauss objects to such overreliance
on drawing and representational form as defining characteristics of Pollock's
authorial singularity.
Study of Pollock has for some time provided a segue into issues of race,
leading to a critique by some art historians of the absence of artists of color
from the typical roster of Abstract Expressionist innovators. In 1979 Andrew
Kagan remarked on the commensurability of Pollock's painting methods with
jazz (a kind of music the artist loved), which is, of course, an "invention pri-
marily of black Americans."282 Kagan cited an early comparison of Pollock
and jazz as a "not-quite-accurate but highly prophetic analogy." In 1945 the
newspaper critic Alfred Frankenstein wrote perceptively: "The flare and spat-

68 Introduction
 ter and fury of [Pollock's] paintings are emotional rather than formal, and like
the best jazz, one feels that much of it is the result of inspired improvisation
rather than conscious planning."283
Appraising the disproportionate dependence of white high culture on black
popular culture and diversions, Kagan conjectured that the perceived corre-
spondence between Pollock and jazz helped promote his acceptance in Europe
as an archetype of the New World "noble savage." In The Culture of Spontane-
ity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (1998), Daniel Belgrad
gives this subject a more exhaustive treatment, describing the myriad ways in
which freedom of individual expression in African American music provided
a trope for the "painterly dialogue" at the root of gestural Abstract Expres-
sionism. Moreover, Belgrad explains, "The social significance of spontaneity
can be appreciated only if this aesthetic practice is understood as a crucial site
of cultural work: that is, as a set of activities and texts engaged in the struggle
over meanings and values within American society." This countercultural
stance, Belgrad argues, was "actively confrontational" toward "the dominant
ethnocentrism" of postwar life in the United States.284
In 1989, for "Abstract Expressionism: Other Dimensions," Jeffrey Wech-
sler had expanded that rubric to include forty-three artists; four were women,
but none were African American.285 Four years later, however, the Tate Gallery
Liverpool's "Myth-Making: Abstract Expressionist Paintings from the United
States," included two works, Mumbo Jumbo (1950, fig. 24) and Klu Klux (1963,
a late date for this context), by Norman Lewis, an African American artist. An
essay by Gibson on Lewis's career and work was featured in the companion
catalogue, American Abstract Expressionism. Gibson further argued that Lewis
deserved recognition for working along Abstract Expressionist lines in an Art-
forum article, "Recasting the Canon: Norman Lewis and Jackson Pollock," as
well as in the catalogue for a Lewis retrospective mounted at the Kenkelaba
Gallery.286 In all of these venues Gibson developed points that she would aug-
ment in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics.
Not limited to featuring overlooked female artists of the 19405 and 19505,
Gibson's 1997 book also reclaims for Abstract Expressionism male African
Americans and homosexuals of various racial backgrounds. Artists such as
Lewis and Alfonso Ossorio (a gay man born in the Philippines) were also mar-
ginalized by what Gibson deems a too-limiting "criterion of originality" that
worked to keep the official roster artificially small. As she explains, with very
few exceptions (most notably de Kooning), those then and now considered to
be Abstract Expressionists believed abstraction and mimesis to be mutually

Introduction 69
 exclusive. Only works that showed the former tendency, as Greenberg put it,
could qualify as "major art," a prejudice that worked against inclusion in the
movement's pantheon of ethnic as well as sexual minorities whose interests
did not stimulate the creation of works that qualified as "pure."
Gibson argues throughout Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics that the
conflation of freedom and individuality with masculinity (of straight, white,
European descent)—identified by abstraction—precluded serious considera-
tion for artists who preferred métonymie or narrative specificity, intimate size,
decorative style, sensuality, stylistic variation, and private or socially based
emotional content. (All of these characteristics are typified as feminine or sub-
cultural in sensibility.) Further, in the 19405 and 19505, when women and
black artists (such as Lewis, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Roy DeCarava,
Beauford Delaney, Ronald Joseph, Rose Piper, Hale Woodruff, and Thelma
Johnson Streat) disregarded their own inclinations, they were accused of being
derivative, whereas, when de Kooning, Pollock, and other white colleagues
adopted or metaphorized sexuality and primitiveness, they were lauded for ex-
panding their universality.287 Mixing or alternating between abstraction and
representation—a common practice of many of the artists Gibson discusses
—was a strategy derided as denoting a lack of conviction. But she reads this
tactic another way, reconfiguring it more positively as representative of an
"infrapolitics of resistance," that is, as evidence of a cultural act that contains
meanings not read as criticism by the dominant class but understood as such
by those in subordinated groups.288
The culmination of Gibson's work on Lewis was a solo exhibition, "Nor-
man Lewis: Black Paintings 1946-1977," со-organized for the Studio Museum
in Harlem in 1998. Additional essays by Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Jorge
Daniel Veneciano, Lowery Stokes Sims, and David Craven finally conferred
on Lewis the art historical recognition that had eluded him during his life-
time. Craven's essay frames Lewis's importance in the context of his "longtime
activism on behalf of social justice and other progressive causes," restyling his
oeuvre as a postcolonial critique of "imperial representation, language, and
ideological control."289 Instead of comparing him with Pollock, as Gibson
had done, Craven describes Lewis as carrying on an "interimage" dialogue,
in works such as Klu Klux, with de Kooning's "commanding black paint-
ings," especially Black Friday (fig. 25) and Light in August (1948; the latter ti-
tle refers to a famous novel about racial repression in the South by William
Faulkner). Craven sees the example of Norman Lewis as a challenge to the Eu-

70 Introductio n
rocentrism that underpins Leja's assumptions about the validity of Modern
Man discourse for Abstract Expressionism.
In the mid-iggos Leja chose to explore further one very specific ramifi-
cation of the identity problems he categorized in Refraining Abstract Expres-
sionism. Writing for Critical Inquiry, Leja examined Barnett Newman's "ec-
centric handling of gendered metaphors," highlighting the artist's response
to accusations of "patriarchal masculinity" leveled at him by a former stu-
dent. Hubert Crehan, who (punningly) mistranslated Vir Heroicus Sublimis
as "Heroic Man Erect," wrote in 1959 in Art News: "Newman believes in a
masculine environment, and he gets this idea across in his paintings It is a
proud and inflexible archaic, male sensibility that Newman expresses, lifted
from the Old Testament. But we live in another world, really, one certainly
that is in need of the phallic charge, although the new man [clearly another
pun], I imagine, will be aware that we should have more music with the danc-
ing. It takes two to tango." Newman's "misguided" rebuttal concluded, "Some
day Mr. Crehan may learn that no matter how many it takes to tango, it takes
only one real man to create a work of art."290 According to Leja, the rebuttal
demonstrates that a better understanding of the "conceptions and metaphors
of gender identity operative among a particular interpretive community in post-
World War II New York ... may shed some light on the failure of Newman's
work with critics."291 (As we recall, Greenberg resuscitated Newman's repu-
tation in the 19605 for reasons that largely ran counter to the artist's inten-
tions.) In essence, Leja posits that Newman's disavowal of any conflict be-
tween his anima and his animus (female and male sides of the individuated
self), which both Pollock and de Kooning more or less admitted as having
motivated the creation of some of their best works, belied a certain lack of res-
onance with the contemporary situation. Newman's continuing fascination
with the authority of God as Creator, delineated in the book of Genesis and
reified in his monumental 1963-1964 architectural sculpture Broken Obelisk
(fig. 26), betrayed his underlying reactionary masculinism.292
The shared predilection of Rosenberg and Hess to interpret Newman's art
in relation to the first book of the Old Testament (and in terms of Jewish mys-
ticism) has already been discussed, and mention has also been made of Ro-
senberg's elevation of immigrants (such as Rothko)293 and the sons of immi-
grants (such as Newman) to the status of American pioneers. Gibson, among
others, has noticed that "it might be argued that canonical Abstract Expres-
sionism's resistance to naturalistic imagery stems from the large proportion of

Introduction 71
 Jews in its ranks." She also broaches the fact that its major critical supporters
—Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Schapiro—were Jewish as well.294 In Art-as-
Politics, Annette Cox not only placed a great deal of importance on Green-
berg and Rosenberg's early years as Trotskyites, but she also featured their
extensive stints writing for Jewish magazines. As Louis Kaplan has since
pointed out, Greenberg freely acknowledged in 1944 that "the reflection in my
writing of the Jewish heritage ... though it may be passive and unconscious,
is certainly not haphazard. I believe that a quality of Jewishness is present in
every word I write." Kaplan argues that it is possible to "reframe the problem-
atic of modernist self-criticism in Greenberg's repression or displacement of
Jewish subjectivity" and that, although he makes no mention of their shared
ethnic heritage in his 1962 essay "After Abstract Expressionism," it is no acci-
dent that Newman and Rothko are the artists on whom he "centered his analy-
sis of the self-critical tendency of modernist painting."295 Indeed, Theodoros
Stamos (another of the Irascibles) once remarked to Irving Sandier about
Newman and Rothko: "I've always thought of them as the Lions of Judea.
[Rothko's] pictures are heraldic in that sense.... When I say the pictures are
like the Lion of Judea, well, he is the Lion of Judea. He is these pictures."296
Employing strategies borrowed from cultural studies (especially diaspora
studies), a substantial group of art historians in the 19905 began to rethink the
accomplishments of mid-to-late twentieth-century American artists and crit-
ics from the vantage point of Jewish ethnicity.297 Milton Brown, in Painting a
Place in America: Jewish Artists in New York, igoo-ig45, the catalogue for a
1991 exhibition held at the Jewish Museum, acknowledged that, although
many (for example, Adolph Gottlieb) believed that art should "transcend any
racial, ethnic, religious or national boundaries,"298 Rothko and Newman pre-
sent a more complex situation; Brown eventually concludes, however, that
"their Jewish connections are tenuous at best."299
Brown relates with skepticism Werner Haftmann's 1971 reading of Roth-
ko's "stacked, large planes of color" as "visual symbols for the drapery which
refuses to reveal the hidden God or for the temple curtain before the ark." Ac-
cording to Haftmann, Rothko undertook in his signature paintings "the erec-
tion of that tent which the Jews, a nomadic people, raised around their ark in
order to establish a space for the Holy in which there existed only the void
and the word."300 Alternatively, Matthew Baigell has suggested that the Ab-
stract Imagists (all were Jewish except for ClyfFord Still) emphasized tragedy,
terror, and brutality in their writings (as seen, for example, in the wording of
Rothko and Gottlieb's 1943 letter to the New York Times] because they were

72 Introduction
deeply affected by leaking news about the Holocaust.301 This trauma may
have had an impact on their art as well; it is BaigelPs opinion that "the large
rectangular forms Rothko used in his mature works are rather derived in
some measure from the large open graves that he saw only in photographs af-
ter the end of the war."302 (Baigell reads earlier paintings of Rothko's with en-
tombment themes as indicating knowledge of Jewish burial practices, which
the artist combined with Christian iconography "in the same way that Cha-
gall interpreted Crucifixions for his own purposes.") Thus Newman's stripe
compositions, in which the artist seemingly arrogates for himself the primal
creative gesture of God—a prohibition in Judaism—may actually have been
motivated by anger about the senseless murder of six million.
Along related lines, Lee Krasner has also been reinterpreted through the
lens of her ethnicity. In 1973, Whitney curator Marcia Tucker commented
insightfully that Krasner's most hieroglyphic Little Images, as well as a series
of dramatically explosive gestural compositions she made after Pollock's
death (fig. 27), seem to have been generated from right to left as if the artist
were writing Hebrew (which she learned to do as a child).303 Robert Hobbs,
in his catalogue essay for Krasner's second major U.S. retrospective, which
traveled around the country from 1999 through 2001, posited additional Jew-
ish meanings for Krasner's art. Highlighting her Orthodox upbringing and
her friendships—well before she knew Pollock—with Greenberg and especially
Rosenberg, Hobbs situates the former Lena/Lenore Krassner as a "responsive
member of the New York Jewish intelligentsia in a pre- and post-Holocaust
world."304 Kuspit's demonstration of the importance of Rosenberg's Jewish-
ness for the core concept of "The American Action Painters" ("Rosenberg,"
Kuspit points out, "argued that anxiety about identity is 'the most serious
theme'—indeed, the 'ultimate metaphysical theme'—in both Jewish life and
modern art")305 may help explain the meaning of Krasner's most pugnacious
taunt to posterity: "My art is so biographical if anyone can take the trouble to
read it."306
Like Rosenberg and Greenberg, Krasner was an active Trotskyist during
the Depression. The dialectical methodology she internalized as a result of
immersion in radical politics, which exerted a strong impact on the way she
made art for the rest of her life, is emphasized in both her catalogue raisonné
and in Hobbs's account of her developmental impulses. The fact that politics
also had a formative influence on Gorky, but to a very different end, became
another topic for contextual scholarship in the iggos. Peter Balakian, in a
review of "Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years," organized by Michael

Introduction 73
 Auping for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, states that he is perplexed
by the exhibition's relative lack of attention to "the event which most pro-
foundly shaped Gorky's life." This was the Armenian genocide, a wholesale
policy of racial persecution and extermination by the Ottoman Turks in 1915-
1918 that prefigured the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. As Gorky wrote to
his sister after their emigration to America:

We are but a slice of our homeland's soul, tossed afar from it by foul storms.
Vartoosh, dear, I dream of it always and it is as if some ancient Armenian
essence within me moves my hand to create so far from our homeland the
shapes of nature we loved in the gardens, wheatfields and orchards of the
Adoian family in Khorkom. Our beautiful Armenia which we lost and which
I shall repossess in my art I shall resurrect Armenia with my brush for
307
all the world to see.

According to Balakian, although scholars have cited Gorky's traumatic

childhood experiences (especially in close readings of the two versions of his
painted composition The Artist and His Mother, fig. 17), none have fully ex-
plored the ethnic implications of his subsequent paintings. Documentation of
Gorky's Armenian heritage published by his nephew Karlen Mooradian is
useful, but difficult to read, too personally involved, and not artistically savvy.
Most authors who quote Gorky's letters use them for purely nostalgic pur-
poses without detailing their genocidal context, thus failing to explain the
critical import of the artist's exile mentality and its profound effect on his im-
agery, even in works that seem primarily abstract. Gorky himself recognized
the hybridity of his art and the influence on it of both Eastern and Western
sources (combining, for example, Toros Roslin with Picasso and Surrealism).
As Balakian points out, "Before discourse about decolonization and culture
was popular, Gorky instinctively understood the issue of cultural imperial-
ism."308 Gorky most emphatically did not create politicized paintings (deem-
ing Social Realism "poor art for poor people"), but his works were politically
motivated nevertheless.
Although the Abstract Expressionists relinquished the (leftist) political and
social incentives that had seemed compelling in the 19305, the idea that their
art still had political and social implications (for the Left and the Right) has
become an accepted, although highly contested, interpretive given during the
past several decades. For example, Fred Orton concluded in 1992: "If action
painting had any meaning, it was about revolutionary political agency arising
from the contradictions of capitalism, the reality of which could not be totally

74 Introduction
excluded if the prospect of radical change was to be kept open . . . sometime
. . . somewhere. . . . Action painting was the sign that the possibility of revo-
lution was not totally closed down, that the dynamic of revolution was still
there. Action painting was that, or it was nothing."309 Another viewpoint, dif-
fering somewhat from that of Orton and authors who share his critique of the
movement as complicit with Truman-era hegemony, is represented in works
published in the 19903 by David Craven and Nancy Jachec, both of whom
produced substantive articles leading to book-length studies by the end of the
decade.310 In the updated introduction to newer texts added to his 2000 edi-
tion of Pollock and After, Frascina characterizes Jachec's ideas as responses to
Craven's readings. Craven's thoughts, for the most part, run directly counter
to those of Guilbaut, Cockcroft, and Leja.311
Examining whether exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting held
abroad were actually successful in promoting American imperialism, Craven
demonstrates that this was definitely not the case in Latin America. Many
Marxist painters in Nicaragua and Cuba, for example, imitated Pollock and
Motherwell because their works seemed to demonstrate a path to political
and artistic insurgency, not collusion with hegemonic ideology. Latin Ameri-
can intellectuals, moreover, were deeply offended by the "paternalistic" the-
ses of Guilbaut and his cohorts. Craven aims to prove that the Abstract
Expressionists never really abandoned their political and social idealism—
they simply expressed it in an "alternative modernist" form. In order to ac-
complish this, he marshals verbal and documentary evidence of earlier and
later political convictions (against American military intervention in other
countries and in favor of civil rights in the 19603) on the part of a number of
the movement's major participants. That the Federal Bureau of Investigation
considered Rothko, Gottlieb, Krasner, Motherwell, Reinhardt, and Lewis
"un-American" enough to maintain files on them helps Craven underline this
point.
Throughout his text, Craven posits the values promoted by Meyer Scha-
piro in 1957 in "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art"—rather than
those espoused by Greenberg and Rosenberg—as touchstones for the reten-
tion of political engagement in whatever form (Marxist, socialist, anarchist)
individual Abstract Expressionist artists felt most comfortable with. Jachec,
on the other hand, "argues that American avant-garde painting was promoted
by the United States government, not because of its affinities with American
values, but rather because of its radical character, which it hoped would ap-
peal to a Western European populace perceived by the State Department as

Introduction 75
 inclined toward socialism."312 Jachec, who was trained and teaches in En-
gland, places greater emphasis than Craven on European existentialist phi-
losophy as a stimulant to American artistic anarchism.
In order to prove his points, Craven employs statements of intent by the
artists to a more significant degree than writers such as Cockcroft and Guil-
baut. Particularly useful for Craven's purposes are remarks made by Robert
Motherwell and Barnett Newman, which he uses as epigraphs. Resonating
with the convictions of Schapiro, with whom he had studied at Columbia,
Motherwell noted in 1950: "The abstractness of modern art has to do with
how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order....
But I think that the art of the School of New York, like a great deal of modern
art that is called 'art for art's sake,' has social implications. These might be
summarized under the general notion of protest."313 In 1962, Newman recalled
in an interview for Art in America magazine: "Almost fifteen years ago Harold
Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly
mean to the world. My answer was that if he and others could read it properly
it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer
still goes."314
Craven's primary interpretation of these and other sociopolitical motiva-
tions expressed by Motherwell, Newman, and their colleagues leads to his
assertion (based on one of Schapiro's cardinal tenets) that the Abstract Ex-
pressionist artists "intended their 'automatic' hand-made works to be a com-
mentary on the dehumanizing developments intrinsic to the Age of Auto-
mation."315 Craven agrees with Schapiro's judgment that the movement was
simultaneously a form of labor and a new visual language, each aspect of
which must be "seen in relation to human self-realization and in light of a dia-
logical aesthetics necessitating viewer engagement." Accordingly, the essence
of Abstract Expressionist art is "romantic anticapitalism."316
An observation by Schapiro that is celebrated by Craven—that modern
paintings "may be regarded as means of affirming the individual in opposi-
tion to contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working and doing"—
is also used by Caroline A. Jones in Machine in the Studio: Constructing the
Postwar American Artist (1996) to justify one of her major assertions.317 In
early sections of this book, Jones analyzes the congruence of such notions of
American individualism with the powerful nineteenth-century topos of the
"solitary individual artist in a semi-sacred studio space." She shows that (as
seen, for example, in the films and photographs of Namuth and the Art News
"Paints a Picture" series) this definition of genius was still revered in the Ab-

76 Introduction
 stract Expressionist period. The remainder of her text details radical changes
that occurred in the 19605 when business or factorylike working conditions
were adopted by Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Earth artist Robert Smith-
son. Calling on a variety of theoretical positions popularized since Schapiro
wrote of "the great importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the
quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a
texture and field of operation" (most prominently, Foucault's ideas about au-
thorship), Jones investigates the ideological connotations of indexicality in
paintings produced by Pollock and his associates. One result of her study is
the reaffirmation of Schapiro's claim that the traditionally revered triangular
metonymy adhering between the (male) artist, his brushstroke, and his studio
was a salient factor linking Abstract Expressionism with concepts of Ameri-
can liberty.
As Bradford Collins reemphasized at the start of the decade, the Abstract
Expressionists are often considered "the last of the genuine Bohemian art-
ists,"318 despite the fact that (as shown by Deirdre Robson),319 by 1960 many
were selling their works for substantial amounts of money. Illustrations in Life
magazine and other such popular culture sources exhibit how, by the mid-to-
late 19505, Abstract Expressionist art had become a status item in the homes
of wealthy collectors (especially the nouveau riche). Following the poor rec-
ord of sales in the 19405 and early 19505 by the dealers Samuel Kootz, Peggy
Guggenheim, Howard Putzel and Betty Parsons, market success for the New
York School (perhaps spurred by Pollock's dramatic death in 1956), gradually
became more assured. The value of these works also increased because of ma-
jor museum purchases and aggressive handling by newly sophisticated Man-
hattan galleries such as Sidney Janis and Leo Castelli.
As Collins demonstrates, however, "Indifference to success and popular
opinion was an essential element of the popular caricature [of the Abstract
Expressionists as bohemians]. Crass concerns belonged to enemies of honest
art, to artists who would pander to popular taste and expectations."320 An in-
tent to boycott capitalist culture (denigrated by Greenberg as engendering
kitsch) has certainly been considered one of the "ethical foundations" of the
movement's avant-garde role as a progressive "corrective force."321 But can
holding on to such attitudes still be advocated half a century after the heyday
of the movement? In the summer of 1994, T. J. Clark assayed a summary and
"defense" of Abstract Expressionism seen in this light. Significantly, Clark
chose to air his conclusions in October, a journal subtitled "Art/Theory/
Criticism/Politics," founded in 1976 "as a forum for the presentation and the-

Introduction 77
 oretical elaboration of cultural work" by a group of critics including Rosalind
Krauss.322 He began this essay, essentially a list of propositions, with the fol-
lowing statement:

We have come a certain way from Abstract Expressionism, and the ques-
tion of how we should understand our relationship to it gets to be interesting
again. Awe at its triumphs is long gone; but so is laughter at its cheap philoso-
phy, or distaste for its heavy breathing, or boredom with its sublimity, or re-
sentment at the part it played in the Cold War. Not that any of these feelings
have gone away or ever should, but that it begins to be clear that none of
them—not even the sum of them—amounts to an attitude to the painting in
question. They are what artists and critics once had because they did not
have an attitude—because something stood in the way of their making Ab-
stract Expressionism a thing of the past.323

Clark concludes that "our failure to see Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still as
ending something, or our lack of a story of what it is they were ending [consti-
tutes] considerably more than a crisis in art criticism or art history," and then
proceeds to mount an exoneration that will render them "usable" by precipi-
tating closure.
In the form in which it appeared in October and the revised version of this
argument published in Farewell to an Idea: Excerpts in the History of Mod-
ernism, Clark essentially mounts a Marxist critique of popular semiotic views
of Abstract Expressionism in which he features a term fraught with contro-
versy in its application to this movement. Semiological interpretations, he
avers, while purporting to signify endlessly, are actually "frozen in the tri-
umph of their prearranged moments of vision." He offers his most pointedly
anti-Greenbergian judgment so far: "I think we might come to describe Ab-
stract Expressionist paintings better if we took them above all to be vulgar"
Clark goes one better than Krauss in his desire "to do something more trans-
gressive" than merely reference Bataille's informe. He states: "It is an advan-
tage to the term Vulgar'... that discursively it points two ways—to the object
itself, to some abjectness or absurdity in its very make-up, some telltale blem-
ish, some atrociously visual quality that the object will never stop betraying
however hard it tries, and to the object's existence in a particular social world,
for a set of tastes and styles of individuality that have still to be defined, but are
somehow there, in the word even before it is deployed."324
Individuality, the personal, social, and political condition (and meretri-
cious petty bourgeois goal)325 that Abstract Expressionist art is generally taken

78 Introduction
to signify, because it is, in reality, a contingent rather than a transcendent state
—and therefore a dangerous falsehood—certainly also qualifies it as "vulgar."
(Clark uses its "drive toward emptiness, endlessness, the nonhuman and the
inorganic" and especially what he calls its "incessant courting of Death" to
demonstrate this point.) Vulgarity, Clark admits, "is gendered, of course," as
well as class-structured; using it as a template for mapping meaning, this move-
ment's worship of male creative genius reconfigures as mere homosociality.
More important, in another reversal of value, kitsch now exemplifies "exal-
tation."326 Thus conceived, Abstract Expressionism's hegemonic aesthetic re-
lation to European forbears and contemporaries, and its claim to particular-
ity, agency, and mastery, as well as its universality and sublimity, still requires
re(de)finition.

Conclusion
How exactly can the field of Abstract Expressionist studies be character-
ized at the start of a new millennium? Packed with controversies, propagan-
dizing, and polemics, both the context and the critique of this undeniably
meaningful American artistic phenomenon have continued to gain in breadth
and depth for more than half a century. Following and sometimes initiating
interpretive trends with wide repercussions for scholarship in numerous
humanistic disciplines, the ongoing reception of Abstract Expressionist art
provides a fascinating case study in shifting American and European cultural
• • • .9 7
priorities.
Reputations continue to be made by scholars and curators who advance
new or substantially altered interpretations of the achievements of varied per-
sonae who played pioneering roles in the "heroic years" of the Abstract Ex-
pressionist drama.328 (Another study could be written examining contextual
and critical reaction to works by talented artists of the second generation.) A
supplement to Pollock's 1978 catalogue raisonné of complete works was issued
the same year Krasner's appeared (1995); a complete catalogue of Rothko's
works on canvas was published in 1994, Newman's in 2004, and a project to
prepare a catalogue of Motherwell's paintings and collages has been launched
to complement the compendia of his prints published in 1984 and 2003.329
In the decade between 1994 and 2004, numerous important exhibitions of
first-generation New York School painters were mounted in the United States
and abroad. In addition to those already noted, these include Pollock (Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 1998; Musei Civici, Venice, 2002); Krasner (Independent
Curators, 1999); Norman Lewis (Studio Museum in Harlem, 1998); and de

Introduction 79
 Kooning (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2002; Institut Valencia
d'Art Modern/Fundación "la Caixa," Madrid, 2002). In addition, major shows
highlighting the oeuvres of Motherwell (Miriam and Ira D.Wallach Gallery,
Columbia University, 1997); Rothko (National Gallery of Art, 1998; Fundado
Juan Miró, Barcelona, 2000; Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2001); Still
(Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2001); Gottlieb (Fundación Juan
March, Madrid and IVAM, Valencia, 2001; Jewish Museum, 2002); Newman
(Stedelijk, 2001; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002); Hofmann (Naples Mu-
seum of Art, 2003) and Gorky (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003) were
organized during the same time frame.330
Indeed, as noted by the art historian Patricia Mainardi, exhibits of Ab-
stract Expressionist painting are coming close to matching French Impres-
sionist shows in popularity. Mainardi points to the shared ability of both move-
ments to reference "oft-told" tales that appeal to the leisure-seeking gallery
visitor:

Museum studies, it would seem, prefer Impressionist shows to everything

else, but I have come to think that the attraction is as much to the story the
exhibition tells as to the paintings that compose it. The unprecedented suc-
cess of the MoMA's recent Jackson Pollock show suggests to me that Abstract
Expressionism shares some of the same myths and legends constituting the
morality tale repeated by most Impressionist exhibitions. [...]
One of the basic tales of modernism is that of the bohemian artist who,
scorned by philistines, was obliged to live in poverty, enduring the slings and
arrows of outrageous critics, but who worked hard and persevered, true to
his (rarely to her) unique vision. After his death this impoverished artist was
recognized as a transcendent genius, his once-scorned works now command-
ing fabulous prices. Now that American Abstract Expressionism has been re-
formulated as a morality tale along the lines of the American success story, we
are witnessing its newfound success with the general public, in the past al-
ways notoriously hostile to abstract art.331

Does this largely monographic recent exhibition and publishing record,

we might ask, signal a disturbing resurgence of traditional (and hagiographie)
approaches, in spite of so much intervening discourse that worked to dis-
credit conservative, clichéd and canonizing avenues of interpretation? What-
ever popularized interpretations docent tours and museum wall labels might
continue to promote, a careful perusal of essays included in recent catalogues
and texts of current books on Abstract Expressionist painters indicates that

80 Introduction
iconological and more theoretically ambitious forms of decoding and analysis
(interdisciplinary, psychological, gender- and class-based, ethnic, semiotic,
deconstructive, and so on) are now regularly incorporated into these types
of studies. No longer are style, technique, influence, iconography, and stan-
dards of "quality" the only—or necessarily the primary—considerations of most
monographic writing about the Abstract Expressionists. Less hierarchical and
more speculative readings, which often compete, intermix freely with conven-
tional explanations of form, motive, and signification, although they are not
as popular with the average museum visitor.
The clarification of basic issues—including the patent fact that the "un-
wanted title" Abstract Expressionism presents an oxymoron—continues to
be nuanced by archival discoveries, the application of innovative semantic
fields, and the benefit of greater hindsight, among other possibilities. Its built-
in curatorial and institutional biases notwithstanding, the Whitney Museum
of American Art's huge two-part 1999-2000 exhibition "The American Cen-
tury," for which Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture provided a
crucial mid-point fulcrum, allowed fresh opportunities for comparative vi-
sual analysis that will likely affect future scholarship.
The purpose of the present essay is to erect a clear interpretive framework
for the statements, articles, and essays by and about the first-generation Ab-
stract Expressionists included in the anthology that follows. Continuing study
of the hypotheses of key commentators and further analysis of frequently
referenced texts is meant to illuminate and keep open—not close down—
ongoing debate. I am mindful, and hope readers of this book will be as well,
of the implications of a revealing comment made by Robert Motherwell, one
of whose many roles included serving as editor of "Documents of Modern
Art," published by Wittenborn & Schultz from 1944 to 1951. (He produced
the first ten compilations in that consequential series.) When asked to con-
tribute brief remarks for the spring 1959 issue of It Is, Motherwell hearkened
back to Possibilities, another notable editorial stint, as he acknowledged the
dangers inherent in allowing one's ideas to appear in print: "12 years ago
Harold Rosenberg and I got Baziotes, Pollock, and Rothko to make short
statements for our magazine—all admirable statements, but they in turn must
have got fed up over the years with the constant republication of their few
paragraphs by the museum-machine and the art-book factory. No one wants
to be imprisoned in a few sentences, even his own."332 Of course, it should by
now be quite clear, even the most up-to-date contextual approaches still de-
pend on these self-same resources from the 19405 and 19505 as central evi-

Introduction 81
 dence, to which then can be added the inferences, deductions, and denota-
tions made by a host of additional authors writing about Abstract Expression-
ism during intervening decades.
In order to strengthen the possibility of ascertaining and highlighting cu-
mulative discursive interactions, the statements, reviews, and essays repub-
lished in the remainder of this volume are sorted thematically and chronolog-
ically. Readings in a particular section amplify previous entries, compare and
contrast, or provide a related approach to similar material by a different set of
artists, historians, and critics. This mapping of alternative frameworks for un-
derstanding is operative within each section and across the entire compila-
tion. By looking first at the discussion in each division of the introductory es-
say, then turning to the primary and secondary sources arranged in similarly
demarcated anthology sections, readers may clarify their comprehension of
competing trends in the explanation of Abstract Expressionism's develop-
ment and ongoing impact.
Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique charts written re-
sponses to the first-generation Abstract Expressionists' accomplishments and
the changing cultural relevance of this movement across the span of five tur-
bulent decades. Understanding with greater precision how Abstract Expres-
sionism has already been analyzed and (re)configured provides a matrix for
continuing assessment of the national and international repercussions of
this very American achievement. It is hoped that new opportunities for chal-
lenge and revision will result as scholars, students, and curators digest this
information.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes:

AB: The Art Bulletin
AF: Artforum
AM: Arts Magazine
AN: Art News
NYT: New York Times
PR: Partisan Review
TN: The Nation

i. Karmel 1999!), 262-79. This anthology includes the full text of nine papers pre-
sented at a January 1999 symposium in New York City and was issued as one of
two companion volumes (see also Karmel 1999a) to the retrospective's award-
winning catalogue, Varnedoe and Karmel 1998. Chave 1993 is the only text writ-

82 Introduction
 ten after 1979 included in Karmel I999b. Another recent anthology of writings
about Pollock is Harrison 2000, which includes interviews, letters and other pri-
mary source documents, personal responses by friends, critics, and other artists
to Pollock the man and his art, and creative responses by subsequent painters,
authors, photographers, and others.
2. New authors included in Frascina 2000 are David Craven, Fred Orton, A. Deir-
dre Robson, Michael Kimmelman, Ann Gibson, Anna C. Chave, Michael Leja,
and Rosalind Krauss. The quotation is found in Frascina 1985,13.
3. Frascina 2000, 4. The issues to which he refers include, most prominently,
Marxist interrogation of the "institutionalized Modernist narrative" initiated in
the 19305 by the critic Clement Greenberg and arguments about the interrela-
tion of avant-garde art, culture, and politics in the McCarthy era that postulate
Abstract Expressionism's purpose or appropriation as a weapon in the cold war.
All are discussed below in the text.
4. This is particularly true of the arguments by T. J. Clark and Michael Fried for
and against the approach of Greenberg, discussed below. Some of the same au-
thors whom Frascina added to his second edition and one identical essay (Fred
Orton's "Action, Revolution and Painting") were also included in Thistlewood
1993, issued in conjunction with the Tate Gallery Liverpool exhibition "Myth-
Making: Abstract Expressionist Painting from the United States." This cata-
logue features arguments on postwar American painting primarily formulated
by British academics. As a source for revisionist approaches that reconfigure un-
derstanding of the movement, Thistlewood 1993 is circumscribed by its limited
distribution and the editor's concern that "adjustments to the field of Abstract
Expressionism's meaning and interpretation that would inevitably arisefrom this
particular exhibition should be explicit" (8; italics his).
5. Many readings gathered in Rose 1975 and Chipp 1968 are selections first collected
in Tuchman 1965. Tuchman's choice of thirty-three excerpted artists' statements
and edited critical commentary constitutes the earliest significant attempt at a
survey of the movement's defining ideas using primary source material. More
current updates to Rose and Chipp are Harrison and Wood 1993 (updated to
2000 in 2002) and Hills 2001. Hills's abbreviated historiography discusses San-
dier 1970 (citing the critique of it in MofFett 1972), Ashton 1973, Rosenzweig
1980, and Guilbaut 1983. Hills terms the latter "the first full revisionist history of
the period." See below for further analysis of these sources.
6. See Chipp 1968,502; Rose 1975,130.
7. Harrison and Wood 1993,549-50.
8. See Shapiro and Shapiro 1977; Shapiro and Shapiro 1990, preface, xi.
9. The artists included in "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments,"
on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery from 19 September to 29 November
1987, were William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Wil-

Introduction 83
 lem de Kooning, Lee Krasner (the only woman), Robert Motherwell, Barnett New-
man, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Mark Tobey,
and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Beryl Wright's chronology in Auping 1987 expands
a similar effort in Rosenzweig 1980, 35-45. Other authors included in Auping
1987 are Lawrence Alloway, Donald Kuspit, Richard Shiff, Marcelin Pleynet,
and David Sylvester, as well as Ann Gibson and Michael Leja, younger scholars
who had recently written dissertations on Abstract Expressionist topics.
10. Auping 1987, introduction, 11. Auping's choices for the exhibition may not have
lived up to the ideals expressed his preface. InAF%6 (December H)87):122, the
critic John Yau commented that, while assembling the works on view, Auping
"had a wonderful opportunity to provide an alternative to currently accepted
readings, but, sad to say, he played it safe instead." Yau considers the exhibition
and catalogue content (too much focus on Newman) skewed in favor of provid-
ing a pedigree for the 19603 direction defined by Clement Greenberg as "Post-
Painterly Abstraction." He complains that Auping's "historicist elaboration of
formalism's codifications concentrates on field painting and thus continues the
notion that Abstract Expressionism's principal accomplishment was an empiric
understanding of the surface of the picture plane." Alternatively, the conserva-
tive critic Jed Perl praised the exhibition but termed Auping's catalogue "insuf-
ferably chi-chi." See Perl's "Pollock and Company," New Criterion 6 (November
1987): 27-33-
11. Auping 1987,11-12.
12. Auping (1987,12) employs the term "battleground," borrowed from Kramer 1985.
13. For more extensive analysis of the importance of this periodical, see Franks 2002,
the catalogue to an exhibition held at the Yale University Art Gallery.
14. Motherwell, quoted in Gibson 1984,93.
15. This letter by Gottlieb and Rothko (edited by Newman) is embedded in Jewell
I943b, x9. For analysis of this letter and its impact, see Clearwater 1984, 23-25;
Barnes 1993,2-13. See also Pollock 1944,14.
16. Pollock 1947-48,79.
17. For a summary of the pros and cons of the "evasion of language" argument, see
Cernuschi 1997,15-16.
18. Gibson (1984,347), citing ideas found in Carl G.Jung, Modern Man in Search of
a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1933).
19. O'Neill 1990; Terenzio 1992. In "Willem de Kooning: The Artist as Artwriter"
(Carrier 2002,32) the following question is posed: "Imagine a ghastly catastro-
phe in which all Abstract Expressionist paintings, and all illustrations of them,
are destroyed, but the writings of the artists themselves and their champions sur-
vive. What might future historians infer about this American period style?" Moth-
erwell and Newman would be among the few whose reputations would still be
intact in such a situation, according to Carrier. He proposes that de Kooning's

84 Introduction
 written commentaries also constitute a corollary discourse that enriches the un-
derstanding of his paintings.
20. Mother well and Rosenberg 1947-48,1.
21. Baziotes 1947-48, 2; Rosenberg 1947-48, 2. See also Rothko 1947-48, 84, where
the artist states, "I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are
the performers.. .. Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or de-
scribed in advance." For discussion and analysis of Possibilities i (the only num-
ber ever published), see Gibson 1984, 66-81; Gibson 1990,33-40; Hobbs 1979;
Barnier 2000. Pierre Chareau (architecture) and John Cage (music) were co-
editors of Possibilities with Rosenberg (writing) and Motherwell (art). In an in-
terview with Gibson on 13 April 1982, Motherwell explained "What we tried to
do in Possibilities ... was not theoretical; we wanted to present the evidence: very
factual descriptions presenting the thing—without theory." Quoted in Gibson
1984,68 (italics hers).
22. Motherwell i944a, 9-14, reproduced in Christian Kloyber, éd., Wolfgang
Paalen's DYN: The Complete Reprint (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 2000): n.p., and
excerpted in Terenzio 1992,27-34.
23. The first is an undated handwritten notation found in Pollock's papers after his
death. Francis V. O'Connor has attributed this entry to ca. 1950 in O'Connor
and Thaw 1978, vol. 4,253, doc. 89 (emphasis in original). The second is quoted
in Rodman 1957, 82. For a reconsideration of the possible meanings of the latter
statement, see Landau 2OO2a, 73-90.
24. See Gottlieb, Rothko [and Newman], 1943 letter to NTT embedded in Jewell
I943b,x9.
25. For a wide sampling of expressions of this reluctance to explain their works, see
Gibson 1984; Gibson к)88а. She adds, as well as Jung's theory, mentioned above,
the Abstract Expressionists' loathing of the formulas for making art prescribed
by fascist regimes; their distaste for Surrealism's literary bent; Greenberg's pro-
scription of the borrowing by one art form of aspects associated with another;
parallels with the tenet of New Criticism known as the "heresy of paraphrase";
and the example of aversion to interpretation inherent in Russian formalism and
existentialist philosophy.
26. Alloway, "Artists as Writers, Part One: Inside Information*," AF12 (March 1974):
30-35, quoting a statement first published in Paintings by Clyfford Still 1959. Ac-
cording to Alloway, "The emergence of Abstract Expressionism was [verbally]
documented from the beginning, though informally, by its originators." For an-
other "messianic" example, see Hofmann's pronouncement that "the life-giving
zeal in a work of art is deeply embedded in its qualitative substance. The spirit
in a work is synonymous with its quality. The Real in art never dies, because its
nature is predominantly spiritual" (found in Hofmann 1948, reprinted in Ross
!99°5 85) or, in the final paragraph of Newman 1948, the artist's proclamation

Introductio n 85
 that "we are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with
our relationship to the absolute emotions Instead of making cathedrals out of
Christ, man, or 4life,' we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings"
(italics his); reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990, 352-8 and O'Neill 1990,
170-3 .
27. Goodnough 1950,9-22, reprinted in Gibson 1990,314-44.
28. Coates, "The Art Galleries," New Yorker, 28 May 1945, 68. Coates's first use of
the term "abstract Expressionist" (variously capitalized) was in a review of Hans
Hofmann's exhibition at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery appearing in the New
Yorker, 30 March 1946, 83-84. In the latter, Coates wrote of Hofmann that "he is
certainly one of the most uncompromising representatives of what some people
call the spatter-and-daub school of painting and I, more politely, have christened
abstract Expressionism." Earlier, Coates had commented, "There's a style of
painting gaining ground in this country which is neither Abstract nor Surrealist,
though it has suggestions of both, while the way the paint is applied—usually in a
pretty free-swinging, spattery fashion, with only vague hints of subject matter-
is suggestive of methods of Expressionism. I feel some new name will have to be
coined for it, but at the moment I can't think of any." See his "The Art Galleries,
Assorted Moderns," New Yorker, 3 December 1944, 51. For an overview of such
early reactions to Abstract Expressionism in the art press and the popular press,
see Halasz 1983, pts. 1-2.
29. See Janis 1944, 89. The chapter titled "American Surrealist Painters," in which
he places Mark Tobey, Fanny Hillsmith, William Baziotes, Janet Sobel, Loren
Maclver, Morris Graves, Boris Margo, Jimmy Ernst, Gerome Kamrowski, Doro-
thea Tanning, David Hare, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, and
Robert Motherwell, among others, concludes: "Though abstraction and surreal-
ism are considered counter movements in twentieth-century painting, there is in
certain painters a fusion of elements from each. American painters particularly
have a strong inclination to develop interchanging ideas which may fit into either
tradition, though there are purists in both categories who adhere to basic prem-
ises and moreover insist that it is impossible to do otherwise. Apparently the
schism between the factions is not as insurmountable as their members believe.
That abstract painters are able to bridge the gap to surrealism is indicated.... It
is also true that the opposite takes place. Motherwell, formerly a member of the
surrealist circle, still retains surrealist ideas while approaching pure abstraction.
Artists who embrace both directions have for a precedent the work of Picasso."
Janis's book appears to be the first in which quotations by artists now associated
with Abstract Expressionism are appended to illustrations of their works. In it,
Pollock makes his now-famous statement about his painting The She-Wolf of
1943: "She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my

86 Introduction
 part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could
only destroy it" (112).
30. R[iley] 1944, 8,31. Maude Riley observes that newcomers on view, such as Pol-
lock and Rothko, instead "seem to have found something of their own and will
perhaps be the start of a third party of which modern art stands compellingly
in need." As noted above, both are designated "American Surrealists" by Janis,
whereas Motherwell, de Kooning, Hofmann, and Leonore Krassner ( later known
as Lee Krasner) are listed as "American Abstractionists."
31. Greenberg 1945, reprinted in O'Brian K)86b, 28-30. Putzel had stated in his cat-
alogue brochure that the "real forerunners" of this "new metamorphosism" were
Arp and Miró. Greenberg points out that James Johnson Sweeney of MoMA had
referred to this art in the winter issue of PR as "an expressionist direction." In
later definitions Greenberg will bracket out the impact of Surrealist influence
acknowledged here. PutzePs show included works by Masson, Miró, Arp, Hof-
mann, Pollock, Picasso, Gottlieb, Gorky, Matta, Rothko, Tamayo, Poussette-Dart,
Lee Krasner, and Charles Seliger. For more on Putzel and A Problem for Critics,
see Lader 1982.
32. Jewell 1943C, 6x. In answer to Gottlieb and Rothko's written response to his criti-
cism of works that they had submitted to the exhibition by the Federation of
Modern Painters and Sculptors Inc. at Wildenstein's, Jewell wrote, "Personally
I don't believe that any vital new movement has been started at all." Regarding
Gottlieb and Rothko's paintings and statements, the critic lamented, "these reli-
ably kindle, I fear, no such distinguished hope. There isn't enough that is 'new'
in them; and there is too much that is obscure and contradictory and involved
and irrelevant to our present purpose as a nation."
33. Earlier, Kootz had complained of the dearth of innovation in American painting:
"I probably have haunted the galleries during the past decade as much as have
the critics, because of my anxiety to see new talent, intelligent invention. My re-
port is sad. I have not discovered one bright white hope. I have not seen a painter
veer from his established course. I have not seen one attempt to experiment,
to realize a new method of painting. Isn't there a new way to reveal your ideas,
American painters? Isn't it time right now to check whether what you're saying
is régurgitation, or tired acceptance, or the same smooth railroad track?" Quoted
in Edward Alden Jewell, "The Problem of Seeing," NTT, ю August 1941, sec. 9,
7. A few years later, Kootz commented that the future is "something we could
only determine if we knew the ultimate potential for Abstraction and Expres-
sionism. These are the two great movements after Cézanne, and from them have
come our most important living artists." See Kootz 1943,60.
34. Ortega y Gassett, "On Point of View in Fine Arts," PR 16 (August 1949): 822-36,
from The Dehumanization of Art, published in English by Princeton University

Introduction 87
 Press in 1948. Quoted in Kootz and Rosenberg 1949, n.p. A copy of this exhibi-
tion brochure is in the MoMA library.
35. For the importance to Abstract Expressionism of the aesthetic theories of John
Dewey's Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Blach, 1934), see Buettner 1981,
58-62, and Buettner's "John Dewey and the Visual Arts in America," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (Summer 1975): 383-91.
36. Kootz and Rosenberg 1949, n.p.; italics Rosenberg's. According to Kootz, the
intrasubjective "makes no attempt to chronicle the American scene, exploit mo-
mentary political struggles, or stimulate nostalgia through familiar objects; he
deals instead with inward emotions and experiences. Dramatically personal,
each painting contains a part of the artist's self."
37. Rosenberg 1947, reprinted in Possibilities, 75. The other three painters were Ro-
mare Bearden, Byron Browne, and Carl Holty, none of whom today would likely
be considered an Abstract Expressionist.
38. Sfawin] 1958,57-8. In his review of the 1960 Venice Biennale, termed "a vindica-
tion of the New American Painting," Sidney Tillim noted that some Italians call
Kline "a modern Caravaggio" who, "observed away from the pressures of New
York[,] ... appears a tower of stylistic authenticity." See Tillim's "Report on the
Venice Biennale," AM 35 (October 1960): 28. For their statement in Possibilities,
see Motherwell and Rosenberg 1947-1948, i.
39. See Nicolas Galas, "The Essence of Tragedy," Tiger's Eye 3 (March 1948): 112-14,
reprinted in Gibson 1984, 143-45. Galas pointed out that "the individual who
has extreme self-confidence and great will power can rise above others." See
Ashton 1973,187-88, for the impact of this essay, especially on Rothko, Gottlieb,
and Newman.
40. The title of the Life piece undoubtedly refers to Greenberg's 1948 comment in
TN( reprinted in O'Brian igSGb, 202): "It is indeed a mark of Pollock's powerful
originality that he should present problems in judgment that must await the di-
gestion of each new phase of his development before they can be solved. Since
Marin—with whom Pollock will in time be able to compete for recognition as the
greatest American painter of the twentieth century—no other American artist
has presented such a case." In other reviews from the late forties, Greenberg used
additional superlatives to back up his claim that Pollock was not only the best
painter of his generation but "one of the major painters of our time." These are
collected in Karmel 19993 as well as in O'Brian igSob. Karmel (19993, 63) notes
that "Greenberg's steady drumroll of praise" had earned Pollock the attention
of Time magazine as early as 1947. For additional discussion of Pollock's media
attention, see Landau 1989,11-22; Corlett 1987.
41. For example, one photo caption reads "Pollock drools enamel paint." A different
interpretation of this Life article is presented in Collins 1991.
42. Quoted in Ellsworth 1949, 45. Hofmann also explains that "it is the privilege of

88 Introduction
 a democracy like ours that it expects the artist to be, through his art, the per-
sonification of its fundamental principles in being the highest example of spiri-
tual freedom." C.Jones (1996), cites "the private drama of the Abstract Expres-
sionist canvas."
43. C.Jones 1996,35.
44. Goodnough 1951, reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 74-8. Goodnough also wrote
"Kline Paints a Picture," which appeared in AN m December 1952.
45. Kaprow 1958,24-26,55-56.
46. E. de Kooning 1951,38, reprinted in E. de Kooning 1994,103-8, her ellipsis. The
notes for "David Smith Makes a Sculpture," written by the artist to provide gen-
eral background material for de Kooning's article, were later published in AN.
See Smith 1969,46-48,56.
47. Finkelstein 1950, 203, 205. As Finkelstein comments, "There is something dis-
tinctly American in this insistence upon art as organic synthesis, in the rejection
of all discipline save that of the experience itself. The New World has always
meant expanding horizons, fullness and freedom of opportunity and the throw-
ing off of old conventions" (206). See Finkelstein 1956 for his coining of the term
"Abstract Impressionism" to describe mid-1950s works by New York School art-
ists such as Jack Tworkov and Philip Guston.
48. Schapiro, "Recent Abstract Painting," reprinted in Modern Art igth and 2oth
Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 218; Ross 1990,
258-68. Originally published as "The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art"
(Schapiro 1957). For a more complete discussion of Schapiro's point of view to-
ward Abstract Expressionism, especially his argument that abstraction "cannot
be arbitrarily divorced from an historical or sociopolitical context," see Cernus-
chi 1997; Craven 1999.
49. Hess, éd., "Is Today's Artist with or Against the Past?" 1958,27,28.
50. "What Abstract Art Means to Me" 1951,7 (de Kooning's quotation), 12 (Mother-
well's quotation).
51. Seitz's dissertation was finally published as Abstract Expressionist Painting in
America in 1983 by the National Gallery of Art and Harvard University Press as
one in a series of Ailsa Mellon Bruce Studies in American Art. Some of the core
ideas of Seitz 1983 were summarized earlier in articles such as Seitz 1953. Follow-
ing Nietzsche, Seitz (1983) translates Zeitgeist as "a constellation of ideas which
seems to be in the atmosphere" (2).
52. See W. Rubin 1958. Rubin's "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition" was
published in six different issues of AF(February-May 1967); it is reprinted in its
entirety (without illustrations) in Karmel 1999a, 118-75.
53. The painters featured were Hofmann in February 1950, Pollock in May 1951,
Kline in December 1952, de Kooning in March 1953, Larry Rivers in January
1954, Fairfield Porter in January 1954, Ad Reinhardt in the summer issue for 1956,

Introduction 89
 Jane Freilicher in November 1956, Joan Mitchell in November 1957, and Nell
Blaine in May 1959. As noted, "David Smith Makes a Sculpture" appeared in Sep-
tember 1951.
54. For more information on The Club, which lasted from 1949 to 1962, see Sandier
1965^ Pavia reminisced about his role in founding The Club in Kay Larson,
"The Art Was Abstract, the Memories Are Concrete," NTT, 15 December 2002,
Arts and Leisure section, 50-51. An earlier, more short-lived forum, The Sub-
jects of the Artists School (1948-1949), is discussed in Cavalière and Hobbs 1977,
no.
55. This assessment is found in Pavia 1960, 8-9. (Pavia started It Is magazine in
1955.) See Hess 1951,94, where it is written that "There is no 'New York School'
of the 19505, for the action of the background is that it releases, instead of impos-
ing. ... The place is where things meet and happen, where each is on his own.
... Despite the efforts of certain promoters, ambitious for some coup d'état, there
is no leadership. There is work being done."
56. For the first quotation see Hess i95ob, 23. In this article, Hess adds rather ro-
mantically, "Rickety stairs and cold water flats are not figures of speech; they ex-
ist, in the deepest Sartre sense, as do all the grey discomfort, bleakness and eco-
nomic insecurity that go with them." The second quotation is found in Hess,
"Inside Nature ? AN 56 (February 1958): 59.
57. Alloway (i975a, 46) characterizes Hess's book on de Kooning as a "tight web of
documentation and poeticized gossip."
58. Hess 1953, 30-31. Here Hess compares de Kooning to a Procrustes who "does
not know the dimensions of his bed," stating that the artist "needs such doubt
to keep off-balance." For an even more floridly Romantic 19503 interpretation
of Woman I, see Leo Steinberg, "Month in Review," AM 30 (November 1955):
46-47. Evoking Walter Pater's overripe description of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona
Lisa, Steinberg states that Woman I is "at once more old and young than the
beauty whose appeal is to our waking taste. She is the fluid, touch-determined
image of the newly born; the remembered flesh that yielded at all points to the
lover; the succubus that lies too heavy on the drifting consciousness of sleep."
59. Hess, "4 Stars for the Spring Season: De Kooning,'M^50 (April 1951): 24,52.
60. Rosenberg 1958. In an essay m AN Annual, "Tenth Street: A Geography of Mod-
ern Art," Rosenberg described Tenth Street metaphorically, terming it "a trad-
ing post of ideas and the latest moves in art." He wrote, "On Tenth Street, the
individual prevails against the band, and it is to him that art there owes its inspi-
ration and its vocabulary. . . . The artist thus finds it necessary to exist on the
edge of the edge if he is to avoid being swept by collective currents. For this pur-
pose Tenth Street is ideal: it is all edge." Reprinted in Rosenberg, Discovering the
Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1973), 100-109.

90 Introduction
61. For Rosenberg's political background, see Cox 1982; Herbert 1984-85; Herbert
1985. For the critic's admiration of Baudelaire (as well as Valéry and Dosto-
yevsky), see Ashton 1980.
62. Rosenberg 1952,23,48. Emphasis has been added to the word "crisis," but Ro-
senberg himself capitalized "paint."
63. See "Parable of American Painting," in Rosenberg 1959, 13-22, and his "The
Search for Jackson Pollock," AN 59 (February 1961): 35. See Cox 1982 and Ash-
ton 1980 for further discussion of the Coonskinners/Redcoats binary. In "Tenth
Street" (1958) Rosenberg pointed out how "the new American 'abstract' art, the
first to appear here without a foreign return address, constituted, interestingly
enough, the first art movement in the United States in which immigrants and
the sons and daughters of immigrants have been leaders in creating and dissemi-
nating a style." Rosenberg went on to list forty-seven denizens of Tenth Street
who fit into that category, including Gorky, de Kooning, Hofmann, Rothko, Gott-
lieb, Newman, Baziotes, and Philip Guston. Reprinted in Discovering the Pres-
ent, 101-2.
64. Rosenberg 1952, 22-23. For more on Rosenberg's training and early partisan
criticism, see Elaine O'Brien, "The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg: The-
aters of Love and Combat" (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York Graduate
Center, 1997).
65. Rosenberg 1952, 22-23. Although his comment about breaking distinctions
between art and life had an important effect on Happenings artists such as Ka-
prow, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg, many Abstract Expressionist painters dis-
agreed violently with its premise. For one example, see the copy of "The Ameri-
can Action Painters" found in Lee Krasner's papers, now owned by the Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Krasner had been very close to Ro-
senberg in the 19303 (she and Igor Pantuhoff, her romantic interest before she
married Pollock, lived for a time with Rosenberg and his wife May Natalie Ta-
bak, and it was Krasner who first introduced Rosenberg and Greenberg). Never-
theless, Krasner strongly pooh-poohed most of the essay's major points. Her
marginalia indicate that she (and Pollock as well?) considered the title Action
Painter to be "insidious." She also noted that "original work exists; it does not
demonstrate what it is about to become" (her emphasis).
66. As Greenberg would assert publicly in "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name"
(Greenberg K)62b), his primary riposte to Rosenberg's "The American Action
Painters," Pollock believed that Rosenberg based his ideas for this essay on a
conversation the two of them had on the train from Manhattan to East Hampton.
This idea was perpetuated in the writings of Barbara Rose, В. Н. Friedman,
Bryan Robertson, and others. Rosenberg, however, maintained adamantly that
his American Action Painter was a conflation of de Kooning, Pollock, and Kline.
O'Brian I993b, 138 reprints the version of Greenberg's essay that originally ap-

Introductio n 91
 peared in Encounter (London) 19 (December 1962): 67-71. See Winkenweider
1998,101, n. 29, for references to sources where (in Winkenweider's terminology)
"this falsehood" is repeated.
67. Lisa Phillips, "Beat Culture: America Revisioned," in Beat Culture and the New
America, ig^o-ig6^ (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in associa-
tion with Flammarion, Paris, 1996), 39. Kenneth Rexroth explains in "Disen-
gagement: The Art of the Beat Generation," New World Writing No. и (New
York: New American Library, 1957) that "a poem by Dylan Thomas, a saxophone
solo by Charles Parker, a painting by Jackson Pollock—these are pure confabula-
tions as ends in themselves" (28-41). For further discussion of the resonance of
Pollock's paintings and Rosenberg's 1952 essay "American Action Painters" for
the Beats see Landau 1989,18-21,239-40; Lhamon 1990; Belgrad 1998.
68. Brustein 1956,134-35. See also "The Wild Ones" 1956, 70-71, where Pollock is
termed pejoratively "Jack the Dripper."
69. For recent reinterpretation of these remarks in a more positive light, see Alfieri,
"The Pollock Exhibition," in Maroni and Bigatti 2002, 9-20; Landau 2002a,
73-90. Pollock's 11 December 1950 telegram response, which begins "NO CHAOS
DAMN IT," appeared as a letter to the editor of Time in response to the American
news magazine's 20 November 1950 excerpt of Alfieri 1950. The latter text was
also published in its entirety in the Museo Correr's catalogue for the late-summer
exhibition of Guggenheim's Pollock collection. All of these primary texts are re-
printed in Karmel 1999a, 68-71.
70. Greenberg, "Art," TN, 1 February 1947, 137-39; reprinted in O'Brian ig86b,
122-25, and Karmel 19993,56-57.
71. Greenberg, "Review of an Exhibition of De Kooning," TJV466, 24 April 1948,
448, reprinted in O'Brian K)86b, 229.
72. As those who have written about Greenberg have already established, his devel-
opment of these criteria date to his earliest essays about art, "Avant-Garde and
Kitsch," PR 6 (Fall 1939): 34-49, and "Towards a Newer Laocoon," PR 7 ( July-
Aug. 1940): 296-310. Both have been widely reprinted since then. See, e.g.,
O'Brian 19863,5-38.
73. KozlofTK)65b, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,139-51.
74. Goldwater 1960, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,126-38.
75. For Goldwater's comments see Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,34. Some of these in-
ternational reviews are reprinted in ibid., 101-8; a larger number appear in Ross
1990, 279-95, and there is a complete listing in Tuchman 1965, 249-50. Those
quoted here are, respectively, Mario Valsecchi, in // Giorno, Milan, 10 June 1958;
unsigned, Le Phare, Brussels, 14 December 1958; and L. D. H., La Libre Belgique,
Brussels, 12 December 1958. Like the critic for Libre Belgique, Bruno Alfieri
(who had criticized Pollock as chaotic) admitted at the end of his 1950 UArte

92 Introductio n
 Moderna review that, "compared to Pollock, Picasso, poor Pablo Picasso, the lit-
tle gentleman who [for] a few decades [has] trouble[d] the sleep of his col-
leagues with the everlasting nightmare of his destructive undertakings, becomes
a quiet conformist, a painter of the past." It is probably this judgment to which
Pollock referred when he complained to Time magazine, "THINK YOU LEFT OUT
MOST EXCITING PART OF MR. ALFiERi's PIECE." The review and the response are
both reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 68-71.
76. Rexroth 1959,30-33. See Heron 1956,15, for a critique of John Berger's negative
review of Abstract Expressionism as "a full expression of suicidal despair." Heron
comments that "this is Marxist criticism at its most hysterical."
77. Barr 1959, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,95-100.
78. Greenberg 1950, reprinted in O'Brian 1993a, 62.
79. Michelson, "Paris," ^M30 (June 1959): 17.
80. In order to counter the growing preeminence of Greenberg, Rosenberg contin-
ued to defend his critical model in numerous venues during the early 19608.
These include most prominently Rosenberg 1960 and "Action Painting: Crisis
and Distortion," in Rosenberg 1966,38-47. Referring pejoratively to Greenberg
in the latter as "a tipster on masterpieces, current and future," Rosenberg com-
plained that, in his rival's "burlesque of art history, artists vanish, and paintings
spring from one another with the help of no other generating principle than what-
ever 'law of development' the critic happens to have on hand" (43).
81. For more on this, see Halasz 1983, pt. 3,85. Additional information about Green-
berg's critical career may be found in Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A
Life (New York: Scribner, 1997).
82. See Greenberg K)62b for criticism of Sir Herbert Read's phenomenological read-
ing. This resulted in a 1963 exchange of letters between these two critics in En-
counter magazine. These are reprinted in O'Brian K)93b, 135-44.
83. Kramer 1962, 60-63. For extensive discussion of Greenberg's early association
with PR and his subsequent rejection of Marxism and Stalinism, see Herbert
1985, Cox 1982. The latter makes a case for Greenberg's 1945-1957 affiliation with
the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary as critical in shaping his anti-
Soviet attitude in the cold war period. Cox points out that, significantly, none of
Greenberg's many essays on political topics was chosen for inclusion in Art and
Culture: Critical Essays (Greenberg 1961).
84. For the influence of Hofmann on Greenberg, see the critic's 1957 memoir, "The
Late Thirties in New York" (1960 revised version) in Greenberg 1962,230-38, as
well as Kozloff 1965^ Lee Krasner was responsible not only for introducing
Greenberg to Rosenberg; she also introduced him to both Hofmann and Pol-
lock. The fact that Hofmann had spent the critical years 1904-1914 in Paris
and knew Matisse, Braque, Picasso, and Delaunay must have been impressive to

Introduction 93
 Greenberg, who admitted that the public lecture series given by Hofmann in
the winter of 1938-39 was an eye-opening experience. For more on Hofmann's
French-based aesthetic, see Landau 1976.
85. See Kroll 1962. Kroll cites Greenberg's "Louis and Noland," Art International
4 (May 1960): 27-8, in which Greenberg denigrates the "loose-brush, dry-
bristled, scumbled, and lathered surfaces of the de Kooning and Kline school,
with its Cubist hangover" and the "circle of virtuosity which began with that
school." "Louis and Noland" is reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 94-99.
86. All of the characteristics of Abstract Expressionism that Greenberg abhorred are
adulated in Friedman 1954, 12-13. Here Friedman writes, "Never before has a
large group of artists (except the surrealists) so emphasized and, indeed, over-
emphasized the irrational (the 'unpredictable,' 'surprising,' 'intuitive,' 'phantom,'
'revelation.' And no group (except the dadaists . . .) has so attacked 'memory,'
'geometry,' 'the world,' 'most people,' 'dogma,' 'authority,' 'tradition.' " For a com-
parison of the "Wôlfflinian cast" of Friedman's ideas with Greenberg's view of
history, see Foster 1980,75-76. Foster notes Friedman's use of "inordinate" as an
adjective to define Abstract Expressionism's key techniques and effects.
87. Greenberg, "Complaints of an Art Critic," reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 265-72.
88. Greenberg's " 'American-Type' Painting" originally appeared in PR 22 (Spring
1955), 179-96, but was substantially revised for Art and Culture (Greenberg 1961,
208-29), according to O'Brian 1993a, 235. It has been widely reprinted in, e.g.,
Ross 1990,235-53, and is also included in this volume.
89. Greenberg 1952, reprinted in O'Brian 19933,99-106.
90. Greenberg 1955. For discussion, see Kozloff 1965, reprinted in Shapiro and Sha-
piro 1990,143.
91. Schapiro 1956,146-47; Rosenzweig 1980,12.
92. Rosenzweig 1980,12. The two reviews cited are Belle Krasne, "The Bar Vertical
on Fields Horizontal," Art Digest 25 (i May I95i):i6, and Judith Kaye Reed, "New-
man's Flat Areas," Art Digest 24 (i February 1950): 16.
93. Schapiro 1956,146-47-
94. "Foreword: On Art and Terminology," in Arnason 1961,13.
95. Arnason, introduction to ibid., 24.
96. Gottlieb and Rothko, quoted in Jewell I943b, xg. As already noted, their letter
was written in response to Jewell 19433. Although Newman helped write or ed-
ited their letter, because he did not exhibit in that show and Jewell therefore did
not mention his art derisively, it was not appropriate for Newman to со-sign. In
"The Plasmic Image," a multipart essay of 1945 published in O'Neill 1990,
138-55, Newman accuses Jewell of trying to "belittle" his friends' art by labeling
it "globalism."
97. Gottlieb and Rothko, quoted in Jewell I943b, x9; Newman I947b, reprinted in

94 Introductio n
 Shapiro and Shapiro 1990; Ross 1990; Harrison and Wood 1993; Hills 2001;
O'Neill 1990. Cited in the same context in Cavalière and Hobbs 1977,110-17.
98. Greenberg, essay for Post Painterly Abstraction (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1964); reprinted in O'Brian i993b, 192-97.
99. O'Brian i993a, 104,232.
mo. Reprinted in O'Neill 1990,108.
101. Alloway 19б5а, reprinted in Alloway 1975,20.
102. Rosenblum 1961, reprinted in Ross 1990, 273-78. In Rosenblum 1975, the au-
thor expanded these arguments. In "The Sublime Is Now" (Newman 1948),
once again opposing Greenbergian aesthetic criteria, Newman decisively re-
jected art historical inevitability, the "fetish of quality," and the structures of
beauty associated with Platonic conceptions of judgment. Newman wrote that
"the image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete,
that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic
glasses of history."
103. Greenberg 1955, reprinted in O'Brian 1993a, 228; Greenberg K)62b, reprinted
in O'Brian i993b, 141.
104. Alloway К)6за, reprinted in Alloway 1975,31-41; Rosenblum 1961, reprinted in
Ross 1990,276.
105. Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 85-94.1 follow
the orthographic designation set out by Charles Harrison in "Modernism," in
Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard ShifT
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 147. Harrison capitalizes Mod-
ernism to refer to the art critical theories of Greenberg and Michael Fried. If
an author has not capitalized the term within a quotation, I do not correct it,
however.
106. "Byzantine Parallels," in Greenberg I96ia, 167-70. In " 'American-Type' Paint-
ing" Greenberg had commented, "In some of the huge 'sprinkled' pictures [Pol-
lock] did in 1950 and showed in 1951, value contrasts are pulverized as it were,
spread over the canvas like dusty vapor (the result was two of the best pictures
he ever painted)." Reprinted in O'Brian 1993a, 233.
107. For discussion of Greenberg's concept of "optical mirage" as he applied it to
Pollock, see Krauss 1993,246; this section is reprinted in Frascina 2000,361-63.
108. Fried 1965, 14-17, reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 97-103. Rosenzweig (1980, 23)
points out that "Pollock Paints a Picture" (Goodnough 1951) opened the door
for both Greenberg and Fried by stressing the artist's use of aluminum paint as
a device "tending to hold other colors on the same plane as the canvas" (41).
109. Fried's organization of "Three American Painters—Kenneth Noland, Jules
Olitski, and Frank Stella" (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965) and his
subsequent focus on Stella as the prime exemplar of Modernism complemented

Introductio n 95
 Greenberg's stint as advisor for the French &, Company gallery in Manhattan
from 1959 to 1960. These activities lent even more authority to their theoretical
positions. Greenberg's French &, Company job, as well as his curatorial activi-
ties at such other institutions as Bennington College and the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, for example, provided another important avenue to promote
the artists he favored, such as Newman, Louis, Noland, and Olitski.
no. Kenworth Moffett, Jules Olistki (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 13, quoted
in Rosenzweig 1980, 27-28. A few years later, the Minimalist sculptor Donald
Judd would pronounce that "Pollock created the large scale, wholeness and
simplicity that have become common to almost all good work." See Judd 1967,
34-
in. See Rubin 1967 (reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 118-75); O'Connor 1964 (excerpted
from O'Connor 1965); O'Connor 1967. Influential interviews that Krasner gave
in the 19608 (mostly in conjunction with the MoMA show) include Glaser 1967;
du Plessix and Gray 1967 (which also includes reminiscences about Pollock by
Tony Smith, Betty Parsons, and Alfonso Ossorio); and Friedman 1969. These
interviews are reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 25-48.
112. Alloway 1966, reprinted in Alloway I975b, 42-51.
113. For Greenberg's relationship with the students in his 1961-1963 Harvard Uni-
versity graduate seminar, see Reise 1968, parts 1-2. Rosalind Krauss, Michael
Fried, and Jane Harrison Cone were in this class. Barbara Rose, whose husband
at the time, the painter Frank Stella, was a close friend of Fried's, was also strongly
influenced by Greenberg's Wolfflinian approach.
114. Irving Sandier, in American Art of the ig6os (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1988),
labels seriality a major attribute of the sensibility of the sixties (73-76). (Numer-
ous journal articles described this widespread tendency. See, e.g., Mel Bochner,
"Serial Art Systems: Solipsism," AM 41 (Summer 1967): 39-43; Jack Burnham,
"Systems Esthetics," AF43 (September 1968): 30-35.
115. See Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of David Smith, David Hare and
Mirko," 7^164,19 April 1947,459-60, and Greenberg 1947 (both reprinted in
O'Brian K)86b, 140,166-67); see also Greenberg 1956-57 (reprinted in O'Brian
a
*993 5 275-79 and slightly revised in Greenberg 1961,203-7).
116. Cone 1966, 1-2. She cites Greenberg's comment in "David Smith (1956-57)"
that Smith "is one of these artists on the order of Balzac who not only can afford
their mistakes, but even need them." (See O'Brian 1993a, 275-79.) By 1964 Green-
berg declared that Smith's "radical unevenness" had become "almost entirely a
thing of the past." See Greenberg K)64b, reprinted in Art International 8 (May
1964): 34-37; O'Brian 199зЬ, 188-92.
117. See Smith I952b; Smith 1960, 44 (for the quotation); Kuh 1962, 219-34. On
Smith's working in series, Greenberg commented in 1964, "And as the pieces in
each series multiplied, they became less abrupt as variations, more nuanced.

96 Introductio n
 But the nuancing, instead of making Smith's manner more involuted or ambigu-
ous, only made it more logical and direct." Reprinted in O'Brian I993b, i8g.
118. Motherwell 1966,66.
119. See, e.g., Greenberg's description of Smith's Untitled (24 April 1965) in "David
Smith: Comments on His Latest Works," reprinted in O'Brian K)93b, 226-27:
"This is one example, a very late work, in which the vein of his flat painted
('mural') sculpture crosses that of his Zig series. As in a Synthetic Cubist paint-
ing, the flat 'picture' plane is jolted into what seem two planes of different depth,
only to have its 'integrity' reasserted. This is done, as much pictorially as sculp-
turally, by the inflections of the dividing ridge of steel, which cuts into and col-
lects space on top of and outside the 'picture' plane. Both the pictorial and the
sculptural seem here to transcend themselves in a new kind of unified medium."
120. Rose 1975,179-80.1 borrow the phrase "epitaph for an avant-garde" from Fer-
ren 1958. Rose seems to reference Sandier 1959 in her assessment.
121. Greenberg 1965, reprinted in O'Brian i993b, 215.
122. Newman 1965,39, 55. For a related view of Abstract Expressionism's putative
demise, see T[homas] В. Н [ess], "Editorial: The Many Deaths of American Art,"
AN59 (October 1960): 25.
123. Battcock 1969-1970, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,152-56. In review-
ing the earlier "American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists" exhibition at
the Guggenheim, Sidney Tillim made many of the same points. For instance,
Tillim wrote that "Mr. Arnason revealed Abstract Expressionism as having
arrived at the pinnacle of decadence and ennui." See his "Month in Review,"
AM36 (December 1961): 42-43. During the sixties, some of AAFs regular writ-
ers were apparently attempting to provide a corrective to the boosterism found
in AN in the previous decade.
124. Geldzahler 1969,15.
125. Gottlieb, quoted in Friedman 1978, 96, from an unpublished interview with
Andrew Hudson. See also Collins 1991,294-99.
126. This petition garnered a huge amount of publicity. In addition to the Life arti-
cle, "Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show," 15 January
1951,34, other national coverage included Weldon Kees, "Art," TN170,3 June
1950,556-57; "The Revolt of the Pelicans," Time, 5 June 1950,54; "The Metro-
politan Goes Native," Cue, ю June 1950,22,45-46; and "Blind justice: Jury ap-
pointed for first national exhibition to be held at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in December; with text of open letter signed by twenty-eight artists," AN 49
(Summer 1950): 15, reprinted in Ross 1990, 226-27. Local coverage included
"The Irascible Eighteen," New York Herald Tribune, 23 May 1950; "18 Painters
Boycott Metropolitan; Charge 'Hostility to Advanced Art,' " NTT, 22 May 1950;
"18 U.S. Artists Boycott Contest of Metropolitan," New York Herald Tribune, 22
May 1950; "18 Artists Vow to Boycott 'Met' Exhibit," New York World-Telegram

Introductio n 97
 and Sun, 22 May 1950. Many of these clippings are pasted into a scrapbook in
the William and Ethel Baziotes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
127. Friedman (1978,102) states that "no group photograph of the Abstract Expres-
sionists has been as widely reproduced as Leen's," and it has been used count-
less additional times since he made this statement.
128. Sandier 1970,2-3.
129. Arnason 1961,13,24.
130. Moffett 1972,313-14.
131. McCaughey 1971,71-72. At that time, McCaughey (like Moffett) was a formalist
along Greenbergian lines. As such, he complained that Sandier's position "di-
lates too readily into a series of dubious equations (subject matter equals con-
tent, content equals meaning, meaning equals significance)." It is McCaughey's
view that "the abstract expressionists removed the subject matter of painting
from the area of the discoursable and the discoverable into the area of the strictly
optical experience." Another perspective is represented in Harrison 1973, 9.
Harrison admires the way "Irving Sandler's recently published study of Ab-
stract Expressionism has done much to readjust the overall picture in terms of
substantiated history and original documentation," thus providing welcome
"material for alternative hypotheses."
132. See Alloway, "Artists as Writers," 31; Whitney Independent Study Program
1975; Cavalière and Hobbs 1977,110-17; Car mean and Rathbone, 1978.
133. For Pollock's quotation, see Rodman 1957, 82; Gottlieb's "Statement, 1947" ap-
peared in "The Ides of Art," Tiger's Eye i (December 1947): 43, reprinted in
Ross 1990, 52; Rothko is quoted from the typescript of "The Portrait and the
Modern Artist," an "Art in New York" program for radio station WNYC broad-
cast on 13 October 1943,1-3 (reprinted in Tuchman 1965,139, as well as Allo-
way and MacNaughton 1981). All are also republished in Whitney Independent
Study Program 1975.
134. Cavalière and Hobbs 1977, no.
135. Dissertations on Abstract Expressionist criticism written in the 19703 include
Cox's Art-as-Politics, completed and published in 1977; Buettner's American
Art Theory 1945-1970, completed in 1977 and published in 1981; and Foster's
The Critics of Abstract Expressionism, completed in 1973 and published in 1980.
Dissertations on Abstract Expressionist art and artists in process or completed
during the seventies and early eighties include Gail Levin (influence of Kandin-
sky), Melvin P. Lader (Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery),
Gladys Kashdin (Abstract Expressionist art and ideas), Ann Eden Gibson (Ab-
stract Expressionist little magazines), Robert C. Hobbs (Motherwell), Robert
Mattison (Motherwell),Janet T. Anderson (Motherwell), Mona Hadler (Baziotes),
Ellen G. Landau (Krasner), Mary R. Davis (Gottlieb), Cynthia Goodman (Hof-

98 Introduction
 mann), Diane Newbury (Hofmann), Elizabeth Langhorne (Pollock), Matthew
Rohn (Pollock), Harry F. Gaugh (Kline), Benjamin G. Paskus (Newman), David
M. Quick (Newman), Beverly June Wayne (Reinhardt), Robert Fulton Porter
(Rothko), James Ward (Rothko), Anna C. Chave (Rothko), Catherine Olivier
(Tobey), Frederic J. Hoffman (Tobey), Edward R. Kelly (Tobey), Jeanne Che-
nault (Tomlin), and Harry Rand (Gorky). Robert ReifPs dissertation on Gorky
was completed in 1961. For more details about these doctoral studies, many of
which formed the basis for subsequently published books, see "Artists' Bibli-
ographies and Selected Exhibitions" in Auping 1987,274-95.
136. Cavalière (1979) explains how the 1975 Whitney Downtown exhibition, "Sub-
jects of the Artists: New York Painting, 1941-1947," provided the genesis of
"Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years."
137. See Roberta Smith, " 'Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years' at the Whit-
ney," Art in America 67 (May-June 1979): 134; Hilton Kramer, "Art: Elegiac
Works of Lee Krasner," NTT, 9 February 1979, C25- For discussion of the im-
pact of this exhibition on Krasner's career, see "Forming Krasner's Identity,"
in Landau 1995,10. A few paintings by Krasner had also been included in the
Whitney Downtown's earlier show, "Subjects of the Artists."
138. Prominent critics writing about Krasner in the late 19605 and 19705 included
Lawrence Campbell, Emily Wasserman, Cindy Nemser, Bryan Robertson, Elea-
nor Munro, Marcia Tucker, and Barbara Rose. See Landau 1995, 21-22, for a
complete list of articles and catalogue essays by these authors.
139. Rose 1977,100, n. 2, tells how Krasner "still smarts when she tells the story of
Barnett Newman calling to invite Pollock to join the protest of the 'irascible
eighteen' against the Metropolitan Museum. Krasner answered the phone; New-
man asked to speak with Pollock and did not invite her to join, although she
had been active in all of the various artists' protest activities in the thirties."
Krasner's absence from Leen's photograph is widely considered as having been
highly detrimental to her acceptance as a pioneer Abstract Expressionist. Fried-
man 1978 cites other artists who were not in the photograph who also probably
should have been.
140. Hofmann's role as a teacher to several first-generation and many second-gener-
ation Abstract Expressionists, and especially his famous "push-pull" method,
took on renewed importance in studies of the 19705. See Rosenberg 1970; Sand-
ier 1973; Goodman 1979.
141. See O'Connor 1965, 366-68, 372; the exchange of letters between Rubin and
O'Connor in AFz (June 1964): 4-5; Polcari I979b; Roskill 1979.
142. Some of the numerous other sources from the late 19605 and the 19705 on these
topics include Alloway 1968; Kagan 1975; Cavalière 1977; Wechsler 19773,
I977b; Hadler 1977; Polcari 19793; D. Rubin 1979; Laurance P. Hurlburt, "The
Siqueiros Experimental Workshop: New York, 1936," Art Journal 35 (Spring

Introduction 99
 1976): 237-46. A high percentage of these articles appeared in AM during the
period when it was edited by the late Richard Martin. Martin offered many
younger scholars of Abstract Expressionism a chance to publish their ideas in
the 19705 and 19805.
143. See Allentuck 1971, preceded by Sandier 1968. After Allentuck's reprint, numer-
ous book reviews and additional articles on Graham were published, including
Kokkinen 1976, Herrera 1976, and Carl Goldstein, "John Graham during the
19205: His Introduction to Modernism," JJÍ 51 (March 1977): 98-99.
144. See not only Graham's System and Dialectics (Graham 1939), but also his article
"Primitive Art and Picasso" (Graham 1937).
145. Ellen Schwartz, "The Birth of Abstract Expressionism," AN 78 (January 1979):
75. For an even more critical review, see Geoffrey Dorfman, " 'Abstract Expres-
sionism: The Formative Years,' Whitney Museum of American Art," AFij (De-
cember 1978): 61-63. Dorfman decries the paintings on view as having "the
look of a few surviving artifacts of a curatorial dig."
146. Quoted in Allentuck 1971, 95. Cited in Hobbs and Levin 1978, 13; Graham's
emphasis is retained.
147. See Simon K)67a, K)67b. Busa's quoted remark was made to Melvin P. Lader in
an unpublished interview, Minneapolis, 26 May 1976.1 am grateful to Lader for
providing access to this transcript. See Landau 1989,94-99 and D. Rubin 1979,
103-9 for further discussion of these joint artistic sessions.
148. Quoted in Simon 1967^ 22-23.
149. Smith, " 'Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,' " 134.
150. These are Friedman 1972; Kligman 1974; and O'Connor and Thaw 1979.
151. Pollock's 1956 statement, "We're all of us influenced by Freud, I guess. I've been
a Jungian for a long time," quoted in Rodman 1957, 82, was used as primary
evidence.
152. See Langhorne 1977; Langhorne 1979 (reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 202-19). For
Krasner's lawsuit and other details of the Jungian interpretation controversy,
see Cernuschi I992b.
153. See Gordon 1980 for a discussion of the major points of the so-called Jungian
critics of Pollock, as well as W. Rubin 1979 for arguments against them. Rubin's
articles on the limits of psychological criticism of Pollock are reprinted (with-
out illustrations) in Karmel 1999a, 220-61.
154. In light of the findings of conservators who examined the paintings in MoMA's
1998 Jackson Pollock retrospective, some of Rubin's assertions about Pollock's
rejection of figuration in the allover pictures require correction. See James Cod-
dington, "No Chaos Damn It," and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, "Jackson Pollock:
Response as Dialogue," in Karmel 1999^ 101-20. See Landau 2002a for further
discussion as to how Rubin's thesis requires revision since the conservators'
discovery of physical evidence of buried figuration. Karmel uses new digital

100 Introduction
 methods to demonstrate this in "Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs
of Hans Namuth" (Karmel 1998), 87-137.
155. See Hobbs 1975. A copy is in the library of the Dedalus Foundation, New York.
A concise version of the arguments made in this dissertation is presented in
Hobbs 1976,29-34, reprinted below.
156. See Fineberg 1978. Motherwell admitted his problems returning affection in an
interview with Fineberg, 5 November 1976.
157. Rosenberg 1952,23. See Rand 1976 and Rand 1977,114-15.
158. Rosenberg K)62b, 50,34. Articles published in the 19603 and books published
in 1978 and 1980 by Karlen Mooradian, Gorky's nephew, established many per-
tinent biographical details. See Auping 1987, 274, for information on these
sources. Foster (1976) observes that, because "his art was somewhat unconge-
nial" to their respective theses, the differing treatment of Gorky by Rosenberg
and Greenberg presents an interesting comparison. As Foster points out, "Un-
like Greenberg, who thought Gorky was good but not important, Rosenberg
viewed Gorky as a great innovator" (61).
159. Eliza Rathbone, "Arshile Gorky: The Plow and the Song" in Carmean and Rath-
bone 1978, 58-90. These ideas were elaborated in Rand 1980. See also Lader
1984.
160. Hess 1972, p. 232. For the friendship of Gorky, Graham, and de Kooning see
Reiff 1977; Rose 1976; Lader 1978.
161. Hess 1972,223-27.
162. Lader 1978, 95-97; E. A. Carmean Jr., "Willem de Kooning: The Women" in
Carmean and Rathbone 1978,154-83; Yard 1978. Yard quotes the artist speak-
ing about his Women in an interview with David Sylvester (excerpted in Hess
1968,149): "I look at them now [ten years later] and they seem vociferous and
ferocious. I think it had to do with the idea of the idol, the oracle, and above all
the hilariousness of it." In that same interview (De Kooning 1963), the artist ex-
plained, "So I fear that I have to follow my desires" (Hess, 1968,148), cited in
Carmean and Rrthbone 1978,157.
163. Anderson 1967,60. The other sculptors Greenberg named as promising in "The
New Sculpture" (reprinted in O'Brian K)86b, 313-19) were Theodore Roszak,
David Hare, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, Richard Lippold, Peter Grippe,
Burgoyne Diller, Adeline Kent, Ibram Lassaw, and Isamu Noguchi. In 1984 the
Whitney Museum of American Art organized an important exhibition on Ab-
stract Expressionist sculpture titled "The Third Dimension: Sculpture of the
New York School" (Phillips 1984).
164. E. A. Carmean Jr., introduction to in Carmean and Rathbone 1978,16.
165. Krauss 1977. This catalogue raisonné and Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture
of David Smith (Krauss I97ib) were based on the author's 1969 Harvard Uni-
versity dissertation, "The Sculpture of David Smith."

Introduction 101
 166. Krauss igyib, 6-7,44.
167. See, e.g., Dehner 1977-78. The oeuvre of Dehner, who was married to Smith
from 1927 to 1952, is thoroughly explored in Marter 1980-81 and Marter 1993.
(See Marter 1984 and below in the text and the anthology for Marter's dis-
cussion of the ramifications for both Dehner and Smith of their personal and
artistic relationship.) Marter has also written articles and catalogue essays on
Theodore Roszak, the only other male Abstract Expressionist sculptor whose
reputation comes close to that of Smith. See "Theodore Roszak's Early Con-
structions: The Machine as Creator of Fantastic and Ideal Forms," АЛ/54 (No-
vember 1979): 110-13; Theodore Roszak: The Drawings (New York: Drawing So-
ciety, 1992).
168. Quoted in Wye 1982,16. In the introduction to this catalogue, William Rubin
comments that "Louise Bourgeois is a loner of another order, whose bona fides
goes back four decades to a period when maintaining a wholly individual pro-
file in the face of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, David Smith et alia in-
volved an immense force of artistic and personal character" (ii).
169. For Bourgeois's participation on this panel, see Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of
the Father, Reconstruction of the Father; Writings and Interviews ^23-1997, ed-
ited by Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obst (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press; Paris: Editions Violette, 1998), 64.
170. Wye 1982,17. See Gibson 1997,125-27, for further discussion of Bourgeois's re-
lation to Surrealism and the Abstract Expressionists. In a 1969 interview with
William Rubin published in Bernadac and Obst, Louise Bourgeois, 83, Bour-
geois disavows any connection to male Abstract Expressionist sculptors:
Q: Danny Robbins sees you "not related to the New York milieu." Do you not feel
an affinity to the work done in the 405 and early 505 by Ferber, Lipton, Ros-
zak and others who were exploring themes of eclosión and organic growth,
often in a context of biomorphism distantly derived from Surrealism?
A: I do not feel any affinity with the sculptors you name.
171. Bourgeois is quoted in Terrie Sultan, "Redefining the Terms of Engagement,"
in Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory; Works 1982-1993 (New York: Brook-
lyn Museum of Art, 1994), 28. For analysis of Bourgeois's brand of feminist exis-
tentialism, especially as it relates to understanding her 19403 sculptural series
Personnages, see Helfenstein 2002,10-32 (quotation is at 10).
172. "The Late Thirties in New York," in Greenberg 1961,230, published in an ear-
lier form as "New York Painting Only Yesterday," AN 56 (Summer 1956): 58,
84-86 (reprinted in O'Brian I993b, 19-25). This quotation was used as an epi-
graph in Shapiro and Shapiro 1977 (reprinted in Frascina 1985 and Frascina
2000) and in Guilbaut 1983,17. For Rosenberg's statement see Rosenberg 1952,
48.
173. Reprinted in Rose 1975,129-30; Gibson 1990,239-40. In Terenzio 1992,45-46,

102 Introduction
 this text is also republished. Terenzio asserts that "MotherwelPs discarded
drafts for the preface reveal that he had intended quite a different approach,
which he must have relinquished to Rosenberg's persuasion."
174. MotherwelPs "The Modern Painter's World" was initially given as a lecture at
Mt. Holyoke College on 10 August 1944. It is reproduced in Kloyber, Wolfgang
Paalen's DYN(emphasis MotherwelPs) and excerpted in Terenzio 1992,27-35,
and Hills 2001,164-68.
175. Newman's "What About Isolationist Art?" (1942) was unpublished until it ap-
peared in Hess 1971, 35-36. It is reprinted in Ross 1990, 121-25 and O'Neill
1990, 20-29. In this polemical essay Newman paralleled the isolationism of re-
gionalist and American Scene art with Hitlerism, labeling both examples of
"vicious nationalism." Elsewhere, in a related statement made in 1943 (for a
catalogue to the first group show of American Modern artists at the Riverside
Museum), Newman decried the fact that "art in America is still the plaything of
politicians." Quoted in Guilbaut 1983,69.
176. Guilbaut 1983, 72-79. He also discusses MotherwelPs "The Modern Painter's
World" at 79-81.
177. Ibid., 11. A good overview of the main points of the cold war argument is given
in Cernuschi 1997, 37-40. For the original articles, see Shapiro and Shapiro
1970; Kozloff 1973; Hauptman 1974; Cockcroft 1974; Mathews 1976; Tagg 1976;
Guilbaut 1980. All but Hauptman and Tagg are reprinted in Frascina 2000.
Frascina notes that AF provided a publication opportunity for many of these
authors.
178. Cockcroft, in Frascina 1985,126 (quotation is at ill). Especially important are
parallels between the high value that Abstract Expressionist artists placed on
creative risk and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's cold war policy of polit-
ical "brinkmanship" during Truman's presidency.
179. Barr, "Is Modern Art Communistic?," NYTMagazine, 14 December 1952, 22-
23,28-30. See text below for discussion of "The New American Painting."
180. See especially Orton and Pollock 1981, reprinted in Frascina 1985, Frascina
2000, and Orton and Pollock 1996.
181. Irving Sandier, introduction to Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred
H. Barr, Jr. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 42-45. Additional criticism
of Guilbaut and his cohorts is found in Kramer 1985. (I borrow the phrase
"complacent accessory" from Kramer.) Other interesting reviews of Guilbaut's
book that go into greater detail about the pros and cons of the argument that
Abstract Expressionism can be considered a weapon of the cold war include
Buchloh 1984; Craven 1985; Thomas Lawson, "How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War," AF zz (Sum-
mer 1984): 83; and Patricia Hills, "Book Review" Archives of* American ArtJour-
nal 30, nos. 1-4 (1990): 84-87. Craven also reviews Seitz 1983 and Cox 1982.

Introduction 103
 182. Harrison 1973, pt. i, 9; this essay was originally commissioned for Anthony Rich-
ardson and Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art (London: Penguin Books,
1973).
183. Kuspit 1980, reprinted in The Critic as Artist: The Intentionality of Art (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 171-81. Kuspit was responding to Fuller
1979-
184. Kuspit 1980,173; Kramer 1985, 2. But, this series (according to Kramer) "can
hardly be regarded as any sort of assertion of Cold War ideology. On the con-
trary, [the Elegies to the Spanish Republic] pay homage to one of the most un-
questioned anti-fascist pieties of the liberal Left." Although the title of de Koon-
ing's Light in August (1948) refers to a novel by Faulkner with a political theme
(see text below), it is unclear that the artist had a political motivation when
painting this canvas. The 19605 works of Norman Lewis, also mentioned below,
react to civil rights issues, but they postdate Abstract Expressionism's heyday.
185. Mattison 1987 (a revised version of the author's 1986 Princeton University doc-
toral dissertation). See also Mattison 1982,1985.
186. Quoted in Motherwell 1963, n.p. Cited in Collins 1984,95 (for Spanish Elegies),
96 (for modern art).
187. Ashton and Flam 1983,33.
188. Motherwell, in Bryan Robertson, Addenda to personal interview with the art-
ist, 1965, n.p.; transcript in the collection of the Dedalus Foundation, New
York. Quoted in Terenzio, 1980,36. A frequently cited example is Motherwell's
observation in "Beyond the Aesthetic," Design 47 (1946): 14-15: "The 'pure' red
of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist no matter how one shifts
its physical contexts. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps, and
a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling to-
ward red or its relations, and it would be useless as an artistic element." Mother-
well was probably the most highly educated Abstract Expressionist. He earned
a BA in philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and studied at the Gradu-
ate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University from 1937 to 1938 and at
Columbia University with Meyer Schapiro in 1939. He spoke fluent French and,
unlike his American colleagues, could converse with the Surrealist emigres in
New York during World War II.
189. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953), quoted in Kuspit 1978a, 120. Kuspit's arguments were influenced
by the phenomenology of the philosophers Edmund Husserl and Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty.
190. Kuspit 19783,121,123. See, e.g., Bannard 1971. Gibson (1981) discusses the limi-
tations of Greenberg's "critique of the color-field painters' work as essays in re-
duction," as does Alloway (1973, 38). Gibson cites Fried, William Rubin, and

104 Introduction
 Bannard as continuing the formalist line of assignment; Alloway cites Eugene
C. Goossen.
191. Rothko 1946, n.p., cited by Firestone 1981,140.
192. Still, letter to Gordon Smith, director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, i Janu-
ary 1959, published in Paintings of Clyfford Still 1959; cited in Firestone 1981.
The entire letter is reprinted in Chipp 1968, 574-76. Motherwell's comment,
which is frequently quoted, was made to Margaret Paul. See Motherwell 1963,
reprinted in Terenzio 1980,10.
193. Firestone 1980,1982.
194. See Newman's statement in "The Ides of Art, 6 Opinions on What Is Sublime
in Art?," Tiger's Eye 6 (1948): 51-53 and in Still 1952, 21-22. Both are cited in
Alloway 1973.
195. I borrow this characterization (not stipulated by Alloway) from Kuspit 1977,35.
Kuspit writes that, in general, "Still thinks of art as value-laden rather than fact-
oriented."
196. Gibson 1981,144-45, !52.
197. Rothko is quoted from the transcript of a joint broadcast with Gottlieb on the
radio station WNYC, 13 October 1943. See Polcari 1979,126. The entire tran-
script is reprinted in Alloway 1981, appendix B.
198. For details, see Weiss 1983.
199. For some idea of the huge controversy generated by this show (conceptualized
by William Rubin), see Arthur C. Danto, "Defective Affinities," TJV239, i De-
cember 1984,590-92; Hal Foster, "The 'Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art,
or White Skin Black Masks," October 34 (Fall 1985): 45-70, reprinted in Hal
Foster, Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 181-208;
Thomas McEvilley, "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: " Trimitivism' in 20th Cen-
tury Art' at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984," AF 2,3 (November 1984): 55.
Varnedoe's essay, "Abstract Expressionism," is found in the MoMA exhibition
catalogue, 2:615-59, and his response to critics, "On the Claims and Critics of
the Trimitivism' Show," appeared in Art in America 73 (May 1985): 11-13, l5-> ^
19,21.
200. Zakian (19883,33) details "problems with this standard notion of sublimity as it
relates to the facts of Newman's art and writing." Zakian avers that "Rosenblum
and his followers erred by misunderstanding the nature of metaphysics" and
objects to Auping's unquestioning acceptance of the standard interpretation
found in "Beyond the Sublime," included in Auping 1987,146-66.
201. Rushing 1988,187,193. See David Sylvester, "The Ugly Duckling," in Auping
1987,137-45; Jean-François Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," AF
22 (April 1984): 36-43; Hess 1971,73; Rosenberg 1978,79.
202. Baigell 1994,34; Hess 1971,56. Baigell provides a more complete discussion of

Introduction 105
 Newman's putative sources in Kabbalah. He considers that Newman (a secular
Jew), as well as Hess and Rosenberg, misread Hasidic religious exaltation by
equating it with personal fulfillment. Hess refers to Gershon G. Scholem, Major
Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1946), 260-76. Baigell also
postulates the importance of writings by Sartre and Martin Buber for New-
man's universalizing desire to "make cathedrals ... out of ourselves."
203. Chave igSga, 3. The Rothko quotation is from William C. Seitz's notes from
an interview with Rothko, William C. Seitz Papers, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution. Quoted in ibid., 25. Rodman (1957,82) states that Pol-
lock declared in 1956, "I don't care for 'abstract expressionism' . . . and it's
certainly not 'non-objective' and not 'non-representational' either. I'm very rep-
resentational some of the time and a little all of the time. . . . Painting is self-
discovery. ... Every good artist paints what he is."
204. Quoted in Rodman 1957,93, and included in Chave H)89a, 25.
205. Przyblyski (1994, 550) comments on Chave's thesis in her review of Leja 1993.
According to Przyblyski, Chave's version of Rothko's mature style, seen as a
"palimpsest of traces" ("of Surrealist automatism, archaic symbolism, tribal art,
Nietzschean conceptions of tragedy and Utopian dreams of the timeless" as well
as Renaissance religious iconography), though more focused on close readings
of individual works, is ultimately less innovative than Leja's re-conception of
Pollock's modernist subjectivity. Chave I989b is an abbreviated version of the
main points of Chave KjSga.
206. Cernuschi 1986 refers to Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics,
translated by W. Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). Arguments
about Rothko in Cernuschi 1986 were expanded in Cernuschi 1997.
207. For example, Gottlieb, whose gridlike pictographs of the early forties, which of-
ten featured runelike symbols in compartments, lent themselves to structuralist
and semiotic reexaminations. See, e.g., Rand 1977,121-22; Berger 1981,138.
208. Gibson 1987,65.
209. Ibid., 75-76,78.
210. Ibid., 71 (her italics).
211. For further explication of the psychological meanings of this work, see Landau
1989,217-18.
212. Shiff 1987, 98, based on definitions provided by Charles Sanders Peirce, Col-
lected Papers, edited by Charles Harshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burke, 8
vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958-60), 2:143-44,156-73.
213. Namuth, "Jackson Pollock," in Portfolio: The Annual of the Graphic Arts (Cin-
cinnati, 1951),; reprinted in Rose K)8ob, 9-20. Namuth's essay was also in-
cluded in Rose's original French edition, U Atelier de Jackson Pollock (Paris:
Macula/Pierre Brochet, 1978), as were commentaries by Rosalind Krauss, "Read-
ing Photographs as Texts," and Francis V. O'Connor, "The Photographs of

106 Introduction
 Jackson Pollock as Art Historical Documentation." Additional material was
added by Rose to the English version, including her own "Hans Namuth's Pho-
tographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth: Parts 1-2," originally published in AM
(Rose 1979). Rose K)8ob is reviewed in Orton and Pollock 1996,165-76.
214. Rose 1979,112.
215. Shiff 1987,112-13.
216. For treatments of Newman's influence that appeared in the 19805, see, e.g., Gib-
son K)88c, 15; Auping, "Beyond the Sublime" in Auping 1987. For Pollock, see
Rose 1979,114-15; Landau 1989, 240-44. A recent comprehensive treatment is
Kirk Varnedoe's "Comet: Jackson Pollock's Life and Work," in Varnedoe and
Karmel 1998, 67-71. According to Helen Frankenthaler, "with de Kooning you
could assimilate and copy... Pollock instead opened up what one's own inven-
tiveness could take off from. Given one's own talent and curiosity, one could ex-
plore, originate, discover from Pollock as one might, say, from Picasso or Gorky
or Kandinsky." See Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1971), 30. For more on de Kooning's impact on the second generation, see Koz-
loff 1964; Sandier 1978.
217. Monographs include Frank 1983; Rohn 1987 (a revision of the author's 1984
University of Michigan dissertation, which analyzes Pollock's poured paintings
from the point of view of Rudolf Arnheim's gestalt perceptual psychology);
Landau 1989. Cernuschi 1993 followed closely behind. Biographies written in
the 19808 include Potter 1985; Solomon 1987; Naifeh and Smith 1989.
218. O'Connor 1980, 9. For a description of Pollock's difficult birth, see O'Connor
and Thaw 1979,4:203. For her elaboration of Jungian theories, see Langhorne
1989. In Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 121-35, Donald Kuspit offers "An Alternate Psychoana-
lytic Interpretation of Jackson Pollock's Psychoanalytic Drawings."
219. See Carmean K)82a; Krauss 1982.
220. Rose 1981, reviewed by Grace Glueck as "Scenes from a Marriage: Krasner and
Pollock," AN 80 (December 1981): 57-61. See also Rose 1983 for the catalogue
for the Krasner retrospective; Landau 1984 is a review of this exhibition.
221. See Landau K)8ia, igSib; Kuthy and Landau 1989,71-92. Landau 2OO2b is a re-
vised and updated version of the latter published in English. Its subtitle, "The
Erotics of Influence," is borrowed from David Shapiro, "Art as Collaboration:
Toward a Theory of Pluralist Aesthetics 1950-1980," in Artistic Collaboration
in the Twentieth Century, edited by Cynthia Jaffe McCabe (Washington DC:
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1984), 55.
222. See Wechsler 1989,61-64; Goossen 1958a.
223. Of the twenty-two artists represented in "The Interpretive Link: Abstract Sur-
realism into Abstract Expressionism; Works on Paper 1938-1948," shown at the
Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1986, seven were not American. A dozen were

Introduction 107
 among those included in Wechsler's exhibition—which had a total of forty-three
different artists, probably the largest number ever assembled under the rubric of
Abstract Expressionism. None of these were so-called second-generation art-
ists such as Norman Bluhm, Al Leslie, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning, and
Helen Frankenthaler. Another exhibition at the same venue, "Action/Precision:
The New Direction in New York (1955-1960)," organized by Schimmel in 1984,
addressed the innovations of that group. Almost a decade after "The Interpre-
tive Link," two books about Surrealism's impact on the New York School, Tash-
jian 1995 and Sawin 1995, were published. The respective contributions of
these two studies are reviewed in Jachec 1998.
224. For the original three essays, see T. J. Clark, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of
Art"' Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark," Criti-
cal Inquiry 9 (September 1982): 139-56, 217-34. Clark's rejoinder, "Arguments
about Modernism: A Reply to Michael Fried," was first published in W. J. T.
Mitchell, The Politics of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), 239-48. All are reprinted in Frascina 1985, 47-88; Frascina 2000, 60-
109. Frascina also republishes Greenberg's 1939 "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" in
both editions. For the quotations, see Clark, "Greenberg's Theory," in Frascina
1985,49,55,59 (italics his).
225. See Fried, "How Modernism Works," in Frascina 1985,65-71.
226. Polcari (igSSd, 176-77). The author also provides a very specific critique of the
Marxist approach to Abstract Expressionism: "In short, this vein of Late Marx-
ist writing depends on faulty premises; specious associations; perpetuations
of original critical misunderstandings; simplistic, political recontextualizations
and entrapments; quotations out of context; factual errors; dismissal of the per-
sonal, cultural and intellectual concerns; sweeping abstractions and generaliza-
tions; and willful ignorance of intentions, subjects, forms and imagery of the
artists" (177).
227. Gibson K)88b, 171.
228. Wanda Corn, "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art"AB 20
(June К)88):199. Corn cites a democratizing rebellion "against elitism and the
restrictiveness of a canon that privileged male artists and high art masterpieces"
as initiating new approaches in the 19608 and 19705, stating that "many were
pushed towards their revisionist stance by the radical critique of art history it-
self, which questioned a discipline that focused so exclusively on art considered
innovative and aesthetically superior." She explains that techniques borrowed
from other disciplines became particularly useful for the framing of new ques-
tions in art history. See also Donald Kuspit, "Conflicting Logics: Twentieth
Century Studies at the Crossroads,"^ 69 (March 1987): 117-32.
229. See Anfam 1990; Leja 1993. Leja's "The Formation of an Avant-Garde in New

108 Introductio n
 York," in Auping 1987,13-33, became a chapter of the latter. Both were based on
Leja's 1988 Harvard University dissertation.
230. Anfam 1990,12.
231. Ibid., 20.
232. Still, quoted in Rothko 1946 and cited in Anfam 1993с, 265, an article based on
the author's 1984 University of London dissertation.
233. Anfam I993b. In another exhibition mounted in the same year, a larger survey of
American art shown in the United Kingdom and Germany, Anfam also served
as coordinating editor of the catalogue. In his essay for the latter (Anfam K)93a),
Abstract Expressionism is described as running its course between a play of
extremes in which "spectacle, extravagance and force" are "held in check, de-
ferred and given correctives." When "strong narrative impulses (flowing from
Regionalism, American Scene painting and 19303 murals) were short-circuited
. . . the results are oddly fabulated pictures" (88, Anfam's italics). This show,
"American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1913-1993," was
held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and stopped at the Martin-
Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
234. Anfam 1993d, 479-85, especially 480, 482. The Pollock books reviewed are
Naifeh and Smith 1989, Landau 1989, and Doss 1991. Anfam also discusses
Guilbaut 1990, Ross 1990, and Shapiro and Shapiro 1990. Additional analysis
of Clark 1990 (published in Guilbaut 1990) is found in Jonathan Harris, "Alter-
ity, Metaphor, and Formation: Around the Edges of a Paradigm," Oxford Art
Journal 14, no. 2 (1991): 88-95.
235. Newer essays in Thistlewood 1993 provided evidence that this approach con-
tinued to flourish in the United Kingdom. Harris 1993 includes a good sum-
mary of the British Marxist position.
236. See Champa and others 1985. Nancy R. Versaci, who wrote the introduction to
the catalogue for "Flying Tigers," explains that the image and spirit evoked by
the Flying Tigers (an elite group of American flyers who helped defend Burma
and Southeast China against the Japanese) "not only captured the essence of
America's reaction to the war; it is also an apt metaphor for the response of cer-
tain American artists to the turmoil and dislocation of the I93o's and 1940's"
(4-13).
237. Polcari 1991,368. See also Polcari 1995a.
238. Lengthy reviews of Leja 1993 that analyze his arguments in detail include An-
fam I994b, Przyblyski 1994, and Hobbs 1994. Przyblyski remarks that Leja's
book might be read "almost as a pre-text to such revisionist histories as Serge
Guilbaut's" (549). For basic summaries of the theoretical positions of Michel
Foucault and Louis Althusser, see William Innés Homer, The Language of Con-
temporary Criticism Clarified (Madison, CT: Soundview Press, 1999), 38-41,
85-87.
Introduction 109
 239- Leja (1993,329), summarizes: "The selves they generally discovered were not
ravishing unities but rather, on one hand, conflicted Neanderthals harboring
frightening, unfathomable, and primitive impulses, and on the other, puny and
impotent victims of nature and fate."
240. Additional discussion of this topic, which follows Leja's lead and provides more
specific details of cinema history, can be found in Minturn 1999. Minturn points
out that "there is little evidence which suggests that film noir filmmakers and
Abstract Expressionist painters communicated with each other directly" (277).
He provides a list of thirteen films noir made between 1944 and 1950 in which
the protagonist or one of the main characters is a painter (297).
241. Many of the artist's own statements could be used to back up this point. In addi-
tion to "Experience of our age in terms of painting," previously cited, Pollock's
comment to William Wright in late 1950 ("It seems to me that the modern painter
cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms
of the Renaissance or of any other past culture") underscores Leja's thesis. See
Karmel 1999a, 20, for a reprint of this interview, made for broadcast on radio
station WERI, Westerly, Rhode Island, in 1951. This text has been widely re-
published since appearing in the documentary chronology that O'Connor cre-
ated for MoMA's 1967 Pollock retrospective.
242. Leja 1993,256.
243. Both Hobbs (1994) and Przyblyski (1994) comment that Leja's argument is
weakest in regard to analysis of the work of women associated with Abstract
Expressionism. Hobbs points out that, "rather than seeing such artists as Lee
Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, and Grace Hartigan as critics of the dominant ide-
ology by virtue of their marginalized status, [Leja] regards them as victims"
(107). Przyblyski mentions that "subjectivity, masculine or feminine, is a more
complex, contradictory, and cobbled-together construct than Leja's representa-
tions of Modern Man would lead us to believe" (551).
244. Leja illustrates only two efforts by women: an Indian Space painting by Ger-
trude Barrer and a 1954 work by Elaine de Kooning. He frequently quotes Kras-
ner's many published remarks about her husband, but her own role in Abstract
Expressionism's development is not treated. Some of the comments I make in
this section were made previously in a review of Gibson 1997 in Woman's Art
Journal 20 (Spring-Summer 1999): 59-61.
245. Guggenheim organized two exhibitions limited to women artists at Art of This
Century, one in 1943 and one in 1945, details of which are presented in Conaty
1997,15-24. Conaty discusses the question of marginalization represented by
this all-female concept. (Krasner, for example, refused to submit works to Gug-
genheim's women's art shows.) Whereas women artists played a relatively large
role in the WPA and in Depression-era groups such as the American Abstract
Artists, and although two of the most important dealers to handle the Abstract

110 Introduction
 Expressionists in the forties were female (Guggenheim and Betty Parsons), many
of the gains women made in the 19305 and early forties vanished in face of New
York's suddenly more ambitious, market-oriented, and male-dominated com-
munity. For more on this situation, see Ellen G. Landau, "Tough Choices: Be-
coming a Woman Artist, 1900-1970," in Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move
into the Mainstream, igjo-85, edited by Randy Rosen and Catherine C. Brawer
(New York: Abbeville, 1989), 30-36.
246. See Marter 1997. Marter's Baruch exhibition and Conaty's "Art of This Cen-
tury: The Women" are both reviewed by Amy Winter in Woman's Art Journal
20 (Spring-Summer 1999): 61-63. The former show featured works by Krasner,
Dehner, Elaine de Kooning, Perle Fine, Joan Mitchell, Betty Parsons, and Ethel
Schwabacher.
247. Wagner 1996,9. Another example is Louise Bourgeois.
248. Wagner 1989 presents discussion of the demeaning language frequently em-
ployed in reviews of Krasner's work. Wagner lists the reviews from which these
words were taken (57, n. 13). See also "Krasner's Fictions," in Wagner 1996, es-
pecially 126,165. Gretchen Munson, in "Man and Wife," ^./¥48 (Oct. 1949): 45,
famously wrote, "There is a tendency among some of these wives [shown with
their husbands in Sidney Janis's current exhibition "Artists: Man and Wife"] to
'tidy up' their husband's styles. Lee Krasner (Mrs. Jackson Pollock) takes her
husband's paints and enamels and changes his unrestrained, sweeping lines
into neat little squares and triangles." See "Forming Krasner's Identity" and
"Remarks, CR 252-55" in Landau, 1995,10-16,123, for further analysis of re-
views of Krasner's debut exhibition at Betty Parsons.
249. Wagner 1996,167-68. In order to turn fulfilling Pollock's needs to her own ad-
vantage, Krasner, according to Wagner, engaged in prosopopoeia, "apostrophe
to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity conferring upon it the power of
speech," a concept borrowed from Paul de Man. Wagner proposes that, like a
ventriloquist, Krasner contrived an alter ego to speak as an artist, not simply a
wife. She describes Krasner as chastening and rendering antirhetorical Pol-
lock's signature technique. Chave 1993 covers similar ground, but Wagner reads
Krasner's marks as challenging difference, rather than as disempowering and
inarticulate. See my review of Wagner 1996, Л? 79 (December 1997): 11-14 for
further discussion of her primary thesis.
250. This lecture, published here for the first time, was given as the Case Western
Reserve University Department of Art History and Art Annual Harvey Bu-
chanan Lecture in Art, in conjunction with an exhibition, "Dorothy Dehner:
Drawings, Prints, Sculpture," held at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 11 July-5
November 1995. See also Marter 1984; Marter 1993.
251. Neither Krauss I97ib nor Lubar 1984 mentions Dehner's imagery as either par-
allel to Smith's or influential for Smith's conceptions of works such as Jurassic

Introductio n 111
 Bird. Wilkin (2000, 13) stipulates direct connections between Smith's sculp-
tures and the paintings of male friends such as Gottlieb, Noland, and Mother-
well, but Wilkin also does not reference Dehner, except as a source of infor-
mation about Smith's Medals for Dishonor (27). All of these authors point out
Smith's European prototypes including, most prominently, Picasso, González,
and Giacometti.
252. Marter, "Arcadian Nightmares," citing an interview with Dehner, New York
City, 6 December 1979.
253. Leja 1993,254-56. He also observes that "the bepedestaled Hedda Sterne in the
famous Irascibles photo published in Life in 1951 has become perhaps the best
symbol of the marginal presence women have been accorded in Abstract Ex-
pressionism" (256). For a somewhat sensationalized version of the de Koonings'
unusual relationship, see Hall 1993. Craven (1999) disagrees with Leja's conclu-
sions about gender and Abstract Expressionism (115-23).
254. Duncan 1989, reprinted in Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in
Critical Art History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 189-207.
Yard (1991) reads de Kooning's Black Friday (1948) as a direct response to Pi-
casso's Demoiselles d'Avignon.
255. See Leja 1993, и, 317 n. 183; Minturn 1999,285-88.
256. Seitz 1983,126. Powell (1990) notes that the artist placed collages of advertise-
ments for two films (Alexander the Great and World Without End) in his paint-
ing Easter Monday (1950).
257. Hess 1965,37. Sylvester (1995, 223) reiterates de Kooning's admission that this
painting and those in the series that followed "had to do with the female
painted through all the ages, all those idols." In the same interview with Syl-
vester (reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro 1990,225-28) de Kooning referred to
the hilariousness of "the idea of the idol and the oracle." Minturn (1999, 285-
86) interprets this as de Kooning's poking fun at the "pompous transcendental
rhetoric about their 'spiritual kinship with primitive art' " in early statements by
Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman.
258. Cateforis, "Willem de Kooning's 'Women' of the 19505: A Critical History of
Their Reception and Interpretation," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1991.
A typical consideration of de Kooning's women as femmes fatales is Robert
Rosenblum, "The Fatal Women of Picasso and de Kooning," AN 84 (October
1985): 98-103. See Cornelia H. Butler, "The Woman Problem: On the Contem-
poraneity of de Kooning's Women," in Butler and Schimmel 2002,180-91, for
additional analysis of critical reactions to de Kooning's Women.
259. Quoted by Barber 1997,14. See Sylvester 1995, reprinted in Shapiro and Sha-
piro 1990,227.
260. Barber 1997,14. In addition to Duncan 1985, see Griselda Pollock, "Killing Men

112 Introductio n
 and Dying Women: A Woman's Touch in the Cold Zone of American Paint-
ing," in Orton and Pollock 1992,219-94. For a complete discussion of de Koon-
ing's use of this posture and his attraction to the metaphor "a woman has two
mouths, one is the sex," see ShifT 1994,38-50. The artist made the latter remark
to Bibeb in "Willem de Kooning: Ik vind dat allés een mond moet hebben en ik
zet de mond waar ik wil," Vrij Nederland (Amsterdam), 5 October 1968. See
Shiff 1994,63,67, nn. 1,45.
261. W. de Kooning 1951, 85-67. See David Sylvester, "Flesh Was the Reason," in
Prather 1994,15-31, for discussion of this conceit.
262. Nochlin (1998, ill) comments, "I am not sure I can agree with any single evalua-
tion of the 'Woman' series from the viewpoint of 'positive' or 'negative' gender
representation. There is too much ambivalence here. And what, precisely, con-
stitutes 'positive' or 'negative' when a cultural concept like 'woman' (in general)
is at stake?"
263. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Lon-
don: Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, 1990), 139.
264. Barber 1997,18. Another possible model suggested by Barber is Mary Russo's
concept of the female carnivalesque as presented in The Female Grotesque: Risk,
Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Russo draws on concepts
proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin. See Bakhtin's "Carnival and Carnivalesque," in
Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1998), 250-60.
265. Perchuk 1995,32. In the same catalogue, Harry Brod explains (in "Masculinity
as Masquerade," 13-19) exactly how this concept can be extrapolated from Joan
Riviere's "Womanliness as Masquerade," International Journal of Psychoanaly-
sis 9 (1929): 303-13.
266. Clark 1990,229, cited in Perchuk 1995,32.
267. For this incident, see Peggy Guggenheim's Out of This Century: Confessions of
an Art Addict (New York: Universe, 1979), 296. Perchuk (1995,32) also cites the
fact that Pollock's teacher Thomas Hart Benton and the conservative critic
Thomas Craven (Benton's friend) both accused him of making the drip paint-
ings "by ingesting paint and then pissing on the canvas" (as described in Naifeh
and Smith 1989,631).
268. A.Jones 1998,55.
269. Ibid., 57. Referencing Foucault and Roland Barthes, Jones describes the "au-
thor-function" Pollock as "a 'plurality of egos' put into play by the cultural text,
a 'function of discourse.' " For precise definition of the term "author-function,"
see Foucault's "What Is an Author?," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 124,130.

Introduction 113
 270. A.Jones 1998,58 (her italics).
271. Another interesting treatment of Pollock's masculinity is Peter Wollen, "Mán-
nerkunst: Siqueiros and Pollock," in Harten 1995,2:55-72.
272. Chave 1993, reprinted in Karmel 1999a, 268-74. See Pollock's interview with
Wright (Karmel 19993,22) for the artist's remark about being able to control the
flow of paint. Chave cites many other examples of Pollock's usage of this "fe-
male" term.
273. Saltzman (1998) points out that, whereas male artists were often praised by crit-
ics for reconfiguring feminine aspects and strategies with their "superior skill,"
Frankenthaler's "menstrual painterly fluids came to signify the trace of an invol-
untary bodily function" (12). Another comparison between Pollock and Frank-
enthaler that takes into consideration similar gender issues but draws a different
conclusion is Anne M. Wagner, "Pollock's Nature, Frankenthaler's Culture," in
Karmel I999b, 181-200.
274. Krauss's split with her mentor began in the 19708 when she expressed disap-
proval of the decision to strip color from some of David Smith's sculptures by
the executors of Smith's estate: Motherwell, the lawyer Ira Lowe, and Green-
berg. (See Krauss 1974.) Her own subsequent criticism replaces a reliance on
Greenbergian formalism with structuralist and poststructuralist approaches al-
lied to the ideas of Saussure, Barthes, and Derrida. For discussion of Krauss's
changing theoretical positions, see Kuspit, "Conflicting Logics," 126-28; David
Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From For-
malism to Beyond Postmodernism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). Siegel (1999,
163-67) delineates Krauss's approach to interpreting Pollock.
275. Krauss 1993,244.
276. Ibid., 276,284 (her italics).
277. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 40-41. This was first published in 1930. See
Perchuk 1995,36-37, for additional discussion.
278. In addition to Bataille's Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, edited
and translated by Allan Stoeckl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985), Krauss's concepts draw on ideas in Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror,
translated by Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), first
published 1980. Bataille, a French theorist, philosopher, and novelist associated
with the Surrealist movement, was drawn to the power of eroticism, especially
pornography and the obscene. For more on his ideas, see Peter Tracey Connor,
Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2000); Bataille: A Critical Reader, edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wil-
son (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997).
279. Krauss referenced Ricard in a lecture presented in 1992 at Princeton University
in conjunction with the Princeton Art Museum's showing of the exhibition "Jack-

114 Introduction
 son Pollock: 'Psychoanalytic' Drawings," organized by Cernuschi. See also Bois
and Krauss 1997,28-29,93-ЮЗ-
280. Krauss, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," first published in Karmel I999b,
155-80. Other essays printed in Karmel I999b by the conservators Coddington
and Mancusi-Ungaro, 101-20, present and interpret findings of x-radiographic
and other physical examinations of Pollock's poured paintings that may contra-
dict Krauss's position.
281. Karmel 1998,87-137.
282. Kagan (1979, 96-99) cites Krasner's recollection that Pollock "would get into
grooves of listening to his jazz records—not just for days—day and night, day
and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the roof!
Jazz? He thought it was the only other creative thing happening in this country"
(quoted in Friedman 1972, 88). The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
in The Springs, East Hampton, New York, retains many of Pollock's original 78
rpm and 33 1/3 rpm LP jazz recordings.
283. Alfred Frankenstein, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 August 1945, reprinted in
O'Connor 1967,38.
284. Belgrad 1998,1-2. See also Lhamon 1990 for the mainstreaming of black Amer-
ican culture in the fifties.
285. The women were Krasner, Ethel Schwabacher, Sonia Sekula, and Janet Sobel.
Battcock (1969-1970,48) took Geldzahler to task for not including women and
African Americans in the show "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970"
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Henry Geldzahler offered no apology for
the artist who has rejected the demands made upon him by a crumbling society.
Instead, he emphasizes it and concentrates on just those artists who were most
arrogant and abusive to their social reality. That is why there is no Marisol, or
Nevelson, nor any black artists' work. He has spotlighted the decadence, glam-
our, romanticism, poetry and arrogance of the Abstract Expressionists, which
is at once exhilarating and frightening" (his italics).
286. Gibson (1992, 68) comments that "Lewis's absence as a subject, in Althusser's
sense, from the roster of the Abstract Expressionists is both revealing and dis-
turbing because of the morphological and conceptual similarities of his work
to Abstract Expressionism and also because of his close association with the
artists of the school." She points out that Lewis frequented The Club and the
Cedar Bar and (like Bourgeois) attended the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35 in
1950. His works were shown at Marian Willard's avant-garde gallery. For more
details, see Gibson 1989. Witkovsky (1985) makes similar points about Romare
Bearden, comparing his works with Motherwell and Hofmann, rather than
Pollock.
287. Gibson (1997, 76) describes this paradoxical situation in theoretical terms:
"What distinguished the use of signs of ethnicities and sexualities that were not

Introductio n 115
 Caucasian and not heterosexual and male was precisely the binarity it estab-
lished between their 'modern' abstraction and that of other cultures and gen-
ders, and the position of control in which it placed the modern. To incorporate
what was not-self was to master it and at the same time claim its attributes."
288. Using tools of domesticity (the way Louise Nevelson sometimes employed a
scissors to make sculpture, for instance) is another example of the "critique of
mastery" Gibson recognizes in those who worked outside canonical Abstract
Expressionist practice. Alerting viewers to the ways in which gender and race
are codified in abstraction by exaggerating stereotypes (for example, Bour-
geois), dissembling their identities by changing their names (Krasner), creoliz-
ing (Lewis), performing in front of their paintings (Streat), and other subver-
sive tactics, Gibson redefines Abstract Expressionism's "others" as actively at
work to "destabilize and resist" what they were apparently trying to accommo-
date. She valorizes such transgressions, reading them more positively as repre-
sentative of self-aware parody and deliberate play on the white male notion of
authenticity.
289. Craven 1998, quoting the definition of post-colonialism in Bill Ashcroft and
others, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7.
290. Crehan 1959,12, cited in Leja 1995, 559. David Kaufmann has suggested that
Crehan's comments may also have been subtly anti-Semitic. I am grateful to Kauf-
mann for sharing this assessment with me. Newman's rebuttal appeared in a let-
ter to the editor, AN58 (June 1959), 6, cited in Leja 1995,560.
291. Leja 1995,560. As W.Jackson Rushing remarks in "Decade of Decision," a re-
view of Strick 1994 published in Art Journal 54 (Spring 1995): 88-91, Newman
was "a fastidious micromanager of the critical/public reception of his work"
(88). This became even more evident on publication of the artist's selected writ-
ings (O'Neill 1990).
292. See Polcari 1994 for more on this work and its meanings. Bois 1990 includes
discussion of Newman's obsession with the thematics of origin in the book of
Genesis.
293. See Breslin I993b, 45-46, for Rothko's reaction to "transplantation to a land
where he never felt entirely at home."
294. Gibson 1997,95. The list of Jewish art historians and critics associated with the
rise and criticism of Abstract Expressionism could be expanded to include
Hess, Seitz, Sandier, Friedman, Rose, W. Rubin, Kozloff, Kuspit, Baigell, Ro-
senblum, the Shapiros, and many others in the following generation of scholars.
295. Greenberg, "Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the
Younger Generation of American Jews," Contemporary Jewish Record 6 (Febru-
ary 1944): 32-33, reprinted in O'Brian 19863,176-79. This comment is cited by
Louis Kaplan, "Refraining the Self-Criticism: Clement Greenberg's 'Modernist
Painting' in Light of Jewish Identity," in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History,

116 Introduction
 edited by Catherine M. Soussloff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),
180-99. Other works about the ways Greenberg's Jewishness affected his criti-
cism include Margaret Olin, "C [lenient] Hardesh [Greenberg] and Company:
Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity," in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional
Identities, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: Jewish Museum and Rut-
gers University Press, 1996), 39-59; Bradford R. Collins, "Le pessimisme poli-
tique et 'la haine de soi' juive: Les origines de l'esthétique puriste de Green-
berg," Les cahiers du musée national de l'art moderne 45-46 (Fall-Winter 1993):
61-84; and Thierry de Duve, Clément Greenberg Between the Lines (Paris: Dis
Voir, 1996), 39-46.
296. Sandier, interview with Stamos, 6 August 1988, Archives of American Art, Smith-
sonian Institution. Cited in Gibson 1997,123 (italics his).
297. These include most notably Kuspit, Baigell, Saltzman, Kaplan, Soussloff, Olin,
Kleeblatt, Nochlin, Carol Zemel, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ziva Amishai-Maisels, and
Milly Heyd. See, e.g., the essays collected in Complex Identities: Jewish Con-
sciousness and Modern Art, edited by Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), as well as those in SousslofF, Jewish
Identity.
298. Gottlieb, quoted in Milton Brown, "An Explosion of Creativity: Jews and
American Art in the Twentieth Century," in Painting a Place in America: Jew-
ish Artists in New York, igoo-ig45, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt and Susan
Chevlowe (New York: Jewish Museum in association with Indiana University
Press, 1991), 67.
299. Whereas Brown (ibid.) describes Rothko and Newman >as deracinated, Baigell
adopts Homi K. Bhabha's concept of "cultural hybridity" to characterize their
relation to their Jewishness. See Baigell 2002, 99; Bhabha, "The Other Ques-
tion: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Out
There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Fergu-
son (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art/Cambridge: MIT Press,
1990), 71-88.
300. Haftmann 1971, cited by Avram Kampf in Jewish Experience in the Art of the
Twentieth Century (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), 201.
301. David Anfam has noted that the NYT of 13 June 1943 in which Gottlieb and
Rothko's letter was included (see Jewell 194зЬ) also printed a letter to the editor
in which the chief of the German Labor Front wrote, "The Jews are the chosen
race, all right—but for extermination purposes only" (cited in Baigell 2002,
114). Baigell points out that Newman, in a 1945 essay called "Surrealism and the
War" (unpublished except in O'Neill 1990, 94-96), makes it clear that he had
seen horrific photographs of the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps.
302. Baigell (2002,102) mentions that James E. B. Breslin, the artist's biographer, has
proven that Rothko exaggerated his claim to have experienced pogroms in

Introductio n 117
 Latvia as a child and seen such mass graves. See Breslin iggga, 326. The latter
interprets Rothko's "weightless, softly edged rectangles [which] lift off the can-
vas and advance towards the viewer" as re-creating "the tensions, the play be-
tween separation and absorption of early psychic life." Rothko's " 'presences,' "
he claims, "evoke the maternalbody" See Breslin i993b,49 (italics his).
303. Tucker 1973,16.
304. Hobbs 1999,29.
305. Kuspit, "Meyer Schapiro's Jewish Unconscious," in Soussloff, Jewish Identity,
200. Kuspit cites Rosenberg, "Is There a Jewish Art?," in Discovering the Pres-
ent, 230.
306. Quoted in Nemser 1975,9. See Landau 1995,10-16 for additional discussion of
Krasner's identity problems (although not from a Jewish point of view).
307. Quoted in Balakian 1996, 59. Balakian (60) also quotes a letter from Gorky to
his sister dated 24 November 1940, cited in Auping 1995,80: "As Armenians of
Van ... [w]e lived and experienced it. The blood of our people at the hands of
the Turks, the massacres Our death march, our relatives and dearest friends
dying... before our eyes. The loss of our homes, the destruction of our country
by the Turks, Mother's starvation in my arms. Vartoosh dear, my heart sinks
now in even discussing it."
308. Balakian 1996,65.
309. See Orton 1991 for an opinion of "The American Action Painters" as "a text sit-
uated in and inscribed by a particular Marxist tradition, by the mutation and
modification of New York Marxism related to the C. P. U.S. A., by the setbacks of
the late 19308, and by the espousal of international Trotskyism with its notion of
agency and the freedom of art." Orton 1991 is reprinted in Orton and Pollock
1996,177-203; Frascina 2000,261-87.
310. Craven 1999; Jachec 2000. Portions of Craven's book were previously pub-
lished in AH (Craven 1990), in Oxford Art Journal (Craven 1991), and in This-
tle wood 1993.
311. Two review articles that summarize and assess Craven's main points are Cer-
nuschi 1999C and Jachec 1999-2000.
312. Jachec 2000, abstract page. A summary version of her main thesis, which "re-
examines the relationship between a flourishing artistic movement of the 19403
and 19505 and the concomitant 'new liberalism' as defined and supported by the
new left," is found in Jachec 1991.
313. Motherwell, "The New York School," lecture given at the Mid-Western Confer-
ence of the College Art Association, University of Louisville, 27 October 1950.
Published in Terenzio 1992,77-78 and quoted in Craven 1999,8.
314. Newman 1962,16, quoted in Craven 1999,151.
315. Ibid., 151. See also Craven 1990, in which Abstract Expressionism is discussed
in the context of automatism and the "Age of Automation." Cernuschi (1999,

118 Introduction
 39) presents the opposing position: that automatism was not all that pertinent
to Newman's creativity.
316. Craven 1999,134,136.
317. Schapiro 1957,38-39, cited in ibid., 133 and in C.Jones 1996,10-11.
318. Collins 1991,283. As noted, Collins endeavors to prove that the popular press of
the fifties was not as actively hostile to these artists as most art historians have
maintained.
319. See Robson 1988,1985; the latter is reprinted in the anthology and in Frascina
2000, 288-93. Both are based on Robson's doctoral thesis, "The Market for
Modern Art in New York, 1940-1960," University College, London (later pub-
lished as Robson 1995).
320. Collins 1991,303.
321. Ibid., 307, quoting Gaugh 1986,28-30.
322. Unsigned introduction to October: The First Decade, 1976-1986, edited by An-
nette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Copjec (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1987), ix.
323. Clark i994b, 23. This twenty-five page set of propositions is reconfigured to
read as continuous text in Clark 1999,371-403 (reprinted in the anthology).
324. Clark I994b, 28. The other quotations cited are found on pp. 25-27, italics his.
Interestingly, some of the most noted Abstract Expressionist artists used this
term in both its positive and negative connotations in early statements. For
instance, in his response to the question of "what abstract art means to me,"
posed in MoMA Bulletin 1951, de Kooning comments, "I always seem to be
wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity" (7). Another example is David Smith's
explanation: "From the philosophic-aesthetic point of view, at the time of cre-
ation the contemporary work of art is a vulgarization. By vulgar I mean the Ox-
ford definition 'offending against refinement of good taste.'" See Smith 1954a,
98.
325. Clark writes in a Marxist vein, "Abstract Expressionism, I want to say, is the
style of a certain petty bourgeoisie's aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cul-
tural power. It is the art of that moment when the petty bourgeoisie thinks it can
speak (and its masters allow it to speak) the aristocrat's claim to individuality.
Vulgarity is the form of that aspiration" (Clark I994b, 36).
326. For further discussion and appraisal of Clark's concept of vulgarity, see Siegel
1999,186-92; Bernstein 1996; Harris 2000; and Cornelia Butler's essay in But-
ler and Schimmel 2002,186-87. Bernstein explores further Clark's reference to
Ador no's theory of the "disenchantment of art."
327. For example, in Dijkstra 2003,261-62, American Abstract Expressionism (which
rendered obsolete the more socially oriented Expressionism of the prior two
decades) is praised as "exhilarating, adventurous, and innovative" precisely be-
cause it was "just the ticket for those who wanted to turn art into big business."

Introduction 119
 Dijkstra further notes that "as today's CEOs know better than anyone, the best
merchandise consists of material without any intrinsic meaning: 'useless' mer-
chandise you've made people want to have because it will make them feel supe-
rior to others." He maintains that "abstraction, as a 'high art' form whose 'in-
herent worth' could be clearly defined and controlled (as opposed to the fickle
variables of taste that ruled representational art)," proved to be "extremely well
suited" to the needs of corporate executives of the 19505, despite the public's
continuing preference for more understandable styles. Dijkstra concludes,
"In abstraction, then, American corporations found an effective antidote to the
rather embarrassing social focus of the art of the figurative expressionists."
328. Dissertations about first-generation Abstract Expressionist painters and sculp-
tors completed in the 19905 include Susan Cooperrider (de Kooning), David
Cateforis (de Kooning), Gregory Gilbert (Motherwell), Andrea Pappas (Rothko),
Joanne Kuebler (Poussette-Dart), Leesa Fanning (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko,
and the body), Steven Zucker (parallels with Hannah Arendt), Graeme Corn-
well (printmaking), Douglas Dreishpoon (Roszak), Lori Verderame (Lipton),
Valerie Livingston (Ferber), Patrick Frank (San Francisco Abstract Expression-
ism), Susan Landauer (San Francisco Abstract Expressionism including Still
[published as Landauer 1996]), and Patrick Negri (Newman, Pollock, Rothko,
and religion).
329. See O'Connor 1995; Landau i995b; Anfam 1998; Terenzio and Belknap 1984;
Engberg 2003. Graham 1991 is a catalogue raisonné of de Kooning's prints. Ma-
jor biographies of Pollock and Rothko were also published around this time
(see n. 217).
330. Either the organizing institution or institutions or the first venue of a traveling
exhibition have been cited. Other Abstract Expressionist solo exhibitions in
the 19905 include most prominently Pollock (Stàdtisches Kunsthalle Dussel-
dorf, 1995; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997); Motherwell (Intercultura, Mex-
ico City, 1991), Smith (Independent Curators, Inc., 1996; Museo Nacional Cen-
tro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1996; North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art,
1998); Still (Albright-Knox Art Gallery and San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, traveling in Europe, 1992), Kline (Menu Collection, 1994; Fundació Antoni
Tapies, Barcelona, 1994), Gottlieb (Phillips Collection, 1994), Gorky (Sala de
Exposiciones de la Fundación Caja de Pensiones and Whitechapel Gallery,
1990; Art Museum, Princeton University, 1994; Modern Museum of Fort Worth,
1995); Dehner (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1995); Kline (Fundado Antoni Tapies,
1994); de Kooning (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1993; National
Gallery of Art, 1994; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art
Center, 1995); Rothko (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1994), and Newman
(PaceWildenstein, 1994).

120 Introduction
331. Patricia Mainardi, "Repetition and Novelty: Exhibitions Tell Tales," in The
Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, edited by Charles W. Hax-
thausen (Williamstown: Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2002),
82-83.
332. Motherwell 1959,10. On the other hand, as Barnett Newman wrote in Tiger's
Eye 2 (December 1947): 42-46, "An artist paints so that he will have something
to look at; at times he must write so that he will have something to read."

Introduction 121
This page intentionally left blank
The 1940s
MYTHOLOGIZING
THE MOVEMENT
This page intentionally left blank
ARSHILE GORKY Excerpt from Letter to His Sister Vartoosh, 1942

Beloveds, the stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles
of the artist's brush. And as the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I commu-
nicate my most private perceptions through art, my view of the world. In try-
ing to prove by the ordinary and the known, I create an inner infinity. I prove
within the confines of the finite to create an infinity.

SOURCE: Diane Waldman, Arshile Gorky, 1904-1948: A Retrospective (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1981), 44. Copyright © 2003 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

ADOLPH GOTTLIEB AND MARK ROTHKO Excerpt from "Art

in New York"

GOTTLIEB: We would like to begin by reading part of a letter that has just
come to us:
"The portrait has always been linked in my mind with a picture of a per-
son. I was therefore surprised to see your paintings of mythological charac-
ters with their abstract rendition, in a portrait show, and would therefore be
very much interested in your answers to the following— ..."
Now, the questions that this correspondent asks are so typical and at the
same time so crucial that we feel that in answering them we shall not only
help a good many people who may be puzzled by our specific work but we
shall best make clear our attitude as modern artists concerning the problem
of the portrait, which happens to be the subject of today's talk. We shall
therefore read the four questions and attempt to answer them as adequately
as we can in the short time we have. Here they are:

1. Why do you consider these pictures to be portraits?

2. Why do you as modern artists use mythological characters?
3. Are not these pictures really abstract paintings with literary titles?

SOURCE: Radio script for WNYC, October 13,1943, in Clifford Ross, Abstract Expres-
sionism: Creators and Critics (New York: Abrams, 1990), 210-12. Copyright © 2003 Kate
Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

125
 4- Are you not denying modern art when you put so much emphasis on
subject matter?

Now, Mr. Rothko, would you like to tackle the first question? Why do you
consider these pictures to be portraits?

ROTHKO: The word portrait cannot possibly have the same meaning for us
that it had for past generations. The modern artist has, in varying degrees,
detached himself from appearance in nature, and therefore, a great many of
the old words which have been retained as nomenclature in art have lost their
old meaning. The still life of Braque and the landscapes of Durcat have no
more relationship to the conventional still life and landscape than the double
images of Picasso have to the traditional portrait. New Times! New Ideas!
New Methods!
Even before the days of the camera there was a definite distinction be-
tween portraits which served as historical or family memorials and portraits
that were works of art. Rembrandt knew the difference; for, once he insisted
upon painting works of art, he lost all his patrons. Sargent, on the other
hand, never succeeded in creating either a work of art or in losing a patron—
for obvious reasons.
There is, however, a profound reason for the persistence of the word por-
trait because the real essence of the great portraiture of all time is the artist's
eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions—in short the
human drama. That Rembrandt expressed it by posing a sitter is irrelevant.
We do not know the sitter but we are intensely aware of the drama. The Ar-
chaic Greeks, on the other hand, used as their models the inner visions which
they had of their gods. And in our day, our visions are the fulfillment of our
own needs.
It must be noted that the great painters of the figure had this in common.
Their portraits resemble each other far more than they recall the peculiari-
ties of a particular model. In a sense they have painted one character in all
their works. This is equally true of Rembrandt, the Greeks' Olympics or
Modigliani, to pick someone closer to our own time. The Romans, on the
other hand, whose portraits are facsimiles of appearance, never approached
art at all. What is indicated here is that the artist's real model is an ideal
which embraces all of human drama rather than the appearance of a par-
ticular individual.
Today the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man's
existence is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of as-

126 1940s
cribing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man's
experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art
is a portrait of an idea.

GOTTLIEB: That last point cannot be overemphasized. Now, I'll take the
second question and relieve you for a moment. The question reads "Why
do you as modern artists use mythological characters?"
I think that anyone who looks carefully at my portrait of Oedipus, or at
Mr. Rothko's Leda, will see that this is not mythology out of Bulfmch. The
implications here have direct application to life, and if the presentation seems
strange, one could without exaggeration make a similar comment on the life
of our time.
What seems odd to me is that our subject matter should be questioned,
since there is so much precedent for it. Everyone knows that Grecian myths
were frequently used by such diverse painters as Rubens, Titian, Veronese
and Velasquez, as well as by Renoir and Picasso more recently.
It may be said that these fabulous tales and fantastic legends are unintelli-
gible and meaningless today, except to an anthropologist or student of myths.
By the same token the use of any subject matter which is not perfectly ex-
plicit either in past or contemporary art might be considered obscure. Obvi-
ously this is not the case since the artistically literate person has no difficulty
in grasping the meaning of Chinese, Egyptian, African, Eskimo, Early Chris-
tian, Archaic Greek or even Pre-historic art, even though he has but a slight
acquaintance with religious or superstitious beliefs of any of these peoples.
The reason for this is simply that all genuine art forms utilize images that
can be readily apprehended by anyone acquainted with the global language
of art. That is why we use images that are directly communicable to all who
accept art as the language of the spirit, but which appear as private symbols
to those who wish to be provided with information or commentary.
And now, Mr. Rothko, you may take the next question. Are not these pic-
tures really abstract paintings with literary titles?

ROTHKO: Neither Mr. Gottlieb's painting nor mine should be considered ab-
stract paintings. It is not their intention either to create or to emphasize a for-
mal color-space arrangement. They depart from natural representation only
to intensify the expression of the subject implied in the title—not to dilute or
efface it. If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them
again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to
express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's primitive

1940s 127
 fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only
in detail but never in substance, be they Greek, Aztec, Icelandic, or Egyptian.
And modern psychology finds them persisting still in our dreams, our ver-
nacular, and our art, for all the changes in the outward conditions of life.
Our presentation of these myths, however, must be in our own terms,
which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths them-
selves—more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of
the idea rather than their graceful classical version; more modern than the
myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our
own experience. Those who think that the world of today is more gentle and
graceful than the primeval and predatory passions from which these myths
spring, are either not aware of reality or do not wish to see it in art. The myth
holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not through the remem-
brance of the beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fan-
tasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves,
as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life. And
now, Mr. Gottlieb, will you take the final question? Are you not denying
modern art when you put so much emphasis on subject matter?

GOTTLIEB: It is true that modern art has severely limited subject matter in
order to exploit the technical aspects of painting. This has been done with
great brilliance by a number of painters, but it is generally felt today that this
emphasis on the mechanics of picture-making has been carried far enough.
The surrealists have asserted their belief in the subject matter, but to us it is
not enough to illustrate dreams.
While modern art got its first impetus through discovering the forms
of primitive art, we feel that its true significance lies not merely in formal
arrangements, but in the spiritual meaning underlying all archaic works.
That these demonic and brutal images fascinate us today is not because
they are exotic, nor do they make us nostalgic for a past which seems en-
chanting because of its remoteness. On the contrary, it is the immediacy of
their images that draws us irresistibly to the fancies, the superstitions, the
fables of savages and the strange beliefs that were so vividly articulated by
primitive man.
If we profess a kinship to the art of primitive men, it is because the feelings
they expressed have a particular pertinence today. In times of violence, per-
sonal predilections for niceties of color and form seem irrelevant. All primi-
tive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the imme-

128 1940s
diate 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.

ROBERT MQTHERWELL Excerpts from "The Modern Painter's World"

[.. .] The function of the artist is to express reality as felt. In saying this, we
must remember that ideas modify feelings. The anti-intellectualism of En-
glish and American artists has led them to the error of not perceiving the con-
nection between the feeling of modern forms and modern ideas. By feeling is
meant the response of the "body-and-mind" as a whole to the events of reality.
It is the whole man who feels in artistic experience as when we say with Plato:
"The man has a pain in his finger" (The Republic, 462 D), and not, "The finger
has a pain." I have taken this example from Bosanquet, who goes on to say:
"When a cbody-and-mind' is, as a whole, in any experience, that is the chief
feature . . . of what we mean by feeling. Think of him as he sings, or loves, or
fights. When he is as one, I believe it is always through feeling...." (Three Lec-
tures on Aesthetic).
The function of the modern artist is by definition the felt expression of
modern reality. This implies that reality changes to some degree. This impli-
cation is the realization that history is "real," or, to reverse the proposition,
that reality has a historical character. Perhaps Hegel was the first fully to feel
this. With Marx this notion is coupled with the feeling of how material reality
is.... It is because reality has a historical character that we feel the need for
new art. The past has bequeathed us great works of art; if they were wholly
satisfying, we should not need new ones. From this past art, we accept what
persists qua eternally valuable, as when we reject the specific religious values

SOURCE: DYN(November 1944), 9-14. Motherwell text copyright © Dedalus Founda-

tion, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York.

129
 of Egyptian or Christian art, and accept with gratitude their form. Other val-
ues in this past art we do not want. To say this is to recognize that works of
art are by nature pluralistic: they contain more than one class of values. It is
the eternal values that we accept in past art. By eternal values are meant those
which, humanly speaking, persist in reality in any space-time, like those of aes-
thetic form, or the confronting of death.
Not all values are eternal. Some values are historical—if you like, social, as
when now artists especially value personal liberty because they do not find
positive liberties in the concrete character of the modern state. It is the values
of our own epoch which we cannot find in past art. This is the origin of our
desire for new art. In our case, for modern art. ...
The remoteness of modern art is not merely a question of language, of the
increasing "abstractness" of modern art. Abstractness, it is true, exists, as the
result of a long, specialized internal development in modern artistic structure.
But the crisis is the modern artist's rejection, almost in toto, of the values
of the bourgeois world. In this world modern artists form a kind oí spiritual
underground.

Empty of all save fugitive relations with other men, there are increased de-
mands on the individual's own ego for the content of experience. We say that
the individual withdraws into himself. Rather, he must draw from himself. If
the external world does not provide experience's content, the ego must. The
ego can draw from itself in two ways: the ego can be the subject of its own ex-
pression, in which case the painter's personality is the principal meaning
expressed; otherwise the ego can socialize itself—i.e., become mature and
objectified—through formalization.

The surrealist position is far more contradictory. They have been the most
radical, romantic defenders of the individual ego. Yet part of their programme
involves its destruction. Where the abstractionists would reduce the content
of the superego to the aesthetic, not even the aesthetic has value for the surre-
alists. It serves merely as a weapon of the middle class. Authority from the
external world is rejected altogether. This is the dada strand in the fabric of
surrealism. With the content of the superego gone, the surrealists are driven to
the animal drives of the id. From hence the surrealists' admiration for men

130 1940s
who have shattered the social content of the superego, for Lautréamont and
the Marquis de Sade, for children and the insane. This is the sadistic strand.
It is from this direction that surrealism tends to become predominantly sex-
ual. Yet it is plainly impossible for cultivated men to live on the plane of ani-
mal drives. It is therefore a pseudo-solution to the problem posed by the deca-
dence of the middle class.
A second major tendency of surrealism is to renounce the conscious ego
altogether, to abandon the social and the biological, the superego and the id.
One retreats into the unconscious. The paradox is that the retreat into the un-
conscious is in a sense the desire to maintain a "pure ego." Everything in the
conscious world is held to be contaminating, as when the hero in search of
the fabulous princess, in the Celtic fairy tale, must never permit himself to be
touched, whether by a leaf, an insect, or anything from the external world, as
he flies through the forests on his magic horse. If he were touched by the world,
his quest would immediately come to a disastrous end. Even when the hero
arrives at the princess's castle, he must jump from his flying horse through
a window without touching the windowframe. He does in the end reach the
princess, and after resting with her seven days and nights, wherein she never
opens her eyes, she gives birth to a young god. The surrealist conception of
the journey into the unconscious is of some such hero's task. Automatism is
the dark forest through which the path runs. The fundamental criticism of
automatism is that the unconscious cannot be directed, that it presents none of
the possible choices which, when taken, constitute any expression's form. To
give oneself over completely to the unconscious is to become a slave. But here
it must be asserted at once that plastic automatism though perhaps not verbal
automatism—as employed by modern masters, like Masson, Miró, and Picasso
—is actually very little a question of the unconscious. It is much more a plastic
weapon with which to invent new forms. As such it is one of the twentieth
century's greatest formal inventions

1940s 131
 JACKSON POLLOCK A Questionnaire

Where were y ou born?

Cody, Wyoming, in January, 1912. My ancestors were Scotch and Irish.
Have y ou traveled any?
I've knocked around some in California, some in Arizona. Never been to
Europe.
Would you like to go abroad?
No. I don't see why the problems of modern painting can't be solved as
well here as elsewhere.
Where did y ou study?
At the Art Students League, here in New York. I began when I was seven-
teen. Studied with Benton, at the League, for two years.
How did y our study with Thomas Benton affect y our work, which differs so
radically from his?
My work with Benton was important as something against which to react
very strongly, later on; in this, it was better to have worked with him than
with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less
strong opposition. At the same time, Benton introduced me to Renais-
sance art.
Why do y ou prefer living here in New York to y our native West?
Living is keener, more demanding, more intense and expansive in New
York than in the West; the stimulating influences are more numerous and
rewarding. At the same time, I have a definite feeling for the West: the vast
horizontality of the land, for instance; here only the Atlantic ocean gives
you that.
Has being a Westerner affected y our work?
I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American
Indian art. The Indians have the true painter's approach in their capacity
to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what
constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their color is essentially Western,
their vision has the basic universality of all real art. Some people find ref-
erences to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures.

SOURCE: Arts & Architecture (February 1944), 14. Copyright © 2003 The Pollock-
Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

132
 That wasn't intentional; it probably was the result of early memories and
enthusiasms.
Do y ou consider technique to be important in art?
Yes and no. Craftsmanship is essential to the artist. He needs it just as he
needs brushes, pigments, and a surface to paint on.
Do y ou find it important that many famous modern European artists are
living in this country?
Yes. I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years
was done in France. American painters have generally missed the point
of modern painting from beginning to end. (The only American master
who interests me is Ryder.) Thus the fact that good European moderns
are now here is very important, for they bring with them an understanding
of the problems of modern painting. I am particularly impressed with
their concept of the source of art being the unconscious. This idea inter-
ests me more than these specific painters do, for the two artists I admire
most, Picasso and Miró, are still abroad.
Do y ou think there can be a purely American art?
The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country
during the 'thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a
purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd And in
another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve it-
self: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be
qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems
of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.

NORMAN LEWIS Thesis, 1946

During the past fourteen years, I have devoted the major part of my attention
and as much time as finances made possible to becoming a painter. For about
the last eight of these years, I have been concerned not only with my own
creative and technical development but with the limitations which every

SOURCE: "Norman Lewis: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction" (Kenhelabh

Gallery, 1989).

133
 American Negro who is desirous of a broad kind of development must face—
namely, the limitations which come under the names "African Idiom," "Negro
Idiom" or "Social Painting." I have been concerned therefore with greater free-
dom for the individual to be publicly first an artist (assuming merit) and inci-
dentally, a Negro.
For the attainment of such a condition, I believe that it is within the Negro
artist himself that the greatest possibilities exist since the excellence of his
work will be the most effective blow against stereotype and the most irrefut-
able proof of the artificiality of stereotype in general.
Believing this as well as desiring a degree of artistic excellence for myself as
an individual, I have tried to maintain at least enough curiosity to keep my
work moving in new directions and I have seen it pass almost automatically
from careless reproduction and then strictly social art to a kind of painting
which involves discovery and knowledge of new trends. I, in the process, grew
from an over-emphasis on tradition and then propaganda to develop a whole
new concept from myself as a painter.
This concept treats art not as reproduction or as convenient but entirely
secondary medium for propaganda but as the production of experiences which
combine intellectual and emotional activities in a way that may conceivably
add not only to the pleasure of the viewer and the satisfaction of the artist but to
a universal knowledge of aesthetics and the creative faculty which I feel exists
for one form of expression or another in all men. In this sense, art comes to
have a life of its own; to be evidence of the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic
level of men in a specific era; to be always changing and going towards greater
understanding of human beings; to enrich living for everyone. It comes to be
an activity of discovery in that it seeks to find hitherto ignored or unknown
combinations of forms, colors, and textures and even psychological phenom-
ena, and perhaps to cause new types of experience in the artist as well as the
viewer. Above all, it breaks away from its stagnation in too much tradition and
establishes new traditions to be broken away from by coming generations of
artists, thus contributing to the rise of cultural and general development.
In view of this concept of art and the function of the artist, it is my desire to
work not only for myself as an artist but for broader understanding as a teacher,
in a manner as free from public pressures and faddish demands as possible and
with an understanding of cultures other than my own. Thus, I am particularly
interested at this time in working for at least a year in Europe, hoping that this
may do much towards achievement not only of my own aims, but for the in-
creased awareness towards the Negro artist and among Negro artists themselves.

134 1940s
JACKSON POLLOCK Application for a Guggenheim Fellowship

I intend to paint large movable pictures which will function between the easel
and mural. I have set a precedent in this genre in a large painting for Miss
Peggy Guggenheim which was installed in her house and was later shown in
the "Large-Scale Paintings" show at the Museum of Modern Art. It is at pres-
ent on loan at Yale University.
I believe the easel picture to be a dying form, and the tendency of modern
feeling is towards the wall picture or mural. I believe the time is not yet ripe
for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting
would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of
the future, without arriving there completely.

SOURCE: Copyright © 2003 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York.

BARNETT NEWMAN The Ideographic Picture

IDEOGRAPH A character, symbol or figure which suggests the idea of an object

without expressing its name.

IDEOGRAPHIC Representing ideas directly and not through the medium of their
names; applied specifically to that mode of writing which by
means of symbols, figures or hieroglyphics suggests the idea of an
object without expressing its name.
—Century Dictionary

IDEOGRAPH A symbol or character painted, written or inscribed, representing

ideas.
—Encyclopaedia Britannica

SOURCE: Betty Parsons Gallery, January 20-February 8,1947. Copyright © 2004 The
Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

135
 The Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide did not concern himself with the in-
consequentials that made up the opulent social rivalries of the Northwest
Coast Indian scene; nor did he, in the name of a higher purity, renounce the
living world for the meaningless materialism of design. The abstract shape he
used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward meta-
physical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the
pleasant play of nonobjective pattern, to the women basket weavers. To him a
shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier
of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The ab-
stract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal "abstraction" of a visual
fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion
with its overload of pseudoscientific truths.
The basis of an aesthetic art is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of neces-
sity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the
artist's problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor
fauvist destruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, nor the tortured
line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild
eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery
—of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer,
softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Every-
thing else has everything else.
Spontaneous, and emerging from several points, there has arisen during
the war years a new force in American painting that is the modern counter-
part of the primitive art impulse. As early as 1942, Mr. Edward Alden Jewell
was the first publicly to report it. Since then, various critics and dealers have
tried to label it, to describe it. It is now time for the artist himself, by showing
the dictionary, to make clear the community of intention that motivates him
and his colleagues. For here is a group of artists who are not abstract painters,
although working in what is known as the abstract style.
Mrs. Betty Parsons has organized a representative showing of this work
around the artists in her gallery who are its exponents. That all of them are as-
sociated with her gallery is not without significance.

136 1940s
BARNETT NEWMAN The Sublime Is Now

The invention of beauty by the Greeks, that is, their postulate of beauty as an
ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philoso-
phies. Man's natural desire in the arts to express his relation to the Absolute be-
came identified and confused with the absolutisms of perfect creations—with
the fetish of quality—so that the European artist has been continually involved
in the moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublimity.
The confusion can be seen sharply in Longinus, who despite his knowl-
edge of non-Grecian art, could not extricate himself from his platonic attitudes
concerning beauty, from the problem of value, so that to him the feeling of ex-
altation became synonymous with the perfect statement—an objective rheto-
ric. But the confusion continued on in Kant, with his theory of transcendent
perception, that the phenomenon is more than phenomenon; and with Hegel,
who built a theory of beauty, in which the sublime is at the bottom of a struc-
ture of kinds of beauty} thus creating a range of hierarchies in a set of relation-
ships to reality that is completely formal. (Only Edmund Burke insisted on a
separation. Even though it is an unsophisticated and primitive one, it is a clear
one and it would be interesting to know how closely the Surrealists were influ-
enced by it. To me Burke reads like a Surrealist manual.)
The confusion in philosophy is but the reflection of the struggle that makes
up the history of the plastic arts. To us today there is no doubt that Greek art
is an insistence that the sense of exaltation is to be found in perfect form, that
exaltation is the same as ideal sensibility, in contrast, for example, with the
Gothic or Baroque, in which the sublime consists of a desire to destroy form;
where form can be formless.
The climax in this struggle between beauty and the sublime can best be ex-
amined inside the Renaissance and the reaction later against the Renaissance
that is known as modern art. In the Renaissance the revival of the ideals of
Greek beauty set the artists the task of rephrasing an accepted Christ legend
in terms of absolute beauty as against the original Gothic ecstacy over the leg-
end's evocation of the Absolute. And the Renaissance artists dressed up the
traditional ecstacy in an even older tradition—that of eloquent nudity or rich

SOURCE: Tiger's Eye i, no. 6 (December 1948), 51-53. Copyright © 2004 Barnett New-
man Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

137
 velvet. It was no idle quip that moved Michelangelo to call himself a sculptor
rather than a painter, for he knew that only in his sculpture could the desire
for the grand statement of Christian sublimity be reached. He could despise
with good reason the beauty-cults who felt the Christ drama on a stage of rich
velvets and brocades and beautifully textured flesh tints. Michelangelo knew
that the meaning of the Greek humanities for his time involved making Christ
—the man, into Christ—who is God; that his plastic problem was neither the
medieval one, to make a cathedral, nor the Greek one, to make a man like a
god, but to make a cathedral out of a man. In doing so he set a standard for
sublimity that the painting of his time could not reach. Instead, painting con-
tinued on its merry quest for a voluptuous art until in modern times, the Im-
pressionists, disgusted with its inadequacy, began the movement to destroy
the established rhetoric of beauty by the Impressionist insistence on a surface
of ugly strokes.
The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty. However, in
discarding Renaissance notions of beauty, and without an adequate substitute
for a sublime message, the Impressionists were compelled to preoccupy them-
selves, in their struggle, with the culture values of their plastic history so that
instead of evoking a new way of experiencing life they were able only to make
a transfer of values. By glorifying their own way of living, they were caught in
the problem of what is really beautiful and could only make a restatement of
their position on the general question of beauty; just as later the Cubists, by
their Dada gestures of substituting a sheet of newspaper and sandpaper for
both the velvet surfaces of the Renaissance and the Impressionists, made a
similar transfer of values instead of creating a new vision, and succeeded only
in elevating the sheet of paper. So strong is the grip of the rhetoric of exalta-
tion as an attitude in the large context of the European culture pattern that the
elements of sublimity in the revolution we know as modern art, exist in its
effort and energy to escape the pattern rather than in the realization of a new
experience. Picasso's effort may be sublime but there is no doubt that his work
is a preoccupation with the question of what is the nature of beauty. Even
Mondrian, in his attempt to destroy the Renaissance picture by his insistence
on pure subject matter, succeeded only in raising the white plane and the
right angle into a realm of sublimity, where the sublime paradoxically becomes
an absolute of perfect sensations. The geometry (perfection) swallowed up
his metaphysics (his exaltation).
The failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to this blind de-
sire to exist inside the reality of sensation (the objective world, whether dis-

138 1940s
torted or pure) and to build an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the
Greek ideal of beauty, whether that plasticity be a romantic active surface, or a
classic stable one). In other words, modern art, caught without a sublime con-
tent, was incapable of creating a new sublime image, and unable to move away
from the Renaissance imagery of figures and objects except by distortion or
by denying it completely for an empty world of geometric formalisms—apure
rhetoric of abstract mathematical relationships became enmeshed in a strug-
gle over the nature of beauty; whether beauty was in nature or could be found
without nature.
I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of Euro-
pean culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any
concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it. The question that
now arises is how, if we are living in a time without a legend or mythos that can
be called sublime, if we refuse to admit any exaltation in pure relations, if we
refuse to live in the abstract, how can we be creating a sublime art?
We are reasserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with
our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the absolute props
of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality
is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke as-
sociations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing
ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth,
or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting.
Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or "life," we are making it out
of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident
one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who
will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.

JACKSON POLLOCK My Painting

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel,
palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or
a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter added.

SOURCE: Possibilities i (1947-1948), 79. Copyright © 2003 The Pollock-Krasner Founda-

tion /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

139
 When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after
a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no
fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting
has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact
with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony,
an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

MARK ROTHKO The Romantics Were Prompted

The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off
places. They failed to realise that, though the transcendental must involve the
strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.
The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artist to ac-
cept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation. Freed from a
false sense of security and community, the artist can abandon his plastic bank-
book, just as he has abandoned other forms of security. Both the sense of
community and security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental
experiences become possible.
I think of my pictures as dramas: the shapes in the pictures are the per-
formers. They have been created from the need for a group of actors who are
able to move dramatically without embarrassment and execute gestures with-
out shame.
Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in ad-
vance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. It is at the
moment of completion that in a flash of recognition, they are seen to have the
quantity and function which was intended. Ideas and plans that existed in the
mind at the start were simply the doorway through which one left the world in
which they occur.
The great cubist pictures thus transcend and belie the implications of the
cubist program.
The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is

SOURCE: Possibilities i (1947-48), 84. Copyright © 2003 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christo-
pher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

140
faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must
be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the crea-
tion and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him,
as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprece-
dented resolution of an eternally familiar need.

On shapes:

- They are unique elements in a unique situation.

- They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.
- They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or
to violate what is probable in the familiar world.
- They have no direct association with any particular visible experience,
but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms.

The presentation of this drama in the familiar world was never possible, un-
less everyday acts belonged to a ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent
realm.
Even the archaic artist, who had an uncanny virtuosity, found it necessary
to create a group of intermediaries, monsters, hybrids, gods and demigods.
The difference is that, since the archaic artist was living in a more practical
society than ours, the urgency for transcendent experience was understood,
and given an official status. As a consequence the human figure and other ele-
ments from the familiar world could be combined with, or participate as a
whole in the enactment of the excesses which characterize this improbable
hierarchy. With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of
things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with
which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.
Without monsters and gods, art cannot enact our drama: art's most pro-
found moments express this frustration. When they were abandoned as un-
tenable superstitions, art sank into melancholy. It became fond of the dark,
and enveloped its objects in the nostalgic intimations of a half-lit world. For
me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the
probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human
figure—alone in a moment of utter immobility.
But the solitary figure could not raise its limbs in a single gesture that
might indicate its concern with the fact of mortality and an insatiable appetite
for ubiquitous experience in face of this fact. Nor could the solitude be over-
come. It could gather on beaches and streets and in parks only through coin-

1940s 141
 cidence, and, with its companions, form a tableau vivant of human incommu-
nicability.
I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or repre-
sentational. It really is a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breath-
ing and stretching one's arms again.

JOHN GRAHAM Excerpts from System and Dialectics of Art

Art opens access to the unconscious mind,

science opens access to the conscious mind.

Preface

Art is the force which led humanity through the ages of darkness—auto-
matically, and through the ages of space—by inference.
In the history of humanity subjects and problems in numberless fields have
been thoroughly investigated and solved. [Such are: geometry and Roman
Law which have finally and exhaustively formulated certain phenomena once
and for all. The subject of art, however, has never been exhaustively investi-
gated, formulated and systematized, either by writers or artists.] There have
been pages written on art—inspired, beautiful and otherwise but all have been
either fragmentary, amateurish or sentimental.
The state of confusion that exists among the artists and writers in general,
regarding such fundamental terms as art, work of art, form, style, method, etc.,
is no longer tolerable.
This is an attempt: to define questions of art exhaustively; to term them
specifically; to formulate a dialectic method in art—a method of plastic, logi-
cal argumentation; to unite questions of art into a coordinated system.
It is called a System because it intends: (a) to provide a related terminology
in art; (b) to divide the history of art according to social-economic periods;
(c) to provide for the classification of works of art and periods of art based on

SOURCE: John Graham's System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Marcia Epstein Allentuck
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971). Copyright ©John D. Graham Papers,
Archives of American Art / Smithsonian Institution [reel 4043, frames 68-75].

142
space-consciousness; (d) to provide tangible bases for the evaluation of works
of art and periods of art.
It is called Dialectics because it intends to provide the methods of logical
argumentation in the domain of art.
New York—Paris, 1дз6-1дз6

1. What Is Art?

Art is essentially a process. A process of what? A process of abstracting.

What kind of a process? A creative process of abstracting. A writer abstracts
his thoughts and experiences on a white sheet of paper, a musician abstract
the same phenomena into sounds and a painter abstracts three-dimensional
phenomena on a two-dimensional plane.
The manifestation of art consists of two elements:

SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE

(A) Creation is the subjective element and has only two sources: (a) thought
(conscious and unconscious), (b) emotion. The conscious mind is the clear-
ing house for one's instincts. Instincts report impressions to the conscious mind
by way of the senses. Thought is the generator and emotion is the medium of
transmission.
(B) Space is the objective element and is the basis of all the arts—music, paint-
ing, dancing, strategy, boxing or poetry. In music the domination of space is
achieved by space-binding sounds, in dancing by space-binding gestures, in
painting by space-binding form, in strategy by space-binding moves. A mas-
ter boxer anticipates every blow from any direction and evades it by a hair's
breadth because he contains in his mind, in himself, the exact evaluation of
the space he operates in. He commands this space and this ability gives him a
superiority over his adversary.
As a process—art is a creative operation of abstracting.
As material evidence—art is a consolidated accumulation of monuments to
a given civilization.
Art in particular is a systematic confession of personality.
Art in general is a social manifestation.

2. What is abstraction ?

Abstraction is the evaluation of form perfectly understood. Objectively ab-

stracting is the transposition (transmutation) of the phenomenon observed
into simpler, clearer, more evocative and organically final terms. Subjectively

1940s 143
 abstracting is an ability to evaluate events observed into a new and synthetic
order.
Since every art manifestation is essentially an abstraction (even photog-
raphy is a mechanical abstraction of three-dimensional events on the two-
dimensional plane), since the very nature of art rests on abstracting, then it is
only logical to pursue the course of abstracting fearlessly to its logical end in-
stead of evading it under the disguise of charm or of being "true to nature" or
"true to life."
Art has nothing to do with representation, impersonation, interpretation,
decoration, compromise, character, caricature or psychological problems. It
contains psychological problems but deals with them in terms of form and
not subject matter.
In theatre good acting operates within the measurable space and in form.
Good acting develops not within the play but without the play, parallel or at an
angle to it. Thus great acting differs radically from the impersonative, inter-
pretative acting and mimicry.

3. What is the value of abstraction and what are the methods?

Abstraction reveals the thing as such and regardless of its conventional as-
sociations; abstract art teaches humanity to think in a detached way; abstrac-
tion as a figure of speech opens the unconscious mind and allows the truth to
emerge, it opens new vistas of speculation; it teaches that the old habitual moor-
ings can safely be abandoned and new, saner and more general bases sought
after.
Methods of abstraction:
(a) Disassociation of form and color observed and reassociation of the
same on new, more significant terms.
(b) Isolation by a powerful gesture of a portion of space or a phenomenon;
study of the same, and drawing of furthest possible conclusions.

4. What is the purpose of art?

The purpose of art in general is to reveal the truth and to reveal the given ob-
ject or event; to establish a link between humanity and the unknown; to create
new values; to put humanity face to face with a new event, a new marvel.
The business of art is not to portray life or nature or their aspects (there are
other agencies that do it better, such as photography, book-keeping, etc.), but
by using nature as a point of departure draw pertinent conclusions, create
new values which will eventually enlighten people on the subject of pure truth.

144 1940s
 The purpose of art in particular is to re-establish a lost contact with the un-
conscious (actively by producing works of art), with the primordial racial past,
and to keep and develop this contact in order to bring to the conscious mind
the throbbing events of the unconscious mind. Conscious mind is incapable of
creating; it is only a clearing house for the powers of the unconscious.
The abstract purpose of art is to arrest the eternal motion and thus estab-
lish personal contact with static eternity.
The concrete purpose of art is to lift repressions (and not to impose them).

6. What is a work of art?

A work of art is a phenomenon or event only as far as it is perceived by hu-

man consciousness.
A work of art is a creative, significant and unique expression of one's point of
view. A work of art is a problem posed and solved. A work of art is an organism,
itfunctions.
A work of art must satisfy these characteristics: (a) it must have a point
of view—conscious or unconscious; (b) it must be materialized—expressed;
(c) it must be creative—produce a new value; (d) it must be significant, have a
message to humanity as a result of a certain ideology—message deliberate or
not deliberate, great or small; (e) it must be unique, it cannot be produced in
series, even the artist himself cannot duplicate his work of art; (f ) it must be an
organism and to be an organism it must function. That which lacks any of the
above mentioned characteristics is not a work of art.

7. How is a work of art produced?

A work of art is produced by going through the stages of (a) analysis or

penetration; (b) discovery or revelation; (c) organization.

12. What is the origin of art?

The origin of art lies in human longing for enigma, for the miraculous, for
expansion, for social communication (appetitus socialtatis), for continuity
and consequently—life eternal. This longing for perpetuity engenders artist's
desire to arrest the eternal motion.
Our unconscious mind contains the record of all our past experiences—

1940s 145
 individual and racial, from the first cell germination to the present day. Hu-
man beings lost to a great extent or never possessed the access to the wisdom
stored in the unconscious. The unconscious mind is the power house, the
creative agent. The conscious mind is the clearing house or a controlling agent.
In the past certain individuals (people called them geniuses, messiahs and
saints) had a greater than average access to the unconscious.
Art offers an almost unlimited access to one's unconscious. However the
only way to approach the powers of the unconscious is through our emotions
and instincts. In this way art differs from craft—the first is based on the pow-
ers of the unconscious, the second is based on the powers of the conscious
mind. Thus art is the best medium for humanity to get in touch with the
sources of its power.

15. How is a great work of art recognized?

A great work of art is always affirmative and never merely suggestive. It is

always implicit and not explicit. The great art is always ceremonial. The great
art is terrifying, sometimes monstrous and repellent, but always beautiful.
When the gods speak, the figure is stupendous and frightful.

EDWARD ALDEN JEWELL Excerpt from "The Realm of Art: A New

Platform; 'Globalism' Pops into View"

Last Sunday in this place there appeared some comment on the third annual
exhibition of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors, which re-
mains current at Wildenstein's through June 26. In the course of that article it
was mentioned that one of the artist-members of the federation had promised
a statement calculated to disperse befuddlement (which I had freely con-
fessed) over certain paintings.
Circumstances have developed most fortunately. I am in receipt not only

SOURCE: New York Times, June 13,1943. (Note: Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko's letter
to Jewell is embedded in this text.) Copyright © 1943 by The New York Times Co. Re-
printed with permission.

146
of the statement referred to but likewise of a statement from another artist-
member of the federation. Furthermore, it proved possible to secure photo-
graphs of the three paintings in the show that had seemed to me most in need
of some sort of clarification. They are herewith reproduced, so that the reader
may conveniently refer to them as we proceed.
All this is being done in an effort to be helpful all round. There are the
artists, whose work should be approached objectively—in so far as objectivity
can be compassed within the realm of human frailty. And there is the public,
which, I am sure, wants always to be open-minded and to understand if it can
what the artists have tried to express.

"Globalism"

This much by way of preface. But I think before we become absorbed in

the artists' statements it may be well to refer again to the platform upon which
the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors rests its crusade against the
enslavement of narrow "nationalism." Two pivotal excerpts from that plat-
form or covenant were quoted here last week, one of which I should like to
borrow once more, wishing, as the phrase has it, to leave no stone unturned.
The federation asserts:

In the last analysis the quality of a civilization is largely judged and under-
stood through its art. It follows that to understand one's own time one must
experience the art of one's own time. Since no man can remain untouched by
the present world upheaval, it is inevitable that values in every field of human
endeavor will be affected. As a nation we are now being forced to outgrow our
narrow political isolationism. Now that America is recognized as the center
where art and artists of all the world meet, it is time for us to accept cultural
values on a truly global plane.

With respect to the foregoing I again agree that it is quite right that we
should try to become global in our thinking. And if the art that has baffled me
is to be accepted as in line with that effort, then I don't see why, taking Mr.
Rothko's "Syrian Bull" by the horns, we shouldn't term the new movement
that seems to be afoot "Globalism." It may be esteemed at least as apt as such
tags as "Fauvism," "Cubism" and "Futurism"—more apt, in fact, than "Futur-
ism," which tells us nothing about the "simultaneity" of the art the Italian mod-
ernists were producing back around 1911, whereas "Globalism" might take in
pretty much everything under the sun.
It is therefore with confidence, with pride rather than wistfulness, that I

1940s 147
 submit Globalism as a name for the new art that is being cradled right here in
our midst. This I feel to be a historic moment, even though the statements to
which we now come have left me, I confess, in as dense a mood of befuddle-
ment as ever.

Entente Cordiale
The first statement at hand is jointly signed by Adolph Gottlieb and Mar-
cus Rothko; and, while dealing in part with general esthetic and critical is-
sues, it bears specific reference to the paintings by these two artists, which are
reproduced. Here is the preamble:

To the artist the workings of the critical mind is one of life's mysteries. That is
why, we suppose, the artist's complaint that he is misunderstood, especially
by the critic, has become a noisy commonplace. It is therefore an event when
the worm turns and the critic quietly, yet publicly, confesses his "befuddle-
ment," that he is "nonplused" before our pictures at the federation show. We
salute this honest, we might say cordial, reaction toward our "obscure" paint-
ings, for in other critical quarters we seem to have created a bedlam of hyste-
ria. And we appreciate the gracious opportunity that is being offered us to
present our views.

Now since (in behalf of a conceivable public need along these lines) I had
asked the artists merely for an explanation, it came as no shock of surprise to
read:

We do not intend to defend our pictures. They make their own defense. We
consider them clear statements. Your failure to dismiss or disparage them is
prima facie evidence that they carry some communicative power.
We refuse to defend them not because we cannot. It is an easy matter to
explain to the befuddled that "The Rape of Persephone" is a poetic expres-
sion of the essence of the myth: the presentation of the concept of seed and
its earth with all its brutal implications; the impact of elemental truth. Would
you have us present this abstract concept, with all its complicated feelings, by
means of a boy and girl lightly tripping?
It is just as easy to explain "The Syrian Bull" as a new interpretation of an
archaic image, involving unprecedented distortions. Since art is timeless, the
significant rendition of a symbol, no matter how archaic, has as full validity to-
day as the archaic symbol had then. Or is the one 3,000 years old truer?

148 1940s
"Consummated Experience"

Well, up to this point it seemed as if we might be going to get somewhere

on a concrete basis. But—

these easy program notes can help only the simple-minded. No possible set
of notes can explain our paintings. Their explanation must come out of a
consummated experience between picture and onlooker. The point at issue,
it seems to us, is not an "explanation" of the paintings, but whether the intrin-
sic ideas carried within the frames of these pictures have significance. We feel
that our pictures demonstrate our esthetic beliefs, some of which we, there-
fore, list:
1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored
only by those willing to take the risks.
2. This world of the imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to com-
mon sense.
3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way—
not his way.
4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the
large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to re-
assert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion
and reveal truth.
5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what
one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism.
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 ar-
chaic art.

Period. But there is one paragraph more, which covers considerable ground
and treads on enough toes to keep the chiropodists busy all Summer:

Consequently, if our work embodies these beliefs it must insult any one who is
• spiritually attuned to interior decoration: pictures for the home; pictures for
over the mantel; pictures of the American scene; social pictures; purity in art;
prize-winning potboilers; the National Academy, the Whitney Academy, the
Corn Belt Academy; buckeyes; trite tripe, etc.

1940s 149
 Trijugated Tragedy"

The foregoing, I think, had best not be picked to pieces, especially by the
simple-minded, for it might explode. And besides, I doubt whether it could
be explained any more than (as stated by the artists themselves) the pictures
can be explained. There must be a "consummated experience" between the
text and the reader. And when the reader has participated in that consumma-
tion, then he should be able to decide whether the framed "intrinsic ideas"
have any "significance."
I do not recommend it, but the fearless might gingerly poke at one phrase
and marvel that, to be valid, subject-matter must be "tragic." So far Globalism
seems to guarantee a rather bleak and cheerless future. [...]

MAUDE RILEY Excerptfrom "Whither Goes Abstract

and Surrealist Art?"

Two exhibitions and a book on Abstract and Surrealist Art in America focus
attention during December upon these long-surviving forms in 20th century
art. The book is by Sidney Janis (Reynal 8c Hitchock, $6.50); the exhibitions
are his, too, for they are composed of the paintings illustrated in the publica-
tion, which will be released December 4. The Nierendorf Galleries will show
(starting Dec. 5) American and European Pioneers ofzoth Century Art. The
Mortimer Brandt Galleries opened the "young" American section of the
study on Nov. 28 with an exhibition of 50 paintings which bears the same title
as the book, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America.
While both sections of the exhibition drew mostly bewildered comment
from a country-wide press when the exhibition was on tour of museums dur-
ing past months (one newspaper billed the show as "Unpleasant Mishmash"),
it can be predicted without conceit that New York audiences will look upon
the "pioneer" section at Nierendorf's as almost classic. For there they will
find early works by Braque, Gris, Picasso, Léger, Klee, Marin, Demuth, Stella,
Miro, etc. Discussion will take place mainly in the midst of the Brandt Gallery

SOURCE: Art Digest (December i, 1944), 8,31.

150
showing of the younger Americans, not the least of the provocations there be-
ing one of classification. It will be necessary to hold on tight to reason. For
while it would be most gratifying to find some of the confusion in present-day
painting cleared up in an "explanatory" exhibition of this nature, the public is
in, instead, for real chaos.
The younger generation of abstract and surrealist painters is of two kinds:
those who are painting elaborations upon the premises set up by the pioneers
of these two expressions, and who are like outriders to the main procession;
and those who have elected to stay within the traditions set up by the elder
Europeans and Americans who preceded them. There are many of the for-
mer; few of the latter. There are many abstractionists in modern painting; few
true surrealists.
Alert observers will not fail to study, in this connection, certain new paint-
ings in the present Whitney annual in which a marked leaning towards ab-
straction and surrealism was noted by New York critics. The Whitney's paint-
ings are in most cases very recent works and therefore indicate something the
two- to five-year-old paintings in the Brandt show do not. There seems to me,
as I ponder the signs, a prevailing confusion among those who are painting,
and those who would rationalize trends.
At the Whitney, it is the artists who are confused and are changing coats
with one another. The abstractions are becoming soft, the surrealisms becom-
ing hard, and identities are being lost. At the Brandt show, it is the projector,
Mr. Janis, who offers confused explanations by way of cataloguing. Abstract
and surrealist art were once two well-understood and theoretically opposed
schools of expression. Here, they are interchanged so that the terms that were
intended originally, I am sure, as a guide to understanding of the painters' in-
tention, are used to confound the public. (And I would be surprised if many
an artist in the show wasn't bewildered to find himself catalogued as he is.)
The last time I saw Lee Gatch, Ralph Rosenborg, Gina Knee, Arshile Gorky
and Loren Maclver, they were all abstractionists. Now, with the same pictures
by which they are known, they have become surrealists. Sandy Calder, who has
been explained at great length by James Johnson Sweeney as a surrealist, has
become an abstractionist to Mr. Janis. Furthermore, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert
Motherwell and Mark Rothko were shifted back and forth before the show
was set and Motherwell ended up among the abstractionists with a fairly Miro-
like painting called Spanish Prison, while Rothko's The Omen of the Eagle
and Gottlieb's Pictograph went into the more favored school of surrealism.
One gathers that Mr. Janis is bestowing honors when he makes a painter a

1940s 151
 surrealist. He seems to encourage youth by that device. For instance, William
Baziotes has a painting called Balcony in which balustrades are thrown into a
wiggling pattern as though seen through smoke or steam. This is "credited"
with being a surrealism.
[...] Most interesting among the newcomers are Mark Rothko and Jackson
Pollock, who seem to have found something of their own and will perhaps be
the start of a third party, of which modern art stands compellingly in need.
The forty-year-old terms, abstract and surrealist, are Cinderella slippers
and there's no use pretending they fit all of the new generation.
M.R.

HOWARD PUTZEL A Problem for Critics

Classification is extraneous to art. Most labels attached to painting are unen-

lightening. Talent's the thing. "Isms" are literature. Nevertheless, a large part
of the public that looks at contemporary painting demands classification.
Possibly classification leads to clarification. The word Cubism, though inac-
curate, is apt. I hope that some art critic, museum official or someone will find
as pertinent a first syllable which may be applied to the new "ism."
During the past dozen years, and particularly since 1940, the tendency to-
ward a new metamorphism was manifest in painting. However this may seem
related with totemic images, earliest Mediterranean art and other archaic ma-
terial, it does not, in re-examination, appear to utilize any of these for direct
inspirational sources. One discovers that the real forerunners of the new
"ism" were Arp and Miro. Some of Picasso's paintings are in the same cate-
gory, but the series he calls Metamorphoses are, in aspect, more sculptural
than pictorial.
Here the new "ism" finds its most effective support among American
painters. The closeness of objective resemblance to pre-Columbian expres-
sions indigenous to this hemisphere is an incidental factor. What counts is
that the painters, however respectful, are unimpressed with any idea of be-

SOURCE: Edward Alden Jewell, "Toward Abstract or Away?," New York Times, July i,
1945. Copyright © 1945 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

152
coming "another Picasso" or "another Miro," and that their works indicate
genuine talent, enthusiasm and originality. I believe we see real American
painting beginning now.

ROBERT MQTHERWELL AND HAROLD ROSENBERG Editorial Preface

This is a magazine of artists and writers who "practice" in their work their
own experience without seeking to transcend it in academic, group or politi-
cal formulas.

Such practice implies the belief that through conversion of energy something
valid may come out, whatever situation one is forced to begin with.

The question of what will emerge is left open. One functions in an attitude of
expectancy. As Juan Gris said: you are lost the instant you know what the re-
sult will be.

Naturally the deadly political situation exerts an enormous pressure.

The temptation is to conclude that organized social thinking is "more seri-

ous" than the act that sets free in contemporary experience forms which that
experience has made possible.

One who yields to this temptation makes a choice among various theories of
manipulating the known elements of the so-called objective state of affairs.
Once the political choice has been made, art and literature ought of course to
be given up.

Whoever genuinely believes he knows how to save humanity from catastro-

phe has a job before him which is certainly not a part-time one.

SOURCE: Possibilities i (1947-48), i. Motherwell text copyright © Dedalus Foundation,

Inc. / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

153
 Political commitment in our times means logically—no art, no literature. A
great many people, however, find it possible to hang around in the space be-
tween art and political action.

If one is to continue to paint or write as the political trap seems to close upon
him he must perhaps have the extremest faith in sheer possibility.

In his extremism he shows that he has recognized how drastic the political
presence is.

SAMUEL M. KOQTZ AND H A R O L D R O S E N B E R G TheIntrasubjectives

The guiding law of the great variations in painting is one of disturbing sim-
plicity. First, things are painted; then sensations; finally, ideas. This means that
in the beginning the artist's attention was fixed on external reality; then on the
subjective; finally, on the intrasubjective. These three steps are the points on a
straight line After Cezanne, Painting only paints ideas—which, certainly,
are also objects, but ideal objects immanent to the subject or intrasubjective.
—José Ortega y Gassett

The past decade in America has been a period of great creative activity in
painting. Only now has there been a concerted effort to abandon the tyranny of
the object and the sickness of naturalism and to enter within consciousness.
We have had many fine artists who have been able to arrive at Abstraction
through Cubism: Marin, Stuart Davis, Demuth, among others. They have
been the pioneers in a revolt from the American tradition of Nationalism and
of subservience to the object. Theirs has, in the main, been an objective act as
differentiated from the new painters' inwardness.
The intrasubjective artist invents from personal experience; creates from
an internal world rather than an external one. He makes no attempt to chroni-

SOURCE: The Intrasubjectives (New York: Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, 1949). Copyright ©
Samuel M. Kootz Papers, Archives of American Art / Smithsonian Institution [reel 3090,
frames 520-23].

154
cíe the American scene, exploit momentary political struggles, or stimulate
nostalgia through familiar objects; he deals, instead, with inward emotions
and experiences. Dramatically personal, each painting contains part of the
artist's self; this revelation of himself in paint being a conscious revolt from
our puritan heritage. This attitude has also led him to abandon the curious
custom of painting within the current knowledge of the spectator, attempting
instead through self-experience to enlarge the spectator's horizon.
Such painting (in its inception) may never reach epic heights. As the per-
sonal anguish of Tomlin's "Death Cry" (so intimate and sensitive) may seem
small when compared to the lacerating revulsion to fascism of Picasso's
"Guernica." Yet, on these walls, you will note the great urge to creativity, the
high level of intellectual elegance, and always the jealous adherence to indi-
vidual statement.
Intrasubjectivism is a point of view in painting, rather than an identical
painting style. Note, in the varied personalities here shown, the lyricism of
Pollock, the sensitive calligraphy of Tobey and Graves, the poetry of Baziotes
(quiet and understated, as opposed to the optimism and fury of Hofmann),
Motherwell's felt images, Gottlieb's inventive recall of ancient and modern
myth, de Kooning's love of paint; these, and the others included, have a joint
passion for ideas and for a subtler, surer way of expressing them.
The artists in this exhibit have been among the first to paint within this
new realm of ideas. As their work is seen and understood, we should have more
additions to their ranks, until the movement of Intrasubjectivism becomes
one of the most important to emerge in America.
—Samuel M. Kootz

The painter who sees something that inspires him will copy it, you can be
sure. He will reproduce landscapes, nudes, apples, merchants, battles, angels,
hunting dogs—on one condition: that this image put him in touch with grace,
glamor, solidity, whatever it is that arouses him beyond himself.
All art is, of course, subjective—or, in Leonardo's term, a mental thing.
When there is a thing outside the painter's head that awakens the mental
thing, the spectator may recognize it in the painting. As the painted hills
speak to him, he hears also the hills of "nature." This happy duet makes paint-
ing "intelligible."
The modern painter is not inspired by anything visible, but only by some-
thing he hasn't seen yet. No super-lively kind of object in the world for him.

1940s 155
 Everything of that sort has to be put there. Things have abandoned him, in-
cluding the things in other people's heads (odysseys, crucifixions). In short,
he begins with nothingness. That is the only thing he copies. The rest he invents.
The nothing the painter begins with is known as Space. Space is simple: it
is merely the canvas before it has been painted. Space is very complex: it is
nothing wrapped around every object in the world, soothing or strangling it.
It is the growing darkness in a coil of trees or the trunk of an elephant held at
eye level. It is the mental habit of a man with a ruler or a ball of string—or of
one who expects to see something delightful crop up out of nowhere. Every-
one knows it is the way things keep getting larger and smaller.
All this is space or nothingness, and that is what the modern painter be-
gins by copying. Instead of mountains, copses, nudes, etc., it is his space that
speaks to him, quivers, turns green or yellow with bile, gives him a sense of
sport, of sign language, of the absolute.
When the spectator recognizes the nothingness copied by the modern
painter, the latter's work becomes just as intelligible as the earlier painting.
Such recognition is not really very difficult. The spectator has the nothing
in himself, too. Sometimes it gets out of hand. That busy man does not go to
the psychiatrist for pleasure or to learn to cook. He wants his cavity filled and
the herr doctor does it by stepping up his "functioning" and giving him a past
all his own. At any rate, it was knowing the nothing that made him ring that
fatal doorbell.
Naturally, under the circumstances, there is no use looking for silos or
madonnas. They have all melted into the void. But, as I said, the void itself,
you have that, just as surely as your grandfather had a sun-speckled lawn.

—Harold Rosenberg

156 1940s
The 1950s
ESTABLISHING
AUTHORITY
This page intentionally left blank
ROBERTGOODNOUGH,ED. Excerpts from Artists'Sessions
at Studio 35

MOTHERWELL: What then exactly constitutes the basis of our community?

STERNE: We need a common vocabulary. Abstract should really mean ab-
stract, and modern should really mean modern. We don't mean the same
things with the same words.
HOFMANN: Why should we? Everyone should be as different as possible.
There is nothing that is common to all of us except our creative urge. It just
means one thing to me: to discover myself as well as I can. But every one of
us has the urge to be creative in relation to our time—the time to which we
belong may work out to be our thing in common
HOFMANN: A very great Chinese painter once said the most difficult thing in
a work of art is to know the moment when to stop
MOTHERWELL: The question then is, "How do you know when a work is
finished?"

NEWMAN: I think the idea of a "finished" picture is a fiction. I think a man

spends his whole life-time painting one picture or working on one piece of
sculpture. The question of stopping is really a decision of moral considera-
tions. To what extent are you charmed by its inner life? And to what extent
do you then really approach the intention or desire that is really outside of
it? The decision is always made when the piece has something in it that you
wanted
DE KOONING: I refrain from "finishing" it. I paint myself out of the picture,
and when I have done that, I either throw it away or keep it. I am always in
the picture somewhere. The amount of space I use I am always in, I seem to
move around in it, and there seems to be a time when I lose sight of what I
wanted to do, and then I am out of it. If the picture has a countenance, I
keep it. If it hasn't, I throw it away. I am not really very much interested in
the question
REINHARDT: It has always been a problem for me—about "finishing" paint-
ings. I am very conscious of ways of "finishing" a painting. Among modern

SOURCE: Modern Artists in America, ed. Robert Goodnough(Wittenborn Schultz, 1951).

Copyright © 1951 Wittenborn Art Books, Inc., New York.

159
 artists there is a value placed upon "unfinished" work. Disturbances arise
when you have to treat the work as a finished and complete object, so that
the only time I think I "finish" a painting is when I have a dead-line. If you
are going to present it as an "unfinished" object, how do you "finish" it? ...
HOFMANN: To me a work is finished when all parts involved communicate
themselves, so that they don't need me.
MOTHERWELL: I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skillfully done. But,
contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering. I no-
ticed in looking at the Carré exhibition of young French painters who are
supposed to be close to this group, that in "finishing" a picture they assume
traditional criteria to a much greater degree than we do. They have a real
"finish" in that the picture is a real object, a beautifully made object. We are
involved in "process" and what is a "finished" object is not so certain
HOFMANN: Yes, it seems to me all the time there is the question of a heritage.
It would seem that the difference between the young French painters and the
young American painters is this: French pictures have a cultural heritage.
The American painter of today approaches things without basis. The French
approach things on the basis of cultural heritage—that one feels in all their
work. It is a working toward a refinement and quality rather than working
toward new experiences, and painting out these experiences that may finally
become tradition. The French have it easier. They have it in the beginning.
DE KOONING: I am glad you brought up this point. It seems to me that in
Europe every time something new needed to be done it was because of tra-
ditional culture. Ours has been a striving to come to the same point that
they had—not to be iconoclasts
GOTTLIEB: There is a general assumption that European ... specifically
French—painters have a heritage which enables them to have the benefits
of tradition, and therefore they can produce a certain type of painting.
It seems to me that in the last fifty years the whole meaning of painting
has been made international. I think Americans share that heritage just
as much, and that if they deviate from tradition it is just as difficult for an
American as for a Frenchman. It is a mistaken assumption in some quarters
that any departure from tradition stems from ignorance. I think that what
Motherwell describes is the problem of knowing what tradition is, and be-
ing willing to reject it in part. This requires familiarity with his past. I think
we have this familiarity, and if we depart from tradition, it is out of knowl-
edge, not innocence.
DE KOONING: I agree that tradition is part of the whole world now. The point

160 1950s
 that was brought up was that the French artists have some "touch" in mak-
ing an object. They have a particular something that makes them look like a
"finished" painting. They have a touch which I am glad not to have.
BAZIOTES: We are getting mixed up with the French tradition. In talking
about the necessity to "finish" a thing, we then said American painters
"finish" a thing that looks "unfinished," and the French, they "finish" it.
I have seen Matisses that were more "unfinished" and yet more "finished"
than any American painters. Matisse was obviously a terrific emotion at
the time and he was more "unfinished" than "finished."

MOTHERWELL: I think Sterne is dealing with a real problem—what is the

content of our work? What are we really doing? The question is how to
name what as yet has been unnamed
BAZIOTES: Whereas certain people start with a recollection or an experience
and paint that experience, to some of us the act of doing it becomes the ex-
perience; so that we are not quite clear why we are engaged on a particular
work. And because we are more interested in plastic matters than we are in
a matter of words, one can begin a picture and carry it through and stop it
and do nothing about the title at all. All pictures are full of association.
REINHARDT: Titles are very important in surrealist work. But the emphasis
with us is upon a painting experience, and not on any other experience.
The only objection I have to a title is when it is false or tricky, or is some-
thing added that the painting itself does not have
DE KOONING: I think that if an artist can always title his pictures, that means
he is not always very clear.

NEWMAN: I think it would be very well if we could title pictures by identi-

fying the subject matter so that the audience could be helped. I think the
question of titles is purely a social phenomenon. The story is more or less
the same when you can identify them. I think the implication has one of two
possibilities: (i) We are not smart enough to identify our subject matter, or
(2) Language is so bankrupt that we can't use it. I think both are wrong. I
think the possibility of finding language still exists, and I think we are smart
enough. Perhaps we are arriving at a new state of painting where the thing
has to be seen for itself....

1950s 161
 HOFMANN: I believe that in an art every expression is relative, not absolutely
defined as long as it is not the expression of a relationship. Anything can be
changed. We speak here only about means, but the application of the means
is the point. You can change one thing into another with the help of the rela-
tions of the thing. One shape in relation to other shapes makes the "expres-
sion"; not one shape or another, but the relationship between the two makes
the "meaning." As long as a means is only used for itself, it cannot lead to
anything. Construction consists of the use of one thing in relation to an-
other, which then relates to a third, and higher, value.

HOFMANN: It is related to all of this world—to what you want to express. You
want to express something very definitely and you do it with your means.
When you understand your means, you can.
MOTHERWELL: I find that I ask of the painting process one of two separate
experiences. I call one the "mode of discovery and invention," the other the
"mode of joy and variation." The former represents my deepest painting
problem, the bitterest struggle I have ever undertaken, to reject everything
I do not feel and believe. The other experience is when I want to paint for
the sheer joy of painting. These moments are few. The strain of dealing
with the unknown, the absolute, is gone. When I need joy, I find it only in
making free variations on what I have already discovered, what I know to be
mine. We modern artists have no generally accepted subject matter, no in-
herited iconography. But to re-invent painting, its subject matter and its
means, is a task so difficult that one must reduce it to a very simple concept
in order to paint for the sheer joy of painting, as simple as the Madonna was
to many generations of painters in the past The other mode is a voyag-
ing into the night, one knows not where, on an unknown vessel, an absolute
struggle with the elements of the real.
REINHARDT: Let's talk about that struggle.
MOTHERWELL: When one looks at a Renaissance painter, it is evident that
he can modify existing subject matter in a manner that shows his unique-
ness and fineness without having to re-invent painting altogether. But I
think that painters like Mondrian tend to move as rapidly as they can to-
ward a simple iconography on which they can make variations. Because
the strain is so great to re-invent reality in painting.
REINHARDT: What about the reality of the everyday world and the reality
of painting? They are not the same realities. What is the creative thing that

162 1950s
 you have struggled to get and where did it come from? What reference or
value does it have, outside of the painting itself? ...
DE KOONING: If we talk in terms of what kinds of shapes or lines we are us-
ing, we don't mean that and we talk like outsiders. When Motherwell says
he paints stripes, he doesn't mean that he is painting stripes. That is still
thinking in terms of what kind of shapes we are painting. We ought to get
rid of that. If a man is influenced on the basis that Mondrian is clear, I
would like to ask Mondrian if he was so clear. Obviously, he wasn't clear,
because he kept on painting. Mondrian is not geometric, he does not paint
straight lines. A picture to me is not geometric—it has a face It is some
form of impressionism We ought to have some level as a profession.
Some part of painting has to become professional.
NEWMAN: De Kooning has moved from his original position that straight
lines do not exist in nature. Geometry can be organic. Straight lines do ex-
ist in nature. When I draw a straight line, it does exist. It exists optically.
When de Kooning says it doesn't exist optically, he means it doesn't exist in
nature. On that basis, neither do curved lines exist in nature. But the edge
of the U. N. building is a straight line. If it can be made, it does exist in na-
ture. A straight line is an organic thing that can contain feelings.
DE KOONING: What is called Mondrian's optical illusion is not an optical
illusion. A Mondrian keeps changing in front of us.
GOTTLIEB: It is my impression that the most general idea which has kept
cropping up is a statement of the nature of a work of art as being an arrange-
ment of shapes or forms of color which, because of the order or ordering
of materials, expresses the artist's sense of reality or corresponds with some
outer reality. I don't agree—that some expression of reality can be expressed
in a painting purely in terms of line, color, and form, that those are the es-
sential elements in painting, and anything else is irrelevant and can con-
tribute nothing to the painting
NEWMAN: We are raising the question of subject matter and what its nature is.
DE KOONING: I wonder about the subject matter of the Crucifixion scene-
was the Crucifixion the subject matter or not? What is the subject matter?
Is it an interior subject matter?
H о FM ANN: I think the question goes all the time back to subject matter.
Every subject matter depends on how to use meaning. You can use it in a
lyrical or dramatic manner. It depends on the personality of the artist.
Everyone is clear about himself, as to where he belongs, and in which way
he can give aesthetic enjoyment. Painting is aesthetic enjoyment. I want

1950s 163
 to be a "poet." As an artist I must conform to my nature. My nature has a
lyrical as well as a dramatic disposition. Not one day is the same. One day
I feel wonderful to work and I feel an expression which shows in the work.
Only with a very clear mind and on a clear day I can paint without inter-
ruptions and without food because my disposition is like that. My work
should reflect my moods and the great enjoyment which I had when I did
the work
BARR: What is the most acceptable name for our direction or movement?
(It has been called Abstract-Expressionist, Abstract-Symbolist, Intra-
Subjectivist, etc.)
SMITH: I don't think we do have unity on the name.
ROSENBERG: We should have a name through the years.
SMITH: Names are usually given to groups by people who don't understand
them or don't like them.
BARR: We should have a name for which we can blame the artists—for once
in history!...
MOTHERWELL: In relation to the question of a name here are three names:
Abstract-Expressionist; Abstract-Symbolist; Abstract-Objectionist.
BROOKS: A more accurate name would be "direct" art. It doesn't sound very
good, but in terms of meaning, abstraction is involved in it.
TOMLIN: Brooks also remarked that the word "concrete" is meaningful; it
must be pointed out that people have argued very strongly for that word.
"No-objective" is a vile translation.
NEWMAN: I would offer "Self-evident" because the image is concrete.
DE KOONING: It is disastrous to name ourselves.

Note

A three-day closed conference took place April 21-23, 1950, from four to seven
P.M. It constituted the final activity of Studio 35. The participants who attended one
or more of the sessions were William Baziotes, Janice Biala, Louise Bourgeois, James
Brooks, Willem de Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, Herbert Ferber, Adolph Gottlieb, Peter
Grippe, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Weldon Kees, Ibram Lassaw, Norman Lewis,
Seymour Lip ton, Barnett Newman, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Ralph Ro-
senberg, Theodoros Stamos, Hedda Sterne, David Smith, and Bradley Walker Tom-
lin. The moderators were Alfred H. Barr,Jr., Director of The Museum of Modern Art,
Richard Lippold, and Robert Motherwell.
Modern Artists in America was the first and only issue of this magazine edited by
Motherwell and Reinhardt.

164 1950s
ELAINE DE KOONING David Smith Makes a Sculpture

Hot-forging a piece of metal with a trip-hammer, flame-cutting with an acety-

lene torch or welding his forms together, David Smith says "the change from
one machine to another means no more than changing brushes to a painter or
chisels to a carver. . . . Michelangelo spoke about the noise and the marble
dust in our profession, but I finish the day looking more like a grease-ball than
a miller."
The huge cylinders, tanks and boxes of metal scrap; the racks filled with
bars of iron and steel-plate; the motor-driven tools with rubber hoses, discs
and meters; the large negatively charged steel table on which he executes
much of his work; the forging bed nearby; and the big Ford engine that sup-
plies the current for welding and drowns out WQXR on his little radio in
the corner, all help to give his working quarters near Bolton Landing, in the
Adirondacks, the aspect of a small, erratic but thriving foundry. Here, since
1941, when he built the long room that serves as his studio, poured the con-
crete floor and topped the structure with a full row of north skylights set at a
thirty-degree angle, Smith has turned out some twenty-odd pieces of sculp-
ture a year. With an oil stove at either end, the studio is usable through zero
weather, and Smith's winter work-clothes—heavy ski shoes, hunter's-red wool
jacket and blue jeans, like those sported by lumbermen in the district—are a
further protection against low temperatures. Calling his shop the Terminal
Iron Works, after a Brooklyn waterfront company owned by two Irishmen,
Blackburn and Buckborn, who gave him working-space in their shop for his
sculpture in the thirties, Smith feels that this name more closely defines his
"beginning and method" than to call it a "studio." "Since 1933," he says, "I have
modeled in wax for single bronze castings; I have carved marble and wood;
but most of my works have been steel, which is my most fluent medium."
Born in 1906 in a "Sherwood Anderson town" in Indiana where he lived
until he was eighteen, Smith left home to go to Ohio University, but quit after
a short period arid went to work in the Studebaker factory in South Bend,
where he got his "first taste of metal-working." But it was not until seven years
later, in 1933, when he borrowed a set of welding equipment from a garage,

SOURCE: Art News (September 1951), 38-50. Copyright © 1951 ARTnews LLC,
September.

165
 that he began the metal sculpture for which he is known. Beginning his career
as a painter in New York, he studied with John Sloan at the Art Students
League where he met Dorothy Dehner, "a student a year ahead," who became
his wife.
"You get something from everybody," says the sculptor. From Sloan, he
"got revolt against established convention"; he was introduced to Cubism by
Jan Matulka. A show of Gargallo at В rummer's and a piece at the Museum of
Modern Art by Gonzáles, pioneer experimenter with sculpture in direct metal,
interested him in the Spanish ironworking traditions. Most important, he
feels, was "the intense interchange among artists on the project" and conver-
sations with Stuart Davis, Gorky and John Graham "in the days when Ameri-
can abstract art was rarely shown except in artists' studios."
And now, although Smith likes his solitude, he still finds the company of
artists necessary, and makes regular trips to New York "after several months
of good work" to go to galleries and museums and to "run into late-up artists
chewing the fat at the Sixth Avenue cafeteria, the Artists Club, the Cedar
Tavern ... then back to the hills," where he likes to "sit and dream of the city
as I used to dream of the mountains when I sat on the dock in Brooklyn."
The sculptor—who worked on ships with Blackburn's crews of dock work-
ers, and during the thirties at a locomotive works in Schenectady "where you
had to lay down 120 feet of weld to earn a day's pay"—feels that his guiding
techniques are not those of sculpture but of industry. "One thing I learned from
working in factories," he says, "is that people who make things—whether it's
automobiles, ships or locomotives—have to have a plentiful supply of materi-
als. Art can't be made by a poor mouth, and I have to forget the cost problem
on everything, because it is always more than I can afford—more than I get
back from sales, most years more than I earn. For instance, 100 troy ounces of
silvers costs over $100; phos-copper costs $4 a pound; nickel and stainless
steel electrodes cost $1.65 to $2 a pound; a sheet of stainless steel 1/8 inch thick
and 4 by 8 feet costs $83, etc. I don't resent the cost of the best material or the
finest tools and equipment. Every labor-saving machine, every safety device I
can afford, I consider necessary." Since recently receiving his second Guggen-
heim Fellowship, Smith's stock is "larger than it has ever been before." Sheets
of stainless steel, cold and hot rolled steel, bronze, copper and aluminum are
stacked outside; lengths of strips, shapes and bar stock are racked in the base-
ment of the house or interlaced in the joists of the roof; and stocks of bolts,
nuts, taps, dies, paints, solvents, acids, protective coatings, oils, grinding

166 1950s
wheels, polishing discs, dry pigments and waxes are stored on steel shelving
in his shop.
From working all shifts on his various jobs, Smith also discovered his pro-
found distaste for "routine-life." "Any two-thirds of the twenty-four hours are
wonderful as long as I can choose," says the sculptor, who puts in a regular
twelve-hour working day which usually starts at 11:00 A.M. after a "leisurely
breakfast and an hour of reading" in his large three-room, one-story house,
six hundred feet from the shop. Built with similar economy and Spartan pro-
portions, of pale grey cinderblocks, with a steel roof he welded on himself, a
steel floor covered with rubber tile and huge plate-glass windows that face a
magnificent stretch of mountains, this structure is plain, elegant and conven-
ient. Here, in a small studio, working from quart bottles of colored ink, Smith
makes quantities of the drawings that usually precede or accompany the de-
velopment of his sculpture.
When he starts on a new work, Smith doesn't want to get involved with its
dramatic meanings. "The explanation—the name—comes afterwards," he
says. Looking at his recent work, The Cathedral, in terms of its inescapable
social implications, he sees it as a "symbol of power—the state, the church or
any individual's private mansion built at the expense of others." The relation
between oppressor and oppressed is conceived as a relation between man and
architecture. The poetic existence of the building comes to a focus in the
predatory claw. The limp form on the steps under the talons, expressing "the
concept of sacrifice," is "a man subjugated, alive or dead, it doesn't matter."
The prominent disc in the back is a "symbol of the coin." The relic or frag-
ment of a skeleton displayed on the "altar table" refers to a spurious "exalta-
tion of the dead," as does the silhouette of the man hollowed out of the plaque
on the left (here he uses "stitches" of metal running up the center of the figure
to evoke the seams on the sacks sewn around corpses in the Middle Ages).
The incised plaques suggest walls or the artworks on them and the upright
bars reiterate this interior aspect as pillars, which then rise as towering spires
in a construction, measuring only 3 feet high, that achieves heroic scale. But
much of the content resides in the actual material used—forged steel, encrusted
with pale oxides that suggest Pompeian pinks and golds.
"Possibly steel is so beautiful," the sculptor feels, "because of all the move-
ment associated with it, its strength and functions Yet it is also brutal: the
rapist, the murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring." Human
brutality, "the race for survival," has been a predominant subject for this art-

1950s 167
 ist. From his predatory birds and dogs personifying greed and rapacity to his
"spectres" of war swooping precipitously in fierce diagonals, Smith's sculp-
ture in the past has been characterized by an overwhelming sense of motion,
but his recent work, with the stress on the vertical and horizontal, reveals a
new preoccupation with centralized balances and—particularly in the case of
The Cathedral—with a curious climactic stillness. Evocative and complex, it
expresses the termination of an event. The scene is transfixed, but motion is
vividly implicit in the construction of its parts. A flat disc seems to have rolled
along its track on the cross-bar before coming to its present equilibrium; pil-
lars with the rings around them can be seen as pistons arrested; a twisted col-
umn has reached an impasse in its logical movement downward as a drill; the
scythe or scimitar supported by the column has come to the end of a predes-
tined sweep to become the rim of a cupola; the prone form was moving erect
before it was caught and pinned to the steps by the downward-pouncing claw.
Finally, the separate members of the violent situation are resolved into parts of
an architectural structure, as characters in Greek mythology are transfigured
into symbols of their last act or emotion.
Conceiving a piece of sculpture through different levels of experience,
Smith doesn't see a form as stationary but as "going places," having direction,
force-lines, impetus: "Projection of an indicated form, continuance of an in-
completed side, the suggestion of a solid by lines, or the vision of forms revolv-
ing at varying speeds—all such possibilities I consider and expect the viewer to
contemplate. An art-form should not be platitudinous or predigested with no
intellectual or spiritual demands on the consumer." The first impact of his
sculpture on "the consumer" is, naturally, in terms of its most general associa-
tions. His works are primarily abstractions whose impetus and rhythm are a
matter of "drawing" which then, secondarily, yields up the narrower action of
the subject. And finally, on a third and more practical level of reference,
Smith's forms suggest motion in the way that tools or parts of machinery not in
use still reveal their predisposition to a specific function. It is mainly on this
level that Smith consciously composes—and therefore he often finds that he
can work with "ready-made" parts (he used sections of an old wagon for his
first piece of metal sculpture in 1933). This interplay of form and function can
follow either way. A theme will suggest a particular tool (an old hand-forged
wood-bit that he had "lying around for fifteen years" became the figure with
the wrung neck that he wanted for the foreground of The Cathedral}; and con-
versely, a tool or piece of machinery will often suggest a theme: thus, four

168 1950s
turnbuckles he found rusted together in an empty lot were brought home and
cleaned and hung in his studio until one day, two months later, the sculptor re-
calls, "I recognized them as the bodies of soldiers with the hooks for heads,"
and immediately began work on an eloquent sculpture of four charging sol-
diers. Constantly on the lookout for discarded machinery, he loads his truck
("a necessity for a sculptor") with his bulky finds which are stored along with
his regular stock.
Smith has "no set procedure in beginning a sculpture." Usually there are
drawings—anything from sketches in pocket notebooks to the large ink draw-
ings on sheets of linen rag. Some works start out as chalk outlines on the ce-
ment floor of his shop with cut steel forms working into drawings; some, like
The Cathedral, are begun and finished without sketches. There always are,
however, weeks of preparation. "I want an abundance of ideas and material so
I always make many more pieces than I need. In this case, I knew more or less
how the vertical structure, relating to church architecture and a forest maze,
was to be arranged." So the first step was to forge a group of bars into right
angles with unequal legs, the long leg in each case intended as an upright.
In preparation for forging, the bars were clamped in a vise with a flame-torch
trained on them and then anchored in place so that the sculptor was free to
work on something else. About half of these forgings were selected for the ini-
tial grouping. Then the base was forged and a set of short, tapered bars were
tack-welded around the rim as supports for the rising, angular structure. (If
dissatisfied at any point in the development of a piece with the position or
proportions of a form . . . he removes it by flame-cutting, a process "pretty
much as easy as running a knife through butter.") For the fore-altar body, he
cut down the stubby, partially forged limbs with a band-saw before welding
them to the torso. And after the wood-bit was pounded into the limp, ropy
line he wanted for the twisted neck, and the knob was built up with melted
iron to form the head, they were attached—"like a ball and chain"—to the body
which was then placed on the altar steps. When the twisted column was set on
its supporting table, he began work on the hollow arm of the claw^ cutting a
boiler-tube in half "on the bias," and forging an elongated funnel from each of
the parts. For lengths that have to tally exactly, he sometimes uses a micro-
meter, but more often he gauges distances by eye, testing relationships by hold-
ing the piece to be added up against the forms already fixed in place, and then
extending or shortening the new piece to make it fit. Searching for the propor-
tions of the plaques, he suspended various rectangles of paper in position,

1950s 169
 and when satisfied with the measurements, he formed them from steel-plate
with an oxyacetylene cutting machine. This machine burns smoothly and is
most useful, he finds, on straight lines and geometric forms; and the slag it
leaves on the edges can be easily hammered off or else smoothed down with a
grinder. For the negative "shroud-figure" in the left-hand plaque and for the
"mural" on the right, he drew his forms with soapstone and then burned the
design completely through the metal with a hand-torch.
Working constantly from five sides at once (including the top view), the
sculptor will change from one metal to another during the development of a
piece, sometimes because of a physical problem. For the glittering wounds
under the talons, he used silver, which "served aesthetically" and, thinner than
water in its melted state, has a penetrating quality that makes it an excellent
soldering agent for fine joints that are not under a strain. Also selected for
their brilliance were the stainless steel rivets that plug up the holes or support
the encircling bands of the uprights.
After all his forms were temporarily tack-welded into position and the
sculptor felt he had no more adjustments to make, final arc-welding completed
the assembly....
The last step is the surfacing. "I've no aesthetic interest in tool-marks,"
says Smith. "My aim in handling materials is the same as in locomotive build-
ing—to arrive at a given form in the most efficient manner"; but "each method
imparts its function to varying materials." And the sculptor is not necessarily
interested in eradicating tool-marks either, and generally the act of beating
a form into shape gives it its final surface. When he wants small, shiny spots—
as on certain seams in The Cathedral—he uses a die-grinder with tungsten-
carbide burrs, and although he sometimes works with so fine a burr that he
needs a magnifying glass (on his medals, for instance), he rarely tries for a
high polish, preferring a surface that expresses the crude nature of the metal.
Using color in various ways this past year, he applied subdued metallic tones
in even, mat coats with a spray gun to some works, or smeared rust solvent
mixed with large quantities of powdered pigment on others—like the huge,
red Fish recently shown at the Whitney Museum—achieving brilliant, streaky,
raw washes; but for the subtle, blonde tones of The Cathedral, his method was
more tentative. Dissolving splotches of rust, Smith coated the different metals
of the piece with a phosphoric acid, mixing small amounts of cadmium pow-
der with it to produce deposits which varied from the golden patina on the
steps to the mottled, whitish-pink of the twisted column, all falling into a
unified range of shimmering, elusive tones.

170 1950s
 Finished, The Cathedral seems to expand through its own atmospheric
haze as an historical edifice, bigger than life, undetailed and unapproachable,
taking on as part of itself the surrounding air and countryside. This extraor-
dinary sense of "landscape" in the coloring is reiterated formally in the pow-
erful, horizontal lines that cut through the piece, giving it a curious effect of
transparency as each of the elements seems to indicate a receding plane. And
with the irregular placement of the six short legs or "corners" that support the
"walls" of this sculpture, a sense of deep interior distance is created on the
shallow base (the depth is only 17 1/8 inches at the bottom step) as the first
level of horizontals, including the two tables, seems always to fall at eye-level,
no matter from which angle the piece is viewed. And thus, Smith has magi-
cally achieved his aim—to create a sculpture that is, in his own words, at once
"scene and symbol."

CLYFFORD STILL Statement

That pigment on canvas has a way of initiating conventional reactions for

most people needs no reminder. Behind these reactions is a body of history
matured into dogma, authority, tradition. The totalitarian hegemony of this
tradition I despise, its presumptions I reject. Its security is an illusion, banal,
and without courage. Its substance is but dust and filing cabinets. The hom-
age paid to it is a celebration of death. We all bear the burden of this tradition
on our backs but I cannot hold it a privilege to be a pallbearer of my spirit in
its name.
From the most ancient times the artist has been expected to perpetuate the
values of his contemporaries. The record is mainly one of frustration, sadism,
superstition, and the will to power. What greatness of life crept into the story
came from sources not yet fully understood, and the temples of art which bur-
den the landscape of nearly every city are a tribute to the attempt to seize this
elusive quality and stamp it out.

SOURCE: 15 Americans (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 21-22. Copyright ©
MoMA.

171
 The anxious men find comfort in the confusion of those artists who would
walk beside them. The values involved, however, permit no peace, and mutual
resentment is deep when it is discovered that salvation cannot be bought.
We are now committed to an unqualified act, not illustrating outworn myths
or contemporary alibis. One must accept total responsibility for what he exe-
cutes. And the measure of his greatness will be in the depth of his insight and
his courage in realizing his own vision.
Demands for communication are both presumptuous and irrelevant. The
observer usually will see what his fears and hopes and learning teach him to
see. But if he can escape these demands that hold up a mirror to himself, then
perhaps some of the implications of the work may be felt. But whatever is seen
or felt it should be remembered that for me these paintings had to be some-
thing else. It is the price one has to pay for clarity when one's means are hon-
oured only as an instrument of seduction or assault.

THOMAS . HESS de Kooning Paints a Picture

In the first days of June, 1950, Willem de Kooning tacked a y-foot-high canvas
to his painting frame and began intensive work on Woman—a picture of a
seated figure, and a theme which had preoccupied him for over two decades.
He decided to concentrate on this single major effort until it was finished to
his satisfaction.
The picture nearly complied to his requirements several times in the
months that followed, but never wholly. Finally, after a year and a half of con-
tinuous struggle, it was almost completed; then followed a few hours of vio-
lent disaffection; the canvas was pulled off the frame and discarded. After that
three other related pictures were begun (and these have since been finished).
A few weeks later, the art historian Meyer Schapiro visited de Kooning's
Greenwich Village studio and asked to see the abandoned painting. It was
brought out and re-examined. Later it was put back on the frame, and after

SOURCE: Art News (March 1953), 30-33,60-67; Copyright © 1953 ARTnews LLC,
March

172 1950s
some additional changes was declared finished—i.e., not to be destroyed.
This was mid-June, 1952.
When the canvas was mounted on a permanent stretcher prior to being
taken to the Janis Gallery (where de Kooning is having a one man show this
month, which includes Woman), another alteration was made. Then Woman
escaped by truck from its creator.
The painting's energetic and lucid surfaces, its resoundingly affirmative
presence, give little indication of a vacillating, Hamlet-like history. Woman
appears inevitable, like a myth that needed but a quick name to become uni-
versally applicable. But like any myth, its emergence was long, difficult and (to
use one of the artist's favorite adjectives) mysterious.

Invitation au Voyage

It would be a false simile to compare the two years' work that resulted in
Woman to a progress or a development. Rather there was a voyage; not a mis-
sion or an errand, but one of those Romantic ventures which so attracted po-
ets, from Byron, Baudelaire, through Lewis Carroll's Snark, to Mallarmé and
Rimbaud (Ingres' harem, Delacroix's Barque, Van Gogh's Berceuse who was
to accompany lonesome sailors are parallels in painting). There is a certain
revulsion preceding and even causing the metaphysical (for the journey is in-
evitably around the walls of a studio) embarkation. "The flesh is sad, alas, and
I've read all the books," complained Mallarmé. In de Kooning's case there
was dissatisfaction with an almost totally non-figurative style, the symbolism
of which, perhaps, had become too introspective to play the ambitious picto-
rial role demanded by the artist. But in all such journeys there is also confi-
dence (Mallarmé's "ennui" still "trusts the supreme adieu" of waving hand-
kerchiefs), and belief in the journey.
The stages of the painting ... illustrate arbitrarily, even haphazardly, some
of the stops en route—like cities that were visited, friends that were met. They
are neither better nor worse, more or less "finished," than the terminus. They
are memories which the camera has changed to tangible souvenirs. Some might
appear more satisfactory than the ending, but this is irrelevant. The voyage,
on the other hand, is relevant: the exploration for a constantly elusive vision;
the solution to a problem that was continually being set in new ways. And the
ending is like the poets' ending, too; the voyage simply stops. You are neces-
sarily "home again"; need for the particular journey no longer exists. The re-
sult, like that of all works of art, can be compared to a new map of the human
sensibility.

1950s 173
 Procrustes Improvises

Some artists like to work from an easy chair which is riveted to a concrete
slab which is anchored to the center of the earth. Others, and among them de
Kooning, prefer to keep off-balance. They insist that everything is possible
within the painting, which means they must devise a system for studying an
infinitely variable number of probabilities.
De Kooning has devised a method of a continuous series of drawings which
are cut apart, reversed, exchanged and otherwise manipulated on the paint-
ing. It is like Procrustes, who cut or stretched travelers to fit his bed, but with
the important difference that this Procrustes does not know the dimensions of
his bed. He needs such doubt to keep off-balance.
One of the simplest steps in the method is illustrated in the [way] two char-
coal studies on paper have been cut laterally in half at the figure's hips and
combined to make another figure—the top part frontal; the bottom, three-
quarters' view. The result is something like an "animated" study; the body has
been given a progressive motion by a substitution of new parts. In this con-
text, readers of ARTNEWS may remember an oil-on-paper sketch by Ingres
for The Turkish Bath [Nov. '52] of a reclining nude with three arms, or, for that
matter, Huck Finn's description of the drawing of a lady who had as many
arms as a spider because the artist could never decide which was the best
pose. De Kooning achieves similar multiplicity, but each of his figures can be
studied with its correct allotment of anatomical parts—a necessary aspect for
this artist. It is inconceivable, at this stage of his thinking, that he would paint
a three-eyed or one-legged figure. He insists that everything and only every-
thing appropriate be represented in the painting.
More complicated applications of the Procrustean method are illustrated
in the stages of the work-in-progress. Before making changes, de Kooning fre-
quently interrupted the process of painting to trace with charcoal on trans-
parent paper large sections of, or the whole composition. These would be cut
apart and taped on the canvas in varying positions. Thus in stage 1, the posi-
tion of the skirt and knees has been shifted by the overlay; in 2, that of the
figure's left arm and hand.
This device serves two purposes, one technical, the other conceptual, but
it is a single device and its technical and conceptual uses are separated only to
simplify discussion. In practice it is one action; it can be described partially
in two ways.
Technically the method permits the artist to study possibilities of change

174 1950s
before taking irrevocable steps. It also keeps a continuous if fragmentary rec-
ord of where the picture has been. De Kooning often paints on the paper over-
lays, testing differences of color and drawing. Furthermore, when he goes back
to the canvas it can be in relation to an area in two different stages of develop-
ment—the overlay and the state beneath it. Off-balance is heightened; proba-
bilities increase; the painter makes ambiguity into actuality. And ambiguity,
as we shall see, is a crucial element in this (and almost all important) art.
Conceptually, the method is used to approach what de Kooning calls the
"intimate proportions" of anatomy. He attempts to recapture "the feeling of
familiarity you have when you look at somebody's big toe when close to it, or
at a crease in a hand or a nose or lips or a necktie." Uninterested in "artistic
proportions"—the traditional ratios of limb to trunk to height, etc.—he seeks
an anatomy that will be stylistically relevant, and also become, as it were, "so
many spots of paint." R. P. Blackmur has defined style as the individual quali-
fication of the act of perception, and de Kooning's perceptions focus on the
New York he daily observes, populated by birdlike Puerto Ricans, fat mamas
in bombazine or a lop-sided blond at a bar. Such are the observations he is
ambitious to translate—or rather to synthesize—with the plastic means he
controls.
One approach to "intimate" perception is by interchanging parts of the
anatomy. The artist points out that a drawing of a knuckle, for example, could
also be that of a thigh; an arm, that of a leg. Exactly such switches were often
made during the painting of Woman, attempting always, in the continual shifts,
re-creations, replacements, substitutions, to arrive at a point where a sense of
the intimate (i.e., what is seen and familiar in everyday observation) is con-
veyed by proportion—among other means.
So if Procrustes does not know how long and wide his bed is, he knows ex-
actly what kind of a bed the visitor must fit. The refusal to define the dimen-
sions becomes another link in the chain of ambiguities that will finally meas-
ure the surface of Woman to the artist and spectator.
(Parenthetically it should be added that de Kooning's dissatisfaction with
conventional proportions—which have satisfied such older re-inventors of
anatomy as Picasso—is based on long experience with them. Years of training
at the Academy of his native Rotterdam, and a later period of what might be
termed lyrical Ingrism, gave him the mastery of tradition essential to discard-
ing or changing convention.)

1950s 175
 The Skin

The physical appearance of Woman, as has been mentioned, gives no clue

to the length of its history. Paint is applied in consistent impastos which thin
out to the canvas in a few places and rise elsewhere to heavy ridges. "I like
a nice, juicy, greasy surface," says the artist, who refuses to capitalize on the
process of correction and the happy accidents it so often produces. Changes,
made after prolonged study or in moments of emphatic refusal, are preceded
by scraping back to the canvas.
The pigments employed are a wide variety of standard tube colors; tita-
nium white; the medium is a mixture of turpentine, stand oil and damar var-
nish. Surfaces are kept fresh and evenly moist. In this respect it should be
noted that although Woman took two years to complete, de Kooning is a fast
worker, and the entire picture frequently changed in a few hours time. The
voyage may have been long, but its tempo was hectic.
If the materials are conventional, they were applied in many different and
unconventional manners—as one might expect from the motivating style. In
addition to the usual selection of long-handled artists' brushes, de Kooning
uses about a dozen inch to inch-and-a-half house-painters' brushes; a wide,
slanted palette knife; and a number of "liners"—brushes with about a dozen
б-inch bristles attached to a flat ferrule. These are used by display and scenery
painters to make emphatic, fluid lines (the artist supported himself when he
first came to the U.S. in 1926 by painting houses, signs and decorations, and
his early training had included the crafts of commercial art; he is one of the
few to have made personal use of the many tricks of the trades). With these in-
struments he is able to give the skin of his painting a breathing vitality and
spontaneity....
"Impossible" passages often appear: a torrent of color will suddenly dis-
appear into strokes of other hues running at right angles. Some of these effects
are deliberately produced by masking—i.e., placing paper over the surface
adjacent to the one being painted and running the strokes over the paper, which
is then removed, leaving a clean edge. More of them—and more important—
have a sort of montage effect, a jump in focus, as if someone had abruptly
changed the lens through which you were looking. De Kooning says that his
wife, Elaine (herself a painter, whose writings have frequently appeared on
these pages), was the first to notice this and to attribute it to the use of over-
lays. The record of a shift in a unit's position is retained in perceptible but un-
accountable shifts of plane. Here the masking is not in paint, but in ideas. The

176 1950s
 effect, however, is similar, and gives an illusion of shallow space in which edges
flicker up and down the surface—as they do in some Cubist painting.
Color has been called de Kooning's weakness by some of his colleagues;
they point to his many works in black and white and to the emphasis on drafts-
manship in his paintings and studies. The artist himself freely admits he is not
a colorist as moderns have come to accept this term as equivalent to Matisse
or Bonnard. He cannot predict where he wants to put a specific blue or rose—
or even which blue or rose he wants. (At the opposite extreme is Bonnard,
who walked around a group of paintings with a brush loaded with crimson,
putting a bit on here, a bit there. He knew he wanted to use that crimson, on
those paintings, that day.) De Kooning often starts his colors from the com-
monplace—the intimate—objects around him: the blue of a curtain, the red
from a box of soap flakes, the off-grey of a wall seen across the street. There
are no limits; but the hues must be gay, which, as will be seen, is the ambience
of Woman. As work progresses, colors change with shape and meaning of shape,
fluctuating as delicately as they might in a Mondrian. They give hints of loca-
tion, space and texture on the figurative level; they differentiate and accentu-
ate the tensions established on the surface; they relate to each other in the
various contradictions of flat surface and apparent depth. In the entity of
Woman, they become unanalyzable components of form which add to its air
of opulence, violence and laughter.
[. . . ] In all the stages of the work in progress, a mouth is attached to the
painting. In [a] sketch, it is the ruby smile of the Lucky Strike lady with the
"T-zone." In the stages, it is other photographed mouths cut from advertise-
ments and posters, sometimes with enlarged lips, often with teeth accentuated
by black verticals. This is not an overlay—which is a point of change—but a
point of rest, the center, unturning point of the wheel around which all else
moves. The fragment of trompe-Poeil reality becomes a reference within the
painting to the actual woman outside it. It is always present, but will be finally
discarded. To return to the metaphor of the voyage, the smile is the passport,
the silly bit of paper which you must have with you at all times to continue the
journey. It also adds a further element of ambiguity and suggests more proba-
bilities to the work in progress.

1950s 177
 No-Environment

Where is the woman sitting; what is behind her; what are the names of her
appurtenances?
At first Woman was sitting indoors on a chair. Then a window-shape at the
upper right established a wall and distance—but she could have been outside
a house as well as inside, or in an inside-outside porch space. This state of
anonymous simultaneity (not no-specific-place but several no-specific-places)
is seen more clearly in the few "objects" which appeared, then disappeared
around the seated figure.
De Kooning claims that the modern scene is "no-environment" and pre-
sents it as such. To make his point, he opened a tabloid newspaper and leafed
through its illustrations. There was a politician standing next to an arched
doorway and rusticated wall, but remove the return of the arch—the wall
might be a pile of shoe boxes in a department store, or "nothing." The out-
door crowd scene with orators on the roof of a sound truck could be the inte-
rior of Madison Square Garden during a prize-fight. The modern image is
without distinct character probably because of the tremendous proliferation
of visual sensation which causes duplicates to appear among unlikes. The Re-
naissance man saw and visualized, let us say, n things. Today, fed by still, cin-
ema and television cameras, we experience n to the looth power, and of course,
the ns become similar because our brains become numb to their differences.
Distinctions weaken. Finally the environment of the modern artist—the ob-
jects which he names in his pictures—appertains to the pictures only. The
decision is neither one of purification or narcissism—it is, in its way, social
comment.
But note that the reasoned lack of identity of objects adds another major
ambiguity to the painting—each object is purposefully shown as liable to
many interpretations.

Woman

Woman and the pictures related to it should be fixed to the sides of trucks,
or used as highway signs, like those more-than-beautiful girls with their eter-
nal smiles who do not tempt, but simply point to a few words or a beer or a
gadget. Like the girl at the noisy party who has misplaced her escort, she sim-
ply sits, is there, and smiles because that is the proper thing to do in America.
The smile is not fearful, aggressive, particularly significant or even expressive
of what the smiler feels. It is the detached, semi-human way to meet the world,

178 1950s
and because of this detachment it has a touching irony and humanity. It can be
properly compared to the curling lips of the Greek Kouros and the mediaeval
Virgin.
An interpretation along such lines perhaps accounts for the actual smile
pasted to the canvas for two years. The center of realism had to be at the spot
where gesture had psychological significance—and ambivalence. And the smile
demands a setting of gay color with its intimate derivation from objects in the
studio. Intimate proportions, too, become necessary, for without the detach-
ment they give, the smile becomes caricature or sentimental.
Ever since Van Gogh, sentimentality has been the curse of the painters,
who took the liberty to distort. Lips or foreheads stretch plastically, but emo-
tionally they urge the spectator to weep with the artist for all the sorrows
of the world. The painters of the Expressionist movements often have been
tricked into self-pity by their liberation from convention. The older, more
rigid disciplines could help keep the essential remove between expression
and self-analysis. When these became bankrupt, they also devalued a multi-
tude of minor talents who might have become capable decorators, but ended
up as rather obnoxious snivelers. For specific examples, there are the novels of
Thomas Wolfe, and their opposites but equals in the hard-boiled school, es-
pecially in its Gallic phase, like Bosquet. The smiling Woman is de Kooning's
notable solution to this problem, and it can be compared to Balthus' adoles-
cents, with their unwavering stares, or (and here the connection is more di-
rect) Picasso's cow-faced girls with crazy hats.

The Triple Thinker

Edmund Wilson took the title of his recent book from a phrase of Flau-
bert's, "and what is an artist if he is not a triple (i.e. triply a) thinker?"
Ambiguity exactingly sought and exactingly left undefined has been the
recurrent theme in Woman. Ambiguity appears in surface, parts, illusion of
space, in masking, overlays, interchangeable anatomies, intimate proportions
and colors, no-environment, etc. The artist suggests a further complication of
meaning, and points out that his "idolized" Woman reminds him strongly of
a landscape—with arms like lanes and a body of hills and fields, all brought
up close to the surface, like a panorama squeezed together (or like Cézanne).
Then you notice again the openness of certain forms, where contiguous ob-
jects seem set in different planes, and the width of the eyes opens up the face
to a vista.
The thinker is on many levels; to make the number three: the paint, the

1950s 179
 woman, the landscape. Each level could be divided into several others, and in-
terrelated in more ways. This was perhaps one reason for the length of the
voyage, for in less than twenty-four months, the accretion of subtleties and
multi-interpretations might not have occurred.
The fact that the picture was never really ended—never satisfied—and that
it brought a number of paintings and sketches through with it, might have
been predicted from the conditions laid down by the artist at the start. But all
that we need care about is that the image, in all its complexity, came through
to the end.

Last Change

After Woman was declared finished by the artist it was prepared for stretch-
ing on a permanent frame. De Kooning had purposely used an over-size can-
vas, and had covered the unused edges with aluminum paint, so they would
not "make a plane," but still allow room for shifting the format

LOUISE BOURGEOIS Artist's Statement

An artist's words are always to be taken cautiously. The finished work is often
a stranger to, and sometimes very much at odds with what the artist felt, or
wished to express when he began. At best the artist does what he can rather
than what he wants to do. After the battle is over and the damage faced up to,
the result may be surprisingly dull—but sometimes it is surprisingly interest-
ing. The mountain brought forth a mouse, but the bee will create a miracle of
beauty and order. Asked to enlighten us on their creative process, both would
be embarrassed, and probably uninterested. The artist who discusses the so-
called meaning of his work is usually describing a literary side-issue. The
core of his original impulse is to be found, if at all, in the work itself.
Just the same, the artist must say what he feels:
My work grows from the duel between the isolated individual and the
shared awareness of the group. At first I made single figures without any free-

so URGE: Design Quarterly, no. 30 (1954), 18. Reprinted with the permission of the
Louise Bourgeois Studio.

180
dom at all: blind houses without any openings, any relation to the outside
world. Later, tiny windows started to appear. And then I began to develop an
interest in the relationship between two figures. The figures of this phase are
turned in on themselves, but they try to be together even though they may not
succeed in reaching each other.
Gradually the relations between the figures I made became freer and more
subtle, and now I see my works as groups of objects relating to each other. Al-
though ultimately each can and does stand alone, the figures can be grouped
in various ways and fashions, and each time the tension of their relations
makes for a different formal arrangement. For this reason the figures are placed
in the ground the way people would place themselves in the street to talk to
each other. And this is why they grow from a single point—a minimum base of
immobility which suggests an always possible change.
In my most recent work these relations become clearer and more intimate.
Now the single work has its own complex of parts, each of which is similar, yet
different from the others. But there is still the feeling with which I began—the
drama of one among many.
The look of my figures is abstract, and to the spectator they may not appear
to be figures at all. They are the expression, in abstract terms, of emotions and
states of awareness. Eighteenth-century painters made "conversation pieces";
my sculptures might be called "confrontation pieces."

Louise Bourgeois, 1954

allan kaprow The Legac y of Jackso n Polloc k

The tragic news of Pollock's death two summers ago was profoundly depress-
ing to many of us. We felt not only a sadness over the death of a great figure,
but also a deep loss, as if something of ourselves had died too. We were a piece
of him: he was, perhaps, the embodiment of our ambition for absolute libera-
tion and a secretly cherished wish to overturn old tables of crockery and flat

SOURCE: Art News (October 1958), 24-26,55-57. Copyright © 1958 ARTnews LLC,
October.

181
 champagne. We saw in his example the possibility of an astounding freshness,
a sort of ecstatic blindness.
But there was another, morbid, side to his meaningfulness. To "die at the
top" for being his kind of modern artist was to many, I think, implicit in the
work before he died. It was this bizarre implication that was so moving. We re-
membered van Gogh and Rimbaud. But now it was our time, and a man some
of us knew. The ultimate sacrificial aspect of being an artist, while not a new
idea, seemed in Pollock terribly modern, and in him the statement and the rit-
ual were so grand, so authoritative and all-encompassing in their scale and
daring that, whatever our private convictions, we could not fail to be affected
by their spirit.
It was probably this sacrificial side of Pollock that lay at the root of our de-
pression. Pollock's tragedy was more subtle than his death: for he did not die
at the top. We could not avoid seeing that during the last five years of his life
his strength had weakened, and during the last three he had hardly worked at
all. Though everyone knew, in light of reason, that the man was very ill (his
death was perhaps a respite from almost certain future suffering) and that
he did not die as Stravinsky's fertility maidens did, in the very moment of
creation/annihilation—still we could not escape the disturbing (metaphysi-
cal) itch that connected this death in some direct way with art. And the con-
nection, rather than being climactic, was, in a way, inglorious. If the end had
to come, it came at the wrong time.
Was it not perfectly clear that modern art in general was slipping? Either it
had become dull and repetitious as the "advanced" style, or large numbers of
formerly committed contemporary painters were defecting to earlier forms.
America was celebrating a "sanity in art" movement, and the flags were out.
Thus, we reasoned, Pollock was the center in a great failure: the New Art. His
heroic stand had been futile. Rather than releasing the freedom that it at first
promised, it caused not only a loss of power and possible disillusionment for
Pollock but also that the jig was up. And those of us still resistant to this truth
would end the same way, hardly at the top. Such were our thoughts in August
1956.

But over two years have passed. What we felt then was genuine enough, but
our tribute, if it was that at all, was a limited one. It was surely a manifestly hu-
man reaction on the part of those of us who were devoted to the most ad-
vanced artists around us and who felt the shock of being thrown out on our
own. But it did not seem that Pollock had indeed accomplished something,

182 1950s
both by his attitude and by his very real gifts, that went beyond even those
values recognized and acknowledged by sensitive artists and critics. The act
of painting, the new space, the personal mark that builds its own form and
meaning, the endless tangle, the great scale, the new materials are by now
clichés of college art departments. The innovations are accepted. They are be-
coming part of textbooks.
But some of the implications inherent in these new values are not as futile
as we all began to believe; this kind of painting need not be called the tragic
style. Not all the roads of this modern art lead to ideas of finality. I hazard the
guess that Pollock may have vaguely sensed this but was unable, because of
illness or for other reasons, to do anything about it.
He created some magnificent paintings. But he also destroyed painting. If
we examine a few of the innovations mentioned above, it may be possible to
see why this is so.
For instance, the act of painting. In the last seventy-five years the random
play of the hand upon the canvas or paper has become increasingly impor-
tant. Strokes, smears, lines, dots became less and less attached to represented
objects and existed more and more on their own, self-sufficiently. But from
Impressionism up to, say, Gorky, the idea of an "order" to these markings was
explicit enough. Even Dada, which purported to be free of such considera-
tions as "composition," obeyed the Cubist esthetic. One colored shape bal-
anced (or modified or stimulated) others, and these in turn were played off
against (or with) the whole canvas, taking into account its size and shape—for
the most part quite consciously. In short, part-to-whole or part-to-part rela-
tionships, no matter how strained, were a good 50 percent of the making of a
picture (most of the time they were a lot more, maybe 90 percent). With Pol-
lock, however, the so-called dance of dripping, slashing, squeezing, daubing,
and whatever else went into a work placed an almost absolute value upon a di-
aristic gesture. He was encouraged in this by the Surrealist painters and po-
ets, but next to his their work is consistently "artful," "arranged," and full of
finesse—aspects of outer control and training. With the huge canvas placed
upon the floor, thus making it difficult for the artist to see the whole or any ex-
tended section of "parts," Pollock could truthfully say that he was "in" his
work. Here the direct application of an automatic approach to the act makes
it clear that not only is this not the old craft of painting, but it is perhaps bor-
dering on ritual itself, which happens to use paint as one of its materials. (The
European Surrealists may have used automatism as an ingredient, but we can
hardly say they really practiced it wholeheartedly. In fact, only the writers

1950s 183
 among them—and only in a few instances—enjoyed any success in this way.
In retrospect, most of the Surrealist painters appear to have derived from a
psychology book or from each other: the empty vistas, the basic naturalism,
the sexual fantasies, the bleak surfaces so characteristic of this period have
impressed most American artists as a collection of unconvincing clichés.
Hardly automatic, at that. And, more than the others associated with the Sur-
realists, such real talents as Picasso, Klee, and Miró belong to the stricter dis-
cipline of Cubism; perhaps this is why their work appears to us, paradoxi-
cally, more free. Surrealism attracted Pollock as an attitude rather than as a
collection of artistic examples.)
But I used the words "almost absolute" when I spoke of the diaristic ges-
ture as distinct from the process of judging each move upon the canvas. Pol-
lock, interrupting his work, would judge his "acts" very shrewdly and care-
fully for long periods before going into another "act." He knew the difference
between a good gesture and a bad one. This was his conscious artistry at work,
and it makes him a part of the traditional community of painters. Yet the dis-
tance between the relatively self-contained works of the Europeans and the
seemingly chaotic, sprawling works of the American indicates at best a tenu-
ous connection to "paintings." (In fact, Jackson Pollock never really had a
malerisch sensibility. The painterly aspects of his contemporaries, such as
Motherwell, Hofmann, de Kooning, Rothko, and even Still, point up at one
moment a deficiency in him and at another moment a liberating feature. I
choose to consider the second element the important one.)
I am convinced that to grasp a Pollock's impact properly, we must be acro-
bats, constantly shuttling between an identification with the hands and body
that flung the paint and stood "in" the canvas and submission to the objective
markings, allowing them to entangle and assault us. This instability is indeed
far from the idea of a "complete" painting. The artist, the spectator, and the
outer world are much too interchangeably involved here. (And if we object to
the difficulty of complete comprehension, we are asking too little of the art.)
Then Form. To follow it, it is necessary to get rid of the usual idea of "Form,"
i.e., a beginning, middle, and end, or any variant of this principle—such as
fragmentation. We do not enter a painting of Pollock's in any one place (or
hundred places). Anywhere is everywhere, and we dip in and out when and
where we can. This discovery has led to remarks that his art gives the impres-
sion of going on forever—a true insight that suggests how Pollock ignored the
confines of the rectangular field in favor of a continuum going in all directions
simultaneously, beyond the literal dimensions of any work. (Though evidence

184 1950s
points to a slackening of the attack as Pollock came to the edges of many of
his canvases, in the best ones he compensated for this by tacking much of the
painted surface around the back of his stretchers.) The four sides of the paint-
ing are thus an abrupt leaving off of the activity, which our imaginations con-
tinue outward indefinitely, as though refusing to accept the artificiality of an
"ending." In an older work, the edge was a far more precise caesura: here ended
the world of the artist; beyond began the world of the spectator and "reality."
We accept this innovation as valid because the artist understood with per-
fect naturalness "how to do it." Employing an iterative principle of a few highly
charged elements constantly undergoing variation (improvising, as in much
Asian music), Pollock gives us an all-over unity and at the same time a means
to respond continuously to a freshness of personal choice. But this form al-
lows us equal pleasure in participating in a delirium, a deadening of the rea-
soning faculties, a loss of "self " in the Western sense of the term. This strange
combination of extreme individuality and selflessness makes the work remark-
ably potent but also indicates a probably larger frame of psychological refer-
ence. And for this reason any allusions to Pollock's being the maker of giant
textures are completely incorrect. They miss the point, and misunderstand-
ing is bound to follow.
But given the proper approach, a medium-sized exhibition space with the
walls totally covered by Pollocks offers the most complete and meaningful
sense of his art possible.
Then Scale. Pollock's choice of enormous canvases served many purposes,
chief of which for our discussion is that his mural-scale paintings ceased to
become paintings and became environments. Before a painting, our size as
spectators, in relation to the size of the picture, profoundly influences how
much we are willing to give up consciousness of our temporal existence while
experiencing it. Pollock's choice of great sizes resulted in our being con-
fronted, assaulted, sucked in. Yet we must not confuse the effect of these with
that of the hundreds of large paintings done in the Renaissance, which glori-
fied an idealized everyday world familiar to the observer, often continuing the
actual room into the painting by means of trompe l'oeil. Pollock offers us no
such familiarity, and our everyday world of convention and habit is replaced
by the one created by the artist. Reversing the above procedure, the painting
is continued out into the room. And this leads me to my final point: Space.
The space of these creations is not clearly palpable as such. We can become
entangled in the web to some extent and by moving in and out of the skein of
lines and splashings can experience a kind of spatial extension. But even so,

1950s 185
 this space is an allusion far more vague than even the few inches of space-
reading a Cubist work affords. It may be that our need to identify with the pro-
cess, the making of the whole affair, prevents a concentration on the speci-
fics of before and behind so important in a more traditional art. But what I be-
lieve is clearly discernible is that the entire painting comes out at us (we are
participants rather than observers), right into the room. It is possible to see in
this connection how Pollock is the terminal result of a gradual trend that
moved from the deep space of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the
building out from the canvas of the Cubist collages. In the present case the
"picture" has moved so far out that the canvas is no longer a reference point.
Hence, although up on the wall, these marks surround us as they did the
painter at work, so strict is the correspondence achieved between his impulse
and the resultant art.
What we have, then, is art that tends to lose itself out of bounds, tends to fill
our world with itself, art that in meaning, looks, impulse seems to break fairly
sharply with the traditions of painters back to at least the Greeks. Pollock's
near destruction of this tradition may well be a return to the point where art
was more actively involved in ritual, magic, and life than we have known it in
our recent past. If so, it is an exceedingly important step and in its superior
way offers a solution to the complaints of those who would have us put a bit of
life into art. But what do we do now?
There are two alternatives. One is to continue in this vein. Probably many
good "near-paintings" can be done varying this esthetic of Pollock's without
departing from it or going further. The other is to give up the making of paint-
ings entirely—I mean the single flat rectangle or oval as we know it. It has been
seen how Pollock came pretty close to doing so himself. In the process, he
came upon some newer values that are exceedingly difficult to discuss yet bear
upon our present alternative. To say that he discovered things like marks, ges-
tures, paint, colors, hardness, softness, flowing, stopping, space, the world,
life, death might sound naive. Every artist worth his salt has "discovered"
these things. But Pollock's discovery seems to have a peculiarly fascinating
simplicity and directness about it. He was, for me, amazingly childlike, capa-
ble of becoming involved in the stuff of his art as a group of concrete facts seen
for the first time. There is, as I said earlier, a certain blindness, a mute belief
in everything he does, even up to the end. I urge that this not be seen as a sim-
ple issue. Few individuals can be lucky enough to possess the intensity of this
kind of knowing, and I hope that in the near future a careful study of this (per-
haps) Zen quality of Pollock's personality will be undertaken. At any rate, for

186 1950s
now we may consider that, except for rare instances, Western art tends to need
many more indirections in achieving itself, placing more or less equal empha-
sis upon "things" and the relations between them. The crudeness of Jackson
Pollock is not, therefore, uncouth; it is manifestly frank and uncultivated, un-
sullied by training, trade secrets, finesse—a directness that the European art-
ists he liked hoped for and partially succeeded in but that he never had to
strive after because he had it by nature. This by itself would be enough to
teach us something.
It does. Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become
preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday
life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-
second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other
senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements,
people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint,
chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies,
a thousand other things that will be discovered by the present generation of
artists. Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first time, the
world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose entirely
unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel
lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and
horrible accidents. An odor of crushed strawberries, a letter from a friend, or
a billboard selling Drano; three taps on the front door, a scratch, a sigh, or a
voice lecturing endlessly, a blinding staccato flash, a bowler hat—all will be-
come materials for this new concrete art.
Young artists of today need no longer say, "I am a painter" or "a poet" or
"a dancer." They are simply "artists." All of life will be open to them. They
will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will
not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real meaning. But
out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness
as well. People will be delighted or horrified, critics will be confused or
amused, but these, I am certain, will be the alchemies of the 19605.

1950s 187
 MARUGA SAW1N In the Galleries: Franz Kline

When Franz Kline draws his brush across the canvas the gesture is automati-
cally associated with authority, so much so that a showing of his latest paint-
ings is a portentous event: he is forced to measure up to the test of his own
reputation instead of coming before us freshly and without reference to previ-
ous accomplishments. The exhibition of his work which closed the 1957-58
season at the Janis Gallery has both its rewarding and its disappointing as-
pects, but of greatest interest was the indication of continued exploration on
the artist's part, a confident reaching out to break new ground rather than the
strengthening of mastery over already demarcated areas. This preference for
extension over consolidation is apparent in the greater play of space, the massed
rather than the fragmented darkness, the bold introduction of color and a
generally freer painting activity, with the attendant diminishing of clarity.
The small paintings, oil on paper, sometimes combined with collage, are
masterful in their taut balance, their richness of tone and texture, and they ex-
emplify on a modulated scale the welding of strong contrasts which is Kline's
forte. The larger works in color, notably King Oliver, in which the color range
is at its fullest, appear florid in contrast with the purgative purity of the black
and white canvases. Colors here are deployed with more regard for their light
and dark properties than for their tonal variety, so that they function still in
terms of contrasts, although with greater complexity. In the black and white
canvases (most of which are dated 1958) the emphasis is on space rather than
the innate character of the forms; engulfing masses of black pierced by streaks
of light create a fathomless darkness. The essence of these paintings is mo-
tion, the force that brings light out of dark and substance out of void, the ulti-
mate drama. In such paintings as Siegfried and Requiem Kline has succeeded
in conveying this as well as or better than any of his contemporaries. (Janis,
May ig-June 14.)
—M.S.

SOURCE: Arts Magazine (September 1958), 57-58. Reprinted with the permission of
Martica Sawin.

188
HAROLD R O S E N B E R G The American Action Painters

J'ai fait des gestes blanc parmi les solitudes.

—Apollinaire

The American will is easily satisfied in its efforts

to realize itself in knowing itself.
— Wallace Stevens

What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the
deepest artists in the movement—certainly not as well as, if successful, it does
the others. Yet without the definition something essential in those best is bound
to be missed. The attempt to define is like a game in which you cannot possi-
bly reach the goal from the starting point but can only close in on it by picking
up each time from where the last play landed.

Modern Art? Or an Art of the Modern?

Since the War every twentieth-century style in painting is being brought to

profusion in the United States: thousands of "abstract" painters—crowded
teaching courses in Modern Art—a scattering of new heroes—ambitions stim-
ulated by new galleries, mass exhibitions, reproductions in popular maga-
zines, festivals, appropriations.
Is this the usual catching up of America with European art forms? Or is
something new being created? . . . For the question of novelty, a definition
would seem indispensable.
Some people deny that there is anything original in the recent American
painting. Whatever is being done here now, they claim, was done thirty years
ago in Paris. You can trace this painter's boxes of symbols to Kandinsky, that
one's moony shapes to Miró or even back to Cézanne.
Quantitatively, it is true that most of the symphonies in blue and red rec-
tangles, the wandering pelvises and birdbills, the line constructions and plane
suspensions, the virginal dissections of flat areas that crowd the art shows are
accretions to the "School of Paris" brought into being by the fact that the

SOURCE: Art News (December 1952), 22-23,48-50. Copyright © 1952 ARTnews LLC,
December.

189
 mode of production of modern masterpieces has now been all too clearly ra-
tionalized. There are styles in the present displays that the painter could have
acquired by putting a square inch of a Soutine or a Bonnard under a micro-
scope. ... All this is training based on a new conception of what art is, rather
than original work demonstrating what art is about to become.
At the center of this wide practicing of the immediate past, however, the
work of some painters has separated itself from the rest by a consciousness of
a function for painting different from that of the earlier "abstractionists," both
the Europeans themselves and the Americans who joined them in the years of
the Great Vanguard.
This new painting does not constitute a School. To form a School in mod-
ern times not only is a new painting consciousness needed but a conscious-
ness of that consciousness—and even an insistence on certain formulas. A
School is the result of the linkage of practice with terminology—different
paintings are affected by the same words. In the American vanguard the words,
as we shall see, belong not to the art but to the individual artists. What they
think in common is represented only by what they do separately.

Getting Inside the Canvas

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter

after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to re-
produce, re-design, analyze, or "express" an object, actual or imagined. What
was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he
went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of
material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.
It is pointless to argue that Rembrandt or Michelangelo worked in the
same way. You don't get Lucrèce with a dagger out of staining a piece of cloth
or spontaneously putting forms into motion upon it. She had to exist some-
place else before she got on the canvas, and the paint was Rembrandt's means
for bringing her here. Now, everything must have been in the tubes, in the
painter's muscles, and in the cream-colored sea into which he dives. If Lu-
crèce should come out she will be among us for the first time—a surprise. To
the painter, she must be a surprise. In this mood there is no point in an act if
you already know what it contains.
"B. is not modern," one of the leaders of this mode said to me the other day.
"He works from sketches. That makes him Renaissance."
Here the principle, and the difference from the old painting, is made into a

190 1950s
formula. A sketch is the preliminary form of an image the mind is trying to
grasp. To work from sketches arouses the suspicion that the artist still regards
the canvas as a place where the mind records its contents—rather than itself
the "mind" through which the painter thinks by changing a surface with paint.
If a painting is an action, the sketch is one action, the painting that follows
it another. The second cannot be "better" or more complete than the first.
There is just as much significance in their difference as in their similarity.
Of course, the painter who spoke had no right to assume that the other had
the old mental conception of a sketch. There is no reason why an act cannot
be prolonged from a piece of paper to a canvas. Or repeated on another scale
and with more control. A sketch can have the function of a skirmish.

Call this painting "abstract" or "Expressionist" or "Abstract-Expressionist,"

what counts is its special motive for extinguishing the object, which is not the
same as in other abstract or Expressionist phases of modern art.
The New American Painting is not "pure art," since the extrusion of the
object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The apples weren't brushed off the
table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color. They had
to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting. In this gestur-
ing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, color,
composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which—or practically all, as
has been attempted, logically, with unpainted canvases—can be dispensed
with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act. It is to be
taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever to be or be not in
it, will be a tension.

Dramas of as If

A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist.

The painting itself is a "moment" in the adulterated mixture of his life—
whether "moment" means, in one case, the actual minutes taken up with spot-
ting the canvas or, in another, the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted
in sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as
the artist's existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction
between art and life.
It follows that anything is relevant to it. Anything that has to do with action
—psychology, philosophy, history, mythology, hero worship. Anything but art
criticism. The painter gets away from Art through his act of painting; the
critic can't get away from it. The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools,

1950s 191
 styles, form, as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain
kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas, is bound to
seem a stranger.
Some painters take advantage of this stranger. Having insisted that their
painting is an act, they then claim admiration for the act as art. This turns the
act back toward the aesthetic in a petty circle. If the picture is an act, it cannot
be justified as an act of genius in a field whose whole measuring apparatus has
been sent to the devil. Its value must be found apart from art. Otherwise the
"act" gets to be "making a painting" at sufficient speed to meet an exhibition
date.
Art—relation of the painting to the works of the past, Tightness of color,
texture, balance, etc.—comes back into painting by way of psychology. As
Stevens says of poetry, "it is a process of the personality of the poet." But the
psychology is the psychology of creation. Not that of the so-called psychologi-
cal criticism that wants to "read" a painting for clues to the artist's sexual pref-
erences or debilities. The work, the act, translates the psychologically given
into the intentional, into a "world"—and thus transcends it.
With traditional aesthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the
canvas its meaning is not the psychological data but role, the way the artist or-
ganizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation.
The interest lies in the kind of act taking place in the four-sided arena, a dra-
matic interest.
Criticism must begin by recognizing in the painting the assumptions in-
herent in its mode of creation. Since the painter has become an actor, the spec-
tator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction
—psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert wait-
ing. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations among the automatic,
the spontaneous, the evoked.

"It's Not That It's Not That It's Not That"

With a few important exceptions, most of the artists of this vanguard found
their way to their present work by being cut in two. Their type is not a young
painter but a reborn one. The man may be over forty, the painter around seven.
The diagonal of a grand crisis separates him from his personal and artistic past.
Many of the painters were "Marxists" (W.P.A. unions, artists' congresses)
—they had been trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art
(Cubism, Post-Impressionism)—it amounts to the same thing.
The big moment came when it was decided to paint Just To Paint. The

192 1950s
gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aes-
thetic, moral.
If the war and the decline of radicalism in America had anything to do with
this sudden impatience, there is no evidence of it. About the effects of large is-
sues upon their emotions, Americans tend to be either reticent or uncon-
scious. The French artist thinks of himself as a battleground of history; here
one hears only of private Dark Nights. Yet it is strange how many segregated
individuals came to a dead stop within the past ten years and abandoned,
even physically destroyed, the work they had been doing. A far-off watcher,
unable to realize that these events were taking place in silence, might have as-
sumed they were being directed by a single voice.
At its center the movement was away from rather than toward. The Great
Works of the Past and the Good Life of the Future became equally nil.
The refusal of Value did not take the form of condemnation or defiance of
society, as it did after World War I. It was diffident. The lone artist did not
want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world. Liberation
from the object meant liberation from the "nature," society, and art already
there. It was a movement to leave behind the self that wished to choose its fu-
ture and to nullify its promissory notes to the past.
With the American, heir of the pioneer and the immigrant, the foundering
of Art and Society was not experienced as a loss. On the contrary, the end of
Art marked the beginning of an optimism regarding himself as an artist.
The American vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas as
Melville's Ishmael took to the sea.
On the one hand, a desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaus-
tion; on the other, the exhilaration of an adventure over depths in which he
might find reflected the true image of his identity.
Painting could now be reduced to that equipment which the artist needed
for an activity that would be an alternative to both utility and idleness. Guided
by visual and somatic memories of paintings he had seen or made—memories
which he did his best to keep from intruding into his consciousness—he ges-
ticulated upon the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare
him and his art to be.

Based on the phenomenon of conversion the new movement is, with the
majority of the painters, essentially a religious movement. In every case, how-
ever, the conversion has been experienced in secular terms. The result has
been the creation of private myths.

1950s 193
 The tension of the private myth is the content of every painting of this van-
guard. The act on the canvas springs from an attempt to resurrect the saving
moment in his "story" when the painter first felt himself released from Value
—myth of past self-recognition. Or it attempts to initiate a new moment in which
the painter will realize his total personality—myth of future self-recognition.
Some formulate their myths verbally and connect individual works with
their episodes. With others, usually deeper, the painting itself is the exclusive
formulation, it is a Sign.
The revolution against the given, in the self and in the world, which since
Hegel has provided European vanguard art with theories of a New Reality,
has re-entered America in the form of personal revolts. Art as action rests on
the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is
in the process of creating. "Except the soul has divested itself of the love of
created things ..." The artist works in a condition of open possibility, risking,
to follow Kierkegaard, the anguish of the aesthetic, which accompanies possi-
bility lacking in reality. To maintain the force to refrain from settling any-
thing, he must exercise in himself a constant No.

Apocalyps e and Wallpape r

The most comfortable intercourse with the void is mysticism, especially a
mysticism that avoids ritualizing itself.
Philosophy is not popular among American painters. For most, thinking
consists of the various arguments that то PAINT is something different from,
say, to write or criticize: a mystique of the particular activity. Lacking verbal
flexibility, the painters speak of what they are doing in a jargon still involved
in the metaphysics oí things: "My painting is not Art; it's an Is." "It's not a pic-
ture of a thing; it's the thing itself." "It doesn't reproduce Nature; it is Nature."
"The painter doesn't think; he knows." Etc., etc. "Art is not, not not not not
..." As against this, a few reply, art today is the same as it always has been.
Language has not accustomed itself to a situation in which the act itself is
the "object." Along with the philosophy of то PAINT appear bits of Vedanta
and popular pantheism.
In terms of American tradition, the new painters stand somewhere be-
tween Christian Science and Whitman's "gangs of cosmos." That is, between
a discipline of vagueness by which one protects oneself from disturbance
while keeping one's eyes open for benefits; and the discipline of the Open
Road of risk that leads the farther side of the object and the outer spaces of the
consciousness.

194 1950s
 What made Whitman's mysticism serious was that he directed his "cosmic
T" toward a PikeVPeak-or-Bust of morality and politics. He wanted the in-
effable in all behavior—he wanted it to win the streets.
The test of any of the new paintings is its seriousness—and the test of its
seriousness is the degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the
artist's total effort to make over his experience.
A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an
action and its relation to a transforming process in the artist. The canvas has
"talked back" to the artist not to quiet him with Sibylline murmurs or to stun
him with Dionysian outcries but to provoke him into a dramatic dialogue.
Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered by a new question. By its
very nature, action painting is painting in the medium of difficulties.
Weak mysticism, the "Christian Science" side of the new movement, tends
in the opposite direction, toward easy painting—never so many unearned mas-
terpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, asso-
ciated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute,
the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely
to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture com-
pletes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself or his
own desire to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that re-
main safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the com-
monplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an
apocalyptic wallpaper.
The cosmic "I" that turns up to paint pictures but shudders and departs
the moment there is a knock on the studio door brings to the artist a megalo-
mania that is the opposite of revolutionary. The tremors produced by a few
expanses of tone or by the juxtaposition of colors and shapes purposely
brought to the verge of bad taste in the manner of Park Avenue shop windows
are sufficient cataclysms in many of these happy overthrows of Art. The mys-
tical dissociation of painting as an ineffable event has made it common to mis-
take for an act the mere sensation of having acted—or of having been acted
upon. Since there is nothing to be "communicated," a unique signature comes
to seem the equivalent of a new plastic language. In a single stroke the painter
exists as a Somebody—at least on a wall. That this Somebody is not he seems
beside the point.
Once the difficulties that belong to a real act have been evaded by mysti-
cism, the artist's experience of transformation is at an end. In that case what is
left? Or to put it differently: What is a painting that is not an object nor the

1950s 195
 representation of an object nor the analysis or impression of it nor whatever
else a painting has ever been—and that has also ceased to be the emblem of a
personal struggle? It is the painter himself changed into a ghost inhabiting
The Art World. Here the commonplace phrase, "I have bought an O" (rather
than a painting by O) becomes literally true. The man who started to remake
himself has made himself into a commodity with a trademark.

Milieu: The Busy No-Audience

We said that the new painting calls for a new kind of criticism, one that
would distinguish the specific qualities of each artist's act.
Unhappily for an art whose value depends on the authenticity of its mys-
teries, the new movement appeared at the same moment that Modern Art en
masse "arrived" in America: Modern architecture, not only for sophisticated
homes, but for corporations, municipalities, synagogues; Modern furniture
and crockery in mail-order catalogues; Modern vacuum cleaners, can open-
ers; beer ad "mobiles"—along with reproductions and articles on advanced
painting in big-circulation magazines. Enigmas for everybody. Art in America
today is not only nouveau, it's news.
The new painting came into being fastened to Modern Art and without in-
tellectual allies—in literature everything had found its niche.
From this isolated liaison it has derived certain superstitions comparable
to those of a wife with a famous husband. Superiorities, supremacies even, are
taken for granted. It is boasted that modern painting in America is not only
original but an "advance" in world art (at the same time that one says "to hell
with world art").
Everyone knows that the label Modern Art no longer has any relation to the
words that compose it. To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern
or art; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand-year-old mask from the
South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach be-
comes Art.
When they find this out, some people grow extremely enthusiastic, even,
oddly enough, proud of themselves; others become infuriated.
These reactions suggest what Modern Art actually is. It is not a certain
kind of art object. It is not even a style. It has nothing to do either with the pe-
riod when a thing was made or with the intention of the maker. It is something
that someone has had the power to designate as psychologically, aesthetically,
or ideologically relevant to our epoch. The question of the driftwood is: Who
found it?

196 1950s
 Modem Art in America represents a revolution of taste—and serves to
identify power of the caste conducting that revolution. Responses to Modern
Art are primarily responses to claims to social leadership. For this reason
Modern Art is periodically attacked as snobbish, Red, immoral, etc., by estab-
lished interests in society, politics, the church. Comedy of a revolution that re-
stricts itself to weapons of taste—and which at the same time addresses itself
to the masses: Modern-design fabrics in bargain basements, Modern interiors
for office girls living alone, Modern milk bottles.
Modern Art is educational, not with regard to art but with regard to life.
You cannot explain Mondrian's painting to people who don't know anything
about Vermeer, but you can easily explain the social importance of admiring
Mondrian and forgetting about Vermeer.
Through Modern Art the expanding caste of professional enlighteners of the
masses—designers, architects, decorators, fashion people, exhibition direc-
tors—informs the populace that a supreme Value has emerged in our time,
the Value of the NEW, and that there are persons and things that embody that
Value. This Value is a completely fluid one. As we have seen, Modern Art does
not have to be actually new; it only has to be new to somebody—to the last lady
who found out about the driftwood—and to win neophytes is the chief interest
of the caste.
Since the only thing that counts for Modern Art is that a work shall be new,
and since the question of its newness is determined not by analysis but by so-
cial power and pedagogy, the vanguard painter functions in a milieu utterly
indifferent to the content of his work.
Unlike the art of nineteenth-century America, advanced paintings today
are not bought by the middle class. Nor are they by the populace. Considering
the degree to which it is publicized and feted, vanguard painting is hardly
bought at all. It is used in its totality as material for educational and profit-
making enterprises: color reproductions, design adaptations, human-interest
stories. Despite the fact that more people see and hear about works of art than
ever before, the vanguard artist has an audience of nobody. An interested indi-
vidual here and there, but no audience. He creates in an environment not of
people but of functions. His paintings are employed not wanted. The public
for whose edification he is periodically trotted out accepts the choices made
for it as phenomena of The Age of Queer Things.

An action is not a matter of taste.

You don't let taste decide the firing of a pistol or the building of a maze.

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 As the Marquis de Sade understood, even experiments in sensation, if de-
liberately repeated, presuppose a morality.
To see in the explosion of shrapnel over No Man's Land only the opening
of a flower of flame, Marinetti had to erase the moral premises of the act of de-
struction—as Molotov did explicitly when he said that Fascism is a matter of
taste. Both M's were, of course, speaking the driftwood language of the Mod-
ern Art International.
Limited to the aesthetics, the taste bureaucracies of Modern Art cannot
grasp the human experience involved in the new action paintings. One work
is equivalent to another on the basis of resemblances of surface, and the move-
ment as a whole a modish addition to twentieth-century picture making. Ex-
amples in every style are packed side by side in annuals and in the heads of
newspaper reviewers like canned meats in a chain store—all standard brands.
To counteract the obtuseness, venality, and aimlessness of the Art World,
American vanguard art needs a genuine audience—not just a market. It needs
understanding—not just publicity.
In our form of society, audience and understanding for advanced painting
have been produced, both here and abroad, first of all by the tiny circle of po-
ets, musicians, theoreticians, men of letters, who have sensed in their own
work the presence of the new creative principle.
So far, the silence of American literature on the new painting all but amounts
to a scandal.

CLEMENT GREENBERG "American-Type" Painting

The latest abstract painting offends many people, among whom are more
than a few who accept the abstract in art in principle. New painting (sculp-
ture is a different question) still provokes scandal when little that is new in lit-
erature or even music appears to do so any longer. This may be explained by
the very slowness of painting's evolution as a modernist art. Though it started
on its "modernization" earlier perhaps than the other arts, it has turned out to

SOURCE: Partisan Review (Spring 1955), 179-96. Reprinted with permission of Janice
Van Home for the Estate of Clement Greenberg.

198
have a greater number of expendable conventions imbedded in it, or these at
least have proven harder to isolate and detach. As long as such conventions
survive and can be isolated they continue to be attacked, in all the arts that in-
tend to survive in modern society. This process has come to a stop in litera-
ture because literature has fewer conventions to expend before it begins to
deny its own essence, which lies in the communication of conceptual mean-
ings. The expendable conventions in music, on the other hand, would seem
to have been isolated much sooner, which is why the process of moderniza-
tion has slowed down, if not stopped, there. (I simplify drastically. And it is
understood, I hope, that tradition is not dismantled by the avant-garde for
sheer revolutionary effect, but in order to maintain the level and vitality of art
under the steadily changing circumstances of the last hundred years—and that
the dismantling has its own continuity and tradition.)
That is, the avant-garde survives in painting because painting has not yet
reached the point of modernization where its discarding of inherited conven-
tion must stop lest it cease to be viable as art. Nowhere do these conventions
seem to go on being attacked as they are today in this country, and the com-
motion about a certain kind of American abstract art is a sign of that. It is
practiced by a group of painters who came to notice in New York about a
dozen years ago, and have since become known as the "abstract expression-
ists," or less widely, as "action" painters. (I think Robert Coates of the New
Yorker coined the first term, which is not altogether accurate. Harold Rosen-
berg, in Art News, concocted the second, but restricted it by its implication to
but three or four of the artists the public knows under the first term. In Lon-
don, the kind of art in question is sometimes called "American-type paint-
ing.")1 Abstract expressionism is the first phenomenon in American art to
draw a standing protest, and the first to be deplored seriously, and frequently,
abroad. But it is also the first on its scale to win the serious attention, then the
respect, and finally the emulation of a considerable section of the Parisian
avant-garde, which admires in abstract expressionism precisely what causes it
to be deplored elsewhere. Paris, whatever else it may have lost, is still quick to
sense the genuinely "advanced"—though most of the abstract expressionists
did not set out to be "advanced"; they set out to paint good pictures, and they
"advance" in pursuit of qualities analogous to those they admire in the art of
the past.
Their paintings startle because, to the uninitiated eye, they appear to rely
so much on accident, whim, and haphazard effects. An ungoverned spontane-
ity seems to be at play, intent only on registering immediate impulse, and the

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 result seems to be nothing more than a welter of blurs, blotches, and scrawls
—"oleaginous" and "amorphous," as one British critic described it. All this is
seeming. There is good and bad in abstract expressionism, and once one can
tell the difference he discovers that the good owes its realization to a severer
discipline than can be found elsewhere in contemporary painting; only it
makes factors explicit that previous disciplines left implicit, and leaves im-
plicit many that they did not.

To produce important art it is necessary as a rule to digest the major art of

the preceding period, or periods. This is as true today as ever. One great ad-
vantage the American abstract expressionists enjoyed in the beginning was
that they had already digested Klee and Miró—this, ten years before either
master became a serious influence in Paris. Another was that the example of
Matisse was kept alive in New York by Hans Hofmann and Milton Avery at a
time when young painters abroad tended to overlook him. Picasso, Léger, and
Mondrian were much in the foreground then, especially Picasso, but they did
not block either the way or the view. Of particular importance was the fact
that a large number of Kandinsky's early abstract paintings could be seen in
New York in what is now the Solomon Guggenheim Museum. As a result of
all this, a generation of American artists could start their careers fully abreast
of their times and with an artistic culture that was not provincial. Perhaps it
was the first time that this happened.
But I doubt whether it would have been possible without the opportunities
for unconstrained work that the WPA Art Project gave most of them in the late
'305. Nor do I think any one of them could have gotten off the ground as well
as he did without the small but relatively sophisticated audience for adventur-
ous art provided by the students of Hans Hofmann. What turned out to be an-
other advantage was this country's distance from the war and, as immediately
important as anything else, the presence in it during the war years of artists
like Mondrian, Masson, Léger, Chagall, Ernst, and Lipchitz, along with a num-
ber of European critics, dealers, and collectors. Their proximity and attention
gave the young abstract-expressionist painters self-confidence and a sense of
being in the center of art. And in New York they could measure themselves
against Europe with more benefit to themselves than they ever could have
done as expatriates in Paris.
The justification for the term, "abstract expressionist," lies in the fact that
most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or
Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they

200 1950s
all started from French painting, got their fundamental sense of style from it,
and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from
it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direc-
tion in which it had to go in their time.
Picasso was very much on their minds, especially the Picasso of the early
and middle '305, and the first problem they had to face, if they were going to
say what they had to say, was how to loosen up the rather strictly demarcated
illusion of shallow depth he had been working within, in his more ambitious
pictures, since he closed his "synthetic" Cubist period. With this went that
canon of drawing in faired, more or less simple lines and curves that Cubism
imposed and which had dominated almost all abstract art since 1920. They
had to free themselves from this too. Such problems were not attacked by pro-
gram (there has been very little that is programmatic about abstract expres-
sionism) but rather run up against simultaneously by a number of young
painters most of whom had their first shows at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery in
1943 to 1944. The Picasso of the '305—whom they followed in reproductions
in the Cahiers d'Art even more than in flesh-and-blood paintings—challenged
and incited as well as taught them. Not fully abstract itself, his art in that pe-
riod suggested to them new possibilities of expression for abstract and quasi-
abstract painting as nothing else did, not even Klee's enormously inventive
and fertile but equally unrealized 1930-1940 phase. I say equally unrealized,
because Picasso caught so few of the hares he started in the '305—which may
have served, however, to make his effect on certain younger artists even more
stimulating.

To break away from an overpowering precedent, the young artist usually

looks for an alternative one. The late Arshile Gorky submitted himself to Miró
in order to break free from Picasso, and in the process did a number of pic-
tures we now see have independent virtues, although at the time—the late '305
—they seemed too derivative. But the 1910-1918 Kandinsky was even more of
a liberator and during the first war years stimulated Gorky to a greater origi-
nality. A short while later André Breton's personal encouragement began to
inspire him with a confidence he had hitherto lacked, but again he submitted
his art to an influence, this time that of Matta y Echaurren, a Chilean painter
much younger than himself. Matta was, and perhaps still is, an inventive
draughtsman, and in some ways a daring painter, but an inveterately flashy
and superficial one. It took Gorky's more solid craft, profounder culture as a
painter, and more selfless devotion to art to make many of Matta's ideas look

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 substantial. In the last four or five years of his life he so transmuted these
ideas, and discovered so much more in himself in the way of feeling to add to
them, that their derivation became conspicuously beside the point. Gorky
found his own way to ease the pressure of Picassoid space, and learned to float
flat shapes on a melting, indeterminate ground with a difficult stability quite
unlike anything in Miró. Yet he remained a late Cubist to the end, a votary of
French taste, an orthodox easel painter, and virtuoso of line, and a tinter, not a
colorist. He is, I think, one of the greatest artists we have had in this country.
His art was largely unappreciated in his lifetime, but a few years after his tragic
death in 1948, at the age of forty-four, it was invoked and imitated by younger
painters in New York who wanted to save elegance and traditional draughts-
manship for abstract painting. However, Gorky finished rather than began
something, and finished it so well that anybody who follows him is condemned
to academicism.
Willem de Kooning was a mature artist long before his first show in 1948.
His culture is similar to Gorky's (to whom he was close) and he, too, is a
draughtsman before anything else, perhaps an even more gifted one than Gorky
and certainly more inventive. Ambition is as much a problem for him as it was
for his dead friend, but in the inverse sense, for he has both the advantages
and the liabilities—which may be greater—of an aspiration larger and more so-
phisticated, up to a certain point, than that of any other living artist I know of
except Picasso. On the face of it, de Kooning proposes a synthesis of mod-
ernism and tradition, and a larger control over the means of abstract painting
that would render it capable of statements in a grand style equivalent to that of
the past. The disembodied contours of Michelangelo's and Rubens's nude
figure compositions haunt his abstract pictures, yet the dragged off-white,
grays, and blacks by which they are inserted in a shallow illusion of depth—
which de Kooning, no more than any other painter of the time, can deepen
without risk of second-hand effect—bring the Picasso of the early '305 persist-
ently to mind. But there are even more essential resemblances, though they
have little to do with imitation on de Kooning's part. He, too, hankers after ter-
ribilità, prompted by a similar kind of culture and by a similar nostalgia for
tradition. No more than Picasso can he tear himself away from the human
figure, and from the modeling of it for which his gifts for line and shading so
richly equip him. And it would seem that there was even more Luciferian pride
behind de Kooning's ambition: were he to realize it, all other ambitious paint-
ing would have to stop for a while because he would have set its forward as
well as backward limits for a generation to come.

202 1950s
 If de Kooning's art has found a readier acceptance than most other forms of
abstract expressionism, it is because his need to include the past as well as
to forestall the future reassures most of us. And in any case, he remains a late
Cubist. And then there is his powerful, sinuous Ingresque line. When he left
outright abstraction several years ago to attack the female form with a fury
greater than Picasso's in the late '305 and the '405, the results baffled and shocked
collectors, yet the methods by which these savage dissections were carried out
were patently Cubist. De Kooning is, in fact, the only painter I am aware of
at this moment who continues Cubism without repeating it. In certain of his
latest Women, which are smaller than the preceding ones, the brilliance of the
success achieved demonstrates what resources that tradition had left when
used by an artist of genius. But de Kooning has still to spread the full measure
of that genius on canvas.
Hans Hofmann is the most remarkable phenomenon in the abstract ex-
pressionist "school" (it is not really a school) and one of its few members who
can already be referred to as a "master." Known as a teacher here and abroad,
he did not begin showing until 1944, when he was in his early sixties, and only
shortly after his painting had become definitely abstract. Since then he has
developed as one of a group whose next oldest member is at least twenty years
younger. It was only natural that he should have been the maturest from the
start. But his prematureness rather than matureness has obscured the fact that
by 1947 he stated and won successful pictures from ideas whose later and
more single-minded exploitation by others was to constitute their main claim
to originality. When I myself not so long ago complained in print that Hof-
mann was failing to realize his true potentialities, it was because I had not
caught up with him. Renewed acquaintance with some of his earlier work and
his own increasing frequency and sureness of success have enlightened me as
to that.
Hofmann's pictures in many instances strain to pass beyond the easel con-
vention even as they cling to it, doing many things which that convention re-
sists. By tradition, convention, and habit we expect pictorial structure to be
presented in contrasts of dark and light, or value. Hofmann, who started from
Matisse, the Fauves, and Kandinsky as much as from Picasso, will juxtapose
high, shrill colors whose uniform warmth and brightness do not so much ob-
scure value contrasts as render them dissonant. Or when they are made more
obvious, it will be by jarring color contrasts that are equally dissonant. It is
much the same with his design and drawing: a sudden razor-edged line will
upset all our notions of the permissible, or else thick gobs of paint, without

1950s 203
 support of edge or shape, will cry out against pictorial sense. When Hofmann
fails it is either by forcing such things, or by striving for too obvious and pat a
unity, as if to reassure the spectator. Like Klee, he works in a variety of man-
ners without seeming to consolidate his art in any one of them. He is willing,
moreover, to accept his bad pictures in order to get in position for the good
ones, which speaks for his self-confidence. Many people are put off by the
difficulty of his art—especially museum directors and curators—without real-
izing it is the difficulty of it that puts them off, not what they think is its bad
taste. The difficult in art usually announces itself with less sprightliness. Looked
at longer, however, the sprightliness gives way to calm and to a noble and im-
passive intensity. Hofmann's art is very much easel painting in the end, with
the concentration and the relative abundance of incident and relation that be-
long classically to that genre.

Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell have likewise gotten less appreci-
ation than they deserve. Not at all alike in their painting, I couple them for the
moment because they both stay closer to late Cubism, without belonging to it,
than the painters yet to be discussed. Though one might think that all the ab-
stract expressionists start off from inspired impulse, Motherwell stands out
among them by reason of his dependence on it, and by his lack of real facility.
Although he paints in terms of the simplified, quasi-geometric design spon-
sored by Picasso and Matisse and prefers, though not always, clear, simple
color contrasts within a rather restricted gamut, he is less of a late Cubist than
de Kooning. Motherwell has a promising kind of chaos in him but, again, it is
not the kind popularly ascribed to abstract expressionism. His early collages,
in a kind of explosive Cubism analogous to de Kooning's, have with time ac-
quired a profound and original unity, and between 1947 and 1951 or so he
painted several fairly large pictures that I think are among the masterpieces of
abstract expressionism: some of these, in broad vertical stripes, with ocher
played off against flat blacks and whites, bear witness to how well decoration
can transcend itself in the easel painting of our day. But Motherwell has at the
same time painted some of the feeblest pictures done by a leading abstract ex-
pressionist, and an accumulation of these over the last three or four years has
obscured his real worth.
Gottlieb is likewise a very uneven artist, but a much more solid and accom-
plished one than is generally supposed. He seems to me to be capable of a
greater range of controlled effects than any other abstract expressionist, and it
is only owing to some lack of nerve or necessary presumptuousness that he

204 1950s
has not made this plainer to the public, which accuses him of staying too close
to the grid plans of Klee or Torrès-Garcia, the Uruguayan painter. Over the
years Gottlieb has, in his sober, pedestrian way, become one of the surest crafts-
men in contemporary painting, one who can place a flat, uneven silhouette,
that most difficult of all things to adjust to the rectangle, with a rightness be-
yond the capacity of ostensibly stronger painters. Some of his best work, like
the "landscapes" and "seascapes" he showed in 1953, tends to be too difficult
for eyes trained on late Cubism. On the other hand, his 1954 pictures, the first
in which he let himself be tempted to a display of virtuosity and which stayed
within late Cubism, were liked better by the public than anything he had shown
before. The zigzags of Gottlieb's course in recent years, which saw him be-
come a colorist and a painterly painter (if anything, too much of one) between
his departures from and returns to Cubism, have made his development a very
interesting one to watch. Right now he seems one of the least tired of all the
abstract expressionists.
Jackson Pollock was at first almost as much a late Cubist and a hard and
fast easel-painter as any of the abstract expressionists I have mentioned. He
compounds hints from Picasso's calligraphy in the early '305 with suggestions
from Hofmann, Masson, and Mexican painting, especially Siqueiros, and be-
gan with a kind of picture in murky, sulphurous colors that startled people less
by the novelty of its means than by the force and originality of the feeling
behind it. Within a notion of shallow space generalized from the practice of
Miró and Masson as well as of Picasso, and with some guidance from the early
Kandinsky, he devised a language of baroque shapes and calligraphy that
twisted this space to its own measure and vehemence. Pollock remained close
to Cubism until at least 1946, and the early greatness of his art can be taken as
a fulfillment of things that Picasso had not brought beyond a state of promise
in his 1932-1940 period. Though he cannot build with color, Pollock has an
instinct for bold oppositions of dark and light, and the capacity to bind the
canvas rectangle and assert its ambiguous flatness and quite unambiguous
shape as a single and whole image concentrating into one the several images
distributed over it. Going further in this direction, he went beyond late Cub-
ism in the end.
Mark Tobey is credited, especially in Paris, with being the first painter to
arrive at "all-over" design, covering the picture surface with an even, largely
undifferentiated system of uniform motifs that cause the result to look as
though it could be continued indefinitely beyond the frame like a wallpaper
pattern. Tobey had shown the first examples of his "white writing" in New

1950s 205
 York in 1944, but Pollock had not seen any of these, even in reproduction,
when in the summer of 1946 he did a series of "all-over" paintings executed
with dabs of buttery paint. Several of these were masterpieces of clarity. A
short while later he began working with skeins of enamel paint and blotches
that he opened up and laced, interlaced, and unlaced with a breadth and power
remote from anything suggested by Tobey's rather limited cabinet art. One of
the unconscious motives for Pollock's "all-over" departure was the desire to
achieve a more immediate, denser, and more decorative impact than his late
Cubist manner had permitted. At the same time, however, he wanted to con-
trol the oscillation between an emphatic physical surface and the suggestion
of depth beneath it as lucidly and tensely and evenly as Picasso and Braque
had controlled a somewhat similar movement with the open facets and poin-
tillist flecks of color of their 1909-1913 Cubist pictures. ("Analytical" Cubism
is always somewhere in the back of Pollock's mind.) Having achieved this
kind of control, he found himself straddled between the easel picture and some-
thing else hard to define, and in the last two or three years he has pulled back.
Tobey's "all-over" pictures never aroused the protest that Pollock's did.
Along with Barnett Newman's paintings, they are still considered the reductio
ad absurdum of abstract expressionism and modern art in general. Though
Pollock is a famous name now, his art has not been fundamentally accepted
where one would expect it to be. Few of his fellow artists can yet tell the differ-
ence between his good and his bad work—or at least not in New York. His most
recent show, in 1954, was the first to contain pictures that were forced, pumped,
dressed up, but it got more acceptance than any of his previous exhibitions
had—for one thing, because it made clear what an accomplished craftsman he
had become, and how pleasingly he could use color now that he was not sure of
what he wanted to say with it. (Even so, there were still two or three remarkable
paintings present.) His 1951 exhibition, on the other hand, which included
four or five huge canvases of monumental perfection and remains the peak of
his achievement so far, was the one received most coldly of all.

Many of the abstract expressionists have at times drained the color from
their pictures and worked in black, white, and gray alone. Gorky was the first
of them to do so, in paintings like The Diary of a Seducer of 1945—which hap-
pens to be, in my opinion, his masterpiece. But it was left to Franz Kline,
whose first show was in 1951, to work with black and white exclusively in a
succession of canvases with blank white grounds bearing a single large calli-
graphic image in black. That these pictures were big was no cause for sur-

206 1950s
prise: the abstract expressionists were being compelled to do huge canvases
by the fact that they had increasingly renounced an illusion of depth within
which they could develop pictorial incident without crowding; the flattening
surfaces of their canvases compelled them to move along the picture plane lat-
erally and seek in its sheer physical size the space necessary for the telling of
their kind of pictorial story.
However, Kline's unmistakable allusions to Chinese and Japanese calligra-
phy encouraged the cant, already started by Tobey's example, about a general
Oriental influence on American abstract painting. Yet none of the leading
abstract expressionists except Kline has shown more than a cursory interest
in Oriental art, and it is easy to demonstrate that the roots of their art lie al-
most entirely within Western tradition. The fact that Far Eastern calligraphy
is stripped and abstract—because it involves writing—does not suffice to make
the resemblances to it in abstract expressionism more than a case of conver-
gence. It is as though this country's possession of a Pacific coast offered a handy
received idea with which to account for the otherwise inexplicable fact that it
is now producing a body of art that some people regard as original.
The abstract-expressionist emphasis on black and white has to do in any
event with something more crucial to Western than Oriental pictorial art. It
represents one of those exaggerations or apotheoses which betray a fear for
their objects. Value contrast, the opposition and modulation of dark and light,
has been the basis of Western pictorial art, its chief means, much more impor-
tant than perspective, to a convincing illusion of depth and volume; and it has
also been its chief agent of structure and unity. This is why the old masters al-
most always laid in their darks and lights—their shading—first. The eye auto-
matically orients itself by the value contrasts in dealing with an object that is
presented to it as a picture, and in the absence of such contrasts it tends to feel
almost, if not quite as much, at loss as in the absence of a recognizable image.
Impressionism's muffling of dark and light contrasts in response to the effect
of the glare of the sky caused it to be criticized for that lack of "form" and
"structure" which Cézanne tried to supply with his substitute contrasts of
warm and cool color (these remained nonetheless contrasts of dark and light,
as we can see from monochrome photographs of his paintings). Black and white
is the extreme statement of value contrast, and to harp on it as many of the
abstract expressionists do—and not only abstract expressionists—seems to
me to be an effort to preserve by extreme measures a technical resource whose
capacity to yield convincing form and unity is nearing exhaustion.
The American abstract expressionists have been given good cause for this

1950s 207
 feeling by a development in their own midst. It is, I think, the most radical of
all developments in the painting of the last two decades, and has no counter-
part in Paris (unless in the late work of Masson and Tal Coat), as so many other
things in American abstract expressionism have had since 1944. This devel-
opment involves a more consistent and radical suppression of value contrasts
than seen so far in abstract art. We can realize now, from this point of view,
how conservative Cubism was in its resumption of Cezanne's effort to save
the convention of dark and light. By their parody of the way the old masters
shaded, the Cubists may have discredited value contrast as a means to an illu-
sion of depth and volume, but they rescued it from the Impressionists, Gau-
guin, van Gogh, and the Fauves as a means to structure and form. Mondrian, a
Cubist at heart, remained as dependent on contrasts of dark and light as any
academic painter until his very last paintings, Broadway Boogie Woogie and
Victory Boogie Woogie—which happen to be failures. Until quite recently the
convention was taken for granted in even the most doctrinaire abstract art,
and the later Kandinsky, though he helped ruin his pictures by his insensitiv-
ity to the effects of value contrast, never questioned it in principle. Malevich's
prophetic venture in "white on white" was looked on as an experimental quirk
(it was very much an experiment and, like almost all experiments in art, it failed
aesthetically). The late Monet, whose suppression of values had been the most
consistently radical to be seen in painting until a short while ago, was pointed
to as a warning, and the fin-de-siecle muffling of contrasts in much of Bon-
nard's and Vuillard's art caused it to be deprecated by the avant-garde for many
years. The same factor even had a part in the underrating of Pissarro.
Recently, however, some of the late Monets began to assume a unity and
power they had never had before. This expansion of sensibility has coincided
with the emergence of Clyfford Still as one of the most important and original
painters of our time—perhaps the most original of all painters under fifty-
five, if not the best. As the Cubists resumed Cézanne, Still has resumed Monet
—and Pissarro. His paintings were the first abstract pictures I ever saw that
contained almost no allusion to Cubism. (Kandinsky's relations with it from
first to last became very apparent by contrast.) Still's first show, at Peggy Gug-
genheim's in 1944, was made up predominantly of pictures in the vein of an
abstract symbolism with certain "primitive" and Surrealist overtones that were
in the air at that time, and of which Gottlieb's "pictographs" represented one
version. I was put off by slack, willful silhouettes that seemed to disregard
every consideration of plane or frame. Still's second show, in 1948, was in a
different manner, that of his maturity, but I was still put off, and even out-

208 1950s
raged, by what I took to be a profound lack of sensitivity and discipline. The
few large vertically divided areas that made up this typical picture seemed
arbitrary in shape and edge, and the color too hot and dry, stifled by the lack
of value contrasts. It was only two years ago, when I first saw a 1948 painting
of Still's in isolation, that I got a first intimation of pleasure from his art; sub-
sequently, as I was able to see still others in isolation, that intimation grew
more definite. (Until one became familiar with them his pictures fought each
other when side by side.) I was impressed as never before by how estranging
and upsetting genuine originality in art can be, and how the greater its pres-
sure on taste, the more stubbornly taste will resist adjusting to it.
Turner was actually the first painter to break with the European tradition
of value painting. In the atmospheric pictures of his last phase he bunched
value intervals together at the lighter end of the color scale for effects more pic-
turesque than anything else. For the sake of these, the public soon forgave him
his dissolution of form—besides, clouds and steam, mist, water, and light were
not expected to have definite shape or form as long as they retained depth,
which they did in Turner's pictures; what we today take for a daring abstract-
ness on Turner's part was accepted then as another feat of naturalism. That
Monet's close-valued painting won a similar acceptance strikes me as not be-
ing accidental. Of course, iridescent colors appeal to popular taste, which is
often willing to take them in exchange for verisimilitude, but those of Monet's
pictures in which he muddied—and flattened—form with dark color, as in
some of his "Lily Pads," were almost as popular. Can it be suggested that the
public's appetite for close-valued painting as manifested in both Turner's and
Monet's cases, and in that of late Impressionism in general, meant the emer-
gence of a new kind of taste which, though running counter to the high tradi-
tions of our art and possessed by people with little grasp of these, yet expressed
a genuine underground change in European sensibility? If so, it would clear
up the paradox that lies in the fact that an art like the late Monet's, which in its
time pleased banal taste and still makes most of the avant-garde shudder,
should suddenly stand forth as more advanced in some respects than Cubism.
I don't know how much conscious attention Still has paid to Monet or Im-
pressionism, but his independent and uncompromising art likewise has an
affiliation with popular taste, though not by any means enough to make it ac-
ceptable to it. Still's is the first really Whitmanesque kind of painting we have
had, not only because it makes large, loose gestures, or because it breaks the
hold of value contrast as Whitman's verse line broke the equally traditional
hold of meter; but just as much because, as Whitman's poetry assimilated,

1950s 209
 with varying success, large quantities of stale journalistic and oratorical prose,
so Still's painting is infused with that stale, prosaic kind of painting to which
Barnett Newman has given the name of "buckeye." Though little attention
has been paid to it in print, "buckeye" is probably the most widely practiced
and homogeneous kind of painting seen in the Western world today. I seem to
detect its beginnings in Old Crome's oils and the Barbizon School, but it has
spread only since the popularization of Impressionism. "Buckeye" painting is
not "primitive," nor is it the same thing as "Sunday painting." Its practition-
ers can draw with a certain amount of academic correctness, but their com-
mand of shading, and of dark and light values in general, is not sufficient to
control their color—either because they are simply inept in this department,
or because they are naively intent on a more vivid naturalism of color than the
studio-born principles of value contrast will allow. "Buckeye" painters, as far
as I am aware, do landscapes exclusively and work more or less directly from
nature. By piling dry paint—though not exactly in impasto—they try to cap-
ture the brilliance of daylight, and the process of painting becomes a race be-
tween hot shadows and hot lights whose invariable outcome is a livid, dry,
sour picture with a warm, brittle surface that intensifies the acid fire of the
generally predominating reds, browns, greens and yellows. "Buckeye" land-
scapes can be seeд in Greenwich Village restaurants (Eddie's Aurora on West
Fourth Street used to collect them), Sixth Avenue picture stores (there is one
near Eighth Street) and in the Washington Square outdoor shows. I under-
stand that they are produced abundantly in Europe too. Though I can see why
it is easy to stumble into "buckeye" effects, I cannot understand fully why
they should be so universal and so uniform, or the kind of painting culture
behind them.
Still, at any rate, is the first to have put "buckeye" effects into serious art.
These are visible in the frayed dead-leaf edges that wander down the margins
or across the middle of so many of his canvases, in the uniformly dark heat of
his color, and in a dry, crusty paint surface (like any "buckeye" painter, Still
seems to have no faith in diluted or thin pigments). Such things can spoil his
pictures, or make them weird in an unrefreshing way, but when he is able to
succeed with, or in spite of them, it represents but the conquest by high art of
one more area of experience, and its liberation from Kitsch.

Still's art has a special importance at this time because it shows abstract
painting a way out of its own academicism. An indirect sign of this impor-
tance is the fact that he is almost the only abstract expressionist to "make" a

210 1950s
school; by this I mean that a few of the many artists he has stimulated or in-
fluenced have not been condemned by that to imitate him, but have been able
to establish strong and independent styles of their own.
Barnett Newman, who is one of these artists, has replaced Pollock as the
enfant terrible of abstract expressionism. He rules vertical bands of dimly
contrasting color or value on warm flat backgrounds—and that's all. But he is
not in the least related to Mondrian or anyone else in the geometrical abstract
school. Though Still led the way in opening the picture down the middle and
in bringing large, uninterrupted areas of uniform color into subtle and yet
spectacular opposition, Newman studied late Impressionism for himself, and
has drawn its consequences more radically. The powers of color he employs
to make a picture are conceived with an ultimate strictness: color is to func-
tion as hue and nothing else, and contrasts are to be sought with the least pos-
sible help of differences in value, saturation, or warmth.
The easel picture will hardly survive such an approach, and Newman's
huge, calmly and evenly burning canvases amount to the most direct attack
upon it so far. And it is all the more effective an attack because the art behind it
is deep and honest, and carries a feeling for color without its like in recent
painting. Mark Rothko's art is a little less aggressive in this respect. He, too,
was stimulated by Still's example. The three or four massive, horizontal strata
of flat color that compose his typical picture allow the spectator to think of
landscape—which may be why his decorative simplicity seems to meet less
resistance. Within a range predominantly warm like Newman's and Still's, he
too is a brilliant, original colorist; like Newman, he soaks his pigment into the
canvas, getting a dyer's effect, and does not apply it as a discrete covering layer
in Still's manner. Of the three painters—all of whom started, incidentally,
as "symbolists"—Rothko is the only one who seems to relate to any part of
French art since Impressionism, and his ability to insinuate contrasts of value
and warmth into oppositions of pure color makes me think of Matisse, who
held on to value contrasts in something of the same way. This, too, may ac-
count for the public's readier acceptance of his art, but takes nothing away
from it. Rothko's big vertical pictures, with their incandescent color and their
bold and simple sensuousness—or rather their firm sensuousness—are among
the largest gems of abstract expressionism.
A concomitant of the fact that Still, Newman, and Rothko suppress value
contrasts and favor warm hues is the more emphatic flatness of their paint-
ings. Because it is not broken by sharp differences of value or by more than a
few incidents of drawing or design, color breathes from the canvas with an en-

1950s 211
 veloping effect, which is intensified by the largeness itself of the picture. The
spectator tends to react to this more in terms of décor or environment than in
those usually associated with a picture hung upon a wall. The crucial issue
raised by the work of these three artists is where the pictorial stops and deco-
ration begins. In effect, their art asserts decorative elements and ideas in a pic-
torial context. (Whether this has anything to do with the artiness that afflicts
all three of them at times, I don't know. But artiness is the great liability of the
Still school.)
Rothko and especially Newman are more exposed than Still to the charge
of being decorators by their preference for rectilinear drawing. This sets them
apart from Still in another way, too. By liberating abstract painting from value
contrasts, Still also liberated it, as Pollock had not, from the quasi-geometrical,
faired drawing which Cubism had found to be the surest way to prevent the
edges of forms from breaking through a picture surface that had been tautened,
and therefore made exceedingly sensitive, by the shrinking of the illusion of
depth underneath it. As Cézanne was the first to discover, the safest way to
proceed in the face of this liability was to echo the rectangular shape of the
surface itself with vertical and horizontal lines and with curves whose chords
were definitely vertical or horizontal. After the Cubists, and Klee, Mondrian,
Miró, and others had exploited this insight it became a cliché, however, and
led to the kind of late Cubist academicism that used to fill the exhibitions of
the American Abstract Artists group, and which can still be seen in much of
recent French abstract painting. Still's service was to show us how the con-
tours of a shape could be made less conspicuous, and therefore less dangerous
to the "integrity" of the flat surface, by narrowing the value contrast its color
made with that of the shapes or areas adjacent to it. Not only does this keep
colors from "jumping," as the old masters well knew, but it gives the artist
greater liberty in drawing—liberty almost to the point of insensitivity, as in
Still's own case. The early Kandinsky was the one abstract painter before Still
to have some glimpse of this, but it was only a glimpse. Pollock has had more
of a glimpse, independently of Still or Kandinsky, but has not set his course by
it. In some of the huge "sprinkled" pictures he did in 1950 and showed in
1951, value contrasts are pulverized as it were, spread over the canvas like dusty
vapor (the result was two of the best pictures he ever painted). But the next
year, as if in violent repentance, he did a set of paintings in black line alone on
unprimed canvas.
It is his insights that help explain why a relatively unpopular painter like
Still has so many followers today, both in New York and California (where he

212 1950s
has taught); and why William Scott, the English painter, could say that Still's
was the only completely and originally American art he had yet seen. This
was not necessarily a compliment—Pollock, who may be less "American," and
Hofmann, who is German-born, both have a wider range of power than Still—
but Scott meant it as one.

The abstract expressionists started out in the '405 with a diffidence they
could not help feeling as American artists. They were very much aware of the
provincial fate around them. This country had had good painters in the past,
but none with enough sustained originality or power to enter the mainstream
of Western art. The aims of the abstract expressionists were diverse within a
certain range, and they did not feel, and still do not feel, that they constitute
a school or movement with enough unity to be covered by a single term—like
"abstract expressionist," for instance. But aside from their culture as painters
and the fact that their art was all more or less abstract, what they had in com-
mon from the first was an ambition—or rather the will to it—to break out of
provinciality. I think most of them have done so by now, whether in success or
failure. If they should all miss—which I do not think at all likely, since some
of them have already conclusively arrived!—it will be at least with more reso-
nance than that with which such eminent predecessors of theirs as Maurer,
Hartley, Dove, and Demuth did not miss. And by comparison with such of
their present competitors for the attention of the American art public as Shahn,
Graves, Bloom, Stuart Davis (a good painter), Levine, Wyeth, etc., etc., their
success as well as their resonance and "centrality" is assured.
If I say that such a galaxy of powerfully talented and original painters as
the abstract expressionists form has not been seen since the days of Cubism,
I shall be accused of chauvinist exaggeration, not to mention a lack of a sense
of proportion. But can I suggest it? I do not make allowances for American art
that I do not make for any other kind. At the Biennale in Venice this year, I saw
how de Kooning's exhibition put to shame, not only that of his neighbor in the
American pavilion, Ben Shahn, but that of every other painter present in his
generation or under. The general impression still is that an art of high distinc-
tion has as much chance of coming out of America as a great wine. Literature
—yes: we know now that we have produced some great writing because the
English and French have told us so. They have even exaggerated, at least about
Whitman and Poe. What I hope for is a just appreciation abroad, not an exag-
geration, of the merits of "American-type" painting. Only then, I suspect, will
American collectors begin to take it seriously. In the meantime they will go on

1950s 213
 buying the pallid French equivalent of it they find in the art of Riopelle, De
Staël, Soulages, and their like. The imported article is handsomer, no doubt,
but the handsomeness is too obvious to have staying power....

"Advanced" art—which is the same thing as ambitious art today—persists

in so far as it tests society's capacity for high art. This it does by testing the
limits of the inherited forms and genres, and of the medium itself, and it is
what the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, and
Mondrian did in their time. If the testing seems more radical in the case of the
new American abstract painting, it is because it comes at a later stage. The
limits of the easel picture are in greater danger of being destroyed because
several generations of great artists have already worked to expand them. But if
they are destroyed this will not necessarily mean the extinction of pictorial art
as such. Painting may be on its way toward a new kind of genre, but perhaps
not an unprecedented one—since we are now able to look at, and enjoy, Per-
sian carpets as pictures—and what we now consider to be merely decorative
may become capable of holding our eyes and moving us as much as the easel
picture does.
Meanwhile there is no such thing as an aberration in art: there is just the
good and the bad, the realized and the unrealized. Often there is but the dis-
tance of a hair's breadth between the two—at first glance. And sometimes
there seems—at first glance—to be no more distance than that between a great
work of art and one which is not art at all. This is one of the points made by
modern art.

Note

i. In the revised version of the essay, published in Art and Culture, this parenthesis
was enlarged into a lengthy footnote in which Greenberg stated that he got the term
"American-type" painting from Patrick Heron. Greenberg rejected all other labels
for such painting. The attack on Rosenberg's concept of "Action Painting" was his
first in public. [John O'Brian]

214 1950s
MEYERSCHAPIRO Excerpt from "The Liberating
Quality of Avant-Garde Art"

The Vital Role That Painting and Sculpture Play in Modern Culture

In discussing the place of painting and sculpture in the culture of our time,
I shall refer only to those kinds which, whether abstract or not, have a fresh in-
ventive character, that art which is called "modern" not simply because it is of
our century, but because it is the work of artists who take seriously the chal-
lenge of new possibilities and wish to introduce into their work perceptions,
ideas and experiences which have come about only within our time.
In doing so I risk perhaps being unjust to important works or to aspects of
art which are generally not comprised within the so-called modern movement.
There is a sense in which all the arts today have a common character shared
by painting; it may therefore seem arbitrary to single out painting as more
particularly modern than the others. In comparing the arts of our time with
those of a hundred years ago, we observe that the arts have become more
deeply personal, more intimate, more concerned with experiences of a subtle
kind. We note, too, that in poetry, music and architecture, as well as in paint-
ing, the attitude to the medium has become much freer, so that artists are will-
ing to search further and to risk experiments or inventions which in the past
would have been inconceivable because of fixed ideas of the laws and bound-
aries of the arts. I shall try to show however that painting and sculpture con-
tribute qualities and value less evident in poetry, music and architecture.

In a number of respects, painting and sculpture today may seem to be op-

posed to the general trend of life. Yet, in such opposition, these arts declare
their humanity and importance.
Paintings and sculptures, let us observe, are the last hand-made, personal
objects within our culture. Almost everything else is produced industrially, in
mass, and through a high division of labor. Few people are fortunate enough
to make something that represents themselves, that issues entirely from their
hands and mind, and to which they can affix their names.
Most work, even much scientific work, requires a division of labor, a sepa-

SOURCE: Art News (Summer 1957), 36-42. Copyright © 1957 ARTnews LLC.

215
 ration between the individual and the final result; the personality is hardly
present even in the operations of industrial planning or in management and
trade. Standardized objects produced impersonally and in quantity establish
no bond between maker and user. They are mechanical products with only a
passing and instrumental value.
What is most important is that the practical activity by which we live is not
satisfying: we cannot give if full loyalty, and its rewards do not compensate
enough for the frustrations and emptiness that arise from the lack of spon-
taneity and personal identifications in work: the individual is deformed by it,
only rarely does it permit him to grow.
The object of art is, therefore, more passionately than ever before, the occa-
sion of spontaneity or intense feeling. The painting symbolizes an individual
who realizes freedom and deep engagement of the self within his work. It is
addressed to others who will cherish it, if it gives them joy, and who will rec-
ognize in it an irreplaceable quality and will be attentive to every mark of the
maker's imagination and feeling.
The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous in the painting and
sculpture stimulates the artists to invent devices of handling, processing, sur-
facing, which confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence
the great importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of
the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and
field of operation—all signs of the artist's active presence. The work of art is
an ordered world of its own kind in which we are aware, at every point, of its
becoming.
All these qualities of painting may be regarded as a means of affirming the
individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience
of working and doing.
I need not speak in detail about this new manner, which appears in figura-
tive as well as abstract art; but I think it is worth observing that in many ways
it is a break with the kind of painting that was most important in the 19205. Af-
ter the First World War, in works like those of Léger, abstraction in art was
affected by the taste for industry, technology and science, and assumed the
qualities of the machine-made, the impersonal and reproducible, with an air
of coolness and mechanical control, intellectualized to some degree. The art-
ist's power of creation seems analogous here to the designer's and engineer's.
That art, in turn, avowed its sympathy with mechanism and industry in an op-
timistic mood as progressive elements in everyday life, and as examples of
strength and precision in production which painters admired as a model for

216 1950s
art itself. But the experiences of the last twenty-five years have made such con-
fidence in the values of technology less interesting and even distasteful.
In abstraction we distinguish those forms, like the square and circle, which
have object character and those which do not. The first are closed shapes, dis-
tinct within their field and set off against a definite ground. They build up a
space which has often elements of gravity, with a clear difference between above
and below, the ground and the background, the near and far. But the art of the
last fifteen years tends more often to work with forms which are open, fluid
or mobile; they are directed strokes or they are endless tangles and irregular
curves, self-involved lines which impress us as possessing the qualities not so
much of things as of impulses, of excited movements emerging and changing
before our eyes.
The impulse, which is most often not readily visible in its pattern, becomes
tangible and definite on the surface of a canvas through the painted mark. We
see, as it were, the track of emotion, its obstruction, persistence or extinction.
But all these elements of impulse which seem at first so aimless on the canvas
are built up into a whole characterized by firmness, often by elegance and
beauty of shapes and colors. A whole emerges with a compelling, sometimes
insistent quality of form, with a resonance of the main idea throughout the
work. And possessing an extraordinary tangibility and force, often being so
large that it covers the space of a wall and therefore competing boldly with the
environment, the canvas can command our attention fully like monumental
painting in the past.
It is also worth remarking that as the details of form become complicated
and free and therefore hard to follow in their relation to one another, the paint-
ing tends to be more centered and compact—different in this respect from the
type of abstraction in which the painting seems to be a balanced segment of a
larger whole. The artist places himself in the focus of your space.
These characteristics of painting, as opposed to the characteristic of in-
dustrial production, may be found also in the different sense of the words "au-
tomatic" and "accidental" as applied in painting, technology and the every-
day world.
The presence of chance as a factor in painting, which introduces qualities
that the artist could never have achieved by calculation, is an old story. Mon-
taigne in the sixteenth century already observed that a painter will discover in
his canvas strokes which he had not intended and which are better than any-
thing he might have designed. That is a common fact in artistic creation.
Conscious control is only one source of order and novelty: the unconscious,

1950s 217
 the spontaneous and unpredictable are no less present in the good work of art.
But that is something art shares with other activities and indeed with the most
obviously human function: speech. When we speak, we produce automati-
cally a series of words which have an order and a meaning for us, and yet are
not fully designed. The first word could not be uttered unless certain words
were to follow, but we cannot discover, through introspection, that we had al-
ready thought of the words that were to follow. That is a mystery of our
thought as well.
Painting, poetry, and music have this element of unconscious, improvised
serial production of parts and relationships in an order, with a latent unity
and purposefulness. The peculiarity of modern painting does not lie simply
in its aspect of chance and improvisation but elsewhere. Its distinctiveness
may be made clear by comparing the character of the formal elements of old
and modern art.
Painters often say that in all art, whether old or modern, the artist works es-
sentially with colors and shapes rather than with natural objects. But the lines
of a Renaissance master are complex forms which depend on already ordered
shapes in nature. The painting of a cup in a still-life picture resembles an ac-
tual cup, which is itself a well-ordered thing. A painting of a landscape de-
pends on observation of elements which are complete, highly ordered shapes
in themselves—like trees or mountains.
Modern painting is the first complex style in history which proceeds from
elements that are not pre-ordered as closed articulated shapes. The artist to-
day creates an order out of unordered variable elements to a greater degree
than the artist of the past.
In ancient art an image of two animals facing each other orders symmetri-
cally bodies which in nature are already closed symmetrical forms. The mod-
ern artist, on the contrary, is attracted to those possibilities of form which in-
clude a considerable randomness, variability and disorder, whether he finds
them in the world or while improvising with his brush, or in looking at spots
and marks, or in playing freely with shapes—inverting, adjusting, cutting,
varying, reshaping, regrouping, so as to maximize the appearance of random-
ness. His goal is often an order which retains a decided quality of randomness
as far as this is compatible with an ultimate unity of the whole. That random-
ness corresponds in turn to a feeling of freedom, an unconstrained activity at
every point.
Ignoring natural shapes, he is alert to qualities of movement, interplay,

218 1950s
change, and becoming in nature. And he provokes within himself, in his spon-
taneous motions and play, an automatic production of chance.
While in industry accident is that event which destroys an order, inter-
rupts a regular process and must be eliminated, in painting the random or ac-
cidental is the beginning of an order. It is that which the artist wishes to build
up into an order, but a kind of order that in the end retains the aspect of the
original disorder as a manifestation of freedom. The order is created before
your eyes and its law is nowhere explicit. Here the function of ordering has, as
a necessary counterpart, the element of randomness and accident.
Automatism in art means the painter's confidence in the power of the or-
ganism to produce interesting unforeseen effects and in such a way that the
chance results constitute a family of forms; all the random marks made by one
individual will differ from those made by another, and will appear to belong
together, whether they are highly ordered or not, and will show a characteris-
tic grouping. (This is another way of saying that there is a definite style in the
seemingly chaotic forms of recent art, a general style common to many artists
and unique individual styles.) This power of the artist's hand to deliver con-
stantly elements of so-called chance or accident, which nevertheless belong to
a well-defined, personal class of forms and groupings, is submitted to critical
control by the artist who is alert to the Tightness or wrongness of the elements
delivered spontaneously, and accepts or rejects them.
No other art today exhibits to that degree in the final result the presence of
the individual, his spontaneity and the concreteness of his procedure.
This art is deeply rooted, I believe, in the self and its relation to the sur-
rounding world. And the pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within
a culture that becomes increasingly organized through industry, economy and
the state intensifies the desire of the artist to create forms that will manifest his
liberty in this striking way—a liberty that in the best works, is associated with
a sentiment of harmony, and the opposite stability, and even impersonality
through the power of painting to universalize itself in the perfection of its
form and to reach out into common life. It becomes then a possession of every-
one and is related to everyday experience.

If the painter cannot celebrate many current values, it may be that these
values are not worth celebrating. In the absence of ideal values stimulating to
his imagination, the artist must cultivate his own garden as the only secure

1950s 219
 field in the violence and uncertainties of our time. By maintaining his loyalty
to the value of art—to responsible creative work, the search for perfection, the
sensitiveness to quality—the artist is one of the most moral and idealistic of
beings, although his influence on practical affairs may seem very small.
Painting by its impressive example of inner freedom and inventiveness and
by its fidelity to artistic goals, which include the mastery of the formless and
accidental, helps to maintain the critical spirit and the ideals of creativeness,
sincerity and self-reliance, which are indispensable to the life of our culture.

International Reaction to Alfred H. Barr Jr.,

'The New American Painting"

Mercedes Molleda, Revista, Barcelona, August 30,1958

I had resigned myself to not seeing the exhibition. But others did not re-
sign themselves, and thus in rapid, improvised, and exhausting days, it was
possible to move eighty-one canvases, packed in more than forty enormous
cases, from Milan to Madrid. To judge the size of the transoceanic guests, a
detail will suffice: to bring into the Museum two of the canvases, one by Jack-
son Pollock and one by Grace Hartigan, required sawing the upper part of the
metal entrance door of the building the night before the inauguration.
Upon entering the room, a strange sensation like that of magnetic tension
surrounds you, as though the expression concentrated in the canvases would
spring from them. They are other myths, other gods, other ideas, different from
those prevailing in Europe at present, and from the grayish and textured Pari-
sian fog which also in this country of light and color today masks the poly-
chromatic traditions.
Each picture is a confession, an intimate chat with the Divinity, accepting
or denying the exterior world but always faithful to the more profound iden-
tity of conscience. The present painting is a mystery to many who wish to un-
derstand its significance without entering into its state, thereby committing an
error as profound as he who wishes to attain the Moradas of Teresa de Avila
by means of intelligence and not by means of Grace.

SOURCE: The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries, 1958-1959
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1958), 9-12. Copyright © MoMA, New York.

220
L D. H., La Libre Belgique, Brussels, December 12,1958

This is a demonstration of strength in proportion to the size of the United

States. The Biggest in the World. The show must be seen. Even if you leave this
encounter in a state of terrible dejection and of real anxiety as to the solidity of
human reason on this planet in 1958. For this strength, displayed in the frenzy
of a total freedom, seems a really dangerous tide. Our own abstract painters,
all the "informal" European artists, seem pygmies before the disturbing power
of these unchained giants. They paint in terms of walls, not of easel-size can-
vases. Size counts for a great deal in the impression of space they give
Some years ago, the American painting shown here stood for virtually
nothing. Today, whether you oppose or accept it, it exists. It is a fact. And a fact,
as the British say, is stronger than a Lord Mayor....
The movement is generally known as "abstract expressionism" or, more
accurately, "action painting." This latter, to my mind, corresponds better to
the immediate impression received at first contact. Here is an esthetic terrify-
ing for its excess, its chaos. But it certainly seems to represent "action" in its
most frenetic and hallucinatory aspects. Whether it is produced and per-
formed by geniuses or intelligent orangutangs, intellectual weaklings or com-
plete humbugs, there is in this work an undeniably "active" quality. Beyond
which, there is no spontaneous explanation possible. This is the existential
nothingness expressed by various temperaments.

Unsigned, Le Phare, Brussels, December 14,1958

The packing alone of some of these works weighed no less than 800
pounds! The show is, therefore, a substantial one, all the canvases being of
imposing dimensions. Now that we have paid this homage to questions of
size and transportation, let us say quite bluntly that this enormous sideshow is
the most frightening demonstration of impotence that has ever been hawked
around the world. Seventeen painters, famous (we are told) in the United States,
find themselves involved in this wretched imposture. An extremely handsome
catalogue provides us with their photographs. And these deserve to be closely
examined. In the expressions, the postures, the gaze of each of these artists, one
can really discover one of the various complexes, which, among our transat-
lantic colleagues, are the qualifications of nobility of thought
These artists prove to themselves that they are something or someone by
saying: "I paint, therefore I am." Almost the way certain criminals of recent
American vintage have projected themselves into reality by saying: "I kill,
therefore I am."

1950s 221
 The Belgian—and European—public (the exposition will make a European
tour, like a wild-west show) should pay attention to this cultural manifesta-
tion. It is with great profit that the programmatic remarks of several of the ex-
hibition's artists will be read. Each is the expression of a frustration, of a de-
sire for self-punishment or possession which relate quite distinctly to psychiatry.
As for the paintings themselves, they far exceed the worst excesses imagi-
nable as for indigence, mediocre imitativeness, and intellectual poverty. One
can examine here with consternation inkspots measuring 2 yards by 2 1/2;
graffiti enlarged 10,000 times, where a crayon stroke becomes as thick as a
rafter; vertical stripes 2 1/2 yards wide separate areas 2 yards wide; soft rec-
tangles, formless scribblings, childish collections of signs; enough to make
our own abstract painters blush for shame, exposed henceforth to the most
humiliating comparisons.
There has been a great deal of crowing about the traditionalism of modern
Russian artists. It seems to me that if art needs air and free imagination, it also
needs the disciplines that any honestly practiced craft demands.
The seventeen Americans presented to us as the most representative of the
new transatlantic painting have neither craft nor imagination. They are free,
perhaps, but they are pathetic creatures who make poor use of their freedom.
To those of my readers who find my remarks irritating, I simply extend the
request that they pay a visit to the Palais des Beaux-Arts and judge the evi-
dence for themselves. It is essential that certain things be said and understood.

Will Grohmann, Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin, September 7,1958

The New American Painting is an event, and as such was feted in Basel,
from where the exhibit came. The fact that the large Pollock one-man show
came too, is chance; it had not been intended for Berlin. Pollock is without
question the genius of the post-war generation of painters, who were born be-
tween 1900 and 1923, and correspond in age to our own successful artists from
E. W. Nay to Sonderborg. The youngest, Sam Francis, is born in the same
year as Sonderborg (1923), Mark Rothko about the same time as Nay and
Jackson Pollock (1912), as most of our "tachistes," whose leader, the unforget-
table Wols, like Jackson Pollock, died an all too early death.
The seventeen American painters at the "Steinplatz," though not drawing
on the entire present artistic output of the United States, do present a repre-
sentative section thereof. In view of the large number of great talents, one can
speak of an American School; for the first time in the history of art, personali-
ties are emerging that are not influenced by Europe, but, on the contrary,

222 1950s
influence Europe, including Paris, through the convincingness of their con-
ceptions. For nearly ten years Pollock has exerted his influence on the avant-
garde of all countries. The appearance of his paintings in Paris and in Venice
was a sensation; and since the young Sam Francis lives in Paris, he too is in
the center of international interest. The unshakable fortress of the French
School is shaken
Pollock is regarded as a tachist, the originator of the movement, but he is
more. In front of his giant canvases one does not think of schools or slogans,
but only of talent and singularity. His rich inventiveness and his force of move-
ment and organization are admirable. Here is reality, that of today not of yes-
terday. A Walt Whitman revival, superabundance of the continent, the sea and
the moods, the seizing of the undiscovered world, as 300 years ago, when the
pioneers arrived. And what a culture of the painterly. How differentiated the
single layers of events are gradated one on top of the other, so that in the end it
includes the whole of reality, evoked, not represented, because nothing is rep-
resented, all is invented in the spirit of a natural and universal happening.
Pollock was a genius, but by European standards, one can easily count half
of the other sixteen to be exceptional talents. Someday these painters too will
make their mark in Paris; it will, as in the case of Kandinsky, still take two
decades. Only the painters already know today what it is all about. They may
not be quite equal to the task, because our society does not know any more
the jungle nor a society in progress.
There is, for example, Willem de Kooning, who suggests in his February
part of a season, in composition and in memory. There are dimensions of
memory, but fused to painterly inventions or perhaps it is the opposite. For
the spectator that is not essential, he is not concerned with the process, but
with the result. De Kooning also has influence; Grace Hartigan, the only
woman painter of the group, belongs to his way of expression, and Theo-
doros Stamos, with his High Snow and Jack Tworkov with his Prophets? They
may have the same conception of what art can be today: They are painters
without regard for the ready-made world. What they paint is real; it is the
spectator himself who must have a certain amount of imagination in order to
comprehend. Without an actual consciousness of the universe this is not pos-
sible. Here there is no comfort, but a struggle with the elements, with society,
with fate. It is like the American novel; something happens, and what happens
is disquieting and at the same time pregnant with the future. Here we do not
have a question of aesthetics, not today, but possibly in another twenty years,
when we have gotten used to the idea that painting is also this.

1950s 223
 Unknown to us were Clyfford Still and James Brooks, who with their enor-
mous dimensions make us sense what goes on within an American painter,
faced with the immensity of his continent and his growing history. These are
maps that reach from the South Sea all the way to the Atlantic; and when
Brooks calls a painting Doubt (1954), it is not meant in a psychological sense
(what would we care about the psychology of Mr. Brooks) but in the sense of
a universal event. Nevertheless the colours are as optimistic as those of our
E. W. Nay, the only one who dares to work in larger dimensions. Still, they
would seem like miniatures next to these world maps.
Very different are Mark Rothko and Sam Francis. Both see things from a
greater distance, the one as a last residue of remembered prairie or desert, the
other as rampant growth without limits. Those are dreams as they exist in child-
hood, mixed with fear but also with palpitating hope. Every great artist keeps
within himself part of this state which is as cruel as it is believing. In Europe
childhood dreams are different, more hereditary, more archaic. The archaic
lacks in this colonial country, memory does not reach back as far as the Sume-
rians but only to the Indians, which were encountered on the roads toward
the West Coast. That is not yet long ago. Possibly more burdened are those
painters, who immigrated from the east, as Arshile Gorky, in this case not
from Poland or Russia, but from Armenia. Here we have surreal, tragic, meta-
morphosed through the centuries, entanglement in accidental anxieties as
once Hieronymus Bosch communicated them in this way.
Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline stand apart from the rest. They paint
gigantic symbols on the wall and call their proclamations Elegy for the Span-
ish Republic or Accent Grave. The paintings are hypotheses of that which
could come; but poems by Ezra Pound or the Spaniard Guillen are exactly as
hypothetical if one starts with the limitations of one's own imagination. What
makes these painters artists is the advance into a world which is not prefabri-
cated, but for that reason is also not boarded in; on the contrary, it is so vast
that one hardly dares to enter it. What is emphasized here? An event that
starts like a poem by Ezra Pound and ends with a statute for the investigation
of the space of the universe. Greece is not a European suburb anymore.
These are examples of the whole, not a sum total of personalities, not a
grouping. Nevertheless, there does exist enough common ground. They all
use vast dimensions, not from megalomania, but because one cannot say these
things in miniature. Klee was able to do just that; his world was not smaller
because of it; he was a monk and wrote the psalter of our speculum. Ameri-
cans are world travellers and conquerors. They possess an enormous daring.

224 1950s
... One proves oneself in the doing, in the performance, in the act of creation.
In the United States one speaks of Action Painting. We speak of Abstract Ex-
pressionism. This difference characterizes Americans as well as Europe. We
cannot forget, we distill the conceptions of long experience instead of creat-
ing new ones. In any case, these young Americans stand beyond heritage and
psychology, nearly beyond good and bad. In Europe we are a little bit afraid
before such a lack of prejudice. Could it be that we are already in a state of
defense?

1950s 225
This page intentionally left blank
The 1960s
CONSOLIDATING
THE CANON
This page intentionally left blank
P. G PAVÍA The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism

In Two Parts

PART I: THE " H E S S - P R O B L E M " AND ITS SEVEN PANELS AT THE CLUB
1952
If we temporarily shelve the over-powering personalities in the avant-garde,
we can reach down to underground ideas that are foundations of the Ameri-
can Abstract Art movement. Subtle but strong essences of its beginnings are
buried in seven very special panels given at "the club" in a series entitled
"Abstract Expressionism." Some of the ideas and the element of chance that
went into making this "handy" title can be traced, ironically and philosophi-
cally, through these seven panels. The American movement of abstract art is
not the fireworks of one or two artist personalities but is a deeply-rooted idea
clawing the only strong perch for art in the second half of this century. It is not
so easy to explain this phenomenon, and yet it is not so hard to feel with it—
and get a feeling of being reborn.
The title "Abstract Expressionism" was not heard by me nor was I ever
aware that it had been mentioned before by any of the later claimants to au-
thorship of the title. I insist on this point: before these panels, I, as the ini-
tiator of the panels, the writer of the weekly postcard-announcements to the
club-members, had never heard of this title except for a near sounding of it in
Kandinsky's well-known title of the Thirties, "Abstract-impressionism." Kan-
dinsky's writings contain many titles that, like this one, are rich in esthetic
thinking. Anyone who lived in Paris during the Thirties couldn't avoid expo-
sure to pure and impure titles and some real isms. But the Germanic twist of
"Abstract Expressionism" I never heard till Thomas B. Hess mentioned the
two esthetic strains and suspected that the artists were making underground
changes in their art.
Is not the definition of the avant-garde this particular need for seeking a
change? Henry Miller said someplace that an avant-garde change is measured
in time by the duration of a particular generation. Perhaps this group of artists
was the Golden Generation for abstract art.
As an eye- and ear-witness and also the doer and maker of these seven pan-
els, I'm presenting first the whole outlay of panel members, and annotated

SOURCE: It Is (Spring 1960), 8-11. Reprinted with the permission of Philip Pavia.

229
 schedules marking the most curious transformation of the unwanted title "Ab-
stract Expressionism." These panels bustled with new ideas and sparked dor-
mant, underlying sensibilities. But still the name "Abstract Expressionism" is
unpopular.

PART ONE

A large, stimulating, provocative climate of new air arrived at the end of the
first and the beginning of the second phase of modern art. This new force was
not as one expected: one of the many forms it took was a book, Abstract Paint-
ing, by Thomas B. Hess. This was the first substantial book on abstract paint-
ing in New York, and in the eyes of the artists easily a prime mover of the Fifties.
The atmosphere was frantic in the early Fifties. Professional publicists and
art journalists were predicting for the coming decade that a definitely declin-
ing movement standing on the shoulders of a few artist personalities would
find no shoulders, no movement, period. Cutting through the gloom of that
period in New York, Hess built up an esthetic that appealed to working art-
ists. His book was not entirely optimistic; it had a healthy mixture of convic-
tion and cynicism. But he sought an idea that would tie together all the varie-
gated personalities of the then young abstract art, and thus would free es-
thetics from personalities.
As Mr. Hess delved seriously into American abstract art, his tone of writ-
ing and his highly-tuned sensibility were a deep, moving inspiration to work-
ing artists. The ideas he unraveled, the directions to which he pointed and his
awareness of future possibilities reversed the gloom, and the American artists
gained new momentum.

In Abstract Painting, Hess paraded sensory observations full of esthetic

definition:

But the very manipulation of pigment has pried the subject from nature into
the personal sensation of terror, violence—and paint.
Forms are distorted to increase their natural action; the claws are more claw-
ing, the rocks more jagged.
This is the final dilemma of the Expressionist—how to make "Art" out of the
sensation.

He gives warning that appeals only to working artists:

The answer (to eclectics) seems obvious—pick up where Munch left off, work
hard at techniques, balance each tone, paint "abstractly" so forms will run

230 1960s
 nicely into their neighbors and the edge of the picture will curve the eye back
towards the central drama.

Never before this time had such tactile phrasing been offered to the eager, hun-
gry sensibilities of abstract and nearabstract artists.

Then Mr. Hess reached one of the main points in his probing of abstract
art:

The tendencies toward and of abstract painting and Expressionism may be

the most important movements in the art of the first half of our century, and
the most relevant ones to more recent developments. (Italics mine.)

From the first, Hess's suspicion that "abstract painting" and "Expressionism"
were two poles of the same esthetic was not at all popular with the avant garde
artists. Jackson Pollock, for instance, came to the "club" the same week Ab-
stract Painting was published and in an argument threw the book at me (and
missed).
A few weeks later, I felt the importance of airing out the "Hess problem." In
fact, I decided to have several panels at the "club" in order to test the "prob-
lem's" worth. Forming panels was always a complex procedure. Once the
topic and panelists had been selected, all might seem to be going smoothly,
but then when we started the panels, the six or so members would make things
complicated again. The style at the "club" was to "jam" (improvise) panels,
with the panelists' moods allowed complete freedom. Forgetfulness, late-
ness and current feudings prevented them from becoming stiff contractual
affairs.
The panels on "Abstract Expressionism" started simply enough. The artists
joined in for the plain business of deciding whether Hess was right or wrong.
I decided to keep the two ideas separated, as Hess's theory had left them. That
is, as he did not combine the words "abstract painting" and "Expressionism"
but merely juxtaposed two irreconcilable ideas, so should the series of panels
start. First, I thought to exhaust "Expressionism" and then bring in a contrast-
ing panel on the "pure" or "abstract painting" (terms obviously closer to
abstract artists). Next, perhaps there would be contrasts with other groups
such as the structuralists, the constructionists, etc. The plan was not that thor-
oughly premeditated, but a general must also prepare for retreats, so I readied
these possible positions in case the "Hess problem" needed more panels—and
more fire.

1960s 231
 Before describing the actual happenings of these panels, I must explain
the stratifications of the "club."
Of course, there never was an opinion-poll taken at the "club," but those
weekly artists' panels, year after year, are a cross-section of esthetic ideas in
New York. A miraculous law of dedication kept these highly individualistic
artists together, their ideas criss-crossing and over-lapping in a conflict that
would tear apart any other togetherness. They faced each other with curses
mixed with affection, smiling and evil-eyed each week for years.
The "club's" heroes can be roughly divided among the following camps.
Picasso was the crowned king for most of the artists in the "club." His middle-
period was most liked and praised. Kandinsky and Soutine, however, were
two princes held in deepest reverence by a rather large, strong group. Panel
after panel, the ideas, works and genius of these two neglected pioneers were
debated with strong conviction. (Miro, Ernst, Arp and Breton had been sup-
planted, and in fact were almost extinct in this "club," in contrast to their
being apotheosized in "Studio 35," an earlier "club"-like school on Eighth
Street.) And almost as strong an influence as this group in the "club" and al-
ways the most stubborn obstacle at all panels was the hard-core purist group,
who were pals of Mondrian when he was alive in America.
Anyone who attended "club" nights and panel talks was beholden to and
bewildered by this teeming, individual infighting about contemporary ab-
stract and nearabstract art. The ground rule was exactly as Robert Goldwater
said in It is, #4, "... no mention of names . . . who might be present or have
friends. The idea was to prevent riots." First, the panel would make an esthetic
major premise and another minor one; this would bring on a group rebuttal
which, in turn, would bring on another group for counter-rejoinder. The ar-
guments went in a see-saw pattern; encountering of personalities, feuding of
personalities; play down ideas, play up ideas; wronging down the cause and
righting up the effect; the firs ter and seconder, the major and minor; whether
to split into two and mend back into one or let it alone; either you're against it
or you're for it.
There were many leaders and one was always aware of the pressure of
many personable individual artists whose opinions were felt in moments of
decision. At the drop of a hat, however, these individuals would cut loose and
whip out stinging cries for or against an idea. And if an individual upped one
of the above heroes and downed another, it was demanded, if not commanded,
that he prove his arguments by tactile, on-the-spot sensory evidence: he had

232 1960s
to hit the quick of the artists' sensations to win. No man was allowed to ride
horseback.
The "club" was like a mythical Pittsburgh: firing, melting, annealing, cut-
ting, shaping, rolling—not steel but fibre-sensations for a renewed purified
experience. This talking out of art experiences, substituting specific psychol-
ogy for general logic, came to one concrete conclusion: a change must be made,
but this change should be deep-rooted and definitely from top-to-bottom.
The artists must also thirst for coolness. Thus, the "club" was almost indis-
pensable in New York if an artist was thinking and creating, seeking a new es-
thetics of abstract art.

With no fanfare, the panels on "Abstract Expressionism" started. The au-

diences, 95% of them artists, witnessed one of the strangest series of discus-
sions in American art. From start to finish, the panels followed the rhythm of a
seesaw, with conclusions posing more questions, and answers opposite to one
another. The cuts and wounds of the polemics multiplied dangerously. The
exchanges were altogether too personal, and, as attacks on the "Hess problem"
accelerated, there was no stopping the crevices between opposing ideas from
becoming deeper and wider. It was gradually made clear that personalities
were being jostled by ideas. Indeed, the "problem" was digging deeper and
deeper into the foundations of abstract art itself.
Here is the panel schedule as announced to members, with notes tracing
the mutation of an unwanted title:

— "Expressionism " ( I )
January 18,1952.
Panel Members and Alternates: Philip Guston, Thomas B. Hess, Franz Kline,
Ad Reinhardt, Harold Rosenberg, and Jack Tworkov.
The title "Expressionism" was taken from the first half of the quotation in T. B.
Hess's book. Later, I intended to use his exact words, "painting ''abstractly'" or
"abstract painting"for a separate panel.

— "abstract Expressionism " ( II )

January 25,1952.
Panel Members and Alternates: Peter Busa, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de
Kooning, Burgoyne Diller, John Ferren, Perle Fine, Adolph Gottlieb, Harry
Holtzman, Landes Lewitin, Emanuel Navaretta, and Esteban Vicente.
Title was extended to make it nearer to the actual phrase used in Mr. Hess's

1960s 233
 book. John Ferren and I consulted and decided not to make it read like the titles
which Kandinsky invented during the Thirties (like "Abstract-impressionism").
So the words were used as one adjective and one proper noun.

— "abstract-Expressionism " ( III )

February i, 1952.
Panel Members and Alternates: James Brooks, R. Eglehart, Fritz Glarner,
Robert Goldwater, Ad Reinhardt, Milton Resnick, Kurt Seligman, and two
others whose names are illegible in my notebook.
Title was hyphenated at the suggestion of Ad Reinhardt.

— "Abstract Expressionism " ( IV)

Sub-title: "Questions to Young Artists"
March 7,1952.
Panel Members and Alternates: Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell,
John Myers, Frank O'Hara, and Larry Rivers.
The hyphen was omitted at the insistence of a few members whose names and
reasons I have forgotten.

— "The Structural Concept of the Twentieth Century"

March 21,1952.
Sub-title: "Abstract Expressionism" (V)
Peter Busa (Moderator) and James J. Sweeney.
The original title was omitted entirely because opposition was getting stronger.
My wishful thinking pressed the hope that "structural" would balance the word
"abstract" and solve the problem.

-"The Purists'Idea"
March 28,1952.
Sub-title: "Abstract Expressionism" (VI)
Panel Members and Alternates: Paul Brach, John Ferren, John Fitzsimmons,
Harry Holtzman, and Ad Reinhardt.
/ think it was Ad Reinhardt who forbade the term on this panel. The original
title was again omitted. Still, this panel continued discussion of the "Hess
problem"

- "CaféNight"
April 4,1952.
Sub-title: "The 'Open night' on 'Abstract Expressionism' " (VIII)
The title had not only been omitted but this café night was meant to be used for

234 1960s
 an open discussion about having these provocative and feuding panels continue
under their unwanted title. On the advice of some of the principal members, it
was decided in a time-out conference to end the panels that very same night. The
title was withdrawn butfor a very long time afterwards the air was full of fights
and threats.

Historically, the counterpart of the "abstract" and "Expressionist" duality

may be the never-defined Delacroix vs. Ingres duality in French painting.
One cannot hyphenate the esthetic equivalents of "Delacroix" and "Ingres"
and call it pure. In the art experience is there a threshold (that can never
be exactly fixed) where visual elements enter the sensibilities and are sepa-
rated from one another? Must we choose at this point either one way or the
other, as did those two great French antagonists? Do the "abstract" and the
"Expressionist" reach a final fork in the road? The awesome thought that Ab-
stract Art has a duality parallel to the other major art movements in history is
almost unbelievable. "Abstract" to have a pattern equivalent to the Old Mas-
ters' esthetic!
In art, a name cannot be just a name. A name, like a catalyst, must weld ele-
ments into one. The name "Abstract Expressionism," even though it is easy
for journalists to handle, has never won approval from artists as the name.
(Nor has any other.) What was the chief objection—the point of friction? It
was the implication of a sinister collaboration of the abstract artists with the
representational artists, making the nearabstract more important than the ab-
stract. From the hyphenation or coupling of the words, "abstract" and "Ex-
pressionist," dedicated abstract artists saw the handwriting on the wall: after
such long underground resistance, they were to be swallowed up by repre-
sentational art. Instead of proud, pioneering abstract artists, they were to be
nothing but bastardized nearabstract artists with hybrid experiences. A bas-
tard word, a bastard idea and a bastard artist would be a compact paraphrase
of complaints.
If the "Hess problem" did anything, it certainly woke up the American art-
ist, making him conscious that abstract art can be full of esthetic under-
currents and that "abstract" was not a simple word to signify style. And these
undercurrents in abstract art are more susceptible to the sensibility than to
memory or logic. Thus, by exploring these potentialities negatively and posi-
tively, the avant-garde movement entered a more permanent phase, going to-
wards a pure land undreamed of by the connoisseurs of fading Continental
styles.

1960s 235
 One great indirect feature emerged from these polemics: the arguments
were the biggest shot in the arm American Abstract artists had ever had. That
is, they felt absolutely free, and joyously dumped out the art journalists' cur-
rent singsong idea that abstract art was based on one or two or so personali-
ties. It is true that in the past, as art history books show, some light-weight
isms were based on personalities. But Abstract Art emerged as a movement
based on a solid new esthetic and independent of personalities, as evidenced
by its inspiration to so many giant abstract artists in New York. However un-
mendably split and broken from one another are these artists over the unwanted
title "Abstract Expressionism" and however undesirable this title is among
abstract artists when said in a certain tone, one thing is sure: the title was the
first real beachhead gained by abstract art after the danger of succumbing in
that watery grave prepared by the soft-minded surrealists.

P. G. Pavía

In Part Two, in the next issue, we will collate as completely as possible quo-
tations from these sessions as remembered by the panelists and audience-
members who talked and listened at the seven "Abstract Expressionism" pan-
els at the Eighth Street "club."

LOUISE ELLIOTT RAGO We Interview Lee Krasner

Lee Krasner admitted she was dubious when I called to ask if I might come to
talk with her about "Why People Create." She said that at first she thought we
were publicity seekers. Before I arrived for our appointment Miss Krasner
had checked various sources and was pleased to learn that this was one vehi-
cle that gave the artist an opportunity to express himself without the usual
mixed up estheticjargon, and without distorting any of the artist's views.
Miss Krasner volunteered that this was the first time she had allowed any-
one to interview her, and now was pleased with the idea of having an opportu-
nity to express some of her ideas on art and to see them in print. After talking

SOURCE: School Arts (September 1960), 31-32. Reprinted with the permission of Donna
Elliott.

236
with her briefly I realized she was most articulate, and that her clarity about
some existing issues would be beneficial.
I opened my visit with Miss Krasner by telling her that recently I heard
a lively discussion in which the participants, men and women, discussed a
study that had been made whereby it was determined that many women were
currently more experimental in their painting than men. The question finally
arose that, if there were so many more women doing experimental work in
painting, how is it that we haven't had a great woman painter since Mary Cas-
satt? (It occurred to me then that it would be most interesting to discuss this
point with Lee Krasner, since she has been a member of the Avant-Garde
group since the thirties, and oftentimes was the only woman invited to exhibit
with men.)

LOUISE RAGO: Miss Krasner, do you really believe that there have been no
great women painters since Mary Cassatt?
LEE KRASNER: I do not think it is a question of Mary Cassatt's greatness.
It's like asking when were women permitted to give up their veils? I believe
this is a problem for the sociologist and anthropologist. We are discussing a
living problem and painting is one of the most complex phenomena today.
There is undoubtedly prejudice. There are some galleries which will not
show women. It takes years to knock off prejudice. When I am painting, and
this is a heroic task, the question of male or female is irrelevant. Naturally
I am a woman. I do not conceive of painting in such a fragmented sense.
LOUISE RAGO: Some artists say that they cannot remember ever not sketch-
ing or painting—it is something they have done all their lives—while others
developed later in life. Have you always been interested in painting or was
this something you developed later in life?
LEE KRASNER: Ironically enough when I went to Washington Irving High
School (a high school devoted to art majors in New York City), I passed
all other courses with flying colors except art. I barely passed the final art
exam. I then went on to the National Academy to study for three years,
where I was considered a nuisance and impossible. Somehow I hung on.
LOUISE RAGO: Since you recall your high school days and I am a high school
art teacher, I am often confronted with the question—do you think my child
has talent? How do you feel about this business of "talent?"
LEE KRASNER: Talent, as you speak of it, disturbs an equilibrium. It's too
easy. It's a dangerous thing. The word talent, and what it implies, is com-
monplace, and in fact more detrimental than helpful.

1960s 237
 LOUISE RAGo: Miss Krasner, would you mind telling us what your reaction
was to some of your art teachers?
LEE KRASNER: I must have had a strong inner conviction because there cer-
tainly was no encouragement from the outside. I was told to take a "mental
bath" at the Academy. In the thirties when Hans Hofmann first came over
from Europe I went to study with him. For the first time I felt a personal
ease, and an encouraging response from a teacher.

Miss Krasner added that her first big break was in the late thirties when
she was invited to participate in the McMillen Inc. exhibition of French
and American painting. Honored at being shown with Matisse and Picasso
she was unaware that two of her co-exhibitors were Jackson Pollock and Wil-
lem DeKoenig [sic]. It was through this exhibition that Lee Krasner met Jack-
son Pollock. Miss Krasner went to Pollock's studio unannounced—literally
"crashed." No one—not even Pollock's brother with whom he lived, was al-
lowed in his studio. As an artist Miss Krasner was acutely aware of and com-
pletely overwhelmed by what she saw. Pollock's work was a living force.

LOUISE RAGO: Do you feel that you have lost your personal identity because
you happened to be the wife of Jackson Pollock?
LEE KRASNER: If anything my identity has been enriched through knowing
Pollock. Naturally I would be influenced by as dynamic and powerful an
artist as Pollock. I owe an astonishing debt to him. It was a tremendous ad-
vantage to know him; however, I still paint as Lee Krasner. (Miss Krasner
forcefully and unhesitatingly added, "Unfortunately, it was most fortunate
to know Jackson Pollock.")
LOUISE RAGO: I am so very happy to hear you say that you loved Pollock's
work and that there was no competition between you. He must have been a
"real great guy."
(I observed closely and couldn't help notice a twinkle which I am sure
brought back fond memories. Miss Krasner merely smiled and softly mused
that he sure was a "great guy." She continued thoughtfully, "Yes, we are
fortunate if we get one like Pollock in a century.")
LEE KRASNER: Painting is revelation, an act of love. There is no competitive-
ness in it. As a painter I can't experience it any other way.
LOUISE RAGO: This is pretty remarkable that you have managed to sustain
yourself despite so much criticism and antagonism. How would you ac-
count for this?
LEE KRASNER: I am preoccupied with trying to know myself in order to com-

238 1960s
 municate with others. Painting is not separate from life. It is one. It is like
asking—do I want to live? My answer is yes—and I paint.
LOUISE RAGO: Miss Krasner, we have discussed your reaction to the Acad-
emy and we also know that you have been an Avant-garde painter since the
thirties—what is your reaction to the Avant-garde today?
LEE KRASNER: We have a great deal of academy in the "so-called" Avant-
garde today. I do not like it. It is closed and standing still. Status-quo is the
easy way. It must be punctured—no matter how painful.

Like so many people in the public limelight, we often read and hear things
about them that often are half-truths or no truth at all. So it is with Lee Krasner,
widow of the late Jackson Pollock. I had heard that Lee Krasner was now reap-
ing the harvest of Pollock's name and that she had copied his style of painting.
I also heard that even though Lee Krasner had been his wife, that she and Jack-
son Pollock had been in professional competition with each other. These were
some of the things I wanted to talk with Miss Krasner about, because I felt we
would all be interested.

ROBERT ROSENBLUM The Abstract Sublime

How Some of the Most Heretical Concepts of Modern American Abstract

Painting Relate to the Visionary Nature-Painting of a Century Ago

"It's like a religious experience!" With such words, a pilgrim I met in Buf-
falo last winter attempted to describe his unfamiliar sensations before the
awesome phenomenon created by seventy-two Clyfford Stills at the Albright
Art Gallery. A century and a half ago, the Irish Romantic poet, Thomas
Moore, also made a pilgrimage to the Buffalo area, except that his goal was Ni-
agara Falls. His experience, as recorded in a letter to his mother, July 24,1804,
similarly beggared prosaic response:

SOURCE: Art News (February 1961), 38-41. Copyright © 1961 ARTnews LLC, February.

239
 I felt as if approaching the very residence of the Deity: the tears started into
my eyes; and I remained, for moments after we had lost sight of the scene, in
that delicious absorption which pious enthusiasm alone can produce. We
arrived at the New Ladder and descended to the bottom. Here all its awful
sublimities rushed full upon me ... My whole heart and soul ascended to-
wards the Divinity in a swell of devout admiration, which I never before ex-
perienced. Oh! bring the atheist here, and he cannot return an atheist! I pity
the man who can coldly sit down to write a description of these ineffable won-
ders: much more do I pity him who can submit them to the admeasurement
of gallons and yards ... We must have new combinations of language to de-
scribe the Fall of Niagara.

Moore's bafflement before a unique spectacle, his need to abandon measur-

able reason for mystical empathy, are the very ingredients of the mid-
twentieth-century spectator's "religious experience" before the work of Still.
During the Romantic Movement, Moore's response to Niagara would have
been called an experience of the "Sublime," an aesthetic category that sud-
denly acquires fresh relevance in the face of the most astonishing summits of
pictorial heresy attained in America in the last fifteen years.
Originating with Longinus, the Sublime was fervently explored in the later
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and recurs constantly in the aes-
thetics of such writers as Burke, Reynolds, Kant, Diderot, and Delacroix. For
them and for their contemporaries, the Sublime provided a flexible semantic
container for the murky new Romantic experiences of awe, terror, boundless-
ness, and divinity that began to rupture the decorous confines of earlier aes-
thetic systems. As imprecise and irrational as the feelings it tried to name, the
Sublime could be extended to art as well as to nature. One of its major expres-
sions, in fact, was the painting of sublime landscapes.
A case in point is the dwarfing immensity of Gordale Scar, a natural won-
der of Yorkshire and a goal of many Romantic tourists. Re-created on canvas
between 1811 and 1815 by the British painter James Ward (1769-1855), Gordale
Scar is meant to stun the spectator into an experience of the Sublime that may
well be unparalleled in painting until a work like Clyfford Still's ig^-D.
In the words of Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) was the most influential
analysis of such feelings, "Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the
sublime." Indeed, in both the Ward and the Still, the spectator is first awed
by the sheer magnitude of the sight before him. (Ward's canvas is 131 by 166

240 1960s
inches; Still's, 113 by 159 inches.) At the same time, his breath is held by the
dizzy drop to the pit of an abyss; and then, shuddering like Moore at the bot-
tom of Niagara, he can only look up with what senses are left him and gasp be-
fore something akin to divinity.
Lest the dumbfounding size of these paintings prove insufficient to para-
lyze the spectator's traditional habits of seeing and thinking, both Ward and
Still insist on a comparably bewildering structure. In the Ward, the chasms
and cascades, whose vertiginous heights transform the ox, deer, and cattle into
Lilliputian toys, are spread out into unpredictable patterns of jagged silhou-
ettes. No laws of man or man-made beauty can account for these God-made
shapes; their mysterious, dark formations (echoing Burke's belief that obscu-
rity is another cause of the Sublime) lie outside the intelligible boundaries of
aesthetic law. In the Still, Ward's limestone cliffs have been translated into
an abstract geology, but the effects are substantially the same. We move physi-
cally across such a picture like a visitor touring the Grand Canyon or journey-
ing to the center of the earth. Suddenly, a wall of black rock is split by a sear-
ing crevice of light, or a stalactite threatens the approach to a precipice. No
less than caverns and waterfalls, Still's paintings seem the product of eons of
change; and their flaking surfaces, parched like bark or slate, almost promise
that this natural process will continue, as unsusceptible to human order as the
immeasurable patterns of ocean, sky, earth, or water. And not the least awe-
some thing about Still's work is the paradox that the more elemental and
monolithic its vocabulary becomes, the more complex and mysterious are its
effects. As the Romantics discovered, all the sublimity of God can be found
in the simplest natural phenomena, whether a blade of grass or an expanse
of sky.
In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant tells us that whereas "the Beauti-
ful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having
boundaries, the Sublime is to be found in a formless object, so far as in it, or
by occasion of it, boundlessness is represented" (I, Book 2,23). Indeed, such a
breathtaking confrontation with a boundlessness in which we also experience
an equally powerful totality is a motif that continually links the painters of the
Romantic Sublime with a group of recent American painters who seek out
what might be called the "Abstract Sublime." In the context of two sea medi-
tations by two great Romantic painters, Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the
Sea of about 1809 and Joseph Mallord William Turner's Evening Star, Mark
Rothko's Light, Earth and Blue of 1954 reveals affinities of vision and feeling.
Replacing the abrasive, ragged fissures of Ward's and Still's real and abstract

1960s 241
 gorges with a no less numbing phenomenon of light and void, Rothko, like
Friedrich and Turner, places us on the threshold of those shapeless infinities
discussed by the aestheticians of the Sublime. The tiny monk in the Friedrich
and the fisher in the Turner establish, like the cattle in Gordale Scar, a poi-
gnant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the in-
finite smallness of His creatures. In the abstract language of Rothko, such
literal detail—a bridge of empathy between the real spectator and the presen-
tation of a transcendental landscape—is no longer necessary; we ourselves are
the monk before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these
huge and soundless pictures as if we were looking at a sunset or a moonlit
night. Like the mystic trinity of sky, water, and earth that, in the Friedrich and
Turner, appears to emanate from one unseen source, the floating, horizontal
tiers of veiled light in the Rothko seem to conceal a total, remote presence that
we can only intuit and never fully grasp. These infinite, glowing voids carry
us beyond reason to the Sublime; we can only submit to them in an act of faith
and let ourselves be absorbed into their radiant depths.
If the Sublime can be attained by saturating such limitless expanses with a
luminous, hushed stillness, it can also be reached inversely by filling this void
with a teeming, unleashed power. Turner's art, for one, presents both of these
sublime extremes. In his Snowstorm of 1842, the infinities are dynamic rather
than static, and the most extravagant of nature's phenomena are sought out
as metaphors for this experience of cosmic energy. Steam, wind, water, snow,
and fire spin wildly around the pitiful work of man—the ghost of a boat—in
vortical rhythms that suck one into a sublime whirlpool before reason can
intervene. And if the immeasurable spaces and incalculable energies of such
a Turner evoke the elemental power of creation, other works of the period
grapple even more literally with these primordial forces. Turner's contempo-
raryjohn Martin (1779-1854), dedicated his erratic life to the pursuit of an art
which, in the words of the Edinburgh Review (1829), "awakes a sense of awe
and sublimity, beneath which the mind seems overpowered." Of the cata-
clysmic themes that alone satisfied him, The Creation, an engraving of 1831, is
characteristically sublime. With Turner, it aims at nothing short of God's full
power, upheaving rock, sky, cloud, sun, moon, stars, and sea in the primal act.
With its torrential description of molten paths of energy, it locates us once
more on a near-hysterical brink of sublime chaos.
That brink is again reached when we stand before a perpetuum mobile of
Jackson Pollock, whose gyrating labyrinths re-create in the metamorphical
language of abstraction the superhuman turbulence depicted more literally, in

242 1960s
Turner and Martin. In Number 1,1948, we are as immediately plunged into di-
vine fury as we are drenched in Turner's sea; in neither case can our minds
provide systems of navigation. Again, sheer magnitude can help produce the
Sublime. Here, the very size of the Pollock—68 by 104 inches—permits no
pause before the engulfing; we are almost physically lost in this boundless
web of inexhaustible energy. To be sure, Pollock's generally abstract vocabu-
lary allows multiple readings of its mood and imagery, although occasional ti-
tles (Full Fathom Five, Ocean Greyness, The Deep, Greyed Rainbow) may in-
dicate a more explicit region of nature. But whether achieved by the most
blinding of blizzards or the most gentle of winds and rains, Pollock invariably
evokes the sublime mysteries of nature's untamable forces. Like the awesome
vistas of telescope and microscope, his pictures leave us dazzled before the
imponderables of galaxy and atom.
The fourth master of the Abstract Sublime, Barnett Newman, explores a
realm of sublimity so perilous that it defies comparison with even the most ad-
venturous Romantic exploration into sublime nature. Yet it is worth noting
that in the 19405 Newman, like Still, Rothko, and Pollock, painted pictures
with more literal references to an elemental nature; and that more recently,
he has spoken of a strong desire to visit the tundra, so that he might have the
sensation of being surrounded by four horizons in a total surrender to spatial
infinity. In abstract terms, at least, some of his paintings of the 19503 already
approached this sublime goal. In its all-embracing width (1141/2 inches), New-
man's VirHeroicus Sublimis puts us before a void as terrifying, if exhilarating,
as the arctic emptiness of the tundra; and in its passionate reduction of picto-
rial means to a single hue (warm red) and a single kind of structural division
(vertical) for some 144 square feet, it likewise achieves a simplicity as heroic
and sublime as the protagonist of its title. Yet again, as with Still, Rothko, and
Pollock, such a rudimentary vocabulary creates bafflingly complex results.
Thus the single hue is varied by an extremely wide range of light values; and
these unexpected mutations occur at intervals that thoroughly elude any ra-
tional system. Like the other three masters of the Abstract Sublime, Newman
bravely abandons the securities of familiar pictorial geometries in favor of the
risks of untested pictorial intuitions; and like them, he produces awesomely
simple mysteries that evoke the primeval movement of creation. His very titles
(Onement, The Beginning, Pagan Void, Death of Euclid, Adam, Day One) attest
to this sublime intention. Indeed, a quartet of the largest canvases by New-
man, Still, Rothko, and Pollock might well be interpreted as a post-World-
War-II myth of Genesis. During the Romantic era, the sublimities of nature

1960s 243
 gave proof of the divine; today, such supernatural experiences are conveyed
through the abstract medium of paint alone. What used to be pantheism has
now become a kind of "paint-theism."
Much has been written about how these four masters of the Abstract Sub-
lime have rejected the Cubist tradition and replaced its geometric vocabulary
and intellectual structure with a new kind of space created by flattened, spread-
ing expanses of light, color, and plane. Yet it should not be overlooked that
this denial of the Cubist tradition is not only determined by formal needs, but
also by emotional ones that, in the anxieties of the atomic age, suddenly seem
to correspond with a Romantic tradition of the irrational and the awesome
as well as with a Romantic vocabulary of boundless energies and limitless
spaces. The line from the Romantic Sublime to the Abstract Sublime is bro-
ken and devious, for its tradition is more one of an erratic, private feeling than
submission to objective disciplines. If certain vestiges of sublime landscape
painting linger into the later nineteenth century in the popularized panoramic
travelogues of Americans like Bierstadt and Church (with whom Dore Ash-
ton has compared Still), the tradition was generally suppressed by the inter-
national domination of the French tradition, with its familiar values of reason,
intellect, and objectivity. At times, the countervalues of the Northern Roman-
tic tradition have been partially reasserted (with a strong admixture of French
pictorial discipline) by such masters as van Gogh, Ryder, Marc, Klee, Fein-
inger, Mondrian; but its most spectacular manifestations—the sublimities of
British and German Romantic landscape—have only been resurrected after
1945 in America, where the authority of Parisian painting has been challenged
to an unprecedented degree. In its heroic search for a private myth to embody
the sublime power of the supernatural, the art of Still, Rothko, Pollock, and
Newman should remind us once more that the disturbing heritage of the Ro-
mantics has not yet been exhausted.

244 1960s
H.H.ARNASON Excerpt from American Abstract
Expressionists and Imagists

[...] As the title indicates, the present exhibition is really a double exhibition
which not only surveys the present state of the Abstract Expressionists but
follows in some detail the direction to which the name "Abstract Imagists"
has been applied. It is a fact that from the late Forties to the present day cer-
tain painters, loosely grouped with the Abstract Expressionists, have rather
been concerned through extreme simplification of their canvases—frequently
to the dominant assertion of a single overpowering element—in presenting an
all-encompassing presence. This "presence" could be described as an "im-
age" in the sense of an abstract symbol rather than as a reflection or imitation
of anything in nature. The paintings of Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, Rein-
hardt, and frequently Still and Motherwell all very different, all have in com-
mon this sense of symbolic content achieved through dramatic statement of
isolated and highly simplified elements. A comparable effect is achieved in the
endless hypnotic squares of Josef Albers and, among younger artists, in the
great, floating, free color shapes of Raymond Parker or the precisely delin-
eated shape tensions of Ellsworth Kelly.
At the present time, in 1961, there is much evidence of seeking for new di-
rections among younger American painters. Although the majority of younger
painters is still probably exploring one or another form of free abstraction, a
great deal of attention has recently been given to a number who are attempting
to break with what they feel to be the tyranny of Abstract Expressionism.
Some of these are seeking new expressive directions within the formal control
of geometry; others are applying the directness and spontaniety of Action
Painting to a restudy of the figure or of landscape. In both painting and sculp-
ture there has been recently a resurgence of Dada and Surrealist exploration.
The present exhibition has deliberately placed together a number of art-
ists, some of whom are normally described as Abstract Expressionists, others
as Neo-Precisionists or Classicists, others as Neo-Dadaists, to suggest that
there is actually at the present time a substantial tendency among both free
and precise abstractionists towards a process of simplification of forms with

SOURCE: American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists (New York: Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, 1961), 23-31. Reprinted with the permission of the Guggenheim
Museum.

245
 an accent on large abstract color shapes whose expressive intent makes of
the entire painting an abstract image. Whereas Hans Hofmann has for many
years worked back and forth between free and geometric abstraction, some
painters such as Leslie and Carone who have generally been thought of as Ac-
tion Painters begin to demonstrate in certain works a substantial use of geo-
metric forms.
The exhibition would suggest the continually increasing influence of the
"Imagist" wing of "Abstract Expressionism," the drawing together among cer-
tain artists of some elements of free and geometric expression towards the end
of greater simplicity, clarity, and power of expressive means.

As the current exhibition attempts to point out, Abstract Expressionism is

itself a complex of almost as many different styles as there are artists involved;
and many of these artists are themselves in a constant process of change and
development, on the one hand or, on the other, of a continuing refinement and
simplification of a dominant image. While the tendencies suggested in this
exhibition by no means exhaust the varied experiments now being carried on
by both the free and the precise abstractionists in America, they do suggest on
the part of both older and younger artists a significant tendency in the direc-
tion of a more obvious and recognizable order and structure, a process of
simplification and regularization on the part of many which actually seems to
bring closer together the Expressionist, the Imagist, and the Geometric trends
in current abstraction.
When the paintings around 1950 by a number of the pioneer Abstract
Expressionists (so-termed) are re-examined, their tremendous diversity is at
once apparent. The surging labyrinth of what is now called a "classic period"
drip painting by Jackson Pollock is entirely different from the slashing virtu-
osity of de Kooning's brush stroke, even though both have the sense of im-
mediacy and participation in the act of painting involved in the concept of
Action Painting. The paintings of Motherwell or Gottlieb presented more
isolated shapes or signs which took on a suggestion of symbolic content that
might justify the term "image." In the same way the great unified color shapes
of Rothko or the vast color planes of Newman, divided or joined by his char-
acteristic vertical "line" (which is itself of course a color plane or shape that
combines with the larger planes in the creation of a dramatically ambiguous
space)—these are certainly subject pictures in the overpowering impact of
color and of expanding or contracting space.

246 1960s
 As suggested above, the paintings of Rothko, Motherwell, Newman, Gott-
lieb, as well as Still, all very different, have in common this sense of an abstract
image or a symbol presented through the abstract visual means of color and
line and shapes. Of course, every abstract as well as realistic painter has an
"image" which becomes the painting itself, but in these artists the sense of the
image or of the painting as a mysterious presence is capable of moving the
emotions of the spectator, of developing complex associations from the pur-
est visual stimuli.
When we examine recent paintings by these and other pioneers of the
movement, the continuing diversity is still apparent, but in some cases there is
a curious drawing together of some of the different trends. The de Kooning
reveals more apparently the geometric structure which has always underlain
his most violent expressionistic works. The color areas are larger and more ar-
chitecturally simplified. The brush stroke, still strong and emphatic, no longer
dominates the picture plane. The sense of immediacy insisted upon by most
of the Action Painters is now more apparently coupled with the control which
long experience has always brought to these artists' most direct and intuitive
painting.
For several years Gottlieb has also been working towards an art of dramatic
simplicity. His series of recent paintings, with dominant closed and explod-
ing shapes, has unquestionably had great influence on younger artists seeking
a new expressive image. The Rolling of this exhibition, with its red and blue
circles hovering over the powerful, black, tangled shapes, is suggestive of
some of his earlier symbolic landscapes, but has gained in expressive power
through the economy of means. Here the image begins to develop many dif-
ferent individual associations—landscape, outer space, symbol of order and
chaos—whatever the spectator brings to it. While still a completely abstract
work, the implication of subject or symbolic content is so strong that it is im-
possible to think of the picture as essentially an arrangement of abstract color
shapes on a two-dimensional surface. The painting is an abstract image.
Robert Motherwell throughout his career has alternated in his painting
between the presentation of elegant and of brutally dramatic color shapes or
signs. His great painting The Voyage: Ten Tears After can be considered almost
as a summary of his principal expression and achievements. Vast, pure areas
of cream color bound the central area of bare, sized canvas in which explodes
a brilliant splash of blue. A powerful black vertical shape divides the right and
center, and across this floats a cloudlike amorphous form which lends a sense
of mystery to the entire work. Here, with the most deceptive simplicity and

1960s 247
 economy of means, the artist has not only created a painting of great formal
beauty but has presented a powerful and suggestive image.
Black and White No. 2 by Franz Kline is an astonishing work for this artist
in its severe geometric clarity. Here the whites, which are too often in his works
thought of as a background for an expressive calligraphy, assume a position
almost of dominance. A work like this moves towards the architectural sim-
plification of Motherwell and has even some affinity to recent experiments of
some geometric abstractionists. This single work cannot, of course, summa-
rize the entire current direction of Kline, since he continues to work back and
forth between a severe architectural style and an over-all, more violent surface,
as well as between black and white and color.
The same is true of newer works by Hans Hofmann, who recently has been
alternating freely expressive paintings with strongly vertical-horizontal geo-
metric works, intricately textured paint surfaces with experiments in the most
delicately simplified paintings.... Floating Mirage is an astonishing example
of an image achieved through the greatest economy of means, a work which
exemplifies the dictum of "less is more."

The exhibition of "American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists," 1961,

raises rather than answers a number of questions about American abstract
painting today. It recognizes that many important trends exist within current
American abstraction beyond the ones which are illustrated here. However, if
we accept the premise that Abstract Expressionism as it has developed over
the last fifteen years is actually several different movements centered in several
highly individual artists, we can observe certain trends and changing patterns
during this period. In summary, we have here suggested that while different
artists associated with Abstract Expressionism in fact contain elements of Cub-
ism, of Impressionism, and of other seemingly contradictory styles, one may
broadly divide the principal painters involved under the labels of "Expres-
sionists" (Pollock, de Kooning, Tworkov, Bluhm, Mitchell, etc.) or "Imagists"
(Rothko, Newman, Reinhardt, Gottlieb, Motherwell, etc.). It is recognized
that these terms are arbitrary and in some degree interchangeable, since all
these artists are expressing something and all of them are also creating an im-
age. However, distinctions can be recognized between those artists who more
actively express, through the energy of the brush or palette knife and of the to-
tal canvas surface, the act of painting itself; and on the other hand, those art-
ists in whom the gesture of the brush stroke is relatively less significant, who

248 1960s
attempt through simplified color areas or through dramatically isolated shapes
or signs to present in abstract terms a conflict or relationship which has moved
or pleased or troubled them.
The essence of all this painting is, of course, the expressive power of the
abstract means; of color, space relationships, contrasts on the canvas, of lines,
and textures and the brush strokes themselves. This expressive power has al-
ways been recognized by painters, and from the time of the Impressionists in
the late nineteenth century the separation of the abstract expressive means
from the expression of naturalistic subject matter has been increasingly the
quest of experimental artists. The ability of Abstract Expressionist painting to
move the emotions (if only to rage) has been recognized from the beginning,
although the validity of this expression has been questioned, and the seeming
lack of order, of structure, of form, of technique, has been constantly deplored.
However, when one now looks at a Pollock or de Kooning of the late Forties,
the interval of years enables us to recognize both the skill and the discipline
which underlie the intuitive spontaneity of the painting's surface.
A principal characteristic of this painting in 1961 is perhaps that the skill
and the structure are more immediately apparent, in some cases with a loss of
the feeling of immediacy. As pointed out, there is evident a move on the part of
both Expressionists and Imagists towards a dramatic simplification. In many
instances the greater sense of discipline is achieved by the use of essentially
geometric means or motifs. We also find geometric abstractionists using im-
ages comparable to those of the free abstractionists for similar effects.
There are, of course, even within the exhibition, exceptions to all these
generalizations. Grace Hartigan's and George McNeil's paintings seem to be-
come even more compressed and complex. There is a whole group of Imag-
ists (Pousette-Dart, Richenburg, Ferren, Jimmy Ernst, etc.) who achieve their
effects through intricate elaboration of their canvas surfaces. Nevertheless,
there is evidence of certain significant trends and changes within the movement
of Abstract Expressionism. Whether these augur a decline in the movement as
a movement is a matter of interest primarily to its foes and to art historians. All
movements in art ultimately decline, but the fallacy involved is the impression
that the leaders of these movements, if still surviving, also inevitably decline.
One is reminded of the French critic who, in reviewing a Salon of 1919, ob-
served that there seemed to be very few Cubist works represented. "At last,"
he said, "we are now finished with that nonsense, thank Heavens."
The fact that great Cubist works continued to be produced during the
Twenties, that Picasso and Braque and many other painters have continued to

1960s 249
 use Cubist elements down to the present day, would suggest that the critic
was at least premature. However, more significant is the fact that Picasso and
Braque may have ceased to be Cubists but they never ceased to be artists. The
question today is similarly not whether Abstract Expressionism is dead or
alive. It is: "What and how well is de Kooning—or Motherwell—or Guston—
or Rauschenberg—or Goldberg—or Ronald—painting now?" In a sense there
are no art movements. There are only artists.

LAWRENCE ALLOWAY The Biomorphic '40s

BIO "a combining form denoting relation to, or connection with, life,
vital phenomena, or living organisms."

MORPHOLOGY "the features, collectively, comprised in the form and structure

of an organism or any of its parts."

The movements of 20th-century art, to the extent that they began with artists'
acts of self-identification, in opposition either to another group of artists or
against a public made grandiose and threatening as the Philistines, tend to
stay monolithic. Efforts are made to unify these discrete movements, like dif-
ferent shaped beads on a string of "the classical spirit" or "the expressionist
temperament," but obviously this delivers very little, except an illusion of
mastery to the users of cliché. More is needed than the revival of the exhausted
classical/romantic antithesis, which leaves the movements to be united se-
quentially undisturbed. Modern art tends to be written about by the artists
and their friends in the first case, and by generalizers and popularizers after
that, with the result that the mosaic of movements has remained largely un-
affected, to the detriment of unorganized artists and traditions. For example,
there is a line of biomorphic art (which combines various forms in evocative
organic wholes) that, to the extent that it is discussed in the usual framework,
could only be viewed as a part of Surrealism. What failed to fit would come
under such headings as Precursors of, or The Inheritance of, Surrealism, or,

SOURCE: Artforum (September 1965), 18-22. Copyright © Artforum, September 1965,

The Biomorphic '405, by Lawrence Alloway.

250
maybe, just plain Independents (as if the artists were eccentrics, or nuts, off
the main-line).
Biomorphism, so far as Surrealism goes, is a painterly equivalent of the
transcriptual puzzles and combinations of objects of Magritte and Dali. How-
ever, the main painters of biomorphism have been merely affiliated to Surreal-
ism, or Shanghai-ed into it, as is the case with Arp and Miró; Masson alone,
for much of his career, was an official Surrealist. Biomorphism, with its inven-
tion of analogies of human forms in nature and other organisms, has wide
connections, for example, with Art Nouveau (in which the human body shares
a promiscuous linear flow with all created objects) and with Redon, whose
ambiguous imagery is born of reverie.
In New York in the mid-4os biomorphism was of the greatest importance
and one of its sources was certainly Surrealism. However, we must also account
for the position of an artist like Baziotes whose Moon World, 1951, is very close
to the bland sack of Brancusi's marble seal, Le Miracle, 1936. Another example
of the pervasiveness of biomorphism apart from the influence of Surrealism is
the late work of Kandinsky. After 1934 there is a persistent use of waving ten-
drils and squirming free forms, but dried out when compared with the juici-
ness of Miró, or the ripeness of Arp. These irregular radiating or flattened
forms, however parched, are fully characteristic of biomorphism's inventory of
organic form. In the visual arts it is a cultural reflex to regard nature as land-
scape. However, in biomorphic art, nature can also be a single organic form, or
a group of such forms (like Baziotes' Moon World). Or they can be presented in
swarms, tangling with one another. Barnett Newman, writing about Stamos,
indicates the importance of nature to him, as to other biomorphic artists: "His
ideograph captures the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mush-
room, the crayfish and the seaweed. He redefines the pastoral experience as
one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon."1
In addition to the flat, more-or-less placid, and (as it were) one-cell bio-
morphs, another aspect of organic imagery is important. This is linear-based
(as opposed to painterly and planar) biomorphism, with the canvas or paper
swarming like the jungle which exists below the ordinary scale of human vi-
sion. (Hence the importance of microscopy, either as a direct visual influence,
or, more usually, as conceptual backing to justify an artist's working assump-
tion of "endless worlds," extensions of consciousness beyond the proportion-
ate contour of classical and Renaissance art.)
Proliferating biomorphism is the analogue of manic activity in the artist,
whose muscular activity issues in the marks which we interpret as a self-

1960s 251
 discovering subject. The graphic preliminaries of the artist suggest forms out
of which conflations of human, floral, animal, and insect-like forms can be de-
veloped. Crowded and manic biomorphism is directly linked to automatism,
which was cultivated by the Surrealists as a means of direct access to the Un-
conscious mind. The ideal of direct action was most clearly recognized in
drawing, except for phases of Masson's and Ernst's painting. In New York in
the '408 automatism was pressed as a cause by Matta, who influenced Mother-
well and Baziotes. Pollock, too, expressed interest in its procedures. Referring
to "European moderns" Pollock said: "I am particularly impressed with their
concept of the source of art being the unconscious."2 There is an unbroken
link between automatic processes in art (working at speed, encouraging ac-
cidents) and belief, often of a rather nonchalant and expedient sort, in the
unconscious.
The unconscious, in its turn, is linked to mythology which, after a lively
influence on 20th-century culture, reached a climax in the '405, and nowhere
more than in New York. The appeal of myth must have had something to do
with the fact that it offered a control mechanism by which all data, all experi-
ences, could be handled. It was not myth as a body of precise allusions as, say,
in lyth-century poetry, but myth as a kind of "manna." Myths, absorbed more
or less automatically in our education, updated by Freud and Jung, revealed
ubiquitous patterns that tied in the personal psyche with the greatest events,
new or old. Revealing of this aspect is "A Special Issue on Myth," published
by the magazine Chimera in K)46.3 Here is a partial name-list from its 88
pages: Alcestis, John Buchan, Columbus, Dante, Earwicker, Faustus, Gluck,
Hitler, and so on to Veblen and John Wesley; subjects discussed include
witches and warlocks, Hegel's spirit, the Siegfried cycle, and Walpole's Castle
ofOtranto. This should be enough to show that in the '405, mythology was se-
riously regarded as a key to the psycho-social order we share with world cul-
ture. (Adolph Gottlieb remembers that he had a copy which he kept for about
ten years.) Mythology, used like this, turned the whole world into an intimate
and organic spectacle. Thus, an artist with an interest in mythology could
discover its enduring and fantastic patterns in his art and, at the same time,
project his personal patterns out into the world. The pleasure taken in pre-
history, as subject and title, in Rothko and S tamos, for example, is indicative
of this quest for unplumbed humanity, with the remote in time as a metaphor
of psychological depth.
At a moment when abstract artists were turning from existing geometric
styles, mythology gave to evocative and suggestive, but not precisely decod-

252 1960s
able, signs, the appropriate atmosphere and ideal context. Of the biomor-
phists, Baziotes, Gottlieb, Pollock, and Rothko used myth-conferring titles,
and so did Gorky in the sense of binding his paintings to personal desire and
memory. There is a psycho-sexual content in biomorphic art, which abounds
in visceral lyricism full of body allusions. Gorky, in this respect comparable to
Baziotes and Rothko, creates a kind of polymorphous fabulism. Particular
cases of resemblance are not interesting: the point is the identity of everything
with its simultaneous phases of seeding, sprouting, growing, loving, fighting,
decaying, rebirth. The impression is of a natural and personal abundance,
in opposition to geometric art (urban or platonic) or figurative art (bound to
particular cases). The desire for a nuanced and subjective imagery was mani-
fested in paintings that did not subordinate the artist's use of paint to a tidy
and cleaned up end-state. On the contrary, rich meanings were located within
the creative act itself, so that the process-record itself is sensitized. Biomor-
phic art depends in part (i) on the depiction of beings and places, but also (2)
on the enactment of the work itself. The artist's gestures are image-making
and keep their identity as physical improvisation beyond the point of comple-
tion. Gorky's and Pollock's linearism, Rothko's liquidity, Baziotes' scumbled
haze of color, were all technical devices fused with permissive meanings.
Thus biomorphic art emerged in New York as the result of a cluster of
ideas about nature, automatism, mythology, and the unconscious. These ele-
ments fed one another to make a loop out of which this evocative art devel-
oped. It made possible, too, the continuation of aspects of biomorphism fa-
miliar in European art (especially Miró and Klee) although native artists like
Arthur G. Dove, with his uterine landscapes, may have helped predispose
American artists to the ambiguous mode. If it was the conjunction of these
varied elements that was fruitful in New York for biomorphism, considerable
latitude in its forms is to be expected. This, in fact, is the case, and assuming
that a tradition is validated more by how far it can be stretched than by how
narrowly it can be administered, it is a sign of biomorphic art's historical ap-
propriateness that so much could be made of it. One aspect of its diversity is
seen in Still's biomorphism, which is at the border of his abstract art, and
hence ambiguously interpretable as abstract. His paintings of circa 1938 to
circa 1946 are rocky and troll-like; a stickily dragged paint creates a Northern
melodrama of thrones and presences, like Mount Rushmore as the statue of
the Commander.
A checklist of American biomorphists in the '403 would be unmanageable
if it were comprehensive, but it is possible to indicate the central groupings.

1960s 253
 Pollock, in drawings of the late '305, made what are virtually straight biomor-
phic exercises. These chain-reactions of repetitive and transforming imagery
are presumably the type of drawing that he discussed with his Jungian analyst
in 1939. Pollock's paintings were not stylistically kin with these fluent draw-
ings, however: his biomorphic paintings of 1943-46 set the human or totemic
passages in a late Cubist framework. These works are a turbulent extension of
Picasso's so-called Surrealist Three Dancers, 1925, in the direction of more di-
rect passion and fuller human traces. It was not until 1951 that he revived the
iconography of these periods, ambiguously human, fully biomorphic, in the
black paintings, without any Cubist bracing. Gorky's early metamorphic scenes
also derive from Cubism; in the '305 he made what Alfred Barr called Curvi-
linear Cubism, as undulant as cartoons of well-stacked girls or rippling bi-
ceps. In a way, Gorky's development parallels André Masson's, who, from be-
ing a Cubist, and friend of Gris, expanded Cubist subject-matter, and then
relinquished its forms entirely for organic and improvisatory work. However,
Gorky's sexy Cubism was only a preliminary for the full biomorphism of the
three Garden in Sochi^paintings (1940-41), with their conspicuous adaptation
of Miró, leading into the linear twists and folds, washed with transparent color
and flecks of clear hue (like a parted orifice) of The Pirate 1,1942. Gorky influ-
enced de Kooning, but biomorphism in de Kooning (circa 1945-48,1949-50),
no matter how many breasts and slits jerk and ripple, in forms like ghosts
made out of sheets in old-fashioned cartoons, is implicitly urban. His manne-
quins piled in a warehouse are a rationalized version of the pastoral baccha-
nals of Gorky.
Four artists were particularly occupied with the evocation of the primal,
using pre-history and marine biology. Rothko, between circa 1945 and 1947,
paints an imagined ocean floor in which linear organisms wriggle as his wrist
moves, creating animate forms transparent to their misty backgrounds. A
1945 painting was entitled Birth of Cephalopods, which are a class of Mollusca
"characterized by a distinct head with 'arms' of tentacles attached to it; com-
prising Cuttlefishes, the Nautilus, etc., and numerous fossil species" (OED).
Alien but beguiling, disembodied but sexual forms drift, hover, and coalesce.
Stamos stated the theme clearly in 1946 (after hesitant moves in the preceding
year). Omen and Nautical Warrior, both of 1946, present marine forms ani-
mated in ways to imply combat, encounter, self-awareness and contact. Bio-
logical low life is the analogue of human feeling and order. Gottlieb's picto-
graphs, begun in 1941, have a biomorphic potential, as when the artist speaks
of using "hand, nose, arms" as details in painting, "often separating them

254 1960s
from their associations as anatomy."4 Beyond this, however, is the frequent
appearance in paintings of 1946-47 of fleshy marine forms, as in Return of the
Mariner, 1946. Baziotes evolved in 1947 (after a period in 1942 when he was
occupied by the promises of automatism) a biomorphic style that was the base
of all his subsequent work. He used, in that year, rudimentary human con-
tours which assimilated references to a dwarf, Cyclops, an armless and leg-
less veteran of World War I, a heavy female contour. These elements were not
opposed, but subsumed to unified images. Other interests of Baziotes were
"lizards and prehistoric animals,"5 not to mention the zoo and the aquarium.
To conclude: a description of biomorphic art cannot be restricted to a Sur-
realist ambience, although this was certainly a stimulus. It is important to
stress that several of the American artists contacted earlier, original traditions
which Surrealism had adapted and rigidified. Thus, Baziotes went around "be-
hind" Surrealism to a form of reverie more like Redon's than, say, Dali's: in
Baziotes flora and fauna lyrically oscillate but within a formal canon of unper-
turbed refinement. When he wrote, "[I]t is the mysterious I love in painting.
It is the stillness and the silence,"6 he raised unmistakably the symbolist canon
of inert and strange beauties. Gorky, too, can be connected behind André
Breton, who helped with his titles, to a broader style, the tradition of the Gro-
tesque. Vitruvius, who objected to this capricious ornamental style, described
it well by writing against it: "How can a tender shoot carry a human figure,
and how can bastard forms composed of flowers and human bodies grow out
of roots and tendrils?"7 Several aspects of biomorphic imagery can be consid-
ered as an incorporation into easel painting of the monstrous fusions and cal-
ligraphic energy of the Grotesque. Other connections could be made back to
traditional iconographies of herbal, bacchanal and paradise, which combine
pastoral scene with erotic act. However, enough has been said to show that
biomorphism is a continuation of extensive traditions of fantasy, as well as the
product of a particular historical situation in New York in the '405.

Notes

This essay incorporates brief passages from two other pieces by the author: the intro-
duction to William Baziotes: A Memorial Exhibition, The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York, 1965, and "Gorky," Artforum i, no. 9, March 1963.
1. Theodores Stamos. Exhibition Catalogue, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, March
1947-
2. Quoted from Arts and Architecture, February, 1944, in "New York School, The
First Generation," Los Angeles County Museum, 1965.

1960s 255
 3- Chimera, New York, vol. 4, no. 3, Spring 1946.
4. Quoted from "Limited Edition," 1945 in: New York School: The First Generation,
Los Angeles County Museum, 1965. The Tiger's Eye, 2, 1947 (a magazine that
Barnett Newman was an associate editor of) included an anthology of poetic writ-
ing and painting on the theme of "The Sea" (pp. 65-100). It included a Milton
Avery beach scene, two fully biomorphic Stamos paintings of circa 1946, and
Baziotes' patterned cubist Florida Seascape 1945. Elsewhere in the magazine Sta-
mos wrote (in "The Ides of Art"): "I am concerned with the Ancestral Image
which is a journey through the shells and webbed entanglements of the phenome-
non" (my emphasis).
5. For these quotations, and others, see: William Baziotes, A Memorial Exhibition,
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1965.
6. Baziotes. Ibid.
7. Quoted by Wolfgang Kayser: The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1963.

MICHAEL FRIED Jackson Pollock

The almost complete failure of contemporary art criticism to come to grips

with Pollock's accomplishment is striking. This failure has been due to sev-
eral factors. First and least important, the tendency of art writers such as
Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess to regard Pollock as a kind of natural
existentialist has served to obscure the simple truth that Pollock was, on the
contrary, a painter whose work is always inhabited by a subtle, questing for-
mal intelligence of the highest order, and whose concern in his art was not
with any fashionable metaphysics of despair but with making the best paint-
ings of which he was capable. Second, in the face of Pollock's all-over drip
paintings of 1947-50—the finest of which are, I believe, his masterpieces—the
vocabulary of the most distinguished formal criticism of the past decades,
deriving as it does chiefly from the study of Cubism and Late Cubist painting
in Europe and America, begins to reach the furthest limits of its usefulness.
Despite Pollock's intense involvement with Late Cubism through 1946, the
formal issues at stake in his most successful paintings of the next four years

SOURCE: Artforum (September 1965), 14-17. Copyright © Artforum, September 1965,

"Jackson Pollock," by Michael Fried.

256
cannot be characterized in Cubist terms,1 and in general there is no more fun-
damental task confronting the formal critic today than the evolution and re-
finement of a post-Cubist critical vocabulary adequate to the job of defining
the formal preoccupations of modernist painting since Pollock. What makes
this task especially difficult is the fact that the formal issues with which Pol-
lock and subsequent modernists such as Louis, Noland, Olitski and (though
perhaps to a lesser degree) Stella have chosen to engage are of a phenomeno-
logical subtlety, complexity and richness without equal since Manet. The fol-
lowing discussion of Pollock's work will concentrate on a nexus of formal is-
sues which, in my opinion, are central both to Pollock's art after 1947 and to
some of the most salient characteristics of subsequent modernist painting.
These issues concern the ability of line, in modernist painting of major ambi-
tion, to be read as bounding a shape or figure, whether abstract or represen-
tational. The discussion will begin with an attempt to describe the general
nature of Pollock's work between 1947 and 1950, and will move on to consider
several specific paintings which illustrate the virtually self-contradictory char-
acter of Pollock's formal ambitions at this time.
The Museum of Modern Art's "Number One" (1948), roughly typical of Pol-
lock's best work during these years, was made by spilling and dripping skeins
of paint on to a length of unsized canvas stretched on the floor which the artist
worked on from all sides. The skeins of paint appear on the canvas as a con-
tinuous, all-over line which loops and snarls time and again upon itself until
almost the entire surface of the canvas is covered by it. It is a kind of space-
filling curve of immense complexity, responsive to the slightest impulse of the
painter and responsive as well, one almost feels, to one's own act of looking.
There are other elements in the painting besides Pollock's line: for example,
there are hovering spots of bright color, which provide momentary points of
focus for one's attention, and in this and other paintings made during these
years there are even handprints put there by the painter in the course of his
work. But all these are woven together, chiefly by Pollock's line, to create an
opulent and, in spite of their diversity, homogeneous visual fabric which both
invites the act of seeing on the part of the spectator and yet gives his eye
nowhere to rest once and for all. That is, Pollock's all-over drip paintings re-
fuse to bring one's attention to a focus anywhere. This is important. Because it
was only in the context of a style entirely homogeneous, all-over in nature and
resistant to ultimate focus that the different elements in the painting—most
important, line and color—could be made, for the first time in Western paint-
ing, to function as wholly autonomous pictorial elements.

1960s 257
 At the same time, such a style could be achieved only if line itself could
somehow be prized loose from the task of figuration. Thus an examination of
"Number One," or of any of Pollock's finest paintings of these years, reveals
that his all-over line does not give rise to positive and negative areas: we are
not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure,
whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read
as ground. There is no inside or outside to Pollock's line or to the space through
which it moves. And this is tantamount to claiming that line, in Pollock's all-
over drip paintings of 1947-50, has been freed at last from the job of describ-
ing contours and bounding shapes. It has been purged of its figurative charac-
ter. Line, in these paintings, is entirely transparent both to the non-illusionistic
space it inhabits but does not structure, and to the pulses of something like
pure, disembodied energy that seem to move without resistance through them.
Pollock's line bounds and delimits nothing—except, in a sense, eyesight. We
tend not to look beyond it, and the raw canvas is wholly surrogate to the paint
itself. We tend to read the raw canvas as if it were not there. In these works Pol-
lock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing ob-
jects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or
figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas. In
a painting such as "Number One" there is only a pictorial field so homoge-
neous overall and devoid both of recognizable objects and of abstract shapes
that I want to call it "optical," to distinguish it from the structured, essentially
tactile pictorial field of previous modernist painting from Cubism to de Koon-
ing and even Hans Hofmann. Pollock's field is optical because it addresses
itself to eyesight alone. The materiality of his pigment is rendered sheerly
visual, and the result is a new kind of space—if it still makes sense to call it
space—in which conditions of seeing prevail rather than one in which objects
exist, flat shapes are juxtaposed or physical events transpire.
To sum up then: in Pollock's masterpieces of 1947-50, line is used in such
a way as to defy being read in terms of figuration. I hope it is clear that the
opposition "figurative" versus "non-figurative," in the sense of the present ar-
gument, stands for a more fundamental issue than the opposition between
the terms "representational" and "non-representational." It is possible for a
painting or drawing to be both non-representational—what is usually termed
"abstract"—and figurative at the same time. In fact, until Pollock that was the
most that so-called "abstract" painting had ever been. This is true, for in-
stance, of de Kooning, as well as of all those Abstract Expressionists whose
work relies on Late Cubist principles of internal coherence. It is true also of

258 1960s
Kandinsky, both early and late. For example, in Kandinsky's "Painting with
White Forms" (1913), a heroic attempt has been made to allow line to work as
freely as color. But one senses throughout the canvas how the line has been
abstracted from various natural objects; and to the degree that one feels this,
the line either possesses a residual but irreducible quality as of contour, so
that one reads it as having an inside and an outside—as the last trace of a natu-
ral object that has been dissolved away by the forces at work in the pictorial
field—or else it possesses the quality of an object in its own right: not merely
as line, but as a kind of thing, like a branch or bolt of lightning, seen in a more
or less illusionistic space. In his later work—"Yellow-Red-Blue" (1929) is a case
in point—Kandinsky tried to overcome his dependence upon natural objects
by restricting himself to geometrical shapes that could be made with compass
and ruler; and he chose to emphasize or heighten the quality which his line
possessed from the start, of being another kind of thing in the world. In paint-
ings such as this, Kandinsky's line seems like segments of wire, either bent or
straight, which are somehow poised in a space that is no less illusionistic than
in the earlier paintings. Both these canvases by Kandinsky could be called
non-representational; but both are clearly figurative, if we compare them with
Pollock's all-over paintings of 1947-50.
Pollock, however, seems not to have been content with the non-figurative
style of painting he had achieved, and after 1950 returned to figuration, at first
in a series of immensely fecund black-and-white stain paintings, and after-
wards in works which tended to revert to something close to traditional draw-
ing. These latter paintings probably mark Pollock's decline as a major artist.
But it is important to observe that Pollock's involvement with figuration did
not cease entirely between 1947 and 1950.
For example, the painting "White Cockatoo" (1948) was made by dripping
black paint in a series of slow-moving loops and angular turns which come
nowhere near covering the brown canvas; but instead of trying to create the
kind of homogeneous visual fabric of paintings like "Number One," Pollock
chose to fill in some of the areas accidentally circumscribed when his black
line intersected itself, with gouts of red, yellow, green, blue and white oil paint,
either knifed onto the canvas or squeezed in short bursts directly from the
tube. It is significant that Pollock was careful not to fill in only the most con-
spicuous of these areas. Some of the most positive contours are left almost
completely devoid of painted fill-in, whereas areas that seem to lie between
more positive contours have been filled in. The result is that the painting leaves
one with the strong impression that the black line, instead of retaining the

1960s 259
 non-figurative character it possesses in the optical paintings made at the same
time, works to described shapes and evoke forms seen as if against a colored
background. By filling in certain areas isolated by his black line as it loops and
angles back upon itself, Pollock restored to it some measure of line's tradi-
tional role in bounding and describing shapes and figures. And the fact that in
"White Cockatoo" he filled in both predominantly convex and concave (or
positive and negative) areas does not work to counteract the figurative char-
acter of the line. Rather, it creates a rough equivalent to a Synthetic Cubist
ambiguity of figure versus ground, but without the rigor and strict conse-
quentiality of Synthetic Cubism itself. "White Cockatoo," then, represents an
awkward compromise among three stylistic modes: first, Synthetic or Late
Cubism; second, what might be called naive abstract illusionism or naive ab-
stract figuration, in which an abstract shape or figure is seen against a back-
ground situated an indeterminate distance behind it; and third, the all-over,
optical, non-figurative abstraction of Pollock's best contemporary work.
"White Cockatoo" is not a successful painting. But it is an important one, be-
cause it suggests that as early as 1948, when Pollock was realizing masterpiece
after masterpiece in his optical style, he could not keep from chafing at the
high price he had to pay for this achievement: the price of denying figuration,
of refusing to allow his line to describe shapes, whether abstract or represen-
tational. It is significant, however, that "White Cockatoo" does not try to re-
pudiate the techniques of paintings such as "Number One." Instead it sug-
gests that Pollock had begun to cast about for some way to do what seems, on
the face of it, impossible: to achieve figuration within the stylistic context of
his all-over, optical style.
There are other paintings, such as "The Wooden Horse" (1948) and "Sum-
mertime" (1948), which reinforce this interpretation. In all of these Pollock
seems to have been preoccupied with the problem of how to achieve figura-
tion within the context of a style that entailed the denial of figuration; or to
put it another way, with the problem of how to restore to line some measure of
its traditional figurative capability, within the context of a style that entailed
the renunciation of that capability. Only if we grasp, as vividly and even as
painfully as we can, the contradiction implicit in what seems to have been
Pollock's formal ambition in these works—to combine figuration with his all-
over, optical style—will we be able to gauge the full measure of his achieve-
ment in two other paintings of these years.
The first of these I want to consider is the painting "Cut-Out" (1949). Ei-
ther before he came to paint it or, more probably, in the course of painting it,

260 1960s
Pollock arrived, almost certainly through intuition rather than rational analy-
sis, at the realization that the only formally coherent way to combine his all-
over, optical style with figuration was somehow to make the painting itself
proclaim the contradiction implicit in this ambition. This sounds more para-
doxical than in fact it is. It has been observed how Pollock's all-over style en-
tailed the negation of figuration; and how figuration in turn entailed the nega-
tion of that style. In "Cut-Out" these negations become the fundamental
means by which the painting is made. That is, in "Cut-Out" Pollock achieved
figuration by negating part of the painted field—by taking something away
from it—rather than by adding something as in "White Cockatoo," "The
Wooden Horse" and "Summertime." Here Pollock actually cut away the fig-
ure or shape, which happens to be roughly humanoid in outline, from a piece
of canvas on which an all-over painted field had previously been dripped, and
then backed this piece with canvas-board. The result is that the figure is not
seen as an object in the world, or shape on a flat surface—in fact it is not seen
as the presence of anything—but rather as the absence, over a particular area,
of the visual field. This enhances, I think, the force of the word "optical" with
which I have tried to characterize Pollock's all-over style. Figuration is achieved
in terms of eyesight alone, and not in terms that imply even the possibility
of verification by touch. The figure is something we don't see—it is, literally,
where we don't see—rather than something, a shape or object in the world, we
do see. More than anything, it is like a kind of blind spot, a kind of defect in
our visual apparatus; it is like part of our retina that is destroyed or for some
reason is not registering the visual field over a certain area. This impression
is strengthened if we ask ourselves where, in this painting, the cut-out area
seems to lie in relation to the painted field. For me, at any rate, it does not lie
behind the field, despite the fact that where the field is cut away we see the
mostly blank canvas-board behind it; and it does not seem to lie on the sur-
face, or in some tense, close juxtaposition with it, as in the shallow space of
Synthetic Cubism. In the end, the relation between the field and the figure is
simply not spatial at all: it is purely and wholly optical: so that the figure cre-
ated by removing part of the painted field and backing it with canvas-board
seems to lie somewhere within our own eyes, as strange as this may sound.
In "Cut-Out" Pollock succeeds, by means of the most radical surgery
imaginable, in achieving figuration within the stylistic context of an opticality
almost as unremitting as that which characterizes paintings such as "Number
One." But there are two important respects in which "Cut-Out" remains
inconsistent with Pollock's all-over, optical style. The first is its tendency to

1960s 261
 focus our attention on the figure created where Pollock cut away the painted
canvas. This figure is emphasized as no single visual incident or cluster of in-
cidents is ever emphasized in those all-over pictures in which the painted
fields are left intact. And the second has to do with the proportion of the total
canvas occupied by the cut-out figure. In "Cut-Out" it is large enough to de-
prive the visual field of the sense of expansiveness, of sheer visual density, that
we find in a painting such as "Number One." Both these qualifications disap-
pear in the face of the last painting I want to consider in detail, "Out of the
Web" (1949).
Again in "Out of the Web" Pollock achieved figuration by removing part of
a painted field, which in this case had been dripped onto the smooth side of
a piece of brown masonite. This time, however, the figures that result do not
occupy the center of the field; they are not placed so as to dominate it and to
focus the spectator's attention upon themselves. Instead they seem to swim
across the field and even to lose themselves against it. In "Out of the Web," as
in "Cut-Out," figuration is perceived as the absence, over a particular area, of
the visual field. It is, again, like a kind of blind spot within our eyes. But unlike
the figure in "Cut-Out," the sequence of figures in "Out of the Web" is almost
as hard to see, to bring one's attention to bear on, as a sequence of actual blind
spots would be. They seem on the verge of dancing off the visual field or of
dissolving into it and into each other as we try to look at them.
"Out of the Web" is one of the finest paintings Pollock ever made. In it, for
the first and only time, he succeeded completely in restoring to line its tradi-
tional capability to bound and describe figures within the context of his all-
over, optical style—a style I have argued was largely founded on the liberation
of line from the task of figuration. It is, however, not surprising, if one is at all
familiar with Pollock's career, that he did not repeat his remarkable solution
throughout a whole series of works; among the important American painters
who have emerged since 1940 Pollock stands almost alone in his refusal to re-
peat himself. And having solved the problem of how to combine figurative
line—the line of traditional drawing—with opticality in "Cut-Out" and "Out
of the Web," Pollock abandoned the solution: because it could not be im-
proved upon, or developed in any essential respect, and because to repeat the
solution would have been to debase it to the status of a mere device. In this
sense Pollock's solution was both definitive and self-defeating, and from 1951
on his work shows the strong tendency already mentioned to revert to tradi-
tional drawing at the expense of opticality. But in a series of remarkable paint-
ings made by staining thinned-down black paint into unsized canvas in 1951,

262 1960s
Pollock seems to have been on the verge of an entirely new and different kind
of painting, combining figuration with opticality in a new pictorial synthesis
of virtually limitless potential; and it is part of the sadness of his last years that
he appears not to have grasped the significance of what are perhaps the most
fecund paintings he ever made.

Note
i. For example, in his essay "American-Type Painting," Clement Greenberg remarks
on what seems to him the close visual relationship between Pollock's all-over paint-
ing and Analytical Cubism. "I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollock's
1946-1950 manner really took up Analytical Cubism from the point at which Pi-
casso and Braque had left it when, in their collages of 1912 and 1913, they drew back
from the utter abstractness for which Analytical Cubism seemed headed." ("Art and
Culture," Boston, 1961, p. 219.) One is always ill at ease disagreeing with Greenberg
on visual grounds; however, I cannot help but see Pollock's all-over painting of
these years in radically different terms.

SIDNEY SIMON Concerning the Beginnings of the New York

School, 1939-1943: An Interview with Peter
Busa and Matta, Conducted in Minneapolis
in December 1966

SIMON: Your exile from Europe began when, Matta?

MATTA: In October 1939.1 had already joined the Surrealist group. I had
signed too many anti-Hitler and anti-Stalin papers not to be persecuted by
the SS. The "resistance" was not yet possible. Especially after the Trotsky
experience, most Trotskyites felt the need to get out of Europe. It is perhaps
of some interest that I came to New York on the same boat as Tanguy.
SIMON: Tell me something about your life in New York.
MATTA: In New York, I lived rather poorly at first. Julian Levy was our natu-
ral contact among the art dealers. Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Reis, who collected

SOURCE: Art International (Summer 1967), 17-20. Reprinted by permission of Sidney Si-
mon and Art International.

263
 Surrealist art, were our sponsors. I found an apartment at 15 Gay Street,
near 8th Street and 6th Avenue. It was there that I began to paint and to
meet the younger American artists.
The first person I met in New York was Francis Lee. He had a loft on
loth Street where I used to go. I remember that his loft was one of these
great big spaces without any room separations. The New York situation
was very strange to me. There were—how would I say?—many artists who
knew something about European art. But it was as if "art" was something
not in Europe but something imported to America. Do you know what I
mean? Art was something rare or artificial instead of being the expression
of a man.
BUSA: I went to parties in Lee's loft. In fact, Baziotes, who knew Francis Lee,
took me there. It was there that I met Matta. Matta, I remember, was mar-
ried. No one else of our generation was married yet. There were plenty of
others around, people in the Village who were what you would call trained
artists although they did not have formal training in "how to be imagina-
tive." Gerome Kamrowski and I were close friends. Did you know, Matta,
that Kamrowski was one of the first to practice automatic painting in this
country?
MATTA: No, I wasn't aware of that.
BUSA: During the last legs of the WPA even Pollock was squeezing tubes
of tempera color directly onto the canvas without using brushes. This
would have been around 1940 or thereabouts. So even before Matta came
on the scene, there was quite a bit of groundwork for art being done that
was definitely outside the galleries. On the WPA, for instance, we used to
practice a clandestine kind of automatic drawing, which we took seriously,
but was obviously not acceptable to the Project officials. Stuart Davis and
Léger were big influences in those days. But Picasso was God. Picasso
influenced all of us.
MATTA: Don't you think all of that has something to do with what we find in
the Soviet Union today? What I mean, of course—Picasso was known—but
the idea that someone would express himself in relation to the oppression
of the workers around him was, as you suggest, almost underground. The
WPA artists painted the working class, "looking at" it, not from the "in-
side," not from the need for emancipation.
SIMON: What was your work like at that time, Peter?
BUSA: I was practicing an idiom that came directly out of Léger and Picasso,
but it was also related to American Indian art in the sense of being flat. It

264 1960s
 was also close to Stuart Davis. In those days I knew the work of Tony
Smith, Steve Wheeler and Robert Barrrell. I felt close to the abstract artists
on the Project. But, you know, we couldn't submit any of that work. It
wouldn't have been acceptable. It would have been considered blotchy,
or simply "paint on canvas." What we did on the Project was colored by
our having to do commissioned work.
It's ironic, but some of the best things were the murals. Those by Davis
and Byron Browne for station WNYC; and those by Xceron, Gorky, Von
Wicht, Bolotowsky, Brooks and Guston on the Rikers Island project. The
murals were certainly of a different caliber than the US Treasury Depart-
ment murals, which were really deadly.
SIMON: Do you have any recollection of the Museum of Non-Objective Art?
BUSA: We used to call it the Art-of-Tomorrow Museum. Another place we
frequented was the Museum of Living Art at N.Y.U., the Gallatin Collec-
tion. We haunted it like it was our own personal Village museum. Then
Matta came. He was the first big influence on a small group of us. The won-
derful thing about Malta's stimulus was his grasp of the morphology of
paint. From him we got the idea that paint could transcend the fact that it
was just something on the canvas.
SIMON: I'm not sure I get exactly what it is you're saying.
BUSA: Paint was not just paint; it could become crushed jewels, air, even
laughter. It was quite open. It had that tremendous possibility of transfor-
mation, which we hadn't recognized before. And we wouldn't have recog-
nized it had it not been for the stimulation we got from each other.
SIMON: Did you know Gorky in 1939?
BUSA: Yes. But Gorky came late to this idea. Bill Baziotes, for example,
started drip painting even before Pollock. He destroyed a lot of that work.
My own work, in my exhibition at Peggy's in 1946, was quite free. I was
throwing and dripping paint onto the canvas and pouring it as well. But
the point is, as I am sure Matta agrees, the flashes of understanding were
momentary. It wasn't sustained.
MATTA: These artists I started meeting—yourself, Pollock, Kamrowski,
Baziotes, Motherwell—were full of vitality. But in some funny way they
were painting from color reproductions instead of painting about them-
selves. You know what I mean? Actually they had a fantastic experience to
report—the experience of America. To me, this was fascinating. And this
automatic technique of the Surrealists (which means to show the function-
ing of the mind) fit them like a glove. They were very professional. They

1960s 265
 knew a great deal! As a matter of fact, they knew even more than we Surreal-
ists knew about art history. Their studios were covered with reproductions
of pictures pasted to the walls, while in our case there was not so much ref-
erence to these things.
BUSA: But to know history gave the American artist a greater chance to reject
history. Look at what happened. We had to start somewhere. We had this
healthy attitude of anti-art which for many of us became personalized as
self-destruction. It was amazing how we could all come out of it and smile.
The point I am making is this: we were, all of us, really abstract painters, so
that our idea of the role of the imagination differed greatly from that of the
Surrealists. Pm not saying we didn't gain anything from Surrealism. It was
a fuse which lit up the American scene. But from where? It was your pres-
ence, Matta, that personalized Surrealism for us.
MATTA: What I was transmitting was the theory of Surrealism. In those days
Surrealism was known through Dali; so you never really knew what was be-
hind it. As for myself, I felt that nothing would be new, only old-new—that
is, until we changed the game and not only the pieces in the old game. You
know what I mean?
BUSA: What you are saying is that art was not mixed up enough with life. As
I said before, we were abstract artists and abstract art had no place in Surre-
alism. It is true, we were working to make art; and even if it was good, pro-
fessionally, it didn't really mean anything insofar as tying it up with life. You
were right, this was the important thing. It is interesting to reflect on our
first efforts to overcome this limitation: the work looked like vomit. Because
none of us got the message on the ideal level (which you knew so well). It
was sheer catharsis.
SIMON: I want to return for a moment to Matta's statement that Surrealism
was known here mainly through Dali. I don't think that's the whole story, do
you?
MATTA: I meant that only figuratively. Look. The only gallery besides Pierre
Matisse that had to do with Surrealism in a big way was Julian Levy. He had
a show before I came here, of de Chirico. The lack of interest it created was
unbelievable. Most of those pictures were unsold; three or four years later, I
was able to buy a well-known de Chirico for a small amount, something like
$700. You have to understand that America was practically virgin territory.
SIMON: There was a small group of artists who met at your studio. Am I cor-
rect in this?
MATTA: Yes, but that was much later. I knew them before as individuals. We

266 1960s
 talked alone first. There was a vague interest in what we were doing, but the
problem was not grasped until later. You may recall, there was a big Surre-
alist show—it was organized by a French refugee committee of liberation.
Then I think it was that all of you realized that you had in me someone who
knew something about all of this. This show awoke a lot of things in you.
You didn't know where to turn; and then, perhaps, you remembered that
there was this guy who knew something about it. And then—it was about a
year later—things started getting more interesting to you.
SIMON: You had your first show at the Julian Levy Gallery in 1940.
MATTA: Yes. I will tell you something very amusing. I remember I first
showed my pictures in the Julian Levy Gallery with Tchelitchew in the
main room and with Walt Disney in the second room. In a tiny little room
in one corner was my work. Everything in America, you see, was still at
the beginning.
BUSA: But to get back to the popular notion of Surrealism as we understood
it. We knew about Dali. We knew that Dali was a kind of illustrator. The
dirtiest word you could call an artist then was an "illustrator." We consid-
ered Dali as an illustrator of dreams, an artist without plastic consciousness.
That is why most of us dismissed Dali as an influence. Which artists were
influenced by Dali? None except a few Marxist realists.
SIMON: Peter, you knew Pollock in the Benton class; but when did Pollock
and Matta first meet?
BUSA: I don't remember. But I know that Pollock got to know Matta by going
with us to Matta's studio, like we all did on Saturdays. We would show each
other our work and have discussions
MATTA: ... Yes, yes, I want to recall some of the details—somebody told
me—this was after I met you, Peter—that there was this man called Pollock
who had a studio on 8th or gth Street. And I went to see him. I saw his
work. (You see, all of these artists somehow I saw by themselves first.)
BUSA: It was Motherwell who told you about Jackson.
MATTA: Yes, yes, Motherwell. He became a very important link.
BUSA: Motherwell was very important in all this. He organized our meeting
with you. In those days, Matta was still a kind of nebulous figure. Naturally,
I'd seen his work. I had seen Matta's work in a 1939 issue of Minotaur—in
color. We all had this feeling that he was a well-known artist, a European.
He had his nice studio on gth Street. So when we rang the bell and went
upstairs it was to call on a well-established artist. Here we were, no older
than him—Pollock might have been a year or two older—but we had a feel-

1960s 267
 ing like students, in a way. I don't want to labor the point; but that was the
situation: we were still on a kind of learning level.
MATTA: Yes, but I don't know if "learning" is the right word. Because I
think you will agree that it had also something to do with the idea of creat-
ing a group and agreeing on a direction. By getting together we were more
likely to succeed in attacking a vocabulary. I remember that some of the
first things we used to do were things like that—images of man. Everyone
brought a sample of his work. I felt that we had to keep a degree of reference
to reality. It couldn't be all explosion, you know.
BUSA: Let me ask you a question, Matta. What was it that most attracted us to
Surrealist automatism? For instance, we'd already known about Masson's
work which was quite free. What attracted us particularly to this idea of to-
tal freedom of expression?
MATTA: I think that—how would I say?—I think that you were all ready to ex-
plode. The situation was very WPA. There was a time bomb—definitely a
morphology of explosion in those very early things you were doing. They
looked like something that was the feeling you had.
BUSA: But what I was getting at was our antagonism to Surrealism. Don't you
remember how it was expressed even in our discussions in the group?
MATTA: Yes, but I had it myself in those days
BUSA: ... I remember that quite well. That's why I asked you the other day if
you still consider yourself a Surrealist. Because even though you were one
of the Surrealists, you were something new.
MATTA: I always defended Breton's definition of Surrealism, which has to do
with the total emancipation of man. Surrealism is "more reality." There is
always the need for man to grasp "more reality"; for only in this way can we
create a truly human condition.
SIMON: Can you tell me something more of what you remember about Moth-
erwell?
BUSA: Well, Motherwell was always a very organized fellow—I mean he had a
tremendous facility for gathering ends together.
MATTA: That's true. He was a translator in pragmatic terms of the things that

BUSA: ... that were even vague to us. He would come out and explain things
and bring them out. As a matter of fact, I was annoyed in the beginning, be-
cause he talked more than Matta did
MATTA: ... He would translate in terms of esthetics what I was trying to say,
and then I would say, "No, it's not that at all that I am trying to say." He

268 1960s
 would try to drive everything into esthetics, you know. I don't deny beauty
in a work, but I regard it as only one of the conditions necessary to create.
Emancipation is another.
SIMON: Peter, would you say that Matta's work in those days was the most ad-
vanced artistically?
BUSA: Yes, as a Surrealist. He was the most mature of our group. Matta's
work was not dogmatically Surrealist, but was on an idea plane, which
made it more exciting. We were not attracted to the clichés of Surrealism.
After all, some of us had been painting for ten years and we knew Surreal-
ism for what it was.
MATTA: I want to tell you something quite curious. Max Ernst spent the
summer of 1942 in Cape Cod, at our house, a house we rented near the
beach. Max started working with different cans, making holes in them.
He put the picture on the floor and made the cans move above them as if
they were mobiles. They dripped paint on the canvas. These were the
first drip paintings I was aware of. This freedom of Pollock (which came
much later) was very clear to me, but very elemental. It was like going
from hand-painting to arm-painting.
BUSA: True. But there was muscle in it. In Pollock it came out strong. In
Kline, too, it was evident from his first works in that direction. You have to
admit that Max Ernst's efforts with the cans were very modest compared to
Pollock. The structure of imagination in our work revealed a feeling quite
different from European art.
SIMON: To return to the so-called group ...
BUSA: There was never an official group. We didn't form a group from the
point of view of having an ideology. We merely shared certain ideas and in-
terests.
SIMON: Were there six of you, including Matta?
BUSA: Yes. We were the first American practitioners of automatic painting
that I know of. Gorky wasn't part of it. As I remember it, when we came to
Matta's studio, there was Motherwell, Baziotes, Pollock, Kamrowski, and
myself. It was a very small group; but it was as many as we could corral at
the time—those who were really involved, that is.
SIMON: When exactly did you start to meet? Can you pin it down for me?
MATTA: I'm trying to remember. In October—like it used to happen in those
days, everybody changed apartments. There were a lot of available apart-
ments. We moved to gth Street.
BUSA: That was in '42, because I remember that very well. I'd spent the sum-

1960s 269
 mer away from New York. Then, when I came back, I saw Motherwell,
Baziotes and Kamrowski. We didn't meet together as a group until the fall
of 1942. We started meeting in October and continued through that winter.
Motherwell was on 8th Street. I used to visit him there. I think it was a pe-
riod of good times and productive as hell. In the restaurants the food was
spiced with parlor games. Remember, I borrowed your book on mental
telepathy.
MATTA: Pollock, you recall, was the one who resented most this idea of a
group. It was then that he painted an enormous picture of very anthropo-
morphic things. It was quite free already, vibrating.
BUS A: Pasiphàe, very likely. Or Totem I or II.
MATTA: I would say that the winter of 1942-43 was when we met. Then in
1943, things were starting to get difficult. We didn't see one another. With
Motherwell especially I had a terrific incompatibility of ideas. I was really
very much in this Surrealist revolution, and he became more and more a
collage man. In 1943—that summer—I passed, in my own work, from a sort
of burning fire, mineral lights kind of thing into a space that was described
by geodesic lines and waves. Then we moved to the country. The war was
becoming a ferocious thing. I couldn't ignore it any more. I began to feel
"society" in a new way, for the first time.
BUSA: Do you remember the painting you did of the figure with the gun?
MATTA: Yes, yes, it was a portrait of Breton. No doubt it represented in some
funny way my hostility to certain aspects of Surrealism. Once when I was
working on a picture I called the Vitreur, I got very furious. I was very dis-
contented with it, and I destroyed the picture. In destroying this picture
(it was a large one of 6 or 7 yards) I used—perhaps remembering what Max
Ernst had done the summer before—just paint drippings to cover the pic-
ture. I created chaotic circles of drippings and things like that. I liked the
result as a sort of expression of my anger in terms of the war. It was a curi-
ous feeling. I wasn't in the war. I felt that I should participate, but being
terrifically antimilitarist, I went through a ferocious crisis, so to speak.
And then I passed, in my work, to these anthropomorphic things.
SIMON: Did this change about in your feelings and in your work affect your
relations with the others?
MATTA: Yes. It created a very definite divorce. Especially Motherwell. When
he came to visit me, he would say, you are coming back to the figure.
BUSA: He had an abhorrence of the figure as I remember. As soon as we
painted the figure it was as though it wasn't art.

270 1960s
MATTA: I became sort of the fellow who wasn't accepted. They were happy as
long as my work expressed cosmic violence and whirlpools. I think it was a
pity we didn't see more of each other. Because action is not necessarily the
hands.
в USA: It was a fratricidal situation in many ways. I remember the very first
time you met Gorky and overhearing the conversation. It was at a small
gathering. Gorky was saying, "You know, I think you paint too thin." And
Matta graciously replied, "Oh, I don't think I paint so thin." It was an infan-
tile conversation that went on in that way for a while. Gorky, if you remem-
ber, was painting very heavy in those days. He hadn't even started to be-
come influenced by any of our ideas. You could hardly lift his palettes; they
were like African shields, very heavy. Exasperated, finally, Gorky pulled
himself up to his full height (I thought he was going to fight), and he said,
"Well, let's put it this way—you don't paint so thin, I don't paint so thick."
With that we all relaxed. His sense of humor, which ranged from the ridicu-
lous to the sublime, endeared him to all of us. We all laughed, but Gorky
laughed the most.
SIMON: When did the issue of "scale" enter into your thinking?
BUSA: Almost immediately after our contact with Matta. American artists
hardly ever attempted large canvases. We always had this idea that we were
making pictures instead of the pictures making us. The change in our think-
ing stemmed from a sense of relief which resulted from a feeling that we
were breaking down the barriers between art and life. This feeling freed
our sense of scale.
SIMON: Do I understand you to mean that it was Matta who inspired you in
this direction?
BUSA: Yes, very profoundly. Matta's idea was that we have a rich world within
and don't have to look for it outside ourselves. It was an idea that combined,
ultimately, brilliance of the mind with enthusiasm of the act.
MATTA: To me the image always represented an act. The action of the imagi-
nation is somehow more valid to me, more developed, than the action of
the arm.
BUSA: We had a horror about making an image. But actually Matta's ideas
were new, even for Surrealism. I don't see, however, that the emphasis, in
our case, was necessarily on the arm. There was freedom, yes, but of both
mind and imagination as well.
MATTA: At one point the artists started discussing not any more who we are
and what happens to us and how we are changed by our paintings, etc., but

1960s 271
 started talking with their hands, trying to describe space like a dancer
does.
в USA: This business of physical instead of mental space—we were all aware
of the difference. Pollock less so than the others because he already had an
idea of total configuration, of having all of the canvas pulsate. The "tour-
ists" call it "all-over art."
MATTA: What interested me at this time, however, was to find some reference
in my mental space to the human being, to society. This I regarded as a nat-
ural step in my art. But you felt it, too, you know. Because Pollock, at one
moment, from all this whirlpool of cosmic matter wanted to reach the figure
too...
BUSA: Yes, he did.
MATTA: ... to return to the "old-new," as I see it. One of the last things Gorky
said to me was that he wanted to get some kind of human reference in his
work. And de Kooning did, too. Except that de Kooning went back to some
curious Rouault notion, some German Expressionist notion of the figure.
Very—how would you say?—very unlucidly. Because de Kooning was still
afraid of a reference to the human figure.
BUSA: I don't follow you entirely. But it is true, Pollock did call de Kooning
a "French" painter. I didn't understand this then, but I do now. But to get
back to Pollock for a minute. Pollock had an extreme awareness of the physi-
cal aspect of his talent. I remember conversations we had about his use of
accident. It was his favorite term. I asked Pollock, "Do you try to control the
accident?" And he said, "No, don't control it, use it. Let it be yours!"
Of course, you have to remember that we were all human beings in the
sense of trying to create great art. In my opinion, this was the tragic aspect
of Gorky and de Kooning. But Pollock never thought in this way when he
worked. This was his power. Pollock's life was tragic; but not his achieve-
ment. Not his work.
SIMON: Did you know Clyfford Still?
MATTA: No.
BUSA: All of the American artists seemed to know each other. I knew Still.
You couldn't miss his large canvases at Peggy's. She gave him his first New
York show there in 1945. Or was it 1944? I don't remember. She doesn't say
much about him in her book. But in my book, Still's quiet hand created the
critical distance we needed: from the anti-art gestures, from Surrealism,
from French painting and from de Kooning's painting as well. Also his was

272 1960s
 an attitude markedly different from Pollock's. In retrospect, he was the
guide post to Rothko, to Newman's bigness of form as well as to later
developments.
SIMON: You've mentioned Gorky only in passing.
BUSA: Gorky, I feel, was an important figure for me personally. Gorky had a
deep sense of humor that was high-class satire. It had a ring of truth about
it. The reason for this humor, I felt, was his unconscious and deep wealth
of knowledge about art. He knew a lot about "history." But he also had the
humility of an artist who wanted to destroy "history," to solve an equation
of zero. Never a cynic, he retained enough innocence to project his roman-
tic personality onto other people. He could even do so with an intimate
group. He would tell all that were present that the basis of the "real new"
(as he called it) was for them to admit that they were bankrupt as artists. He
meant this to apply in the realm of ideas about art, because he had a real in-
terest in non-art and anti-art. Well, everyone was holding on to art and not
willing to take up anti-art or the destruction of art, as an involvement, by
admitting they were bankrupt. But Gorky understood this. He would self-
consciously and lightheartedly hide his understanding by the impertinence
of his approach. Gorky, with his great mixture of gentleness and sarcasm,
understood better than most the unpredictable quality of human action—
especially in the case of an artist willing to face life more bare. But with it
all, we had some fun, too.
SIMON: You haven't said much about Baziotes.
MATTA: Baziotes was a very good fighting fellow. I think he really wanted
something new.
BUSA: Among all of us, he was probably the most faithful adherent to ortho-
dox Surrealism. In fact, he considered himself a Surrealist. He was the only
one of our group who proclaimed any adherence to it. Even Kamrowski
(who later had the blessing of Breton) was squeamish about it. Baziotes'
position created the first split in our ranks. I let him know where I stood.
My feeling was that he was the most scared. At least Motherwell used to
say, "Let's pretend we're not afraid." Always with good humor, of course.
MATTA: But, no! For Baziotes, it was not a question of Surrealism, but a ques-
tion of emancipating himself!
BUSA: Baziotes worked with a kind of Miró orientation. And he made
amoeba-like shapes which came from Arp. Baziotes was as involved with
"history" as Motherwell was. Baziotes studied Miró. I remember he bor-

1960s 273
 rowed the Miró book from me. You know, we all tried to get a little corner
on this and that. It was only natural. It was Jackson, of course, who broke out
of it completely.
SIMON: Matta, what were your feelings about Pollock's work at that time,
that is, before 1943? Or before the drip paintings?
MATTA: My feeling was that it was very Masson. With all due respect to
Masson, he was never very important in this searching of imagination.
Masson didn't have enough imagination. He had to come back constantly
to these little nudes and things.
SIMON: Did you ever talk with Pollock about Masson?
MATTA: No, because in that period ...
BUSA: ... there was a kind of isolation between all of us after we started to
show.
MATTA: I don't know if you remember, but I was all of 1946 and 1947 in Eu-
rope. Then I came back in 1948. Pollock's drip paintings—for a moment,
when I saw them, I thought that Pollock had broken into something new,
that Pollock was operating in terms of the mind. These paintings interested
me very much.
BUSA: Which year was that?
MATTA: His first drip paintings were done in 1947. It is interesting, but what
made me believe that his attitude was not, as I had thought, that of a man
who wanted to grasp things through the imagination, was that slowly the
scribble, instead of differentiating itself into a new morphology of form,
started to become those nudes, those figures again with the heads and eyes.
In the end, it was very clear to me that the reference wasn't to the imagina-
tion at all. Probably Pollock was always making nudes, even though to us
his free style always seemed to convey some enormous cosmic reference.
BUSA: My reaction to Pollock's work was that it had tremendous assertion.
He never consciously made a fetish out of accident, or was interested in ac-
cident per se, or accident for its own sake. He used incident, rather, to create
a situation which he could transform into an event. This was really a trans-
formation of his life into art. He went out on a limb as no one else did. He
was willing to go to hell for this idea. He had exuberance, enthusiasm.
His work had tremendous scale and breadth—and all of it was on a thin line
of making a mess of it. This was his forte and his contribution, which is
priceless.
I remember that he did a big canvas in about three hours. To some peo-
ple it seemed a case of an idea taking on the aspect of a criminal act, you

274 1960s
 know, against all that was sacred in art. Pollock broke all sense of time in
doing that canvas. What I mean is that with a mural it is usual to take time
to plan it and then you go to work. Pollock didn't work this way, not at all.
Instead, he created a new basis for physical involvement, one which was
psychic, one in which there was real involvement with the idea of where
man's space is (which most of us talked about simply as mental space).
As de Kooning said, rightly, "Jackson broke the ice."
SIMON: This notion of time in relation to scale was revolutionary, obviously.
BUSA: You have to admit that Pollock worked havoc with the concept of time
as a factor in painting. He devaluated it. It was no accident. Pollock knew
how to use his means (his talent) so that it transcended pure "incidentality"
so to speak. He once said to me, "Go ahead, make a mess. You might find
yourself by destroying yourself and by working your way out of it."
SIMON: One final question. What was Pollock's feeling about paint as paint,
about the medium?
BUSA: Pollock was a natural painter. He could swim in it and come out creat-
ing the most beautifully organized lyrical effects. Pollock had the most artic-
ulate understanding of his means. While lavish and extravagant in spirit, he
utilized the most economical means of color to get at a special kind of lyri-
cism. He could make that magical nothingness everything. He gave painting
an organism of existing, a canvas pulsating with the heart of a new-born
creature.
MATTA: He was very concerned with paint!
BUSA: He was what you might call anal-erotic about it. He could play with
paint. He could make a painting called "Shimmering Substance" like you
would make a mudpie. He was a natural painter.
MATTA: Yes. But you know, it was in this sense that art and not life were the
main preoccupations of American action painting. Sometime again we will
have to talk about the younger generation of American painters who are
picking up where we began—Rauschenberg and the others—and how I feel
they are still going back to the "old-new." New York is being colonized now
by Los Angeles just as it was colonized by Paris before. We have, unfortu-
nately, still to change the game.

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 SIDNEY SIMON Concerning the Beginnings of the New
York School, 1939-1943: An Interview
with Robert Motherwell Conducted in
New York in January 1967

SIMON: Since these discussion are concerned with the origins of the so-
called New York School, I would welcome your detailed reminiscences of
the period roughly from 1939 to 1943. What, for example, were the circum-
stances that led to your close association with Matta in 1940?
MOTHERWELL: To give some idea of what must have taken place, I will have
to emphasize the fact that my background up to 1940 had little to do with
painting. Until then, I had known only one obscure American artist. My
grown-up life had been spent in prep school and universities, involving var-
ious scholarly pursuits. It is true, on the other hand, that I drew and painted
all my youth, so that I can't really say that I walked into the New York art sit-
uation visually naked, but I certainly had no professional experience at all.
SIMON: Might we back-track a bit? You were at Harvard for a time, isn't that
so? When was that?
MOTHERWELL: The academic year of 1937-1938.1 was a graduate student in
the Philosophy department. That particular year, Arthur Lovejoy, who was
a visiting professor, had a year-long seminar in the History of the Idea of
Romanticism. When he discovered that I was interested in painting, he as-
signed to me Eugène Delacroix, whose journal had just been published in
translation. Both Lovejoy and my Harvard mentor, David Prall, liked what
I wrote well enough to suggest that I go to Paris for a year and prepare it for
publication. It was in May, 1938, that I went to France. After a short stay at
the University of Grenoble to improve my French, which remained awful,
I spent the rest of the time in Paris almost until the war began. There was
an interlude at Oxford, in July 1939.
SIMON: Had you yet decided on a career in painting?
MOTHERWELL: No. Back in the States, I got a teachingjob at the University
of Oregon for one year, as a substitute for someone on sabbatical leave. I
took the job so that I would have something to do while I was trying to

SOURCE: Art International (Summer 1967), 20-23. Reprinted by permission of Sidney

Simon and Art International. Motherwell text copyright © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. /
Licensed by VAGA, New York.

276
 make up my mind whether to continue my academic career or to become a
painter—which I really longed to do, but did not know how to go about.
During that year I met the composer, Arthur Berger, who advised me to go
to New York and study with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia, while making up
my mind. New York, he thought—and quite rightly—was much more of a
center of art than the other places I had been. So I wrote to Columbia. They
pointed out that I was unqualified technically to be in the graduate school
of art history but were willing to take me, on probation.
SIMON: Your contact with Meyer Schapiro is of course very well known.
MOTHERWELL: I owe him a lot. When I came to New York I knew no one. By
coincidence I lived near Schapiro. I began to paint a lot. Occasionally, be-
cause I didn't know anyone else who would be interested, I used to take my
pictures and show them to him—I realize now, somewhat to his annoyance.
I had no conception of how busy people are in New York. One day
he suggested that what I really needed was to know some other artists. He
knew most. He wanted to know whom I would like to meet. If it were possi-
ble, he said, he would arrange it.
SIMON: Did he influence you about becoming a painter?
MOTHERWELL: He felt strongly that I should become a painter and not a
scholar—not that my scholarship was inadequate—but that my real drive
was obviously toward painting. He asked me what American painters I
liked; and I said I didn't know of any that I really liked or wanted to meet.
And then he said, what about the Parisian Surrealists (who were most of
them in New York in exile)?
SIMON: Do you remember when exactly this conversation took place?
MOTHERWELL: It must have been around Christmastime, 1940.1 said that,
judging from the little I had seen, I didn't like Surrealist painting either.
What I had in mind was the work of Dali, the more literary kind. And he
said, whether you like their painting or not, they are the most lively group
of artists around. (They would have been in their 4o's then.) They are
highly literate; and, since you have an orientation toward modern French
culture, it could be good for you. So I said, from that point of view, fine.
After some reflection, he arranged that I study engraving with Kurt Selig-
mann. (Seligmann spoke English very well.) He was learned, and, as we
would say nowadays, "square." Although I was interested in learning en-
graving, the thing was really a pretext (which we both understood) to help
me to enter a bit into the French milieu. After all, I couldn't just hang
around

1960s 277
 SIMON: What kind of impression did the Surrealists make on you? What
were they like?
MOTHERWELL: They were a real fraternity. Such as I have never seen before,
or since, among artists. (Most of the artists I have known have as their best
friends other artists, but it is a personal rather than an ideological relation-
ship.) Surrealism was a complicated system of ideas and attitudes, having to
do not only with art.
SIMON: Since you found them such a close-knit group, was it hard for you to
get to know them?
MOTHERWELL: No. What I am trying to emphasize is their comradeship.
To answer your question, through Seligmann—all the Surrealists appeared
in his studio at one time or another—and his reciprocal visits to various stu-
dios (taking me with him) I not only met them, but also had an important,
if minor, function to perform: I was an American. Most of them had been
plunged straight into exile. There were lots of things that puzzled them,
from the most minor things like—If you couldn't get olive oil, what other
kind of cooking oil would serve as well? Why do Americans do this or that
or the other thing? And being an American I was in a position to be helpful,
to provide other frames of reference.
SIMON: I take it from what you say that they had few real contacts with Amer-
icans?
MOTHERWELL: They were artistically isolated on the whole. They knew that
the American artists held off, either out of jealousy or out of lack of sympa-
thy; or perhaps feeling threatened, or merely not being interested: I don't
know. But I, of course, had nothing yet about which I could feel threatened.
Not yet a painter, and being imbued in French culture, and regarding them
as forming a distinctive part of this culture, I had great sympathy. And so I
was useful to them in some ways. I think they liked me, too.
SIMON: You would have met Matta about this time?
MOTHERWELL: Yes. The first Surrealist I met and the only one who was close
to my age was Matta. He was the most energetic, enthusiastic, poetic,
charming, brilliant young artist that I've ever met. This would have been
the spring of 1941.
We tend to forget, in thinking about this period, that it was the end of the
Depression. The war was about to begin; it had already begun in Europe.
Most of the artists of my generation nearly all had been on the WPA, at $25 a
week, or whatever it was. The WPA was heavily socially oriented; and those
few artists who were attracted to modern or abstract art had a rough time.

278 1960s
 None had recognition. Most were poor, depressed, with considerable feel-
ings of hopelessness, but determined nevertheless to carry on, in their re-
spective aspirations.
For an enthusiastic person like Matta to appear—this had an extremely
important catalytic effect. (Matta and I were both "foreigners" to the New
York painting scene. Matta came from a different world, while I, an Ameri-
can, had never been forced to endure what my colleagues had.)
SIMON: Can you recall the first time you met Matta?
MOTHERWELL: I can't. I would imagine it was in Seligmann's studio. (The
other possibility is that I met him through the Onslow-Fords. I can't re-
member. Gordon Onslow-Ford had something of the same relationship as
I had to Matta—that is, we were both his admirers.) What I do remember
is that Matta and I became friendly very quickly. By this I mean we met at
least a couple of times a week, etc., during the spring 1941. He was married
at the time to an American girl. I remember that he wanted very badly to get
out of America for the summer. Seligmann had another pupil in engraving,
a young girl, Barbara, who was the daughter of Bernard Reis, the art collec-
tor. It was finally arranged that the Mattas and the Seligmanns, Barbara
Reis and I would all go to Mexico for the summer. Then, as you will recall,
in May, Paris fell to the Germans. And the Seligmanns, both of whom were
Swiss Jews, were worried about their relatives in Europe and so they de-
cided they couldn't go. The Mattas, Barbara and I got on a boat and left for
Mexico. On the boat was a young Mexican actress with whom I promptly
fell in love, and soon after married.
SIMON: How important do you feel this Mexican sojourn was for your artistic
development?
MOTHERWELL: It was important in a special sense. In the three months of
that summer of 1941, Matta gave me a ten-year education in Surrealism.
Through him, I met Wolfgang Paalen, a prominent Surrealist, who was liv-
ing in Mexico City. At the end of the summer, the Mattas and Barbara Reis
returned to New York. Maria and I settled near Paalen till nearly Christ-
mastime. Paalen was an intellectual, a man widely read; and it was with
him that I got my postgraduate education in Surrealism, so to speak.
By the time Maria and I returned to New York, we were already married.
We took an apartment on Perry Street in the Village, not far from where
Matta lived. One day, I recall, Matta and I went up to Columbia to see the
mathematical three-dimensional objects (like very beautiful abstract sculp-
tures) that are made by mathematicians, to show their concepts in three

1960s 279
 dimensions. In the subway, on the way back, there was a very attractive
young woman, who spoke to Matta. Afterwards I asked who she was, and
he said that she was the wife of a very good young American artist, Bill
Baziotes. Come to think of it, he said, you ought to get to know Baziotes. He
thought we would like each other. Matta had us to dinner, and we became
friends on the spot.
SIMON: Do you recall seeing Malta's first show in New York, at the Julian
Levy Gallery? It opened in April 1940. This would have been a year before
you met him.
MOTHERWELL: No, I don't remember seeing it. My vivid feelings about his
work were always the same. I loved his pencil drawings, but I never really
liked his paintings. For me they were theatrical and glossy, too illusionistic
for my taste. But I do think the drawings he made in those years—in the late
I93o's and 1940's—are among the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful
work made in America at that time. And there were hundreds of them.
Matta, with all his worldliness and sociability, has always been a very hard
worker, enormously productive.
SIMON: How do Pollock, Busa and Kamrowski relate to the general situation
that we have been discussing?
MOTHERWELL: Well, here is where I have got to talk about what has always
seemed to me the beginnings of what later became known as Abstract Ex-
pressionism. The thing that I want to establish (and I say this as a meta-
phor) is that Matta had an Oedipal relation to the Surrealists. He was, in
the time we are talking about, only about 30 years old while all of the other
Surrealists were in their forties. He was the loved son, the heir apparent; but
he was also treated with a certain amount of suspicion, somewhat unfairly,
because the last person to play his role was also Spanish speaking—I'm re-
ferring, of course, to Salvador Dali. The Surrealists at the moment hated
Dali; and I think there was some suspicion that Matta might be ultimately
another Dali. In any case, Matta certainly had a deep love-hate relationship
with the Surrealists. At one moment when the hate relationship was more
dominant, he wanted to show the Surrealists up, so to speak, as middle-
aged grey-haired men who weren't zeroed into contemporary reality. He re-
alized that if he made a manifesto by himself, or even if he had a beautiful
show by himself, the Surrealists could say, well, he's a Surrealist and he's
very talented; but if there were a group who made a manifestation that was
more daring and qualitatively more beautiful than the Surrealists them-
selves, then he could succeed in his objective of showing them up.

280 1960s
SIMON: The possibility of succeeding in this I would say must have been
rather dim. Would you agree?
MOTHERWELL: Of course. The thing was that there weren't a lot of good
painters around; or if there were we didn't know about them; so the prob-
lem was how to go about it. Matta came to me and Baziotes with the prob-
lem. Of course, I didn't know any American artists, though by this time
I had got to know most of the European artists reasonably well. Baziotes,
however, had been on the WPA for many years and perhaps was still on it at
that time. So Matta said to Baziotes, are there some guys on the WPA who
are interested in modern art and not in all that social realist crap? Baziotes
said there are very few. He named Pollock, de Kooning, Kamrowski and
Busa. And then Matta said to me, how can we make a manifestation? And
I answered that the great manifestation in America had been the Armory
Show, that perhaps we should hire an armory, or a big loft or something,
and show new work. Matta said—quite properly—if we are going to make a
manifesto against the Surrealists, the work has to have some group point,
something more than simply personal talent. Then I said, you and I have
talked for a year constantly about Surrealist theories of automatism and we
believe that they can be carried much further. Since the three of us have
been experimenting with various forms of automatism all winter, perhaps
we could explain what automatism is to the artists Baziotes has named and
see if they would be interested in some kind of collaboration. I suggested
that perhaps we could even rent a place, a month in advance of the show,
and all go there for a month and make this manifestation on the spot.
SIMON: You make it sound like a quite feasible idea after all. I would be in-
terested to know why it never came off.
MOTHERWELL: Matta was all for it then. He was very enthusiastic, full of
ideas, loved to see things start; but once they got started, he often lost inter-
est or got interested in something else. So what ultimately happened was
that I , as the theoretician, and Baziotes, as the friend of the artists, were sent
to explain all of this to them somewhat on our own. Matta, you see, re-
treated from the enterprise, which nonetheless was more personal to him
than to us.
SIMON: But you went ahead with the project anyway?
MOTHERWELL: Yes. I asked Baziotes who he thought to be the most talented
of his friends. Baziotes thought probably Pollock. He gives the impression
of being very tough and he didn't know how receptive he would be to the
idea. I remember that Baziotes called up Pollock and we made a date to go

1960s 281
 and spend a whole afternoon with him. I talked, I guess, for four or five
hours explaining the whole Surrealist thing in general and the theory of au-
tomatism in particular, which nowadays we would call a technique of free
association. I showed Pollock how Klee and Masson made their things, etc.
And Pollock, to my astonishment, listened intently; in fact, he invited me
to come back another afternoon, which I did. This would be the winter of
1942.
SIMON: Just how interested would you say Pollock was?
MOTHERWELL: What I haven't said is that by this time Pd become friendly
with Peggy Guggenheim (who either had or was about to marry Max Ernst
and was very much part of the Surrealist milieu). I think a lot of Pollock's
interest in me was not altogether in what I was saying, but in that I had a
connection with Peggy Guggenheim. (In those days it was almost impossi-
ble for an unknown American artist to show in a first-rate modern gallery,
such as Curt Valentin or Pierre Matisse.) And it turned out, in fact, that
Peggy Guggenheim was the only one who recognized—because of the mi-
lieu she was in—the value of the new artists, and showed us with style and
class, to her credit. But Pollock learned something esthetically too. He was
barely past the Mexicans and coming up to the Picasso of the I93o's.
SIMON: You mentioned a second visit to Pollock.
MOTHERWELL: That second visit I recall vividly. Pollock was living with
Lee Krasner, who was a pupil and admirer of Hofmann, who lived only a
few doors from them. I think it was at Lee's behest that Pollock took me
over after dinner to see Hofmann. It was the first time I had met him, and I
at once realized that my being 26 years old—Hofmann was already in his
6o's—it would be impertinent for a young apprentice artist to tell him about
what painting was. As it turned out, Pollock got drunk on a big jug of red
wine, and we all had to carry him down four flights into the street and then
up four flights to his place. It was a helluva job.
SIMON: Did you see much of Pollock after that?
MOTHERWELL: After several months, Pollock and I became somewhat
friendly. He and his wife and I and my wife and the two Baziotes used to
write automatic poems together, which I kept in a book. Unfortunately,
this book is now lost, given away or stolen. I greatly regret that I have
never been able to recover the poems which were inserted in the book for
safekeeping!
SIMON: After Pollock, which artist did you contact?
MOTHERWELL: I think Peter Busa was the next. In those days Busa struck me

282 1960s
 as the epitome of the Italian artisan, gentle and charming. Just married.
I seem to recall that he was painting the female figure with the degree of ab-
straction of, let us say, Karl Hofer, or perhaps, Modigliani. After Busa, we
called on Kamrowski, a depressed man who expressed an interest in our
proposed project and did begin to work in these directions. The last person
to be visited—it was Pollock's initiative that took me to see him—was de
Kooning. He had a loft around West igth Street. In those days de Kooning
was painting figure paintings in a direction that he developed jointly with
Gorky and John Graham. De Kooning was also doing abstractions in a
rather loose and to me not very interesting manner. I think at this particular
time his figure paintings were not wholly resolved. He had some inability to
"finish" them. I remember that there were never eyes in the sockets. There
were other details that baffled him. In any case, he wasn't particularly inter-
ested in what I told him; he became interested in automatism only much
later.
SIMON: Does Gorky figure in this at all?
MOTHERWELL: Only to the extent that about two years later, Matta, on his
own, converted Gorky to the theory of automatism. Gorky in those days
wouldn't pay much attention to what we said, although I spent a whole
evening at Peggy Osborn's house telling him all about Surrealism, about
which, incidentally, he knew very little. This would be the spring of 1942.
SIMON: Would it be correct to say that an informal group of the artists you
and Baziotes contacted ended up by meeting from time to time in Matta's
studio in order to conduct certain experiments?
MOTHERWELL: To be truthful I don't recall an awful lot about that. The
meetings must have been separate. It was an awkward situation in that
Matta was the guiding spirit. You have to remember that he was much
more "successful," he was earning his living as an artist, he knew many fa-
mous collectors and artists very well, and he was part of the international
art-establishment. On the other hand, we were all loners, basically, ignored
and neglected; so that he would, so to speak, flirt with us, but never aban-
don his other world for us. In the end, though he was the instigator of it all,
the strongest relationships grew up among the American artists, because,
in a way, we were left in the lurch by him, and we made our own way.
Nevertheless, my conviction is that, more than any other single thing,
the introduction and acceptance of the theory of automatism brought about
a different look into our painting. We worked more directly and violently,
and ultimately on a much larger scale physically than the Surrealists ever

1960s 283
 had. It was the germ, historically, of what later came to be called Abstract
Expressionism.
SIMON: Can you recall any of the early experiments you and the others
made?
MOTHERWELL: Let's see. The summer of'411 was in Mexico. Either the
next summer or the one after, Peggy Guggenheim, who was by then married
to Max Ernst, took a house for the summer in Provincetown. I and several
other people followed. Matta was living nearby—he had a house in Well-
fleet. Several times (in going to Peggy's for dinner) Max took me into his
studio. There he had hung brushes from the ceiling on a cord so that they
would just touch a canvas placed on the floor beneath. They would swing
like a pendulum, making a kind of labyrinth on the canvas. Of course, this
anticipated Pollock's drip style, but only in a very limited sense, i.e., limited
to arcs. By comparison, what Pollock achieved was totally different, totally
free.
We experimented rather freely. Together we would make what the Sur-
realists called the Exquisite Corpse. You know what that is?
SIMON: Yes, of course. The paper is folded and each one does a different part
of the figure.
MOTHERWELL: Right. I remember that a conflict came up between Matta and
myself. As I said earlier, I greatly admired his pencil drawings, which were,
roughly speaking, in the same vein as Miró—very comic and very plastic.
When we began to play the Exquisite Corpse, I thought Matta would use
this degree of abstraction, but instead he drew comically, very
realistically. As in a Barney Google cartoon there would be a nose and,
very carefully, a pimple on it, a couple of hairs coming out of it—very much
in the style of present-day Mad Magazine. I expected that he would draw
in a more inventive Klee or Miró way—more the way I tried to draw at the
time. So the group drawings looked funny.
SIMON: Was Pollock receptive at all to these various experiments?
MOTHERWELL: I don't know. To be truthful, it always astonished me when he
appeared. He said very little, and made it very clear, after the second
session I had with him, that he didn't believe in group activities and would
not join the proposed manifestation that we were going to have. At the same
time, I think now, in retrospect, that he was much more ambitious than I
realized. In those days, given my university background, I did things with
a certain gratuitousness, with a love of doing things for their own sake. As
and "amateur" in the English sense. Pollock had had a much more tor-

284 1960s
 merited, and, socially, a much more difficult life than I had. He was probably
much tougher than I was, but didn't reveal this to me. He was certainly in-
terested in getting in a functioning world. Peggy Guggenheim, rather than
the Surrealists, was the real center of attraction to him, I think now.
SIMON: Peggy Guggenheim opened her gallery in November 1942. Exactly a
year later she gave Pollock his first one-man show.
MOTHERWELL: I don't remember exactly when Peggy became aware of Pol-
lock, Baziotes and myself among the young American artists. But I do re-
member that she was going to put on the first international collage show
that had ever been held in America. It was going to include all the names—
Schwitters, Max Ernst, Cornell, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Masson, etc. And
because she was benignly and generously interested in the three of us—you
see, she suggested to me that we all make some collages, and if they were any
good (she reserved the right of judgment) she'd put them in the show. It was
to have been the first chance for all three of us to show in a major gallery
with major artists. The idea both excited and intimidated us. One day, Pol-
lock suggested to me—Pollock in a funny way was a very shy as well as a
very violent man—he suggested in a reticent way that since neither of us
had ever made a collage that we try to do them together. I liked the idea and
we decided to do so in his studio. (He had been painting much longer than
I had, and had a much more professional set-up than mine in terms of
space, light and materials.)
And we did make our first collages together. He, I remember, burnt his
with matches and spit on it. Generally, he worked with a violence that I had
never seen before. As is well known, I took to collage like a duck to water. I
showed my results to Matta, who liked them very much, but said that they
are too little. "If you can do them that well little, you can do them bigger."
He urged me to make some big ones. And I did. They became the core of
my first show at Peggy Guggenheim's in October 1944.
SIMON: To return to Pollock for a moment, what, in your opinion, led him to
adopt the drip technique?
MOTHERWELL: I have a theory about how Pollock came to work this way.
Of course it's not demonstrable, but from everything I saw of him in those
days and from looking at his work, I believe it to be true: when I met him he
was just coming out from having been deeply influenced by the Mexican
painters—I think, particularly, by Orozco. The only American painter he
liked then—he told me so—was Albert Ryder. (In that famous early docu-
ment by him which appeared in one of the art magazines—I actually wrote it

1960s 285
 for him on the basis of interviews—he says this specifically.) As you know
he studied with Benton. What Ryder, Benton and Orozco all have in com-
mon is that they are highly rhythmic, brutal and Expressionist painters. I
am convinced that an intense, brutal rhythm was at the heart of Pollock's
plastic understanding as well.
When I met him, as I say, he was just coming out of Orozco into violent
Picassos of the sort having to do with the drawings for Guernica. In those
days Mary Gallery had a collection of art devoted entirely to Picasso and
Léger. It included Picasso's famous woman with a knife in her hand holding
a rooster—a brutal, beautiful picture. And I think Pollock's aspiration was
to make his own version of that kind of Picasso—the Picasso's of the mid-
I93o's. And he wasn't able to do it without making them look too much like
Picasso. Pollock, by nature, was a convulsive man, a really violent man and a
hard-drinking man. I think that at certain moments of despair and frustra-
tion, he would violently cross out his Picasso images, and, at a certain mo-
ment, some of them took on a beauty of their own. Part of the beauty of Pol-
lock's work is the sense that underneath his beautiful surface there is a sea
of swarming eels, lobsters and sharks. And I think that, at a certain moment
(it was perfectly natural), he realized that he didn't have to make the Picasso
thing at all, but could directly do the crossing out or dripping, or what have
you
But even in one of his very last shows, he returned to a version of a
Picassoesque figure. I think a lot of Pollock's doubt—which doesn't seem
to me strange at all—was that his gift was for something other than that what
he really wanted to do. I have a feeling that in many artists, when they finally
find their style, it's not what they originally wanted to do at all, but it turns
out to be what they are best at doing. And it would be a foolish man who
would do something else.
SIMON: Your comments about Pollock bring to my mind the question of
Masson. How much had you looked at Masson's work?
MOTHERWELL: We all looked at Masson's work a lot. He was here. No one, it
is true, knew him very well. To the best of my knowledge, he never learned a
word of English. Also, he lived in the country, in Connecticut; the Surreal-
ists, after they had been here a couple of years, tended to move to the coun-
try. Gorky, when he was picked up by the Surrealists, also moved to Con-
necticut. There was a regular enclave there.
SIMON: Where would you have seen Masson's work?
MOTHERWELL: He exhibited a lot. I can remember several one-man shows.

286 1960s
 He was a prolific, hard-working artist. Everyone would have been very
aware of his work in terms of automatism, which is how his work is built.
And many of us were also aware of some beautiful collages he had made
much earlier—a fairly blank canvas with a few automatic lines and very
often feathers or something like that pasted on—around 1927, or so.
SIMON: What about Kandinsky's work?
MOTHERWELL: I don't think most of us paid much attention to Kandinsky,
with the exception of Gorky; but even in Gorky's case, the interest was
much more technical, about edges, lines, etc., than in Kandinsky's overall
conception. I think that some historical things are, in a way, invented all
over again. My personal conviction is that had Kandinsky never existed,
Abstract Expressionism would look exactly the same way.
What I am saying is that at the particular moment in American art that
we are talking about, what was needed was a creative principle. It is never
enough to learn merely from pictures. When you learn merely from pic-
tures, the result is bound to be somewhat imitative as compared to starting
off with a real principle. In this sense, the theory of automatism was the first
modern theory of creating that was introduced into America early enough
to allow American artists to be equally adventurous or even more adventur-
ous than their European counterparts. It was this that put America on the
artistic map, so to speak, as authentically contemporary.
SIMON: In this respect Peggy Guggenheim's gallery served a very practical
function.
MOTHERWELL: Yes. Look at the artists who showed at Peggy's—Baziotes,
Pollock and myself—and a little later Rothko, Still and Gottlieb, and so
on. Before that time, Gorky had a large underground reputation. Also Hof-
mann. But very few people had seen their pictures. Around 1945 Kootz
came along and offered us money to paint—very little but enough to man-
age on. Many of the artists of what I think of as the second wave of Abstract
Expressionism were impressed that we were making a mark, so to speak,
and decided that it was time for them to start to move. And only then did
they begin to examine seriously the principles on which our work was
based—and in the process partly distorted them. Peggy always said she
would go back to Europe when the war was over, and she did.
I remember some years ago talking to Rothko about automatism. He
and I became friends in the mid 1940's. I told him a lot about Surrealism.
He was one of the few American painters who really liked Surrealist paint-
ing, went to Surrealist shows, and understood very well what I was talking

1960s 287
 about. When he developed the style in the late 1940's for which he is now fa-
mous, he told me that there was always automatic drawing under those
larger forms. When I talk about automatic drawing—the method we used—
I don't mean doodling, something absent-minded, trivial and tiny. If we
doodled—and perhaps you can say that we did—it was ultimately on the
scale of the Sistine Chapel. The essential thing was to let the brush take its
head and take whatever we could use from the results. And of course it was
Pollock who became the most identified with this technique of working.
In his dripping, one could see most clearly and nakedly the essential nature
of the process.
SIMON: A new sense of scale, then, I take it, you feel was an essential factor in
Abstract Expressionism—even in the 1940's?
MOTHERWELL: I think that one of the major American contributions to mod-
ern art is sheer size. There are lots of arguments as to whether it should be
credited to Pollock, Still or Rothko, even Newman. It's hard to say, proba-
bly Pollock, possibly Still
SIMON: Yes, what about Still in this connection?
MOTHERWELL: I had never heard of Still, until he had his first show at
Peggy's. Pollock had his in '43, Baziotes and I in '44, Rothko and Still in
'45.1 must say, it is to Still's credit—his was the show, of all those early
shows of ours, that was the most original. A bolt out of the blue.
SIMON: In what sense?
MOTHERWELL: Most of us were still working through images toward what
ultimately became Abstract Expressionism. Baziotes, Pollock and I all had
some degree of figuration in our work, abstract as our work was; whereas
Still had none. His canvases were large ones in earth colors. I don't sup-
pose that they would seem so large now, but they did then. They mainly
had a kind of jagged streak down the center, in a way like a present-day
Newman if it were much more free-handed, that is, if the line were jagged,
like lightning.
My belief is that Still's influence on Abstract Expressionism was
strongest later on, in the very late 40's when he and Rothko met in San
Francisco teaching in the same school. Rothko was deeply impressed with
Still; and Rothko, in those days, was, in turn, very close to Newman. (I also
think that they must have had some experience with Expressionism, which
undoubtedly contributed a certain element to Abstract Expressionism.)
But the developments I have been talking about—automatism particu-
larly—came out of Paris, and not out of either German or American Expres-

288 1960s
sionism. I think the "Expressionist" part of Abstract Expressionism had to
do with a certain violence native to the American character; I do not think it
was the result of esthetic considerations. What, in my opinion, happened in
American painting after the war had its origins in automatism that was as-
similated to the particular New York situation—that is, the Surrealist tone
and literary qualities were dropped, and the doodle transformed into some-
thing plastic, mysterious, and sublime. No Parisian is a sublime painter, nor
a monumental one, not even Miró.

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 The 1970s
EMERGING CONTEXTS
AND CLOSER READINGS
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JUDITH WOLFE Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery

While Jackson Pollock's interest in high art was paramount, the theories of
Carl Gustav Jung were also important as a means of realizing an expression
that was both individual and universal in its implications. This aspect of Pol-
lock, while widely known, has not been sufficiently explored, nor has it even
received proper credit as a motivating force within his development.
Pollock's knowledge of Jung's work seems to have begun in 1934 when, as
a janitor at the City and Country School in New York City, he met Helen
Marot, a teacher interested in Jungian psychology. Through her guidance, he
would have been aware of Jung's latest writings, for she knew Mrs. Gary Baynes,
who translated Jung's writings for English language publication both in En-
gland and in the United States under the auspices of the Analytical Psychol-
ogy Club of New York.1
A letter from Sanford Pollock to his brother Charles in July 1937 states that
he, Sandy, had taken Jackson to "a well recommended Doctor, a Psychiatrist,
. . . some six months" previously.2 Art therapy may have been used in this
treatment, for it was Pollock who suggested to Henderson in 1939 that he use
drawings as a basis of psychological analysis.3 The painter was at the West-
chester Division of New York Hospital in treatment for acute alcoholism from
June to September, 1938. Early in 1939, for 18 months until the summer of
1940, Pollock was in analysis with the Jungian psychologist, Joseph L. Hen-
derson. (Henderson is included in Man and His Symbols, a collection of es-
says edited by Jung and published in 1964 as a popular introduction to Jung-
ian thought.) After Henderson left for San Francisco, Pollock consulted Dr.
Violet Staub de Laszlow, a prominent Jungian who later edited Psyche and
Symbol (1958) and the Modern Library Basic Writings (1959) of Jung.4 This
relationship lasted at least two years, possibly longer.5
In the fall of 1943 Pollock sought a different treatment, with a homeopathic
physician in New York, whom he visited more or less regularly until his death.6
Five years later, in 1948, he received help that seemed effective from a general
practitioner in East Hampton: "He is an honest man, I can believe him," was
Pollock's explanation to his wife.7 Two years later (1950) Pollock was drinking

SOURCE: Artforum (November 1972), 65-73. Copyright © Artforum, November 1972,

"Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery," by Judith Wolfe

293
 again. From March 1951 to June 1952 he consulted a woman psychiatrist spe-
cializing in alcoholism and took part in group therapy sessions, only to dis-
continue them when the doctor objected to the nature of his concurrent bio-
chemical treatment, which lasted for two years, beginning in September 1951.
Then, in the summer of 1955, he reentered analysis with Ralph Klein, a clini-
cal psychologist of the Sullivanian Institute.8
The listing of professional treatments Pollock underwent is not an exhaus-
tive probe, but it is fair to say that Pollock's contacts with Jungian thought are
strongest early in his career. In fact, he had immediate access to Jung's writ-
ings and ideas from the mid-'30s to the early '405. Also, it seems as if Pollock
gave up on psychological means and favored the physiological for the better
part of that career, that is, from around 1943 to early 1951, mid-1952 to 1955.
Nonetheless, weeks before his death in 1956, Pollock said in reference to the
labels "nonobjective" and "nonrepresentational," "I'm very representational
some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of
your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge. We're all of us influenced by
Freud, I guess. I've been a Jungian for a long time."9
Mrs. Lee Krasner Pollock recalls that Pollock referred to his sessions with
Dr. Henderson as having been important to him.10 Yet, in 1939 Henderson
was only in his first year of practice and has since admitted to having to cope
with the problem of his own counter-transference:

I wonder why I neglected to find out, study or analyze his personal problems
in the first year of his work I wonder why I did not seem to try to cure his
alcoholism I have decided that it is because his unconscious drawings
brought me strongly into a state of counter-transference to the symbolic mate-
rial he produced. Thus I was compelled to follow the movement of his sym-
bolism as inevitably as he was motivated to produce it.11

Thus, personal problems were not the issue, but "symbolic material" was.
As Jungians are schooled in mythology and anthropology, Henderson proba-
bly dealt with such information in his sessions with the artist. "Most of my
comments centered around the nature of the archetypal symbolism in his
drawings," Henderson later wrote to В. Н. Friedman, Pollock's most recent
biographer.12
Pollock we know was interested in American Indian cultures. It is note-
worthy that 20 years later, in "Ancient Myths and Modern Man," the chapter
which Henderson contributed to Man and His Symbols, the psychologist used
as many examples from folk tales of American Indians as from Greek myths.

294 1970s
 Pollock therefore was cognizant of the areas of psychology and American
anthropology—so important to the New York painters in the early '405—
earlier than were most other American painters of his generation. In addition,
his attitudes resulted from an internal need rather than from a programmatic
artistic development. In Pollock's case, the Jungian intonation preceded the
fashionable psychological stress (primarily Freudian) which accompanied the
absorption of Surrealist thinking in this country during World War II.
Jung's 1932 article on "Picasso," his only article devoted to a painter, may
have been known to Pollock in 1940 when a translation appeared in New
York, or even earlier through the offices of his Jungian friends. There Jung
states that a

series of images ... begins as a rule with the symbol of the Nekyia—the jour-
ney to Hades, the descent into the unconscious The journey through the
psychic history of mankind has as its object the restoration of the whole man,
whole with regard to the bipolarity of human nature. After the symbols of
madness experienced during the period of disintegration there follow images
which represent the coming together of the opposites: light/dark, above/
below, white/black, male/female, etc.13

The ideas of a journey into the unconscious, often called the "night sea jour-
ney," and the coming together of opposites abound in Jung's writings as well
as in his students' discussions, so that this particular article, though surely of
interest to Pollock, need not be the sole source of these ideas. The disintegra-
tion of conflicting opposites might find its painterly analogue in Pollock's early
allover abstraction in which light/dark and warm/cool colors frenetically in-
terrupt each other in short brushstrokes.
Most of Pollock's paintings before 1942 can be dated only approximately.14
They show great diversity of subject matter and style. The subjects may be
loosely classified as figure groups and less frequently single figure studies,
stylized landscapes with and without figures, purely symbolic forms, and
forms so thoroughly abstracted as to only arbitrarily belong to the above
groupings. When the animal is part of a figure group in these earlier works, it
is as a separate entity and man is present in some connected way, as, for in-
stance, horse and rider. At a point which seems simultaneous with the entry
of stylistic elements derived from Picasso, animal and human parts are con-
joined in the same figure. Such a metamorphosis is clearly present in a work
called Painting of around 1938. Lawrence Alloway feels the point of departure
for this work was a late Cubist still life such as the 1925 Studio with Plaster

1970s 295
 Head or Ram's Head by Picasso.15 If this is so, it doesn't entirely account
for the emotional effect communicated by the inverted human head, upward-
thrust clenched fist, and downward-piercing beak shape.
Painting may be the earliest example of one of Pollock's preferred formats:
a horizontal rectangle with registers above and below and closed off at the
sides, a type more fully developed in Guardians of the Secret and Pasiphaë of
1943 and furthered with variations in Night Mist of 1944 and Numbers и and
14 of 1951, to cite the most important. While Picasso and the Mexican mural-
ists are clearly influential in Painting, William Blake may have also contributed
to the conception of the picture in terms of both content and format. The 1936
Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism exhibition held at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art included precursors of these movements and kindred works by artists
of earlier centuries. A plate from Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job is listed
and illustrated in the influential catalogue: "With dreams upon my bed, Thou
scarest me and affrightest me with Visions." Certainly such a personal reli-
gious view would have appealed to Pollock. His partiality to Blake is clear, for
a work by that artist was one of the illustrations which Pollock had tacked on
his Long Island studio wall.16
Jungians stress the importance of Job's perception of God as a dual power.
Blake expresses this duality in his depiction of God, whose leg metamor-
phoses from a manlike calf to a cloven hoof. And the text which Blake en-
graved just above this image, from II Corinthians, reads: "Satan himself is
transformed into an Angel of Light "Job, outstretched upon a bed, pushes
away the hovering Satan-God, who is depicted with pointed tufts of hair.
Muscular arms loop up from flames below and tug at Job. At the top register
are "stone tablets of the Law" from which emanate "the lightnings of damna-
tion."17 In Pollock's Painting the horizontal registrations with wider implica-
tions than a purely sexual reference may well owe much to this composition
by Blake. Pollock's painting, however, resembles the etching only in general
tone, in the undulating lower area and menacing pointed form above. Pollock
has felt the need to leave more space at the sides. On the left, in fact, are two
elements which correspond to specific shapes in the etching: an arc similar to
half the stone tablets and a zigzag like the bolt of lightning; both elements are
seen laterally.
The Painting remains much more personal than any of its possible icono-
graphie sources. Certainly some private symbolism is intended. Perhaps the
beaked birdlike head may represent reputed spiritual qualities, a false god
with the capacity to torture. The object of its wrath is a human/bull-or-horse

296 1970s
head, itself symbolic perhaps of more earthy, impulsive qualities. A sentence
from Jung's discussion of Job is apposite:

Here Job is voicing the torment of soul caused by the onslaught of uncon-
scious desires; the libido festers in his flesh, a cruel God has overpowered him
and pierced him through with barbed thoughts that agonize his whole being.

Jung goes on to comment (C. W., V, pp. 289-90):

The same image occurs in Nietzsche:

Stretched out, shivering,
Like one half dead whose feet are warmed,
Shaken by unknown fevers,
Shuddering from the icy pointed arrows of frost,
Hunted by thee, О thought,
Unutterable! veiled! horrible one!
Thou huntsman behind the clouds.
Struck to the ground by thee,
Thou mocking eye that gazeth at me from the dark:
Thus do I lie,
Twisting, writhing, tortured
With eternal tortures,
Smitten
By thee, cruel huntsman,
Thou unknown—God!

Pollock probably looked at the volume in which Jung wrote these lines, Psy-
chology of the Unconscious, in a chapter entitled, "The Battle for Deliverance
from the Mother."
At about the same time as Painting, Pollock executed a vertical canvas of
more dense and masklike interlocked shapes. Its title, Birth, may have more
than one meaning. There are similarities with Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon,
the painting generally regarded as heralding the birth of Cubism, and one
which Pollock especially liked.18 In addition to Pollock's strident use of mask
forms and a cascading composition, the bent "leg" in the lower left part of the
painting recalls the leg of the squatting woman in the Picasso canvas. The
head of the same figure in the Picasso is cupped in a variation on the crescent
shape of the melon slice beside her leg. Such shapes seem to form each of the
circular "masks" of the Pollock. That these telescoping, tumbling forms can
be read as masks is clear from an untitled painting of about 1936 in which Pol-

1970s 297
 lock depicts a standing male nude, rather like an archaic Kouros except that
the head is represented by the same mask-and-crescent form which is multi-
plied in Birth.19 The masks of Birth acquire an additional resonance when we
realize Pollock seems to innovate upon just that section of the Demoiselles in
which the derivation from the ritual mask is most extreme.
Pollock's leg has an odd terminus, rather like the end of a hollow cylinder.
The analogous Picasso leg terminates behind a still life in which there is a
similar round shape, probably an apple. There may be a larger reason for the
existence of this aperture at the end of a limb. It could represent the place
from which life emerges and into which life-forming substance is put: Jung
treats most symbols as bisexual in nature. In fact, an illustration from Jung's
Symbols of Transference, first published in the United States in 1916 as Psych-
ology of the Unconscious, depicts people walking out of a large hollow tube, a
"birth-giving orifice" of Mexican mythology (C. W., V, p. 125).
That Pollock's circular mask-beings emerge from between the legs is not
surprising. The upraised fingers to the right of this area, quite Picasso-like,
and similar to those in the upper left of Demoiselles d'Avignon, comprise the
most naturalistic element in the picture. Such a distinction calls to our atten-
tion the fact that the hand is the immediate means of creating a painting, and
perhaps this could be an additional meaning for Pollock's title. Tony Smith,
the sculptor, says that Pollock was very curious about the idea of having chil-
dren and asked questions of Smith, father of four, implying that he related
human offspring to the production of art: "He was always asking what it was
like. Did they seem a part of you, an extension of you? ... It was almost as if he
thought you could have some kind of control over what they would be like—
even as babies. It must have been the way he thought about art."20
In 1939 Henderson formed the opinion that "a psychic birth-death-rebirth
cycle was essential to the maintenance of Pollock's sanity."21 This is a widely
held Jungian concept and would certainly have been known to Pollock before
he met Henderson, and therefore, could figure in the painting's heritage at
whatever date the painting was made.
Birth was exhibited in a group show of American and French paintings
selected by John Graham early in 1942 at McMillen, Inc., New York City. Pol-
lock probably sought the acquaintance of this cosmopolitan artist after the ap-
pearance of Graham's article, "Primitive Art and Picasso," in the Magazine of
Art of April, 1937. In his paper, which is steeped in Jung, Graham spoke of
the collective unconscious as having manifested itself throughout the ages in
meaningful forms which the present-day unconscious is capable of receiving.

298 1970s
He felt this force was most evident in the design of primitive art and in Pi-
casso's work after 1927. As Picasso, Jung, and the art of tribal cultures, spe-
cifically the Indians of the American Southwest, were all important to Pollock,
there was certainly matter in the article to delight him. But the degree of Gra-
ham's influence is hard to pinpoint, as is Graham's work of the time.
One of Pollock's paintings, at least, seems to bear some relation to Gra-
ham. Bird, tentatively dated c. 1941, is marked by the color preferences associ-
ated with Graham: cerulean blue, red, white, black outlining. Such a heraldic
combination of images must reflect a will to meaning. The single eye hovering
in the sky might imply spirituality and possibly godliness; in a 1943 explica-
tion of Jung's psychology, such a floating eye was the "Eye of God," and for
the patient who drew it, interpreted to be "a symbol of the Self."22 The bird's
body is another variation on the mask motif. The top half, including the wings,
stands against the sky while the lower portion is in the darkness of the bottom
half of the picture, in which two human heads extend from opposite poles of
a glowing, golden orb. The heads are only minimally differentiated—symme-
try was important in this painting—but the differences in the rendering of
noses and mouths convince me that the heads must be female and male. The
female nose is marked by nostrils (openings), while the male nose is a pro-
truding shape; the female lips seem fuller and softer than the male.
Considered diagrammatically, the painting could be interpreted as the bal-
ance and conjoining of male and female qualities in the treasured region of the
unconscious. From this harmonious balance, one's conscious state may real-
ize its highest possibilities. This heavy, even dogmatic, treatment contrasts
sharply with Pollock's usual multivalent references, both artistic and sym-
bolic, a multivalence which provokes a more mysterious interest and more
closely approximates the complexities of Jungian interpretation.
Pollock's painting of 1942-1946 is more "of a piece" than the early work but
still shows great diversity. Imagery contributes to the seeming consistency,
but Pollock has largely settled on a composition of one or two or more ab-
stract personages. This concentration on human/animal imagery is exercised
with varying degrees of figure-readability and of figure-on-ground versus an
allover interaction of forms. A theoretical position would make us want to see
this stylistic variation establish a progression leading into the allover drip
paintings. If one selects the proper paintings, this can be done. However, con-
temporaneous with such "development," Pollock continued to paint legible
figures against distinct grounds, as in The Child Proceeds of 1946.23 It seems
that Pollock's attitude at this time favors what he is saying as much as how he

1970s 299
 says it. Indeed, Robert Motherwell, with whom he was briefly associated in
the early '405, wrote prophetically in 1944 that Pollock's "principle problem
is to discover what his true subject is. And since painting is his thought's
medium, the resolution must grow out of the process of his painting itself."24
Moon Woman of 1942, a painting included in Pollock's first one-man show
held in Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1943, clearly de-
rives from Pollock's Jungian interests, as its title attests. For Jung, the moon is a
symbol of periodic creation, death (when invisible), and recreation. Most im-
portant to Pollock, perhaps, the moon represents the Diana-Hecate dualism:
the young girl, anima-spirit, contrasted with the all-devouring Terrible Mother.
The painting, Moon Woman, with its cursive arabesques and the slim aspect
of its stick figure, appears to deal with the anima-spirit: "vague feelings and
moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for per-
sonal love, feelings for nature, and... [a man's] relation to the unconscious."25
This picture, unlike many of the period, is easily experienced as capricious
and delightful, though sinister overtones are present as well. The eye pierces a
crescent shape which produces little scratches of tears or blood, and a version
of the conventional Picasso profile is soberly incorporated into what at first
seemed the back side of the lady's head.
Guardians of the Secret,, 1943, while not much larger than Moon Woman,
suggests the incipient monumentalism of the later Pollock. Its rectangular
sectioning, working in from the framing edge, provides a structure similar to
both the ground plan and the post-and-lintel elevation of a Greek temple, a
structure which also bears testimony to Mondrian's presence in New York.
The vertical guardians flanking the center, which houses the inner chaos of
the secret—the casket or bed or altar—are most likely male and female figures,
the alchemical King and Queen, Sol and Luna. Which is male and which is
female remains unanswered, though most probably the female is on the left,
as was the case in Bird and as is consistent with Jung's historical and psycho-
logical data.
The lower guardian, an alert dog, derives from the animal world and is also
the least abstracted figure. From him, an ability to decipher the images de-
creases in moving upward through the flanking figures to the upper register,
and intelligibility is confounded altogether in the central area. The forms which
emerge from this center seem to occupy the two adjacent registers of back-
ground in the upper section. This background duality may refer to the higher
and lower aspects of conscious ideas, emerging from the undifferentiated
unconscious. These "ideas" are more conceptualized than the instinctual ani-

300 1970s
mal world. In this sense, then, the painting can be understood to represent
both the manifestations of, as well as the guardians of, that central secret, the
unconscious.
Such a diagrammatic interpretation of the painting is consonant with the
fact that Jungians diagram all aspects of the psyche—the ego, the uncon-
scious, the sphere of consciousness, to name but a few. However,Jungian dia-
grams are most frequently circular, radiating from a center and divided into
four parts which contain no figure. If Pollock's composition represents a Jun-
gian scheme, it has been entirely remodeled.
Pasiphaë of 1943 uses a similar design format. Geometry is not nearly so
evident, however; the strongest internal boundary is the broken ellipse in
which the central struggle takes place. There appears to be an "audience" in
the double flanking figures, now four in all. In Jung's writings four is a symbol
of wholeness and completeness, and the number plays a prominent role in his
discussions of the process of individuation: the four developmental stages of
the anima; the four functions of consciousness—thought, intuition, feeling,
sensation; or the four elements of the physical world whose alchemical inter-
action provides an analogy for that process. The four beings who witness the
central event might locate it in some such psychic drama.
According to William S. Lieberman, Pollock's first title for this painting
was The White Whale; according to Bryan Robertson, Moby Dick.26 Pollock
only changed it to Pasiphaë at the enthusiastic insistence of James Johnson
Sweeney, the curator of the Museum of Non-Objective Art, now the Guggen-
heim. One must remember that Pollock took great care in choosing titles but
that it was generally after the completion of the painting that he dealt with this
problem. The central motif of Pasiphaë seems equally as much a woman
astride a bull as a white whale pursued by Ahab. Whatever the final title, each
of the possibilities concerns the obsession of a human being with an allegori-
cal animal. "In mythology," Jung notes, "the unconscious is portrayed as a
great animal, for instance ... as a whale, wolf or dragon," and since the equiva-
lent area in Guardians of the Secret was the unconscious, the elliptical arena of
Pasiphaë may symbolize the unconscious as well (C. W.y XIV, p. 210).
In this ellipse a sticklike figure struggles with a larger animal-being, white
shot with yellows, pale blue and lavender and whose flailing limbs, neither
distinctly bull nor whale, end in toes and possibly fingers. Whether the action
be a sexual or tragic agon is of little consequence to the overall Jungian view,
in which the "conjunctio" takes place in the "vessel," here the ellipse, which
"is also called the grave"; the union is understood to be a "shared death," with

1970s 301
 rebirth following. The striving for this union—fully-achieved psychic integra-
tion and the attendant expansion of understanding—is the central concern of
Jung's work and, quite certainly, of Pollock's paintings.
Moby Dick was a favorite book of Pollock's.27 He fully appreciated the sym-
bol for which he named his picture. There can be no doubt that he meant to
represent the quest and anger and engagement with a central force potent
enough to bite off one's leg—to castrate.
Unlike Pasiphaë, the animal imagery of She-Wolf is readily identifiable. The
large wolf occupies the major portion of the composition; a central, rectangu-
lar area is marked by the ground line, foreleg, and a straight line somewhat
near the creature's back. This central area, so different from that ofPasiphaë,
is devoid of activity, especially in contrast with the swirling lines and over-
painting at the edges of the picture. This barren area is occupied by the crea-
ture's teats, a place of nourishment. Just where Romulus and Remus ought to
suckle if we accept as Pollock's source the Etruscan statue of the she-wolf with
the Renaissance addition of infants, there is studiously nothing. The absent
nurslings may find a counterpart in a drawing Pollock had given to Hender-
son several years earlier, in which a human mother raises her hand in denial
against the child seeking her breast.28
Jung mentions the Roman she-wolf in his Psychology of the Unconscious,
with which Pollock was probably acquainted. In the same chapter, "The Dual
Mother," Jung describes the psychosis of a possessive mother who in a delir-
ium, "at the time of the climacteric ... [ran] about on all fours, howling like a
wolf. . . . She had herself become the symbol of the all-devouring mother"
(С.Ж,У,рр.321,328).
The relation of both the mother and a large animal with the unconscious is
clear in Jung's writings, as is the fact that every mythical element has positive
and negative aspects. In the She-Wolf, Pollock has presented an animal with
power over life and death. The teats exhibit her life-giving function; the ab-
sence of children indicates her more fearful aspects. Pollock's comment on the
painting was:

She-Wolf came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my
part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable,
could only destroy it.29

There is a specific instance where Pollock uses an American Indian image

published by Jung. Sir Herbert Read, one of the editor's of Jung's Collected

302 1970s
Works, wrote in 1961 to Lawrence Alloway of a Haida Indian tattoo pattern
representing the woman in the moon comparable to Pollock's Moon Woman
Cuts the Circle of 1943. Read also mentioned a "reference on the same page to
a Hottentot legend about 'cutting offa sizeable piece' of the moon."30 The leg-
end in question actually refers to the sun, but this does not dilute the source of
Pollock's title. Jung illustrates the tattoo in Psychology of the Unconscious in
the chapter on "The Dual Mother."
In this chapter, Longfellow's Hiawatha was used as a framework upon
which Jung discussed the nature of the son's relationship to the mother, with
the specific intention of illustrating that the act of breaking away from the
mother is itself a form of death necessary to begin a new life. "Young Hia-
watha asks his grandmother what the moon really is. She tells him that the
moon is the body of a grandmother who had been thrown up there by one of
her warlike grandchildren in a fit of rage." Jung then relates this concept to
"the throwing upward of the mother, her fall and birthpangs" (C. W.y V, pp.
317-318). The Hottentot legend next put forward is again meant to illustrate a
human birth from a heavenly body.
These origins come into play in Jung's further discussion of Hiawatha's
relationships to his grandmother, nature, dead mother, and bride. It may be
possible to make an intricate, direct interpretation of the painting from Jung's
text, but perhaps it is wiser to let the matter stand as Pollock's personal trans-
lation of the ideas of birth, entry into the mother-unconscious, and cutting
loose, the emergence into the outer world in a state of renewed fruitfulness.
Alloway's text implies that it is the figure on the right in Moon Woman Cuts
the Circle which is based on the tattoo. However, its swinging counter-gestures
strain the similarity, which I find only in the arc-curve of the body and in the
billowy contour of the legs. Pollock has even added a feather headdress to this
creature. The little semicircular entity in the disintegrating red circle, be-
cause of its vague sketchiness, can be seen as nearer to the Haida figure. But
this concerns only the visual motif. The title and context of the picture clearly
do relate to Jung.
What is more, Pollock employed the tattoo in another painting. It is quite
recognizable as the figure floating at the top center of Guardians of the Secret,
but reversed to face the opposite direction. It hovers in what might be the
realm of conscious ideas, midway between the heads of the male and female.
This symbol of woman in the moon, emerging from the unconscious, might
serve as mediator between man and his anima, "the woman within." As Jung

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 says, "The assimilation of contrasexual tendencies . . . becomes a task that
must be fulfilled [in the second half of life] in order to keep the libido in a state
of progression."31
Another variation of this motif can be found in Night Sounds of 1944. The
crescent moon is clearly mounted on a neck and the negative spaces in the lit-
tle figure now can be read as features of a face. Chalked next to "her" in this
painting is a motif we've met before: the winged figure of Bird, without its
wings. The embryolike form in the "body" of the bird itself resembles an
upside-down variation on the Haida tattoo. The bird could now be a much-
demeaned (in relation to the moon) "sun-disc equipped with . . . feet." Simi-
larly, it could be a particle either to be subsumed into the growing moon, or
just cut away from the waning moon. For each of these possibilities there are
male/female, consciousness/unconsciousness analogies.
Thus we see Pollock borrowing a specific Jungian motif and welding it
into more complex situations and even new formal versions but nonetheless
respecting the "moonness" of the motif and, in one instance, even its "Indian-
ness." Similar sources probably may be found for many of the frequently re-
peated motifs in Pollock's work. They need not always come from primitive
art through Jung's publications, although this seems a likely source. In going
through Pollock's papers, Bernice Rose came across many references to arti-
cles and books by or about Jung.32
It is noteworthy that Pollock has chosen images from Jung that were origi-
nally produced on the American continent. The rationale for this may derive
from Jung himself: he specifically states that his allusion to the Indian legend
of Hiawatha has greater validity because it is used in interpreting the writings
of an American (C. W., V, p. 313).
One of the later paintings from the 1942-1946 period is Circumcision of
1946, which was shown in the spring of the same year. It may well be one of
the pictures Clement Greenberg found "at first sight crowded and repetitious
reveal[ing] on second sight an infinity of dramatic movement and variety."33
Circumcision, an initiation "rite of death and rebirth, which provides the
novice with a 'rite of passage' from one stage of life to the next," as explained
by Henderson, is the "break .. . with the original parent archetype" and the
beginning of "assimilation into the life of the group." Man "gives himself to
his assigned role in the community" and "becomes more consciously related
to woman."34
As one unravels the "dramatic movement" of the painting, a ground line
becomes apparent. Beneath this line, at the left half, lies the boy undergoing

304 1970s
the initiation. It is here that Pollock chose to put his signature. The ground
band is balanced by a less distinct top area and the space in between appears
vertically divided approximately in thirds. In the middle section I find the fig-
ure of a grown man in a "snowshoveling" posture, presumably inflicting the
wound upon the boy. Above the man are violent lightning forms. Perched on a
post to the man's right may be the figure of an owl, traditionally representative
of darkness and death, not very auspicious but indicative of one aspect of the
ceremony.
Black and white reproductions increase the difficulty involved in "read-
ing" the other two sections which, unlike that of the man, seem to continue
into the upper area. Each could be a giant cult figure, such as one Pollock had
drawn for Henderson several years earlier.35 On the right one can make out a
seated man with a tattooed body smoking a pipe and, on the left, a standing
woman whose eye focuses downward on the boy's head in a reciprocally-
crossed beam. The triangle superimposed on her head, as well as its balanc-
ing counterpoint below, recall Matisse's Piano Lesson (1916-17), acquired by
the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, the very year of Pollock's painting. Inci-
dentally, in the Matisse, a representation of a woman sits over and behind a
boy. Perhaps these large scale beings in Pollock's painting represent the par-
ent archetypes, or the future grown-up life, or both.
In the year 1947, Pollock elaborated his allover drip technique. To one of
the early paintings of this period (1947-1950) he gave the title Alchemy'.36 It
was Jung who focused on the study of alchemy when in the late 19205 he "had
found a quotation in literature that [he] thought might have some connection
with early Byzantine alchemy," and in 1929 his Commentary on the Golden
Flower first presented his interest in the symbolic significance of alchemy for
modern psychology.37 His lectures at the Éranos conferences in 1935 and 1936
dealt with the subject again; they were translated and published in New York
in 1939 and later formed the basis of Psychology and Alchemy, published 1944.
Further studies followed, but it is clear that Jung's main concepts on the im-
portance of alchemy were available to New Yorkers by the late '305 and cer-
tainly by the mid-'4os.
Alchemical evolution is epitomized by the formula, Solve et Coagula (dis-
solve and congeal): "analyze all the elements in yourself, dissolve all that is in-
ferior in you, even though you may break in doing so; then, with the strength
acquired from the preceding operation, congeal."38 Cirlot, the Spanish poet,
art critic, and symbology expert, explains, "The four stages of the process were
signified by different colors, as follows: black (guilt, origin, latent forces) for

1970s 305
 'prime matter' (a symbol of the soul in its original condition); white (minor
work, first transmutation, quicksilver); red (sulphur, passion); and, finally,
gold." These are the colors of Pollock's Alchemy, with yellow instead of gold,
to which aluminum has been added to mediate between the light-dark con-
trasts. Did Pollock title the work only after he noticed fire colors and melting
forms, or did the motto solve et coagula guide him in its facture?
Pollock had always had a predilection for equalizing the paint activity
across the surface of his canvas, manifested in various ways from his paintings
as a Thomas Hart Benton student to Flame, from Stenographic Figure to Cir-
cumcision. In Eyes in the Heat and Shimmering Substance of 1946, as William
Rubin points out, "fragments of Pollock's earlier totemistic presences are cov-
ered by the rhythmical linear pattern of white paint which dominates their
surfaces.^^ Alchemy appears to be one of the first attempts to deal with paint
interactions in such a way that the underlying figure is not necessary. Paint
movement itself, as an analogy to other, deeper processes, can become the sub-
ject. While I think the process of painting prompted Pollock's stylistic "break-
through," it is entirely likely that Jung's concept of the process of psychic indi-
viduation provided important confirmation for the new style.
Curiously, it seems that Pollock added some "figures" to the top layers of
this painting. I read an asterisk-star, a numeral "4," a space, and a numeral "6"
from left to right laid on in thick white paint. The "4" and the "6" show up
in enough other works to merit attention. In an untitled drawing of around
1943 they are scattered across the "body" of a figure reminiscent of the Venus
of Willendorf, and "6 4" is plainly written at the lower part of the body of
Wounded Animal, 1943. To Jung, four represented completeness; six, with
even and uneven factors, represented the hermaphrodite or fusion of male and
female, and could be "most skilled in begetting" and a representative of "mar-
riage and harmony" (C. W., XVI, p. 238, n. 8). As Jung never underestimated
numbers, I feel that Pollock is here, in a marginally abstract manner, indicat-
ing what is going on in his work. Lee Krasner Pollock once asked him about
the numbers "4" and "6" and "he insisted that '46' was his magic number." She
went on to explain that he had lived at 46 East 8th Street and his address at
West Houston, she believed, had been 46.40
Alchemy was shown early in 1948 at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The titles of
most of the sixteen other paintings in that show might be classed under the
headings "sky" and "sea": Shooting Star, Comet, Reflections of the Big Dipper;
Sea Change, Full Fathom Five, Watery Paths; and, in between, Lucifer, Vortex,
and Phosphorescence. These titles, Mrs. Pollock has explained, were the result

306 1970s
of a group effort. Just before the paintings were sent off to the Betty Parsons
Gallery, the Pollocks' neighbors Mary and Ralph Manheim came over to Pol-
lock's studio and the four of them had a naming session. Everyone contributed,
with Pollock vetoing or approving titles. Largely, it was the Manheim's titles
which were used, Mrs. Pollock remembers.41
By the 1949 exhibition, all works were numbered. It is worth reviewing Pol-
lock's choice of titles. Almost two-thirds of the individual titles of these paint-
ings attest to a new interest in nature. In the 1947 exhibition the works were
divided into two series: Sounds in the Grass and Accabonac Creek. These na-
ture themes reflect the fact that Pollock moved to Long Island in November
1945; the summer of 1946, when he would have painted the works for the Jan-
uary 1947 show, was his first summer of exploration in his countryside terri-
tory. Before that, in the spring show of 1946, his titles were more specifically
related to Jungian themes: Circumcision, The Troubled Queen, The Little King,
High Priestess, Once Upon a Time. They are urban ideas, taken from books
rather than from nature. The 1945 titles clustered around black, totems, and
the night: Horizontal on Black, Square on Black, The Totem—Lesson I, The
Totem—Lesson II, The Night Dancer, The First Dream, Night Ceremony, Night
Mist, Night Magic. In 1943 the titles centered on the moon and the male-and-
female themes.
Despite these generalizations, we can clearly see Pollock's ideas moving
from Jungian mythical concepts to natural phenomena. Jung is not forgotten,
though. For one thing, the theme of the "night sea journey" of the psyche
through the unconscious may inform the sea titles of the 1948 exhibition, or
at least Pollock's receptiveness to such titles. Constellation titles allude to
Jung as well.
Early in 1949 Pollock's show at the Parsons Gallery heralded the change to
paintings designated by numbers. The accompanying descriptive titles which
sometimes emerged were mostly names of colors, although references to na-
ture and an object did slip in: Shadows, Summertime, White Cockatoo, The
Wooden Horse, (and Arabesque]. At the end of that year, the next show had
only Out of the Web and Birds of Paradise as subtitles for two of the 34 paint-
ings. The latter must be a later addition for Mrs. Pollock had never heard of
it. In 1950 the exceptions were Lavender Mist, titled by Clement Greenberg,
Shadows, probably a later name, Autumn Rhythm, Pollock's own title, and One,
again Pollock's own, but the result of a somewhat forced situation.42
Alfonso Ossorio, Pollock's friend, wrote the introduction for the late 1951
exhibition catalogue at the Parsons Gallery and at Pollock's request, it was

1970s 307
 reprinted in the 1952 Museum of Modern Art catalogue for the Fifteen Ameri-
cans exhibition. It has a remarkably Jungian ring:

The attention focused on his immediate qualities ... has left largely un-
touched the forces that compel him to work in the manner that he does
His painting confronts us with a visual concept organically evolved from
a belief in the unity that underlies the phenomena among which we live.
Void and solid, human action and inertia, are metamorphosed and refined
into the energy that sustains them and is their common denominator....
The present group of paintings is done with an austerity of means that
underlies their protean character: thin paint and raw canvas are the vehicles
for images full of the compulsion of dreams and the orderliness of myth
[The paintings] both reawaken in us the sense of personal struggle and its
collective roots and recall to us the too easily forgotten fact that "what is
without is within."

Ossorio's final quote is probably from Jung. As so many efforts have been
devoted to describing the nature of the space in Pollock's painting, I would
like to give in full one of Jung's famous "within-without" passages as an alter-
native prospect:

I can only stop and gaze with admiration and awe at the depths and heights
of our psychic nature. Its nonspatial world conceals an untold abundance of
images that have been amassed and organically consolidated during millions
of years of development. My consciousness is like an eye that contains in it-
self the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic nonego that fills them non-
spatially. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful
psychic factors. The most we may be able to do is to misunderstand them, but
we can never rob them of their power by denying them. Beside this picture
I would like to place that of the starry vistas of the heavens at night, for the
only equivalent of the world within is the world without, and just as I reach
this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through
the medium of the psyche.43

This ambivalence between the spatial and non-spatial, the natural and the
psychically phenomenal is what we experience in Pollock's now classic all-
over drip paintings. The drip technique evolved as Pollock dealt with the pro-
cess of painting; and at this period there is seldom any imagery to analyze as
"Jungian"; yet I feel Jung's involvement with the ultimate meaningfulness of

308 1970s
the image—its numinous quality—must be credited as one of the factors be-
hind these magnificent "outpourings."
The fact that Pollock discontinued his sessions with Jungian doctors need
not imply a détente in his interest in Jung's ideas. In 1951 Pollock, to use his
own words, was "drawing on canvas in black—with some of my early images
coming thru "44 By 1954, even his early titles had returned. Four Opposites
specifically relates to Jung's four elements of the conjunctio, while other titles
call forth the night sea journey and correspondences with nature: Ocean Grey-
ness, The Deep, Grayed, Rainbow, Easter and the Totem, Moon Vibrations, and
Ritual are also versions of his interests of the mid-'40s.
As titles of the '505 recall various phases of the titles of the '405, so too
some of the formal solutions hark back to earlier works. Easter and the Totem,
1953, probably comes from the same source as The Totem—Lesson II, 1945,
and Male and Female, 1942: Matisse's Bathers by a River (c. 1910-17), which in
the late 19305 had "hung for a long time in the lobby of the Valentine Gallery."45
Four Opposites, 1953, seems a slightly less linear recall of The Blue Unconscious
of 1946. White Light, 1954, and Scent, 1955, are related to Eyes in the Heat and
Shimmering Substance of 1946 and to the untitled allover work of around
1937-
Even a sketchy review of themes and compositional devices in Pollock's
work shows a continuing reliance upon Jungian thought and also upon Pol-
lock's ability to be inspired by and to assimilate qualities from the work of
other artists—for his own ends. It is perhaps precipitous in terms of my re-
search, which has concentrated on Pollock's middle years and Jung, but I
would hazard the hypothesis that in his later paintings the dialogue with other
artists' works had become a revival of his own earlier choices of art works and
a dialogue with his own earlier creations. Reasons for this turning in upon
himself might be found in the greater critical and public acceptance of the
newly heralded Abstract Expressionist movement. In reference to his latest,
more figurative works, Pollock himself said in 1951, ". . . [I] think the non-
objectivists will find them disturbing—and the kids who think it simple to
splash a Pollock out."46 Thus, it was with his imagery and even with the for-
mal solutions of the early '403 that he apparently felt most uniquely himself,
most inimitable.
Pollock's return in the later works to the motifs and content of the '405 con-
firms the importance of Jung as a touchstone to his art. While I feel that the
major impetus came from art itself, both from Pollock's appreciation of works

1970s 309
 by other artists and from his experience with the processes inherent in mak-
ing a painting, Jung provided a method of ordering concepts and of raising
the personal to universal experience.

Note s
1. C. L. Wysuph, Jackson Pollock: Psychoanalytic Drawings, New York, 1970, p. 13,
tells us that it was Mrs. Baynes, through Helen Marot, who referred Pollock for
treatment to Dr. Henderson.
2. Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock, the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1967, p. 22. Unless otherwise stated, the following facts regarding Pollock's treat-
ments come from O'Connor's well-researched biographical chronology.
3. Wysuph, p. 12, n. 11.
4. It is from Bernice Rose, author of Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper, Greenwich,
Connecticut, 1969, that I learned of Dr. de Laszlow's name.
5. Lee Krasner Pollock, in conversation. O'Connor, p. 25, gives no indication of du-
ration. Wysuph, p. 18, says Pollock worked with her "for the next few years."
6. See В. Н. Friedman, Jackson Pollock, Energy Made Visible, New York, 1972, p. 170,
for additional facts.
7. Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who Was Jackson Pollock?" Art in Amer-
ica, May-June, 1967, p. 48.
8. Friedman, pp. 172,192,22O.
9. Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York, 1961, p. 82.
10. In conversation, April 25,1972.
11. Joseph L. Henderson, "Jackson Pollock: A Psychological Commentary," unpub-
lished essay, 1968, quoted in Wysuph, p. 14.
12. Letter of November 11,1969, in Friedman, p. 41.
13. Carl G.Jung, Collected Works, translated by R.F.C. Hull, Princeton, 1956, XV,
pp. 138, 140. Hereafter referred to as Jung, C. W. Also available in paperback:
Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature, Princeton, 1971.
14. Hopefully this will be clarified with the publication of the Pollock catalogue
raisonné, which is in preparation under the editorship of Eugene Victor Thaw
and Francis V. O'Connor.
15. Lawrence Alloway, Jackson Pollock, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., London, June
1961, no. 26. Zervos V, pp. 445 and 443.
16. Information from Virginia Allen, consultant for the Pollock catalogue raisonné,
in conversation.
17. Source given in S. Foster Damon, Blake's Job, Providence, 1966, pp. 32,59.
18. The similarity to the Demoiselles d'Avignon was observed by Robert Pincus-
Witten in a seminar lecture, Fall 1971, City University of New York, Graduate
Division. Ossorio says it was one of Pollock's favorite paintings, in "Who Was
Jackson Pollock?" p. 58; Lee Krasner Pollock has confirmed this in conversa-
tion. The painting was in the Museum of Modern Art Picasso exhibition of 1939

310 1970s
 and acquired by the museum in the same year. It had been reproduced in the
1936 MOMA catalogue Cubism and Abstract Art. The possibility remains that
Birth, now dated 1937, may be considered a slightly later work, allowing for per-
sonal experience of Picasso's Demoiselles.
19. Bryan Robertson, Jackson Pollock, London, 1960, pi. 112; Marlborough-Gerson,
1964, no. 10.
20. Ossorio, "Who Was Jackson Pollock?" p. 54.
21. Wysuph, p. 21.
22. Jolandejacobi, The Psychology of Jung, an Introduction with Illustrations, trans-
lated by K.W. Bash, New Haven, 1943, pi. G, p. 130.
23. Alloway, no. 47.
24. Robert Motherwell, Partisan Review, Winter 1944, in O'Connor, p. 31.
25. M.-L. von Franz, "The Process of Individuation," Man ana His Symbols, New
York, 1964, p. 177.
26. Mr. Lieberman's account cited in Bernice Rose, Works on Paper, p. 106, n. 32;
Robertson, p. 139.
27. Robertson, p. 148.
28. Wysuph, pi. 58. Henderson contributed the momentous information that "Pol-
lock's mother was central to his difficulties" (Wysuph, p. 17). Lee Krasner Pollock,
Tony Smith, and Alfonso Ossorio affirm this judgment in "Who Was Jackson
Pollock?"
29. O'Connor, p. 34 (from Sidney Janis, Abstract ¿r Surrealist Art in America, N.Y.,
1944).
30. Alloway, no. 34.
31. Jung, C. W., V, p. 318.1 have not come across an English-language edition of Psy-
chology of the Unconscious published prior to the Collected Works in which this il-
lustration appears. However, since "cutting off a sizeable piece" so relates to Pol-
lock's title and since he would have been personally interested in the content of
the chapters, "Symbols of the Mother and Rebirth," "The Battle of Deliverance
from the Mother," and "The Dual Mother," in this classic work by Jung, one must
leave the matter open for the present. [Of the two English-language publications
of this Haida tattoo cited in Jung's German-language source, the volume most
likely to have been seen—possibly owned—by Pollock is: Franz Boas, éd., The
Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 5, published as Memoir[s] of the American
Museum of Natural History, New York, vol. 8, part I (Leiden and New York:
1905-09), "Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida," by John R. Swanton,
PL XXI. While the explanation of the image in Swanton's text is so close to that
given by Jung that an interested reader of both texts might identify it with Jung's
explanation, the only claim that can be made here is that Pollock probably knew
the image.]
32. Ms. Rose told me of these notations among Pollock's papers in conversation.
33. Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation, April 13,1946, p. 445.
34. Henderson, "Ancient Myths and Modern Man," Man and His Symbols, pp.
129-133.

1970s 311
 35- Wysuph, pi. il; O'Connor, p. 85, lower right.
36. While I feel this title was Pollock's own, some doubt must remain, as will be dis-
cussed in note 41 below.
37. Jung, "Approaching the Unconscious," Man and His Symbols, p. 54.
38. In J.E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, New York, 1960, pp. 6,8, from P.V. Piobb,
Clef universelle des sciences secrètes, Paris, 1950.
39. William Rubin, "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition, Part I," Artforum,
February, 1967, p. 18. Reproduced in O'Connor, p. 89, lower right; Rose, Works
on Paper, p. 35. Bernice Rose, p. 34, also relates this numbers to Jungian influ-
ences.
40. Lee Krasner Pollock in conversation. The West Houston address was 76, but 46
had been the street number at Carmine Street in 1932-33 (O'Connor, pp. 17-18).
Friedman, p. 61, gives this information in connection with Wounded Animal,
without mention of Jung.
41. Lee Krasner Pollock in conversation. She has affirmed that somewhere it is writ-
ten down which titles were Pollock's. Virginia Allen has not yet located that
record in her work on the catalogue raisonné. Alchemy is different enough from
the other titles, as is the work from the other paintings, that I feel Pollock finished
it earlier, that is, early enough to have titled it himself. A point of interest: Ralph
Manheim subsequently translated from the German Jolande Jacobi's Complex,
Archetype, Symbol in the Psychology ofC. G. Jung, London and N.Y., 1959.
42. Mrs. Pollock's comments on the titles of the last two exhibitions mentioned were
given in conversation.
43. Jacobi in Complex, p. 189, quotes this from Jung's introduction to Otto Krane-
feldt, Secret Ways of the Mind, 1932, p. xxxix.
44. Letter of June 7,1951, to Ossorio, quoted in O'Connor, p. 59.
45. Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York," Art and Culture, 1961, Boston,
P. 233-
46. From the letter to Ossorio, note 44.

312 1970s
LAWRENCE ALLOWAY Residual Sign Systems in
Abstract Expressionism

A problem that reciprocally involved both subject matter and formality en-
gaged the Abstract Expressionist painters of the middle and late forties. It was
how to make paintings that would be powerful signifiers, and this led to deci-
sions as to what signifiers could be properly referred to without compromis-
ing (too much) the flatness of the picture plane. The desire for a momentous
content was constricted by the spatial requirement of flatness and by the his-
torically influenced need to avoid direct citation of objects. Something of this
train of thought can be seen in Barnett Newman's reflections on the role of the
hero image in sculpture. He pointed out that the heroic was no longer directly
available to the sculptor and hence, though he does not say so, to the painter.
Therefore, he argued, the human gesture, freed of anatomy, could be used to
signify the human presence.

Herbert Ferber, by removing this mock hero, has reevoked the naked heroic
gesture. Hanging his powerful line on and over pure space, he has succeeded
in freeing himself from this hero, so that the gestures of his images move in
free splendor, thus enabling each of us to fill the open masses with our bulky
selves to become our own personal heroes. Ferber's skeletal line, by the
majesty of its abstract freedom, touches the heroic base of each man's own
nature.1

There is some reason to think, if one considers Ferber's naive sculpture of

the period, that Newman is doing the best he can for a friend and that perhaps
the real subject is Newman's own work. Certainly in his paintings the bands
of color seem to have a comparable symbolic function, indicating in terms of
verticality the basic human posture. In addition, an important group of large
paintings includes bands that are literally close to human scale. The term
"gestural" is commonly applied to Abstract Expressionism with reference to
conspicuous brushwork, but the term is also applicable to those of Newman's
paintings in which the whole work has a gestural function. The tall lines and
the man-sized area are a kind of gestural condensation of "the naked heroic
gesture."

SOURCE: Artforum (November 1973), 36-43. Copyright © Artforum, November 1973,

"Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism," by Lawrence Alloway

313
 In 1948 Newman wrote: "we are freeing ourselves of the impediments of
memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, and what have you, that have
2
been the devices of Western European painting." In later statements Rothko
and Still confirmed the renunciatory mode. Rothko rejected "memory, his-
3
tory, or geometry," and Still dismissed "outworn myths and contemporary
4
alibis." Common to these three artists in the late forties is, therefore, an idea
of art as the outcome of essentializing doctrine: art is what is left when surface
detail and secondary ideas have been scraped away. These statements have
been taken pretty much at face value, but actually there is more to be said.
For instance, it is notable that the renunciations demanded have a definite
cultural context. Newman wrote that "here in America, some of us, free from
the weight of European culture, are finding the answer by completely denying
5
that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it."
This can be compared to Still's statement: "the fog has been thickened, not
lifted, by those who, out of weakness or for positions for power, looked back to
6
the Old World for means to extend their authority in this newer land." These
statements clearly set the renunciations of the artist into the traditional con-
trast of two continents, which originated in the igth century as part of the
attempt to encourage national arts in America. The typology includes con-
trasts of dedication (America) and exhaustion (Europe), vitality and elegance,
honesty and learning. As Benjamin Т Spencer has pointed out, when writing
about America, "Emerson resorted to metaphors which implied primal ener-
gies rather than mature ideologies," such as "a colossal youth" or a "brood of
7
Titans." It is significant that the claim to be free of the (European) past should
be argued in terms of a 19th-century (American) idea.
What is the meaning of this old defense of newness? It relates to a domi-
nant theme of Newman's early writing, namely, the connection between
primitive art and American art. In 1944 he wrote about Pre-Columbian stone
carving and on "The Arts of the South Seas" exhibition at The Museum of
8
Modern Art. In each case Newman takes a primitive art form that is associ-
ated with America, or is at least non-European. In addition, he takes early, if
not the first, artists and discusses their work as part of "the metaphysical pat-
9
tern of life." Contemporaneously with his Indian and Pacific pieces, he ap-
plied notions derived from primitive art to the work of his contemporaries. In
the catalogue The Ideographic Picture, he defines "a new force in American
10
painting that is the modern counterpart of the primitive art impulse." Of
the eight artists in the show, four were Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Rothko, and
Still. (American-ness here is identified with primal energies and should not

314 1970s
be confused with the later artist-as-coonskinner image of Harold Rosenberg,
which trivialized the theme of national identity.) The exhibition that followed
"The Ideographic Picture" at Betty Parsons' Gallery was by Theodoros Sta-
mos, and again Newman wrote the catalog.

Stamos is on the same fundamental ground as the primitive artist who never
portrayed the phenomenon as an object of romance and sentiment, but always
as an expression of the original noumenistic mystery in which rock and man
are equal. Stamos is able, therefore, to catch not only the glow of an object in
all its splendor but its inner life with all its dramatic implications of terror and
mystery.11

Thus, America is both newer than Europe and older: to the extent that it is
newer it is free from a late culture's habits of elaboration and attenuation; but
it is older because artists have not lost their access to primal (i.e., young) ener-
gies and intuitions. These ideas, securely based on 19th-century precedents,
suggest that the tablet of the Abstract Expressionists had not been wiped as
clear as was supposed. A similar situation exists in these artists' treatment of
mythology. As early as 1943 Rothko stated: "if our titles recall the known myths
of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols
upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas."12 And,
again, "we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the idea rather than their
graceful classical version," renewing in oneself "the primeval and predatory
passions from which these myths spring."13 On the same occasion, Gottlieb
said that he was aware of "denying modern art" by placing "so much empha-
sis on subject matter" but "the mechanics of picture making has been carried
far enough."14 (At the time of the broadcast at which they spoke Gottlieb was
in the third year of his pictographic period.)
Four years later, Clement Greenberg wrote, apropos of the pictographs:
"Gottlieb is perhaps the leading exponent of a new indigenous school of sym-
bolism which includes among others Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett
Benedict Newman."15 Here then are several open avowals of the mythology
that marked one group of Abstract Expressionists in the forties before it was
submitted into less explicit forms. Gottlieb's "denial of modern art" as a for-
mal system has the same basis as Newman's polemic against geometry. Writ-
ing in 1958, he declared: "Only an art free from any kind of the geometry prin-
ciples of World War I, only an art of no-geometry can be a new beginning."16
What he was after, for himself and on behalf of American painters, was "a new
image based on new principles It is precisely this death image, the grip of

1970s 315
 geometry that has to be confronted."17 Malevich is expressly mentioned as
representative of the limits that American artists, strengthened by their primi-
tive roots, had to transcend.
Greenberg's description, though he soon dropped it, of New York paint-
ing as "a new indigenous school of symbolism" is very much to the point.
Abstract Expressionism achieved a new alignment of the existing styles of
modern art and found a way of painting that maintained flatness without any
diminishment of signification. If it is not evident from the art, though I believe
it is, there is ample verbal evidence in the written and recorded statements of
the artists of their conviction that art was a projection of their humanity. Art's
value was to be derived from its success in embodying great thoughts and en-
during themes. However, the sententious aspect of Abstract Expressionism
was gradually lost sight of and as early as 1959 E. C. Goossen, referring to
Gottlieb, discussed "how then to keep the physical presence of the painted
surface alive, sensually immediate and materially present, while wielding the
immateriality and illusion of space behind it."18 This expressed well the pic-
torial problem of reconciling the picture plane with the spatial implications of
color, but it confers prime value on this matter. What has happened is that
Gottlieb is being interpreted in terms of "the mechanics of picture making."
It is true that by this time Gottlieb was out of his pictographs, so that the evo-
cation of universal patterns and motifs was reduced. Beyond this, however,
Goossen's language is typical of the estheticizing analysis of Greenberg him-
self, whom Goossen is following, and the later writing of William Rubin and
Michael Fried.
Goossen's stress on syntax at the expense of signification reveals a bias that
characterizes American criticism at large. As the imagery of the myth-makers
became flatter and larger, with fewer internal episodes, the level of symbolism
was less and less discussed. What had been an antiabstract art was turned into
another kind of abstract art, but one with a coloristic rather than a geometric
base. The abstract potential of Newman, Rothko, and Still was exaggerated
at the expense of other readings, including connections between their earlier
and later work. It is crucial to remember in this respect that these three artists
were late starters; though they began weakly, their early work is far from being
student work. It may be clumsy, but it is not empty or uninformed. Newman's
and Rothko's biomorphic imagery and Still's troglodytic imagery, for exam-
ple, were the product of men who had reached their forties. Though there are
real morphological changes in their work of the late 19405, the Abstract Ex-
pressionists can hardly be expected to have started entirely anew at that time

316 1970s
of their lives. As suggested above, even the topic of renewal by renunciation
should not be taken literally but as a cultural reflex. Thus the tendency of criti-
cism to concentrate exclusively on the later work has led to a neglect of its
sources. The problem to consider is whether the reductive mode, initiated in
New York 1947-50, necessarily acts to exclude meanings or whether the de-
clared concerns of the early forties may not persist in condensed and elliptical
forms.
Newman wrote his article on the Sublime in the same year that he painted
the first and second pictures called Onement. The verbal and pictorial state-
ments coincide exactly, but not all the ideas in the article have their origin at
that moment. Aspects of Newman's primitivism are certainly carried into this
fresh context. Similarly with Still, the chronology of his work is obscure but it
is at least clear that he had painted numerous fully characteristic paintings by
1952, when he made the rejective statement quoted above. Rothko's statement
dates from 1949, the year in which he established his mature format of stacked
edge-to-edge forms, but the original article in The Tiger's Eye is not illustrated
by such work. The accompanying illustrations show patchy, free-form paint-
ings, with internal incidents and vertical divisions as well as horizontal.19 The
announced rejection of "memory, history, or geometry" therefore does not nec-
essarily entail the high level of unity of the mature work, as has been assumed.
It is possible that the stress on renunciation may have been intended to
cool some of the more ardent of the mythological references, but, in fact, this
could only be a secondary motive. The subjects of renunciation and rebirth
have their iconographical value, as in a text Rothko wrote for Still's first exhi-
bition in New York in 1946:

It is significant that Still, working out West, and alone, has arrived at pictorial
conclusions so allied to those of the small band of Myth Makers who have
emerged here during the war. The fact that his is a completely new facet of
this idea, using unprecedented forms and completely personal methods, at-
tests further to the vitality of this movement.
By passing the current preoccupation with genre and the nuance of formal
arrangements, Still expresses the tragic-religious drama which is generic to
all Myths at all times, no matter where they occur. He is creating new counter-
parts to replace the old mythological hybrids who have lost their pertinence
in the intervening centuries. For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension
of the Greek Persephone Myth. As he himself has expressed it his paintings
are "of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated."

1970s 317
 Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of asso-
ciations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most
elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself before the will to live—
a profound and moving experience.20

As the paintings of Newman, Rothko, and Still became simpler in format

they did not lose in complexity of content. Although various elements were
dispensed with, what remained was a great deal more than nothing. The parts
that they kept were, in fact, maximized and presented emphatically. The more
art is simplified the more potent what is kept can become; this is obvious but
the rhetoric of 20th-century art gives more prestige to the act of giving up than
holding on. What characterizes the work of the Abstract Expressionists from
the late forties on is precisely the significative magnitude of their austerities. I
am connecting early texts with later paintings not to circumscribe the paint-
ings by a genetic theory but because I know of no better way to account for
their special resonance. If we compare paintings by Frank Stella and Ells-
worth Kelly with those of the Abstract Expressionists, it becomes evident that
a dimension of allusion, an aura of content, has been suspended by the later
artists. They certainly take off from positions given by Newman and Rothko,
but the field of color, the holistic imagery, and the expanded scale of the can-
vas no longer imply momentous content. The allusions of the Expressionists
are not present simply because of the intensity of the older artists' feelings
compared to the reduced passion of the younger generation; the allusions are
present as a set of specific cues, to which Newman's Sublime text is one basic
source.21
In the i8th century the Sublime was an additional esthetic category, as was
the Picturesque; both were added to the existing criterion of Beauty in recog-
nition of the expanded awareness of the period. Similarly in the 19405, the
Sublime was regarded as an addition to European "modern art" in which
geometry was (unfairly) equated with that is known and measurable. In both
its i8th- and 20th-century usages Sublimity was an index of the expansion of
esthetic limits. Some of the formal properties described by Edmund Burke,
to take his Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful as a summarizing text, fit American painting very well.
On "Uniformity" as a cause of the Sublime Burke writes:

if the figures of the parts should be changed, the imagination at every change
finds a check; you are presented at every alteration with the termination of
one idea, and the beginning of another; by which means it becomes impossi-

318 1970s
 ble to continue that uninterrupted progression which alone can stamp on
bounded objects the character of infinity.22
Appropriate to the Sublime, according to Burke, are "sad, fuscous colors, as
black, or brown, or deep purple."23 Rothko's mulberry paintings or Still's
black ones come to mind, as well as Newman's observation on "the revised
use of the color brown ... from the rich tones of orange to the lowest octave of
dark browns,"24 colors that connote the "majestic strength of our ties to the
earth."25 The concept of "artificial infinity" as symbolized by uninflected works
and color in a somber range does not exhaust the correspondences between
the Sublime esthetic and American painting. Burke observed that "extreme
light . . . obliterates all objects, so as in its effects to resemble darkness,"26
which is a better way of describing the effect of a dark painting by Rothko
than most of his critics have arrived at. And, of course, light itself is part of
an expressive tradition that includes the paradox of dark in light described
by Burke and radiance as an image of revelation. Rothko's avoidance of com-
plementary colors and of black-and-white tonal contrasts gives his paintings
an other-worldly look, raising Neo-Platonic memories of light as the energy of
the Creator. Burke also considered as a source of Sublimity the effect on the
spectator's mind of being dominated by an immense object. This can be re-
lated to Newman's statement, "the large pictures in this exhibition are in-
tended to be seen from a short distance."27 Finally, Sublimity, as defined orig-
inally by Longinus, was regarded as "the echo of a noble mind."28 That is to
say the Sublime is not reached by rule; it is a projection of the artist which is
not equated with emotional self-expression, a view that accords well with the
Abstract Expressionist self-image of the artist's role in the world.
It is significant that of the Abstract-Expressionist generation, it is the three
artists we are concerned with here who have entertained environmental ambi-
tions. Pollock in 1947 may have opened the way with his version of the death-
of-easel painting topic which led him to propose paintings halfway between
easel and wall.29 Rothko painted three groups: the first done in 1958-59 for
the Four Seasons Restaurant and now in the Tate Gallery; the Harvard mu-
rals, 1961-62; and the Rothko Chapel, as it is called, painted 1966-68. Newman
painted The Stations of the Cross, 1958-66. Still has not done any ensembles
like these but his exhibitions (Buffalo, 1959; Philadelphia, 1963) are constructed
units. Still has written:

These works are a series of acts best comprehended in groups or as a continu-

ity. Except as a created revelation, a new experience, they are without value. It

1970s 319
 is my desire that they be kept in groups as much as possible and remain so.
... So I am in the strange position of seeking an environment for the work,
and the small means wherein I'll be free to continue the "act."30

He was referring to an exhibition at the Parsons Gallery when he wrote, but

clearly he had in mind cross-referential sequences on larger than gallery
scale. These unitary schemes imply content by format, thus ascribing an ex-
pressive function to the environmental display itself. For instance, in the
Rothko Chapel there are three triptychs, a form of picture with unbreakable
associations to Christian art, and to number symbolism. The paintings of The
Stations of the Cross are not decodable as specific episodes in Christ's Pas-
sion, but they do, as a total of 14 contiguous works, allude to the event as a
whole. Incidentally there are 14 paintings in the Rothko Chapel (the three
triptychs and five singles) and at one point Rothko contemplated indicating
their location on the outside of the Chapel by numbers, a clear reference to
The Stations.51
Reviewing a Rothko exhibition in 1961, Robert Goldwater singled out for
praise "the small chapel-like room in which have been hung three of the mu-
ral series of 1958-59-"32 Later Rothko really painted a chapel: it was first an-
nounced as a Roman Catholic chapel for St. Thomas University; subsequent
plans changed it to an interdenominational chapel at Rice University; it ended
up attached to the Institute of Religion and Human Development, a part of
the Texas Medical Center. The Institute combines ecumenical religious and
interdisciplinary studies with good works (hospital training and family coun-
seling). The Chapel bears neither the name of the donors (the John de Me-
nus) nor that of a saint: it is named for the artist, as if the Sistine Chapel were
to be called the Michaelangelo Chapel. In Newman's The Stations the num-
ber 14 is a symbol as well as a reckoning and there is in addition a sequential
pattern. The first six and the Eighth Stations are more related to each other
than to the Seventh; the Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh are white; the Twelfth
and Thirteenth are mainly black; and the last is the whitest. The order of The
Stations is the chronological order in which they were painted, suggesting
that the subject is not only the biblical event but the artist himself. The Chris-
tian hero and the artist as hero are related as type and antitype in the Testa-
ments, a view of The Stations that fits both specific comments by the artist and
his exalted notion of the role of the artist. Newman reasoned that

the first pilgrims walked the Via Dolorosa to identify themselves with the
original moment, not to reduce it to pious legend; not even to worship the

320 1970s
 story of one man and his agony, but to stand witness to the story of each man's
agony; the agony that is single, constant, unrelenting, willed—world without
end.33

It is Christ's connection to mankind that Newman stresses. As to Newman's

expectations of the artist, the prime text is his early article, "The First Man
Was an Artist": "Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for com-
munication. 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 helplessness be-
fore the void."34 The artist for Newman is one who renews man's original act
of defiance. In The Stations and in the Rothko Chapel what has happened is
that the traditional iconography and layout of Christian art have been usurped
by purely artistic values. By this I do not mean an estheticization of religious
art so much as an assertion of the heroic stance of the artist within the tradi-
tional themes. In Rothko's case, a certain religiosity is also present which
emotionally repeats the motive of the domination of culture by the artist.
The topics that contributed to Abstract Expressionism include mythology,
biomorphism, and the heroic state of being an artist. This cluster is often given
schematically in the early works, but developed and fused in the later works of
Newman, Rothko, and Still. It should perhaps be pointed out that the recog-
nition of a genetic unity in a group does not eliminate the members' empirical
diversity as artists, as men. These artists had in common an avoidance of the
basically naturalistic acceptance of the world as it comes that marks de Koon-
ing's and Kline's art. The high claims made on behalf of art by Newman,
Rothko, and Still are the outcome of personal experience and of a traditional
view of the function of art. Art does not reflect life nor is it separated from so-
ciety; it is conceived as a model of behavior; it has an exemplary moral func-
tion. The art of the Sublime painters, or the field painters, is decidedly an art
for the educated, both in terms of the social responsibility of being an artist
and in terms of the issues to be dealt with as subject matter.
In the use of ideographs and pictographs the artists showed a conscious
recognition of the long-term potency of linguistic systems. Signs have a cer-
tain persistency that elongates their usage far past their original communica-
tion situation. There are many signs learned in our culture and assumed to be
almost natural owing to absorption and repetition. These reinforced systems
carry meanings and values that we have forgotten learning, as one forgets hav-
ing had to learn one's first language. In American art of the forties and fifties
these residues of earlier doctrines and ideas included mixed organic im-
agery,35 an inventory of information systems (such as ideographs), and a re-

1970s 321
 discovery of the expressive power of size. It is notable that scale is not present
as a factor in earlier 20th-century painting, though it entered esthetics in the
i8th century. Color, too, in its revelatory aspect, reentered painting, drawn
from popular association with religious visions and mysterious light sources.
There was, of course, nothing popular about the way this color symbolism
was used by the artists, who subjected it to a searching and original reorgani-
zation. The presence of these available, historically rooted residues is essen-
tial to the continuity of culture. One of the ways in which the artists discussed
here are unlike de Kooning and Kline is the fact that their paintings evoke if
not a timeless realm, at least one of long duration with a slow rate of change.
Witness the continuity of terror as a subject of both primitive and recent art-
ists, for example. Contrary to the notion therefore that these Abstract Expres-
sionist artists started with the minimum, the truth is that they incorporated
complex layers of cultural allusion into their art. In a real sense, Newman,
Rothko, and Still were History Painters by inclination but Abstract painters
by formal inheritance. That is why the work is remarkable, for the diversity of
residual signs that are successfully bound into their art.

Notes

1. Barnett B. Newman, Herbert Ferber. Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947.

2. Barnett B. Newman, "The Ides of Art, 6 Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art?"
The Tiger's Eye, 6,1948, pp. 51-53-
3. Mark Rothko, "Statement," The Tiger's Eye, 9,1949.
4. Clyfford Still, 15 Americans, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1952.
5. Newman, Sublime.
6. Paintings by Clyfford Still, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1959.
7. Benjamin T. Spencer, The Questfor National Identity, Syracuse, 1957.
8. Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1944; Northwest Coast In-
dian Painting, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1946; "Las Formas Artisticas del Pacifico,"
Ambos Mundos, June, 1946, pp. 51-55 (reprinted in Studio International, Febru-
ary, 1970, pp. 70-71).
9. Newman, Northwest Coast Indian Painting.
10. Barnett B. Newman, The Ideographic Picture. Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947.
11. Barnett B. Newman, Theodoros Stamos, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1947. See also
Newman's "La Pintura de Tamayo y Gottlieb," La Revista Belga, 4,1945: Gott-
lieb's capacity to handle mythology is said to link him with "the North American
primitives."
12. Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, WNYC broadcast, October 13,1943, on "The
Portrait and Modern Art."
13. Ibid.

322 1970s
14. Ibid.
15. Clement Greenberg, "Art," The Nation, December 6,1947. In 1945 an unsigned
note in the catalogue of the Rothko exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of
This Century Gallery described the artist as occupying "a middle ground be-
tween Abstraction and Surrealism." (The writer was probably Howard Putzel.)
16. Barnett B. Newman, The New American Painting, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1959, p. 60.
17. Ibid.
18. E. C. Goossen Monterey Peninsula Herald, May 12,1954.
19. Rothko, The Tiger's Eye, 9.
20. Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Art of This Century Gallery, 1946. Typically Still
separated himself, in retrospect, from Rothko, by stating that: "Appropriation by
'Myth-makers' group in New York at this time led to misinterpretation of mean-
ing and intent of the painting" (Paintings by Clyfford Still).
21. Newman, Sublime. For a more detailed comparison of Burke and American
painting, see the author's "The American Sublime."
22. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sub-
lime and the Beautiful, II, ix.
23. Burke, II, xiv.
24. Newman, La Revista Belga, 1945.
25. Ibid.
26. Burke, II, xiv.
27. Barnett B. Newman, Typescript, Betty Parsons Gallery, 1951.
28. Longinus, On the Sublime, IX, 2.
29. Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock, The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1967, p. 40.
30. Clyfford Still, Letter to Betty Parsons, September 26,1949.
31. Information kindly given to me by Jane Dillenberger.
32. Robert Goldwater, "Reflections on the Rothko Exhibition," Art, March, 1961.
33. Barnett B. Newman, Statement, The Stations of the Cross, Lema Sabachthani,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966.
34. Barnett B. Newman, "The First Man Was an Artist," The Tiger's Eye, i, October,
X
947î PP- 57~6o (reprinted in Guggenheim International Award exhibition cata-
logue, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1964, pp. 94-95).
35. See the author's "The Biomorphic '408," Topics in American Art Since 1945,
1975, pp. 17-24, for comments on the significative aspects of biologically derived
images.

1970s 323
 ROBERT C H O B B S Robert Moth e rwe I Is Elegies
to the Spanish Republic

For Robert Motherwell, the act of titling his art is an essential component of
the creative process. He is convinced that viewers require specific intellectual
and emotional perspectives when looking at his paintings so that their experi-
ences of them will be directed and concrete. While some titles reinforce the
type of painterly abstraction for which he is renowned, others, including his
justly famous Elegies to the Spanish Republic, bear political and literary tags.
He intends these ad hoc conjunctions to be mutually supportive and conse-
quently is careful to consider his options when titling works.
The practice of grafting literary titles onto seemingly nonobjective forms
has its origins in Wassily Kandinsky's pre-World War I abstractions that were
often named Composition or more simply Abstraction, and yet are not substan-
tially different from those bearing such apocalyptic monikers as Last Judg-
ment. While one might argue that the quality of the experience is substan-
tially unchanged by these radically different types of titles, I contend that each
one predisposes viewers to specific orientations that substantially affect their
understanding and appreciation of the work before them. Such titles as Com-
position and Abstraction suggest a mode of apprehension more in line with
Kantian aesthetics while Last Judgment extends centuries of close affiliation
between religion and art to suggest the sublimity of a shattering apocalypse,
which in this case releases art from the close connections with the visual
world that have made it readily intelligible. Referential titles attached to ab-
stract paintings might be said to function analogously to the standard staffage
figures appearing in Claude Lorrain's Arcadian scenes, for example, since they
provide a way of characterizing in readily understood terms a given work's
specific mood. However, the conjunction of shepherd and bucolic landscape
is a far cry from Kandinsky's loaded reference to the "Last Judgment" and
also Motherwell's determination to eulogize the Spanish Republic's demise in
his Elegies to the Spanish Republic, which were initiated in the late 19405 and
have continued to the present day.
The way in which referential titles provide a mental focus for Motherwell's
work can be ascertained by recounting an evening I spent in his studio in the

SOURCE: Robert Motherwell, ed.Jürgen Harten (Stadtische Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 1976),

29-34 (revised 2004). Reprinted with the permission of Robert Hobbs, The Rhoda Thal-
himer Endowed Chair of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University.

324
spring of 1976 when he was titling some recently completed pieces.1 During
this session he invited me to act as a sounding board for his choices. He was
having a particularly difficult time naming a powerful study in black and white
similar to his large Africa in the Baltimore Museum.2 This recently completed
austere and solemn painting, which exhibits a prominent diagonal in black, is
so abstract and powerful that it presented a problem as to how it should be
titled. Specifically, the challenge was how to direct its force so that people
might know how to respond to it. The title needed to be both general and yet
specific enough to galvanize a constellation of readily understood meanings
so that the work would not become an open-ended Rorschach. Throughout
this evening the unarticulated assumption guiding Motherwell's quest was his
sincere desire to understand the work in question and provide it with an iden-
tifying label so that others might be equipped to respond similarly to it. When
making the work, he relied on the Surrealist improvisatory method of psychic
automatism—a variant on automatic writing—in which he would attempt to
court the unconscious first through doodling and spilling puddles of paint
that he would then study as possible clues to his inner or essential nature be-
fore cohering them into an overall composition. The process, which repre-
sents a means for encouraging painterly daydreams, constitutes a concerted
attempt at self-enlightenment through paint. Motherwell considers the result-
ant work of art to be an intuited insight that he gratefully receives with the
realization that he might not even begin to fathom its significance until after
he has had time to study the completed work and develop a suitable title for it.
That evening he first proposed a title for this painting that would turn its
huge black pyramidal shape on the right into a landscape. Glancing at one
wall in his studio cluttered with photographs and reproductions of works of
art, which he had culled from books and periodicals over the preceding two
decades, he noted a scene of Mount Kilimanjaro and suggested it as a name.
Then, realizing that such a label not only turned his painting into a landscape
but also made the black mound look as if it lay behind other forms and
loomed upwards toward the sky, he immediately rejected it, no doubt because
he has always insisted on painting shapes so that they exist in a shallow space
parallel to the picture plane. He then began to think in more atavistic terms,
reflecting aloud that there is something brutal about the painting, something
forceful, primitive, and almost primeval. Perhaps, we conjectured, the piece
has something to do with the dolmen cultures of Brittany or maybe the an-
cient Druid sites that his ancestral Scots frequented in the Middle Ages. Con-
sequently, titles incorporating words such as "menhir" and "megalith" were

1970s 325
 suggested and thoughtfully considered in light of the painting. Looking again
at the work, he felt its content could more appropriately be connected to voo-
doo, but he soon rejected this idea because it seemed too trite, even though he
kept maintaining throughout our session that the title of the work should al-
lude to some chthonic force that dwells within human beings similar to the
one in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Tentatively he settled on Haitian
Ritual, then quickly thought of Haitian Black, which seemed to him to be a
perfect title. Later, I discovered that he changed his mind yet again and con-
cluded that In Black and White No. 2 was the best possible solution since he
had been too hesitant about his more geographic references.
Motherwell's inability to immediately think of a definitive title should not
be taken as a sign that meanings in his art are arbitrarily assigned. Some of his
suggested titles might well be employed for another work, and all of them cir-
cumscribe his general goal of connecting his art to a primitivistic theme.3 While
he was puzzling over various possible names for this work, my awareness of it
changed subtly so that it became in effect different paintings. Each of the titles
became a distinct lens that defined and modified my experience of the work.
With each one, some forms were emphasized while others were diminished in
importance.
A similar type of shift occurred when Motherwell titled an enlarged ver-
sion of a small study made in 1948 to illuminate the poem "The Bird for Every
Bird" by his then friend Harold Rosenberg. The title for this larger work,
which is the first Elegy to the Spanish Republic, is At Five in the Afternoon after
a signal phrase found in the first stanza of a famous poem by Spanish poet and
playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. According to the artist, one of the reasons
for dispensing with the reference to Rosenberg's poem in the enlarged work is
his conviction that its frame of reference was limited. For his new piece he was
searching for a metaphor capable of catalyzing the imagination of a range of
viewers by cuing them into a broader historic view. As we will see, Mother-
well's first sketch illuminating the Rosenberg poem correlates closely with
one of Lorca's poems and, in fact, appears to have been anticipated in his
reading of it. He was astounded by the way his sketch so closely parallels this
Spanish writer's theme and images.
Among Lorca's writings, Motherwell preferred his Gypsy ballads, which
are found in his Romancero Gitano. He was deeply moved by their atavism,
emphasis on the fundamentals of life and death, and highly stylized yet in-
tense world symbolically presented in terms of the stark contrasts of black
and white—all of which he regarded as germane to his own art.4

326 1970s
 One of Lorca's Gypsy ballads, his "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejias," is
a eulogy for a close friend—a matador and fellow poet—who was gored to
death on August 11,1934, during a bullfight. Appearing in its first stanza, the
recurring refrain "at five in the afternoon" sounds in English like a sequence
of drum beats, in Spanish "a las cinco de la tarde" reminds one of a funeral
knell. In both English and Spanish it is portentous of the gloom, sorrow, and
sense of desolation that follow an unjust death. For Lorca the refrain specifi-
cally reinforces the incomprehensible shock and sense of inevitability that he
felt. In the first stanza, the phrase "at five in the afternoon" is repeated thirty
times in fifty-two lines of poetry. The effectiveness of this continued reverber-
ation is borne out in the first eight lines of the poem:

At five in the afternoon.

A las cinco de la tarde.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
A boy brought the white sheet
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
At five in the afternoon.
a las cinco de la tarde.
A frail of lime ready prepared.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
At five in the afternoon.
a las cinco de la tarde.
The rest was death, and death alone
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
At five in the afternoon
a las cinco de la tarde

After each line the refrain reiterates an unchanging tempo. At first it sounds
like the beating of a musical instrument in a procession or festival. Then it be-
comes the heightened tempo that accompanies intensified action. Later it sug-
gests the incessant throbbing of pain from a wound, or—even more graphic—
the rhythmic spurting of blood from an open gash. Again the poem builds up
momentum, everything appears in a blinding haze, and a shriek inadvertently
is emitted. Finally, there appears a droning in one's ears and a dull ache: a re-
alization that it is over. At the end of the first section of the "Llanto," one feels
exhausted as if one has been through a wrenching emotional experience.
By piling refrain upon refrain and interspersing between them lines that

1970s 327
 serve as expletives, Lorca creates a sustained climax that shares with Mother-
well's painting an emphasis on the phrase "at five in the afternoon." It is a sus-
tained force that surrounds and compresses together the intervening lines of
the poem and the ovoid shapes in the painting, which viewers are no doubt
expected to imagine as once having been round before the ponderous and im-
placable verticals surrounding them forced them out of shape.
Because "at five in the afternoon" is a most appropriate title for this paint-
ing, it might have remained as a generic label for the entire series except that it
was incomprehensible to people in the United States, unfamiliar with Lorca's
poem, who thought the painting might have something to do with the cocktail
hour. Since Motherwell was still intrigued by the composition, he decided to
explore its possibilities in another work, which he named "Granada." The
choice of this city as a title for a painting indicates a desire to continue focus-
ing on Lorca and his poem as a central theme, especially since Granada, a
strategic city in the early days of the Spanish civil war, was both Lorca's birth-
place and the site where he was murdered.
After completing this work, Motherwell continued to make variations on
the overall schema, which it extends, and decided that titles commemorating
cities important to the Loyalists such as Malaga, Seville, Barcelona, and Ma-
drid might clue viewers into his overall theme. However, he soon recognized
that for some people references to such Spanish cities conjured up the coun-
try's romance and history instead of underscoring the tragic war that had
raged throughout the country only a decade earlier. Reflecting on this situa-
tion, he decided to honor the country itself, and in 1951 he titled a small work
Spanish Elegy, Garcia Lorca Series. Even though he later decided on the over-
all title of Elegies to the Spanish Republic and assigned a number for each new
piece in the series, thus dispensing with the reference to Lorca's name, his ini-
tial idea of connecting the name of this poet with a general title demonstrates
how closely he linked the two in his mind. At the time he described his Elegies
"as an effort to symbolize a subjective image of modern Spain" in terms of
"funeral pictures, laments, dirges, elegies—barbaric and austere."
Although the series became the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Lorca would
have been a fitting subject. Even though he was uninvolved in partisan poli-
tics, he came to symbolize for Loyalists and others the few years of freedom
and democracy that the Spanish Republic represented. In his poetry and
plays, he created stirring images of the country's indigenous strengths, and he
repeatedly affirmed in interviews his strong identification with his country
and its many folkloric traditions, which served as catalysts for his own writ-

328 1970s
ing. Although he advocated understanding the country's literary heritage, he
was not a chauvinist. Often he remarked first on his ties with humanity at
large and then spoke movingly of his identification with Spain before zeroing
in on his connections with his native Andalusia.
Rather than representing Lorca the man in his Elegies, Motherwell has cho-
sen to follow the dictum of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, "to paint,
not the thing, but the effect it produces," and to create by indirection symbols
alluding to the fact that modern Spain castrated itself when it killed Lorca
and destroyed the Republic. But even though he has opted for modernist allu-
sion as a modus operandi, a comparison between lines in Lorca's "Llanto"
with MotherwelPs Elegies reveals close connections between the two, suggest-
ing a thorough grounding in the poem, which provided the artist with a range
of symbols and a stark emotional ambiance, which he hoped to parallel in his
Elegies. Both the colors and the forms in the series reinforce images in the
poem and present moreover a similar intensity of feeling.
When death appears in the first section of the "Llanto," it takes the form of
the "desolate horn" of the bull that lays "eggs in the wound" of the bullfighter.
While the image of eggs correlates with ovoid forms in the paintings, the rela-
tionship between the two goes deeper than morphological parallels since eggs,
connotative of birth and fertility, become the insidious seeds of death, remind-
ing one of the often-quoted cynicism that birth is a terminal disease. The im-
age of implanting eggs in a wound is an insidious characterization of life as
death's fetus, which in turn sets up a tension between the desire to live and the
realization that death is life's natural culmination.
Lorca dramatizes the audience's awareness of Ignacio's death in terms of
the arresting metaphor "and the crowd was breaking the windows." Earlier in
the poem he inserted the line "And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel,"
which in the English translation (which impressed Motherwell) creates an
onomatopoeic effect, which foreshadows the crashing panes of glass herald-
ing the bullfighter's death. The image of the crowd's uproarious act is a spec-
tacular presentation of violently opening a window onto death as well as es-
caping from it. It correlates with the image of a window in the Elegies, which
is usually found in the upper right-hand corner. Almost always windows and
openings in MotherwelPs paintings are placed at a level higher than his view-
ers. Usually they are hieratic and flat and painted with an intensity that makes
them mysterious and beckoning even though one is incapable of going be-
yond them since the realm of the dead is by definition always inaccessible to
the living.

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 The colors in the first section of Lorca's poem are mainly red—iodine cov-
ering the bullring—and white, which is interpreted in terms of white sheet,
cottonwood, and frail of lime. In addition, an intriguing interplay of white and
green appears in the line "Horn of the lily through green groins," in which the
lily, usually symbolic of purity, assumes the terrifying form of the bull's lethal
horn; and the green of the groins results from the gangrene that has overtaken
the cankerous wound. Often Motherwell accents large passages of black and
white in the Elegies with small amounts of red and green: red implies blood,
while green—usually a bright Kelly green suggesting verdure—is so rich that
it establishes a tension between itself and its austere surroundings.
In the second part of the poem, Lorca invokes a series of white objects to
shield him from Ignacio's blood. The rhythm of the lines in this section re-
minds one of the sounds of a Spanish guitar when strings are strummed quickly
and intensely, reaching a climax, then are followed by an abrupt cessation be-
fore the entire cycle is again enacted. Each time that the assertion "I will not
see it!" is repeated, a brief silence follows. In some Elegies similar climatic
buildups are preceded or followed by expressive lacunae that serve as foils for
the lacerated black forms that encroach themselves on white areas, sometimes
overwhelming them. In this section, Ignacio's death has already occurred,
and with it the numbing realization of the loss it represents. Still, with a frailty
that is part of human beings' paradoxical nature, the poet shrinks from it,
attempting to forestall its full visual effect, thus inadvertently allocating to vi-
sion responsibility for full awareness. The poet attempts to use familiar and
comforting white things to shield himself from the indelible appearance of
Ignacio's blood. The underlying irony of this section of the poem is that white
is also the color of Ignacio's deadly pallor so that the shielding objects also re-
call the ultimate horror they are called on to suppress. White plays a further
ambivalent role in this poem when it acts as a wall, a protective barrier, and
also as the lily of the bull's horn, which is the piercing dagger causing Igna-
cio's death.
Firmly aware of the expressive possibilities of white, Motherwell has often
referred those intrigued with its significance in his art to a chapter in Herman
Melville's Moby Dick in which it is viewed as a particularly insidious covering
that casts those wearing it with an even more frightening visage than if they
were dressed in black. In the paintings white is the insidious backdrop; the
bull's color, black, connotes death, while red is the hue of Ignacio's blood:
"Oh, white wall of Spain / Oh, black Bull of sorrow! Oh, hard blood of Igna-
cio! Oh, Nightingale of his veins!" The joining of the white wall and black

330 1970s
bull are crucial for the Elegies because the white—sometimes a wall and often
a void—provides some emotional security for the painter in this abstracted
tragedy, as he has readily acknowledged. The black forms in these paintings
can be equated, as they often have been in critical reviews, with cajones—the
bull's gonads—that are also emblems of the defeated and the dead that are re-
moved and tacked on a wall after a particularly valorous bullfight.
In the last section of the poem Lorca provides the coup de grace to tradi-
tional elegiac poetry. Instead of relying on nymphs to mourn a dead hero and
prophesy his ultimate resurrection, he reaffirms Ignacio's death and ultimate
disappearance since he will no longer be remembered just "like all the dead
who are forgotten in a heap of lifeless dogs." Only the poem is left to memori-
alize Ignacio, and even the poet, as he tries to capture the bullfighter's essen-
tial nature, can only "remember a sad breeze through the olive trees."
While Charles Baudelaire, an earlier authority on the meaninglessness of
modern life, asserted that the uniqueness of Eugène Delacroix's highly Ro-
mantic paintings lies in the languorous melancholy exuded by some of his fig-
ures that in turn is suffused throughout the space enclosing them, Lorca's and
Motherwell's melancholy assumes a different form. They present a stark pic-
ture of death in which there is no resurrection, no afterlife, not even the Greek
compromise of a crepuscular underworld occupied by dim shades. With death
all existence ceases; only the mourning of it briefly remains; and then art sup-
plants mourning.
In his art Motherwell has been able to project an asthmatic childhood ob-
session with death onto the demise of an entire government and its conse-
quent lost culture. Schooled in the methods of psychoanalysis, he has long
recognized that the treatment of patients comprises of necessity two phases.
In the first they discover internal conflicts within themselves and learn to ac-
cept total responsibility for them. In the second they begin to see how these
conflicts relate to the outside world. Points of contiguity are thus established
between the personal and the social so that individual problems are con-
ceived, in part, as reflections of broader concerns. In his work Motherwell
follows a similar procedure, which is largely unconscious, when he looks for
a common meeting ground between his own experiences, particularly those
which evoke strong feelings within him, and events occurring in the world
that are capable of containing as well as enlarging upon his own individual
conflicts. If he did not search for analogies between himself and the world at
large and contented himself with painting historical subjects that he knows
only from secondary sources, his painting could become cold, melodramatic,

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 and rhetorical—a compromise and a monologue—and the tensions that serve
as signs of authenticity would not be there.
His approach is distinctly Romantic albeit different from Delacroix's, and
it is based on his attempts to achieve aspects of the universal through the per-
sonal by being fully aware that the personal is constituted by his own deeply
felt reactions to his anxieties, his immediate environment, and the world at
large. When we examine his Elegies and find that they are remarkably similar
to Lorca's "Llanto," we might be surprised at the conjunctions between the
two since the sketch came before his reading of the poem and yet this dis-
junction is only a momentary obstacle when we recognize that Motherwell
throughout his life identified strongly with Spain since he felt, either rightly
or wrongly, that it connected with threads of Spanish colonial culture still evi-
dent in the California of his youth. Partially because of his background in an
arid Mediterranean-type climate, which had been prescribed as a cure for his
childhood bouts with asthma, Motherwell believed Lorca to be a comrade
spirit since he created in his writings powerful images that joined conjunc-
tions of similar climate and locale with death. Between the paintings and the
poem, the rapport then is more than coincidence since Motherwell perceived
it in terms of his own background, no matter how distantly related it might ap-
pear. Later, as we have seen, he played on the similarity between the "Llanto"
and his Elegies and employed the poem as both local color for this series of
paintings and an intellectual context of informed primitivism in which the ab-
stract forms in them might assume meaning. Although these poetic allusions
are certainly not intended to be coercive and do not force viewers into a single
reading, they do establish an aura of mourning for a lost ideal that had briefly
occurred in the recent past and thus present viewers with the schematic for-
mality of a majestic funeral dirge and the opportunity to reflect on time's pas-
sage and its sweeping effects.
While the Elegies parallel the imagery of the poem, they are not just illus-
trations of it. Between the two a more important and subtle relationship ex-
ists, and this parallel is found in the similarity of feeling that the two evoke.
Deeply entrenched in his country's traditions, Lorca settled on an atavism
that stretches back to the fifteenth-century Spanish Gypsies, in particular their
deep song known as the cante jondo, a profoundly moving lamentation, which
at one time was regularly practiced by many ancient pagans. The cante jondo
is a primitive chant—a form of trilling—that is repeated obsessively. In the
course of being uttered with frequency and with deep feeling entire phrases
can often be lost when impassioned mourners reach self-hypnotic, almost

332 1970s
hysterical states. Lorca incorporates this Gypsy musical device in the first
part of his "Llanto" when he repeats the single, emphatic refrain "at five in the
afternoon" to the point that words, losing their meaning, recall the poet's ob-
sessiveness. When Motherwell appropriates the refrain from the "Llanto" as
a title, he allies his work with Lorca's poem and with the ancient tradition
it recalls, making both of them germane to his own work. "I take an elegy,"
Motherwell has said, "to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for some-
thing one cared about." As visual equivalents for music, the Elegies are con-
cerned with creating and sustaining an emotion: they strike a cord of feeling,
like a particular state of being, when black verticals and ovals create a meas-
ured beat and pulsating rhythm across the canvas. Ovoid shapes, caught and
squeezed between massive verticals, are analogous to the cante jondo, in which
certain phrases and sounds are repeated until the lament, ceasing to be
structured by words and meter, assumes the heightened pitch of a deep-
throated cry.
Motherwell's atavism in the Elegies assumes two alternative forms that can
be described as either architectonic or organic. The sketch illuminating Ro-
senberg's poem belongs to the former category, as do At Five in the Afternoon
and Elegy No. 100. Examples of the organic include The Figure 4 on an Elegy
and No. j8. In addition, many Elegies position themselves between the two.
From the beginning paintings in this series that call to mind architecture have
been monumental in conception if not always in scale, including the first one,
which is about the size of a piece of typing paper. Some of these works allude
to Paleolithic structures such as Stonehenge, menhirs in Brittany, and colossal
stone walls of Mycenae. When this type of Elegy is enlarged, the change is not
as spectacular as one might think since monumentality has already been
achieved in terms of the grandeur of its concept and relationship of part to
whole. In the architectonic group formality implies distance. Often white ar-
eas in these pieces appear to create space, keeping the overall compositions
hieratic and formal. In contrast to these Elegies, organic ones seem more inti-
mate, and their backgrounds assume the look of walls. In some pieces verti-
cals resemble giant penises, and a paradoxical relationship is established be-
tween intimate subject matter and spontaneous technique coupled with the
type of scale that was formerly regarded as a property of public art. Achieving
a dichotomy between the public and the private, the organic Elegies manifest
the artist's stated quest to attain the universal via the personal.
One of the most common fallacies in critical writing, which is more com-
mon in literary than in art criticism, is the tendency to view artists as incar-

1970s 333
 nated in their own work. Even though this is certainly a fallacy, it is one that
often gives an aesthetic lie to the truth. With some Abstract Expressionists
such as Motherwell, who uses psychic automatism as a pathway to his own
unconscious, the lie is not entirely removed from the truth. Proceeding along
this course of thought, I can vouch for the fact that connecting the public and
the private is a signal characteristic of Motherwell's daily conversation. One
reason why he joins in these exchanges, both socially sanctioned rules for po-
lite discourse and very intimate subjects, is his commitment to Sartre's belief
that nothing in life should be considered off limits. Whatever this French exis-
tentialist does can enter into the public domain since he is committed to un-
derstanding his personal life as an aspect of the human condition and conse-
quently regards the sharing of it as valuable to him and others. In other words
he considers himself as an instance of humanity rather than a unique and sep-
arate manifestation, and so does Motherwell.
Coupled with this goal of spanning truthfully one's public and private
selves, Motherwell indulges in hyperbole, which he jokingly refers to as a
"Celtic propensity for exaggeration." To some this proclivity borders on
braggadocio, but seen in terms of his art it enables the artist to assume epical
proportions in his conversation so that he can express in words the depth of
his feeling. This penchant for hyperbole allows him to conflate in the Elegies
the passing away of his childhood fear of death with the actual demise of the
Spanish Republic. Such a conflation indicates the highly cathected nature of
his imagery that celebrates the burial of one specter at the same time that it
mourns the passing of another.
In his own person, as in his art, Motherwell incorporates the seemingly
contradictory qualities of awkwardness and elegance. When he moves, his
gestures are somewhat offhand, lacking deliberateness. He ambles about as if
he is preoccupied with more important matters and walking is only a means
for getting from one place to another. But combined with this sense of being
preoccupied to the point of absentmindedness, there is an air of surety that
comes from his resonant voice and penchant for poetic explanations. These
same characteristics can also be discerned in his paintings. The parallel be-
tween the artist's awkwardness and his art that often first strikes viewers is the
way that the edges of the verticals and ovoid shapes in the Elegies appear to
be almost crude as if they had been hacked out of wood with an ax or formed
of paper that has been bluntly cut with large shears in some places and delib-
erated ripped in others. Another parallel between his person and his style
is found in his forms with their blunted and lacerated edges that are also ele-

334 1970s
gant and sensuous. Moreover he spatters and drips paint with a careless non-
chalance that makes one think of the Renaissance-era word "sprezzatura,"
which conceives of sophistication as an ability to make the difficult appear
easy—certainly a feature of the many analogies that punctuate Motherwell's
everyday speech.
In consideration of his use of full-blown, aggressive black shapes in the
Elegies to communicate power, it is useful to note the subtleties incorporated
in them. In Elegy No. 100 the artist has chosen to leave the pronounced black
swathes largely unmodulated while enriching the warm light areas with warm
grays and cool whites to create varied harmonies. In addition he casually
sprinkles areas of flesh color in them for dramatic relief. Although the purfles
along the edges of the black stripes look as if they were casually painted, they
are the areas that receive the most consideration since they are subtly ac-
cented and reinforced by diminutive touches and slender threads of pink,
ocher, and sienna. These definitive accents are barely apparent from a dis-
tance of five to ten feet unless one already knows that they are there. Since the
large areas in this and other Elegies are so imposing and the slashing brush-
work comprising them is so redolent of bravura and power, the tenuous net-
works of smudges, drips, and lightly brushed traceries of paint along the
edges are often missed by even the most discerning viewers. Although they
are often unaware of these subtleties, these touches characterize Motherwell's
entire endeavor as a masterful one. Moreover, the refinement along the edges
endows these works with resoluteness and a sense of inevitability, and it also
helps to disengage the black shapes at times from the white background while
at other times permitting them to lie flatly next to these passages.
Motherwell's visual poetry becomes ecstatic in his highly organic and rela-
tively small The Figure 4 on an Elegy, one of the most explosive paintings in
the series, which is exemplary of his automatist technique at its height. He
created The Figure 4 on an Elegy in the early 19605 during a particularly crea-
tive period. Even though these frenetic outbursts represent only approximately
two years of output, they greatly enrich the entire series by transforming the
overall schema from slow moving, ponderous dirges into bacchanalian revels.
Individual elements of his basic elegiac composition are pulled together into
one amorphous mass in this painting. Tension, evident in most works in this
series, reaches an extreme, causing the forms to explode in a frenetic out-
burst. Like blood gushing from a wound, these black shapes seem vehemently
to release spatters and drips.
Because the abstracted shapes resemble genitalia in this work, one might

1970s 335
 think that a Dionysian rite is taking place in which worshippers are re-enacting
the sacrifice of a bull. The Titans, legendary ancestors of humankind, ripped
apart this totemic animal that served as a substitute for Dionysus. Freud has
pointed to this myth as one of the sources of the Oedipal idea, which he be-
lieves all mankind shares. The killing and eating of the totem in ancient reli-
gions, according to Freud, occurred periodically and represented an opportu-
nity for worshippers to enact symbolically their Oedipal desire with religious
sanction, thus feeling exonerated of their crime. When Motherwell created
this painting, he may have vented the repressed hostility that he readily ac-
knowledged having against his father, whose first and last names he shared.
At any rate, when he painted this Elegy, he achieved an image of tremendous
psychological release, which can be calculated in terms of the exhilaration
and vitality that the liberated drips and spatters exude.
After having studied Lorca's "Llanto" and MotherwelPs Elegies for an ex-
tended period of time, I am reminded of the statement made by an anony-
mous Roman writer—the so-called Longinus—who referred to the sublime as
an echo of a great mind. The beauty and futility of such an echo is evident in
Lorca's attempts to come to terms with Ignacio Sánchez Mejias after his death
and his discovery that nothing remains—only the wind blows through the
olive trees and the sounds of his own elegiac song are heard. It is evident too
in Motherwell's search to understand death in his Elegies and his realization
that only his memory of it can be resurrected in the form of his powerfully
morbid Elegies with their lacerated black shapes marching to a measured beat
across a white void, creating a stirring rhythm that is reflective of humanity's
tragic and heroic state.

Postscript:

Because of my effort twenty-eight years ago to distill my research and many

conversations with Motherwell into this meditation on his Elegies, I left un-
resolved a problem that the essay indirectly raises, and that is the status of
Abstract Expressionism's purported nonobjectivity. The point is exacerbated
when one realizes that its major adherents repeatedly attempted to frame their
minimal forms in terms of maximal content that was either literary or histori-
cal. We might well question whether the art by Motherwell and other Abstract
Expressionists, with its potentially rich iconography presented in terms of
allusive titles, is really nonobjective. Tying subject matter to even the most ab-
stract forms changes and transforms them so that they lose their idealist api-
rations and become firmly grounded in a historical network of signs that en-

336 1970s
 cumbers them as it directs them to articulated ends. The Elegies' overarching
title precludes looking at this series of works in terms of open-ended melan-
choly since it equates them with a distinct historic time and place. Thus Moth-
erwelPs choice of title makes them function like surrogate history paintings.
With its stated aims of elevating art to the level of a meaningful discourse
on a par with the humanities by connecting it with already canonized historic,
philosophic, and literary ideas, history painting intends to intensify the reci-
procity between the arts and the humanities at the same time that it demon-
strates its adaptability to inter-disciplinary investigations. Although many of
the Abstract Expressionists were concerned with having their suggestive yet
prescribed meanings inhere in abstract forms, they did not recognize that this
goal ultimately connected their art to centuries-old academic practices. Even
though they railed against the academy—an admissible goal in mid-century
America even though it had long ceased to be a contributing factor to new art
for at least fifty years—their art, unbeknownst to them, co-opted the central
aspect of history painting even as it directed this quest for meaning to highly
personal and seemingly abstract ends. Though they wished to create both in-
timate and monumental works, their psychologically predisposed subject mat-
ter subscribed to many of the same types of historical and mythological sub-
jects that academic history painters employed, thereby making it anything but
personal and idiosyncratic. Thus their abstraction can be seen as perpetuat-
ing far more traditional, time-honored ways of working; in fact, it can be re-
garded as a form of elevated referential painting—the twentieth century's re-
sponse to history painting.

Notes

1. After completing my dissertation on Robert MotherwelPs Elegies to the Spanish

Republic, which provides a basis for this essay, I was hired as a one-year replace-
ment in the History of Art Department, Yale University. Because Ivy League uni-
versities often pay junior faculty astonishing low sums, my search for affordable
housing in New Haven was unsuccessful until Motherwell offered to rent his guest-
house to me for the tempting sum of $1.00 per day. The year spent teaching in
New Haven and living in MotherwelPs guesthouse in Greenwich was an extraor-
dinary one. During this time many of the conversations that are referenced both
directly and obliquely in this essay took place. Before this essay was published as
the lead piece for MotherwelPs first European retrospective at the Dusseldorf
Kunsthalle in 1976, he read and approved all quotations and ideas in it that are at-
tributed to him.
2. This painting, according to Motherwell, was named in honor of Arthur Rimbaud,

1970s 337
 who escaped the cultivated realms of French symbolist poetry for life as an adven-
turer in Africa—a metaphor, no doubt, intended to refer also to his own escape
from the confines of Surrealism to the open-endedness of Abstract Expressionism
since he tended in conversation to couch his art in terms of a grand and heroic
struggle.
3. Rereading this section, I am amazed at the extent to which the ideological biases of
race had been internalized by Motherwell, who equated the feeling in his work
with a blackness that was atavistic, primitive, and African, or least diasporic. I am
also amazed at my blindness then to this social and historical construction, but
such is the far-reaching effect of dominant, well-ensconced ideologies.
4. As I now look at this section I am struck by the degree to which Motherwell, one of
the most urbane of twentieth-century writers, was intrigued with a world that
could be characterized as the polar opposite of the one he inhabited. With the ex-
ception of a dysfunctional childhood and his recurrent bouts with alcoholism,
which he freely acknowledged, MotherwelPs world was a highly cultivated and
carefully circumscribed one, which was populated by his psychoanalytic poker-
playing buddies who had life-long passions for James Joyce's writings, his few art-
ist friends such as the highly literate sculptor David Smith, his penchant for
French culture and cooking that he perfected as a Cordon Bleu student of Dione
Lucas, and the overall affluent lifestyle that was financed first by a father who had
been CEO of Wells Fargo Bank and later by sales of his own work and investments.
In retrospect it appears that his atavism was highly intellectual and based on a
thorough understanding of its effectiveness as a psychoanalytic metaphor for
Freud's subconscious and Jung's unconscious mind.

DAVID SHAPIRO AND C E C I L E S H A P I R O Excerpt from "Abstract

Expressionism: The
Politics of Apolitical
Painting," Parts

Abstract art was the main issue among the painters I knew in the late thirties.
Radical politics was on many people's minds, but for these particular artists
Social Realism was as dead as the American Scene. (Though that is not all, by
far, that there was to politics in those years: some day it will have to be told how
"anti-Stalinism," which started out more or less as "Trotskyism," turned into
art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.)
—Clement Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York"

SOURCE: Prospects 3 (1977), 175-214. Reprinted with the permission of David and Cécile
Shapiro.

338
Ill
The most surprising fact about American art in the late 19508 is the dearth
of well-written published material critical of or hostile to Abstract Expres-
sionism. Since a conspiracy is entirely unlikely—even Senator Joe McCarthy
never claimed to have uncovered any in the art world—more likely possibili-
ties must be examined. [...]
Abstract Expressionism, of course, can in no way be equated with Mc-
Carthyism, although the conformism that pervaded the decade goes a long
way toward explaining the power of each. But while McCarthyism was the ex-
pression of a vicious political authoritarianism, Abstract Expressionism
might better be described as anarchist or nihilist, both antipodes of authori-
tarianism, in its drive to jettison rules, tradition, order, and values. "Things
fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,"
Yeats prophetically wrote. Anarchist Abstract Expressionism and neofacist
McCarthyism ruled in their separate spheres during the same period, and the
fact that their control was almost complete for a time makes it fair to suggest
certain parallels.
If the atmosphere of the times and the support of the leading critics, mu-
seums, and art publications helped Abstract Expressionism to reach an un-
precedented vogue that stifled other forms during the 19505, there were other
stimulants to its success as well. The GI Bill for veterans and a new prosperity
meant that schools, in this case mainly college art departments, were expand-
ing and thus catching as young faculty the first wave of artists trained as Ab-
stract Expressionists. They, in turn, taught the next generation of art students,
a group substantially larger than ever before in our history. The varied modes
of art noticeable during the 19305 and 19405 were virtually untaught and un-
represented during the 19505 for more reasons than that they seemed tired
and perhaps old-fashioned in a postwar world. Unlike earlier periods, all art
seemed to be funneled toward one type of expression [. . .] The lever that
lifted Abstract Expressionism to the peak it achieved as the quasi-official art
of the decade, suppressing other kinds of painting to a degree not heretofore
conceivable in our society, was an arm of the United States government. [...]
The United States Information Agency, which as time went on was to spon-
sor a great deal of American art, worked within an official censorship policy
which ruled that our government was not to support nonrepresentational ex-
amples of our creative energy nor circulate exhibitions that included the work
of "avowed communists, persons convicted of crimes involving a threat to the

1970s 339
 security of the United States, or persons who publicly refuse to answer ques-
tions of Congressional committees regarding connection with the communist
movement."16
Among the artists and organizations attacked at some point by one con-
gressional committee or another were the Los Angeles City Council, the Dal-
las Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the American Federation of Art cir-
culating exhibit called "100 American Artists of the Twentieth Century," the
Orozco murals at the New School for Social Research, the Diego Rivera mu-
rals in Detroit, and the Anton Refregier mural created with federal funds for
the Rincón Annex Post Office in San Francisco.17
Almost any style, then, was a potential target for congressional pot-shots,
ranging from that which was explicitly political and/or executed by artists
involved with sociopolitical affairs, to art that categorically denied any possi-
bility of ideological communication. Yet despite the problems, Abstract Ex-
pressionism became the style most heavily dispensed by our government, for
reasons that were in part explained by Thomas W. Braden in a 1967 article
that appeared under the title "I'm Glad the C.I.A. Is Immoral" in the Satur-
day Evening Post.18
Braden, executive secretary of the Museum of Modern Art for a short pe-
riod in the late 19405, joined the Central Intelligence Agency as supervisor of
cultural activities in 1951, and remained as director of this branch until 1954.
Recognizing that congressional approval of many of their projects was "as
likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare," he became involved
with using such organizations as the Institute of Labor Research and the Na-
tional Council of Churches as fronts in the American cold war against com-
munism here and abroad. The rules that guided the CIA allowed them to "use
legitimate existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest;
protect the integrity [sic] of the organization by not requiring it to support
every aspect of official American policy."19 Braden said that "we placed one
agent in a Europe-based organization of intellectuals called the Congress for
Cultural Freedom."20 The agent remained for many years as executive direc-
tor; another CIA agent became editor of Encounter. When money was needed
to finance these projects it was supplied by the CIA via paper organizations
devised for that purpose. Commenting on these activities years later, Conor
Cruise O'Brien said that the "beauty of the operation . . . was that writers
of the first rank, who had no interest in serving the power structure, were
induced to do so unwittingly."21 The same might be said of the Abstract Ex-
pressionists, and perhaps of the critics and museum personnel supporting

340 1970s
them. In any case, Braden, possibly taking his aesthetic cue from his Museum
of Modern Art years, supported the export of Abstract Expressionism in the
propaganda war. It appears likely that he agreed with Greenberg's 1949 re-
mark, the purport of which became for a time the American twentieth-century
version of the discredited "white man's burden," which held—apropos art
—that this country, "here, as elsewhere . . . has an international burden to
carry."22 Backed by money available to the CIA and supportive of Abstract
Expressionism, Braden's branch became a means of circumventing Congress
and sending abroad art-as-propaganda without federal intervention.
In his study of one of the organizations infiltrated by the CIA, the Congress
for Cultural Freedom, Christopher Lasch wrote that

especially in the fifties American intellectuals, on a scale that is only begin-

ning to be understood, lent themselves to purposes having nothing to do with
the values they professed—purposes, indeed, that were diametrically opposed
to them.
The defection of intellectuals from their true calling—critical thought—
goes a long way toward explaining not only the poverty of political discussion
but the intellectual bankruptcy of much historical scholarship. The infatua-
tion with consensus; the vogue of disembodied "history of ideas" divorced
from considerations of class or other determinants of social organization; the
obsession with "American Studies" which perpetuates a nationalistic myth
of American uniqueness—these things reflect the degree to which historians
have become apologists, in effect, for American national power in the holy
war against communism....
The prototype of the anti-communist intellectual in the fifties was the
disillusioned ex-Communist, obsessed by the corruption of Western politics
and culture by the pervasive influence of Stalinism and by a need to exorcise
the evil and expiate his own past.23

Lasch's description fits both Greenberg and Rosenberg, who wrote arti-
cles supporting Abstract Expressionism for CIA-subsidized journals as well
as others. (Partisan Review, according to Lasch, was one of those journals
that for a time was sponsored by the CIA.) Their published material had a
great deal to do with the acceptance of the style by other intellectuals in the
19505. It is also worth remarking in this connection that the word "American"
drums repeatedly in the titles of essays sympathetic to Abstract Expression-
ism: "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture," "Ameri-
can Action Painting," "American Type Painting," "The New American Paint-

1970s 341
 ing," "Is Abstraction Un-American?"—the last a peculiarly 19505-type ques-
tion. It is not surprising, Lasch says, that these cold war intellectuals became
affluent as well as powerful as their usefulness to the government, corpora-
tions, and foundations became apparent, "partly because the Cold War seemed
to demand that the United States compete with communism in the cultural
sphere as well as in every other."24
The Abstract Expressionists were used in the 19505 in a series of interna-
tional exhibitions, sponsored by the International Council of MOMA, whose
purpose appears to have coincided with the aims of government bodies.25
(This may be a good place to note that from 1954 to 1962 the U.S. Pavilion
in Venice was the property of the Museum of Modern Art, the only such na-
tional pavilion privately owned.) "The functions of both the CIA's under-
cover operations and the Modern Museum's International programs were
similar."26 [...]
Although the artists who made this art were generally no longer political
(including those who had been at some time in the past), they were on the
whole in accord with official policy, not only in its fixation on the Communist
menace but also in their disdain for figurative art, especially the left-wing po-
litical art of the Social Realists in America. If these factors did not entirely al-
lay qualms about their employment as part of the establishment propaganda
apparatus, they could take comfort, as artists inevitably do, in the exhibition
record. Few are ever likely to argue about the purposes for which their paint-
ings are exhibited just so long as they are in fact widely and regularly shown.
A vocal portion of the art world, moreover, was cockily triumphant about
the splash American art was making abroad for the first time. As the Luce
publications proclaimed, this was to be the American century. We had emerged
from the war unscathed; we had the biggest and best of everything. We wanted
the rest of the world to know it, and to know that it was all due to our true-blue
goodness, our planning, and our form of government. The new world had in-
vented a new art which lay claim to epitomizing a new freedom.
Yet another reason suggests itself for the speed with which government
and museums cooperated in arranging exhibitions of Abstract Expression-
ism abroad. Social Realism, widely exhibited until World War II, is program-
matically critical of capitalism. Its stated aim, in fact, is to serve as an instru-
ment in the social change that will disestablish capitalism. The Museum of
Modern Art had on occasion exhibited and purchased works of certain Social
Realists and continued to do so for a time after the emergence of Abstract Ex-
pressionism. Indeed, in 1946 MOMA had shown Social Realist Ben Shahn's

342 1970s
work in a retrospective that established his reputation. But they may now have
been relieved to be helped off a hot spot, for it should not be forgotten that
MOMA, like most American museums, was founded and funded by extremely
rich private collectors, and MOMA was still actively supported by the Rocke-
fellers, a clan as refulgent with money and power as American capitalism has
produced.
These people, to paraphrase Churchill, had no wish to preside over the
dismantling of the economic system that had served them so well. It is likely
that related reasons influenced other museums, which, after varying periods
of hesitation, joined in support of Abstract Expressionist art. (Many other
elements, of course, were operative as well.) Museums backed up exhibitions
of the new mode with massive purchases of work by living artists on a scale
that had never before been approached. "It was a kind of instant history, and
quickly a sampling of their works was to be found in most museums," wrote
Joshua Taylor, director of the National Collection, Smithsonian Institution.27
Earlier the rule had been for museums to be extremely chary of acquiring
work by living artists. Now museums not only splurged on canvases sold to
them at ever-augmenting prices; the trustees who had authorized the acquisi-
tions became collectors of the new art. "Trustees often urged the museum to
acquire works by the very artists they were collecting, thus helping to bolster
their own taste," Daniel Catton Rich has observed.28 Even curators—giving
rise to ethical problems—functioned as public taste makers and private clients.
Thus it came about that the critics and their theories, the art publications
as well as the general press, the museums led by the Museum of Modern Art,
the avant-garde art galleries, the clandestine functions of the CIA supported
by the taxpayer, the need of artists to show and sell their work, the leveling of
dissent encouraged by McCarthyism and a conformist era, the convergence of
all varieties of anti-Communists and anti-Stalinists on a neutral cultural point,
the cold war and the cultural weapons employed in its behalf, American post-
war economic vigor and its sense of moral leadership, plus the explosion of a
totally new kind of American-born painting that seemed the objective correl-
ative of Greenberg's early announcement that "the main premises of Western
art have at last migrated to the United States"29—all these combined to make
Abstract Expressionism the only art acceptable on a wide scale during the
conforming 19505.
The rise of Abstract Expressionism to its leadership of the avant-garde,
and from there to its position of official art, is replete with irony. First, because
the very term "avant-garde," as proudly vaunted as Baudelaire's "modernism,"

1970s 343
 was first used in art by socialist artists in the nineteenth century, and its mean-
ing then was very close to what we have come to call Social Realism. "Avant-
garde" as cultural vanguard was used in an 1845 essay in the following way:

Art, the expression of Society, reveals in its highest forms the most advanced
social tendencies; it is a precursor and herald. Now, to know whether an art
worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, if an artist is really at the avant-
garde, one must know where humanity is heading, what is the destiny of the
species ... strip nude with a brutal brush all the ugliness, all the garbage that
is at the base of our society.3Q

Or, as the French socialist philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon wrote twenty

years earlier,

It is we, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde [in the struggle toward
socialism]: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid:
when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble
or canvas.31

It is ironic, too, that an apolitical art that arose at least in part as a reaction
to didactic art, as an "art-for-art's-sake" antidote to "art-as -a-weapon," should
have become a prime political weapon. As Max Kozloff wrote in 1973, in the
19505 the art establishment saw this kind of art as the "sole trustee of the
avant-garde spirit, a belief so reminiscent of the U.S. Government's notion of
itself as the lone guarantor of capitalist liberty."32 It is also an irony that an art
indifferent to morality became the prime example of the morality of free ex-
pression, and that an art foreswearing aesthetics came to be used as the origi-
nator of a new aesthetic.
And perhaps the final irony is that instead of reigning for a thousand years,
as Adolph Gottlieb had predicted,33 it lasted as king for a decade, with pop
art—the epitome of the banal and the glorification of kitsch—its immediate
successor. Jack had killed the giant, but the giant arose again, deformed,
stronger, with greater pretensions, and flexing muscles never dared before.
Pop, as everyone knows, has been succeeded by op, minimal, conceptual,
photorealism, and more yet—but each of these in one way or another either
derives from Abstract Expressionism or is a violent reaction against it, so that
the disruption caused by the dominance of Abstract Expressionism for its
decade will be felt not only in American art but all over the world throughout
this century.

344 1970s
Notes
16. William Hauptman, "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade," Art-
forum, October 1973, p. 49.
17. Ibid., pp. 50-51.
18. Thomas W. Braden, "I'm Glad the C.I.A. Is Immoral," Saturday Evening Post,
May 20,1967, pp. 10 ff.
19. Ibid., p. 11.
20. Ibid.
21. Christopher Lasch, "The Cultural Cold War," in Towards a New Past: Dissent-
ing Essays in American History, éd., Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Pantheon,
1968), p. 353.
22. Clement Greenberg, "Art Chronicle: A Season of Art," Partisan Review (July-
August 1949), p. 414.
23. Lasch, "Cultural Cold War," pp. 323,336.
24. Ibid., p. 344. His statement about the CIA and the Partisan Review is on p. 335.
25. Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern
Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), p. 384. MOMA's international exhibition pro-
gram, Lynes said, was "to let it be known especially in Europe that America was
not a cultural backwater that the Russians, during the tense period called 4he
cold war,' were trying to demonstrate that it was."
26. Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Artforum,
June 1974, p. 40.
27. Joshua C. Taylor, "The Art Museum in the United States," in On Understanding
Art Museums, éd., Sherman E. Lee (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975),
p. 60.
28. Daniel Catton Rich, "Management, Power, and Integrity," in Lee, On Under-
standing Art Museums, p. 137.
29. Clement Greenberg, "Art Chronicle: The Decline of Cubism," Partisan Review
(March 1948), p. 369.
30. James S. Ackerman, "The Demise of the Avant-Garde: Notes on the Sociology of
Recent American Art," Comparative Studies in Society and History 2 (October
1969), 375n. (Italics added.) Ackerman quotes from Renato Poggioli, Theory of
the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968). The original lines were written by
Gabriel-Desire Laverdant, a follower of the socialist Fourier.
31. Ackerman, "Demise of the Avant-Garde," p. 375n. Ackerman is quoting from
Donald Egbert, "The Idea of the Avant-Garde in Art and Politics," American
Historical Review 70 (1967). (Italics added.)
32. Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," Artforum, May 1973,
p. 44.
33. Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961),
P. 87.

1970s 345
 MELVIN P. LADER Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and
the "Ingres Revival" in America

Recent studies have revealed and clarified the prominent role played by the
Russian immigrant John D. Graham in the American avant-garde art scene in
the 19303 and 1940s.1 Having arrived in New York in 1920, this man of diverse
talents was simultaneously an artist, writer, theoretician, collector, polemicist
for modernism, mystic and self-proclaimed magus. By the latter Twenties, he
had become a pivotal personality in a loose-knit group that ultimately would
include some important members of the Early New York School, chief among
whom were the painters Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. Of the three,
Graham indisputably was the most eloquent and the most prolific writer, and
it is largely through his writings that we can gain valuable insights into what
I will call the "Ingres Revival."
In 1937, Graham published his System and Dialectics of Art, a book of philo-
sophical thought and theory which stands today as one of the most important
documents for the study of American art of the Thirties and Forties.2 In our
present knowledge, it would seem that the significance of this volume does not
lie to any marked degree in its direct influence on other artists or their art.3 In-
deed, many of the ideas expressed in the treatise were not necessarily original
with Graham, but rather exemplified vanguard thought during the period un-
der discussion. It is in this capacity as a mirror of contemporary avant-garde
thought that System and Dialectics is used here. In addition to this work, Gra-
ham also authorized articles that expressed similar ideas, and he kept detailed
notebooks and journals in which he often jotted down his views on art and
life.4 Taken collectively, these sources furnish us with a wealth of information
on this crucial period in the history of American art.
Basic to all of Graham's writings is his concept of art history as a succes-
sion of styles, the highest points of which are reached during periods of what
he called "pure painting." By "pure painting" he meant painting that does
not resort to pictorial illusionism, which does not attempt to reproduce reality
on the canvas.5 In accordance with contemporary thought Graham thus was
stressing the necessity for preserving the integrity of the two-dimensional pic-
ture plane.
He traced the history of "pure painting" as the following progression: Pre-

SOURCE: Arts Magazine (March 1978), 94-99. Copyright © Melvin P. Lader.

346
historie, Graeco-Egyptian, Pompeian, Byzantine, Gothic, Uccello, Ingres, Cé-
zanne, Picasso, and Mondrian.6 At one time or another, and in one form or an-
other, Graham in his art and in his thought drew upon most of these links
in the chain of "pure painting."7 But at the time he was writing System and
Dialectics and especially in his own painting of the 19405 Graham was partial
to Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Pablo Picasso, it is true, had
been a strong influence on Graham's abstract paintings of the Thirties and
had played a major positive role in the treatise, but by 1944 Graham had em-
phatically rejected Picasso both in word and in deed. In about 1946, Graham
even authored a manifesto denouncing him as a fraud.8 It should be noted
here that Picasso also was an admirer of Ingres, a point to which I shall return
later. Unlike Picasso, however, Ingres never fell out of Graham's favor and re-
mained very much on his mind throughout this entire period.
It is significant that Graham wrote System and Dialectics in the late Thir-
ties, for throughout the twentieth century in America there had been a mount-
ing interest in Ingres' art. By 1930, the "Ingres Revival" was clearly detectable,
prompting one author to remark that "the coming of Ingres to America forms
a definite chapter in his reestablishment in high favor among critics and art-
ists."9 The Revival had been heralded in 1918 when New York's Metropolitan
Museum of Art acquired the portrait Monsieur Jacques Leblanc and its pen-
dant, Madame Françoise Leblanc (both of 1823), which were among the first
paintings by Ingres to enter into American public institutions. Prior to this
time, not one American museum had possessed an important work by that
French master.10 Thereafter, many such acquisitions were made by various
American Institutions. Chief among these, for example, were The Comtesse
d'Haussonville (1845, acquired by the Frick Collection in 1927) and his Por-
trait of a Gentleman (c. 1807, bequeathed by the Havermeyer family to the
Metropolitan Museum in 1929). Ingres' drawings, too, became prized acquisi-
tions during this period. There was also an increase in the number of exhibi-
tions featuring works by Ingres, culminating in the great "David and Ingres"
exhibition of 1939-1940,n and there was a marked rise as well in the number
of scholarly writings devoted specifically to him. The climax of this renewed
interest seems to have occurred between the years 1937 and 1945, when all of
these manifestations proliferated. Graham's writings could not remain un-
affected by this.
Some scholars previously have noted that Ingres held a fascination for
particular artists of the Early New York School, but none yet have studied the
phenomenon as a collective revivalist trend. Moreover, they have not spoken

1970s 347
 adequately of it in stylistic and visual terms, nor have they explained satisfac-
torily the reasons for such a revival.
Whether this "Ingres Revival" resulted from an increased interest by artists
and critics or whether they merely were swept along within it is not important
here. What is important is to realize that this increased interest in Ingres coin-
cided with a growing awareness of Surrealism in America, and also that it
reflected the twentieth century's preference for formal abstraction.
Using Graham's writings and [considering] an example of his art, we can
now turn to a more detailed discussion of the Ingriste influence. Like Ingres,
Graham was fond of painting women's portraits, and such compositions com-
prise his most powerful and successful paintings. A superb example is his
Two Sisters of 1944, i.e., from about the time that Ingres' influence on Graham's
art seems to have begun. This painting falls well within Graham's definition
of and preference for "pure painting." For although the figures obviously are
based upon nature, they could by no stretch of the imagination be considered
a realistic representation of the sitters. In his System and Dialectics, Graham
wrote:

To copy nature one does not have to be born an artist. Everyone can be taught
to copy nature. It is easy to copy nature, it is only a matter of training. It is
difficult to create. Art is essentially creation. Creation without abstraction is
unthinkable. Therefore nature is used in art only as a point of departure.12

This approach, of course, is reminiscent of Ingres, who had attempted to com-

bine reality and abstraction, art and life. In fact, Graham often cited Ingres in
his notebooks as having said "... the purpose of art is to imitate nature which
means not to copy nature, but to understand its processes and to imitate these
processes as well as to imitate the appearance."13 Ingres made several such
statements, and Graham mentions the same concept in various terms through-
out his writings.
In addition, the flatness of the space, which Graham named as the major
characteristic of "pure painting," is also apparent in his Two Sisters. Graham
wrote at length on space and its perception by man. In one extremely impor-
tant passage in System and Dialectics he concludes that in reality there are but
two dimensions. He said:

Space and matter, as it is accessible to human mind, is only two-dimensional.

Even human vision is essentially two-dimensional since when we look at a
man ... we see the face only and cannot see his back. Only the phenomenon
of binocularity or seeing from two points with a distance between them ac-

348 1970s
 counts for the optical delusion of volume.... Furthermore the third dimen-
sion is not a new dimension but a dimension made up at an angle, to the al-
ready established: a) longitude and b) latitude So the third dimension is
not an element as the first and second but a by-product. Consequently Space
is two-dimensional and can appear three-dimensional only by the operation
of the plane and due to the optical delusion resulting from the binocularity.14

In Two Sisters, Graham stressed this two-dimensionality by using large, sim-

plified, flat areas of color, by using frontal forms, and by including a planar
background that prevents any pronounced visual penetration into depth.
Moreover, the interception of the figures' arms and hands by the picture's
edge, which repeats on the same plane the interception by the border with the
linear background elements, firmly ties the images to the picture's surface.
Comparing the spatial characteristics of this painting with Ingres' portrait
Mme. De Senonnes, one reason becomes apparent why Graham was drawn to
Ingres' art. He, too, has depicted his sitter in a shallow, compressed space.
The mirror behind Mme. de Senonnes functions in a manner analogous to
the background plane in Two Sisters, thus limiting spatial depth and tending
further to flatten the figure. Graham was well aware of this characteristic of
Ingres' art, as were others of the Early New York School, and when in System
and Dialectics he lists the great two-dimensional art of all times, Ingres' name
finds a prominent place.15 Graham termed this type of painting "planimetric"
or "extensive" painting.16 He proceeded to say:

It can be three dimensional in so far as detail modeling is concerned but re-

mains within the plane neither protruding nor receding. This is achieved by
a planimetric arrangement of limbs of the figure by articulating them in the
direction of the design.... Ondulation [sic] within the operating plane means
that the shoulders, arms, legs are thrust and aligned so as not to disturb by the
ondulation [sic] the whole flatness of the plane.17

It is significant that Graham again mentions Ingres as a primary example of

this technique.18 In Two Sisters, Graham shows us what he means by this plani-
metric arrangement and "ondulation." First, detailed modeling is limited to
certain areas as, for example, in the neck. This does not result in any deep
spatial illusionism. On the contrary, all parts seem to adhere to the picture
plane, with the outline of the form helping to maintain this flatness. Second,
the limbs of the figures are spatially located in nearly the same plane, as il-
lustrated here, for example, by the positioning of the arms. Third, in the fig-
ure at the right, the arms, shoulders, and the thrust of the lower body are so

1970s 349
 aligned and woven into the composition that they do not disturb the overall
two-dimensional effect. Ingres' painting also exemplifies Graham's ideas,
though, of course, on a much more subtle level. Graham undoubtedly was fa-
miliar with Ingres' statement that "the beautiful forms are those with flat
planes and with rounds," which, though seemingly contradictory, approxi-
mates Graham's theories and exemplifies the struggle of many modern artists
to synthesize reality and abstraction.19
Beyond this, there is still another characteristic of Ingres' works that un-
doubtedly touched Graham. This is the mood of the paintings which could
be seen as "enigmatically timeless" or "psychologically mysterious." To attain
such feeling, Graham felt that an inert and static quality was paramount.
Again, in his writings, he said:

A great work of art is always static. A dynamic state is the natural state of
things and there is no accomplishment in falling in with eternal motion, the
heroic feat is to arrest motion by stupendous effort and to contemplate.20

Indeed, he felt that the purpose of all art, in the abstract sense, was to arrest
this eternal motion and to "establish personal contact with static eternity."21
In Ingres' Mme. de Senonnes this sense of timelessness is conveyed by her
frozen pose and her introspective character. Her mood suggests an uneasy-
one might venture to say surreal—quality that appealed to Graham's longing
for the enigmatic. Related to this, of course, was Graham's fascination with
modern psychology. He refers to Freud and Jung in his writings, and he often
mentions the relationship between psychology and modern art. This interest
in modern psychology represents still another factor that drew him to Ingres'
portraits which capture not only the appearance of the sitter, but a feeling for
their personality and the workings of their mind as well. In fact, some mem-
bers of the New York School referred to Ingres as the "Freud of Painting."22
Graham's Two Sisters, in its expressive mood, successfully presents us with
psychological mystery and enigma as conveyed by the figures' static, frontal
pose and their fixed, cross-eyed stare. They seem to exist esoterically as god-
desses of the modern world, sorceresses, and ritualistic icons whose presence
intrigues and tantalizes the viewer.
According to Graham, one of the most important elements contributing
to this expressive quality of a painting was form. "Form itself," he said, "ex-
presses fully all elements of subject matter, character, tragedy and psychol-
ogy."23 "Pure form in space speaks of great psychological dramas more poi-
gnantly than psychological art can ever do."24 "Pure form can tell more about

350 1970s
the content than any story could possibly do."25 The exactitude and clarity of
definition with which Graham has drawn his forms in Two Sisters brings to
contemporary art the same expressive precisionism found in the works by In-
gres, who, at one time, had said that "Expressionism in painting demands a
very great science of drawing; for expression cannot be good it if has not been
formulated with absolute exactitude."26
Before proceeding, it would be well to note that Ingres' painting Mme. de
Senonnes may be one of several by Ingres that served as a source for Graham's
Two Sisters. This is especially true of the right-hand figure. She and Mme. de
Senonnes are seated at similar angles with their gaze directed at the viewer,
both wearing Empire-style dresses that expose the upper areas of the breasts.
Indeed, the figure's left breast in either case is shown in near-profile, a device
which allows for spatial ambiguity and further anchors an otherwise three-
dimensional form to the surface of the canvas. Even more striking is the re-
semblance found in the positioning of the arms. The left one, partially hidden
behind the figure, seems nearly detached and terminates in abstractly elon-
gated hands and fingers. Meanwhile, the right arm has become an extension of
the arc that sweeps down from the base of the neck, glides over the shoulder,
and comes to rest in the women's lap in a marvelous demonstration of ab-
stract composition. Graham has left this area in his painting in what would
appear to be an unfinished state. He may, however, have been recalling a spe-
cific device used by Ingres in such portraits as Mme. Philibert Rivière (с. 1805,
The Louvre, Paris). Ingres often cloaked the arms of his figures in shawls or
other wrappings in order to avoid the angularity of a naturalistically rendered
elbow. Such angles formalistically would disrupt the harmonious curvature of
the arm and even the entire composition. The treatment of this area in Gra-
ham's woman may have been similarly motivated. It should be noted in sup-
port of this that in the left-hand figure Graham, too, has avoided depicting the
elbow, but here he simply places the right elbow beyond the picture's border
and hides the left one behind the second sitter.
The eyes of Graham's women frequently are crossed, as they are in his Two
Sisters. Some reasons have been offered to explain the use of this device; for
example, it not only contributes to the heightened psychological power of the
paintings, but it also imparts a degree of tension within the composition that
tends to make the figures more timeless and immobile.27 This explanation is
borne out in part by Graham's own writings when he mentions that eyes natu-
ralistically rendered tend to wander off the canvas.28 On the other hand, Gra-
ham was a practitioner of Yoga and he assuredly was aware of the typical Yoga

1970s 351
 exercise of crossing the eyes, which allows the participant to focus his mind
upon a single point of intense concentration. But in his notebooks he also
wrote that cross-eyed women contained what he called "the mystery of gene-
sis heightened by lines converging in the distance."29 This statement suggests
still another heretofore unmentioned possibility—that it relates to his theory
of binocularity and the resulting illusion of the third dimension. He had
stated, in effect, that the shorter the distance between two points, the less
would be such an illusion and the greater the degree of true two-dimensional
vision. He cited the example that a bull with the wider spacing of his eyes can
see things more volumetrically than can human beings.30 By implication, short-
ening the span between the eyes or making the vision converge at an external
point would increase true two-dimensional sight. Historical antecedents for
depicting cross-eyed women are many, including portraits by Raphael. Since
Raphael was a major source for Ingres' art, it is interesting that Ingres, too,
at times distorted the vision of his sitters, as in his Mme. Aymon, known as La
Belle Zelie (1806, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), whose eyes veer off center.
To sum up what has been established thus far, it is obvious from the writ-
ings and from the art that Graham admired Ingres because of the abstract for-
malist elements of his paintings and because of the Surrealist-related psycho-
logical and mystical aura. For the moment, we will leave it at that.
His figures throughout the decade continued to reflect Ingres' influence.
Celia (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), also of 1944, exhibits all of
the same compositional and stylistic characteristics as well as a similar mood.
Generally, it recalls Ingres' portrait Mme. Inès Moitessier (1851, Samuel H.
Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Graham men-
tions a portrait of Mme. Moitessier in his notebooks, but he probably was
referring to the 1856 seated version in the National Gallery, London. In this
painting, he seemed especially impressed by Ingres' devotion to fine crafts-
manship. Specifically, he had noted that it had taken Ingres four or five years
to complete the painting.31 This concept of craftsmanship and Graham's pre-
occupation with it is an important point to bear in mind.
Having established the foregoing foundations, it remains to show how
these general attitudes, and specifically the love for Ingres—so apparent in
Graham's writings—reflects the art and views of Graham's New York cohorts
Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning.
Gorky, who had met Graham in New York City in the later Twenties, was
also an enthusiastic devotee of Ingres. But this interest and influence on his
own art apparently predates that of Graham, going back to the mid-Twenties

352 1970s
or shortly before.32 It is therefore tempting to speculate that Gorky may have
been a major factor in guiding Graham's taste in that direction, a speculation
in need of much further study.
However that may be, many of the same qualities that endeared Ingres to
Graham are found in Gorky's The Artist and His Mother of c. 1926-29. The
connection with Graham may be even more direct, since it has been suggested
that Graham's Two Sisters was done in response to this Gorky painting.33
Based upon an often reproduced photograph of 1912 depicting the artist and
his mother, Gorky has altered the images of his painting compositionally in
order to create a harmoniously constructed, flattened picture. These altera-
tions, of course, recall Graham's and Ingres' pronouncements to use the natu-
ral world only as a point of departure. Gorky shared this view, believing that
art must go beyond what is seen by the eye to encompass what is seen with the
mind. In other words, the artist must utilize creative imagination to venture
into the realm of the abstract beyond stagnant physical appearance.34 In addi-
tion, the silent atmosphere and the static immobile figures in Gorky's painting
present us with a heightened form of reality similar to that in the work of
Ingres and Graham. It is also perhaps significant that the mother's pose is ex-
tremely frontal, almost heraldic in appearance. Although close to the pose in
the photograph, it nevertheless calls to mind Ingres' powerful images of Na-
poleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806, Musée de l'Armée, Palais des Invalides,
Paris) and his portrait of Ж Louis-François Berlin (1832, The Louvre, Paris).
It is known that Gorky frequently borrowed poses, motifs, or even styles be-
cause they conveyed expressive forces that echoed his own feelings, and this
possibility should not be discounted here.
There are many stories and written statements, as well as the works of art
themselves, that document Gorky's fondness for Ingres. Friends recount, for
example, how he would buy post cards or reproductions of works by Ingres,
and how he delighted in showing these to others while supplying a discourse
in Ingres' expertise and working methods. Moreover, we know that he also
owned and read books on Ingres, and it was not unusual to find him standing
for long periods of time before an Ingres painting in the museums or galleries
that he often frequented.
On the wall of Gorky's studio, there were large life-size reproductions of
paintings by Uccello and Ingres. One of these was the latter's Self-Portrait at
the Age of Twenty-Four of i8o4.35 His student and biographer Ethel Schwa-
bacher has recounted how he would glance quickly at the Ingres reproduc-
tion, or at the Uccello, measuring them against his own canvases on which he

1970s 353
 was working. The reproduction, then, was more than mere decoration. It served
as inspiration and as a model of excellence with which he could compare his
own works. Ingres' Self-Portrait may have inspired Gorky's own three-quarter
length Self-Portrait of c. 1937, which exhibits a number of iconographie and
stylistic affinities. The turn of the figure, the facial expression, the simplified
forms, and the flat background areas, for example, are all similar. The com-
parison is one of types, however, and should not be pressed too far. Further,
we might compare Gorky's work to Ingres' portrait of the painter François-
Marius Granet (c. 1807, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence), which also shares
the same general design and composition. In the Gorky Self-Portrait, the art-
ist holds an object in his right hand that imaginatively might be interpreted as
an artist's palette or a book, like the artist's portfolio held by Granet. We know
that Gorky was extremely fond of art books, showing a decided preference for
monographs on his favorite artists. Not unexpectedly, one of the most sacred
of his books was Walter Pach's monograph on Ingres, a book which had the
distinction of being the first American volume on the French painter, having
been published in 1939 at the height of the "Ingres Revival." Significantly, Pach
felt that the mission of his book was "to restore him [Ingres] to his position as
an artist of the truest originality, one who knew how to use the past rightly,
which is to say as the great guide to the present and the future."36 The book
was very popular among artists and the public, and its role in the "Ingres Re-
vival" undoubtedly was great. Indeed, Gorky maintained that he slept with
this very book under his pillow at night in the belief that he could thus acquire
all the aspects of Ingres' art he so dearly admired.37 Although this story has
more than a touch of Gorky's self-created myth, it nevertheless says something
of his ardent devotion to his artistic hero. It is tempting to suppose that the
book-like object in Gorky's Self-Portrait might also be a book on the French-
man, but this, of course, is highly speculative.
About 1937, Gorky also painted his Portrait of Master Bill, which has been
interpreted as a painting of his friend de Kooning.38 It seems, however, to
have been fashioned upon Ingres' painting Ж Philibert Riviere, and it is virtu-
ally a mirror image of that work. The pose, the alignment and "ondulation"
of the limbs, the cropped legs, the turning of the head, the facial expression,
the prominent emphasis given to the chair, and other Ingriste elements men-
tioned earlier are once again evident. It has been suggested that Gorky's
Portrait of Master Bill may have served as a model for Graham's Poussin
m'instruit of 1944 (Collection of Fritz Bultman, New York).39 Although the
visual comparison is not conclusive enough to warrant the supposition, there

354 1970s
is a stylistic similarity that undoubtedly reflects the influence of Gorky and
Ingres on Graham's painting.
Gorky has earned the reputation as being one of the greatest draftsmen of
our century. In System and Dialectics, Graham had noted that "It is impos-
sible for one to paint well unless one draws well. . . ."40 Thus, not only did
drawing furnish the expressive qualities mentioned above, but it was the very
foundation for all great painting. In this, Graham echoed Ingres, who had
stated that "Drawing is the probity of art Drawing includes three and one
41
half quarters of the content of painting." Gorky, too, believed in this:

... drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But a good drawer
can always paint Drawing gives the artist the ability to control his line
and hand. It develops in him the precision of line and touch. This is the path
towards masterwork.42

Gorky's own mastery of line was due in no small measure to Ingres' influence.
His Self-Portrait of c. 1935 (Collection of Ethel Schwabacher, New York), for
example, utilizes Ingres' precise linear style combined with delicately mod-
eled areas. There are stylistic borrowings as well, exemplified by the elon-
gated curvature and detached quality of the arm. It is also obvious in this
drawing that eyes held a particular fascination for Gorky, as they had for Gra-
ham. He, too, was concerned with the spiritual and psychological quality con-
veyed by the eyes, considering them the "soul of portraiture" and "the prime
communication between the artist and those who view his work."43 In noting
the psychological quality he expresses through the eyes, it is not difficult to
understand why others of the New York School referred to Gorky as "the In-
gres of the Unconscious;"44 which is, of course, a direct paraphrase upon
Ingres' reputation as the "Freud of Painting."
By at least 1933, Graham, Gorky, and Willem de Kooning had become
mutually close friends. De Kooning's name appears but once in System and
Dialectics, but it is significant that he was listed there as one of the outstanding
young American painters.45 He shared many of the same beliefs with Graham
and Gorky, including, of course, his admiration for Ingres. Pictorially, the
Ingriste influence does not begin in de Kooning's work until the late Thirties
at the height of the "Ingres Revival." Gorky, whose interest predates this, may
have been his immediate source as indicated by de Kooning's statement that
"If the bookkeepers think it necessary continuously to make sure of where
things and people come from, well then, I come from 36 Union Square [the
address of Gorky's studio]."46 De Kooning, in turn, may have acted as a cata-

1970s 355
 lyst upon Graham's implementation of Ingres' principles in Graham's own
art of the 19405. Eila Kokkinen has written how Graham did indeed borrow
freely from de Kooning's drawings and has suggested de Kooning's role as
the probable stimulus toward Graham's changing approach to the figure.47
This is probably true in spite of the fact that Graham's interest in Ingres' ideas
dates from an earlier period, as has been shown, and it somewhat explains the
gap between Graham's interest in the theory and the implementation of it.
De Kooning has readily admitted his debt to Ingres. In a 1958 publication,
for example, the artist said, "I used to make imaginary portraits from Ingres
and the Le Nains (I never did copies; I don't think I'd be able to)."48 A few ex-
amples of de Kooning's art works will suffice as illustration of Ingres' impact.
De Kooning's Seated Man of c. 1939 is an early work showing the influence
of Ingres. It relates not only to Gorky's Portrait of Master Bill but also to their
common source in Ingres' M. Riviere. De Kooning's Woman Sitting, also
c. 1943-44, continues the Ingriste seated-portrait tradition. Notable here is
the uneasy stillness which is enhanced by the melancholic gesture of the fig-
ure. This is a device that can also be traced to Ingres' influence as exemplified
in his seated portrait Mme. Moitessier. Furthermore, the finely drawn line
which defines the neck and arm areas is reminiscent of the line in Ingres'
Mme. Henri-Placide-Joseph Panckoucke, for example, and like the line Gra-
ham was to use later in his Two Sisters. This concern with the anatomy and the
struggle to integrate it harmoniously into the composition were of equal im-
portance to de Kooning, who frequently expressed his great difficulty in ren-
dering the shoulder.49
De Kooning's Seated Woman of c. 1942 also recalls Mme. Panckoucke. The
tilting of the head, the facial expression, the exaggerated anatomy, and the
accent on the full breasts make de Kooning's painting roughly a reflection of
Ingres' work. The erotic breast imagery in de Kooning's and Graham's paint-
ings again reminds us of their intense interest in Surrealism and Freudian
psychology.
As a final example, de Kooning's drawing Reclining Nude may have its
source in the Metropolitan's Odalisque in Grisaille, acquired in 1938.50 It is as
if de Kooning simply has turned the body of the figure around and toward the
viewer. But here are the same elongated proportions, the full breasts, the large
hips, and a similar contorted positioning of the legs. The mysterious blank
stare and the pro file-frontal double reading of the face are also clearly the
same.
These brief examples show that the Ingres influence pervaded not only the

356 1970s
art of Graham but also that of his friends, Gorky and de Kooning. Because of
their friendship, their similar views, and because of the types of things they
borrowed from Ingres, we might consider Graham's writings as a general mir-
ror reflection of their common interest and principles.
Recognizing this, I will conclude by returning to the question of why they
persistently and repeatedly chose to follow Ingres. It was more than the for-
malistic and psychological-surreal aspects of his art that have been mentioned
thus far, especially since these qualities might have been found in a number of
artists, including Picasso. In fact, it is often said that Graham, Gorky, and
de Kooning saw Ingres through the eyes of Picasso, a statement which is only
partially true. In many cases, their works are much more closely akin to the
older artist's paintings. During the 19305, in particular, Picasso's influence in-
deed had weighed heavily upon them, but by the latter part of the decade and
in the early Forties all had moved beyond him in their art. The reason for this
sudden shift in outlook is stated explicitly in Graham's own writings. In his
notebooks of the 19405, Graham several times mentions that Picasso's art had
become too sketchy, too facile, too unfinished. He felt that art, as exemplified
by Picasso, had lost the quality of craftsmanship that was so very essential to
continue the tradition of great art. "To be an artist," Graham said, "you have
to be a master craftsman."51 Gorky expressed similar views when he said of
Picasso's best works, "The more I admire them, the further I feel myself re-
moved from all art, it seems so easy, so limited."52 In turning from Picasso,
Graham, Gorky, and de Kooning merely traced the development of Picasso's
art back to one of its basic roots, namely Ingres, where this quality of crafts-
manship was still intact. Moreover, by doing this they were reestablishing a
vital link with the tradition of modern art at its very beginnings, a link which
they felt had been eroded by recent developments. Graham had put it this
way: "Great art, no matter how revolutionary, presents a legitimate link in the
unbroken chain of the development of tradition."53 De Kooning agreed, say-
ing that "the idea that art can come from nowhere is typically American."54
"Being anti-traditional is just as corny as being traditional."55 Gorky also con-
curred: "Every artist has to have tradition. Without tradition art is no good.
Having a tradition enables you to tackle new problems with authority, with
solid footing."56 Graham went on to say that the truly great artists are those
who are able to forge an inevitable link with this chain of tradition. Moreover,
learning from the past masters, as he, Gorky, and de Kooning did from Ingres,
did not mean that a work would be alien to its own age. Graham was most em-
phatic on this point and again cited Ingres as an example: "To be true to one's

1970s 357
 time," he said, "is an automatic thing. You do not have to try it. Ingres was
true to his time in spite [of the fact] that he followed Raffael."57 Thus, there is
no need to consciously seek to invent styles that break with tradition, as he felt
Picasso was doing, since any style, no matter how imitative or eclectic, would
inevitably remain of its own time and spirit.
The revival of interest in the art of Ingres in the 19303 and 19405 is only one
aspect of a more general growing réévaluation of many old masters that in-
cluded, besides Ingres, Uccello and Piero della Francesca among others. But
it was Ingres to whom Graham, Gorky, and de Kooning paid their closest
attention and gave their most unswerving devotion; for it was he who best
epitomized and synthesized the qualities of formalist abstraction, Surrealist-
psychological mood, and perfection of craftsmanship that they so highly
esteemed.

Notes

1. See especially Hayden Herrera, "John Graham: Modernist Turns Magus," Arts
Magazine, 51 (October 1976), pp. 100-105; Hayden Herrera, "Le Feu Ardent:
John Graham's Journal," Archives of American Art Journal, 14 (1974), pp. 6-17;
Eila Kokkinen, "John Graham During the 1940 V Arts Magazine, 51 (November
1976), pp. 99-103. Mention should also be made of the valuable and scholarly in-
troduction by Marcia Allentuck (ed.) in John Graham's Systems and Dialectics of
Art, Baltimore, 1971, pp. 1-84. The present article is a revised version of a paper
presented at the University of Delaware's symposium on American art, April i,
1977, under the title of "An Aspect of John D. Graham's Writings: Ingres and the
Early New York School." I am especially grateful to the University of Delaware
for a grant which helped to defray the cost for photographs used in this essay.
2. John D. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, New York, 1937.
3. Whether or not this particular book influenced Jackson Pollock's development
toward automatism or whether it affected the development of Minimal art in the
19603 are two such questions yet to be more fully explored. At this point, it is
perhaps more reasonable to assume that Graham's influence on his contempo-
raries was on a more personal level through direct contacts.
4. Some of Graham's journals and letters are available on microfilm at the Archives
of American Art.
5. Graham, System and Dialectics, pp. 23-24; Allentuck, pp. 104-105. In this and in
succeeding notes references will be given to both the original System and Dialec-
tics (hereafter cited as "Graham") and to Professor Allentuck's edited version
(hereafter cited as "Allentuck").
6. Graham, p. 24; Allentuck, p. 105.
7. Uccello and other quattrocento artists held a particular fascination for Graham.
For example, his Apotheosis (1957, Collection of Edwin Bergman, Chicago) clearly

358 1970s
 is based upon a quattrocento panel (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge) recently
identified as that of a Warrior and attributed to the studio of Antonio Vivarini.
See Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, "A Rediscovered Series of Uomini Famosi from
Quattrocento Venice," Art Bulletin, 58 (June 1976), pp. 184-95.
8. Elia Kokkinen, "loannus Magus Servus Domini St. Georgii Equitus," Art News,
67 (September 1968), p. 64.
9. Morton D. Zabel, "Ingres in America," Arts, 16 (February 1930), p. 372.
10. Agnes Mongan, "Introduction" in Ingres Centennial Exhibition (Fogg Art Mu-
seum, February 12-April 9,1967), Greenwich, Conn., 1967, p. x.
11. The exhibition, whose full title was "David and Ingres: The Classical Ideal,"
was first seen at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in December of 1939. In
January of 1940, it traveled to M. Knoedler &: Co. of New York, and the following
month it was shown in Cincinnati.
12. Graham, p. 35; Allentuck, p. 118.
13. Notebooks, Archives of American Art.
14. Graham, p. 105; Allentuck, p. 179.
15. Graham, p. 107; Allentuck, p. 181.
16. Graham, p. 86; Allentuck, p. 163.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. This is an often quoted statement and can be found, for example, in Walter Pach,
Ingres, New York, 1939, p. 172.
20. Graham, p. 51; Allentuck, p. 131.
21. Graham, p. 15; Allentuck, p. 95.
22. Interview with Mrs. Ethel Baziotes, New York City, November 4,1976.
23. Graham, p. 64; Allentuck, p. 143.
24. Graham, p. 52; Allentuck, p. 132.
25. Graham, p. 41; Allentuck, p. 122.
26. Pach, Ingres, p. 173.
27. Kokkinen, "loannus Magus," p. 65.
28. Notebooks, Archives of American Art.
29. Quoted in Allentuck, p. 6.
30. Graham, p. 105; Allentuck, p. 179. In paragraph 91, entitled "What Is Binocular-
ity?," Graham further states: "The distance between the two ray feelers from the
two eyes establishes by differentiation the fact of flatness or protrusion" (Gra-
ham, p. 92; Allentuck, p. 167).
31. Notebooks, Archives of American Art. Graham was incorrect in saying that the
painting took Ingres four or five years to complete. Commissioned in 1844,
Ingres worked seven years on the seated version of Mme. Moitessier before tem-
porarily giving up and creating, in a relatively brief time, the 1851 standing
version. He then resumed the painting now in the National Gallery of London,
completing it only in 1856, twelve years after the original commission. An article
relating the problems Ingres had faced with the commission was published in
1936: Martin Davies, "Portrait by the Aged Ingres, Madame Moitessier Seated"

1970s 359
 Burlington Magazine, 68 (June 1936), pp. 256-68. The painting was acquired by
London's National Gallery in that same year.
32. If the dating is to be accepted, Gorky had already formulated his Ingriste taste in
1923 when he painted Portrait of Myself and My Imaginary Wife (Joseph H. Hir-
shhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
B.C.). While the male head obviously is derived from Picasso's Tête de marin
(1905-06, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller, New York), the female
head stylistically recalls works by Ingres, such as his Mme. de Laureal (1840,
Musée Ingres, Montauban). This is true even to the extent that both Ingres and
Gorky have juxtaposed the female head with the head of a second relatively unre-
lated and isolated figure.
33. Kokkinen, "John Graham," p. 102.
34. Letter from Gorky to his family, February 17,1947, published in Ararat, 12 (Fall
197l), F-39-
35. Ethel Schwabacher has confirmed that the Ingres reproduction was the Musée
Condé's Self-Portrait at the Age of Twenty-Four of 1804, and not the Self Portrait
that the Metropolitan Museum acquired in 1943. However, Mrs. Schwabacher
has identified the reproduction as being that of an earlier state of the Musée
Condé's painting. In its original state, the artist held a handkerchief in his left
hand with which he was rubbing out a portrait of the lawyer Gilibert drawn on
the easel before him. There was also an overcoat draped over Ingres' right shoul-
der which has been changed in the present version. For a reproduction of this
earlier state and a discussion, see: George Wildenstein, Ingres, New York, 1954,
pp. 162-63.
36. Pach, Ingres, p. 19.
37. Interview with Mr. Peter Busa, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 26,1976.
38. Gorky's wife Agnes believes that this is not a portrait of de Kooning. See Her-
rera, "John Graham," p. 103.
39. Ibid.
40. Graham, p. 89; Allentuck, p. 165.
41. Pach, Ingres, p. 170.
42. Letter to Gorky's sister Vartoosh, February 9,1942, published in Ararat, p. 29.
43. Letter to Vartoosh, October 11, щф, Ararat, p. 38.
44. Donald Carroll and Edward Lucie-Smith, Movements in Modern Art, New York,
1973, p. 120.
45. Graham refers to him here as "W. Kooning." Graham, p. 75; Allentuck, p. 154.
46. Willem de Kooning, Letter to the Editor, Art News, 47 (January 1949), p. 6.
47. Kokkinen, "John Graham," p. 101.
48. W. de Kooning, "Is Today's Artist With or Against the Past?," Art News, 57
(Summer 1958), p. 27.
49. Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, New York, 1959, p. 22.
50. The authorship of the Odalisque in Grisaille has since been in doubt. During
the period under discussion, however, its authenticity as a work by Ingres was
unquestioned.

360 1970s
51. Marcia Allentuck has recognized the fact that Graham was indeed reacting against
Picasso's lack of craftsmanship. But she seems to imply that the overriding rea-
son for the rejection was jealousy, not theoretical principle. The "crux of the
matter," as she sees it, was Graham's own lack of recognition, which he blamed
upon the frequent comparisons made between his work and Picasso's. Her point
is valid, but based upon the material available to me, I believe the emphasis
should be placed upon the theoretical principles to which Graham devotes much
more space and repeats in many instances. For Allentuck's discussion, see espe-
cially Allentuck, pp. 65-84. Hayden Herrera discusses extensively Graham's
commitment to craftsmanship, but she, too, seems to suggest that jealousy was a
primary reason for Graham's rejection of Picasso. See Herrera, "Le Feu Ardent,"
pp. 9, 12-13. On the other hand, Eila Kokkinen suggests the major emphasis
should be placed upon the War and Graham's questioning of the survival of the
past and present culture. Kokkinen, "John Graham," p. 102.
52. Quoted in The 30's: Painting in New York, Poindexter Gallery, New York, 1957,
n.p.
53. Graham, p. 81; Allentuck, p. 158.
54. De Kooning, "Is Today's Artist With or Against the Past?," p. 27.
55. Ibid.
56. Letter to Gorky's family, January 6,1945, in Ararat, p. 33.
57. Notebooks, Archives of American Art.

DONALD B. KUSPIT Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko

and Clyfford Still

By symbolic pregnance we mean the way in which a perception as a sensory

experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it
immediately and concretely represents It is the perception itself which, by
virtue of its own immanent organization, takes on a kind of spiritual articula-
tion—which, being ordered in itself, also belongs to a determinate order of
meaning It is this ideal interwovenness, this relatedness of the single per-
ceptive phenomenon, given here and now, to a characteristic total meaning
that the term "pregnance" is meant to designate.
Can we continue to ask how signification, a meaning, issues from the mere
raw material of sensation, considered as something fundamentally alien to
meaning, once we have seen that this "unmeaningness" is itself a fiction?
—Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

SOURCE: Arts Magazine (March 1978), 120-25. Reprinted with the permission of Donald
Kuspit.

361
 Yes, we can continue to ask, for it is the core epistemological question about
abstract art, sharply and freshly raised by the works of Rothko and Still, which
generate intense sensations and unpredictable meanings and the question of
their interrelation. As Michel Conil-Lacoste wrote of the late Rothko, there
are "deux lectures de Rothko: non pas seulement celle du technicien de la
coleur, mais aussi celle de l'âme éprise de mysticisme."1 The technician of
color supplies the raw material of sensation, and the mystic communicates
ideal meanings. But how much can the two be said to interweave, when the
sensory experience of color is so intense it is almost indescribable and mean-
ing so indeterminate it is porous? How, in the perception of color, can one dis-
cover spiritual meaning, when the perception is so much a private response
and the meaning no more than suggested, erratically and ambiguously? Rothko
and Still seem to carry to an extreme Redon's belief in:

an expressive, suggestive, and indeterminate art. Suggestive art is the irradia-

tion of sublime plastic elements, drawn together and combined with the pur-
pose of evoking visions which it illuminates and exalts, meanwhile inciting
thought.2

The abstract irradiations of Rothko and Still evoke but do not name visions,
incite but do not clarify thought, and illuminate and exalt but to no clear pur-
pose. Rothko and Still produce pictures which are kinds of palimpsests, with
layer upon layer of implication but with no firm, final layer of sense. Perceiv-
ing them, one experiences deeper and deeper sensations, profounder and pro-
founder meanings, but one erases the other, and none reaches bottom, where
all are rooted and connect. In the end the pictures imprint no absolute sensa-
tion, no one meaning. Sensing comes to seem a hardly adequate response to
them and pursuit of meaning a game of blindman's buff.
The possibility of their collapse into meaninglessness suggests the "unreli-
ability" and even groundlessness of their form and content. Unless color is
understood as what Kandinsky thought it must be—"purposive playing upon
the human soul"3—there is no way one can assume that the pictures imply the
"tragic and timeless."4 There is no way one can assume that the "immanent
organization" of the pictures has a "spiritual articulation" unless one presup-
poses that form and color have spiritual import. Art supplies the abstract ele-
ments and culture the abstract meanings, but their transcendental unity is a
wish—a matter of intention and belief, of a mystique or intention. It may be
that such transcendental unity is not the true issue of abstraction. As Green-
berg wrote:

362 1970s
 Abstract art is effective on the same basis as all previous art, and can convey a
content equally important or equally unimportant; there is no difference in
principle. On the other hand, it is possible to assert... that the great masters
of the past achieved their art by virtue of combinations of pigment whose real
effectiveness was "abstract," and that their greatness is not owed to the spiri-
tuality with which they conceived the things they illustrated so much as it is to
the success with which they ennobled raw matter to the point where it could
function as art.5

But Greenberg himself is confused about the role of content in abstract art, for
he celebrates its hidden presence while being unwilling—or unable—to name
it. Writing about David Smith's sculpture, he remarks:

I am not able to talk about the content of Smith's art because I am no more
able to find words for it than for the ultimate content of Quercia's or Rodin's
art. But I can see that Smith's felicities are won from a wealth of content, of
things to say; and this is the hardest, and most lasting, way in which they can
be won. The burden of content is what keeps an artist going 6

The burden of content in Rothko and Still is conveyed by their intention

that their works be spiritual or transcendental—communicate, in Greenberg's
words, "metaphysical pretensions." "Pictures must be miraculous," wrote
Rothko, "revelations," "unexpected and unprecedented resolutions,"7 while
Still thought he was presenting the "Vision" through the "Act."8 But because
the relation between form and meaning in their works "oscillates," to use
Schiller's term, they do not show the transcendental as belonging to a "deter-
minate order of meaning." It may be that the imprecision that arises because,
as Schiller says, form and content are "contradictory impulses" is itself the
transcendental, which shows itself as the perpetual disjunction between par-
ticular and universal. But if this is what the transcendental is, then the pictures
have no chance at all for symbolic pregnance, which insists upon the synthesis
of specific sensation and determinate meaning as its source. In fact, the Rothko-
Still metamorphosis of form into configurative color obscures rather than il-
luminates spiritual meaning, for it establishes an infinite regress of sensation:
meaning becomes completely indeterminate as one is overwhelmed and swept
along by a continuum of sensation. Reflection on meaning becomes, on the
one hand, a response to color consciousness, which can give no determinate
meaning. On the other hand, it becomes a meditation on the artist's intention
to be profound, but can find no profundity itself—which is why I speak of the

1970s 363
 mystique of intention sustaining and animating the works, rather than of un-
intended meanings realized through their intended sensations.
Thus, the art of Rothko and Still is susceptible to what has been called
"metaphysical pathos," especially the "pathos of sheer obscurity, the loveli-
ness of the incomprehensible," and, akin to it, the "pathos of the esoteric."9
From its origin in the artist's intention to its perception and the attempt to de-
termine its meaning, their art is inevitably subject to mythologization, which
simultaneously preordains its greatness but hides the reasons for it.10 While
the pathos and myths must be cleared away before the pictures can be com-
prehended, they correspond to something in their condition. For, as noted,
neither reading of Rothko-Still actively supports the other—decisively relates
to the other. In fact, each seems to interfere with the other, get in the way of the
other, because to be entirely absorbed in color sensations leaves no room for
spiritual meanings, and to insist on such meanings is to be distracted from
one's sensations. In Rothko-Still sensation and meaning are both, in a sense,
abstract: neither is concretely grounded in nor firmly associated with the other.
Thus, the pictures are "pathetic" not only because form and meaning in them
seem mutually exclusive, but because this affords the opportunity to my-
thologize them as simultaneously physical and metaphysical. Their physical
intensity is self-evident, their meaning mysterious—and so presumably meta-
physical. They evoke the metaphysical without substantiating it because one
expects them to be meaningful without knowing what they might mean.
Thus, the pictures become arrogant: they dismember into esoteric sensations
—sensations with a source but without a purpose—and farfetched but unmen-
tionable meanings. They perfectly exemplify, in Neumeyer's language, ab-
stract art's uncertainty of meaning and ineffability.11 Since they do not refer
to a familiar reality, they presumably refer to a higher reality, but what that re-
ality might be, and whether it is knowable or unknowable, is never hinted at.
Rothko-Still pictures are thus colossal promises based on exaggerated expec-
tations—demanding that one believe in them, but not rewarding one's belief.
Their physicality calls strong attention to them, but their ambiguous meta-
physicality seems a poor, even illusory object for the attention they raise to a
high pitch. The pictures, then, arouse faith in themselves, and it has been said
that faith is a willing suspension of disbelief, but the rewards of such suspen-
sion are highly uncertain, and the ultimate object of faith so invisible it seems
nonexistent. The pathos of the true believer's position is mirrored back to
him by the art's supposed metaphysicality, but that is no more than a tautolog-
ical hypostatization of his suspended disbelief.

364 1970s
 The sensation of suspension— of indeterminate hovering—generates the
momentum of Rothko-Still pictures, and is the source of their lovely incom-
prehensibility and esoteric implications. It is created by the "forthright verti-
cality" Greenberg finds in Still, and the "scumbled over colors" he finds in
Rothko, and is responsible for the "activated, pregnant 'emptiness' " he finds
in both.12 (This "emptiness," activated and made pregnant by color sensa-
tion, is the ambiguous sign of the transcendental spirituality of the pictures—
"ambiguous" because it may be nothing but the physical effect of large shape
filled with color, and so an indication of the absence rather than presence of
spirituality.) More crucially, the sensation of suspension is created by "Still's
slack, willful silhouettes"—Rothko's are as slack but not as willful and less
"arbitrary in contour"—and above all by Still's:

great insight... that the edges of a shape could be made less conspicuous,
therefore less cutting, by narrowing the value contrast that its color made with
the colors adjacent to it.

This permits "the artist to draw and design with greater freedom in the ab-
sence of a sufficient illusion of depth," sparing the surface "the sudden jars
and shocks that might result from 'complicatedness' of contour." This insight,
accepted and adapted by the "less aggressive" Rothko to his less complicated,
more convenient contours, is for Greenberg the gist of "field" painting. It is
not simply, in Rothko's words, the creation of the meta-easel "large shape"
that "has the impact of the unequivocal,"13 but the projection of a subtly dif-
ferentiated "flatness that breathes and pulsates."
Such an extensive, nuanced surface—Greenberg first experienced it as
"utterly uncontrolled"—functioning as an environment for the viewer, is not
without precedent. It originates not simply with Monet, but is recidivist ro-
mantic naturalism, as Greenberg implicitly acknowledges when he connects
Still with Whitman and writes of the "fray-leaf and spread-hide contours that
wander across his canvas like souvenirs of the great American outdoors."
Greenberg, in fact, has argued that:

The best modern painting, though it is mostly abstract painting, remains

naturalistic to its core, despite all appearances to the contrary. It refers to the
structure of the given world both outside and inside human beings.14

One can regard Rothko-Still pictures, with their rejection of the classicist
"craving for clear lines of demarcation,"15 as visionary English gardens—
"dream landscapes," Greenberg once called Rothko's early pictures—and

1970s 365
 both artists can be viewed as belated, decadent, igth-century romantics, ab-
stracting romantic intention and attitude to an ultimate. Romanticism can
"be described as a conviction that the world is an englischer Garten on a grand
scale":

The God of Romanticism was one in whose universe things grew wild and
without trimming and in all the rich diversity of their natural shapes. The
preference for irregularity, the aversion from that which is wholly intellectual-
16
ized, the yearning for échappées into misty distances

The irregularity of Still's images, Rothko's escapes into misty distance, the
untrimmed quality of general configurations and particular shapes—making
it hard to give them an intellectual import and intelligible meaning, but mak-
ing them seem to drift in a netherworld of latent emotion—attest to a romantic
yearning for a wild cosmos symbolic of a full, complex, difficult spirit. Rothko
and Still are not esprits simplistes but "sensible of the general complexity of
things,"17 and as such find any straightforward image anathema and a be-
trayal of the complexity of art, as well as of nature and consciousness.
Yet they do not offer a full cosmos, only the activated, pregnant emptiness
Greenberg encountered—really too loosely structured to be called a cosmos,
and too uneventful to be called full. Nor does it make sense, in the last analy-
sis, to regard their pictures as alluding, in however disguised a manner, to na-
ture. While, in Ehrenzweig's words, Rothko's "use of the weakest possible
forms, such as insubstantial quadrangles insecurely suspended against a more
solid ground,"18 conveys distance, it is not clear that the distance belongs to a
landscape sky. As Friedlander wrote, "a low horizon is always and everywhere
a sign of advanced contemplation of nature,"19 and there is rarely anything
that can still be consistently called a low horizon in Rothko and Still, and
so their pictures cannot be understood as advanced or abstract contempla-
tions of nature. Even when the "lucid film-like transparency of the colour
bands . . . thickened into almost solid cloud banks several miles deep," as in
Rothko's black paintings (among others), it is not clear that because the dis-
tance now appears to be definite and measurable it is cosmic. This thicken-
ing, the consequence of what Ehrenzweig calls a "secondary solidification
process," which also involves verticalization (powerfully evident in Rothko,
Still, and Newman),20 is not concerned to "naturalize" abstraction by show-
ing it to deal in very dense, "figurative" matter. Rather, the conversion of "mo-
bile pictorial space" (such as Pollock's) "into precise almost measurable illu-

366 1970s
sions" aims to discreetly differentiate a potential chaos and thereby bring it
under some control.
This chaos is a purely creative one—it, or transcendental unity of matter
and meaning, can be the outcome of the creative process. Rothko and Still
forestall the chaos by means of solidification and verticalization. At the same
time, as noted, these do not necessarily produce the transcendental, but only
suspension—between potential chaos and potential transcendence. The false
perspective—self-evident in Rothko, implicit in Still (and Newman)—the
solidification and verticalization processes evoke does not promise transcen-
dence because it does not point beyond itself. Rather, the space implied by
the hypothetical perspective is static—almost stagnant in Rothko, and fester-
ing in Still—and undirected, directionless. It is because of these qualities that
the space of their pictures is usually ignored: the works in fact are spoken of
as spaceless, which really means, as Greenberg put it, that they are "almost al-
together devoid of decipherable references" to Cubist space. However, it is
not so much that there is no space in Rothko-Still pictures, but that it does not
live up to our expectations of what space should do: contain something, in
some orientation to it, and move somewhere. But Rothko-Still space seems
constitutionally incapable of containing anything, and congenitally unmoved.
It is these factors that are responsible for the sense of the emptiness of the pic-
tures, and their impacted immediacy.
This unyielding, barren space seems to push the work in a transcendental
direction, as well as keep it from sinking back into an inchoate state. Yet to say
one knows what it does is to presuppose one knows what emptiness is about.
It is this hovering emphasis, a negative of space, that one recurs to in consider-
ing Rothko-Still pictures—a saturated emptiness, an impure absence, which
seems fraught with implications. Now it is noteworthy that Rothko describes
the transcendental as though it were absent—in purely negative terms an un-
namable alternative to the familiar.21 And Still, while he shouts about it, also
does not know how to name it. For both, in the last analysis, it remains a gray
eminence, and their pictures are its runic remains. Both in fact are more cer-
tain of what they are doing when they deny the claims of those they regard as
pretenders to the throne of the transcendental, than they are when they them-
selves pretend to it.22 They are obsessed with separating the profane from the
sacred, but this does not in itself assure them of their own priesthood, or even
guarantee that what they wish to worship exists. They are manqué religious
men, for whom the transcendental can never be self-evident, and thus whose

1970s 367
 aspiration remains peculiarly muted. This cannot be attributed to their being
enamoured of the deus absconditus. Rather, it has to do with a hovering be-
tween scepticism and faith, and doubt of both. Magician-priests, they create
pictures, in a genre familiar from Morris Louis, that are like temple veils or
stage curtains—Rothko's has rents in it, Still's is in a tattered, fiery state. The
Rothko-Still picture means to be, in Breton's words, "an intellectual event, or
a landmark in the direction of mystery and fire." We are tempted to believe—
and they themselves want to believe—there is something significant behind
the curtain. But it is never lifted, the veil is never parted, the god remains in-
visible or invented, a hope or a deception. The pictures strongly intend the
transcendental, but leave it literally a matter of the artist's sleight of hand. In
viewing them, we do not know whether we are in the temple or theater. They
seem to call for ritual, but the script to accompany them has not yet been writ-
ten. Rothko-Still pictures are either magical incantations or pious frauds, per-
haps both, for they traffic in the magic of belief as well as the belief in magic.
Yet viewers believe the pictures touch them with spiritual power, and are
able to find "that lever of consciousness which will change a blank pointed
fabric into a glow perpetuating itself into the memory," as Kozloff puts it.23
The glow, because it is inwardly as well as outwardly revealed, acquires spiri-
tual significance. What is the nature of the "lever of consciousness" that con-
verts glowing emptiness into pregnant perception—that needs no other con-
firmation than its own activity to find emptiness articulate? Spontaneous and
self-justifying, its results stand in no need of clarification, because its force
stands behind them. Ehrenzweig finds this consciousness implicit in the space-
lessness of the pictures—the source of their emptiness. But more than being
implied by the spacelessness, the spacelessness is the exemplification of the
abstract consciousness:

The lack of spatial depth suggested in a mystic-oceanic feeling, of individual

existence lost in the universe. The annihilation of space indicated a dreamlike
level of experience where our commonsense concepts of space and time have
no meaning.

The first sentence offers a conventional interpretation of the unusual experi-

ence of abstraction—the suspension of commonsense concepts of space and
time—the second sentence reports. Ehrenzweig, like Rothko and Still, filters
this experience of abstraction through a familiar concept—the mystic-oceanic
feeling, the transcendental—to make sense of it. All three predetermine the
meaning of abstract consciousness—the transcendental particularly puts it in

368 1970s
a straitjacket—rather than accept it on its own, perhaps frightening terms: the
suspension of active relations with everyday reality, allowing consciousness
to show itself as a generalized state of feeling. The transcendental—the super-
meaningful—is announced to fill the vacuum of meaning created by the re-
moval of the commonsensical, as if to obviate the experience of death by the
prediction of immortality. But the experience of abstraction is not one of
mortification of matter and contemptu mundi, but rather of the revelation of
consciousness as a phenomenon in itself, not one which will outlast matter
but which dynamically charges it with purposive meaning. Abstraction, in
other words, is the discovery of consciousness as the power of intention. To
call abstraction transcendental is to call attention to it not only as a sign of the
disengagement of consciousness from the commonsense world—rather than
its engagement with the uncommonsensical world of the divine—but as a
manifestation of consciousness in and for itself. The hovering emptiness of
Rothko-Still pictures suggests both the disengagement and concentration of
consciousness as reciprocal events. The hovering intends something, but
nothing in particular; it is simply the muscle of consciousness. Ideally, ab-
stract consciousness would like to mirror itself, as it seemingly does in the
pictures realistically, it can re-present the world as meaningful, as it would
seem to want to do in the pictures, but they represent no world for it to re-
work. The purity of abstraction in Rothko and Still—for it can hardly be said
to be significantly naturalistic or geometrical in derivation—is another sign
that their pictures are about consciousness in a state of suspended animation
or abstract suspension, full of intention toward the world but free of it
("oceanic"). The pictures are, in a sense, fictional accounts of phenomenolog-
ical reduction, of the suspension of consciousness from active involvement in
the world and of awareness of its power of intention (but without a conception
of the structure of intention)—of its potential for creating meaning without
actually creating specific, this-worldly or other-worldly meanings. The pic-
tures are thus uncommonsensical, being essentially spaceless and timeless—
non-worldly—and purely "sensible." They are pointedly non-representational
—empty—and ironically dreamlike, i.e., full of potential representations which
can never actualize, but remain kinds of haunting fantasy. The pictures show
consciousness withdrawing into itself, and at the same time projecting the
possibility of a meaningful cosmos, without saying anything about the actual
shape or sense of such a cosmos. The epitomizing abstract picture is simulta-
neously a withdrawal and a proposal, with the content of neither self-evident.
Rothko and Still carry the condensation and displacement of abstraction to

1970s 369
 an extreme in which consciousness itself seems to be revealed, with no com-
mitment to either the reality of nature (space) or the self (time), the conditions
of the world.
Consciousness at its root, as pure intention ("feeling"), abstractly reduced
to its own activity, seems, as Ehrenzweig notes, to lack differentiation, and
thereby to be able to "accommodate a wide range of incompatible forms," i.e.,
to suggest a world but not necessarily to give or commit itself exclusively to
one. To reach the root level of consciousness, in which it seems vivid but
indefinite—is felt but undefined—"suppression of form" rather than "precise
articulation" is necessary. Rothko and Still show suppression of form in pro-
cess. It is particularly evident in Rothko's development, where an early pre-
occupation with the "organic life" of abstract figuration is replaced by, in
Hegel's words, the "principle of tonality" which is responsible for all beauty.
Still has always seemed midway between these extremes. His interest in both
the organic and the beautiful seems tenuous and tentative. He has relatively
consistently been concerned to accommodate a wide range of incompatible
forms, which are not so much alive or beautiful as deviously disembodied, like
fire was for Plotinus. Rothko also seems to achieve a Plotinean disembodi-
ment, but he shows it to be charming—as Greenberg wrote, after 1955 he "pro-
duced far more gorgeous than achieved paintings."24 This not only nullifies
their "glow," making it less significant as abstraction and less the resolute step
of consciousness coming to itself, but making it seem hollow—exactly why
Rothko's works seem more empty and less pregnant than Still's. The tran-
scendental ego Rothko's works are pregnant with aborts. Nonetheless, the sur-
face tension in both Rothko and Still signifies a state of crystallization so ad-
vanced that it can be conceived as an articulation of disembodiment rather
than an abstraction from embodiment.
Ehrenzweig takes "the plastic quality of pictorial space in painting ... as
a conscious signal of a vast unconscious substructure." This substructure
was self-evident in Rothko's early mythological works (mid-Forties), where it
was directly connected with the idea of myth as an attempt to give body and
voice to the ineffable.25 Since then, Rothko's canvases grew increasingly
empty, while Still's, despite similar mythologizing tendencies, also involving
the use of a latent figuration, stayed more or less as they were in principle,
i.e., in their indifference to the organic and the beautiful. Ironically, although
Rothko's pictures became emptier than Still's, they never achieved the same
pure concentration, because they were concerned to organicize and beautify
—vitalize and aestheticize—the transcendental, rather than evoke the fitful play

370 1970s
 of consciousness, as Still's art does. Still's works risk more because they are
less beautiful, and achieve more because they are less openly transcendental.
They thus seem more able to evoke a vast unconscious substructure, without
mythologizing or explicitly "figuring" it. That is, they are more personal—
less universal—than Rothko's pictures. Still has an implicitly more individual
content—and consciousness—than Rothko. Rothko's pictures have always been
more easily labeled—mythological, beautiful, transcendental—than Still's be-
cause they run a culturally prescribed course. Still's, because they do not do
so, can more easily signal the unconscious, without making it conscious.
Their suspension exists to greater effect.
An understandable mistake in the interpretation of the work of Rothko and
Still is to characterize this suspension as sublime, and to pay undue attention
to the environmental scale and impact of the work.26 This is to predetermine
its meaning and formal effect. It is not transparently clear that the infinite is
suggested by the apparently unscalable openness of the form, nor that its
grandeur is all-encompassing. The big pictures are not blindly boundless but
have both circumference and center, only, in Nicholas Cusanus' words, the
"center coincides with the circumference." That is, one's perceptual location
in them always depends upon one's conceptual realization of them, a sense of
their closure as forms of consciousness. Also, the pictures seem less a sur-
rounding environment than a suppurating flatness—an irresistably swelling
flatness pushing one away rather than engulfing one, signaling one to keep
one's distance rather than drawing one in. Engulfment occurs only if one ab-
stractly attends to the flatness, rather than to the fact that it is a colored flatness
—a flatness made pushy by color. As Ehrenzweig remarks, "The battle for the
flat picture plane has been lost over and over again in the history of art." Color
is another way of losing it, of achieving what one might call reverse or pro-
jecting depth—a space that pushes out at the spectator rather than into the
picture. If this battle had not been lost—if the picture was perceived as noth-
ing but pure plane—one would long ago have become indifferent to it, and
the picture would have become nothing, i.e., another indifferent object. The
Rothko-Still picture is empty but not nothing; its flatness is activated and its
emptiness pregnant. It is because of the intensity and implications of the pic-
ture's surface that we cannot enter it as we would an environment. It is too for-
bidding, too swollen with its own self-absorption and self-esteem, to permit
easy penetration of its surface. Its openness is a mirage; it is really an abstract
wall. This alien abstract surface gives no clues to any content that might make
us feel at home on it. It is sheer border, implying a vast unconscious substruc-

1970s 371
 ture but not divulging it, implying a conscious world but not implementing
it. The abstract surface gives the sensation of a boundary about to burst and
impinging on and implying what is beyond itself, but this beyond is too ab-
solutely beyond to be appropriated by vision, to be enjoyed as even an imagi-
nary environment.
Kozloff has recognized this "brinksmanship" in Rothko, in which "mists
are kept from becoming too introspective or nebulous by the austerity of the
format."27 Rothko's "combination of puritanic restrictions and lavish self-
indulgence produces a drama." Rothko himself thought of his pictures as dra-
mas,28 and his preoccupation with the dramatic is an inevitable result of his
brinkmanship. What he said of Milton Avery's pictures can apply to his own:
they communicate at once "a gripping lyricism" and "the permanence and
monumentality of Egypt."29 But what is most important about the dramatic in
both Rothko and Still is that it is the source of their art's symbolic pregnance,
reconceived as indifferent to the question of referencing, with which it was so
involved for Cassirer. In fact, true symbolic pregnance involves a deliberate
refusal to reference particular meanings, an insistence on the indeterminate
situation of meaning. To conceive, as Cassirer did, of symbolic pregnance in
the first place as involving determinate meanings means to conceive of sensa-
tion as necessarily representational of reality. But sensation's role is different,
once we recognize its subjective as well as objective origins. It invokes, even
provokes possible meaning, like a gadfly; it does not fix or confirm actual mean-
ing. All sensations are conditioned by our general sense of reality, bringing its
indeterminacy to bear on particular situations, crystallizing that indetermi-
nacy into a sense of living possibility. Sensations "dramatize" the indetermi-
nate yet vital sense of possible meaning reality might have if it were subject to
our intentionality, and the symbol any constellation of sensations issues in ar-
ticulates such a possible meaning. This dramatic character of sensations is ev-
ident in the unceasing drama of the Rothko-Still picture, and its correlate in-
determinacy and unresolvable yet "felt" meaning. The drama in a Pollock or
de Kooning has the same indeterminacy, but with less sense that it is the ex-
pression of strong intention toward reality. The Rothko-Still use of an open
field makes clear that such indeterminate intention is not arbitrary, as the con-
gestion in a Pollock or de Kooning might lead us to believe. At the same time,
the openness or abstractness of the field makes it clear that the "reality" in-
tended is uncommon.
In general, the best Abstract-Expressionist painting never resolves itself,
never conveys a final meaning, let alone a finished surface. The gestures that

372 1970s
constitute that surface may be decisive in themselves, but their relation to
other gestures is indecisive—"open." Moreover, Abstract Expressionism is not
simply dramatic action between specific formal protagonists—e.g., color and
format—but between the inherent possibilities of form and meaning. It is a
search for, and setting in conflict of, all such possibilities, so that they apoca-
lyptically cancel one another out in expectation of still more profound possi-
bilities—of the final saving possibilities, which will make all come closer.
These, of course, never arrive. Abstract Expressionism epitomizes the escha-
tological brinksmanship inherent in all art—that risking of chaos and mean-
inglessness (dogmatized uncertainty) to achieve a pregnance beyond ordinary,
artless appearances. As such, it epitomizes the fundamental conflict between
intended form and given content inherent in all art, a conflict whose resolu-
tion is always tentative, incomplete, and inevitably forced. The equilibrium
that results is momentary, a truce but not a peace.
In Rothko and Still, the uncertain outcome of the battle or drama creates
the effect of symbolic pregnance. It sets loose a totally abstract and completely
arbitrary power of suggestion which holds full sway over the work. It is a dan-
gerous, permanent undertow in the work, pulling one away from the safe shores
of clear perception and known meaning into a sea in which one can drown in
obscurity—which reads as profundity—of form and meaning. Such absolutely
arbitrary power of suggestion, let loose by dramatic brinksmanship, under-
mines the effort to find anything innate to the art. Form and meaning become
nominal, and the paintings of Rothko and Still cannot even be securely estab-
lished as pictures, whether of an inner or outer world. In KozlofPs words, it is
possible to read them as no more than "pigmented containers of emptiness,"
as forms of resolute absence. Their work shows that all absolutes of form and
universals of meaning are illusions—perhaps possibilities, but magical ones.
Their works leave us with a sense of uncategorizable form and makeshift
meaning. A picture is produced in which everything seems possible but noth-
ing is ever actual, leaving one in a state of perpetual turmoil of expectation, a
kind of psychic randomness—a state of incipient chaos, a kind of nervous
breakdown. One clings to the subtle surface differentiations, the formal possi-
bilities, but these quickly slip out of one's grasp and become informal. One
clings to a variety of attempted meanings, the most ultimate and the most
banal, but none can be decisively articulated. The work perpetually sur-
prises and perpetually stymies: it is infinitely rich with possibilities yet emp-
tily finite.
In the midst of this arbitrariness, what then can the work of Rothko and

1970s 373
 Still be said to give, apart from doubts—apart from the temptation to end the
willing suspension of disbelief and indulge in the pure suspension of scepti-
cism? It gives the promise and pregnance of the life-world, its abounding with
new possibilities, none of which seem to be interfered with by old actualities.
The arbitrariness—the blank check on the power of suggestion—clears away,
as encrusting excess, given forms and meanings, well-known "truths" of state-
ment (including Rothko's "stated" rectilinear forms, which in the "course"
of his work slowly become "unstated"). It leaves a tabula rasa of creative in-
tention, what Emerson called "heroic passion" using "matter as symbols of
it(self)."30 It generates pure abstract passion, creating the illusion of being
charged with absolute passion. To feel charged with such passion is to feel
with inexhaustible, limitless potentiality. Their art is thus quintessentially ro-
mantic: it is an art of quintessential desire. The dramatic art of Rothko and
Still creates the illusion of existing in a presuppositionless state of conscious-
ness in which one's being is an undifferentiated continuum of potentialities,
all of which seem realizable and none of which are specifiable, and which will
never be put to the test—which will never have to stand up to reality, which
has been dismissed by the same abstraction that generated the sense of poten-
tiality. The art communicates a sense of inward plentitude, which one need
not, in Ehrenzweig's Freudian fashion, identify with mystic-oceanic feeling,
but recognize as a Utopian source of fruition. In Rothko and Still emptiness
turns inside out and reveals itself as disguised fullness, if the emptiness is ap-
proached in the proper spirit. As Rothko wrote, the picture can only show it-
self for what it might be when there is "a consummated experience" between
it and the viewer. "The appreciation of art is a true marriage of minds. And in
art, as in marriage, lack of consummation is ground for annulment."31 This
romantic, participation mystique conception of the relationship to art echoes
Hegel's assertion that "The work of art has not such a naive self-centered be-
ing, but is essentially a question, an address to the responsive heart, an appeal
to affections and to minds."32 Sufficiently appealing, the question can be an-
swered, the heart responds to the emptiness of the image with its own fullness,
the involved mind gives the emptiness its own center—its own intention.
In a sense, Rothko and Still show a horror vacui in an abstract, ironical
way. The abstract sensation of potentiality they supply is a product of the cre-
ative belief they stimulate. It is color that is the source of this belief for it cre-
ates a sense of inner movement, of inner timing that triggers expectations,
which must be realized if only in fantasy. What Husserl calls inner time con-
sciousness is involved in the perception of their color—a sense of an irrational

374 1970s
color flux harboring potentiality. The abstract flux implicit in color generates
the sense of potentiality which "fills" the vacuum of the large, open picture,
the vacuum generated by its immensity of scale relative to the human body.
(While Alloway has shown the figurai implications of their work, the empti-
ness of the work, and the irrationality it introduces into the sense of scale,
nullifies such implications, or throws them off.) It is the color flux that keeps
the vacuum from being a total void, and, as long as it is perceived, that pre-
vents the picture from losing its symbolic pregnancy—its significance. It is the
color flux that keeps the suspension dynamic—prevents the verticality from
becoming either static or inspirational, but remaining ambiguously hovering.
The color flux, which is so generative, is also responsible for the overall sense
of off-symmetry in Still and anti-gravity in Rothko. The solidification of the
color flux (Ehrenzweig) brings the matter which symbolizes the heroic pas-
sion of creative intention into being. As long as the color is in flux, the sense
of potentiality is sustained, and the life-world will not abort its futurity to be-
come empty facticity: the picture will not lose its blinding suggestiveness and
become, in Ehrenzweig's words, mere form, academic and decadent. It is the
color which sustains the myth of primordial creativity the picture means to
establish.
The art of Rothko and Still thus presents such a fluidity and interpénétra-
tion of percepts and concepts, such a fecundity of possibilities of sensation
and meaning, that one cannot help but speak of it as "spiritual," for as has
been remarked, the realm of spirit seems not only to permit but to necessitate
contradiction.33 The Plotinean emanations of their pictures, leading to all
kinds of discordant forms and meanings, and discordant relations between
form and meaning—which Plotinus saw as inevitable in spiritual creativity,
and as a sign of its fullness and diversity34—shows, in Rothko's words, "an in-
satiable appetite for ubiquitous experience in face of the fact of mortality."35
This speaks not only for the artist's mortality, but for that of the work—not of
its possible destruction or loss to history, but the way, during perception of it,
it seems simultaneously consequential and inconsequential, become now an-
other aesthetic appearance, now what Plotinus called the "self-intent" of con-
sciousness. Abstraction, in Rothko and Still, has been stretched to a limit at
which it almost breaks—becomes senseless. It has become so concentrated—
so completely metamorphosized concrete being into pure intensity—that one
can only respond to it silently. At the same time, while Rothko said that "si-
lence is so accurate," it is often also purblind and close to indifference. The
pictures may suffer from the same self-appointed or self-stylized greatness—

1970s 375
 self-prejudiced superiority—Rothko and Still were contemptuous of in intel-
lectuals, critics, and historians.36
At one time I thought of their pictures in terms of Heidegger's conception
of the ecstasy or standing-out of futurity, but I have come to see that the sus-
pension implies no particular time-direction—certainly not memory and the
past—and there is not a sufficient momentariness about it to convey the sin-
gular present. Then I thought they showed a concern for "symbolic immor-
tality," in Lifton's definition "a compelling urge to maintain an inner sense of
continuity, over time and space, with the various elements of life,"37 but I do
not see the elements of life in the pictures. I have thought of Rothko's pictures
as "partaking" of the atomic bomb burst,38 with its fusion of light and matter,
surface and form in hovering smoke—a totalitarian synthesizing of all beings,
an ironical unity. The glow of Rothko and Still seemed to me a sublime re-
venge against all matter. The pictures seem so much a matter of the world of
color, which, as Goethe said, represents "the acts and sufferings of light," that
they dissolve the seeming opposition between matter and energy. Yet because
their matter is color it seems insubstantial, and because the light is not present
as an independent phenomenon it seems consequential and energetic, more
impacted, so that the со-implication of matter and energy in the works seems
undermined by the ambiguously significant charge of each. Finally, I thought
the spacelessness of Still's pictures was an ideal way of directly forcing time
into the open, since it could no longer hide in space as its symbol (Bergson):
but without the symbol the phenomenon did not seem to exist. The weakness
of the works of Rothko and Still, if one can call it that, is that they give no de-
terminate symbols, which can eventually lead us to become oblivious of them.
The strength of the works is that they show us how belief generates symbols—
how important the "lever of consciousness" is in the discovery of any kind of
determinateness in art. I see the abstractions of Rothko and Still as a deliber-
ate intaglio of consciousness, a visible relief of consciousness whose features
are, if not invisible, forever changing—faster than Proteus—because they are
not legible, but only felt as spontaneously on the move. Rothko and Still show
Leonardo's blank wall overgrown with possibilities, pregnant with creative
intention but not creative presentation.

Note s

i. Michel Conil-Lacoste, "La transcendence de Rothko," Le Monde des Arts, March

29,1972, p. 13. The scepticism of my article arose out of an experience of discrep-
ancy between the two readings of Rothko and Still, i.e., my perceptual awareness

376 1970s
 of their art did not coincide with the conceptualization of it as transcendental.
They themselves tried to force a transcendental or spiritual meaning upon their
works: this straining for transcendental effect showed that it was not self-evident
in the sensations aroused by the work. Shaped color is not in and of itself tran-
scendentally convincing; expected meaning do not necessarily come into exis-
tence in experience. In a sense, the question of this article is whether the pictures
of Rothko and Still are visual molehills whose interpretation has made them into
transcendental mountains, or transcendental mountains that are inherently diffi-
cult to climb. To assume both—to accept both readings as a matter of course—is
to be intellectually dishonest as well as false to one's experience. It is to evade the
logic of the situation of the art as much as it is to accept an unstructured plurality
of meanings. It is to ignore the fact that a picture by Rothko or Still is an incom-
plete symbol. Their art seems to stretch the limits of symbolism, perhaps beyond
the breaking point.
2. Odilon Redon, "Introduction to a Catalogue," Theories of Modern Art, Herschel
B. Chipp, ed. (Berkeley, 1968), p. 120.
3. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Chipp, p. 155.
4. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, "Statement," Chipp, p. 545. For Gottlieb
and Rothko, the tragic and timeless are the only "valid" subject matter, so that
the experience of their pictures in purely phenomenal terms—as nothing but a
source of unique sensations—misses their point. Yet if the tragic and timeless are
not directly experienced, but are read into the works—with the prompting of the
artist—their meaning is falsified. The ambiguity of the works is that they some-
times seem tragic and timeless, but at other times purely immediate and without
any connotations of value.
5. Clement Greenberg, "Art Chronicle: Irrelevance Versus Irresponsibility," Parti-
san Review, 15 (1948), p. 577-
6. Clement Greenberg, "David Smith's New Sculpture," Art International, 8 (1964),
p. 37. Greenberg argues in effect that all content is implicit in the work: any con-
tent that is explicit has not been assimilated by its style. However, this does not
mean the content cannot be articulated—is "ineffable"—only that in speaking of
it one must also discuss its transformation by style and the point of this transfor-
mation. That is, style must be understood as an interpretation of content—a way
of qualifying it.
7. Mark Rothko, "The Romantics Were Prompted," Chipp, p. 549. Correlate with
his desperate desire to produce visionary pictures was Rothko's sense of "the ur-
gency for transcendent experience," but uncertainty of his ability to achieve and
sustain such experience.
8. Clyfford Still, "Statement," Chipp, p. 576. Both Still and Rothko suffer from a
sense of historic self-presentation, which cannot abide any questioning of mo-
tives and results. Such hubris masks their uncertainty about the success of their
great ambition.
9. Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harper Torchbooks, New York,
1960), p. 11. All quotations from Lovejoy are from this source.
10. Still is particularly guilty of the attempt to absolutize his works. Their workings,

1970s 377
 according to Still, are mysterious, and their implications horrendous. Not only is
the artist a kind of god for Still—the update of this Renaissance idea is that he is
now a deus absconditus rather than, as in the Renaissance, openly divine (Still's
sense of the artist's "obscure" position thus represents a retreat from the Renais-
sance artist's sense of his position)—but his work is also charged with divine
power. It is to be regarded with awe and handled with the care that sanctifies.
Thus, Still could assert, "Let no man undervalue the implications of this work or
its power for life—or for death, if it is misused" (Chipp, p. 576). (One might re-
place "misused" with "not properly respected and unquestionably worshipped.")
11. Alfred Neumeyer, The Search for Meaning in Modern Art (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J., 1964), pp. 88-90. Neumeyer's exploration of the uncertainty and ineffabil-
ity of abstract art is based on the assumption that "Whatever insights we may
gain, they come to us neither through nature nor as literary content... but solely
through associations evoked by sense impressions which cannot be rationally
checked." This does not preclude an implicit or hidden content; at the same
time, it implies that this content can never be completely verified—our sense of
its reality is not binding—but exists as one among many possible interpretations
of the work.
12. Clement Greenberg, " 'American-Type' Painting,'Mr¿ and Culture (Boston, 1961),
p. 225. All subsequent quotations from Greenberg are from this source unless
otherwise noted.
13. Gottlieb and Rothko, p. 545. Correlate with the large shape is the use of "flat
forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth." It is interesting that for
Greenberg flatness is simply an essential property of the medium of painting,
while for Gottlieb and Rothko it has transcendental significance, and becomes a
way of achieving "the simple expression of the complex thought."
14. Clement Greenberg, "The Role of Nature in Modern Painting," Partisan Re-
view, 16 (1949), p. 81. The question, however, is not whether abstract art is natu-
ralistic in origin and end, but why it presents outer and inner nature in ab-
stract—"non-objective" or subjective—form. It is hard to believe that the reasons
are purely stylistic, i.e., art historical in origin, and without any general spiritual
purpose. The shift to abstraction, in other words, involves inner as well as histor-
ical (outer) necessity.
15. Lovejoy,p.56.
16. Lovejoy, p. 16.
17. Lovejoy, p. 7.
18. Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley, 1971), p. 159. All quota-
tions from Ehrenzweig are from this source.
19. Max J. Freidlander, Landscape, Portrait, Still-Life (New York, 1963), p. 55.
20. In Still the verticality is already apparent in a number of realistic works painted
in the 19308, such as the American scene picture Grain Elevators (1937) in the
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. The uprightness of Rothko's pic-
tures seems to imply the centrality of a wingless altarpiece, and Newman's verti-
cality seems a romantic reminiscence of an obelisk. Thus, Still's verticality seems

378 1970s
 naturalistic, Rothko's religious, and Newman's nostalgic-historicist (a disguised
quotation) in origin. In general, the verticality is meant to be the sign of a perma-
nent transcendence—man, as it were, transcending the ground by standing up-
right on it, and no longer able to return to his prone relation to it. This upright-
ness is in effect the beginning of his spirituality, its first sign, for it gives him a
look beyond his finite state and immediate situation and seems to free him from
the material condition of being earthbound. See Erwin Straus, "The Upright
Posture," Phenomenological Psychology (New York, 1966), pp. 137-65.
Still and Newman tend to make the verticality more telling by placing it in
a relatively horizontal format, as though in conflict with this context, and seek-
ing to aspire or reach beyond—and dominate—it. Rothko's works, because they
don't truly do so, convey a seemingly more self-assured, more recognizable spiri-
tuality or transcendence, but thereby a more static, unmoving one. His vertical-
ity is fixed into and so an echo of his format, thereby losing the energy implicit in
the transcendental "direction." Rothko's sense of transcendence is more charm-
ing and mechanical, and so less significant than that of Still and Newman.
21. Rothko, p. 549. Rothko sees only a negative way to the transcendental, through
the "pulverization" of "the familiar identity of things" in order to destroy their
"finite associations." However much he argues that "not everything strange or
unfamiliar is transcendental," the transcendental for him is experienced as strange
or unfamiliar, i.e., as not fully possessed or known and as such not completely
real.
22. For Still (p. 574), particularly to be denied are "self-appointed spokesmen and
self-styled intellectuals with the lust of immaturity for leadership." His contempt
for them is the catalyst for his own higher purpose, but does not insure its
success.
23. Max Kozloff, "Mark Rothko," Renderings (New York, 1969), p. 152. All quota-
tions from Kozloffare from this source.
24. Clement Greenberg, "ROSC '71," Art International, 16 (1972), p. 62.
25. Rothko's early works make a dogmatic assumption of mythological meaning
amounting to the adoption of an ideology of mythology. Andrea Gain's article
"On Mythology" in fact follows Rothko's "The Romantics Were Prompted" in
its original publication in Possibilities, i (Winter 1947-48), and is illustrated by
Rothko's mythological pictures from 1946-47.
26. The most convincing argument for the sublime character of the works of Rothko
and Still was made by Lawrence Alloway, "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract
Expressionism," Artforum, 12 (1973), pp. 36-42. Alloway's argument is that their
paintings are disguised traditional pictures with traditional meaning. However,
insofar as their abstraction is taken seriously, as something important in itself
and not simply as a device for heightening (by hiding) well-known meanings, it
transcends the sublime. Modern abstract art is interested neither in the beautiful
nor the sublime, but the moment when "art"—with all its paradoxical, multi-level
implications—seems to come into existence out of worked-over matter. It is con-
cerned with the tension between non-art and art, the moment when one seems to

1970s 379
 become the other and vice versa. (On the most elementary level, this is the ten-
sion between material and the expressive use to which it may be put—and the
way this expressive use does not always seem to come off, so that the art seems
to reduce to an awkwardly "handled" material.) For a work to be recognized as
beautiful or sublime one must already take for granted the fact that it is a work
of art. Modern abstract art does not take its own artisticness for granted, but is
always—at its best—in the position of demonstrating that it is art, not simply or-
dinary appearance. It is interested in the moment of imaginative transformation
of non-art appearances into artistic appearances, not the aesthetic qualities that
might result from this transformation.
27. What Kozloff treats purely formally, Gottlieb and Rothko (p. 545) see as a
"poetic expression" which has "the impact of elemental truth." Kozloff does not
see the tension between subjective and objective tendencies in Rothko's work as
having to do with subject matter, but reduces it to a matter of composition.
28. Rothko (p. 548) asserts that he thinks of his "pictures as dramas; the shapes in
the pictures are performers." He also remarks that "The presentation of this
drama in the familiar world was never possible, unless everyday acts belonged to
a ritual accepted as referring to a transcendent realm." Clement Greenberg,
"The Crisis of the Easel Painting," Partisan Review, 15 (1948), p. 482, remarks
on the "dramatic imbalance" of forms in Rothko.
29. Mark Rothko, Milton Avery Prints and Drawings, 1930-^64 (Exhibition Cata-
logue, Brooklyn Museum, 1966), p. 16.
30. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature." Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston,
1957), P- 44-
31. Gottlieb and Rothko, p. 545.
32. Quoted by Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (New York, 1957), p. 472.
33. Lovejoy,p.83.
34. Quoted by Lovejoy, pp. 65-66.
35. Rothko, p. 549.
36. Still, p. 547.
37. Robert Jay Lifton, Boundaries (New York, 1969), p. 22.
38. Willem de Kooning, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," Chipp, p. 560, remarks
that "Today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the
concept of painting once and for all." It is possible to argue that the light that led
Rothko away from his mythological paintings was that of the atomic bomb, and
that in fact in a number of Rothko works one has disguised reminiscences of the
famous mushroom shape of the atomic cloud. The cloud—made up of mists-
can be interpreted as a libidinous discharge, helping explain Rothko's exploita-
tion of the libidinous or erotic character of color. Also, the grand sensation it
affords becomes the scaffolding for Rothko's attempt to create a grand manner of
color.

380 1970s
The 1980s
READING NEW
SIGNIFICATIONS
This page intentionally left blank
SERGE GUILBAUT The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde
in America: Greenberg, Pollock, or
from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism
of the "Vital Center"

We now know that the traditional make-up of the avant-garde was revitalized
in the United States after the Second World War. In the unprecedented eco-
nomic boom of the war years, the same strategies that had become familiar
to a jaded Parisian bourgeoisie were skillfully deployed, confronted as they
were with a new bourgeois public recently instructed in the principles of
modern art.
Between 1939 and 1948 Clement Greenberg developed a formalist theory
of modern art which he would juxtapose with the notion of the avant-garde, in
order to create a structure which, like that of Baudelaire or Apollinaire, would
play an aggressive, dominant role on the international scene.
The evolution of Greenbergian formalism during its formative period
from 1939 to 1948 cannot be understood without analyzing the circumstances
in which Greenberg attempted to extract from the various ideological and
aesthetic positions existing at the end of the war an analytical system that would
create a specifically American art, distinct from other contemporary tenden-
cies, and international in import.
When we speak about Greenbergian formalism, we are speaking about a
theory that was somewhat flexible as it began clearly to define its position
within the new social and aesthetic order that was taking shape during and af-
ter the war; only later would it solidify into dogma. We are also speaking about
its relationship to the powerful Marxist movement of the 19305, to the crisis of
Marxism, and finally to the complete disintegration of Marxism in the 19405
—a close relationship clearly visible from the writings and ideological posi-
tions of Greenberg and the abstract expressionists during the movement's de-
velopment. Greenbergian formalism was born from those Stalinist-Trotskyite
ideological battles, the disillusionment of the American Left, and the de-
Marxification of the New York intelligentsia. [...]

SOURCE: October 15 (Winter 1980), 61-78. Reprinted with the permission of Serge Guil-
baut and M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass. Translated by Thomas Repensek. This article
is a revised and expanded version of a paper delivered at the conference "Art History and
Theory: Aspects of American Formalism," Montreal, October 1979. This text has been
edited, and footnotes have been renumbered.

383
 De-Marxification really began in 1937 when a large number of intellectuals,
confronted with the mediocrity of the political and aesthetic options offered
by the Popular Front, became Trotskyites. Greenberg, allied for a time with
Dwight MacDonald and Partisan Review in its Trotskyite period (1937-1939),
located the origin of the American avant-garde venture in a Trotskyite con-
text: "Some day it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism which started out
more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared
the way heroically for what was to come."1 When the importance of the Popu-
lar Front, its voraciousness and success are taken into account, it is hardly sur-
prising that Trotskyism attracted a certain number of intellectuals. The Ameri-
can Communist party's alliance with liberalism disillusioned those who sought
a radical change of the political system that had been responsible for the De-
pression. This alliance prepared the stage for revolution. [...]
It was the art historian Meyer Schapiro who initiated the shift. In 1937,
abandoning the rhetoric of the Popular Front as well as the revolutionary lan-
guage used in his article "Social Bases of Art," in which he emphasized the
importance of the alliance between the artist and the proletariat,2 he crossed
over to the Trotskyite opposition. He published in Marxist Quarterly his cele-
brated article "Nature of Abstract Art,"3 important not only for its intelligent
refutation of Alfred Barr's formalist essay "Cubism and Abstract Art,"4 but
also for the displacement of the ideology of his earlier writing, a displacement
that would subsequently enable the Left to accept artistic experimentation,
which the Communist Popular Front vigorously opposed.
If in 1936, in "Social Bases of Art," Schapiro guaranteed the artist's place
in the revolutionary process through his alliance with the proletariat, in 1937,
in "Nature of Abstract Art," he became pessimistic, cutting the artist off from
any revolutionary hope whatsoever. For Schapiro, even abstract art, which
Alfred Barr and others persistently segregated from social reality in a closed,
independent system, had its roots in its own conditions of production. The
abstract artist, he claimed, believing in the illusion of liberty, was unable to
understand the complexity and precariousness of his own position, nor could
he grasp the implications of what he was doing. By attacking abstract art in
this way, by destroying the illusory notion of the artist's independence, and
by insisting on the relationships that link abstract art with the society that
produces it, Schapiro implied that abstraction had a larger signification than
that attributed to it by the formalists.
Schapiro's was a two-edged sword: while it destroyed Alfred Barr's illusion
of independence, it also shattered the Communist critique of abstract art as an

384 1980s
ivory tower isolated from society. The notion of the nonindependence of ab-
stract art totally disarmed both camps. Leftist painters who rejected "pure
art" but who were also disheartened by the Communist aesthetic saw the "neg-
ative" ideological formulation provided by abstract art as a positive force, a
way out. It was easy for the Communists to reject art that was cut off from real-
ity, isolated in its ivory tower. But if, as Schapiro claimed, abstract art was part
of the social fabric, if it reacted to conflicts and contradictions, then it was
theoretically possible to use an abstract language to express a critical social
consciousness. In this way, the use of abstraction as critical language answered
a pressing need articulated by Partisan Review and Marxist Quarterly: the in-
dependence of the artist vis-à-vis political parties and totalitarian ideologies.
An opening had been made that would develop (in 1938 with Breton-Trotsky,
in 1939 with Greenberg, in 1944 with Motherwell)5 into the concept of a criti-
cal, avant-garde abstract art. The "Nature of Abstract Art" relaxed the rigid
opposition of idealist formalism and social realism, allowing for the réévalua-
tion of abstraction. For American painters tired of their role as propagandiz-
ing illustrators, this article was a deliverance, and it conferred unassailable
prestige on the author in anti-Stalinist artistic circles. Schapiro remained in
the minority, however, in spite of his alignment with J. T. Farrell, who also at-
tacked the vulgar Marxism and the aesthetic of the Popular Front in his "Note
on Literary Criticism."6
In December 1937, Partisan Review published a letter from Trotsky in which
he analyzed the catastrophic position of the American artist who, he claimed,
could better himself, caught as he was in the bourgeois stranglehold of medi-
ocrity, only through a thorough political analysis of society. He continued:

Art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the
same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of
Bourgeois society. To find a solution to this impasse through art itself is im-
possible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic
base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Art can neither escape the
crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably
—as Grecian art rotted beneath the ruins of a culture founded on slavery—
unless present day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revo-
lutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is
determined by its relation to the revolution.7 [...]

Trotsky and Breton's analysis, like Greenberg's, blamed cultural crisis on

the decadence of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and placed its solution

1980s 385
 in the hands of the independent artist; yet they maintained a revolutionary
optimism that Greenberg lacked. For Trotsky, the artist should be free of par-
tisanship but not politics. Greenberg's solution, however, abandoned this criti-
cal position, as well as what Trotsky called eclectic action, in favor of a unique
solution: the modernist avant-garde.8 In fact, in making the transition from
the political to the artistic avant-garde, Greenberg believed that only the latter
could preserve the quality of culture against the overwhelming influence of
kitsch by enabling culture to continue to progress. Greenberg did not con-
ceive of this cultural crisis as a conclusion, as had been the case during the
preceding decade, that is, as the death of a bourgeois culture being replaced
by a proletarian one, but as the beginning of a new era contingent on the death
of a proletarian culture destroyed in its infancy by the Communist alliance
with the Popular Front, which Partisan Review had documented. As this cri-
sis swiftly took on larger proportions, absorbing the ideals of the modern art-
ist, the formation of an avant-garde seemed to be the only solution, the only
thing able to prevent complete disintegration. Yet it ignored the revolutionary
aspirations that had burned so brightly only a few years before. After the moral
failure of the Communist party and the incompetence of the Trotskyites, many
artists recognized the need for a frankly realistic, nonrevolutionary solution.
Appealing to a concept of the avant-garde, with which Greenberg was cer-
tainly familiar, allowed for a defense of "quality," throwing back into gear the
progressive process brought to a standstill in academic immobility—even if it
meant abandoning the political struggle in order to create a conservative force
to rescue a foundering bourgeois culture.
Greenberg believed that the most serious threat to culture came from aca-
demic immobility, the Alexandrianism characteristic of kitsch. During that
period the power structure was able to use kitsch easily for propaganda pur-
poses. According to Greenberg, modern avant-garde art was less susceptible
to absorption, not, as Trotsky believed, because it was too critical, but on the
contrary because it was "innocent," therefore less likely to allow a propagan-
distic message to be implanted in its folds. Continuing Trotsky's defense of a
critical art "remaining faithful to itself," Greenberg insisted on the critical en-
deavor of the avant-garde, but a critique that was directed inward, to the work
itself, its medium, as the determining condition of quality. Against the menac-
ing background of the Second World War, it seemed unrealistic to Greenberg
to attempt to act simultaneously on both a political and cultural front. Protect-
ing Western culture meant saving the furniture.
"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" was thus an important step in the process of de-

386 1980s
Marxification of the American intelligentsia that had begun around 1936. The
article appeared in the nick of time to rescue the intellectual wandering in the
dark. After passing through a Trotskyite period of its own, Partisan Review
emphasized the importance of the intellectual at the expense of the working
class. It became preoccupied with the formation of an international elite to
the extant that it sometimes became oblivious to politics itself. [...]
Greenberg's article should be understood in this context. The delicate bal-
ance between art and politics which Trotsky, Breton, and Schapiro tried to
preserve in their writings is absent in Greenberg. Although preserving cer-
tain analytical procedures and a Marxist vocabulary, Greenberg established
a theoretical basis for an elitist modernism, which certain artists had been
thinking about since 1936, especially those associated with the American Ab-
stract Artists group, who were also interested in Trotskyism and European
culture.9
"Avant Garde and Kitsch" formalized, defined, and rationalized an intellec-
tual position that was adopted by many artists who failed fully to understand
it. Extremely disappointing as it was to anyone seeking a revolutionary solu-
tion to the crisis, the article gave renewed hope to artists. By using kitsch as a
target, as a symbol of the totalitarian authority to which it was allied and by
which it was exploited, Greenberg made it possible for the artist to act. By op-
posing mass culture on an artistic level, the artist was able to have the illusion
of battling the degraded structures of power with elitist weapons. Greenberg's
position was rooted in Trotskyism, but it resulted in a total withdrawal from
the political strategies adopted during the Depression: he appealed to social-
ism to rescue a dying culture by continuing tradition. "Today we no longer
look towards socialism for a new culture—as inevitably as one will appear,
once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preser-
vation of whatever living culture we have right now."10 The transformation
functioned perfectly, and for many years Greenberg's article was used to mark
the beginning of the American pictorial renaissance, restored to a preeminent
position. The old formula for the avant-garde, as was expected, was a com-
plete success.
The appearance of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" coincided with two events
that threw into question the integrity of the Soviet Union—the German-
Soviet alliance and the invasion of Finland by the Soviet Union—and which
produced a radical shift in alliances among Greenberg's literary friends and
the contributors to Partisan Review. After the pact, many intellectuals at-
tempted to return to politics. But the optimism which some maintained even

1980s 387
 after the alliance was announced evaporated with the Soviet invasion of Fin-
land. Meyer Schapiro could not have chosen a better time to interrupt the self-
satisfied purrings of the Communist-dominated American Artist's Congress
and create a split in the movement. He and some thirty artist colleagues, in the
minority because of their attempt to censure the Soviet Union, realized the
importance of distancing themselves from an organization so closely linked
not only to Stalinism, but also the social aesthetic of the Popular Front.
And so the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors was born, a
nonpolitical association that would play an important part in the creation of
the avant-garde after the war, and from which would come many of the first-
generation painters of abstract expressionism (Gottlieb, Rothko, Pousette-
Dart). After the disillusion of 1939 and in spite of a slight rise in the fortunes
of the Popular Front after Germany attacked Russia in June of 1941, the rela-
tionship of the artist to the masses was no longer the central concern of major
painters and intellectuals, as it had been during the 19305. With the disap-
pearance of the structures of political action and the dismantling of the Works
Progress Administration programs, there was a shift in interest away from so-
ciety back to the individual. As the private sector reemerged from the long
years of the Depression, the artist was faced with the unhappy task of finding
a public and convincing them of the value of his work. After 1940 artists em-
ployed an individual idiom whose roots were nevertheless thoroughly embed-
ded in social appearance. The relationship of the artist to the public was still
central, but the object had changed. Whereas the artist had previously ad-
dressed himself to the masses through social programs like the WPA, with the
reopening of the private sector he addressed an elite through the "universal."
By rediscovering alienation, the artist began to see an end to his anonymity; as
Ad Reinhardt explained, "Toward the late '303 a real fear of anonymity devel-
oped and most painters were reluctant to join a group for fear of being labeled
or submerged."11 [...]
Nineteen forty-three was a particularly crucial year, for quietly, without
shock, the United States passed from complete isolationism to the most Utopian
internationalism of that year's best-seller, One World by Wendell Wilkie.12
Prospects for the internationalization of American culture generated a sense
of optimism that silenced the anticapitalist criticism of some of its foremost
artists. In fact, artists who, in the best tradition of the avant-garde, organized
an exhibition of rejected work in January 1943, clearly expressed this new
point of view. In his catalogue introduction Barnett Newman revealed a new
notion of the modern American artist:

388 1980s
 We have come together as American modern artists because we feel the
need to present to the public a body of art that will adequately reflect the
new America that is taking place today and the kind of America that will,
it is hoped, become the cultural center of the world. This exhibition is a first
step to free the artist from the stifling control of an outmoded politics. For
art in America is still the plaything of politicians. Isolationist art still domi-
nates the American scene. Regionalism still holds the reins of America's
artistic future. It is high time we cleared the cultural atmosphere of America.
We artists, therefore, conscious of the dangers that beset our country and
our art, can no longer remain silent.13

This rejection of politics, which had been reassimilated by the propagan-

distic art of the 19305, was, according to Newman, necessary to the realization
of international modernism. His manifest interest in internationalism thus
aligned him—in spite of the illusory antagonism he maintained in order to pre-
serve the adversary image of the avant-garde—with the majority of the public
and of political institutions.
The United States emerged from the war a victorious, powerful, and con-
fident country. The American public's infatuation with art steadily increased
under the influence of the media. Artists strengthened by contact with Euro-
pean colleagues, yet relieved by their departures, possessed new confidence,
and art historians and museums were ready to devote themselves to a new
national art. All that was needed was a network of galleries to promote and
profit from this new awareness. By 1943 the movement had begun; in March
of that year the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, which dealt in old masters, opened
a wing for experimental art, headed by Betty Parsons, to satisfy the market's
demand for modernity.14 In April 1945, Sam Kootz opened his gallery. And in
February 1946, Charles Egan, who had been at Ferargil, opened a gallery of
modern art, followed in September by Parsons, who opened her own gallery
with the artists Peggy Guggenheim left behind when she returned to Europe
(Rothko, Hofmann, Pollock, Reinhardt, Stamos, Still, Newman). Everything
was prepared to enter the postwar years confidently.
The optimism of the art world contrasted sharply with the difficulties
of the Left in identifying itself in the nation that emerged from the war. In
fact, as the newly powerful middle-class worked to safeguard the privileges
it had won during the economic boom, expectations of revolution, even dis-
sidence, began to fade among the Communist party Left. And the disillu-
sions of the postwar period (the international conferences, the Truman ad-

1980s 389
 ministration, the Iron Curtain) did nothing to ease their anxiety. What began
as a de-Marxification of the extreme Left during the war, turned into a total
de-politicization when the alternatives became clear: Truman's America or the
Soviet Union. Dwight MacDonald accurately summarized the desperate po-
sition of the radical Left: "In terms of'practical' political politics we are living
in an age which consistently present us with impossible alternatives.... It is
no longer possible for the individual to relate himself to world politics. . . .
Now the clearer one's insight, the more numbed one becomes."15
Rejected by traditional political structures, the radical intellectual after
1939 drifted from the usual channels of political discourse into isolation, and,
utterly powerless, surrendered, refused to speak. Between 1946 and 1948, while
political discussion grew heated in the debate over the Marshall Plan, the So-
viet threat, and the presidential election in which Henry Wallace and the
Communists again played an important part, a humanist abstract art began to
appear that imitated the art of Paris and soon began to appear in all the gal-
leries. Greenberg considered this new academicism16 a serious threat, saying
in 1945:

We are in danger of having a new kind of official art foisted on us—official

"modern" art. It is being done by well intentioned people like the Pepsi-cola
[sic] company who fail to realize that to be for something uncritically does
more harm in the end than being against it. For while official art, when it was
thoroughly academic, furnished at least a sort of challenge, official "modern"
art of this type will confuse, discourage and dissuade the true creator.17

During that period of anxious renewal, art and American society needed
an infusion of new life, not the static pessimism of academicism. Toward that
end Greenberg began to formulate in his weekly articles for the Nation a criti-
cal system based on characteristics which he defined as typically American,
and which were supposed to differentiate American from French art. This sys-
tem was to revive modern American art, infuse it with a new life by identifying
an essential formalism that could not be applied to the pale imitations of the
School of Paris turned out by the American Abstract Artists. Greenberg's first
attempt at differentiation occurred in an article about Pollock and Dubuffet18
[--•]
Greenberg emphasized the greater vitality, virility, and brutality of the
American artists. He was developing an ideology that would transform the
provincialism of American art into internationalism by replacing the Parisian
standards that had until then defined the notion of quality in art (grace, craft,

390 1980s
finish) with American ones (violence, spontaneity, incompleteness).19 Brutal-
ity and vulgarity were signs of the direct, uncorrupted communication that
contemporary life demanded. American art become the trustee of this new age.
On March 8, 1947, Greenberg stated that new American painting ought
to be modern, urbane, casual, and detached, in order to achieve control and
composure. It should not allow itself to become enmeshed in the absurdity of
daily political and social events. That was the fault of American art, he said,
for it had never been able to restrain itself from articulating some sort of mes-
sage, describing, speaking, telling a story:

In the face of current events painting feels, apparently, that it must be epic
poetry, it must be theatre, it must be an atomic bomb, it must be the rights
of man. But the greatest painter of our time, Matisse, preeminently demon-
strated the sincerity and penetration that go with the kind of greatness
particular to twentieth century painting by saying that he wanted his art
to be an armchair for the tired business man.20

For Greenberg, painting could be important only if it made up its mind to

return to its ivory tower, which the previous decade had so avidly attempted
to destroy. This position of detachment followed naturally from his earlier
critical works (1939), and from many artists' fears of participating in the viru-
lent political propaganda of the early years of the Cold War. It was this inte-
gration that Greenberg attempted to circumvent through a reinterpretation of
modernist detachment—a difficult undertaking for artists rooted in the tradi-
tion of the 19305 who had so ruthlessly been made a part of the social fabric.
The central concern of avant-garde artists like Rothko and Still was to save
their pictorial message from distortion: "The familiar identity of things had
to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our so-
ciety increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment."21
Rothko tried to purge his art of any sign that could convey a precise image,
for fear of being assimilated by society. Still went so far as to refuse at various
times to exhibit his paintings publicly because he was afraid critics would de-
form or obliterate the content embedded in his abstract forms. In a particu-
larly violent letter to Betty Parsons in 1948, he said:

Please—and this is important, show them [my paintings] only to those who
may have some insight into the values involve [d], and allow no one to write
about them. NO ONE. My contempt for the intelligence of the scribblers I have
read is so complete that I cannot tolerate their imbecilities, particularly when

1980s 391
 they attempt to deal with my canvases. Men like Soby, Greenberg, Barr, etc.
... are to be categorically rejected. And I no longer want them shown to the
public at large, either singly or in group.22

The work of many avant-garde artists, in particular Pollock, de Kooning,

Rothko, and Still, seemed to become a kind of un-writing, an art of efface-
ment, of erasure, a discourse which in its articulation tried to negate itself, to
be reabsorbed. There was a morbid fear of the expressive image that threat-
ened to regiment, to petrify painting once again. Confronted with the atomic
terror in 1946, Dwight MacDonald analyzed in the same way the impossibility
of expression that characterizes the modern age, thus imputing meaning to
the avant-garde's silence. "Naturalism is no longer adequate," he wrote, "ei-
ther esthetically or morally, to cope with the modern horror."23
Description of nuclear destruction had become an obscenity, for to de-
scribe it was to accept it, to make a show of it, to represent it. The modern art-
ist therefore had to avoid two dangers: assimilation of the message by political
propaganda, and the terrible representation of a world that was beyond reach,
unrepresentable. Abstraction, individualism, and originality seemed to be the
best weapons against society's voracious assimilative appetite.
In March 1948, when none of the work being shown in New York reflected
in any way Greenberg's position, he announced in his article "The Decline of
Cubism," published in Partisan Review, that American art had definitively
broken with Paris and that it had finally become essential to the vitality of
Western culture. This declaration of faith assumed the decline of Parisian
cubism, he said, because the forces that had given it birth had emigrated to
the United States.
The fact that Greenberg launched his attack when he did was not unre-
lated to certain political events and to the prewar atmosphere that had existed
in New York since January of that year.24 The threat of a Third World War
was openly discussed in the press; and the importance accorded by the gov-
ernment to the passage of the European Recovery Plan reinforced the idea
that Europe—France and Italy—was about to topple into the Soviet camp. What
would become of Western civilization? Under these circumstances, Green-
berg's article seemed to rescue the cultural future of the West:25

If artists as great as Picasso, Braque and Léger have declined so grievously,

it can only be because the general social premises that used to guarantee their
functioning have disappeared in Europe. And when one sees, on the other
hand, how much the level of American art has risen in the last five years, with

392 1980s
 the emergence of new talents so full of energy and content as Arshile Gorky,
Jackson Pollock, David Smith—then the conclusion forces itself, much to our
own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to
the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production
and political power.26

New York's independence from an enfeebled, faction-ridden Paris, threat-

ened by communism from within and without, was in Greenberg's eyes neces-
sary if modern culture was to survive. Softened by many struggles and too
much success, the Parisian avant-garde survived only with difficulty. Only the
virility of an art like Pollock's, its brutality, ruggedness, and individualism,
could revitalize modern culture, traditionally represented by Paris, and effemi-
nized by too much praise. By dealing only with abstract-expressionist art,
Greenberg's formal analysis offered a theory of art that finally brought "inter-
national" over to the American side.
For the first time an important critic had been aggressive, confident, and
devoted enough to American art to openly defy the supremacy of Parisian art
and to replace it on an international scale with the art of Pollock and the New
York School. Greenberg dispensed with the Parisian avant-garde and placed
New York at the center of world culture. From then on the United States held
all the winning cards in its struggle with communism: the atomic bomb, a pow-
erful economy, a strong army, and now artistic supremacy—the cultural supe-
riority that had been missing.
After 1949 and Truman's victory, the proclamation of the Fair Deal, and the
publication of Schlesinger's Vital Center, traditional liberal democratic plu-
ralism was a thing of the past. Henry Wallace disappeared from the political
scene, the Communist party lost its momentum and even at times ventured
outside the law. Victorious liberalism, ideologically refashioned by Schlesin-
ger, barricaded itself behind an elementary anticommunism, centered on the
notion of freedom. Aesthetic pluralism was also rejected in favor of a unique,
powerful, abstract, purely American modern art, as demonstrated by Sam
Kootz's refusal to show the French-influenced modern painters Brown and
Holty.27 Individualism would become the basis for all American art that wanted
to represent the new era—confident and uneasy at the same time. Artistic free-
dom and experimentation became central to abstract-expressionist art.28
In May 1948, René d'Harnoncourt presented a paper before the annual
meeting of the American Federation of Art in which he explored the notion of
individuality, explaining why—his words were carefully chosen for May 1948
—no collective art could come to terms with the age. Freedom of individual

1980s 393
 expression, independent of any other consideration, was the basis of our cul-
ture and deserved protection and even encouragement when confronted with
cultures that were collectivist and authoritarian.

The art of the twentieth century has no collective style, not because it has di-
vorced itself from contemporary society but because it is part of it. And here
we are with our hard-earned new freedom. Walls are crumbling all around us
and we are terrified by the endless vistas and the responsibility of an infinite
choice. It is this terror of the new freedom which removed the familiar sign-
posts from the roads that makes many of us wish to turn the clock back and
recover the security of yesterday's dogma. The totalitarian state established
in the image of the past is one reflection of this terror of the new freedom.29

The solution to the problems created by such alienation was, according to

d'Harnoncourt, an abstract accord between society and the individual:

It can be solved only by an order which reconciles the freedom of the individ-
ual with the welfare of society and replaces yesterday's image of one unified
civilization by a pattern in which many elements, while retaining their own
individual qualities, join to form a new entity.... The perfecting of this new
order would unquestionably tax our abilities to the very limit, but would give
us a society enriched beyond belief by the full development of the individual
for the sake of the whole. I believe a good name for such a society is democ-
racy, and I also believe that modern art in its infinite variety and ceaseless
exploration is its foremost symbol.30

In this text we have, perhaps for the first time, the ideology of the avant-
garde aligned with postwar liberalism—the reconciliation of the ideology
forged by Rothko and Newman, Greenberg and Rosenberg (individuality,
risk, the new frontier) with the liberal ideology as Schlesinger defined it in
Vital Center: a new radicalism. [...]
The new liberalism was identified with the avant-garde not only because
that kind of painting was identifiable in modern internationalist terms (also
perceived as uniquely American), but also because the values represented in
the pictorial work were especially cherished during the Cold War (the notion
of individualism and risk essential to the artist to achieve complete freedom of
expression). The element of risk that was central to the ideology of the avant-
garde was also central to the ideology of Vital Center.31 Risk, as defined by the
avant-garde and formulated in their work as a necessary condition for free-
dom of expression, was what distinguished a free society from a totalitarian

394 1980s
one, according to Schlesinger: "The eternal awareness of choice can drive the
weak to the point where the simplest decision becomes a nightmare. Most men
prefer to flee choice, to flee anxiety, to flee freedom."32 In the modern world,
which brutally stifles the individual, the artist becomes a rampart, an example
of will against the uniformity of totalitarian society. In this way the individual-
ism of abstract expressionism allowed the avant-garde to define and occupy a
unique position on the artistic front. The avant-garde appropriated a coher-
ent, definable, consumable image that reflected rather accurately the objec-
tives and operations of a newly powerful, liberal, internationalist America.
This juxtaposition of political and artistic images was possible because both
groups consciously or unconsciously repressed aspects of their ideology in
order to ally themselves with the ideology of the other. Contradictions were
passed over in silence.
It was ironic but not contradictory that in a society as fixed in a right-of-
center position as the United States, and where intellectual repression was
strongly felt,33 abstract expressionism was for many people an expression of
freedom: freedom to create controversial works, freedom symbolized by ac-
tion and gesture, by the expression of the artist apparently freed from all re-
straints. It was an essential existential liberty that was defended by the mod-
erns (Barr, Soby, Greenberg, Rosenberg) against the attacks of the humanist
liberals (Devree, Jewell) and the conservatives (Dondero, Taylor), serving to
present the internal struggle to those outside as proof of the inherent liberty
of the American system, as opposed to the restrictions imposed on the artist
by the Soviet system. Freedom was the symbol most enthusiastically pro-
moted by the new liberalism during the Cold War.34
Expressionism became the expression of the difference between a free so-
ciety and totalitarianism; it represented an essential aspect of liberal society:
its aggressiveness and ability to generate controversy that in the final analysis
posed no threat. Once again Schlesinger leads us through the labyrinth of lib-
eral ideology:

It is threatening to turn us all into frightened conformists; and conformity

can lead only to stagnation. We need courageous men to help us recapture a
sense of the indispensability of dissent, and we need dissent if we are to make
up our minds equably and intelligently.35

While Pollock's drip paintings offended both the Left and the Right as well
as the middle class, they revitalized and strengthened the new liberalism.36
Pollock became its hero and around him a sort of school developed, for which

1980s 395
 he became the catalyst, the one who, as de Kooning put it, broke the ice. He
became its symbol. But his success and the success of the other abstract-
expressionist artists was also the bitter defeat of being powerless to prevent
their art from being assimilated into the political struggle.
The trap that the modern American artist wanted to avoid, as we've seen,
was the image, the "statement." Distrusting the traditional idiom, he wanted
to warp the trace of what he wanted to express, consciously attempt to erase,
to void the readable, to censure himself. In a certain way he wanted to write
about the impossibility of description. In doing this, he rejected two things,
the aesthetic of the Popular Front and the traditional American aesthetic, which
reflected the political isolationism of an earlier era. The access to modernism
that Greenberg had theoretically achieved elevated the art of the avant-garde
to a position of international importance, but in so doing integrated it into the
imperialist machine of the Museum of Modern Art.37
So it was that the progressively disillusioned avant-garde, although theo-
retically in opposition to the Truman administration, aligned itself, often un-
consciously, with the majority, which after 1948 moved dangerously toward
the right. Greenberg followed this development with the painters, and was
its catalyst. By analyzing the political aspect of American art, he defined the
ideological, formal vantage point from which the avant-garde would have to
assert itself if it intended to survive the ascendancy of the new American mid-
dle class. To do so it was forced to suppress what many first generation artists
had defended against the sterility of American abstract art: emotional content,
social commentary, the discourse that avant-garde artists intended in their
work, and which Meyer Schapiro had articulated.
Ironically, it was that constant rebellion against political exploitation and
the stubborn determination to save Western culture by Americanizing it that
led the avant-garde, after killing the father (Paris), to topple into the once dis-
graced arms of the mother country.

Note s

1. Clement Greenberg, "The Late 3o's in New York," Art and Culture, Boston,
Beacon Press, 1961, p. 230.
2. Meyer Schapiro, "Social Bases of Art," First American Artist's Congress, New
York, 1936, pp. 31-37.
3. Meyer Schapiro, "Nature of Abstract Art," Marxist Quarterly, January-February
Х
937? PP- 77~98; comment by Delmore Schwartz in Marxist Quarterly, April-
June 1937, pp. 305-310?and Schapiro's reply, pp. 310-314.

396 1980s
 4- Alfred Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1936.
5. Leon Trotsky, "Art and Politics," Partisan Review., August-September, 1938, p.
310; Diego Rivera and André Breton, "Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary
Art," Partisan Review, Fall 1938, pp. 49-53; Robert Motherwell, "The Modern
Painter's World, Dyn, November 1944, pp. 9-14.
6. J. T. Farrell,^4 Note on Literary Criticism, New York, Vanguard, 1936.
7. Trotsky, "Art and Politics," p. 4. In spite of Trotsky's article, which was translated
by Dwight MacDonald, the magazine's relationship with the movement remained
unencumbered. In fact, Trotsky distrusted the avant-garde publication, which he
accused of timidity in its attack on Stalinism and turned down several invitations
to write for the magazine (Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary
Radicalism in America, New York, John Wiley and Sons, p. 200).
8. Trotsky agreed with Breton that any artistic school was valid (his "eclecticism")
that recognized a revolutionary imperative; see Trotsky's letter to Breton, Octo-
ber 27, 1938, quoted in Arturo Schwartz, Breton/Trotsky, Paris, 10/18, 1977, p.
129.
9. Many members of the American Abstract Artists were sympathetic to Trotskyism
but looked to Paris for an aesthetic standard; Rosalind Bengelsdorf interviewed
by the author, February 12,1978, New York.
10. Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Partisan Review, Fall 1939, p. 49.
11. Ad Reinhardt, interviewed by F. Celentano, September 2,1955, for The Origins
and Development of Abstract Expressionism in the U.S., unpublished thesis, New
York, 1957, p. xi.
12. Nineteen forty-three was the year of internationalism in the United States. Al-
though occurring slowly, the change was a radical one. The entire political spec-
trum supported the United States involvement in world affairs. Henry Luce,
speaking for the right, published his celebrated article "The American Century"
in Life magazine in 1941, in which he called on the American people vigorously
to seize world leadership. The century to come, he said, could be the American
century as the nineteenth had been that of England and France. Conservatives
approved this new direction in the MacKinac resolution. See Wendell Wilkie's
best-seller, One World, New York, 1943.
13. Catalogue introduction to the First Exhibition of Modern American Artists at
Riverside Museum, January 1943. This exhibition was intended as an alternative
to the gigantic one organized by the Communist-dominated Artist for Victory.
Newman's appeal for an apolitical art was in fact a political act since it attacked
the involvement of the Communist artist in the war effort. Newman was joined
by M. Avery, B. Brown, G. Constant, A. Gottlieb, B. Green, G. Green, J. Graham,
I. Krasner, B. Margo, M. Rothko, and others.
14. Betty Parsons, interviewed by the author, New York, February 16,1978.
15. Dwight MacDonald, "Truman's Doctrine, Abroad and at Home," May 1947,
published in Memoirs of a Revolutionist, New York, World Publishing, 1963,
p. 191.
16. The abstract art fashionable at the time (R. Gwathmey, P. Burlin, J. de Martini)
borrowed classical themes and modernized or "Picassoized" them.

1980s 397
 iy. Greenberg, Nation, April 1947.
18. Greenberg, "Art,"Nation, February i, 1947, pp. 138-139.
19. For an analysis of the ideology of this position see S. Guilbaut, "Création et dé-
veloppement d'une Avant-Garde: New York 1946-1951," Histoire et critique des
arts, "Les Avant-Gardes,"July 1978, pp. 29-48.
20. Greenberg,4Art," Nation, March 8,1947, p. 284.
21. M. Rothko, Possibilities, No. i, Winter 1947-48, p. 84.
22. Clifford Still, letter to Betty Parsons, March 20,1948, Archives of American Art,
Betty Parsons papers, N 68-72.
23. Dwight MacDonald, October 1946, published in Memoirs, "Looking at the War,"
p.180.
24. His article had an explosive effect since it was the first time an American art critic
had given pride of place to American art. There were some who were shocked
and angered by it. G. L. K. Morris, a modern painter of the cubist school, former
Trotskyite and Communist party supporter, violently attacked Greenberg's posi-
tion in the pages of his magazine. He went on to accuse American critics in gen-
eral of being unable to interpret the secrets of modern art: "This approach-
completely irresponsible as to accuracy or taste—has been with us so long that
we might say that it amounts to a tradition." He ironically attacked Greenberg's
thesis for being unfounded: "It would have been rewarding if Greenberg had in-
dicated in what ways the works of our losers have declined since the 3o's." Work-
ing in the tradition of Picasso, Morris was unable to accept the untimely, surpris-
ing demise of cubism ("Morris on Critics and Greenberg: A Communication,"
Partisan Review, pp. 681-684; Greenberg's reply, 686-687).
25. For a more detailed analysis of how events in Europe were understood by the
American public, see Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Ori-
gins of McCarthy ism, New York, Schocken Books, 1974, pp. 293-306.
26. Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism," Partisan Review, March 1948, p. 369.
27. When Kootz reopened his gallery in 1949 with a show entitled "The Intrasub-
jectives," Brown and Holty were no longer with him. The artists shown included
Baziotes, de Kooning, Gorky, Gottlieb, Graves, Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock,
Reinhardt, Rothko, Tobey, and Tomlin. It was clear what had happened: artists
who worked in the tradition of the School of Paris were no longer welcome. In
1950 and 1951, Kootz disposed of Holty and Brown's work, making a killing by
selling the paintings at discount prices in the Bargain Basement of the Gimbels
department store chain. It was the end of a certain way of thinking about paint-
ing. The avant-garde jettisoned its past once and for all.
28. The ideology of individualism would be codified in 1952 by Harold Rosenberg
in his well-known article "The American Action Painters" Art News, December
1952.
29. René d'Harnoncourt, "Challenge and Promise: Modern Art and Society," Art
News, November 1949, p. 252.
30. Ibid.

398 1980s
31. See discussion in "Artist's Session at Studio 35" in Modern Artists in America,
ed. Motherwell, Reinhardt, Wittenborn, Schultz, New York, 1951, pp. 9-23.
32. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center: Our Purposes and Perils on the Tightrope of
American Liberalism, Cambridge, Riverside Press, 1949, p. 52.
33. We should recall that at that time the power of the various anticommunist com-
mittees was on the rise (HUAC, the Attorney General's list) and that attempts
were made to bar persons with Marxist leanings from university positions. Sid-
ney Hook, himself a former Marxist, was one of the most vocal critics; see "Com-
munism and the Intellectuals," The American Mercury, Vol. LXVIII, No. 302
(February 1949), 133-144.
34. See Max KozlofF, "American Painting during the Cold War," Artforum, May
1973, PP- 42-54-
35. Schlesinger, Vital Center, p. 208.
36. The new liberalism accepted and even welcomed the revitalizing influence of a
certain level of nonconformity and rebellion. This was the system's strength,
which Schlesinger clearly explains in his book. Political ideology and the ideol-
ogy of the avant-garde were united: "And there is a 'clear and present danger' that
anti-communist feeling will boil over into a vicious and nonconstitutional attack
on nonconformists in general and thereby endanger the sources of our demo-
cratic strength" (p. 210).
37. See Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War," Art-
forum, XII (June 1974), 39-41.

EVAN R, FIRESTONE James Joyce and the First

Generation New York School

The artists of the first generation New York School, most of whom are known
collectively as Abstract Expressionists, were as a group generally well-read
or well-informed and in touch with the literary currents of their time. Non-
fiction works by Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and James Frazer combined on their
reading lists with the writings of Baudelaire, the French Symbolist poets (es-
pecially Rimbaud), Herman Melville, André Breton and Garcia Lorca, among
others. Although scholars have examined the connections between this group
of artists and literature rather carefully, except in the case of David Smith

SOURCE: Arts Magazine (June 1982), 116-21. Reprinted with the permission of Evan R.
Firestone.

399
 there has been relatively little mention of James Joyce.1 This is surprising
since Joyce is considered by many to be one of the greatest writers of fiction in
the twentieth century, and a number of first generation New York School art-
ists have acknowledged their interest in him. For example, James Brooks, speak-
ing of his friend Bradley Walker Tomlin, said, "I think a writer who influenced
most of us, and I think him pretty strongly, certainly one who influenced me
more than any painter, was James Joyce."2 Others of this generation who have
indicated admiration for Joyce include Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock,
Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Jack Tworkov, Ad Reinhardt, and Tony
Smith.
A number of characteristics of his writing appealed to American artists of
the 19405 and '505, but initially, it was Joyce's "stream of consciousness" tech-
nique that attracted them. Joyce's method of directly conveying his charac-
ters' unedited interior thoughts, begun in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, and expanded in Ulysses, provided another literary equivalent of the vi-
sual automatism they were struggling to develop. In Robert Motherwell's
case, his appreciation of Joyce preceded his preoccupation with the "auto-
matic writing" of the Surrealists. His conviction that a modern artist must be
experimental was in part formed by his reading and intense discussion of
Ulysses while a student at Stanford University in the mid-ig30s.3 The implica-
tions of Joyce's writing must have further crystallized for Motherwell when he
discovered Surrealist writing and art in the early '405.
Motherwell's involvement with Joyce has been recognized in the literature
by his choice of a title for The Homely Protestant of 1948. He has described
how this title was selected:

I could not find a title for possibly my single most important "figure" paint-
ing. Then I remembered a Surrealist custom, viz, to take a favorite book and
place one's finger at random in it. In either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake (I forget
which), my finger rested on the words "the homely protestant "4

For the record, the title is located in a list of abusive phrases on page 71
of Finnegans Wake.5 Motherwell's interest in Joyce continues to this day. It
has been reported that he still "regularly dips back into Ulysses,"6 and in re-
cent years titles of a number of works, for example, The River Liffey, Stephen's
Iron Crown, Stephen's Gate, and Bloom in Dublin, carry Joycean references.
Although the titles were assigned after the works were completed (that is,
Joyce was not consciously on his mind while he was working), the choice of

400 1980s
titles underscores Motherwell's perception, which he shared with a number of
others of his generation, that Joyce's writing was relevant to the art they were
creating.7
That the "simulated" automatism of Joyce's "stream of consciousness" writ-
ing ("simulated" because Joyce's prose actually is very carefully constructed)
influenced artists is evidenced by Barnett Newman's activities in the mid-
19405. According to Thomas B. Hess, "he started to write fiction, influenced
by Joyce's Ulysses, automatic writing, getting it down as fast as he could."8 At
the same time, Newman was creating a series of rapidly executed drawings
and watercolors, no doubt influenced by the biomorphic marine imagery and
automatist techniques of Surrealism, but equally as Joycean in spirit. The
equation between automatism and aquatic imagery, which in Surrealism [is a
metaphor for the unconscious mind,] is characteristic of Joyce's thinking as
well.
Several of the most extended "stream of consciousness" monologues in
Ulysses occur in Chapters III and XIII, in settings at the seashore. Chapter III,
the "Proteus" episode, in particular, is a model for the merger of vividly fluid
marine imagery and free associational thought. At the opening of this chapter
we find these lines:

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing
tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.9

The sea, which yields from its depths unexpected objects and signs, is easily
recognized as analogous to the mind. Joyce was familiar with Freud's theories,
incorporated them in his writings, and consequently, his works have encour-
aged a significant amount of Freudian interpretation.10
In one strikingly visual passage towards the end of Chapter III we read the
following description:

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway
reluctant arms, hissing up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and
upturning coy silver fronds (U, 49:35-37).

Not only does this sound like a possible description of a poured painting by
Jackson Pollock, but in Joyce's next paragraph we find the source for the title
of one of Pollock's breakthrough pictures of 1947, the silver, green-blue, and
white Full Fathom Five. Although there is no minimizing the difficulties as-
sociated with attaching importance to titles in abstract-expressionist works,

1980s 401
 especially in Pollock's case, Pollock did admire Joyce's writings, and the liter-
ary context in which the title of Full Fathom Five is found may have icono-
graphical significance for the painting.
11
Lee Krasner has recalled that Joyce was one of Pollock's favorite authors.
12
His library contained Stephen Hero, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Betty
Parsons, Pollock's [second] dealer, remembered that "he often talked about
13
Joyce." His neighbor in East Hampton, the artist Alfonso Ossorio, observed
that Pollock "read Finnegans Wake, and you felt that he was in tune with the
idea that one word could mean many things He loved the Joyce recordings
14
of his collected works, the music of Joyce's voice." Some who knew him,
Fritz Bultman and В. Н. Friedman, for example, feel that although Pollock
was attracted to Joyce, he probably did not read deeply into the works. More
likely, they believe, his occasional perusals of Joyce were greatly supplemented
by the recordings and by friends such as Tony Smith, who as early as the '405
15
was known to quote large chunks of Joyce by heart.
The title for Full Fathom Five is located in a passage which speaks of "a
loose drift of rubble," quite befitting a painting that has embedded in its sur-
face pebbles, nails, tacks, buttons, keys, coins, matches, and other debris:

Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found
drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble,
fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow,
bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk
though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now (U, 50:4-10)

The poured paintings of 1947 were given titles after they were completed in
picture-naming sessions with Pollock, Lee Krasner, and their neighbors in
East Hampton, Ralph Manheim and his wife. It is generally agreed that most
of the titles were supplied by Manheim. However, as В. Н. Friedman has
pointed out, Pollock had final approval of the titles, and they clearly convey
16
a sense of his artistic ambitions and concerns. [Joyce's description of a
corpse "full fathom five" is based on Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tem-
pest, which either Manheim or Pollock probably encountered in the Decem-
ber 1947 issue of The Tiger's Eye, one of the New York avant-garde's "little
magazines," but Pollock would have been more responsive to Joyce's prose.]
Could Joyce's passages which so aptly describe the color, movement, and
"drift of rubble" in Full Fathom Five also provide a clue to its content? Citing
Lee Krasner that Pollock once told her, "I choose to veil the imagery," Charles
F. Stuckey finds in Pollock's poured paintings "images hidden or 'veiled' from

402 1980s
sight by his webs. . . ,"17 He notes, "The titles Pollock chose for some of his
non-representational canvases refer to spooky presences embedded in or hid-
den behind tangled, nearly impervious barriers. . . ,"18 In the case oí Full
Fathom Five Stuckey could not have been more correct, although [he did not
acknowledge the source of the title]. It is provocative to consider the possibil-
ity that Pollock's title, whether initially his or not, provides evidence of hid-
den imagery, in this instance represented by a corpse "sunk though he be be-
neath the watery floor."
Alfonso Ossorio has commented on Pollock's interest in Finnegans Wake,
and it is with this great book, first published in 1939, that the artist's work is
most instructively compared. One Joyce critic, Clive Hart, has called Finne-
gans Wake "the most outstanding example of what can be done with objet
trouvé collage in literature."19 He sees Joyce's method as "strikingly similar"
to twentieth-century painting techniques: "Bits and pieces are picked up and
incorporated into the texture with little modification, while the precise nature
of each individual fragment is not always of great importance."20 Borrowing a
term from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Margot Norris describes Joyce's "practice of
using bits and pieces of heterogeneous materials without regard to their spe-
cific function" as "bricolage."21 The parallel is obvious with Pollock's amalga-
mation of materials in Full Fathom Five, allowing an assortment of foreign
objects to retain their individuality, but a great deal of Pollock's work can be
understood in terms of "bricolage."
As in the case of Finnegans Wake, which has been described as "essentially
visual There never was a book more cluttered with visual symbols,"22 Pol-
lock's pre-1947 paintings are dense with signs and symbols. Both writer and
painter create complex worlds that evoke a sense of endless symbolic inter-
play. Pollock, as Ossorio noted, appreciated Joyce's use of portmanteau words,
the conjoining of semantically dissimilar words to suggest multiple and con-
tradictory meanings. These constructions provide a literary analogue to the
artist's symbol-making tendencies. Pollock also must have been drawn to
Joyce's use of words as material, which gave them an apparent quality of ab-
straction and autonomy. In a formal sense, a number of pre-1947 paintings,
like Joyce's text, read as "parts placed side by side without transition, parts
in a variety of rhythms, shapes and tones."23 Pollock's friend, James Brooks,
observed that:

Joyce had a non-narrative style. What you were reading was right there.
You're not waiting for something to come. I hated to leave a paragraph
because I didn't need to go anywhere else. But his irreverence, his strange

1980s 403
 juxtaposition of things and unexpectedness was pretty much what we were
after at that time. That was in the air.24

The "substitutionality of parts" and the "variability and uncertainty of struc-

tural and thematic elements" are features common to Joyce's book and Pol-
lock's pre-1947 paintings. In both "meanings are dislocated—hidden in un-
expected places, multiplied and split, given over to ambiguity, plurality, and
uncertainty.. . ,"25 The element of unpredictability created by fluid symbol-
ism and continually shifting relationships in Finnegans Wake and Pollock's
earlier paintings is finally heightened and transformed by the artist's adop-
tion of a radical automatist technique in the poured paintings of 1947-1952.
Margot Norris sees Finnegans Wake as "a decentered universe" in which
"[t]he formal elements of the work... are not anchored to a single point of ref-
erence, that is, they do not refer back to a center."26 Simply put, this is what
modern painters call allover composition, a concept with which Pollock is
inseparably linked. Clement Greenberg, Pollock's critical champion in the
'405, noted in a 1948 essay that Joyce provides a literary parallel for "all-over"
painting.27 James Brooks observed that in Finnegans Wake, "The plot wasn't
the important thing. You are not getting from one place to another. But the
whole book was spread out over an enormous expanse."28 It is conceivable
that Pollock related this aspect of Joyce to his own work.
Aside from any influence Joyce may have had on Pollock, the fundamental
similarities between these men had profound significance for twentieth-
century literature and art. For both, the making of art, the process of creation
rather than the result, was the meaningful part of the effort. As is frequently
said about their respective endeavors, "everything is in a constant state of
becoming."29 Most importantly, in exploring the relationship between the
conscious and unconscious mind, they developed new languages which un-
dermined traditional notions of artistic structure.30 Like the letter in Finne-
gans Wake, the book's principal "expanding symbol [which] quickly comes to
stand for the book itself,"31 Pollock's painting

is not a miseffectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls
and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed: it
only looks like it (FW, 118:28-30).

David Smith frequently alluded to Joyce's writing and its relevance to con-
temporary art, and a number of his comments have been recorded in the lit-
erature. In 1965, Robert Motherwell offered this recollection of Smith:

404 1980s
 I have known David Smith for twenty years, ever since that afternoon we
met by prearrangement (but unknown to each other) during the 19405
In those days I was full of French Symbolist aesthetics, of Rimbaud and
Mallarmé, and of André Breton, of the possibilities of representing reality
indirectly but passionately in one's medium. I can still see David saying,
with his characteristic bluntness and inalterable sense of his own identity,
"I don't need them. I've read James Joyce!" He was right, all of it is in
Ulysses, and I looked at him with a sudden intellectual respect that has
not yet diminished as my affection for him has continually grown.32

Smith, who had a dog named Finnegan,33 recommended "the study of Joyce's
work, such as Finnegans Wake, wherein the use of words and relationships
function much as in the process of the creative artist's mind."34 Stanley Melt-
zoff reported in a 1946 essay, "One of the sculptor's main influences was the
appearance of'Work in Progress' in [the journal] transition"^ He compared
Smith's "sculptural use of metamorphising objects" to Joyce's "literary use of
the pun," and observed that certain of his works "are as complicated as parts
of'Finnegans Wake' and as complete a departure "36
Although a number of Smith's pieces have been compared to Joyce's writ-
ing, only The Letter of 1950 can be directly related to the author's work. Refer-
ring to this sculpture, Smith told Thomas Hess, "That relates the Little Red
Hen that scratched in Joyce . . . the Little Red Hen that scratched the letter
up."37 The letter, as previously noted, is the central symbol in Finnegans Wake,
"a sprawling and somewhat formless motif-complex which ... recurs in liter-
ally hundreds of places in more or less fragmentary form."38 It is evident that
Smith strongly identified with the writer and his symbol. He observed, "I'm
always scratching up letters and that's one of the nice things about Joyce.
There's a part of Joyce in me all my life."39
Rosalind Krauss sees The Letter as an assimilation of Joyce's symbol by ref-
erence to Adolph Gottlieb's pictorial structure in the "Pictograph" paintings.40
Be that as it may, I find that the content and structure of The Letter reflect a
very direct response to Joyce's text. While there are numerous fragmentary
references to the letter throughout Finnegans Wake, it is quoted and described
at some length in Chapter V, where a number of descriptions are compellingly
visual. Smith's sculpture, which, in Krauss's words, "reads like a set of secret
glyphs for which the viewer has no key,"41 not only conveys the inscrutability
of Joyce's discussion of the letter, but can be seen as a rather faithful represen-
tation of the writer's images:

1980s 405
 ruled barriers, along which the traced words run, march, halt, walk, stumble
at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety ... with lines of lit-
ters slittering up and loads of latters slettering down (FW, 114:7-9,17-18)

Or again, in Joyce's description of the letter previously quoted in connection

with Pollock—"a miseifectual whyacinthinous riot of blots and blurs and bars
and balls and hoops"—we find a possible source for Smith's Ys ("whyacinthi-
nous"), Os ("balls and hoops"), and the lines ("bars") that Joyce earlier called
"ruled barriers."42
Joyce's letter, comprised of letters, came from litter scratched up by the hen
in a dump. Joyce informs us, "if you are abced-minded ... what curios of signs
in this 'allaphbed'" (FW, 18:17-18), and he asks, "will this kiribis pouch filled
with litterish fragments lurk dormant in the pouch . . . ?" (FW, 66: 25-26).
Smith, who could not have failed to see the dump, or "allaphbed," as a symbol
of the unconscious mind, said, "I don't differentiate between writing and
drawing, not since I read that part of Joyce."43 However, The Letter, and rj h's
and 24 Greek Y's of the same year, can quite literally be seen to have come from
an "allaphbed" since the steel letters that Smith used were part of an assort-
ment of junk metal he bought from a hardware dealer.44 Like Joyce and Pol-
lock, Smith was one of the great "bricoleurs" of the century, making "brico-
lage" out of a personalized, fragmented symbolism and bits and scraps of
material.
Joyce the "bricoleur" is displayed in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. His ear-
lier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although containing some
elements of the later works, propounds an aesthetic antithetical to the concept
of bricolage. In Chapter V, Stephen Dedalus advocates what "amounts to a
theory of impersonality and autonomy . . . a theory of art for art's sake . . .
[a] static contemplative art."45 Joyce had an audience for these ideas also. In a
1953 article Thomas Hess noted that "[Ad] Reinhardt enjoys the phrasing of
Joyce—young Stephen's trinity of wholeness, radiance and harmony. . . ,"46
On another occasion, Hess observed that many of Reinhardt's illustrated art
satires were strongly influenced by Joyce's later writings.47 An obvious exam-
ple is found in the title of one of the better-known art jokes, "A Portend of the
Artist as a Yhung Mándala," where the author's early title is conjoined with
the punning word play oí Finnegans Wake. It is worthy of note that Hess re-
corded Reinhardt's appreciation of Stephen Dedalus' aesthetics at the time
the artist's work was evolving from relational compositions emphasizing shape,
value, and color contrasts to the monochromatic pictures that culminated in
the "Black Paintings." I do not mean to infer a crucial connection between

406 1980s
Joyce and Reinhardt, only that this aspect of the writer's work may have had
some influence on Reinhardt's thinking, or at the least reinforced it.
In a discussion with a friend, young Stephen translates Aquinas' "Ad pul-
critudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, daritas" as "Three things
are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance" (AP, 248:18-21),
and then explains his theory of art at length:

... [T]he esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and

selfcontained You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You
apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas (AP, 249:5-10).
... [I]mmediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension.
Having first felt that it is one thing[,] you feel now that it is a thing. You appre-
hend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts and
their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia (AP, 249:16-21).
The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of
the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been
arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent
stasis of esthetic pleasure (AP, 250:12-17).

The process of perception that Joyce has Stephen describe matches the expe-
rience of many viewers of Reinhardt's "Black Paintings." The writer who has
best described the gradual recognition of structure in Reinhardt's later works
is Lucy Lippard. She has written:

On entering a room with one or more black paintings, one has a first impres-
sion of only the most general nature. One sees a black square hanging on the
wall After a period of looking at the dull glow, one begins to perceive the
non-blackness ... the extremely muted colors begin to emerge, and with
them, but lagging a little, comes the trisection [of the surface].48

Lippard has given us, without making the association, an excellent descrip-
tion of Stephen's integritas and consonantia. But what of claritas, radiance?
Once again, Lippard writes:

Reinhardt's development from around 1949 to 1960 traces the process of

draining color from light, so that in the last works, light practically replaced
color.... Black, white and gray are called achromatic colors though black is
caused by a complete absorption of color. A high degree of light absorbance
is not the same as total absence of light. The light has been taken in rather
than rejected, the opaque surfaces have paradoxically become transparent
containers of light.49

1980s 407
 Sidney Tillim observed the same phenomenon, stating that "[djarkness in
Reinhardt's painting is a form of light, not illumination of chiaroscuro but an
aspect of form—what might be called total light."50 Reinhardt intentionally
created this effect, thinning his paint and superimposing layer upon layer of
color to get "not colored light" as Reinhardt wrote to Sam Hunter, "but color
that gives offlight."51
Not only do Reinhardt's "Black Paintings" provide a visual demonstration
of Stephen Dedalus' wholeness, harmony and radiance, but Joyce and Rein-
hardt agree on the subject of the artist's presence in a work of art. Joyce has
Stephen say, "The personality of the artist... finally refines itself out of exis-
tence, impersonalizes itself... remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence" (AP, 252:15-23). Reinhardt's
opinion of artists expressing themselves is well known, but on one occasion
he said simply, "The less an artist obtrudes himself in his painting, the purer
and clearer his aims."52
Tony Smith was perhaps the biggest fan of Joyce's writings. Although he
came into prominence as a sculptor in the 19605, he was a friend and col-
league in the '405 of Newman, Rothko, Pollock, and other artists of the first
generation New York School. Irish, with a Jesuit education, and an artist,
Tony Smith strongly identified with Joyce.53 He was always ready to quote
Joyce, and frequently related his work to the writer's. He once cited A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man as one source of his interest in mazes.54 Although
Stephen's family name is similar to that of Daedalus, the mythological maze-
maker, Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake would seem to offer more obvi-
ous examples of labyrinthian structures. At one point Smith speculated on
inflatable sculpture which he related to Surrealism, topology, and to the writ-
ings of Joyce.55 He was interested in all of Joyce's major works, and seems to
have assimilated them in his sculpture.
In some instances, Smith's work provides a three-dimensional exposition
of Stephen's ideas. A piece such as Amaryllis of 1965, for example, initially
appears to consist of simple forms quickly grasped. However, it can not be
understood from a single vantage point. Made of two truncated prisms, the
sculpture's appearance and impact change with each viewpoint. Smith, with a
down-to-earth illustration, succinctly paraphrases Stephen's discussion of
wholeness, harmony, and radiance:

I'm interested in the inscrutability and the mysteriousness of the thing. Some-
thing obvious on the face of i t . . . is of no further interest. A Bennington earth-
enware jar, for instance, has subtlety of color, largeness of form, a general sug-

408 1980s
 gestion of substance.... It continues to nourish us time and time again. We
can't see it in a second, we continue to read it.56

Smith's Wandering Rocks (1967) derives its name from the "phantom" chap-
ter heading of Chapter X in Ulysses. Any serious reader of Joyce, of which
Smith was one, knows that he assigned to each episode of his novel a heading
based on a Homeric reference, and these titles are employed in discussions
of Ulysses in the Joyce literature. Since there are no wandering rocks in Ho-
mer's Odyssey y except by allusion, the title of Smith's sculpture is undoubtedly
Joycean, as is the spirit of the work. In Chapter X, an assortment of Dubliners,
named and described, come into contact, pass each other, and continue their
perambulations around the city. They are, as William York Tindall says, "con-
nected with others, but arbitrarily and by temporal coincidence alone." He
observes that "human elements, like parts of fractured atoms, collide, part,
go separate ways Related by time and place, they lack vital relationship."57
So it is with Smith's sculpture. Each of the five pieces is different and individ-
ually named (Smohawk, Crocus, Slide, Shaft, and Dud), yet as six-sided prisms
they share a familial relationship. Viewed from numerous vantage points, with
the possibility, encouraged by the sculptor, of each installation being differ-
ent, Smith's sculpture communicates those elements of unpredictability, si-
multaneity, connectedness and disconnectedness that Joyce examined in "The
Wandering Rocks" episode.
The title of Smith's Gracehoper (1962-72) is an explicit reference to Joyce's
fable of the "Ondt and Gracehoper" in Chapter XIII ofFinnegans Wake. Ac-
cording to Joyce:

The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity,
(he had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him), or if not, he was always
making ungraceful overtures He would of curse melissciously, by his fore
feelhers, flexors, contractors, depressors, and extensors, lamely.... (FW,
414:22-24,29-31)-58
Smith's looming, lumbering sculpture is aptly named after Joyce's Grace-
hoper. The question is, did he have the creature in mind when he was making
the piece, or for that matter, was he consciously thinking of the chapter in
Ulysses when he was working on Wandering Rocks? In Smith's case, a man
whose thinking was pervaded by Joyce, who committed extensive portions of
Joyce to memory, and who frequently related his work to Joyce's writing, it is
almost a chicken-or-egg question. It is safe to say that his sculpture reflects a
significant involvement with Joyce's images and ideas.

1980s 409
 Tony Smith frequently put sculpture together like Joyce wrote prose. For
instance, Willy (1962) is made up of parts from several sculptures, and P.N.
(1969) is a piece of a model from another work enlarged and turned upside
down.59 This way of working is not uncommon in twentieth-century art, but
with Smith the comparison to Joyce seems inescapable. He is related to the
other "bricoleurs" of his generation, who, to one degree or another, absorbed
and reconstituted Joyce's methods in the creation of expressive visual objects.
A number of artists undoubtedly identified with A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. Echoes of Stephen Dedalus can be discerned in the pronounce-
ments of members of the first generation New York School. MotherwelPs
statement in the '505 that the aim of Abstract Expressionism "was to forge a
whole new language of painting,"60 as Phil Patton has noted, is reminiscent of
Stephen's desire to forge "the uncreated conscience of my race." Stephen's
view of the artist as "a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily
bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life" (AP, 260:1-3),
finds a counterpart in MotherwelPs claim that "abstract art is a form of mysti-
cism . . . one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through
union."61 The polemic nature of Ad Reinhardt's various writings has more
than a little suggestion of Stephen's confident aesthetic discourse. As Nathan
Halper, a Joyce scholar and one-time art dealer, sees it, Joyce, because of the
life he led and the radical explorations he made, became "a sort of patron
saint" of avant-garde artists in the '405 and '505.62 Certainly, for these painters
and sculptors Joyce stood as a convincing example, a symbol, in fact, of the
modern artist, his work and vision.

Notes

An abbreviated version of this essay similarly titled was presented as a paper in the
Second Annual Symposium on Contemporary Art, Fashion Institute of Technology,
New York City, April 30,1982. Revised 2004.

i. Joyce's name has been invoked every so often in discussions of Abstract Expres-
sionism, but usually as simple comparison, not in terms of concrete relation-
ships. Thomas B. Hess spoke of "the Joycean addition of ambiguity employed by
De Kooning," "Is Abstraction Un-American?," Art News, vol. XLIX, no. 10, Feb-
ruary, 1951, p. 41; Ethel K. Schwabacher saw Gorky's "composite structures" de-
veloping "in the direction of James Joyce's elaborate analogies," Arshile Gorky,
New York, 1957, p. 126; and Karen Wilken, "Adolph Gottlieb: The Pictographs,"
Art International, vol. XXI/6, December, 1977, p. 28, observed that the literary
equivalent of Gottlieb's pictographic images "would be the portmanteau word

410 1980s
 coinages of James Joyce, with their superimposed layers of meaning. . .," but in
the cases of all three there is little evidence of a special interest in Joyce.
2. Christopher B. Crosman and Nancy E. Miller, "Speaking of Tomlin" Art Jour-
nal, Winter 1979/80, vol. XXXIX/2, p. 114; from an interview with Brooks and
Ibram Lassaw, East Hampton, New York, September 5,1975.
3. H. H. Arnason, "On Robert Motherwell and His Early Work," Art Interna-
tional, vol. X/i, January 20,1966, p. 19.
4. H. H. Arnason, Robert Motherwell, New York, 1977, p. 103.
5. My page and line references are to The Viking Press editions oïFinnegans Wake,
first published in New York in 1939, which henceforth, as a citation in the text,
will be referred to as FW.
6. Phil Patton, "Robert Motherwell: The Mellowing of an Angry Young Man,'Mr¿
News, vol. 81, no. 3, March, 1982, p. 76.
7. This perception is demonstrated by the invitation to Nathan Halper, author of
several articles on Joyce in the late ¿(.os and early '505, and later an art dealer, to
speak about Joyce at The Club, the artists' club that was first established in 1949
at 39 East 8th Street, and which then moved to various addresses in the '50s. In a
March 10,1982 letter to the author, Halper recalled: "Early in the '505,1 was not
as yet involved in the art world; but living in the Village, I would meet some of
the painters. When they found that I had published a few articles on Joyce, I was
asked to give a talk about him to The Club. Not about Joyce and painting or
sculpture—but Joyce in general. It was felt that he was relevant." Joyce was also
the subject of a seminar held during "Forum '49?" an exhibition in Province-
town, Massachusetts in the summer of 1949 that included the work of Pollock,
Baziotes, Rothko, Tomlin and Pousette-Dart, among others.
8. Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971,
p. 43. The artist's Ulysses, 1952, according to Hess (p. 82), "probably is Newman
tipping his hat to James Joyce, one of his first heroes."
9. I am using the Random House, 1961 edition of Ulysses, p. 37, lines 2-4. Hence-
forth, as a citation in the text, this work will be referred to as U.
10. Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, New York, 1972, p. 37,
states: "Literary enthusiasts were actively linking their favorite writers with
Freudian theories. James Joyce, for instance, was immediately perceived to be a
stream-of-consciousness exemplar of Freud's speculations. . . . Already in the
bohemian circles of the immediate postwar period Freud was as potent a subject
as cubism, Ezra Pound, and Joyce's Ulysses (then being published in installments
in The Little Review)."
11. Francis Valentine O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Cata-
logue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Work, New Haven and Lon-
don, p. 193: IV.
12. Ibid.
13. Francine du Plessix and Cleve Gray, "Who Was Jackson Pollock?? Art in Amer-
ica, vol. 55, no. 3, May-June, 1967, p. 55. Betty Parsons' interview was reprinted
in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible, New York, 1972, pp.
181-182.

1980s 411
 14. Du Plessix and Gray, p. 58.
15. Conversation with Fritz Bultman and B. H. Friedman, February 27,1982 in New
York City. Bultman and Friedman also mentioned Weldon Kees, the poet-
painter, one of the "Irascible Eighteen," as a great transmitter and enthusiast of
Joyce in the '408 and early '508.
16. Friedman, Jackson Pollock . . . , p. 120. Lee Krasner has stated that some of the
titles were Pollock's, although she can not recall which ones. See Judith Wolfe,
"Jungian Aspects of Jackson Pollock's Imagery," Artforum, vol. XI, no. 3, No-
vember, 1972, pp. 72,73, note 41.
17. Charles F. Stuckey, "Another Side of Jackson Pollock," Art in America, vol. 65,
no. 6, November-December, 1977, pp. 84,86.
18. Ibid., p. 88.
19. Clive Hart, Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake, Evanston, Illinois, 1962,
P-34-
20. Ibid., pp. 34-35. Critics of Joyce on a number of occasions have compared his
writing to the visual arts. Frank Budgen, a painter, friend of Joyce's, and one of
his early critics, in James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Bloomington, Indiana,
1960 (reprint of 1934 edition), pp. 91-92, writes that Joyce's method of internal
monologue "is more like impressionist painting. The shadows are full of colour;
the whole is built up out of nuances instead of being constructed in broad
masses; things are seen as immersed in a luminous fluid; colour supplies the
modelling, and the total effect is arrived at through a countless number of small
touches. ..." A more recent critic, William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to
James Joyce, New York, 1959, p. 238, says, "To proceed from Ulysses to Finne-
gans Wake is like proceeding from a picture by Cezanne to a recent abstraction.
In the absence of identifiable surface, we must make what we can of blots, blurs,
and scratches, patiently awaiting the emergence of an order which, though there
maybe, is not immediately visible."
21. Margot Norris, The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake, Baltimore and Lon-
don, 1974, p. 130.
22. Hart, p. 37.
23. Tindall, p. 37. Norris, p. 131, associates the habit of mind that produces "brico-
lage" with the compiling of voluminous notebooks. She reports that Joyce's note-
books were "crammed with list upon list of apparently unrelated words, phrases,
snatches of thought, and bits of data." Pollock, too, filled numerous notebooks,
particularly in the '305, and made countless sketches.
24. Crosman and Miller, p. 114. Many of the syllable combinations that Brooks puts
together to create titles for his paintings have a Joycean flavor.
25. Norris, p. 7.
26. Ibid.,p. 120.
27. Clement Greenberg, "The Crisis of the Easel Painting," Art and Culture,
Boston, 1961, p. 157. Reprinted from an essay in Partisan Review, April, 1948.
Greenberg also mentions Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas as
other parallels in literature.

412 1980s
28. Crosman and Miller, p. 114.
29. See Hart, pp. 50-51, for a discussion of process in Joyce.
30. Joyce's and Pollock's works constitute an attack on the traditional concept of
structure. Norris, p. 121, discussing Joyce, notes that "[t]his attack was not iso-
lated, but belonged to an 'event' or 'rupture' in the history of the concept of struc-
ture, which, according to philosopher Jacques Derrida, took place in the history
of thought sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.... The
'rupture'... results in the idea of a structure in which presence is not so much ab-
sent as unlocatable."
31. Hart, p. 200.
32. Frank O'Hara, Robert Motherwell, Museum of Modern Art, 1965, p. 56; excerpt
from Robert Motherwell, "A Major American Sculptor: David Smith," Vogue,
February i, 1965.
33. Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1971, p.
139, note 16. Jackson Pollock had a dog named Ahab in appreciation of Herman
Melville. The bestowal on these canines of names derived from literary sources
suggests the amusing possibility of a study of pet names among artists as an in-
dex of their cultural interests.
34. Garnett McCoy (éd.), David Smith, New York, Washington, 1973, p. 64. From a
talk titled "What I Believe About the Teaching of Sculpture," Midwestern Uni-
versity Art Conference, Louisville, Kentucky, October 27,1950.
35. Stanley Meltzoff, "David Smith and Social Surrealism," Magazine of Art, vol. 39,
no. 3, March, 1946, p. 100. Portions of Work in Progress, the working drafts for
Finnegans Wake, appeared in seventeen issues of the journal transition between
1927 and 1938.
36. Ibid.,p.ioi.
37. McCoy, p. 180. Reprinted from Thomas B. Hess, "The Secret Letter," David
Smith, exhibition catalogue, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York, 1964.
38. Hart, p. 182.
39. McCoy, p. 180.
40. Krauss, p. 136, note 16.
41. Ibid., p. 84.
42. Edward Fry, David Smith, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York,
1969, p. 62, offers the following interpretation of The Letter: "The imagery in the
words of his sculptural letter includes the schematic interior of a house, a run-
ning man, and a hermit crab; and Smith's reply, couched in Joycean verbal-visual
puns, was thus the question of why о why did he ever leave Ohio."
43. McCoy, from Hess, "The Secret Letter," p. 185.
44. Krauss, pp. 136,139.
45. Tindall, pp. 95-96.1 will be quoting The Modern Library, Random House, 1928
edition OÍA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; henceforth, as a citation in the
text, it will be referred to as AP.
46. Thomas B. Hess, "Reinhardt: The Position and Perils of Purity," Art News, vol.
52, no. 8, December, 1953, p. 59. Hess adds that for Reinhardt, "even this verges

1980s 413
 toward the soul and essences of Celtic hokum." In a telephone conversation of
March 27, 1982, Rita Reinhardt confirmed that her husband had read and en-
joyed Joyce, and she vaguely recalled discussions about Joyce, who, she noted,
was the subject of conversations among many artists and intellectuals in the '403
and '505. She also said that had Hess been inaccurate in his writing, Reinhardt
would have corrected any misrepresentations in print.
47. Thomas B. Hess, "The Art Comics of Ad Reinhardt," Artforum, vol. XII, no. 8,
April, 1974, p. 47. Hess wrote, "The twin heroes of this effort [the art satires] ...
were Joyce and Beckett. The spirit of the former presides over Reinhardt's lust
for cataloguing and naming everything in the world. . . . You hear Joyce in the
tropes, oxymorons, onomatopoeia and alliterations, in the lilt of the language, in
the dirty jokes, plays on names, scholarly, almost pedantic references."
48. Lucy R. Lippard, "Ad Reinhardt: One Work," Art in America, vol. 62, no. 6,
November-December, 1974, pp. 96-97.
49. Ibid., pp. 97-98.
50. Sidney Tillim, "Ad Reinhardt," Arts Magazine, vol. 33, no. 5, February, 1959,
P. 54-
51. Letter to Sam Hunter, Summer, 1966, cited in Margit Rowell, Ad Reinhardt and
Color, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1980, p. 21.
52. Ad Reinhardt, "Twelve Rules for a New Academy," Art News, vol. 56, no. 3, May,
1957, F-38.
53. Smith's special attraction to Joyce was described to me by Fritz Bultman in a
conversation on July 16,1981 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, of course, is largely involved with the Jesuit education of
an aspiring artist.
54. A letter from Tony Smith, October, 1975, in "Janet Kardon Interviews Some
Modern Maze-Makers," Art International, vol. XX/4~5, April-May, 1976, p. 65.
55. Lucy R. Lippard, "Diversity in Unity: Recent Geometricizing Styles," Art Since
Mid-Century: The New Internationalism, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971, p. 247.
56. Samuel Wagstaff,Jr., "Talking with Tony Smith," Artforum, vol. 5, no. 4, Decem-
ber, 1966, p. 18.
57. Tindall,p.i8o.
58. Eleanor Green, "The Morphology of Tony Smith's Work," Artforum, vol. XII,
no. 8, April, 1974, pp. 55-56, quotes a section of this passage and parts of others
(416:8-13,26-30) in relation to Gracehoper and briefly discusses the connection
between Joyce and Smith.
59. Lucy R. Lippard, "Interview with Tony Smith," Tony Smith: Recent Sculpture,
exhibition catalogue, M. Knoedler Be Co., New York, 1971, pp. 9,19.
60. Patton,p. 75.
61. Robert Motherwell, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," Museum of Modern Art
Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 3, Spring, 1951, pp. 12-13.
62. Letter to the author, March 10,1982. Halper feels that perhaps "Motherwell and
Tony Smith were the only ones to do more than make an obligatory dip into the
waters" of Joyce, but his perspective is that of a Joyce scholar.

414 1980s
A.DIERDREROBSON The Market for Abstract Expressionism:
The Time Lag Between Critical
and Commercial Acceptance

The immediate post-World War II years are taken to be those that mark the
emergence not only of the United States as a major world power but also of
new American artistic avant-garde, aggressively different in style and aesthetic
from previous European modernism. Recently some attention has focused
on how Abstract Expressionism came to critical prominence and on the politi-
cal and cultural implications of this new avant-garde, due to the apparent con-
gruence between an aesthetic that stressed individuality and vigour and the
Cold War liberal ideology of the postwar Truman era, which equated these
two characteristics with Western (American) democracy. However, within the
context of this reappraisal of Abstract Expressionism and its increasing promi-
nence, little attention has been focused upon this group's performance within
the marketplace. Where this subject has been broached, there has been a ten-
dency to equate critical and commercial acceptance. If this equation were true,
then it would suggest that Abstract Expressionism achieved commercial suc-
cess in the late 19405. My contention is that this reading of the situation creates
a distortion, predating such success by a number of years, and that only in the
mid-1950s did one see any measurable public willingness to buy the work of
Abstract Expressionists.
Such a misapprehension could be based upon a misunderstanding or in-
complete reading of economic and cultural factors that indicate that Abstract
Expressionist artists could achieve market success in the 19405. The early to
mid-i94os were years of remarkable war-induced prosperity, with concommi-
tant high levels of liquidity. Between 1942 and 1946, the Gross National Prod-
uct of the United States rose sixty-six percent, the stock market was newly
buoyant with share prices rising by eighty percent, personal income levels
doubled for most sections of the population, and despite the introduction of
a widely-based income tax system in 1942, levels of disposable income were
exceptionally high.1 This liquidity was accompanied, as a result of years of
Depression and war-induced shortages, by a public hunger for consumer
durables and luxury goods, and in the mid-i94os one sees a dramatic increase

SOURCE: Archives of American Art Journal, no. 3 (1985), 19-23. Reprinted with the per-
mission of A. Dierdre Robson.

415
 in spending on luxury goods (consumer durables still being unobtainable be-
cause of wartime controls on industry). This spending activity was reflected
in the art world. In 1943 one auction house, Parke-Bernet, reported a gross for
the previous season of $6.15 million—a considerable increase from the $2.5
million spent in 1940—and the total annual value of such sales remained be-
tween $6 million and $6.5 million until 1946.2 The year 1943 also saw the start
of a reported boom for the commercial galleries on Fifty-Seventh Street with
large increases in sales in successive seasons until, in 1946, they were three
hundred percent higher than in 1940.3 Also present at the time was a belief,
propounded by sections of the media (and more particularly the art press),
that there was a new, more widely-based middle-class public for contempo-
rary art. This public was thought to be newly willing to concede respectabil-
ity to American art and artists, largely as a result of the federal New Deal pa-
tronage of the 19305, which had for the first time legitimized the fine arts as
a profession in America. It was thought to have been familiarized with mod-
ern art by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (in New York) and
to have overcome its prejudices against new expressions in art (a conclusion
that was deemed to be proved by greatly increased museum attendance—at
the Museum of Modern Art attendance rose from two hundred-nine thousand
in 1936 to five hundred-eighty-five thousand in 1940).4 This public was also
encouraged to see that the purchase of art works was no longer the province
solely of the very wealthy, particularly via national events such as the federally-
sponsored "Art Weeks" of 1940 and 1941 and through the efforts of commer-
cial dealers who encouraged sales of modestly priced work both in their own
galleries and in non-conventional venues such as department stores.5
The years 1943 to 1947, during which the future Abstract Expressionist
artists (among them Baziotes, Hofmann, Motherwell, Pollock, and Rothko)
were given their first exposure at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century
gallery, would seem to be auspicious for them, coinciding as they did with the
war-induced boom. Prices fetched by major contemporary artists appeared
healthy when one compares them to a national mean income of $2,8oo6—a
major Picasso could cost $5,000, School of Paris painters such as Modigliani
and Soutine generally fetched $1,000 to $5,000, while an established Ameri-
can such as Kuniyoshi was asking $3,000 for large works in the mid-i940s.
Theoretically, there should have been another advantage for the pro to-
Abstract Expressionists in exhibiting at Art of This Century, shown as they
were alongside major names in European modernism in the most discussed
gallery in New York, something that should have favorably affected their sales.

416 1980s
Indeed, their prices, ranging on average from $50 to $750, do seem higher
than one might expect for new American artists—during the same period,
and at the same stage in his career, Jack Levine was asking $100 to $500 at the
Downtown Gallery, while in 1944 Stuart Davis could only get an average of
$500 to $700 for large works, though his prices doubled in the following two
years.7
But a closer examination of sales of proto-Abstract Expressionist work at
Art of This Century shows that they were slow and that only rarely did any of
these artists get anything close to the maximum asking price for any of their
works. Only one painting was sold from Pollock's first exhibition in 1943,
She Wolf for $400, and during the time he was under contract to Guggenheim
(from 1943 to 1947), Pollock's sales never equalled the value of his stipend.
Baziote's sales amounted to nearly $1,430 in the few years after his show in
1944, but only three Rothkos, totalling $265 in value, were sold after his exhi-
bition in 1945. The highest price paid for a Pollock before 1947 was $740 in
1945, while the most paid for a Baziotes was $275 in 1946, for a Motherwell
$225 in 1944, and for a Rothko, $120 in 1946.8 In this situation Art of This
Century was no different from the market for modern art as a whole, for de-
spite increased museum attendance and the high total figures of art sales an-
nually in the mid-i94os, sales of contemporary art accounted for only fifteen
percent of all Fifty-Seventh Street profits.9
In the immediate postwar years, new galleries concerned with avant-garde
American art (Betty Parsons, Samuel Kootz, and Charles Egan) opened, and
the Abstract Expressionist artists began to receive wider exposure, increased
critical coverage, and attention from museums. At the same time, their ask-
ing price levels rose gradually. At Samuel Kootz's gallery, from 1946 to 1948
the general price range for work by his Abstract Expressionist gallery artists
(Baziotes, Hofmann, and Motherwell) was $100 to $950.10 At Betty Parsons's
gallery, Pollock's prices rose to $25O-$3,ooo by 1950, while Rothko's asking
prices rose from $75~$4OO in 1947 to $6oo-$3,ooo in 1951.n It is this rise in
prices that has led to the suggestion that the Abstract Expressionists were be-
coming commercially successful in the late 19405, for it has been taken as in-
dicative of an increased demand for their work on the part of collectors. But in
arriving at this conclusion, two factors have been overlooked. First, there was
a general inflation in art prices in the immediate postwar years. The increase
mirrors the state of the general economy, for in the three years after the end of
the war and with the deregulation of the wartime economy the cost of living
in the United States rose by sixty percent. Among the Americans, Kuniyoshi's

1980s 417
 sale prices rose to $6,000 for large canvases, and Stuart Davis's to $1,000-
$4,500 for similar works, while paintings by major School of Paris painters
could fetch up to $15,000. Second, there has been an apparent failure to dis-
tinguish between asking price and selling price in noting rising prices for Ab-
stract Expressionist work—and in practice the two can be quite dissimilar,
particularly in the case of a new artist. In fact, Pollock rarely got more than
$900 for any work he sold in the years he was with the Parsons Gallery (1947
to 1951). Among these were Number 5, 1948, for which he got $1,500, and
Number i, 1948, which sold for $2,350.12 The highest price paid for a Rothko
in the same period was $1,250, for Number 10,1950 in 1951.13
The importance of inflation as a factor in the rise in asking prices is re-
inforced by the knowledge that the art market as a whole was depressed dur-
ing the late 19405, with auction sales dropping below $6 million per annum,
though the real fall was far greater because of the high inflation. Several deal-
ers, including Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery and Betty Parsons,
complain about how slow business was in these years.14 Other galleries fared
no better. For instance, the closure of the Kootz Gallery in 1948 was due to
financial difficulties caused by commitments to gallery artists for outweighing
the amount made in sales.15 The sluggishness of the art market can be seen as
part of the generally uncertain state of the economy (which went into a mild
recession in 1948) and widespread lack of confidence about its future. Matters
did not markedly improve, either in a general economic sense or within the
market for modern art, until after the Korean War (1951-1953), for though this
conflict stimulated a boom, anticipation of it also generated the highest-ever
single rise in the rate of inflation in late 1950. But the cessation of hostilities
and the lifting of economic controls in 1953 was not followed by the inflation-
ary spiral that characterized 1946. Instead, a short boom and recession se-
quence was followed in the mid-1950s by the first period of economic stability
and business confidence, not distorted by war, for several decades. This change
in economic climate and, more important, the increase in confidence that it
generated eventually had a profound effect on the art market, and particularly
for postwar American painting.
The first signs of Abstract Expressionist market success came soon after
Pollock's death in 1956. Until the mid-1950s the market for modern art contin-
ued to be dominated by major European artists and some more established,
older American painters. By 1955, a work by a modern "old master" such as
Matisse had been known to fetch $75,000, up to $45,000 was being asked for
major examples by School of Paris painters, while artists such as Kandinsky,

418 1980s
Klee, and Léger fetched $8,000 to $10,000. In the same year, Stuart Davis was
asking $7,500 for large paintings, Ben Shahn had a waiting list on works at
$3,500, while more established names such as Kuniyoshi and Hopper had
active markets in the $4,500 to $7,500 price range. By 1955, only Pollock
among the Abstract Expressionists had gotten more than $5,000 for any
work: $6,000 in 1954 for One (Number 31, 1950) and $8,000 in 1955 for Blue
Poles (Number n, 1952).16 Generally, until this date, top prices for any Ab-
stract Expressionist work seem to have been no more than $2,000 to $3,000.
In 1957, however, Pollock's Autumn Rhythm was sold to the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art for $30,000—a painting that the Museum of Modern Art had
been reluctant to buy for $8,000 before the artist's death.17 This sale served
as an important validation of Abstract Expressionism, for it was the first time
that a major museum had bought a painting in this style for a price commen-
surate with what it might pay for a work by a major European artist. Although
the sum paid was influenced by Pollock's death and thus was not directly ap-
plicable to the other artists working within this style, this sale set the ceiling
price for Abstract Expressionist work for some years and helped to boost
prices for the other artists. Where in 1953 $2,000 to $2,500 was being asked
for a large de Kooning, in 1956 a similar work cost $7,500 to $8,500 and
had nearly doubled again in price by 1959.18 Between 1956 and 1958, Rothko's
top prices rose to the region of $5,000, Hofmann's to $7,500, and those of
Baziotes to $3,500. This rise in prices was accompanied by a sharp increase
in the volume of sales, with a number of Abstract Expressionist artists manag-
ing to sell out their exhibitions from 1956 onward, something that none had
managed before this date.
In addition to the general economic circumstances already discussed that
had some bearing on the market for modern art as a whole and for Abstract
Expressionism in particular in the immediate postwar period, there are still
other considerations that provide some clue as to why commercial success
came to these artists in the mid-1950s and no sooner. On a financial level,
where in the early to mid-19408 hopes were pinned on a newly-prosperous
middle class as a prospective market for modern, and in particular American,
art, those concerned overlooked the fact that in reality less than one percent
of the population had sufficiently high incomes (at least $10,000 per annum
in the latter half of the 1940s)19 to enable them to buy more than the occa-
sional minor work of art. Thus, such purchases remained the province of if
not solely the very wealthy then at least the most prosperous. This situation
was exacerbated by the postwar economic uncertainties. It was not until 1956

1980s 419
 that the purchasing power of income recovered to 1944 levels with the help of
cuts in personal taxation in 1954. But of more significance were the attitudes
of the newly prosperous toward the purchase of art. It remained a low priority
and was, as a rule, bought only to satisfy purely decorative needs. There was a
general reluctance to view such spending as an investment. In this the monied
of the United States displayed a marked dissimilarity to their European coun-
terparts, who, over many years of economic uncertainties, had come to regard
art as an investment. For many years in the United States, only a few very
wealthy collectors, concerned primarily with the established names of Euro-
pean modernism, were willing to spend large sums of money on art. Also of
importance was the generation factor: collectors tend to be much of an age
with the artists they collect. Few older collectors, including those known for
their support of the more radical European modernism in the 19305 and early
19405, were able to make the transition to the new American art. Only in the
mid-1950s does one see a younger generation of collectors, seemingly better
able to empathize with Abstract Expressionism, reach economic maturity.
It is these attitudes that have been overlooked when the ideological and
nationalistic links between a new generation of entrepreneurs and Abstract
Expressionism have been stressed, creating the mistaken presumption of the
former's early appreciation of the latter. Instead, those entrepreneurs most in-
terested in collecting American art per se, at least until the early to mid-1950s,
appear to have been more concerned with earlier or more conservative work.
A shift in attitudes on the part both of those already collecting and those with
the money to do so had to be accomplished before Abstract Expressionism
could become commercially successful. On one hand, collectors had to be re-
assured about the status of this new art by its linkage to European modernism
—first by museum exhibitions and purchases that served to validate the new
style; second by the juxtaposition of European and American Abstract Ex-
pressionist work in the same galleries (in this process Sidney Janis and Sam-
uel Kootz were particularly important). On the other hand, to appeal to a new
generation the style had to be strongly identified with the future and with
American aspirations. The first process inevitably took some years to accom-
plish; the requisite shifts in prosperity and confidence that gave a stimulus to
the second only occurred in the years immediately after the Korean War.
Then, and only then, was Abstract Expressionism in a position to achieve
commercial success.

420 1980s
Notes
This article is based on a paper delivered at the "New Myths for Old: Redefining Ab-
stract Expressionism" seminar, College Art Association Conference, New York, N.Y.,
February 1986.

1. For information about the postwar economy, see: Lester Chandler, Inflation in
the United States 1940-1948 (New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1976); Joseph P.
Crockett, The Federal Tax System in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood Press, 1955); Herman P. Miller, Income of the American People (New York:
Wiley, 1955); Harold G. Vattner, The United States Economy in the 19505 (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
2. "Report on Auction Season," Art News XLIII, 10: 21; "Fifty-Seventh Street—a
tight bottleneck for art...," Fortune (September 1946): 145.
3. A. B. Louchheim, "Who Buys What in the Picture Boom," Art News XLIII,
9: 12-14, 23, 24; Louchheim, "Second Season of the Picture Boom," Art New s
XLIV,io:9-n,26.
4. D. MacDonald, "Profiles—Action on West Fifty-Third Street—II," The New
Yorker (12/19/53): 39,42-
5. "Week of Weeks," Time (9/12/40): 59; "Art Week Commentary," Magazine of Art
34, i: 42, 50-56; "Art Week II," Magazine of Art 34,10: 534-535; American Art
Annual XXXV (1938-1941): 17-18; Eugenia L. Whitridge, "Trends in the Selling
of Art," College Art Journal III, 2: 58-64.
6. Miller, p. 111.
7. Prices quoted in this article for European painters are from a variety of sources,
including contemporary art periodicals, published auction prices, and various
gallery and collectors' papers held by the Archives of American Art. Prices quoted
for artists belonging to the Downtown Gallery were obtained from the Down-
town Gallery Papers, microfilm rolls NDi-ND7i, and unfilmed correspondence,
Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
8. These figures are taken from the annual balance sheets of Art of This Century,
1942-1946. Photocopies of these are in the Bernard J. Reis Papers, Archives of
American Art, Washington, D.C.
9. Fortune, p. 148.
10. Samuel Kootz Gallery Papers, microfilm rolls 1318-1321, Archives of American
Art; Kootz to Alfred H. Barr, January 17,1949, Alfred H. Barr Papers, Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York.
11. For Pollock records, see Betty Parsons Gallery Papers, Archives of American
Art, Washington, D.C.; for Rothko, Betty Parsons Gallery Papers, microfilm
rolls N68-62 to N68-74.
12. Barbara Harper Friedman in Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1972) claims that Lavender Mist (Number i, 1950) was sold for
$1,500 on its exhibition in 1950, but no record of this sale appears in the Parsons
Gallery Papers.
13. Betty Parsons Gallery Papers.

1980s 421
 14. Edith Halpert in speeches given at Chicago (11/9/48) and Boston (n.d.), Edith
Gregor Halpert Papers, microfilm roll 1883, Archives of American Art; Betty
Parsons to F. C. Bartlett, October 10,1947, and in typescript, November 30,1965,
both Betty Parsons Gallery Papers.
15. L. Levine, "The Spring of '55," Arts Magazine (April 1947): 34; Rosalind Ben-
gelsdorf Browne, tape-recorded monologue on the relationship between Byron
Browne and dealer Samuel Kootz, n.d., Archives of American Art, Washington,
D.C.
16. Sidney Janis interviewed by Paul Cummings, March 21-September 9, 1972,
Archives of American Art; Friedman, pp. 198-199.
17. Janis, ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Miller, pp. 16-26; Edith Gregor Halpert, "Function of a Dealer," College Art Jour-
nal (Fall 1949): 56.

W. JACKSON RUSHING The Impact of Nietzsche and Northwest

Coast Indian Art on Barnett Newman's Idea
of Redemption in the Abstract Sublime

In the late 19305 and early 19405 the "myth-makers" of the New York avant-
garde, including Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart,
and Mark Rothko, made paintings that referred to atavistic myth, primordial
origins, and primitive rituals and symbols, especially those of Native Ameri-
can cultures.1 Barnett Newman began to work in a similar fashion about 1944
and was influential as a theorist and indefatigable promoter of this new art.
The "myth-makers" shared a tendency to depict ritual violence or inherently
violent myths as well as an archaism exemplified by biomorphic forms and,
often, coarse surfaces. This self-conscious primitivism of early Abstract Ex-
pressionism, which included totemic imagery and pictographic writing de-
rived from Native American art, differed in essence from the primitivism of
the earlier European avant-garde in that it was "an intellectualized primi-
tivism."2 Indeed, if the primitivism of Picasso and Matisse, for example, was
the decontextualization of the plastic form of African sculpture, then that of
the New Yorkers I am considering here was the willful recontextualization of
both primitive form and primitive myth.

SOURCE: Art Journal (Fall 1988), 187-95. Reprinted with the permission of W.Jackson
Rushing III.

422
 Newman focused intently on Northwest Coast Indian ritual art because he
perceived it as a parallel to his own art and to that of his contemporaries. In
fact, the exhibition Northwest Coast Indian Painting, which he organized for
the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1946, may be thought of as a prolegomenon to
The Ideographic Picture, another exhibition he organized for Parsons. Fewer
than ninety days separated the two shows, which suggests that the premise of
The Ideographic Picture (paintings about ideas) was probably already estab-
lished in Newman's mind when he asked, concerning the Indian art, "Does
not this work rather illuminate the work of those of our modern American ab-
stract artists who, working with pure plastic language we call abstract,... are
creating a living myth for us in our own time?"3 Newman's essay for The Ideo-
graphic Picture begins with the image of "the Kwakiutl artist painting on a
hide," an aesthetic act that represents "the pure idea."4 By calling up such an
image Newman hoped to "make clear the community of intention"5 that mo-
tivated the ideographic painters, who included himself, Mark Rothko, and
others. The "myth-making" of this community often consisted in taking old
myths—notably Greek and Northwest Coast Indian—and recasting them ac-
cording to the function of myth as defined by aspects of the early philosophy
of Friedrich Nietzsche and the psychological theories of C. G.Jung.6
Admittedly, the influence of both Nietzsche and Jung on the New York
avant-garde in the 19405 has been treated elsewhere.7 Yet the interrelatedness
of their ideas, and their connections to those of Wilhelm Worringer (whose
Abstraction and Empathy was, as I hope to show, an important text for New-
man), as well as to contemporary anthropological texts, such as Ruth Bene-
dict's Patterns of Culture (1934), has not been thoroughly examined. It is now
clear that Newman's awareness of ethnological texts on primitive art and cul-
ture, anthropological theory, and various exhibits of Indian art interacted with
his understanding of the theories of Nietzsche, Jung, and Worringer about
consciousness and the spiritual function of art, myth, and ritual. This essay
explores the way in which Newman's knowledge of primitive art and cultures,
particularly Native American, coincided with and affirmed those European
intellectual theories, resulting in a view of the world as tragic but redeemable
through art. And this theme is a central aspect of the pictorial content of New-
man's Abstract Expressionist paintings.

In the Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1871) Nietzsche stressed
the primacy of the Archaic period in his search for the origins of the tragedy
as an art form. The essential paradigm through which Nietzsche argued his

1980s 423
 thesis was the Apollinian/Dionysian duality, which he conceived "as the
separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness." The Greeks synthesized
these opposing creative forces into "the equally Dionysian and Apollinian
art-work of Attic tragedy." Nietzsche explained that the Dionysian vision is
not only a recognition of the "terrors and horrors of existence," but also a
"drunken reality [that] seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by
a mystic feeling of Oneness." Dionysian experience is simultaneously an ec-
static union with the "mysterious Primordial Unity," and a cognizance of the
world as fundamentally lacking in any objective meaning. Furthermore, he
saw Dionysian revelry as a universal and fundamental stage of experience:
"From all quarters of the Ancient World—to say nothing of the modern ... we
can prove the existence of Dionysian festivals [in which] the very wildest beasts
of nature were let loose."8
Nietzsche associated the Apollinian mode with repression of the barbar-
ism and ecstasy of Dionysian vision, with the beautiful illusion of the dream
world, and with the search for an absolute truth to mask the constant flux and
subjectivity of genuine reality. Instead of the mystic oneness, the Apollinian vi-
sion maintains the illusion of the principium individuationis.9 And yet, Nietz-
sche insists, the Apollinian Greek had to realize that "his entire existence,
with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden substratum of suffering
and knowledge, which was again disclosed to him by the Dionysian."10 More-
over, as noted above, Nietzsche perceived the Apollinian as essential to the
creation of tragic art.
Concerning the origins of the tragic form, Nietzsche had much to say about
myth that no doubt rang true to Newman's generation. For example, Nietz-
sche writes that it is through tragedy—the dialectical synthesis of the Apollin-
ian and Dionysian modes—that "the myth attains its profoundest significance,
its most expressive form." Warning of the limitations of science (associated
with the order and logic of the Apollinian), Nietzsche states that where reason
is insufficient "to make existence appear to be comprehensible," then "myth
also must be used." Particularly poignant for Newman and the other "myth-
makers" was Nietzsche's insistence that "it is only a horizon encompassed
with myths which rounds off to unity a social movement."11
Nietzsche discovered that the more he came to understand the human
need to redeem the horror of existence, the more he felt "driven to the meta-
physical assumption that the Verily-Existent and Primordial Unity, as the
Eternally Suffering and Self-Contradictory, requires the rapturous vision, the
joyful appearance for its continuous salvation." One could, however, respond

424 1980s
with affirmation to the existential texture of life, embrace both barbarism and
the illusion of beauty, if one simply realized that "only as an aesthetic phenome-
non is existence and the world eternally justified" And finally, in the closing
pages of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche offered to "lead the sympathizing
and attentive friend to an elevated position of lonesome contemplation," where
the treacherous path could be traversed if only we "hold fast to our shining
guides, the Greeks."12
Jung took Nietzsche's advice to heart: he began his Psychology of the Uncon-
scious (1916) by referring to "the simple greatness of the Oedipus tragedy—
that never extinguished light of the Grecian theatre" and by noting that even
today "that which affected the Greeks with horror remains true." Like Nietz-
sche, Jung located his thesis in a paradigm of duality, positing two kinds of
thinking, "directed and dream or phantasy thinking," and observed that the
latter "sets free subjective wishes." Fantastic thinking, which he associated
with the unconscious, is also remarkably Dionysian in nature. For example,
Jung wrote that fantastic thinking "corresponds to the thought of the centuries
of antiquity and barbarism." And, where Nietzsche stressed the relationship
between Dionysian vision and the tragic content of the myth, Jung noted that
fantastic thinking, which flowed automatically from an "inner course," con-
stantly rejuvenated myths "in the Grecian sphere of culture."13
Of prime importance to the primitivist art theory of the "myth-makers"
were the parallels Jung drew between the myths of antiquity, the primitive
mind, dreams, and the thoughts of children.14 He explained that although
"the Dionysian mysteries of classical Athens ... have disappeared," in child-
hood we repeat these archaic tendencies.15 This is an idea widespread in both
nineteenth- and twentieth-century natural and social sciences: ontogeny re-
peats philogeny, or in its development the individual (organism) recapitulates
the evolutionary stages of the species.16 Jung summarized it succinctly: "Our
minds ... bear the marks of evolution passed through."17 And concerning the
dream, Jung quoted Nietzsche: "The dream carries us back into earlier states
of human culture, and affords us a means of understanding it better."18 More-
over, artists in search of access to the unconscious would have observed that
Jung, by way of Nietzsche, was suggesting that, like dreams, the myths of an-
tiquity and primitive art (as the product of the primitive mind) can transport
us back into the primordial stages of consciousness.
Many of the ideas found in Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy
(1908) resemble those of Nietzsche and Jung mentioned above. Worringer, too,
used a post-Hegelian paradigm, insisting on the importance of synthesizing

1980s 425
 the two elements of a duality; for Worringer, it is the urge to abstraction and
the urge to empathy in art that form the "shape of a comprehensive aesthetic
system." Again, he noted that the content of modern culture is founded on the
classical tradition, and warns that our dependence on Aristotelian concepts
blinds us to the "true psychic values ... of all artistic creation." And, most im-
portant of all, Worringer recognized that "there is one great ultimate criterion
for mankind's relation to the cosmos: its need of redemption."19
Newman, as I shall show below, was fascinated by the Dionysian tenden-
cies Worringer found in the abstract art of primitive peoples. Primitive man,
Worringer wrote, "is spiritually helpless ... because he experiences only ob-
scurity and caprice in the... flux of the phenomena of the external world." Wor-
ringer explained abstraction as primitive man's response to the transcenden-
tal forces of nature. Furthermore, he linked such abstraction to a metaphysics
—beyond beauty—that expressed the dialectical struggle "between instinct
and understanding." Worringer's theory pits primitive man, with his tran-
scendental experience of nature, tendency to abstraction, and preponderance
of instinct, against postclassical man, characterized by his perception of im-
manence in nature, urge to empathy in art, and emphasis on understanding.20

Because Newman was a theorist and curator as well as a painter, and be-
cause he, of all the American avant-garde, demonstrated the most overt inter-
est in Northwest Coast art, it is not surprising that his writings register most
fully the impact of the theories of Nietzsche, Jung, and Worringer. The Nietz-
schean conception of tragedy underlies Newman's essay "The Object and the
Image," which appeared in the third issue of Tiger's Eye (March 1948), an avant-
garde journal he coedited for a time. For example, Newman wrote, "Greece
named both form and content; the ideal form—beauty, the ideal content—
tragedy." He also noted that when the "the Greek dream" (Apollonian vision)
prevailed in contemporary European art, it was accompanied by a "nostalgia
for ancient forms," and "self-pity over the loss of the elegant column and the
beautiful profile." Newman decried this refined agonizing over Greek objects:
"Everything is so highly civilized." According to Newman, the American art-
ists, who were barbarians without refined sensibilities, now had the oppor-
tunity to "be free of the ancient paraphernalia" and to "come closer to the
sources of the tragic emotion." Clearly, this was a reference to the new Ameri-
can painting that dealt with the wellspring of tragedy. Concerning the tragic
emotion, Newman asked, "Shall we not, as artists, search out the new objects
for its image?"21

426 1980s
 In that same issue of Tiger's Eye, the avant-garde's interest in Nietzsche's
Apollinian-Dionysian paradigm was made manifest. The following passage
from The Birth of Tragedy, selected perhaps by Newman,22 was juxtaposed with
a drawing by Theodoros Stamos:

I shall keep my eyes fixed on the two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo
and Dionysus, and recognize in them the living and conspicuous represen-
tatives of two worlds of art differing in their intrinsic essence and in their
highest aims. I see Apollo as the transfiguring genius of the principium indi-
viduationis through which alone the redemption in appearance is truly to
be obtained: which by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of
individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the mothers of being, to
the innermost heart of things.23

Even if it remains unresolved whether Newman himself chose this passage

from Nietzsche, it does further confirm, because of his editorial association
with Tiger's Eye, his awareness of the central thesis of Nietzsche's Birth of
Tragedy. Furthermore, a poetic and existential tone, reminiscent of Nietzsche,
is evident in Newman's introduction to The Ideographic Picture, the exhibi-
tion he organized for the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947. For example, he ex-
plained the "artist's problem" as "the idea complex that makes contact with
mystery—of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the
grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy."24 And confronting chaos, Newman be-
lieved, linked men across the ages: "All artists whether primitive or sophisti-
cated have been involved in the handling of chaos."25
Likewise, his brief essay for The Ideographic Picture, an exhibition of
works that he described as "the modern counterpart of the primitive im-
pulse," bears evidence that Newman knew well Worringer's Abstraction and
Empathy. For example, he discussed "the Kwakiutl artist painting on a hide,"
who used abstract shapes that were "directed by a ritualistic will toward a
metaphysical understanding." According to Newman, for the Kwakiutl artist,
shapes were "a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awe-
some feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable."26 The ideas are
comparable to Worringer's assertion of a metaphysics higher than that of
beauty, which is documented by primitive and archaic art, and to his descrip-
tion of primitive man's spiritual helplessness in the face of the flux of nature.27
A few months earlier, in an essay written for the exhibition of Northwest Coast
Indian Painting, Newman wrote what reads as a paraphrase of Worringer.
Whereas Worringer had written, "the urge to abstraction stands at the begin-

1980s 427
 ning of every art and in the case of certain peoples at a high level of culture re-
mains the dominant tendency,"28 Newman explained of the Kwakiutl, Tlin-
git, and Haida Indians: "Among a group of several peoples the dominant
aesthetic tradition was abstract," and "among these simple peoples, abstract
art was the normal, well-understood tradition."29 Furthermore, just as Wor-
ringer had asserted that the theory of empathy (with nature) does not expli-
cate "that vast complex of works of art that pass beyond the narrow frame-
work of Graeco-Roman and modern Occidental art,"30 Newman stated:

It is becoming more and more apparent that to understand modern art, one
must have an appreciation of the primitive arts, for just as modern art stands
as an island of revolt in the narrow stream of Western European aesthetics,
the many primitive art traditions stand apart as authentic aesthetic accom-
plishments that flourished without benefit of European history.31

And, recalling both Worringer and Nietzsche, Newman noted that the North-
west Coast Indian painters were not concerned with "decorative devices,"
but "with the metaphysical pattern of life."32
As for Newman's knowledge of Jungian theory, he stated that he could
communicate with Jungians, but that there might be disagreements about ter-
minology.33 And, like his friends Gottlieb and Rothko, Newman also made
paintings (after 1944) that made specific reference to antique myths and prim-
itive art, which Jung had explained as relics of primordial consciousness. In
addition to Surrealism,34 the automatic-biomorphic qualities of such works as
Gea (1944-45) seem to reflect both Jung's notion of a stream of consciousness
(fantastic thinking) that takes place when directed thinking ceases and his use
of organic growth as a metaphor for the evolution of consciousness. The flow-
ing hand evident in Newman's works on paper from about 1945 is surely
the physical counterpart of the random, spontaneous, and poetic looping of
the unconscious mind, as well as a reflection of his interest in the natural sci-
ences.35 Finally, concerning Newman and Jungian theory, it is instructive to
recall the words of the "missing irascible," the Abstract Expressionist Fritz
Bultman: "Jung was available in the air, the absolute texts were not necessary,
there was general talk among painters."36

Newman's interest in Native American art may well date from his days in
the early 19205 as a student of John Sloan's at the Art Students League. At the
time Newman would have met Sloan, the latter, as critic, collector, and cura-
tor, was actively promoting both old and new Indian art.37 And, in all likeli-

428 1980s
hood, Newman would have discussed both Indian art and Jungian theory with
Gottlieb, with whom he visited the Northwest Coast Hall at the American Mu-
seum of Natural History in the late 1930s.38 Newman also knew the painter-
critic John D. Graham, whose concern with primitive art and Jung and whose
role as catalyst of the avant-garde are well-known.39 Graham's interest in Na-
tive American art was focused on the totemic art of the Northwest Coast, and
he lent objects from his personal collection to the exhibition of Northwest
Coast painting that Newman organized in 1946.40 Sometime in the 19405 New-
man collected four museum-quality model totem poles (probably Haida) and
a painted shield (probably Chiricahua Apache), which are still part of his es-
tate.41 In addition, that fourteen titles in Newman's library treat North Ameri-
can Indian art and culture is testimony to his devotion to this subject. Of
these, five are exclusively or significantly focused on Northwest Coast art and
society; three deal with Aztec art; and the rest are general studies of primitive
art, culture, and anthropology. Among the fourteen are three books by the
Northwest Coast specialist Frank Boas: Anthropology and Modern Life (1928),
The Mind of Primitive Man (1943), and Primitive Art (1955); one rather mys-
tical treatment, Indians of the Americas (1947) by the Native Rights advocate
and former Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, John Collier; and Vol-
ume XXXV (part 2) of The Annual Report of the American Bureau of Ethnol-
ogy (1921), which consists of a lengthy report on Boas's field work with Kwa-
kiutl Indians. Five of the books were publications of the American Museum of
Natural History, an institution whose collections of Northwest Coast art New-
man knew intimately.
Conspicuous for its absence from Newman's library, as it exists today, is
Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), which was a profoundly influen-
tial text in avant-garde circles in the late 19305 and 19403.42 Benedict used as
the focus of her argument Nietzsche's Dionysian and Apollonian modes of ex-
perience. According to Ann Gibson, Patterns of Culture made the Dionysian-
Apollonian distinction "part of the standard intellectual apparatus of the pe-
riod."43 Newman was apparently well aware of this book, which brought
Nietzsche's analysis of the opposing elements of Greek tragedy to bear on the
Kwakiutl Indians of the Northwest Coast and the Zuni Indians of the South-
west. As evidence of this awareness, on at least two occasions Newman found
it convenient to appropriate its title. In a previously unpublished letter to
Harry Shapiro, dated August 1,1944, Newman stated, "There is every reason
for art and anthropology to go together for the objects that form the basis for
the scientific study of the patterns of culture are the same objects that form

1980s 429
 the aesthetic study of the soul of man."44 Shapiro was at that time the Chair-
man of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural
History and had assisted Newman in organizing the Pre-Columbian Stone
Sculpture exhibition at the Wakefield Gallery some months earlier. In this let-
ter, Newman announced his "conviction that the best audience for anthro-
pology, outside of anthropologists themselves, is the art public." As a result of
this conviction, he asked, "Why cannot the Museum do the converse of the
Pre-Columbian exhibition by putting on exhibits of outstanding examples of
modern art?"45
Later, in a passage from his unpublished essay "The New Sense of Fate,"
Newman alluded to Benedict's book in discussing his preference for primi-
tive, as opposed to Greek, plastic art:

All we know concretely of the primitive life are its objects. Its culture patterns
are not normally experienced, certainly not easily. Yet these objects excite us
and we feel a bond of understanding with the primitive artists' intentions,
problems, and sensibility, whereas the Grecian form is so foreign to our pres-
ent esthetic interests that it virtually has no inspirational use. One might say
that it has lost its culture factor.46

Benedict's Patterns of Culture was surely the prototype of that marriage of

Nietzschean archaism (violent myth) and Northwest Coast art, myth, and rit-
ual which was a distinct feature of much avant-garde art, literature, and criti-
cism in the forties.47 It no doubt inspired Newman to select from Boas's re-
port on the Kwakiutl Indians a shaman's song, which appeared in a special
section devoted to the sea in Tiger's Eye, 2 (December 1947). Not surprisingly,
the first part of the song recounts the acquisition of shamanic power by way
of a Dionysian experience involving a totemic animal (Killer Whale) and de-
scent into the underworld (the sea): "I was carried under the sea by the super-
natural power, the supernatural power."48 Newman would have found in the
texts of Benedict, Boas, and others, ethnological confirmation, so to speak, of
Nietzsche's thesis. Patterns of Culture, in particular, probably mediated be-
tween Nietzsche's interpretation of archaic tragedy and Newman's own study
of Northwest Coast art and ritual.

The keystone of Kwakiutl spiritual life is the Tsetseka—a round of winter

ceremonies that take place from November to March.49 The winter ceremoni-
als are, to use Nietzsche's words, a time of "festivals of world-redemption and
days of transfiguration."50 During this period everything in the whole of soci-

430 1980s
ety is indeed transformed: everyone sheds his or her summer name and takes
a Tsetseka name; there are new songs, and new forms of protocol based, not
on secular wealth, but on clan-ceremonial rank. Broadly speaking, Tsetseka is
a time when the spirits come into the village to initiate the novices into one
of the four principal dancing societies. The most important of these is the
Hamatsa, whose ceremony is held under the auspices of Bakbakwalanooksi-
wae, a powerful man-eating spirit who lives in the sky (or at the north end of
the woods-world). The Hamatsa initiate fasts in the woods until he goes into
an ecstatic trance, during which he meets the Cannibal Spirit, from whom he
derives power and whose protege he becomes. Benedict noted, "The experi-
ence of meeting the supernatural spirit was closely related to that of the vi-
sion."51 She went on to say,

The whole Winter Ceremonial, the great Kwakiutl series of religious rites,
was given to "tame" the initiate who returned full of the "power that destroys
man's reason" and whom it was necessary to bring back to the level of secular
existence The initiation of the Cannibal Dancer was peculiarly calculated
to express the Dionysian purport of Northwest Coast culture. Among the
Kwakiutl the Cannibal Society outranked all others.52

And, in another passage, Benedict stressed the Dionysian aspect of the Kwa-
kiutl ritual enactment of cannibalism:

Like most of the American Indians, except those of the Southwest pueblos,
the tribes of the Northwest Coast were Dionysian. In their religious cere-
monies the final thing they strove for was ecstasy. The chief dancer, at least
in the high point of his performances, should lose normal control of himself
and be rapt into another state of existence. He should froth at the mouth,
tremble violently and abnormally, do deeds which would be terrible in a nor-
mal state The very repugnance which the Kwakiutl felt toward the act of
eating human flesh made it for them a fitting expression of the Dionysian
virtue that lies in the terrible and the forbidden.53

Under the spell of the supernatural, the Hamatsa dancer moves in a frenzy
through the winter house crying haap (eat) and occasionally trying to bite the
spectators. They, in turn, surreptitiously encourage him by whispering under
their breath such words as eat and body, which only intensifies the dancer's
madness. And then, like Nietzsche's Dionysian cultist, "in this extremest dan-
ger to the will, art approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress."54 That
is, the taming of the cannibal dancer is a highly structured ritual performance.

1980s 431
 The whole ceremony, in fact, is a supreme artifice with a script (oral tradition),
prescribed sequence of events (ritual), stage hands (cult members), and stage
props. The art objects involved, the likes of which Newman included in the
Northwest Coast Painting exhibition, include masks, drums, dance blankets,
rattles, and shaman's robes. For the Kwakiutl, the theatrical nature of the rit-
ual does not diminish its transforming power. Again, Nietzsche explained this
aspect of art: "In the dithyramb we have before us a community of uncon-
scious actors, who mutually regard themselves as transformed among one
another.... This enchantment is the prerequisite of all dramatic art."55
As Benedict explained:

Perhaps the most striking Dionysian technique of the Winter Ceremonial is

that which finally tames the Cannibal and ushers in his four-month period of
tabu. According to ideas that are current in their culture it expresses in the
most extreme manner the supernatural power that lies in the horrible and
the forbidden.... The final exorcism ... was that which was performed with
menstrual blood. Upon the Northwest Coast menstrual blood was polluting
to a degree hardly excelled in the world.56

Dealing as it does with starvation, ritual death, and rebirth, Tsetseka is an at-
tempt to make a symbolic spiritual defense against the death of nature during
the long darkness of the winter months. Newman would surely have recog-
nized this Dionysian aspect of the Hamatsa dancer. For example, writing in
The Golden Bough, James Frazer linked Dionysus to Adonis, Attis, and Osiris
as fertility gods who symbolize the death of nature in winter and her rebirth in
spring: "Like other gods of vegetation Dionysus was believed to have died a
violent death, but to have been brought to life again; and his sufferings, death,
and resurrection were enacted in his sacred rites."57
Nietzsche also linked the ecstatic behavior of the Dionysian cult to rites
of spring: "It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which
the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful ap-
proach of spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emo-
tions awake, in the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete
self-forgetfulness." And his description of the Dionysian's ecstasy is not un-
like the image of the Hamatsa dancer presented by Benedict: "Even as the
animals now talk . . . so also something supernatural sounds forth from him:
he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted and elated even
as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams." In his state of bestial
desire, the cannibal dancer reenacts the primordial myth-time. Thus, he is

432 1980s
akin to Nietzsche's satyr, who "is the offspring of a longing after the Primitive
and the Natural." Concerning the chorus as the origin of the tragedy, Nietz-
sche observed, "The satyr, as being the Dionysian chorist, lives in a religiously
acknowledged reality under the sanction of the myth and cult."58 There could
be no more precise description of the Hamatsa initiate than this. His self-
induced madness occurs during a clearly defined period of societal transfor-
mation; his barbarism is sanctioned by the secret society that sponsors him;
and his society as a whole recognizes the validity of the sustaining myth (en-
counter with the Cannibal Spirit). Indeed, even the spectators in the house
are full participants in the ritual performance.
With the Nietzschean analysis as model, Benedict and Newman would have
perceived the Kwakiutl Hamatsa ceremony as a Northwest Coast tragedy.
The savagery of the cannibal dancer, which represents primal experience,
or Dionysian content, was redeemed by a total illusion, or Gesamkunstwerk,
which is the supreme Apollonian form. It cannot be coincidental that shortly
after a time of violence and unprecedented brutality—World War II—Newman
chose to exhibit ceremonial painting from the Northwest Coast, which he
called "a valid tradition that is one of the richest of human expressions."59
Furthermore, Newman, in discussing this "pure painting," warned against
appreciating it only for its Apollonian qualities: "It is our hope that these
great works of art, whether on house walls, ceremonial shaman frocks and
aprons, or as ceremonial blankets, will be enjoyed for their own sake, but it is
not inappropriate to emphasize that it would be a mistake to consider these
paintings as mere decorative devices. . . . These paintings are ritualistic."60
Newman was drawn to this art because it, like that of his contemporaries, was
an "expression of the mythological beliefs" of artists who "depicted their
mythological gods and totemic monsters in abstract symbols, using organic
shapes."61

Beyond shaping his art theory and informing his criticism, the idea of
tragedy as the artistic redemption of chaos was also given form by Newman in
his own paintings. Beginning in 1944, Newman made a series of relatively
small, expressionistic works on paper, characterized by biomorphic images
that signify both the creative act and the organic evolution of consciousness.
One such untitled work from 1944 features at the bottom center-to-left a hy-
brid "totemic monster" of Northwest Coast derivation. With its canine body,
long, pointed snout and exaggerated eye it recalls Kwakiutl wolf masks of the
type Newman borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History for

1980s 433
 his Northwest Coast show at the Parsons Gallery. Its curved horns and coiled
tongues, however, are reminiscent also of Sisiutl, a serpent monster that has
the power to transform itself into a fish. One of Newman's books, Pliny God-
dard's Indians of the Northwest Coast (1934), featured numerous illustrations
of composite mythological animals, including a horned water monster.62 In
the center of the picture there is another horned or feathered canine, and float-
ing, swimming, and flying around this animal are several birds and insects.
The natural freedom of the forms in the biomorphic, totemic world of this
untitled work (and the related works of 1944) demonstrates that Newman
shared with this Kwakiutl painter a concern "with the nature of organism."63
Moreover, these are pictures of the subconscious mind's fantasy landscapes,
created by the hand automatically when, as Jung stated, directed thinking
ceases. Newman's choice of fast mediums—chalks, oil crayons, ink, watercolor
—reveals his desire to connect his hand directly to the bank of primeval im-
ages stored in his unconscious, enabling him to produce images free of ra-
tional dictates. He spoke later of the liberation of possibilities inherent in such
a mode of drawing: "How it went. . . that's how it was . . . my idea was that
with an automatic move, you could create a world."64 The sensuous, hot-
house growth and fluid movement of the organic forms in this created world
relate to Newman's conception of the freedom common to primitive and mod-
ern experience. Betty Parsons, who described Newman as "a great authority
on the primitive," recalled that "he gave me the idea that the primitive world
was a free world and [that] this world that I was now in was a free world." Ac-
cording to Parsons, it was Newman's "idea that there was a relationship be-
tween the primitive world and the present world."65
In two of these primitivistic works, The Song of Orpheus and The Slaying of
Osiris (both 1944-45), Newman used organic forms suggestive of the uncon-
scious to pictorialize the tragic content of two ancient myths, both of which
share numerous traits with the myth of Dionysus. Orpheus, a Thracian poet
of Greek legend, used his divinely inspired music to secure the return of his
wife, Eurydice, from the underworld of the dead. But Orpheus ignored the
warnings of Hades and just before he set foot on earth, he looked back into
the underworld and Eurydice disappeared. The women of Thrace were so
angered at Orpheus's prolonged mourning that during one of their Dionysian
orgies they tore his body to pieces. Despite Orpheus's power to restore the
dead through his music, his story, on account of his fallibility, ends in his
tragic dismemberment. Newman's selection of the divine musician as subject
matter cannot be coincidental to his concern with tragedy. Tragedy, Nietzsche

434 1980s
argues, is born out of the spirit of music, and "the essence of tragedy . . . can
only be explained . . . as the visible symbolisation of music, as the dream-
world of Dionysian ecstasy." Like the Dionysian musician, Orpheus symbol-
izes "primordial pain" and its "primordial re-echoing." Furthermore, accord-
ing to Nietzsche, "the pictures of the lyricist [Dionysian musician] . . . are
nothing but his very self... the only verily existent and eternal self resting at
the basis of things."66 Similarly, and with a tragic elegance, Newman writes,
"The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject of painting."67
In the myth and ritual associated with the Egyptian deity Osiris, Newman
may have seen parallels to the Hamatsa Cannibal Society. For instance, not
only is Osiris a "personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature," but,
according to Frazer, he redeemed the Egyptians from the savagery of canni-
balism.68 And Osiris, like Dionysus, is associated with the origin of wine,
suffers dismemberment, is resurrected, and is celebrated with elaborate rit-
ual. In giving form to this myth, Newman again eschewed a narrative tran-
scription, focusing instead on abstract forms that signify growth.
Newman's treatment of these mythic subjects, and others such as Gea and
Pagan Void (1946), represents his willingness to confront the Dionysian con-
tent of tragic modernity. The deprivations of the Great Depression and the
brutality of World War II had demonstrated to Newman and his contempo-
raries that modern and primitive experience—as Nietzsche, Jung, and Wor-
ringer had suggested—were essentially the same. Furthermore, the war, New-
man explained, turned the terror of the unknown into the tragedy of the
known:

We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. We are no

longer in the face of a mystery. After all wasn't it an American boy who did it?
The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have is a tragic rather
than a terror situation. After more than two thousand years we have finally
arrived at the tragic position of the Greek and we have achieved this Greek
state of tragedy because we have at last ourselves invented a new sense of
all-pervading fate.69

Although he continued to reject the ideal form of Greek plastic art because it
overemphasized the Apollonian, his titles bear out his belief that "we can ac-
cept Greek literature, which by its unequivocal preoccupation with tragedy
is still the fountainhead of art."70 But the "tragic perception," according to
Nietzsche, "even to be endured, requires art as a safeguard and remedy."71
Thus, Newman's desire to make an art that would heal, transform, and re-

1980s 435
 deem modernity underlies his concept of the sublime. Furthermore, this de-
sire for the sublime was the source of the drama, clarity, and even purity that
first came into his art with the creation of Onement I (1948) and was fully ar-
ticulated in Onement II (1948). In these two paintings, the expressive zip,
which Newman had already begun to clarify in works such as Moment (1946),
becomes an ideograph of Newman's "first man," who experiences, albeit in
a tortured way, the primal existent unity. But now, true to the idea of tragedy
as an art form, the primordial expression, as given form by the zip, is secured
and made to take its place in a logical order—an artifice of Newman's making.
Despite the fiery passion of the painterly zip in Onement I, its iconic central-
ity, balance, and monumental repose speak of exaltation and of the sublime.

Less than one year after Newman applied the zip in Onement I— thus be-
ginning a mature articulation of the abstract sublime—his essay "The Sub-
lime Is Now" appeared in Tiger's Eye, 6 (December 15,1948).72 Not only does
this essay provide insight into Newman's artistic intentions, but it reveals the
link between those intentions and Nietzsche's view of "the sublime as the artis-
tic subjugation of the awful."73 For example, Newman begins by announcing
that the legacy of the Greek ideal of beauty (Apollonian form) is the European
artist's "moral struggle between notions of beauty and the desire for sublim-
ity."74 In this context, and with the paintings as witness, the desire for sub-
limity must be read as a desire for a tragic art: subjecting Dionysian content
to Apollonian form.75 Even the modernist revolution, Newman explains, rep-
resented "the rhetoric of exaltation" and not "the realization of a new experi-
ence." The result, according to Newman, was a modern art without a sublime
content. He believed, however, that some of the American avant-garde, by re-
fusing to capitulate to "the problem of beauty" at the expense of myth, exalta-
tion, and abstraction, were making sublime art out of their own feelings.76
There is a sense of triumph over resignation in Newman's pronouncement
that the sublime is now. Indeed, Newman was confident enough in 1949 to
title a painting Dionysus. In keeping with his solution to the question of how
to make sublime art, Dionysus is painting as an expansive theater of emotion,
embodied in color and space. And yet, Newman's artistic will imposes the
beauty of order on the orgy of emotion associated with Dionysus. From Dio-
nysus issues that metaphysical comfort which Nietzsche assigns all tragic art:
"In spite of the perpetual change of phenomena, life at bottom is indestructi-
bly powerful and pleasurable."77 In the heroic Dionysus Newman locates the
idea of redemption in the abstract sublime.

436 1980s
Notes
1. The term "myth-makers" originated with Mark Rothko. See: Mark Rothko, in-
troduction to Glyfford Still, exh. cat. New York, Art of This Century Gallery,
1946, n.p. The present essay extends my earlier study, W.Jackson Rushing, "Rit-
ual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism," in The
Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985, exh. cat., Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1986, pp. 273-95. A further discussion of the issues presented
here (particularly as they relate to Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko) occurs in
W. Jackson Rushing, "Native American Art and Culture and the New York
Avant-Garde, 1915-1950" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1989).
2. William Rubin used the term "intellectualized primitivism" to explain aspects
of modern primitivism since World War II. And although I agree in the main
with his assertion that the "object-to-object relationship" between modernist
artists and tribal art "has been largely displaced," there are powerful and notable
exceptions. See: William Rubin, "Modernist Primitivism," in "Primitivism" in
Twentieth-Century Art, exh. cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1985,
p. 10. For a discussion of Abstract Expressionist works with an "object-to-object
relationship" to Native American art, see: Rushing, 1986 (cited n. i), pp. 277-93.
3. Barnett Newman, Northwest Coast Indian Painting, exh. cat., New York, The
Betty Parsons Gallery, 1946, n.p.
4. Barnett Newman, The Ideographic Picture, exh. cat., New York, The Betty Par-
sons Gallery, 1946, n.p.
5. Ibid. The other artists who exhibited in The Ideographic Picture were Hans Hof-
mann, Pietro Lazzari, Boris Margo, Ad Reinhardt, Theodoros Stamos, and
Clyfford Still. Newman originally intended to include Jackson Pollock and Rich-
ard Pousette-Dart, but contractual obligations prevented that (personal commu-
nication from Richard and Evelyn Pousette-Dart, Suffer n, New York, September
15,1986).
6. Dore Ashton noted in 1972 that the juxtaposition of Greek and Northwest Coast
Indian Culture was commonplace in the 19403 and that "the repeated conjura-
tion of Nietzsche . . . whose dual Apollonian-Dionysian position looked more
interesting as the world moved into the nineteen-forties, was a measure of the
spiritual restlessness." See: Dore Ashton, The New York School, New York, 1972,
pp. 188,124.
7. For a lengthy bibliography on the debate over Jungian influence on Jackson Pol-
lock, see: W.Jackson Rushing, "The Influence of American Indian Art on Jack-
son Pollock and the Early New York School" (M.A. thesis, University of Texas
at Austin, 1984), p. 102, n. 14. On the painter-critic John Graham as a credible
source of Jungian theory for Pousette-Dart, Gottlieb, and Pollock, see: Rushing,
1986 (cited n. i), pp. 274, 277-78, 282-83. On the relevance of Nietzsche for the
American "bohemian elite," see: Ashton (cited n. 6), pp. 86, 124,129, 187-88.
See also the comments on Jung and the well-reasoned analysis of Nietzsche's im-
portance to Abstract Expressionist theory in Ann Gibson, "Theory Undeclared:
Avant-Garde Magazines as a Guide to Abstract Expressionist Images and Ideas"

1980s 437
 (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1984), pp. 228-30,239-55.1 am indebted also
to the discussion of the influence of Jung and Nietzsche on Abstract Expression-
ism, in general, and Mark Rothko in particular, in Stephen Polcari, "The Intel-
lectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Mark Rothko," Arts Magazine, 54 (Sep-
tember, 1979), pp. 124-34-
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Wm. A. Hausmann, London,
1909, pp. 22,34,28,27,29-30. It is not clear when Newman first encountered the
writings of Nietzsche, Jung, and Worringer. His wife, Mrs. Annalee Newman, in-
sists that he was not impressed with either Nietzsche or Worringer. It is my be-
lief, however, that the analysis of Newman's texts in this essay argues against
such a contention. Mrs. Newman's recollection is that Newman was first intro-
duced to Worringer when Clement Greenberg, on an unspecified date, referred
him to Form in Gothic. She also recalls that Newman obtained a copy of Form
in Gothic either by loan from the public library or by borrowing a copy from a
friend. As she remembers it, Newman, because of financial circumstances, often
acquired reading materials in these ways. This may explain why pre-1940 edi-
tions of certain texts relating to the development of his art theory are not extant
in his library. By her own admission, however, Mrs. Newman has continued to
purchase, since Newman's death in 1970, the "kinds of books in which he was
interested" (personal communications from Mrs. Annalee Newman, New York
City, September 25,1986, and telephone conversation, April i, 1987). Thus, she
has added to the collection a 1967 translation by Walter Kaufmann of The Birth
of Tragedy, as well as several volumes on Northwest Coast Indian art that were
published after 1970. For allowing me access to her husband's books, and for her
gracious cooperation in general, I am grateful to Mrs. Newman.
9. Ibid., pp. 24-25,32-35,25-
10. Ibid., p. 46.
11. Ibid., pp. 85,116,174.
12. Ibid., pp. 38,50,176.
13. C. G.Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle, New York,
1916, p. 4. Jung freely acknowledged his intellectual debt to Nietzsche and
quoted from him here (e.g., p. 28); pp. 5,22,35,25.
14. Ibid., pp. 27-28.
15. Ibid., p. 35.
16. See: Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Philogeny, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 76,13.
My thanks to Stephen Polcari for calling my attention to this citation. For a dis-
cussion of recapitulation theory and Abstract Expressionism, see: Polcari (cited
n. 7), p. 125.
17. Jung (cited n. 13), p. 35. On Jung and recapitulation theory, see: Gould (cited
n. 16), pp. 161-62.
18. Jung (cited n. 13), p. 28.
19. Wilhem Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock, London,
1963, pp. 4, 123, 127,131. Abstraction and empathy, Worringer explained, "are
only gradations of a common need, which is revealed to us as the deepest and ul-
timate essence of all aesthetic experience," ibid., p. 23.

438 1980s
20. Ibid., p. 18.
21. Barnett Newman, "The Object and the Image," Tiger's Eye, 3 (March 1948),
p. 111.
22. According to Dore Ashton, "Newman probably chose the Nietzsche text" cited
above; see: Ashton (cited n. 6), p. 187. Ann Gibson, however, reports that the pas-
sage was selected by the other two editors, Ruth and John Stephan; see: Gibson
(cited n. 7), p. 239-
23. Nietzsche, quoted in Tiger's Eye, 3 (March 1948), pp. 91-92.
24. Newman (cited n. 4).
25. Barnett Newman, "The Plasmic Image" (1945), quoted in Thomas B. Hess, Bar-
nett Newman, exh. cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1971, p. 37.
26. Newman (cited n. 4).
27. See: Worringer (cited n. 19), p. 127.
28. Ibid., p. 115.
29. Newman (cited n. 3).
30. Worringer (cited n. 19), p. 8.
31. Newman (cited n. 3).
32. Ibid.
33. See Newman's comments on Jung, in Barbara Reise, " Trimitivism' in the Writ-
ings of Barnett B. Newman: A Study in the Ideological Background of Abstract
Expressionism" (M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1965), p. 42.
34. See: Mollie McNickle, "The American Response to Surrealism: Barnett New-
man," in The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism,
exh. cat., Newport Beach, Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1986, pp. 51-56. Al-
though McNickle points out the scarcity of reference to myth in Newman's writ-
ings, she admits that his titles were not chosen arbitrarily. In fact, Newman
intended titles such as Gea, The Slaying of Osiris (1944), The Song of Orpheus
an
(1944-45), d Dionysus (1947) to be clues to the audience about the mythic ori-
entation of their pictorial content. As evidence of this, see his comments about
selecting titles in David Sylvester, "Concerning Barnett Newman," The Listener,
88 (August 10,1972), p. 170.
35. On Newman and the sciences, see: Hess (cited n. 25), p. 26.
36. Fritz Bultman, interview with the author, quoted in Rushing 1986 (cited n. i),
p. 283. Bultman (1919-85) was an active member of the New York avant-garde
for many years and knew well numerous artists, including John Graham, Hans
Hofmann, Weldon Kees, Jackson Pollock, and Tony Smith. Along with New-
man, Gottlieb, Rothko, Pollock, Pousette-Dart, and others, Bultman signed the
famous "irascible" letter protesting the exhibition policies of The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Bultman, however, like Hofmann and Kees (who were also sign-
ers), was not available for the famous photograph of the "Irascibles" taken by
Nina Leen and published in Life (January 15,1951). В. Н. Friedman is convinced
that the absence of these three from the photograph "contributed to their omis-
sion from the official, institutional Abstract-Expressionist 'list.' " See: В. Н. Fried-
man, "In Memoriam: An 'Irascible,' "ArtsMagazine, 60 (January 1986), p. 79. In
the last years of his life, scholars found Bultman to be an accurate and credible

1980s 439
 informant concerning the emergence of Abstract Expressionism (Friedman; and
Irving Sandier, communication with the author, Austin, Texas, November 13,
1984).
37. On Sloan as a patron of Indian art, see: Rushing igxx (cited n. i), Chs. 3,5.
38. See: Phyllis Tuchman, "Interview with Esther Gottlieb," 1982, for The Mark
Rothko Oral History Project; typescript on file at the Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; see p. 6. On Newman's friendship
with and admiration for Gottlieb, see: Hess (cited n. 25), p. 23.
39. On Graham, see: Jacob Kainen, "Remembering John Graham" Arts Magazine,
61 (November 1986), pp. 25-31; Eila Kokkinen, "John Graham during the
19405," Arts Magazine, 51 (November 1976), pp. 99-103; and Irving Sandier,
"John D. Graham: The Painter as Esthetician and Connoisseur," Artforum, 7
(October 1968), pp. 50-53. See also: Dorothy Dehner's comments in the fore-
word to John Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, ed. Marcia Epstein Allen-
tuck, Baltimore, 1971, pp. xiii-xxi.
40. Graham also lent objects to the exhibition Pre-Columbian Stone Sculpture,
which Newman organized at the Wakefield Gallery in 1944. Newman was also
aware of Wolfgang Paalen's and Max Ernst's concern with the totemic aspects of
Northwest Coast art; see: Rushing 1986 (cited n. i), pp. 274-75.
41. My thanks to Judy Freeman, Associate Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Los
Angeles County Museum, for bringing these objects to my attention. The icon-
ography and painting style of the shield are remarkably similar to that found on a
Chiricahua Apache painted leather poncho in the collection of the Museum of
the American Indian, which was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in
1941; see: Frederic H. Douglas and René D'Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the
United States, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1941, pp. 30-31. Ann Gib-
son indicates that the records of the Betty Parsons Gallery show that Newman
purchased a Northwest Coast carved spoon as well. For this information and
a photograph of the object that she located in the files of the Parsons Gallery,
see Gibson (cited n. 7), p. 266, and figure 90. Unfortunately, such an object is no
longer extant in Newman's estate, and his wife has no memory of the purchase.
42. On the popularity of Patterns of Culture, see: Ann Gibson, "Painting outside the
Paradigm: Indian Space," Arts Magazine, 57 (February 1983), p. 104, n. 9.
43. Ibid.
44. Barnett Newman, letter to Harry L. Shapiro, August i, 1944; on file at the Ar-
chives of the Department of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.
45. Ibid.
46. Newman, quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 41.
47. Benedict, however, was taking her cue from her mentor Franz Boas, who com-
pared, in a book owned by Newman, the similarities between the Phaeton legend
of the ancient Greeks and the Northwest Coast Indians; see: Franz Boas, The
Mind of Primitive Man, New York, 1929, pp. 156-57. Newman's copy of this vol-
ume is copyright 1943.
48. Kwakiutl Shaman Song, collected by George Hunt, in Franz Boas, "Ethnology of

440 1980s
 the Kwakiutl," Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology igi^-Ц, Vol.
35, part 2 (1921), pp. 1294-95; quoted in Tiger's Eye 2 (December 1947), p. 83.
49. Any single ceremony is Tseka. Tsetseka is distinguished from Bakoos, the summer
(secular) season, and Klasila, the transitional time, which begins with a period of
mourning for those who have died since the last winter season ended. See: Au-
drey Hawthorn, Art of the Kwakiutl Indians. Seattle, 1967, pp. 33,35,398.
50. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 31.
51. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (ist edition, 1934), Boston, 1961, p. 177.
52. Ibid., pp. 177-78.
53. Ibid., p. 175. Another book in Newman's library contained a similar account;
see: Pliny Earl Goddard, Indians of the Northwest Coast, New York, 1934, pp.
147-50.
54. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 62.
55. Ibid., p. 68.
56. Benedict (cited n. 51), pp. 180-81.
57. Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged, 2nd edition, New York,
1951, pp. 449-50. Gottlieb, who had read The Golden Bough, recalled that he dis-
cussed myth, psychology, and philosophy with his well-read friends. See: Sara
L. Henry, "Paintings and Statements of Mark Rothko (and Adolph Gottlieb),
1941-49: Basis of Mythological Phase of Abstract Expressionism" (M.A. thesis,
New York University, IFA, 1966), p. 15. See also: n. 38 above.
58. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), pp. 27,63,60.
59. Newman (cited п.з).
60. Newman referred to Northwest Coast painting as "pure painting" in a letter to
Harry Shapiro, September 23,1946, on file in the Archives of the Department of
Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History; Newman (cited n. 3).
61. Newman (cited n. 3).
62. See: Goddard (cited n. 53), pp. 158-59. Sistiutl is often double-headed, and
Boas's report on the Kwakiutl (cited n. 47) contains several references to the
monster, pp. 805-6,812,816,820,952,1117,1349.
63. Newman (cited n. 3). For reproductions of the works of 1944 that are related to
the one discussed here, see: Brenda Richardson, Barnett Newman: The Complete
Drawings, ig44~ig6g, exh. cat., Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979,
Pis. i-io.
64. Newman, quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 43.
65. Betty Parsons, quoted in Gerald Silk, Interview with Betty Parsons, June 11,
1981, "Mark Rothko and His Times" (Oral History Project); pp. 8-9 of the type-
script on file at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washing-
ton, D.C.
66. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), pp. ill, 46,46-47.
67. Barnett Newman, quoted in Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman, New York,
1978, p. 21.
68. Frazer (cited n. 57), pp. 420-21.
69. Barnett Newman, "The New Sense of Fate," quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 43.

1980s 441
 For a discussion of certain aspects of early Abstract Expressionism as a primi-
tivistic response to the "awe and fear of a world born again into the atomic age,"
see: Jeffrey Weiss, "Science and Primitivism: A Fearful Symmetry in the Early
New York School" Arts Magazine, 62, (March 1983), pp. 81-87.
70. Newman, quoted in Hess (cited n. 25), p. 43.
71. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 119.
72. Hess (cited n. 25), p. 51, reports that Newman made Onement I on his birthday,
January 29,1948.
73. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 62.
74. Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now," Tiger's Eye, 6 (December 15, 1948),
P. 51-
75. Ann Gibson (cited n. 7), pp. 245-49, finds in "The Sublime Is Now" Newman's
preference for the Dionysian mode.
76. Newman (cited n. 74), pp. 52,53.
77. Nietzsche (cited n. 8), p. 61.

ANN GIBSON The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism

The idea of Abstract Expressionism having a rhetoric—of artists such as Jack-

son Pollock or Mark Rothko having recourse to a set of verbal skills—will ap-
pear to most as a contradiction in terms. Abstract Expressionism has become
synonymous with a reluctance to explain, and that reluctance has become as-
sociated with the assumption that it is irrelevant to discuss meaning as the re-
lation between form and subject matter. The idea that explication is antitheti-
cal to Abstract Expressionist art was generated in part by critics who took
artists at their word. When Clement Greenberg told an interviewer: "I don't
think I quote living painters. And I don't pay any attention to what they say in
connection with their art," paradoxically, he based his conviction at least in
part on comments by painters such as Jackson Pollock. Greenberg recalled,
"He said to me once, 'I don't know where the pictures come from—they just
come,' with a look of surprise on his face. And he expected me to be sur-
prised. I knew then that when things go good for you you don't know where
they come from. But Jackson was so surprised that he didn't figure the picture

SOURCE: Michael Auping, éd., Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments

(Albright- Knox, 1989), 64-93. Reprinted with the permission of Ann Gibson.

442
out—as if works of art ever really succeeded by being figured out whether it be
Mondrian or Poussin or Rubens."1
Much recent scholarship has been devoted, nonetheless, to attempts to
"figure out" these paintings and sculptures by rooting out their subject mat-
ter, with fruitful and sometimes surprising results. Some of Gorky's paintings
have been demonstrated to flow rather directly from objects he associated
with his childhood and his personal life; Pollock's Jungian vision has come to
be seen as a factor in his choice of the "primitive" objects whose forms he
chose to adapt for his work; and David Smith's observations about the simi-
larity of social and sexual aggression appear to have played a significant role
in the development of some of the forms in his sculpture.2
Little attention, however, has been paid to the development of the devices
(even to use such a word seems like an affront to a movement whose original
critics described it as spontaneous and antiliterary) by which these meanings
are attached to the art. This is where rhetoric comes in. Rhetoric has another
definition besides its common usage to mean a set of (perhaps insincere, if
persuasive) verbal skills. As educators in the forties and fifties were quick to
point out, the term refers also to those practical means, so essential to democ-
racy, that people use to link their personal worlds to larger, interpersonal
affairs; contemporary scholars have emphasized the importance of rhetoric
by equating it as the figurai potential of language with literature itself.3 These
skills, or better, agencies of meaning, were understood in the 19405 and 19505
to include the use of such devices as allegory, symbolism, and metaphor, as
well as more elusive formulations such as New Critical paradox and Kenneth
Burke's "mystic oxymoron," literary structures aimed at escaping the confines
of rhetoric altogether.
Although theorists have distinguished among these terms, they do not al-
ways agree with one another on their meaning, and artists have often used
some of them almost interchangeably in discussing painting and sculpture.
Abstract Expressionists sometimes use the word symbol, for instance, when a
rhetorician might have used the word metaphor. What matters here is that the
sense of their statements and, above all, the testimony of their work reveal that
they were critically concerned with just such distinctions as those examined
by writers such as Cleanth Brooks and Kenneth Burke. About causal links in
this coincidence—whether the artists' insights influenced the writers or vice
versa—one can at this point only speculate. In many cases, it may be as Wil-
liam Baziotes noted in 1954, "Music and literature do not inspire any of my
works, but I do find brothers in those arts."4

1980s 443
 Developments in the work of artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Theodore
Roszak, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko,
Peter Grippe, Herbert Ferber, Seymour Lipton, Barnett Newman, and others
may be articulated in the light of understandings represented by these rhetori-
cal terms. Although this essay cannot present an analysis of each career, it
is possible in this format to demonstrate that an old tool (rhetoric) may be
adapted to a new purpose (looking at the ways in which subject matter and
form are related in Abstract Expressionism). I hope that the ideas advanced
here may be read in that spirit, and that further investigations will lead to
more precise adjustments in the analysis of individual careers. The present
exploration, however, does provide two benefits: it serves to tell at least as
much about the distinctions among these artists as it does about their similari-
ties; and it establishes a common stage on which painting, sculpture, and liter-
ature may play to one another, bringing out what may be of use to our age in
the character of each.
One may note in some careers the successive employment of these rhetori-
cal devices: the symbol, the metaphor, the icon, the mystic oxymoron, and
what we will call the narrative allegory. One can identify these devices with
the status of referring in an artist's work—with the manner in which the visible
forms are linked to meaning. It is important to note that the use of these strate-
gies usually developed gradually, as an artist's employment of one merged
into the next, and that one work may employ more than one device. Not all the
artists associated with Abstract Expressionism used all these devices. Rothko,
for instance, rejected certain aspects of oxymoronic construction and never
accepted narrative allegory. It is important, too, to remain aware throughout
this discussion that although most of the Abstract Expressionists were aware
of each other's work, they were not all using the same devices at the same
time, nor did they all find the same devices equally rewarding.

Symbol

By the early 19405, perhaps the most frequently mentioned figurai device
among artists in the Abstract Expressionists' circles was the symbol, an ele-
ment whose purpose was to stand for something beyond itself but in a non-
narrative way. Scholars in these years preferred symbols to allegories, those
types of representation frequently couched in narrative, whose meanings
were considered to be more extrinsic, pedantic, and conventional.5 Jackson
Pollock's move from the comparatively traditional pictorial space he em-
ployed in the 19305 to a flatter, less narrative mode at the end of that decade

444 1980s
may be seen as a passage from allegory to symbol.6 Before 1947, his paintings
displayed figurative elements, such as the two vertical forms at either side of
the central panel of Guardians of the Secret, 1943. These "guardians," whose
importance seems only to be magnified by the fact that they have not been eas-
ily identified,7 may be called symbolic.
Allegory, like realism, was regarded as being tainted with metonymy, as op-
posed to symbol's metaphor. A signet ring is an allegory of power, for exam-
ple, because it is worn by someone who is powerful; the signet becomes a sign
of power, in other words, because of its métonymie relation to power. A tiger is
a symbol of power, however, because it embodies power. The tiger's relation
to power is metaphorical.8 Allegory, narrative, and metonymy were linked to
mimesis and emblematic portrayal—to the connection of events in time—
whereas symbol and metaphor informed the eternal realm of poetry, where
reference is made through "real" similarities rather than by the accident of
contiguity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge made an influential claim that allegory's
weakness lies in the fact of its conventional connection to its meaning (if the
lion is not identified with courage, calling a soldier a lion will be meaningless).
The organic relation of symbols to their meanings, on the other hand, guaran-
teed their superiority.
Like Coleridge and his successors, most Abstract Expressionists would
have considered the symbolism of works such as Albert Pinkham Ryder's Moon-
lit Cove, about 1890-1900, at once less translatable and more universal than
the more allegorical language of paintings such as Peter Blume's The Eternal
City, 1937. In 1955, René Wellek quoted Coleridge in a defense of symbolism
that would have been agreeable to most Abstract Expressionists: "True sym-
bolism is where the particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a
shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the inscrutable."9 Allegories,
it was believed, told one story; once they were deciphered, their suggestive
potentialities were used up. The meaning of symbols, on the other hand, as
noted by Susanne Langer, whose Philosophy in a New Key was published in
1942, was capable of nearly infinite extension: their multiple potentialities
were not liable to be exhausted after a few readings.10
David Smith's production in the years 1945 and 1946 was marked by an in-
creasingly varied but also more personal and ambiguous stream of imagery.11
When he linked not one but two versions of the body of a woman to home in
The Home of the Welder, 1945 (see the torso of the woman in bas-relief on one
side and the stylized mother and child in bas-relief on the reverse side of the
sculpture), his connection was more than métonymie. For Smith, the body of

1980s 445
 woman was coincident not only with his physical home but with the mental
and emotional site of artistic creation; various uses of the female were, in Cole-
ridge's sense, organically bound up with social and political interactions and,
most significantly, with Smith's own production of sculpture.12
Abstract Expressionists rejected allegory in the sense that the term was un-
derstood in the 19405. They scorned forms that conventionally "stood for"
something else, striving, rather, for "some strange inner kernel which cannot
be reached with explanations, clarifications, examinations, or definitions."13
At the same time, they avoided the narrative methods associated with alle-
gory, such as those employed by such artists as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart
Benton, and Ben Shahn, in favor of less linear, more open-ended modes. As
Rothko would later say to Selden Rodman, "I'm interested only in expressing
basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on I communicate
them more directly than your friend Ben Shahn, who is essentially a journal-
ist."14 In distinguishing his achievements from Shahn's, Rothko meant to dis-
tance himself from storytelling, one aspect of the allegorical, and therefore in-
authentic, in Shahn's work. It is significant that Rothko's pictorial methods
not only avoided narrative but were intended to be more immediate, another
way in which symbols were considered to be superior to allegory.15 As Her-
bert Read said in his discussion of the symbolic in art, "Л has worked its effect
before we have become conscious of its presence"™
Some Abstract Expressionists' preference for symbolic over allegorical ref-
erence lay in their appreciation of French Symbolism. The crux of symbolist
poetry for both William Baziotes and Robert Motherwell, according to the
latter, revolved around Mallarmé's famous dictum that the poet should repre-
sent not the thing itself but the effect that it produces—that poetry should
refer indirectly. L. Bailey Van Hook has described Motherwell's Mallarmé's
Swan, 1944-47, as a painting whose effects Motherwell saw as being analo-
gous to those suggested by Mallarmé's poetics, which emphasized the pursuit
of perfection in the arena of chance. The blots in the lower center and right
of the painting, she suggested, have two symbolic meanings: they are readily
recognizable as the emblems of the mistake; as such they represent the un-
avoidable factor of chance in artistic creation. At the same time, they also refer
to Motherwell's recognition of Mallarmé's obsession with getting things just
right. As Motherwell related in 1951:

Sometimes I have an imaginary picture in mind of the poet Mallarmé in his

study late at night—changing, blotting, transferring each word and its rela-
tions with such care—and I think the sustained energy for the travail must

446 1980s
 have come from the secret knowledge that each word was a link in the chain
that he was forging to bind himself to the universe.17

A symbol for Motherwell, then, might be said to fulfill its function of referring
to something indirectly by referring to more than one thing at the same time.18
Some of the most significant additions to the connotations of the word
symbol in the twentieth century are a consequence of the writings of Sigmund
Freud and Carl G.Jung. The interest of a number of Abstract Expressionists
and their close associates in the ideas of both of these psychologists has be-
come a commonplace in the literature on this art. The writings, recorded con-
versations, and often the titles of works by Louise Bourgeois, Herbert Ferber,
Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, Peter Grippe, Willem de Kooning, Lee Kras-
ner, Ibram Lassaw, Seymour Lipton, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman,
Jackson Pollock, Theodore Roszak, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and David
Smith all indicate, as recent scholarship has continued to demonstrate, that
they knew a good bit about the premises of these famous psychologists.19 The
interest of these artists in the psychological, anthropologically defined dimen-
sions of the symbol was paralleled in literature and philosophy by a search for
recurrent archetypal patterns in stories by scholars such as Maude Bodkin,
Joseph Campbell, Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, and Erich Neumann.20
Freud's most important definition of the function of symbols as it was
developed by 1914 is more clinical than Langer's, mentioned above. In The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud used the term symbol to refer to the expres-
sion of a mental state by a dreamed image. Symbols were images or situations
that had a double level of significance: the literal (one might dream of flying)
and the hidden (such dreams of flight, Freud wrote, stood for the remarkable
phenomenon of erection, both involving a suspension of the laws of gravity).
He noted, however, that such "symbolic" contents of the dream are over-
determined: their meanings are not wholly subjective (not, thus, only the
product of the patient's dreamwork) but are also pregiven facts of culture, of-
ten the vestiges of the conceptual and linguistic heritage of the primitive past.
Thus, dreams of flying, for instance, are connected to the winged phalli of the
ancients.21 Gorky would probably not have rejected the relevance of such an
observation as he feathered the abdominal region of the figure at the far right
of The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, 1Q44.22 We know that Gorky saw his artistic
methods as a continuation of ancient traditions, not as a breaking from them.
Thus it is possible that the feathers in Liver refer also to the feathered cos-
tumes of Aztec nobility or to the flame- or petal-like forms that stand for the
Aztec ritual of disemboweling.23 If one considers that both interpretations are

1980s 447
 simultaneously possible, Gorky's use of symbolic form may not only be de-
scribed by Langer's multileveled definition but may be said to exhibit a
Freudian dimension also.24
These observations on Gorky's painting indicate the way in which Freud's
discussion of the symbol would have been inspiring to artists in the Abstract
Expressionist milieu. The symbol's cultural conventionality was what enabled
it, for Freud, to function as a universally readable link between cultures and
ages. His emphasis on the prefabricated quality of the dream symbol, how-
ever, gave artists little individual creative scope.25
Carl Jung agreed with Freud that symbols have a universal cultural validity,
but he differed from Freud in believing that the artist's constructive role was
to present these symbols to mankind, thus facilitating a healing understand-
ing of the human psyche.26 In The Integration of Personality (available in New
York in 1939), Jung defined archetypes as the content of the collective uncon-
scious, as opposed to the content of the feeling-toned complexes, the personal
and private aspect of the unconscious. The archetypes, he claimed, teach hu-
mans that the psyche may be endangered not only by outside influences but
also by its own contents. Only by granting the reality of these forces that are
beyond the control of conscious, rational powers, can man proceed upon the
task of individuation by integrating the unconscious, centralizing processes
that form the personality.27
Jung defined two different categories of archetypes: archetypes that are
personalities, such as the wise old man and the chaotic, life-filled female an-
ima (Rothko's Tiresias, Lip ton's Wild Earth Mother, and de Kooning's long
series of Women paintings come to mind), and archetypes that represent
situations (Pollock's Four Opposites, Ferber's Hazardous Encounter). He called
the second group archetypes of transformation. Both of these categories of
archetypes, wrote Jung, "are genuine and true symbols that cannot be taken
as angela or as allegories, and are exhaustively interpreted. They are, rather,
genuine symbols just in so far as they are ambiguous, full of intimations, and,
in the last analysis, inexhaustible."28 This passage from The Integration of Per-
sonality resonates in Langer's discussion of "charged" symbols:

There are many "charged" symbols in our thought, though few that play as
many popular roles as the cross. A ship is another example—the image of pre-
carious security in all-surrounding danger, of progress toward a goal, of ad-
venture between two points of rest, with the near, if dormant, connotation of
safe imprisonment in the hold, as in the womb. Not improbably the similar

448 1980s
 form of a primitive boat and of the moon in its last quarter has served in past
ages to reinforce such mythological values.29

A number of Abstract Expressionists would have recognized and applauded

the Jungian tone of Langer's Philosophy in a New Key. It was eagerly analyzed
and discussed after its publication in 1942 by artists in circles that included
Adolph Gottlieb, John Graham, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, Barnett
Newman, and Jackson Pollock. Although it is probable that only some of the
artists actually read it (Pollock or Krasner, whose library included it, and
Newman), many would have known Langer's views.30
Like Langer, the Abstract Expressionists used terms and demonstrated
understandings in their statements that are closer in tone and terminology to
Jung than to Freud. Theodore Roszak's work after 1945, such as The Spectre of
Kitty Hawk, 1946, may be seen as symbolic in the multileveled Jungian sense.
The Spectre of Kitty Hawk alludes to David Smith's "Spectre" series in its title
as well as its similarly foreboding presence, which recalls a prehistoric ptero-
dactyl. Roszak, however, associates it also with the history of the airplane (the
machine, as many were so well aware in those years just after World War II,
that dropped the atomic bomb), and the crescent of the moon.31 Roszak's de-
scription of the artist's process demonstrates a Jungian understanding of the
purpose of endeavors like his own: "By working through these large mytho-
logical and legendary aspects of human experience in its large, collective
sense, we come back to the integration of the individual per se. . . . We work
through all these civilizing devices to get back to the completeness of that one
personality."32
Although David Smith read Freud's Totem and Taboo with close attention,
his multileveled approach to meaning in such sculptures as his Jurassic Bird,
1946, is also closer to Jung's treatment of the symbolic process than it is to
Freud's. Here, Smith employed a reference to a prehistoric bird, coupling it
with a winged, phallus-like cannon to express his horrified response to atomic
war. Smith's move from the allegorical Medals for Dishonor to the more sym-
bolic structure of Jurassic Bird accompanied a change in his attitude toward
war itself. Before the final events of World War II, he believed that some wars
are justified. After the dropping of the atomic bomb, Smith, in Jurassic Bird,
as Robert Lubar has suggested, equated contemporary military conflict with
the evolutionary struggle for survival, symbolically suggesting that modern
warfare might extinguish the human race.33
In one of the best-known documents of early Abstract Expressionism,

1980s 449
 Rothko, Newman, and Gottlieb described their work in a letter to the New
York Times in 1942 in terms of that aspect of symbols they understood as a
common denominator between past and present, artist and audience, upon
which both Freud and Jung agreed. They were referring to works like those
from Gottlieb's Oedipus series and Rothko's Untitled (Study for Antigone), of
the early 19405, with their ambiguous combinations of recognizable and ab-
stract forms. Is that swirl a snail? Those wavy lines snakes? A beard? In their
letter they argued that the symbols in their painting were as valid as were ar-
chaic Greek symbols three thousand years ago. "No possible set of notes," the
trio claimed, "can explain our paintings."34 Following the lead of these art-
ists, then, one could say that for Abstract Expressionists-to-be in the early for-
ties as well as for critics and philosophers, the symbol was an image whose
subject was crucial but whose meanings can never be completely explained.
When Adolph Gottlieb recalled, in 1959, "I wanted to use ambiguous sym-
bols for my own purposes, to prevent people from giving them interpretations
I didn't mean,"35 he may have been thinking of paintings like his Pictograph—
Symbol, 1942. In 1941, he developed this flat, gridded composition with no fo-
cal point to house his plurivalent symbols.36 Other artists in his circle were
also using such compositional housings for their symbols. Mark Rothko, for
instance, used a grid in the early forties; Baziotes's Clown and Clock, 1944, ap-
pears to demonstrate a similar impulse to organize (or to resist organization)
along the horizontal and the vertical; Louise Bourgeois's etching The Symbols,
1942, like Gottlieb's Pictograph—Symbol and some of his earlier pictographs,
contains an eye as well as other recognizable images; in Bourgeois's case, a
ladder and a pen and inkwell. The ambiguous meaning of these mimetically
recognizable objects, however, identifies them as symbols, rather than alle-
gorical emblems. Sculptor Peter Grippe, too, who was to exhibit at Marion
Willard's gallery in the years she showed David Smith, Morris Graves, Mark
Tobey, and Richard Lippold, was working with symbolic images such as eyes,
hands, and mouths in a three-dimensional gridded framework by 1941 in such
works as The City #i.37

Metaphor
Earlier in this essay I described the guardian images in Pollock's Guard-
ians of the Secret as symbolic. One may distinguish between this symbolic way
of referring and the closely related but not identical means of metaphor. Com-
pare, for instance, Guardians of the Secret to Gothic, 1944. Although Gothic,
like Guardians, does have some mimetic images (such as the hand that sweeps

450 1980s
up from the lower right), more than many of Pollock's paintings of the mid-
forties, it presents the viewer with a densely filled surface rather than with a
series of images. One could consider that the black lattice looks like the lead-
ing on medieval stained glass windows, thus symbolically relating to the paint-
ing's title in its reference to the middle ages. It is also true, however, that the re-
peated upward surges of blues and greens, barely contained in the framework
of black paint, embodies a resurrection of the kind of Gothic impulse whose
demise Jung lamented:

When the spiritual catastrophe of the Reformation put an end to the Gothic
Age with its impetuous yearning for the heights, its geographical confine-
ment, and its restricted view of the world, the vertical outlook of the Euro-
pean mind was forthwith intersected by the horizontal outlook of modern
times.38

This aspect of Gothics identity is achieved metaphorically, by its structure—

by the relation of colors, forms, and textures—not by its mimetic resemblance
to something outside the canvas.39
The structure of David Smith's sculpture The Hero of 1951 is also meta-
phorical in this relational sense. At first, the heroic status of the figure as im-
plied by the title may seem gratuitous. In fact, even The Heroes identity as a
human form must be based almost entirely on the arrangement of its parts
rather than on their shapes, as is indicated by their technical interchange-
ability. If the eye-shaped head, for instance, were placed where the torso is, it
would read as a torso.
This strange head is perhaps the most striking aspect of the sculpture. Its
large size and oddly horizontal, oval form suggest a deeper meaning than ap-
pears at first glance. Rosalind Krauss has connected this form with a poem in
which Smith wrote:

the subject is me
the hero is eye function.40

Scholars have interpreted this conjunction in various ways, but they have
agreed that by positioning the form of an eye on the shoulders of a structure
called The Hero, Smith wished to identify his own artistic vision with certain
aspects of the concept of the heroic.41 Although many of The Heroes associa-
tions are mimetic (such as the shape of the eye) the major thrust of meaning
(Smith/hero/vision) is accomplished metaphorically, through relations of
parts: the "eye" is where the head should be.

1980s 451
 The word metaphor, as a subcategory, or type of symbol, and the word icon
have no universally accepted definitions; inescapably, they share some of the
symbol's qualities, especially its apparent opposition to the arbitrariness of al-
legory. The Dictionary of World Literature in 1943, for instance, announced
that metaphors, like symbols, substitute one thing for another, but that their
special quality lay in their ability to identify two seemingly disparate things,
offering as an example Shakespeare's "Thou art the grave where buried love
doth live."42 Thus Pollock allowed a mimetic-metonymic similarity between
the forms in his Gothic and glass windows to refer also to a type of energy that
had been termed "gothic" by more than one writer in his era.43
Surrealist André Breton, who had lived in New York in the early forties and
whose views were discussed and disseminated widely among the Abstract
Expressionists, was a most enthusiastic advocate of this kind of structure
(which he subsumed under the term "analogy"). He described its excellence
in terms of its ability to escape the bonds of reason:

Poetic analogy has in common with mystical analogy that it transgresses the
deductive laws in order to make the mind apprehend the interdependence of
two objects of thought situated on different planes, between which the logical
functioning of the mind is unlikely to throw a bridge, in fact opposes a priori
any bridge which might be thrown.44

Breton would have approved of the fact that, in discussing the metaphori-
cal structure in these two works, it has been necessary not only to read, but to
invent. The fact that interpreters have found it essential to contribute not only
their research but their imaginative input to the project is responsible for
significant variations in their interpretations.45 I. A. Richards distinguished
between simple metaphors based on direct resemblances of (or differences be-
tween) the images and the ideas they represent, and more complex ones with
several levels of identification that may even be inconsistent, and whose de-
gree of resemblance will depend on the audience's attitude toward the im-
ages.46 This latter "interactive" aspect of metaphor proved to be especially in-
teresting to contemporaries of the Abstract Expressionists such as William
Empson and Max Black.47 The Abstract Expressionists, too, recognized va-
lidity in the "interactive" aspects of interpretation. In their statement to the
New York Times, for instance, Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman said that the ex-
planation of their pictures "must come out of a consummated experience be-
tween picture and onlooker."
In the work of many of the artists discussed in this essay, there was, in the

452 1980s
mid-forties, a progression away from ways of referring in which the sensory
properties of the art look like (are mimetically, or metonymically related to)
those of the referent (as in Gottlieb's Pictograph—Symbol of 1942). Increas-
ingly, the works (like Pollock's Gothic) possessed qualities that functioned like
those of a model outside the work.48 As mentioned above, artists were not
consistent in their terminology, sometimes using the word symbol to refer to
this more abstract way of referring, and sometimes using the word metaphor.
Some artists used both. Describing what he saw as the two basic twentieth-
century revolutions in sculptural thinking, Seymour Lipton wrote:

Cubism permitted plastic rearrangements of physical space and the metaphor

permitted emotional and symbolic projection of a content concerning the life
of man. This new realm of sculpture leaves out the obvious anatomy of man,
but retains its gesture such as twisted struggle, invocation, striding forward,
etc The "Cloak" [1951] is a dark interior with totem figures of individual
man with its own [figures] growing flower-like and lamp-like internally. The
figure of man protects himself from a hostile world by two sheets of armor
held in position by many barbed fists jutting through the shield.49

Although Lipton did not define his terms, he referred to "the new realm of
sculpture" as what we have here defined as the metaphoric, in which the bur-
den of reference rests on the gestures and relations among forms.
Clearly, something was going on among these artists by the mid-forties.
There was an intensification of their struggles to reconcile what they knew
(their epistemology) with what they, and their mediums, were (their ontol-
ogy). They conceived this struggle in terms of the relation between form and
meaning, and in the work of the artists who have come to be called Abstract
Expressionists, the terms of that relationship were severely questioned. One
could argue, for instance, that in Lipton's Cloak of 1951 a figurai reference
is still apparent. But, in general, Lipton's work, like that of many others in
his circle, was progressing from distorted but recognizable figures, such as
Man Rising from the Ruins, 1944, to considerably more abstract forms. Peter
Grippe recalls that a number of artists met at Barnett Newman's home in 1945
or 1946 to discuss the possibility of a common solution to the question of how
art referred to its subjects.50 The meeting failed to resolve the problem; but
Gottlieb and Newman, among others, continued to be concerned with the
verbal designations that might be applied to their efforts.
It is important at this point to reiterate that not all the artists we now call
Abstract Expressionists experienced this development at the same time; Clyf-

1980s 453
 ford Still, for instance, in the early forties, was one of the earliest to abandon
recognizable symbols. By the later forties, however, an ongoing interest in
symbol, pictograph, and myth, aided by emerging concerns that may be iden-
tified with the terms metaphor, ideogram, and icon, helped to generate in the
work of many a type of art whose appearance suggested to some that it might
have no reference at all in the real world. One could say that abstraction is
really the same as the classical definition of metaphor. As scholars from Con-
dillac to Paul de Man have noted, abstractions come into being "by ceasing to
think of the properties by which things are distinguished in order to think
only of those in which they agree [or correspond] with each other."51 Although
metaphors are not figures that abandon their referents, we see in Condillac's
emphasis on properties, rather than objects, the direction many of the Ab-
stract Expressionists were to follow.
When Adolph Gottlieb wrote, in 1947, "To my mind certain so-called ab-
straction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our
time," his thought paralleled I. A. Richards's position in The Philosophy of
Rhetoric that metaphor is not decoration, but, rather, the very fabric from
which meaning is made. When metaphor functions to extend language, since
language is reality, Richards argues, metaphor expands and secures new reali-
ties. Although Abstract Expressionists would have disagreed with Richards's
equation of language and reality, they would probably not have quarrelled
with a corollary to Richards's argument that gives metaphor two claims to su-
periority. Its basis in the perceptions of essential realities of apparently unlike
things gave it, for thinkers in the forties, a claim to truth; and, in addition,
as the core of the perceptual process, it embodied the tissue of thought. As a
more abstract extension of the symbol, metaphor epitomized both profundity
and reality. To step backward into allegory was to retreat into didacticism and
happenstance; but to plunge forward, beyond a discernible anchor in reality,
was, many believed, to enter a realm where the only choices were decoration
or solipsism.
Writing in Art News in May 1947, a reviewer noted of Clyfford Still (regard-
ing works such as 1Q46-L, 1946) that the artist "is preoccupied with the theme
of the figure in landscape, with overtones of man's struggle against and fusing
with nature. But, considering his extremely abstract style, this symbolism
seems somewhat far fetched."52 Likewise, a critic described Herbert Ferber's
Unknown Political Prisoner, 1952, as "totally devoid of symbolism." Along
with the work of Theodore Roszak, Richard Lippold, and Calvin Albert, she
saw it as a "stylish, abstract, technical tour de force" revealing the artists' "con-

454 1980s
suming egotism, fear, detachment, utter absence of any sense of social respon-
sibility, or lack of the deepest and greatest form of imagination which makes
it possible to project oneself into another person's being."53 For these review-
ers, a symbol was something one could recognize. Granted, its meanings might
not be immediately apparent, but still, the key of access was the resemblance
between what one saw in the art and something one knew in the real world. A
departure from the mimeticism of the symbol was a departure from meaning.
Meanings may still be constructed from works such as Ferber's Unknown
Political Prisoner and in Still's work from the mid-forties, but only by viewers
willing to contribute their own observation and imagination to the project.
One can, for instance, consider the pointed metal curves and mesh grilles of
The Unknown Political Prisoner as focal areas in an interactive metaphor that
are to be given new meaning in the context of their particular conjunction
with one another—the title of the work and the theme of the exhibition (also
entitled The Unknown Political Prisoner) in which it appeared. This new con-
text, the "frame" of the metaphor, imposes an extension of meaning on the
focal points. No longer simply pointed pieces of metal and barriers pierced
with holes, they become symbols of weapons and prisons—the metaphori-
cally whirling elements in the cosmos of cruel forces that threaten and contain
the unknown political prisoner. As Max Black pointed out, to make an inter-
active metaphor work, "the reader [viewer] must remain aware of the exten-
sion of meaning—must attend to both the old [sharpened pieces of metal can
hurt, metal grilles in our society function to keep people out or in] and the
new [their whirling configuration] together."54 In a similarly interactive way,
finding "meaning" in the metaphors Still constructed in the mid-forties ne-
cessitates a return to his earlier work, such as ig4i-2-C,55 and to his state-
ments about his work; only then can one understand the collapse of images of
figure, hand, and phallus into the landscape background in paintings such as
1Q46-L as a metaphor of "man's struggle against and fusing with nature."56
Barnett Newman's thoughts on this matter materialized in an exhibition
entitled The Ideographic Picture at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1947. The appeal
of even multievocative forms with communal meanings had dimmed, and he
felt the need to develop a new, more effective, and immediate method of repre-
sentation. This new form of representation, toward which a number of these
painters and sculptors moved in the late forties, was evident in several works
in the exhibition, in which Newman presented paintings by Hans Hofmann,
Pietro Lazzari, Boris Margo, himself, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theo-
doros Stamos, and Clyfford Still.57 The title of Rothko's Tiresias, 1944, could

1980s 455
 be read as an extension of the meaning of the figurai, archetypal associations
of its forms, as is the case with Reinhardt's Dark Symbol, 1941, whose forms
are also reminiscent of human figures. Rothko's second work in the exhibi-
tion, however, Vernal Memory (present whereabouts unknown), if it resem-
bled his Geologic Memory, Tentacles of Memory, 1945-46, or Prehistoric Mem-
ory, 1946, was done in a more abstract mode; the forms in his composition
could not be named or, considered individually, be seen to relate to his title.
Newman's own Gea, 1945, presents a number of forms that remind one of
winged creatures or insects, despite their nonspecific character. For this rea-
son, Gea may be considered symbolic, because of its more obviously mimetic
character, and less abstract than Newman's second inclusion, painted over a
year later, The Euclidean Abyss, 1946-47.
The Euclidean Abyss differs from Gea in a number of senses. Those that
concern us here not only revolve around contemporary definitions of the word
metaphor, but will also involve the terms ideogram and icon. The flattened
structure of The Euclidean Abyss appears to conform to the type of metaphor
about which Douglas MacAgy speculated in 1949: "It is possible that pictorial
metaphor could allude to a kind of dimensional idiom which would accord
more with twentieth century thought than with the three dimensional instru-
ment inherited from the Renaissance."58 Another perceptive observer, Ruth
Field, compared traditional Western perspective in the visual arts to what she
called "temporal perspective" in poetry: a reference forward or backward in
time in the surface of the poem. Both the contemporary poet and painter, she
wrote, create flat landscapes, without illusion, characterized by a feeling of
infinite expansion. In this, their universe was like that of the modern physi-
cist, she observed: finite but unbounded.59
Considering Newman's Gea and The Euclidean Abyss, Smith's Jurassic
Bird and The Hero, or Pollock's Guardians of the Secret and Gothic, one might
note, inspired by Field's and MacAgy's observations, that the difference be-
tween the first and second work of each of these artists lies in the way the
forms in the work reach the viewer's mind. In each first instance (Gea, Juras-
sic Bird, Guardians of the Secret), the emphasis is as much on what one knows,
on the association of various items within the composition with an experience
—psychological, visual, or literary—as it is on the relation among the forms.
In the second set (The Euclidean Abyss, The Hero, Gothic), the work as a col-
lection of references is subordinated to an emphasis on the relation among
the forms. The message one receives has more to do with how one reacts to
the thought, or the force, that binds the forms together than with the associa-

456 1980s
tion of separate forms—more to do with the ecology of the work, than with its
individual elements.60
The incipient claim to the incarnation of meaning in material generated
what some viewers have felt to be a strangely insistent presence in this art.
There is already in these metaphoric paintings and sculptures, along with
their invitation to personal interpretation, a refusal of "whiteness," a rejection
of reasoned explanation, objectivity, and translatability.61 Karsten Harries has
suggested that in the work of poets such as William Carlos Williams, a new
type of metaphor is born, one whose avoidance of the commonly understood
telos of the object as its basis points to a desire to escape language's referential
functions.62 Read in this way, metaphor serves as an appropriate step for such
artists as Pollock and Smith in the transition that led through the icon to the
antireferentiality of the mystic oxymoron.
The essay Barnett Newman wrote to accompany The Ideographic Picture
exhibition contains references to a number of currents in the awareness of
artists who, in the late 19403, were moving toward more abstract (one might
say, with de Man's Condillac, more metaphoric) modes of representation. As
Newman explains in his essay, these works all represented ideas, but repre-
sented them "directly"—not through the detour of mimesis. They combined
act and idea, he claimed in the introduction to the exhibition, to form shapes
that carried thoughts, rather than merely stood for them. An ideographic shape
was a living thing, an "idea-complex" that actually made contact with the mys-
teries of life, nature, death, and tragedy.63
Newman began his statement for the show with definitions of the term
ideograph and its derivations from the dictionary and the encyclopedia; un-
doubtedly these formulations played a role in the development of his concept.
The word ideographic, however, was closely related to some other words not
mentioned by Newman, whose significant implications for his enterprise
would have been recognized by many in his audience. Those concerned with
avant-garde literature, for instance, would have associated the word ideograph
with imagist poet Ezra Pound's definition of "the picture of a thing" that
means the thing, without, however, resembling it in a mimetic sense.64 For
Pound, an ideogram (such as a Chinese written character) corresponded with
the thing it designated because its structure corresponded with its object. He
expanded this thought to claim (as Newman did) that primitive languages
maintain a close correspondence between signs as ideographic pictures and
the things to which they refer.65 "The ideographic process," Pound wrote, "is
metaphor, the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations."66

1980s 457
 In paralleling developments in contemporary painting to Northwest Coast
Indian culture, Newman was indebted also to the description of the symbol in
Kwakiutl art as it was formulated by Franz Boas. In The Ideographic Picture,
Newman distinguished between what he called "the ritualistic will towards
metaphysical understanding" displayed by the male Kwakiutl artists painting
on hides and the "pleasant play of non-objective pattern [of] the women bas-
ket weavers." In "Art of the North Pacific Coast of North America," in Boas's
Primitive Art (first published in English in 1928), the anthropologist distin-
guished between the symbolic men's style expressed in carving and painting,
and the patterned art of "no especially marked significance" of the women's
style, expressed in basketry, weaving, and embroidery.67 Unlike Newman,
however, Boas in general restricted his descriptions of what the Kwakiutl
symbols mean to the identification of the object or act to which they corre-
spond in tribal life, eschewing the metaphysical implications (and thus the
metaphorical dimension) so important to Newman.68

Icon
The dimensions Newman appears to have woven into his definition of an
ideographic picture included not only Pound's ideogram and Boas's symbol,
but also linguistic concepts derived from the icon, as it was defined by C. S.
Peirce, whose ideas were revitalized in the early thirties by the publication
of his collected papers. For Peirce, both symbols and icons were signs; but a
symbol referred to its object only by virtue of social agreement, as the word
red, for instance, refers to the quality of redness. (Peirce's definition of "sym-
bol," then, in its conventionality, was more like allegory than were the compar-
atively romantic definitions of the symbol discussed earlier in this essay.) An
icon, however, was linked with the thing it represented by exhibiting that
thing, as the red in a representation of an apple both exhibits and stands for
the quality of redness in its object.69 Of course, iconic signs may be similar to
the objects to which they refer in various ways, and Peirce named three: the
image, a sign that, like the example above, reproduces a number of the same
sensory impressions as would the object; the diagram, which, like a blueprint,
exhibits relations like the relations in the object; and the metaphor, a relation-
ship where the "parallelism is not a correspondence of simple qualities nor a
corresponding relation" of parts, but a more general correspondence.70
So defined, Peirce's metaphoric icon is most similar to Newman's "living
thing"—a conception of painting in which the work of art embodies in vari-
ous ways that to which it refers, rather than merely standing for it in absentia.

458 1980s
Peirce's icon shares an important quality with I. A. Richards's and Max
Black's "interactive" metaphors: a sign would be recognized as iconic only if
the viewer recognized it as such.71 By this criterion Ferber's Unknown Politi-
cal Prisoner, for example, projects political and emotional "meaning" only to
the extent that the viewer is able to find similarities between the associations
of its forms, their relationship to each other, its title, and the circumstances of
its exhibition. As Rosenberg observed of Barnett Newman, his paintings are
icons because they request the viewer's faith—they can exist as art only if his
audience believes they are art.72
Mark Rothko's works, too, developed increasingly ironic qualities at the
expense of their other symbolic characteristics throughout the forties. During
these years, forms reminiscent of deepwater creatures' body configurations
and movements—the tentacles and eyes of Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea,
1944, for instance—disappeared, to be replaced by the glowing, unnameable
forms that float on the aqueous fields of works such as Number 18,1948,1949.
Forms that pictured Rothko's particularly light-struck version of the Jungian
sea of the unconscious and/or his version of traditional religious subject mat-
ter were succeeded by forms that seemed themselves to float and refract light
rather than to refer to things that do.73 In the multiforms, then (like Number
18), Rothko could be said to collapse the traditional dichotomy between sen-
sual experience and representation, and thus to blur the borderline between
imagination and reason. "To imagine," Paul Ricoeur has observed of this rela-
tionship, "is not to have a mental picture of something but to display relations
in a depicting mode. When this depiction concerns unsaid and unheard simi-
larities or refers to qualities, structures, localizations, situations, attitudes, or
feelings, each time the new intended is grasped as what the icon describes or
depicts."74
I have used the concept of the icon here principally to clarify an aspect of
the artists' endeavor. I wonder, of course, if it could have had an historical in-
fluence: would these artists themselves have understood enough about Peirce's
concept to have found in it some confirmation of their own goals?
Further research is needed to determine if this was a factor in the develop-
ment of Abstract Expressionism; but preliminary evidence indicates that it
may have been the case. "Charles Peirce was a topic of conversation during
the twenties and thirties, and Barney [Newman] most likely knew about him,"
recalled his friend the poet Leo Yamin, "everybody did." The multitalented
mentor of some of these artists, the painter John Graham, Yamin remembers,
understood Peirce's definition of an icon, as did Adolph Gottlieb, who would

1980s 459
 not have read Peirce himself, but would have known about it from his discus-
sions with Newman and possibly Rothko.75
I know of no indication that these artists read Charles Morris's Signs, Lan-
guage, and Behavior, in which he discusses Peirce's semiotics. The title, how-
ever, would have been attractive to them. They might also have been made
aware of it by Ernst Gombrich's review in the Art Bulletin.™ And although
it was years later that Rosenberg entitled his essay about Newman's achieve-
ment "Icon Maker: Barnett Newman," there was a magazine in 1946 and 1947
entitled Iconograph, whose last issue featured Rothko's work. Its program
evinced a preference for artists who had been inspired by Northwest Coast In-
dian art, and its editor, a young poet-painter named Kenneth Lawrence Beau-
doin, particularly admired Newman and Gottlieb.77
Works like Pollock's Eyes in the Heat, 1946; David Smith's Hudson River
Landscape, 1951; de Kooning's Woman 1,1952; Gorky's One Year the Milkweed,
1944; Bourgeois's Sleeping Figure, 1950; Lipton's Cloak, 1951; Krasner's Blue
Square, 1939-43; and Still's 1Q46-L all have that peculiar iconic character of
metaphor that José Ortega y Gasset called transparency. When we look at or-
dinary objects, Ortega observed, our gaze is bounced back to us; it doesn't
penetrate the surface. When we look at glass, however, something different
happens. Our vision can pass through it, to things beyond; thus glass can
serve as a passage to other objects. On the other hand, we can look at the glass
itself; then it becomes itself an object, and, in a sense, opaque. An art object
that is an iconic metaphor exists in a double condition of being itself and at
the same time being transparent, that is, incorporating things beyond itself.
This metaphorical art object, suggested Ortega, is an object that can be seen
through itself.78
Thus we can see Pollock's Eyes in the Heat, as a determined struggle to
maintain what could be viewed according to Ortega as a certain opacity, to
stay true to the viscosity of his paint, the action of his hand, and the two-
dimensionality of the canvas; or, conversely or concurrently, we can see in it
an Ortegan transparency: a reference to the long tradition of the iconography
of the eye, from the genital Freudian eye of Surrealism back through the eye-
as-articulation of Northwest Coast Indian art, to Leonardo's eye-as-regulator
of nature, to the deified eye of the Egyptians.79 Similarly, in David Smith's
Hudson River Landscape we can experience both the material lyricism of a
metal line in space and/or the banks of the Hudson, its pools sparkling in
sunlight and the tail of the plane from which Smith observed the inspiration
for the sculpture.

460 1980s
Mystic Oxymoron

Peirce linked one aspect of his definition of an icon to painting in a way

that is particularly significant here, because it emphasized the collapse of a
painting into its subject: "In contemplating a painting, there is a moment
when we lose the consciousness that is not the thing, the distinction of the real
and the copy disappears At that moment we are contemplating an icon"8®
This aspect of the icon is the threshold of the next stage of Abstract Expres-
sionist work: the attempt to detach itself altogether from the referring status of
rhetorical structures. The development of such "transparent" objects, objects
that could be seen through themselves, generated what may be viewed as a
crisis of representation. Artists reacted to it in different ways, and with differ-
ent levels of consistency. Some, such as de Kooning, Gottlieb, Bourgeois,
Baziotes, Lip ton, and Roszak, explored the limits of representational territory
but were convinced, for the most part, that to abandon referential structure
was to abandon significance. Others, however, for example, Newman, Still,
Pollock, Smith, Rothko, Reinhardt, and Ferber, attempted to eschew repre-
sentation altogether in order to establish a new status for art.
As Peirce's definition indicates, real iconic status is only achieved when the
distinction between the real and the copy, the signifier and the signified, coa-
lesces in the viewer's mind. In other words, when one can no longer distin-
guish between the art and what it means, when the art is what it means, then it
is iconic. Viewed in this way, an icon is a tautology.
In years shortly before and after The Action Is the Pattern, 1949, Herbert
Ferber would say that "a sculpture should be a metaphor for an idea." By the
late 19405, he began to believe that when the idea is abstract, so the metaphor
should be, and vice versa. Critics have understood the tautology implied by
Ferber's stance. As E. C. Goossen has remarked, Ferber's enterprise reminded
his of Yeats's famous line, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"81
By 1952, with works such as Spheroid II, Ferber stopped using titles that re-
ferred to anything but the sculpture itself.82
In the late forties, Newman developed a new construction. His consolida-
tion of his more varied types of compositions before 1948 into his landmark
style in OnementI, 1948, has most often been linked to his interest in defining
a nonobjective American sublime, a topic he discussed in the pages of Tiger's
Eye in 1948.83 The sublime, as Newman described it there, is the key to this
new structure. He believed that the American expression of the sublime would
come from a "natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relation-

1980s 461
 ship to the absolute emotions.... We are freeing ourselves," he wrote, "of the
impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have
you, that have been the devices of Western European painting."84 Newman
took issue with the definitions of sublimity as an objective type of rhetorical
structure proposed by Longinus, Kant, and Hegel, preferring what he saw as
Edmund Burke's crude but definitive conclusion that beauty and the sublime
are different types of things. Beauty was within the world of sensuous and ra-
tional apprehension that Newman identified with the rhetorical tradition,
whereas the new experience of revelation that he wished to describe was
metaphysical, "beyond the devices of Western painting."85
Newman did not claim in 1948 that he, or any of his contemporaries, had
actually done a work that was sublime in the terms he described. In the pro-
gressive tense, he wrote, "we are finding the answer." By 1950 however, in Vir
Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51, he produced a painting whose referents are not
only ambiguous, as in Onement I, but are also paradoxical. Possible readings
contradict one another. The red field is no longer more or less textured than
the zips. As a result, the metaphor of void and solid, based on the viewer's de-
termination of what is figure and what is ground, becomes problematic. Do
we see the white zip to the left of center through a division in the red field, is it
applied on top of the field (which then may be seen as running continuous be-
hind it), or is the white on the same plane as the red, which could then be read
as butting up against it?
The coexistence of these mutually contradictory elements signals New-
man's adoption of what could be called [an] antirhetorical device: the mystic
oxymoron. As Kenneth Burke wrote in the pages of trans/formation in 1944,
mystic oxymoron is the term in rhetoric for "the figure in which an epithet of
a contrary significance is added to a word; e.g., cruel kindness; laborious idle-
ness" Poets use such ambiguous imagery, Burke suggested, when they want
to meditate on "motives-behind-motives," that is, when they want to express
their subject at a meta-level.86 By constructing his painting so that it could be
read simultaneously in contradictory ways, Newman was using the same
strategies that Kenneth Burke attributed to Keats when he wrote of "un-
heard" melodies and "unravish'd" brides in "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
It should be noted that not all artists who work with opposites are nec-
essarily employing such oxymoronic structure for the purpose of escaping
from rhetorical conventions. One indication that some Abstract Expression-
ists were using it for such purposes, however, lies in their statements of inten-
tion. Thus Barnett Newman, in declaring his search for the sublime, a contra-

462 1980s
dictory sensation that derives pleasure from pain, a sensation that can be
conceived but never really presented, was also declaring his pursuit of what
Burke described as the mystic oxymoron.87 Whether or not Newman knew
the term, his attempts in painting such as Vir Heroicus to create visually a
metaphysical state outside the dominion of the structures of the rational and
sensuous world demonstrate that he was using the structure of mystic oxy-
moron in his work.
Rothko occupies a contradictory position, even within this group of artists
devoted to equivocal structures. By the early 19505, most of his work was ap-
parently "non-referential." It contained no recognizable mimetic symbols,
and seldom even any suggestive titles to direct the viewer toward a topic that
might be metaphorically attached to the stacks of radiating rectangles. As
Rothko's friends and patrons grew to understand, however, the artist had
rather specific associations ("tragedy, ecstasy, doom") in mind for his paint-
ings. In works like Orange and Yellow, 1956, for instance, warmth of tones
beneath the thinly painted rectangle of yellow in the upper register throbs
through the top layer of pigment. This causes that eminently flat surface to
appear to bulge paradoxically forward to accommodate this chromatic con-
tradiction. In his last public speech in 1958, Rothko commented on the neces-
sity of irony, the technique of saying less than one means, or even the opposite
of what one means: "There are some painters who feel they must tell all, but
I'm not among them."88 If one considers this reluctance in tandem with Roth-
ko's distress when viewers failed to see that his work was about human emo-
tion, human drama, and, in particular, tragedy, one can see that the oxymor-
onic structure within Rothko's paintings reflected paradoxes in his intentions
—an impulse to withdraw into silence coupled with a deep need to communi-
cate.89 The particular subjects of paradox in Rothko's late paintings, an-
chored as they were to the ironic communication of human tragedy, guaran-
teed its impurity.
Ad Reinhardt also was much involved with paradox. Unlike Rothko, he
was determined to keep his surfaces free of the mortality of reference. In his
desire to construct a form that is imageless—much as Burke described the
poet's use of the mystic oxymoron as a meditation on absolute sound, on the
essence of sound, which would be soundless as the prime mover is motionless,
or as the "principle" of sweetness would not be sweet, having transcended
sweetness90—Reinhardt moved throughout his career to ever more reductive
combinations of form and color. From his Dark Symbol in 1941 he moved
through the use of metaphoric but still mimetically suggestive forms in Un-

1980s 463
 titled, 1946. At mid-century Reinhardt was using rectangles alone, layering
one on top of another or, more simply, placing them on a single-colored field
in such a way that their vertical and horizontal meetings iconically signified,
at the same time that they illustrated, this meeting of opposites.91 But by 1952,
he had restricted these vertical and horizontal meetings to the abutment of
contiguous edges, as in Red Abstract, 1952. This produced a strange and con-
tradictory warping, as the structure and the color contradict one another. The
fact that these forms fit together edge-to-edge tells the viewer, "these rectan-
gles are on the same plane," while the color, close-valued as it is, says, "on the
contrary, this violet-tinged red floats at a deeper level, below this orange-
tinged one." As a result of the contradictory sensations, this symmetrical and
ostensibly static composition heaves back and forth, its straight divisions
pulled now this way, now that, as the three-dimensional language of its color
struggles to free itself from the two-dimensional grid of form. As Reinhardt
expressed himself several years later, his works produced "the completest
control for the purest spontaneity."92
Reinhardt was most specific about the paradoxical nature of the program
he advocated, a stance that time did not abate. If he ever had doubts about the
project of pursuing "painting 'about which no questions can be asked,'"93 it
was not apparent to his public. Like the long and resolute series of velvety
"black" paintings at the end of his career, Reinhardt's most developed verbal
statements only emphasized and amplified the possibility of producing work
that defied, through its paradoxical structures, its status as a mediated object,
an object whose "meaning" is framed by certain conventions:

The forms of art are always preformed and premeditated. The creative pro-
cess is always an academic routine and sacred procedure. Everything is pre-
scribed and proscribed. Only in this way there is no grasping or clinging to
anything. Only a standard form can be imageless, only a formularized art can
be formulaless."94

The desire to create the thing-in-itself, to make a poem (or here, a painting
or a sculpture) that expresses an idea in all its uncontaminated life and whole-
ness, beyond the reach of rhetorical structures such as allegory and metaphor,
may be expressed in several ways. One way is the use of paradox. Another is
the ostensible use of a prototypically referential mode, such as portraiture
(Pollock's Portrait ofH. M., 1945, for instance, or Herbert Ferber's The Wise
One [Portrait о/В. Ж], 1948, in a work that does not convey that degree of

464 1980s
specificity. The result is a short-circuiting of the function of referring that
calls attention to the very fact that the art does not refer. The implication is
that the art is ineffable: a thing-in-itself, like a person, rather than something
that refers to a person.
A related antirhetorical strategy is the use of elements whose usual func-
tion is to refer to an attribute of an object (line, for instance, is often used
to tell us about the shape of something) as having (as Kandinsky's paintings
have regularly been read) an absolute significance independent of its usual
referential function. Called to mind are Jackson Pollock's "classic" paintings.
In 1947 Pollock began the poured paintings, which synthesized—in the He-
gelian sense of the word—the symbolic and metaphoric aims of his earlier
work in screens of paint whose figurative status was denied by most critics.95
As Lee Krasner reported, in these works Pollock chose to veil the image, inun-
dating in paint anything that might refer to something in the outside world.96
Until the early 19505, these distinctive paintings, such as Convergence, 1952,
displayed the reluctance to refer, demonstrated not only by Kenneth Burke's
mystic oxymorons, but also by Ludwig Wittgenstein's gnomic propositions
and Cleanth Brooks's paradoxes.
Color as well as line has been used allegorically, symbolically, and meta-
phorically by the Abstract Expressionists as it has been by artists in the past.
Some of the artists mentioned here, such as Robert Motherwell, never in-
tended to sever color from its referential function. In 1963, for instance, Moth-
erwell said, "Mainly I use each color as simply symbolic: ocher, for the earth,
green for the grass, blue for the sea and sky. I guess that black and white,
which I use most often, tend to be the protagonists."97 Others, however, such
as Clyfford Still and Ad Reinhardt, intended their color to function inde-
pendently, not as symbol or metaphor but as the indescribable absolute: the
thing-in-itself.98
Still, for instance, saw his colors not as carriers for associations from previ-
ous experience, but as independent entities possessing a primary vigor. He
described his experience with them this way: "As the blues or reds or blacks
leap and quiver in their tenuous ambience or rise in austere thrusts to carry
their power infinitely beyond the bounds of their limiting field, I move with
them."99
Still's understanding of the action of color in his painting might be called
gnomic. According to the dictionary, to be gnomic is to be obscure. There is,
however, a particular type of tautological obscurity possessed by utterances

1980s 465
 such as Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" that can be created also by
phrases that oppose common meanings, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Ob-
jects are colorless."100 All rhetorical agencies, even metaphorical ones, involve
a criterion of usefulness. Paradoxes, contradictions, and tautologies, how-
ever, invalidate this criterion. They gesture toward the inexpressible, toward
the transcendental, or toward a consciousness that cannot be discussed but
that nevertheless lies at the basis of all logical operations. Of this Wittgenstein
acknowledged, "There is indeed the inexpressible. It shows itself; it is the
mystical."101 The oxymoronic structure of some mature Abstract Expression-
ists is like Wittgenstein's refusal to talk about metaphysics, and, in some cases,
reflects also a conviction similar to his, that the inexpressible was located
in feeling, not things.102 One could claim that the construction of paradox
and tautology permits certain Abstract Expressionist productions to work on
their audience in a way that involves a kind of thinking that is detached from
rational understanding. In this view, art exists in its own universe, no longer
as a commentary on life or reality, as Northrup Frye has suggested, but rather
as a system of relationships that are life and reality contained. Thus Pollock's
Shimmering Substance, 1946, both refers to and is a shimmering substance,
in an iconic tautology whose self-sufficiency, from the vantage point of the
19805, could be said to represent a desire to exist apart from time and the
world. Significantly, on this matter Frye quoted Wittgenstein—"We make to
ourselves pictures of facts"—noting that the pictures to which the philoso-
pher referred were themselves facts that existed only in a pictorial universe.103
David Smith may have been less concerned than Reinhardt and Still with
escaping from the rhetorical limits of signifying activity. But by his use of tau-
tology in structures such as his Five Units Equal, 1956, whose title mirrors
its form, and by his paradoxes, such as those in Timeless Clock, 1957, whose
blackening silver affirms rather than denies time, he also demonstrated a de-
sire to achieve the goal Kenneth Burke attributed to the users of the mystic
oxymoron: to move beyond the realm of becoming to that of being.104
It is doubtful if Wittgenstein's ideas were known by many Abstract Expres-
sionists until after mid-century.105 Related ideas, however, were available in
the forties through the writing of New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, whose
classic treatise The Well Wrought Urn contained two chapters on paradox.
Major poets like John Donne and William Wordsworth, Brooks told his read-
ers, could only have accomplished the dignity and precision of their major
poems by the use of paradox. Most of the language of lovers as well as that of
religion is paradox, he observed, quoting such biblical oxymorons as "He

466 1980s
who would save his life must lose it" and "The last shall be first." "Indeed," he
observed, "almost any insight important enough to warrant a great poem ap-
parently has to be stated in such terms."106
The conflict between visual and verbal communications, between the in-
stinctual and the intellectual, remarked by artists and writers for centuries, is
such a paradox, and one which Lee Krasner was well-situated to recognize.
By 1946, when she painted Noon, Krasner had worked extensively with Cub-
ist and Expressionist representational systems, to which she had been intro-
duced in her years as a student of Hans Hofmann. Her interest in the power
of symbols may have begun in the Hebrew mysticism she experienced in
childhood, and it continued in her adult interest in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian,
Celtic, and medieval scroll writing. She had read Jung's Integration of Person-
ality and John Graham's Jungian System and Dialectics of Art, with its rever-
ence for "primitive" art, and had, with Jackson Pollock, played at the Freudian
game of Cadavre Exquis with the Mattas, the Motherwells, and the Bazi-
oteses.107 By Krasner's repeated attestation, her art was based on her own ex-
perience, on her own "inner rhythm"; yet at the same time, her desire to com-
municate, to define her language in respect to the history of art was intense. In
the late 19305, Krasner had written on the wall of her studio this quotation
from Delmore Schwartz's A Season in Hell:

To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast must I adore?
What holy image is attacked: what hearts shall I break?
What lie must I maintain? In what blood tread?108

One may read the regular containment of opulently painted forms in the
lyric Noon, as well as the whole following little image series, with its reference
to chance and control in the amalgam of written and drawn line as a series of
oxymorons where the line exists, paradoxically, as both things at once. In con-
trast to her earlier work in which a reference to a still life or a figure hovered,
however obscurely, the dead heat of the interlocked opposites in the little im-
age series begs the question of the existence of a realm of timeless stasis. Com-
menting on her merging of script and image, the organic and the abstract,
Krasner has said, "As I see both scales, I need to merge these two into the
ever-present. What they symbolize I have never stopped to decide. You might
want to read it as matter and spirit. The need to merge as against the need to
separate."109
Clyfford Still's work after 1948 may also be considered in terms of a desire

1980s 467
 to escape the claims of time. Unlike Newman and Rothko, Still did not intend
his tautological structures as metaphysical analogies of place or tragic irony.110
He saw his canvasses as operations of consciousness, the product of the con-
frontation of life and death forces in which self determination—freedom—was
the prize.111 He found it necessary to withdraw his paintings from the Betty
Parsons Gallery in 1948 and to officially remove the titles applied to them,
whether by himself or by others, because referential titles (such as Premoni-
tion, Green Wheat, and Yellow Pelvis, titles he used in an exhibition in K)43)112
gave the unavoidable impression that the work referred to something beyond
itself.113 During the next two years, as he worked out his version of the oxy-
moron in works like Oil on Canvas ig4g-C (PH-no), Still showed work in
public only once, and that a painting done in 1947.114 In the summer of 1950,
he wrote to a friend of this new approach he had developed: "A new implica-
tion, as unique as any science or form can be, is created. The old must be only
its own proof. My work is equally independent at the moment—alive now, not
proven by a continuum."115 "I paint only myself, not nature," Still told an
interviewer in 1961.116
There were critics, such as Jermayne MacAgy, who saw by 1948 a distinc-
tion between the work of abstract painters who remained with metaphor and
those who attempted to abandon this aspect of it:

If we acknowledge the spatial idiom itself as a profound philosophical sym-

bol, we may assume that these painters [John Atherton, I. Rice Pereira,
Robert Motherwell], however various their outlook, depend in some ways
on certain dimensional limits of knowledge. In recent years it has become in-
creasingly apparent that Clyffbrd Still and Mark Rothko have been moving
beyond these limits Their painting eludes the hallmarks of conventional
spatial meaning. It is a common practice of abstract painters to refer to three-
dimensional space by a kind of pictorial metaphor.... Still and Rothko move
in the opposite direction. Their metaphor invests the physical dimensions of
painting with the values of a human realm that has been inaccessible to west-
ern art.117

MacAgy saw the two-dimensionality of Still's and Rothko's work in the late
forties as an attempt to escape reference to the physical world. Her treatment
of the elusion of those conventions by Rothko and Still indicates her compre-
hension of their program and, as her last sentence indicates, her belief in their
accomplishment.
Some critics not only recognized the departure on the part of some of the

468 1980s
 Abstract Expressionists from more conventional rhetorical devices, but in-
vented remarkable strategies of their own that permitted them to discuss the
art, despite its resistance to interpretation. Harold Rosenberg developed an
existential argument that avoided the necessity of interpreting specifics by
claiming that the real significance lay not in the work, but in the sincerity with
which the painter applied his paint; the canvas was the arena in which the art-
ist committed himself to courageously unpremeditated painterly choices.118
The meaning, Rosenberg implied, lay in this action, in these decisions, not in
their product: the painting was only a ghost.
Clement Greenberg avoided the analysis of referring altogether by denying
that significant contemporary art had subject matter. He distinguished be-
tween subject matter and content: "every work of art must have content, but
... subject matter is something the artist does or does not have in mind when
he is actually at work."119 And for Greenberg, one might say, the medium
was the message: "The message of modern art, abstract or not, Matisse's,
Picasso's, or Mondrian's, is precisely that means are content."120 For Green-
berg, the function of advanced art was not to refer to objects or events beyond
the works of art themselves. That was the job of literature. Painting and sculp-
ture were to differentiate themselves from literature by jettisoning these (for
them) expendable conventions. Thus the visual arts might be presented as co-
herent systems based purely on optical qualities, for painting, or purely on
three-dimensional relationships, for sculpture.121
If one considers that when both of these essays were written many of the
artists discussed were working with oxymoronic structures, and that Rosen-
berg and Greenberg were in frequent touch with a number of these artists
(significantly, not the same ones: Rosenberg was close to Gorky, de Kooning,
Newman, Motherwell, and Baziotes; Greenberg was more interested in the
work of Smith, Still, and, of course, Pollock), it is not surprising that they
supported, each in his own way, the concept that Abstract Expressionism was
art that did not refer.122 The acceptance by these critics of the works as things-
in-themselves and their invention of critical strategies based on that accept-
ance have seemed odd and even somewhat perverse to later historians, espe-
cially when these strategies were retroactively used to discourage the search
for subject matter in earlier works. As a result, scholars have engaged in
increasing numbers in a series of fascinating investigations that read like
accounts of scientific discoveries, or detective stories, aimed at revealing
just what this rather thoroughly ignored subject-matter was.123
One effect of this barrage of new information, however, has been that of

1980s 469
 almost canceling out aspects of the original criticism that were valid. As this
analysis suggests, Rosenberg and Greenberg were not off the mark at all, in
one sense. They recognized that a major element of Abstract Expressionism
at this definitive stage of its development involved the rather stunning attempt
to escape from the status of art as a structure of meaning.124 Both of these ma-
jor critics developed their critical frameworks at least in part to accommodate
the artists' interest in, and, in some cases, determination to avoid, traditional
rhetorical structures.125 Even the relationships described here as the meta-
phor and the icon, some of these artists seemed to feel, married meaning to re-
ferring, nervously restraining it from intercourse with being. Although the
bulk of recent scholarship on Abstract Expressionism has concentrated on
the retrieval of the subject-matter avoided by early criticism, not all more con-
temporary scholars are willing to dismiss the validity of the antirhetorical
basis of such early criticism.
Hubert Damisch, for instance, approached the subject by hailing Erwin
Panofsky's iconology as a salutary, if finally unsuccessful, attempt to escape
from traditional iconography that has tended to treat the appearance of a
work as merely the prop for a signifier that comes from outside. Damisch is
more hopeful about the promise of Charles Peirce's late distinction between
the icon and the hypoicon, an idea that does not follow the representational
behavior of a sign, and yet does refer, in what Damisch terms "some mysteri-
ous way." Perhaps the reason we cannot understand the ideas presented by
artists such as Rothko and Newman is because they have invented a new way
for signs to function, and we know only the old way—where the work is a vehi-
cle for the "real" meaning. These artists, Damisch suggests, "seem to carry
out their work on the near side of the figure if not against it, on the near side
of the sign, if not against it."126 Art history has not progressed much beyond
iconography, Damisch implied, but the "hypoiconic" practices of some Ab-
stract Expressionists may point the way.
Other critics, however, saw less promise in nonrhetorical positions. As
Theodor Adorno has argued, when one collapses a sign into its signifier,
meaning becomes a matter of faith, not of reason. His argument merits close
reading: "The completely demythologized fact," as he wrote [we could con-
sider this to include such objects as Newman's work after 1948, for instance;
Pollock's "classical" paintings; Ferber's sculptures from the late forties; some
of Smith's Cubis and perhaps some of his Circles and Zigs\, "would withhold
itself from language [would be beyond interpretation]; through the mere act
of intending the fact becomes an other [an other language, that is: by merely

470 1980s
coming into existence through human hands, Adorno argues here, a fact, art,
necessarily refers]—at least measured in terms of its idol of pure accessibility.
That without language there is no fact [that unless a thing refers it is not art]
remains, even so, the thorn in the flesh and the theme of positivism [therefore
critics like Greenberg and Susan Sontag must write about the impossibility
of interpretation], since it is here that the stubbornly mythical remainder of
language [the incapability of interpretation] is revealed."127
Applied to "mature" Abstract Expressionism, Adorno's observations about
existential thought may be taken to imply that while it is true, one could say,
along with Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Damisch, that content—meaning in
the traditional sense—in this art is just not the point, one cannot therefore as-
sume that the work is beyond interpretation. As Adorno suggests, the refusal
to participate in one language becomes, perforce, another.128 "In the plastic
arts," wrote Ruth Field, "this annihilation of distance had resulted in a paint-
ing about painting."129 The later art and statements of Reinhardt, Still, and
Ferber are inescapably, at least on one level, about the referential status of their
work: they refer to the types of referring addressed in this essay. For Adorno
this was a negative strategy, an attempt to attain a position beyond criticism,
beyond dialectic adjustment. The later work of a number of Abstract Expres-
sionists presents evidence that they saw it this way too.

Allegory

Some of the artists who appeared to adopt, or who considered at one point
in their careers the possibility of adopting a nonreferential position, later
abandoned its strictures.130 Pollock, Smith, and Krasner, in particular, devel-
oped procedures involving pastiche, the simultaneous presentation of jar-
ringly dichotomous codes, signaling the reemergence in their work of that
bête noir, allegory.131 Other artists, including Motherwell and Gottlieb, also
evolved such procedures without, however, attempting to abandon represen-
tational ambitions first. I mentioned earlier in this essay the current interest in
a revival of an allegorical impulse in the arts; I would like to suggest here that
an assessment of that réévaluation (which is beginning to look less like a re-
vival than a re-cognition) should include certain late Abstract Expressionist
practices whose allegorizing tendencies, expressed in pastiche, may now
finally be championed rather than disparaged. Later Abstract Expressionism
may be divided between those artists who accepted not only the inevitability
but the desirability of referring, and those—like Reinhardt and Still—who did
not.

1980s 471
 Some critics, as noted earlier, have seen the reemergence of allegory as a
process of decay in which the human will is no longer able to endow objects
with meaning.132 Late Abstract Expressionist allegory, however, must not be
read as a wholly, or even mostly negative statement, even though it unques-
tionably represents a shattering freedom that can exist only by bursting the
dream of a universal model of meaning. Allegory is intertextual: in it, one text
is read through another, as the Old Testament becomes allegorical when it is
read through the New. The allegorist uses already existing images and stories
(as de Kooning used collage procedures in the "Woman" images; as Krasner
used her own cut-up paintings, scraps of handmade paper, dripped and drawn
line, and images of eyes and flowers as collage elements in her paintings of the
early fifties; and, of course, as Motherwell, the Abstract Expressionist most
fully and continuously attuned to collage, has used it throughout his career)133
but not to restore their original meaning. Rather, he or she replaces the old
meaning with new ones, which are, nevertheless, dependent on the original
meaning for their point. Thus allegory's "artificiality" is also the source of its
strength: it redeems the past for the present.
When Pollock reintroduced discernible figures into his work in 1951 (see,
for example, Portrait and a Dream, 1953), he abandoned the sovereign privi-
lege accorded to the icon, which as the most extreme type of metaphor, and
therefore the furthest removed from the artificiality of allegory, was regarded
as the utmost figure of authenticity. The later Pollock appeared to sense the
interdependence in allegory of metaphor—how the cadence of his strokes em-
bodied his spirit ("I am nature")—and a different kind of connection: me-
tonymy, an accidental juxtaposition of items in time ("When you're painting
out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge").134 One could see Pol-
lock's rediscovery of allegory in the terms of de Man's Rousseau, for whom
the rediscovery, far from being easy or spontaneous, implied "instead the dis-
continuity of a renunciation, even of a sacrifice."135
Like Pollock, Smith also produced later works that brought back earlier
modes, the symbolic and the iconic as well as antirepresentational devices, us-
ing them in an allegorical pastiche, that is, as systems of representation whose
juxtaposition in a single piece questions the possibility of representation but
[in] Smith causes different ways of representing, or figuring, to operate simul-
taneously in the same work. One can discern found objects, the vise, for ex-
ample, that iconically retain their identity while they represent a function. If
Volton XX is a toolbench, however, in its overall configuration it also makes us
think of a still life. And last but not least, the toolbench, as the locus of those

472 1980s
 devices—hammers, pincers, welding equipment, and so forth—through which
the sculptor empowers himself to perform heroic feats, was a part of the sub-
ject matter of the "Voltris": as part of what that tour de force was about.136
One could say, then, that Volton XX is at once the artist's tools, his model, and
his product: it is signified, signifier, and sign. Like Portrait and a Dream,
Volton XX mixes modes of signifying, presenting presentation and representa-
tion in a melange that questions whether any agency of meaning may claim
universal superiority.
The allegorical procedures of this kind of montage, however, also had an-
other effect, one that would have been abhorred by Reinhardt and Still but
that was, one suspects, courted by the later Pollock, by Smith, by Gottlieb,
by Krasner, Bourgeois, de Kooning, and other Abstract Expressionists whose
work either swung back and forth between modes of representation or who
incorporated more than one mode in the same work. As a number of recent
scholars have remarked, allegorical procedures empty images of their claim to
metaphysical authority.137 If an artist uses symbol and icon at the same time,
both modes are drained of claims to authenticity. Robert Motherwell mixed
these modes in his Je t'aime series; the phrase "je t'aime" in Je t'aime IV, for
instance, symbolically turns the meeting of the figure on the right and the
taller figure on the left into a lover's discussion. At the same time, this narra-
tive reading contrasts with the ambiguous address of the written phrase. Was
the painter saying "je t'aime" to this particular painting, to painting itself, or
was he addressing the phrase to the viewer, making the whole painting a kind
of iconic love letter to humanity that announces and performs its function at
the same time? Like the bricks in the Great Wall of China, the various possi-
ble meanings of these works may be carried off by their audience to build with
according to the codes of their own desires. The kind of queasiness many
viewers feel before this series may be ascribed not only to their (the viewers')
resistance to sentimentality, but also to this mixing of modes, a bricolage that
undercuts the very possibility of authenticity.
The switch by some Abstract Expressionists to multiple and simultaneous
kinds of signification and the alternate uses by others of various ways of refer-
ring imply a belief that the human search for a primordial totality is in vain—
that a God's-eye view is not available. As de Kooning wrote in 1951, "Insofar
as we understand the universe—if it can be understood—our doings must
have some desire for order in them; but from the point of view of the universe,
they must be very grotesque."138
It is possible, in fact, to read the allover configuration of much Abstract

1980s 473
 Expressionist painting as the allegorical legacy of these painters' and sculp-
tors' attempt to disengage themselves from the metonymous, horizontal struc-
ture of narrative. In classical rhetoric, allegory is defined as a single metaphor
in continuous series. Much classic Abstract Expressionism may be read as
metaphor multiplied into sequential structure, as in Pollock's rhythmic inter-
laces, de Kooning's black-and-white paintings, Krasner's little image series,
Bourgeois's figures, and Gottlieb's web paintings.139
One could, then, with hindsight, define the late procedures of certain
Abstract Expressionists as postmodern. We have seen that the gnomic self-
sufficiency of classic or "high" Abstract Expressionism (in which, as noted
above, Abstract Expressionists engaged to varying degrees) assumed that the
rhetorical assumption that images refer could be bracketed, and that the art
object could be a thing-in-itself. Postmodernism practice and some later Ab-
stract Expressionists, in contrast to this, do not attempt to suspend reference,
but work instead to compare and problematize the activity of referring.140
The difference between this postmodern allegory and the kind of allegory
the Abstract Expressionists were trying to escape in the early forties is that
this newer allegory more openly investigates metaphor and metonymy simul-
taneously: it examines the meanings available in the configuration and rela-
tion of the images themselves and compares these observations with the
meanings available in the things to which the titles and images refer.141 Thus
one could say that later Abstract Expressionist construction juxtaposes the
insights at which Damisch hints to the imperatives of Adorno in a conversa-
tion whose contradictions contemporary artists continue to plumb.

Notes

1. Clement Greenberg, interview with James T. Valliere, 1972. Jackson Pollock

Papers, AAA-SI, 3084:827-29.
2. For Gorky, see Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols (Mont-
clair, N.J.: Allanheld &: Shram, 1980); the literature on Pollock's Jungian con-
cerns includes articles and comments by David Freke, Donald Gordon, Rosalind
Krauss, Elizabeth Langhorne, David Rubin, William Rubin, Irving Sandier,
Jonathan Welch, and Judith Wolfe. The connection in David Smith's work be-
tween sexual aggression and war has been most effectively chronicled by Robert
S. Lubar and by Justin Carlino. See also note 12.
3. W.M. Parrish, "The Tradition of Rhetoric," The Quarterly Journal of Speech
(Urbana-Champaign), Dec. 1947, pp. 464-67; James H. McBurney and Ernest
J. Wrage, The Art of Good Speech (New York: Prentice Hall, 1953), pp. 8-15
and 103-5; Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric," A llegories of Reading (New

474 1980s
 Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 10. See Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 189, for a comment that indicates that of
these two meanings of "rhetoric," the former is still the most familiar.
4. William Baziotes, "Symposium: The Creative Ргосе88,'МД Jan. 15,1954, p. 33.
5. In 1943, Joseph Shipley's Dictionary of World Literature defined allegory as "an
extended story that may hold interest for the surface tale . . . as well as for the
(usually ethical) meaning borne along." A symbol, on the other hand, was "a sign
of something beyond the object or idea that it denotes, of another level of
significance that somehow reaches forth to embrace the spirit, mankind, the mys-
teries words cannot otherwise capture that underlie and determine the universe
and human destiny" (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1943), pp. 21 and
568. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1964) has since examined the basis of the romantic prejudice against
allegory. Useful discussions on the historical distinction between symbol and
allegory may be found also in Joel Fineman, "The Structure of Allegorical De-
sire," in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 27-30; Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of
Temporality," in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1983 [1971]), pp. 187-228; and Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward
a Theory of Postmodernism," October (Cambridge, Mass.), Spring 1980, pp.
67-80.
6. For Pollock's development see the essay by Eugene Thaw in Francis V. O'Con-
nor and Eugene Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1979), vol. i, pp. xiv-xvi.
7. W. Jackson Rushing has convincingly compared the configuration and place-
ment of the figures in the Pollock painting to a pair of "guardian" officials illus-
trated in an article about the Zia Pueblo Indians in the Bureau of American Eth-
nology Report of 1894. "Jackson Pollock and Native American Indian Art," a
paper given at the College Art Association Conference, New York, Feb., 1986.
8. One of the most influential distinctions between metaphor and metonymy was
made by Roman Jakobson in "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasie
disturbances," in Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language ( Janua
Linguarum, Series Minor I, The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 69-96. Terence
Hawkes summarizes the aspects of Jakobson's discussion relevant to this essay
in Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp.
76-87. Allegory was linked to metonymy before Jakobson, however, as outlined
in Fineman, "The Structure of Allegorical Desire." For a discussion of some of
the métonymie characteristics of allegorical painting see Fletcher, Allegory, pp.
86-88.
9. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1955), vol.1, p. 211.
10. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1982 [1942]), pp. 281, 284-87. This determination of a symbol as a term
whose meaning is not single is quite different from its usage in some psychologi-

1980s 475
 cal literature. Jacques Lacan's distinctions between the Symbolic and Imaginary
stages of child development have been brought into the discussion of contempo-
rary art by Rosalind Krauss. In "Notes on the Index," Part i, following Lacan,
she characterized the symbol as an arbitrary, stable, preestablished relationship.
She does so to emphasize the causally determined, indexical nature of shifters,
pronouns like you, and adverbs like here, whose meaning depends on their con-
text. October (Cambridge, Mass.), Spring 1977, p. 70. In her emphasis on the
static nature of the symbol, Krauss participates in a more general current dissat-
isfaction with symbol and metaphor as superior figures. See note 5.
11. Karen Wilkin, David Smith (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), pp. 34-35.
12. Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Mass.:
MIT Press, 1971), pp. 62-75; Robert Lubar, "Metaphor and Meaning in David
Smith's Jurassic Bird," AM, Sept. 1984, pp. 78-86;Justin Carlino, "The Signifi-
cance of the Cannon in the Work of David Smith," a paper given at the Fifth An-
nual Symposium on Contemporary Art, Fashion Institute of Technology, New
York, Oct. 18,1985.
13. Richard Poussette-Dart, talk at the Boston Museum School, 1951. Reprinted in
Maurice Tuchman, New York School (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic So-
ciety, 1965), p. 125.
14. Quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn
Books, 1961 [1957]), p. 98.
15. Rothko's sense in this matter was allied to that of Bergson, who, as Langer noted
in 1942, speculated that a symbolism of light and color, or of tone, that was not
linked to verbal, i.e., rational knowledge, might present the viewer with a kind of
"non-discursive symbolism ... which the mind reads in a flash." Langer, Philoso-
phy in a New Key, p. 98.
16. Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1936), p. 66.
17. L. Bailey Van Hook, "Robert MotherwelPs Mallarmé''s Swan" AM, Jan. 1983,
pp. 104-5; MotherwelPs quotation in Van Hook reprinted from Robert Mother-
well, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," AD, Feb. 1951, p. 27. For Baziotes' inter-
est in symbolism, see the essays by Barbara Cavalière and Mona Hadler in Wil-
liam Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition, organized by Michael Preble (Newport
Beach, Calif.: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1978).
18. One should note, however, that unlike earlier works such as Pancho Villa, Dead
and Alive, 1943, whose two figures call to mind the living and dead Mexican
hero, Mallarme's Swan does not display such commonly recognized forms. It
thus spans the rhetorical distance between the work of the earlier forties and the
more metaphorical, iconic mode of the Spanish Elegies.
19. As far as this author knows, there is no single source that catalogues the multifar-
ious psychological aspects of Abstract Expressionism in general, and it is not
possible here to give more than some brief references. Sources include the writ-
ing of scholars mentioned in note 3 as well as work by Mary Davis MacNaughton
and Stephen Polcari.
20. W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks provide an overview of criticism based

476 1980s
 on myth in Chapter 31, "Myth and Archetype," of their Literary Criticism (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969).
21. Sigmund Freud, the Standard Edition, 25 vols., trans, and ed. James Strachey
(London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 5, Chapter
6 (E), "Representation by Symbols in Dreams—Some Further Typical Dreams,"
pp. 352-53, 360,394. For further discussion of the development of Freud's un-
derstanding of the function of the symbol, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philoso-
phy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 96-100.
22. For a discussion of the possible levels of meaning in The Liver is the Cock's Comb
see Rand, Arshile Gorky, The Implications of Symbols, pp. 183-86.
23. Ibid., p. 186; Ann Gibson, "Theory Undeclared: Avant-Garde Magazines as a
Guide to Abstract Expressionist Images and Ideas," Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of
Delaware, 1984, pp. 289-90.
24. Gorky had opportunities to know about Freud in detail. Besides his close rela-
tionship with the Surrealist Matta and his association with André Breton (Bre-
ton gave Gorky many of his titles [David Hare, interview with the author, New
York, Jan. 26,1982]), whose Freudian concerns Gorky could hardly have escaped,
Gorky himself was an intellectual omnivore. As May Natalie Tabak, widow of
Harold Rosenberg, recalled, "the idea of Gorky not knowing anything that was
going on was just incomprehensible. He got letters from Europe, he got maga-
zines from Europe. Before a new movement started, he'd know about it. Even
the papers, the magazines he couldn't read himself, he'd get somebody to read
for him. He got everything, he knew everything that was going on. All of us, for
about twenty years, knew Gorky on different levels. He was a complicated man."
Interview with the author, New York, Apr. 1982.
25. Freud's conception of the symbol as a double-meaning but conventional sign
was essentially similar to that formulated by Charles Saunders Peirce in the best-
known of his many classifications of signs. Peirce's distinctions between symbol
and icon were not always consistent, but by the forties, scholars defined Peirce's
symbol as a sign that represents its object by a conventional rule used by the ob-
server. Although Peirce did discuss the function of symbols, his definition of the
icon (treated later in this essay) is quite close to some Abstract Expressionists'
understanding of their practices. For a discussion of Peirce as he was read in the
forties, see Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks, "Peirce's Sixty-six Signs," The Journal
of Philosophy (New York), no. 42,1945, pp. 383-88; and Arthur Burks, "Icon, In-
dex, and Symbol," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Buffalo), no. 9,
1948-49, pp. 674-75.
26. Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: W.S. Dell & C.F.
Baynes,i933),p.i72.
27. Carl Gustav Jung, The Integration of Personality. Trans. Stanley Dell (New York:
Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1939), pp. 53,275-76.
28. Ibid., p. 89.
29. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 285.
30. Leo Yamin, telephone interview with the author, Mar. 21, 1986. Yamin, a poet,

1980s 477
 and his wife, the painter Alice Yamin, were close friends of the Barnett Newmans
and the Adolph Gottliebs throughout the thirties and forties. For Pollock's own-
ership of Langer's book, see O'Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 195.
31. Wayne Anderson, American Sculpture in Process: igjo-igyo (Greenwich, Conn.:
New York Graphic Society, 1975), p. 66; Joan Pachner, "Theodor Roszak and
David Smith: A Question of Balance," AM, Feb. 1984, pp. 107,114, note 56.
32. Quoted in Stewart Buettner, American Art Theory: 1945-1970 (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 82. The quotation is excerpted from an interview
with James Eliot, 1956, part 2, AAA-SI.
33. Robert Lubar, "Metaphor and Meaning in David Smith's Jurassic Bird" pp.
78-86, esp. pp. 79, 85. As the title indicates, Lubar has used the term metaphor
where I would use symbol. My point here is not to dispute his usage. There are
metaphorical relations as well as symbolic elements in Jurassic Bird. The pur-
pose of this essay is to distinguish more clearly among various ways of referring
and of avoiding reference so that such distinctions may be discussed.
34. Mary Davis MacNaughton, "Adolph Gottlieb: His Life and Art," Part i in Adolph
Gottlieb (New York: The Arts Publisher, Inc., 1981), p. 26, note 14 and Appendix
A, p. 169. Irving Sandier, The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Harper
& Row, Publishers, 1970), p. 70, note 2.
35. Quoted by Mary Davis MacNaughton in Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective (New
York: The Arts Publisher, Inc. in association with the Adolph and Esther Gott-
lieb Foundation, Inc., 1981), p. 38, from a statement by Gottlieb in "American
Exhibit Scores," The American Weekend, Apr. 18,1959, p. 12.
36. MacNaughton, Adolph Gottlieb, p. 34.
37. For Rothko, see Bonnie Clearwater, Mark Rothko: Works on Paper (New York:
Hudson Hills, 1984), p. 26. Andersen, American Sculpture in Process, p. 60.
38. Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 173. In 1949, Greenberg remarked on the lack
of this Gothic spirit in modern life, and, in an earlier article, referred to Pollock's
work as Gothic, narrow, and powerful. "Our Period Style," Partisan Review
(New York), Nov. 1949, p. 1135, and "The Present Prospects of American Paint-
ing and Sculpture," Horizon (New York), Oct. 1947, p. 27.
39. Scholarship since the fifties would dispute the validity of metaphor's claim to
nonmetonymic as well as to nonmimetic superiority (for instance, de Man,
"Semiology and Rhetoric," pp. 12-15). Such thinking is responsible for the reval-
orization of allegory indicated in notes 5 and 12 and the positive description of
allegorical pastiche at the end of this essay. For a survey of some connections be-
tween mimesis and metonymy, see Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), pp. 78-82.
40. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 93.
41. Ibid., pp. 91-98; Gibson, "Theory Undeclared," pp. 207-12.
42. Joseph T. Shipley, The Dictionary of World Literature (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1943), pp. 377-78. See pp. 567-68 for metaphor as a type of symbol.
43. Gibson, "Theory Undeclared," pp. 211-19.

478 1980s
44- André Breton, "Rising Sign," 1947, in Franklin Rosemont, ed. What Is Surreal-
ism? (New York: Monad Press, 1978), p. 281.
45. Krauss, for instance, believes with justification that The Hero is female, while I
maintain that it is Smith himself. See note 42.
46. LA. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), es-
pecially Ch. 5, "Metaphor," and Ch. 6, "Command of Metaphor."
47. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (New York: New Directions,
1951), Ch. 18; Max Black, "Metaphor," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
(London), New Series, vol. i, 1955, pp. 273-94. Although the status of the meta-
phor, like the symbol, as the dominant and truest rhetorical figure has come un-
der fire in the last decades, it continues to elicit much interest among scholars.
See, for instance, Terence Hawkes's survey, Metaphor (London: Methuen, 1972),
On Metaphor, collected essays by various scholars, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), and the experientialist approach of George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1980).
48. In his introductory essay to American Art at Mid-Century, E.A. Carmean, Jr.,
suggested that in Abstract Expressionist painting, metaphors are stated struc-
turally rather than symbolically. "A study of this transformation of the subject
from symbol to structure would clearly be of importance, if it were possible," he
remarked. The definition of the interactive aspect of later Abstract Expressionist
metaphor, above, and of its ideographic and iconic dimensions, which follows in
this essay, attempts to articulate the transition noted by Carmean.
49. Seymour Lipton Papers, AAA-SI, 0386:0074.
50. Interview with the author, Orient Point, Long Island, Feb. 20,1982. Grippe was
one of the artists invited; however, he had already discarded the mimetic symbol-
ism of the hands and mouths apparent in The City #i for the more constructive
direction of Improvisation, 1944.
51. Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon
Sacks, pp. 20-21.
52. "Still," ЛД May 1947, p. 50.
53. Emily Genauer, review of sculptures chosen for an international competition
whose theme was "The Unknown Political Prisoner," sponsored by the London
Institute of Contemporary Art. New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 4,1953.
54. Black, "Metaphor," p. 286.
55. For a discussion of Still's development in these years, see Stephen Polcari, "The
Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Clyfford S till,"-4/, May/June 1982,
pp. 23-27.
56. Ibid.
57. Newman would probably have included the work of other artists, such as Gott-
lieb, especially, but the show consisted only of artists who were currently show-
ing with Betty Parsons.
58. Douglas MacAgy, "A Symposium: The State of American Art," Magazine of Art

1980s 479
 (Washington, D.C.), Mar. 1949, p. 94. Quoted in Stephen С. Foster, The Critics
of Abstract Expressionism (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1980),
p. 40.
59. Ruth Field, "Modern Poetry: The Flat Landscape," Trans/formation (New York),
vol. 1,1952, pp. 152-53.
60. This observation is similar to Paul de Man's arguments for the necessity of rheto-
ric devices, such as metaphor, to language, and therefore to thought itself. "The
Epistemology of Metaphor," in Sacks, éd., On Metaphor, p. 17.
61. Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," Mar-
gins of Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 213.
62. "Metaphor and Transcendence," in Sacks, éd., On Metaphor, p. 78.
63. Barnett Newman, "The Ideographic Picture" (New York: Betty Parsons Gallery,
1947). Reprinted in Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1970), pp. 550-51. Original, with a list of titles of artists' works,
in Betty Parsons gallery files.
64. Ezra Pound, А В С of Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1934), p. 7.
65. For a discussion of Pound's theory of the ideogram and his debt to Ernest Fenel-
losa, see Frederick K. Hargreaves,Jr., "The Concept of Private Meaning in Mod-
ern Criticism," Critical Inquiry (Chicago), Summer 1981, pp. 734-35. Newman
approximated this thought not only in his essay, "The Ideographic Picture," but
also in his essay to accompany the Northwest Coast Indian Painting exhibition at
the Betty Parsons Gallery in the fall of 1946.1 am grateful to Jack Tilton for pro-
viding me with a copy of this essay from the Betty Parsons gallery files.
Goldwater used Albert Aurier's distinction between academic idéalisme and
the idéasme of the Symbolists. Academic idéalisme was merely personification or
allegory, whereas idéasme was true Symbolism, in which the artist sought an ex-
pressive unit of form and meaning. Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (London: Pen-
guin Books, Ltd., 1979), p. 9; see also p. 94 and note 18.
66. Ezra Pound, Instigations (New York: Boni &, Liveright, 1920), p. 376.
67. Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955 [1927]),
p. 184.
68. These dimensions were, however, explored by Boas's students, such as Ruth
Benedict, to whose ideas, such as those expressed in Patterns of Culture, the Ab-
stract Expressionists were closer than they were to those of her mentor. See
"Primitivism as a Theme," introduction to Ch. 12, Part 2, in Gibson, "Theory
Undeclared."
69. Peirce defined and redefined his terms over the course of his career. For an esti-
mate of his most considered definitions of these terms, see Arthur W. Burks,
"Icon, Index, and Symbol," pp. 673-89.
70. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., The Collected Papers of Charles Saun-
ders Peirce, Vols. 1-6 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1931-1935), vol. 2, pp.
157,247.
71. For a discussion of the role of the interprétant in Peirce's sign system, see Burks,
"Icon, Index, and Symbol," pp. 674-77.

480 1980s
72. Harold Rosenberg, "Icon Maker: Barnett Newman," The Redefinition of Art
(New York, Collier Books, 1972), pp. 96-97.
73. Rothko's move from the Surrealistic biomorphism of his undersea creatures to
the more abstract work of the late forties coincided with a lessened concentra-
tion on watercolor as a medium and more on oil on canvas. Bonnie Clearwater,
Mark Rothko: Works on Paper, pp. 31-32. For Rothko's religious subjects, see
Anna Chave, Mark Rothko's Subjects (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1983).
74. Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process," in Sacks, On Metaphor, p. 148.
75. Leo Yamin, letter to the author, Aug. 9,1986; telephone interview with the au-
thor, Mar. 21,1986.
76. Art Bulletin (New York), Mar. 1949, pp. 72-73.1 am grateful to Professor Creigh-
ton Gilbert for calling my attention to Morris's book and Gombrich's review of
it.
77. David Loshak, letter to the authorjan. 23,1982. For more on Iconograph, its staff,
contributors, and its program, see Gibson, "Theory Undeclared," Part i, Ch. i.
78. José Ortega y Gasset, "An Essay in Aesthetics by way of a Preface," [1914] in Phe-
nomenology and Art, Philip W. Silver (New York: W. W. Norton &, Co., Inc.,
1975), pp. 139-40.
79. For an examination of some of Pollock's possible immediate sources for imagery
involving the significance of the eye, see Jeanne Siegel, "The Image of the Eye
in Surrealist Art and Its Psychoanalytical Sources, Part I: The Mythic Eye,"
AM, Feb. 1982, pp. 102-06; and "Part II: René Magritte," AM, Mar. 1982, pp.
116-19.
80. Charles Saunders Peirce, Collected Papers, 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1931-58), vol. 3, p. 362.
81. E.G. Goossen, Herbert Ferber (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981), p. 67.
82. Ibid.
83. See, for instance, Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Ro-
mantic Tradition (New York: Harper &, Row Publishers, Inc., 1975), pp. 210-11.
84. Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now," Tiger's Eye (New York), Dec. 1948,
P. 53-
85. Ibid., pp. 52-53-
86. Kenneth Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," Trans/formation (New
York), vol. 2,1944, PP-164-65.
87. For a discussion of this aspect of the sublime, see Jean-François Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1979]), pp.
77-78. My thanks to Anna Chave for this suggestion.
88. Dore Ashton, "Art: Lecture by Mark Rothko," New York Times, Oct. 31, 1958,
p. 26.
89. Anna Chave, "Mark Rothko's Subject-Matter," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale Univ.,
1982, esp. pp. 108-9,176.
90. Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," pp. 164-65.
91. Reinhardt had experimented with a more obvious interpretation of the fusion of
word and image that the word iconograph implied, in works such as his Untitled

1980s 481
 of 1947, reproduced in Ad Reinhardt (New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 1981), p. 15.
92. Ad Reinhardt, "25 Lines of Words on Art," It Is (New York), Spring 1958, p. 42.
I wish to thank Adrian Jones for this reading of Reinhardt's Red Abstract.
93. Ibid.
94. Ad Reinhardt in Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects (New York: New York
Cultural Center, 1970), p. 46.
95. For a Hegelian reading of Pollock's poured paintings, see Rosalind Krauss, "Con-
tra Carmean: The Abstract Pollock," Art in Am., Summer 1982, pp. 123-31 ff.
96. It appears that this "veiling" was intentional on Pollock's part in these years. Pol-
lock's wife, Lee Krasner, was not the only one to indicate this (O'Connor and
Thaw, Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, p. 263). Edward T. Hults remembers being in Pol-
lock's studio and pointing out what looked to him like a horse's head in a big can-
vas on the floor. Pollock got a can of paint and obliterated it, saying, "Now you
don't see no more horse's head." Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave (New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1985), pp. 140-41.
97. Robert Motherwell, "A Conversation at Lunch," in An Exhibition of the Work of
Robert Mother-well (Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Museum of Art, 1963),
n.p. Dore Ashton affirms that this is still the case, "On Motherwell," in Robert
Motherwell (New York: Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Abbeville Press, 1983),
PP. 34-37-
98. For this idea regarding the function of color and for the previous point about the
function of naming when the name and the referent don't correspond, I am in-
debted to the discussions in Steven Winspur, "The Poetic Significance of the
Thing-in-Itself," Sub-stance (Madison, Wise.) vol. 12, note 4,1983, pp. 41-49.
99. Clyfford Still in Clyfford Still (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, 1976), p. 122.
100. Angus Fletcher, "Wittgenstein's Gnomics: Thinking a Poem." Address given
at Yale Univ., New Haven, Conn., Mar. 25, 1986. Fletcher's reference was to
Wittgenstein's observations on the difficulty of associating in any secure way
color to objects in Remarks on Color, éd. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1977).
101. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 6.522.
102. Jorn K. Bramann, Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Modern Arts (Rochester,
N.Y.: Adler Publishing Co., 1985), pp. 18-20.
103. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1957), p. 122.
104. Kenneth Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," pp. 164-65.
105. Wittgenstein was read and discussed by Abstract Expressionists and others,
but not until the fifties. Lionel Abel, interview with the author, New York, July
29,1982.
106. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovano-
vich, Publishers, 1975 [1947]), pp. 17-18.

482 1980s
107. Ellen G. Landau, "Lee Krasner's Early Career," parts i and 2, Oct. and Nov.
1981.
108. Laudau, "Lee Krasner," Part i, Oct. 1981, pp. 117,121,122, notes 39,57; and Part
2, Nov. 1981, p. 87.
109. Cindy Nemser, "A Conversation with Lee Krasner," AM, Apr. 1973, p. 44.
no. Neither Newman nor Rothko intended that his later work would have no effect
on human activities. They were interested in developing structures whose use-
fulness depended on the configuration of the paint, on the signifier, that is, in a
new way that avoided referring per se. For Rothko's continued interest in con-
veying such content as human values in a historical context, see Dore Ashton,
"Art: Lecture by Rothko"; for Newman's resistance to formalist readings of his
work and his emphasis on his connectedness to human situations, see his cata-
logue statement in United States of America, VIII, Sâo Paulo Bienal, 1965, n.p.
in. Donald Kuspit, "Clyfford Still: The Ethics of Art," 1977, reprinted in The Critic
Is Artist: The Intentionality of Art (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press,
1984), pp. 188,191-92.
112. Polcari, "The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Clyfford Still,"
p. 151, note 12.
113. In a letter of Nov. 25,1948, Still instructed Betty Parsons to roll his work up and
give it to Mark Rothko to store for him, and advised Parsons that he did not
want to show publicly. Betty Parsons Papers, AAA-SI, 68-72:673.
114. He exhibited Oil on Canvas ig4j-HNo. 2 (PH-23J) at the Third Annual Exhibi-
tion of Painting at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Fran-
cisco from Dec. i, 1948 to Jan. 6,1949. Clyfford Still, ed. John P. O'Neill (New
York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979), p. 187.
115. Quoted in Clyfford Still, ed. John P. O'Neill, p. 29.
116. J. Benjamin Townsend, "An Interview with Clyfford Still," Gallery Notes (Buf-
falo), Summer 1961, p. n.
117. Jermayne MacAgy, foreword to the catalogue for the Third Annual Exhibition
of Painting, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1948-49. Quoted in
Clyfford Still, ed. John P. O'Neill, p. 188.
118. Harold Rosenberg, "The Action Painters,'M^ Sept. 1952, pp. 22-23,49~5°-
119. Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Lacoôn," Partisan Review (New York),
Fall 1940, pp. 229-300.
120. Clement Greenberg, "Irrelevance Versus Responsibility," Partisan Review
(New York), May 1948, p. 577. For a discussion of Greenberg's distinction be-
tween form and content see Piri Halasz, "Art Criticism (and Art History) in
New York: The 19403 vs. the 19803: Part 3: Clement Greenberg," AM, March
1983, pp. 80-88.
121. Clement Greenberg, "American-Type Painting,'Mrf and Culture (Boston: Bea-
con Press 1961 [1955]), pp. 208-29. Interestingly, although Greenberg defined
his criteria for painting and sculpture as optical systems opposed to, or outside
of, what he saw as the referential core of literature, for some theorists, such as
Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers, Greenberg's system would have been

1980s 483
 linguistic at least to the core. Lévi-Strauss believed that language was in essence
nonreferential, just as Greenberg believed that what was most essential in the
visual arts was systemic, not referential. See Ch. 3, "Structuralism in Linguis-
tics" in Simon Clarke, The Foundations of Structuralism (Sussex: The Har-
vester Press, 1981).
122. Some of the critics' structures, following the paintings, were oxymoronic,
too: Greenberg wrote of Newman's "pregnant 'emptiness'" and "darkly burn-
ing pictures" (Ibid., p. 255), and Rosenberg that "the painter gets away from art
through his act of painting." Rosenberg's well-known essay, in fact, is to an ex-
tent built on oxymoronic propositions, whose essence to Rosenberg is existen-
tial, such as his rhetorical series of questions, "What is a painting that is not an
object, nor the representation of an object, nor the analysis or impression of
it, nor whatever else a painting has ever been—and which has ceased to be the
emblem of a personal struggle?" Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters,"
PP-28,35.
123. There are far too many contributions to mention here; but a representative list
would include, in addition to those mentioned elsewhere in this text, David An-
tin, Barbara Cavalière, James E. B. Breslin, Mary Davis, Anne Carnegie Edger-
ton, Evan Firestone, Jonathan Fineberg, Robert Hobbs, Gail Levin, Melvin
Lader, Robert S. Mattison, Fred Orton, Griselda Pollock, April J. Paul, Stephen
Polcari, Charles Stuckey, Harry Rand, Jeffrey Weiss, and Kirk Varnedoe.
These newer efforts have explored the intellectual and personal motivations
involved in the production of these works as well as their contexts, and thus
broadened the range of associations available to viewers. They have educated
the audience for these works in the best sense—that is, they have given them
more interpretive choices to articulate what are often strong reactions to these
paintings and sculptures. By demonstrating the range of literary, philosophical,
art-historical, psychological, and even anecdotal subject-matter buried in these
works, and by paying attention to their political, religious, and economic func-
tions, scholars have opened them, not only qualitatively, to a public they have
always had, but quantitatively, to a public to whom their former resistance to
interpretation was a barrier they could not overcome.
124. I use the term meaning here in the sense that it was qualified by Gottlieb: "I fre-
quently hear the question, 'What do these images mean?' This is simply the
wrong question. Visual images do not have to convey either verbal thinking
or optical facts. A better question would be, 'Do these images convey any emo-
tional truth?'" The New Decade (New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 1955), p. 36.
125. The third major critic of this period, Thomas B. Hess, while he shared some
convictions with Rosenberg, has received less attention perhaps in part because
his attentive analysis of subject matter and of the specific differences among art-
ists' intentions has made his criticism appear less extreme, and therefore, less
effective as a foil for current retrospective evaluations. Donald Kuspit, "Two

484 1980s
 Critics: Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg,"^ Sept. 1978, p. 32; and Susan
Klein, "Thomas Hess and the New York School," unpublished paper, 1984.
126. Hubert Damisch, "Semiotics and Iconography," in The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey
of Semiotics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Lisse: The Peter De Ridder Press, 1975),
P
*U*
127. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Fred-
eric Will (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973 [1964]), pp. 41-42,46.
128. Such observations have sparked various opinions regarding the status of art
whose referring function has been thus suspended and the uses that may be
made of it. A number of historians have felt that this abdication plays into the
hands of established political and economic powers (Max Kozloff, "American
Painting During the Cold War," AF, May 1972, pp. 43-54; Eva Cockroft, "Ab-
stract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Jejune 1974, pp. 39-41; Serge
Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art); others that it waits for a
voice to clarify its purpose (Paul Rogers, "Towards a Theory/Practice of Paint-
ing: Abstract Expressionism in the Surrealist Discourse," AF, Mar. 1980, pp.
53-61), or that it stands as a demonstration of the importance of belief in the un-
derstanding of art (Donald Kuspit, "Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and
Clyfford Still," 1978 in The Critic Is Artist, pp. 199-215).
129. Ruth Field, "modern poetry: the flat landscape," p. 155.
130. A number of Abstract Expressionists, however, maintained whatever degree of
nonreferentiality they had attained by the fifties: Ferber, Newman, Reinhardt,
Rothko, and Still, for instance.
131. As Frederic Jameson has described it, pastiche involves the idea of a failure
of art to accomplish its traditional personal and social goals along with a nostal-
gic desire to believe again in the possibility of individualism. The metonymy of
pastiche is the mechanism by which these desires to revive the past are gratified.
"Postmodernism and the Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal
Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 113-16. For Jameson, pas-
tiche is parody after the retirement of established values, a practice in which
some contemporary critics have seen the latest manifestation of modernism's
lost subversiveness. Benjamin Buchloh, "Parody and Appropriation in Francis
Picabia, Pop, and Sigmar Polke,'MF, Mar. 1982, p. 34.
132. This was Frederic Jameson's reading of Walter Benjamin's understanding of al-
legory. Marxism and Form (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press,
1971), pp. 70-73.
Ш- Jorn Merkert, "The Painting of Willem de Kooning," pp. 125-26 in Willem
de Kooning by Paul Cummings, Jôrn Merkert, and Claire Stoullig (New York:
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984); Rose, Lee Krasner, p. 76; E. A.
Carmean, The Collages of Robert Motherwell (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts,
1972).
134. First quotation, 1942: recorded in Jackson Pollock, vol. 4, ed. Francis V. O'Con-
nor and Eugene Thaw (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), p. 226; second

1980s 485
 quotation, 1956, in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists, p. 82. For a
summary of the basis of the privileging of metaphor and recent reassessments
of importance of metonymy [allegory] see Jonathan Culler, "The Turns of
Metaphor," in The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981).
135. De Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," p. 205.
136. Smith's commission at Voltri was for one or two sculptures. He produced in-
stead twenty-six of monumental size, causing public astonishment at his prodi-
gious output. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, pp. 35-36.
137. Gregory L. Ulmer, "The Object of Post-Criticism," pp. 95-99 in The Anti-
Aesthetic, provides a digest of these claims.
138. Willem de Kooning, "The Renaissance and Order," Trans/formation (New
York), vol. 1,1951, p. 87.
139. Craig Owens discussed the sequential structure of pictorial allegory as well as
other aspects of allegorical structure in "The Allegorical Impulse."
140. For this definition of postmodernism, see Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse,"
Part 2, pp. 78-79-
141. Maureen Quilligan discusses this kind of allegorical activity in The Language of
Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 30-33.

I wish to thank some of my colleagues—Bruce Altshuler, Anna Chave, Joseph Mari-

oni, and Jesse Murray—who read and commented on this manuscript at an earlier
stage.

486 1980s
 The 1990s
RE(DE)FINING ABSTRACT
EXPRESSIONISM
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STEPHEN POLCARI Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism

In the months of crisis before and during World War II, Martha Graham (b.
1893) reflected, "You do not realize how the headlines that make daily history
affect the muscles of the human body." One scholar recently expanded on
Graham's observation: "Wariness, the first symptom of fear, was in the air,
and though no one spoke openly about private dread, Martha could read
nervous tension in her dancers' bodies."1 For Graham as well as for many vi-
sual artists, the coming of the war called for a more critical investigation of the
human experience than ever before. It also brought forth a more powerful
solution to human need in crisis: inner regeneration, or, as Graham often
phrased it in theme and form, rebirth.
As America entered the second great cataclysm of the twentieth century,
Graham increasingly moved toward psychological introspection as a subject
in her art. In fact, by the time war clouds overshadowed Europe in 1937, she
had already stated that for her the goal of dance was to "make visible the in-
terior landscape," and she described her work as "journeying" into herself.
Dance, in Graham's mind, had the power to move into the "depths of man's
inner nature, the unconscious, where memory dwells." She added:

As such it inhabits the dancer. It goes into the experience of man, the specta-
tor, awakening similar memories. Art is the evocation of man's inner nature.
Through art, which finds its roots in man's unconscious—race memory—is
the history and psyche of race brought into focus.2

Graham's turn toward psychological introspection was part of a larger turn

in American culture. As the war broke out, American artists of many persua-
sions, having witnessed with alarm the crises of the 19305, confronted an even
more serious disaster through an investigation of man and civilization. In his
response to the war and to his work with the Office of War Information, Ben
Shahn (1898-1969), the quintessential social artist of the 19305, wrote that he
was not the only artist who had been seduced by a social dream that could no
longer be reconciled with the private and inner objectives of art.3
Of major significance in Graham's turn were its parallels to American art,

SOURCE: Smithsonian Studies in American Art (Winter 1990), 3-28. Reprinted with the
permission of Stephen Polcari.

489
 particularly Abstract Expressionism, the most important American art of the
19405, if not the twentieth century. Abstract Expressionism, too, was an art of
introspection largely, although not exclusively, induced by the war. Thus, just
as European modern dance and ballet participated in developments in the vi-
sual arts through the work of Léon Bakst (1886-1924), Pablo Picasso (1881-
1973), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), and many
others, so the themes and forms of Graham's work were part of the historical
and cultural changes taking place in American art at a crucial time in history.
Direct connections between Graham and the Abstract Expressionists are
well known. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), the Abstract Expressionist sculp-
tor, was Graham's set designer from 1935 to 1966, and her audiences were of-
ten filled with painters and sculptors.4 As a whole, however, Graham's dance
theater anticipated and illuminated Abstract Expressionism in an unprece-
dented and heretofore unrecognized way. To view Graham from the 19405
on is to view the idiom of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Mark Rothko (1903-
1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), and others in three-dimensional move-
ment and performance. Graham's art, like much Abstract Expressionism, was
shaped as a mytho-ritual quest. As with the artists, Graham had always been
interested in human behavior. The intense grief oí Lamentation (1930), the
courage and determination of Frontier (1935), and the complex struggle of
American Document (1938), for example, attest to Graham's interest in emo-
tional expression. In the 19405, however, she rendered expression as a tren-
chant psychological search for the first time. With Letter to the World (1940),
Deaths and Entrances (1943), and the symbolist Hérodiade (1944), Graham
presented dance as a mode of psychological, ritual, and histórico-cultural
self-examination that paralleled the concerns the Abstract Expressionists—
partially influenced by the Surrealists—were exploring in their painting and
sculpture at the same time.
Graham's new emphasis developed gradually, but it can be identified in
dances that at first seem to have little to do with Abstract Expressionism.
Affinities between her dance and contemporaneous art can be seen, for exam-
ple, in the increasing complexity of her characters. The inner life of Emily
Dickinson is the subject of Letter to the World, which premiered in 1940 and
was continually revised for the next two years. In the dance Graham portrays
the multiple aspects of Dickinson's psyche. The set, with a trellis at one side
and a bench at the other, depicts the shadow world of the poet's imagination
as set forth in her writing rather than her real world of Amherst, Massachu-
setts. Dickinson's psychological and emotional history is divided into a vari-

490 1990s
ety of characters, no one of which is meant to portray all of her. Each charac-
ter is an aspect of her personality or an important figure in her life: One Who
Speaks, One Who Dances, the Child, the Fairy Queen, and the Young Girl.
The Ancestress embodies Dickinson's Puritan background and her fear of
death, while March and the other male characters are extensions of her Lover
persona and represent her efforts at happiness. Yearnings for happiness, mem-
ories of events and feelings, and the loss of her lover force Dickinson to face
her destiny as a poet, to realize that her happiness is to be found in her work
alone.
Letter to the World thus marked the beginning of Graham's turn to simulta-
neous narration. This technique involves personification of different aspects
of self (and humanity) in separate, multiple episodes, split personalities, con-
trapuntal combinations of real and imaginary events and people, and the fu-
sion of past, present, and even future times. This rich and varied mode of si-
multaneous narration was likewise fundamental to Abstract Expressionism.
Mark Rothko's Entombment (1946, private collection), for example, pre-
sents various possibilities of humanity and its past in a single figure that fuses
symbols of death (a reclining biomorphic Christ), life (the nurturing breasts),
and nature (the claw hand and shell bottom of the central Mary figure). The
form in William Baziotes's (1912-1963) Dwarf is simultaneously childlike and
sinister, with allusions to prehistoric beasts, human beings, snakes, and rhi-
noceroses. Gottlieb's Burst series, with its polarized structure, also symbol-
izes integrated yet divergent mythic, cosmic, and psychological possibilities.
As Gottlieb explained, when working on the Bursts, he "put down the discs
and thought of what form would most oppose them. . . . Opposites are my
view of life."5 Additionally, the form of Graham's dance, a letter, was also used
by some Abstract Expressionists to compose an interlocking set of ideas in
pictographic form. It can be seen in Gottlieb's Letter to a Friend (1948, Adolph
and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New York) and David Smith's (1906-1965)
Letter (1950, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New
York).
Graham's investigation of the multiple aspects of the psyche, personality,
and time lie at the root oí Deaths and Entrances, the story of the Bronte sis-
ters, particularly Emily. Ernestine Stodelle explains how the dance narrates,
in a labyrinthine maze, the fears and figures of Emily's life and imagination:

Fantasies and realities change place before the wandering inner eye; fears
assume the shapes of monsters ... and the stream [of unconscious images]

1990s 491
 instead of coming out... on a peaceful clearing, returns to its source: the
primeval world ... of our ancestors.

Like some Abstract Expressionists, Graham adopted the stream-of-conscious-

ness technique used by some of her favorite authors, including James Joyce
(1882-1941), T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Marcel Proust (1871-1922), and William
Faulkner (1897-1962). A journey into the depths of Emily's psyche dominates
Graham's drama, unleashing the memories, loves, and events of her past. The
three sisters, as youths, bring objects on stage—a conch shell, a goblet—that
spark memories, like Proust's madeleines, of lost opportunities. The sisters
play chess with Destiny, sporadically gesturing before Emily picks up the
goblet, now the symbolic Cup of Life, and sets it down on the chessboard,
thereby ending the game. The Cup of Life enables the sisters to live with their
destinies.6
Deaths and Entrances thus uses time and memory as a narrative, choreo-
graphic device and portrays the simultaneity of past, present, and future.
Stodelle explains, "For the person who 'recollects or remembers,' time is seen
through the telescopic lens of memory, where personal experience is repro-
duced with searing vividness. To look back is to look inward."7
Graham's retrospective introspection is the choreographic equivalent of
the flashback technique of movies. Significant moments from the past are tele-
scoped as memories retraced in the mind and body. Graham once said, "The
human body ... is the instrument by which all the primaries of experience are
made manifest. It holds in its memories all matters of life and death and love."
The result is a metaphoric, allegorical, and poetic montage, with parallel lines
of action crosscut to touch off deep, subconscious ideas. Geneviève Oswald
has commented, "With the crosscutting of these images [Graham] reproduces
the mental process of idea association, often an irrational correlation, and es-
tablishes an inner rhythm to her works."8
The technique was fundamental to Abstract Expressionism during the
same period. Rothko, for example, repeatedly referred to fragments of a bio-
logical and cultural past as memories of past humanity in such works as Mem-
ory, Prehistoric Memory (1946, private collection), and Tentacles of Memory
(1945-46, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). His semi-figurative style
of the early 19405 also fused fragments of art and history of different eras,
from Greco-Roman to modern. In 1949 he summarized his narrative mode by
explaining, "An atavistic memory, a prophetic dream, may exist side by side
with the casual event of today."9 Gottlieb's Pictographs of the same period

492 1990s
likewise incorporate distant, formative memories from an ancestral past. In
works such as Masquerade, he alluded to the simultaneity of different times
and places in the mind—and in Carl Jung's (1875-1961) concept of a collective
unconscious—by juxtaposing mask images from the ancient, so-called primi-
tive, and modern worlds. He combined an Egyptian mask at the left, for exam-
ple, with one derived from the Surrealist Max Ernst's (1891-1976) Woman
Bird image below it and a lion or another Egyptian god-image in the center.
To these are added spirals reflecting southern Arizona's Hohokam pottery,
with its triangular-edged, spiral forms, which Gottlieb saw at the Museum of
Modern Art's Indian Art of the United States exhibition in 1941.
Completing the shift to psychological introspection, Graham's Hérodiade
drew from the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898). Originally en-
titled Mirror before Me, the dance deepens Graham's subject of self-examina-
tion. While the characters of Herod's wife and his stepdaughter Salome may
come from Mallarmé, Graham extended the idea of a temptress to include an
older society woman who, to live more fully, must face the reality of her per-
sonality in a mirror and in the alter ego of an attendant. For Graham, the mir-
ror is a means to arrive at truth. At the conclusion of the dance, the older
woman marches into the "unknown."
Symbolist poetry and the idea of the self-searching mirror were also ele-
ments in Abstract Expressionist art, used by Pollock in The Magic Mirror
(1941, private collection) and by Baziotes in Mirror at Midnight (1942, private
collection). In the latter, Baziotes suggested an overlapping, compartmental-
ized world of stones and jewels, of cellular beginnings in a gothic, dark, and
ambiguous space. Baziotes hoped that the painting embodied the spirit of
Charles Baudelaire's poem "Favors of the Moon." The artist noted, "To me a
mirror is something mysterious, it is evocative of strangeness and otherworld-
liness." For him the mirror facilitated an examination of fundamental internal
forces of the universe.10
In 1946 Graham added myth and ritual to her interest in psychological in-
trospection and thus initiated the final and truest phase of her work parallel-
ing Abstract Expressionism. Several elements aided her, including Jungian
thought and her friends Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and Noguchi. Like
most Abstract Expressionists, Graham approached myth through Jungian
psychology, and in the mid 19405 she underwent Jungian analysis. Her devel-
opment thus paralleled that of Pollock, who had undergone Jungian analysis
from 1938 to 1941. They are perhaps the most Jungian artists of a very Jungian
moment in American culture.11

1990s 493
 Graham's new phase was immediately evident not only in her dance but
also in her words. At this time she began recording in notebooks, eventually
published in 1973, the thoughts, studies, and reading that informed her
dances.12 As Paul Valéry observed in an essay on Leonardo da Vinci, few art-
ists have had the courage to reveal how they produced their works, so Gra-
ham's published notebooks are especially valuable. They preserve the specific
themes, subjects, and sources of the mythic, psychic, and religious culture out
of which Abstract Expressionism developed, and no study of the movement
can be complete without them. Combining insights into primal ritual with
Graham's understanding of anthropology, myth, and depth psychology, they
distill, with citations, the culture and ideology of the American avant-garde of
the 19405. Graham's dances make clear that she combined this culture and
ideology with her own intuitive thought and action.
A brief examination of a sample page from the notebooks reveals Graham's
interest in familiar Abstract Expressionist subjects, including war and dis-
cord; Greek myths and gods and Christian prophets; the sanctification of
light and color; totemism and evolution; psyche and the genesis of conscious-
ness; and the hero. The notion of the hero was a special concern in the 19305
and 19405 that climaxed with the publication of Campbell's Hero with a
Thousand Faces in 1949, a study directly affecting the work of several Abstract
Expressionist artists.13 Graham had known Campbell since the early 19305,
when they taught together at Sarah Lawrence College. By the mid 19405, she
had come to appreciate his interest in myth, ritual, and psychology.
Graham's notes, thoughts, and dances reveal the complex cultural sources
of her mythic, Jungian, and Greek dramas of the late 19405 and 19505. Dark
Meadow of the Soul (1946), Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand into the Maze
(1947), Night Journey (1947), and Clytemnestra (1958) interweave world cul-
ture and mythic drama in forms drawn from French symbolist poetry, primal
ritual, Greek mythology and drama, Jungian and Freudian psychology, the
Old Testament, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and organic evolution—sources that
also informed the works of the Abstract Expressionists. Graham's notebooks
as well as her dances confirm that she, like the artists, explored collective—
that is, public—as well as personal history as the archetypal condition of the
psyche.
Collaboration with Noguchi helped Graham realize her new approach.
The two met in 1928, and Noguchi did two portrait busts of Graham the fol-
lowing year. She began working with Noguchi on Frontier in 1935, after a brief
collaboration with Alexander Calder (1898-1976), but from 1944 to 1950 No-

494 1990s
guchi was Graham's only set designer. Indeed, they continued working to-
gether intermittently until 1966. There has perhaps been no closer collabora-
tion of artist and choreographer in American modern dance.14
Noguchi first joined Americanist themes with surrealist dream spaces, as
in Frontier, in which he wedded the total void of theater space to form and ac-
tion. In the 19405 he committed himself to what is now characterized as Ab-
stract Expressionist symbolism. In Hérodiade he created a prop composed of
a hybrid ancient and modern form, a skeletal kouros figure, suggesting the
ancient and biological roots of the characters' experience and quest. To this
sense of primal origins and continuity he added fertility symbols in Dark
Meadow of the Soul, a biomorphic pelvic gate in Errand into the Maze, and a
sense of time and timelessness represented by an hourglass shape amid sev-
eral fragmentary forms in Night Journey. Perhaps the most stunning are the
prop costumes of Cave of the Heart, including a branching tree that becomes
a spiky, radiant cloak and chariot—what Noguchi described as a nimbus of
the sun—of the fleeing mythic sorceress-goddess Medea. Also noteworthy is
the cathedral-like construction for Joan of Arc in Seraphic Dialogue (1955), in
which Noguchi sought to represent "the life of Joan of Arc as a cathedral that
fills her consciousness entirely."15 The construction soars upward with gleam-
ing geometrical forms symbolizing the saint's medieval celestial divinations.
All these themes and forms are familiar in Abstract Expressionism. No-
guchi's concept of Saint Joan's divine aspirations in Seraphic Dialogue, for
example, recall the medievalism of Richard Pousette-Dart (b. 1916), Rothko,
Gottlieb, Lee Krasner (1911-1984), and Barnett Newman (1905-1970), who
once declared that he sought to make, with soaring light and color, a cathedral
out of man.16
Graham's concerns with myth, ritual, psyche, and ancient and world cul-
tures are immediately clear in her first postwar dance, Dark Meadow of the
Soul. In the program note Graham wrote, " 'Dark Meadow' is a re-enactment
of the Mysteries which attend the eternal adventure of seeking." The dance
combines Celtic, Christian, Egyptian, and other rituals. In the original pro-
duction men and women danced among Noguchi's organic, vertical forms,
some of which served as an altar and some of which sprouted leaves and flow-
ers, symbolizing ritual phallic powers. These forms are much like the forms in
Clyfford Still's (1904-1980) phallic Untitled [PH-436] (1936, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art) and 1Q38-N-1 (1938, San Francisco Museum of Mod-
ern Art). A rich animal life moving through Noguchi's fertile landscape sug-
gests Newman's drawings of 1944-46. Typically, Noguchi's few props delin-

1990s 495
 eated not specific places but rather the deep recesses of mind and memory.17
Graham danced the character One Who Seeks, who is contrasted with a sec-
ond female, She of the Ground, an earth mother figure. Erick Hawkins played
the male god—typically—He Who Summons.
Dark Meadow is about mankind's primal heritage and the patterns of hu-
man behavior, which Graham called "ancestral footsteps." Containing refer-
ences to archaic memory, natural, primitive consciousness, primal, prehensile
humanity, the cosmic cycles of the seasons, and the regeneration of the spe-
cies through love, it is one long fertility ritual.18 The dance seems ultimately
drawn from the pagan equation of sexual and fertility rites intended to renew
land and tribe, as described by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer
(1854-1941). While men might physically perish, Graham's allusions in stream-
of-consciousness imagery to the Christian cross and sprouting phallus sug-
gest that mankind's psyche-spirit will live on and be reborn. Dark Meadow
seems less a dance than a reenacted ritual, which renews mankind by allowing
it to regain the vital forces that have produced it. Like native American ritu-
als, Dark Meadow celebrates the future because ritualized dance inspires, as
Jamake Highwater explains, "new vitality [drawn] from the most distant mem-
ories of the past."19
Dark Meadow is perhaps Graham's most vital dance. Indeed, the ritual
seems designed, as Don McDonagh has pointed out, to "expiate or placate a
disturbance in the deeper flow of vital movement—life." That disturbance,
obliquely alluded to in Graham's notebooks, was the war. She wrote:

Perhaps a kind of invoking from within oneself the Powers of the Spirit
to bring about a better condition—a health of the land, the World ...
Perhaps a kind of "Fertility Ritual."
not for rain but for growth on a Waste Land
—after a War ...
Could I make this a drama of resurrection

Dark Meadow of the Soul is that drama, a sacred ritual calling up the energy of
fertility as the healing balm for her generation's bitter history. Graham once
wrote admiringly of Jung's and Paul Klee's (1879-1940) similar capacity to
avail themselves "of lost energies" of the psyche and of non-Western societies
in the creation of worlds.20 For her as well as for American artists of the 19305
and 19405, history was to be recorded and addressed as historically and cul-
turally induced feelings, needs, and energies in ritual, archetype, and legend.
Graham's depiction of ritualistic vitality highlights the ways her ideas and

496 1990s
forms paralleled fundamental Abstract Expressionism. The parallels were not
only in the symbols, the use of ritual, and the allusions to the primal aspects of
psychology and culture, but through her conception of the importance and
power of vital movement itself. Dark Meadow climaxes the thrust of her ideol-
ogy. Here, as in all of her mythic work—and as in Abstract Expressionist art
itself—Graham suggests an eternal psychic-ritual pattern and rhythm as the
ultimate order of history and life.
Underlying Graham's work is her original conception of the body and its
flow through space. Graham founded dance movement on the expansion and
contraction of the body. In contrast to classical ballet, in which the torso is
held taut and arms, hands, and legs move in a stylized, unearthly manner, she
centered movement on the rhythmic flux of the torso. Through exaggerated
breathing, with its physical contraction of the diaphragm and its release out-
ward through the neck and arms to the surrounding space, she created a
sense of cyclic, rippling, and continuous inward and outward motion. Gra-
ham also emphasized the physicality of movement by having her dancers grip
the floor with their feet rather than stand above it on their toes as in classical
ballet. She replaced the traditional, romantic tutu with the body-revealing leo-
tard. Her movement thus seems to emanate from nature and the earth. Her de-
signs create vitalist and expressive sequences of inward and outward motion,
a sense of the ebb and flow of human action. Intense motion seems to origi-
nate in the depths of the dancers' psychological and spiritual life. For Gra-
ham, the motivation of action was from within rather than from without; the
organic was the psychological.
Graham focused motion in a new way. Under the influence of Louis Horst
(1884-1964), her musical director, she emphasized simple, asymmetrical, blunt,
and unadorned motion. She drew on the dances of so-called primitive peo-
ples not to copy their movements but to create a modern parallel to their in-
tensity. She reduced movement to what she considered "primitive" forms of
force, power, and simplicity. In other words, she conceived of movement as
expressing the concise forms of action that Westerners admired in the dance
of primitive peoples. As Stodelle explains:

Whereas the primitive dancer stamped on the ground with the whole of the
foot, or in lifting the knee flexed the ankle angularly at the joint, the modern
dancer, without actually reproducing those movements per se, uses their
rough textures and broken rhythms to express the vitality of the feeling be-
hind such movements. An inner muscular awareness of weight and energy
is manifest in every step, every lift of the leg, every turn of the body.21

1990s 497
 To Graham, movement was a vehicle of expressive as well as structural and
psychological form.
Graham's conception of movement has strong affinities with the funda-
mental abstract structures of Abstract Expressionism. Rothko's art, for exam-
ple, consists of images and forms of abstract, contrapuntal, organic, and mythic
movement. Through the fluid transitions of shapes in varying combinations
of slow expansion, agitation, maturation, contraction and decline, as in Unti-
tledy Rothko alluded to mythic patterns that lay behind much of his and his
colleagues' work. He described the process as "life, dissolution, and death."
For Rothko and for Graham, human destiny was rooted in and represented
by abstract natural form, action, and movement. Both reenacted destiny's
fundamental rhythm, with its ebb and flow of energy, in the movement of one
gesture or shape into another. Both portrayed human action as a cyclic pro-
cess that continuously tenses and relaxes, contracts and releases, falls and
recovers, or dies and is reborn. Graham characterized the end of her cyclic
movement—the stunning "Graham fall" and drop to the ground—as "a disso-
lution of the body."22 Both felt their work embodied natural truths.
Rothko's poet friend Stanley Kunitz recently expanded on this definition
of rhythmic human action:

"Periodicity." This is what we learn from our immersion in the natural world:
its cyclical pattern. The day itself is periodic, from morning through noon to
night, so too the stars in their passage, the tides, the seasons, the beat of the
heart, women in their courses. This awareness of periodicity is what gives us
the sense of a universal pulse. And any art that does not convey that sense is
a lesser art. In poetry, it leads us ... toward an organic principle.23

Cyclic movement is also emotionally expressive. Graham exaggerated the

rhythmic contractions and expansions of the body to suggest more than na-
ture. By amplifying the move, she made a gesture, indicated a sob, or implied
an emotion. The technique thus reveals the emotional "landscape" of her
characters. Rothko, too, intensified rhythmic motion through color and brush-
work that heightened emotional expression. He described his expression in
cyclic terms: "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions-
tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." Graham and Rothko sought to articulate
human passion in the dramatic flow, shape, and rhythm of their works. A
critic described the cycle of Graham's Primitive Mysteries (1931) as "a simple
folk-like rendering of a three-act passion play, in which the Virgin Mary . . .

498 1990s
relived the tragedy of her Son's crucifixion—and the ecstasy of His resurrec-
tion" (italics added).24
Graham's technique also suggests a second mode of human movement and
destiny. In the complex development of her characters' actions, she antici-
pated gesturalism, an aspect of Abstract Expressionism that matured in the
19505 through its heir, the New York School. Depicting action through move-
ment rippling outward from the pelvis through the legs and arms, Graham de-
veloped modes of expressing anger, fear, rage, and ecstasy that constitute a
gestural dramaturgy. Continuous unfolding is divided into expressive turns,
swings, spirals, and falls that form larger, more complex, interlocking and
overlapping, dissonant movements. Unlike classical ballerinas, Graham's danc-
ers hold their feet at right angles to their legs. Their bodies open and close,
coil and uncoil, and make trajectories. Body movements are tense and broken,
explains a critic:

The upper body will twist strongly against the lower, the arms twist against
each other, or the leg will twist against the vertical spread of the upper body.
Changing and broken rhythms are frequent; a vital movement will meet with
a sudden halt or an abrupt change of direction or mood; the body unfolding
may meet with a sudden collapse; contradictory tensions will occur in the
midst of a sequence that demands fulfillment.25

Throughout her work Graham remained attuned to the kinetic dynamism

of impulse, rhythm, and stress. In Lamentation, for example, with its convul-
sive twists, low swings, diagonal extensions, horizontal spreads, and upward
thrusts, and in later dances with percussive accents, Graham conveyed a primi-
tive vitality in the weighted contrast of rapid body strokes and counterstrokes.
As Susan Leigh Foster explains, Graham's choreography, supported by mod-
ern music that is uniquely subordinated to accent the flow of movement itself,
generates "a dynamic, psychologically charged atmosphere so that the dance
unfolds as an organic progression of emotional states," as a mytho-ritual quest,
and as a timeless gesture.26
It is hard not to recognize such vitality in Abstract Expressionist painting
and sculpture, for dramatic movement formed its basic structure. Convulsive
thrusts and counterthrusts lie behind Willem de Kooning's (b. 1904) curvi-
linear and angular brushwork and Seymour Lipton's (1903-1988) sculpture.
Serpentine, overlapping figure-eight curves and spirals can be found in Pol-
lock's Mural (1943, University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City), Krasner's

1990s 499
 mature coiling paintings such as Celebration (1959-60, private collection),
Gottlieb's Trajectory (1954, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New
York) and Arabesque (1967, private collection), and in gesturalism as a whole.27
Though they ascribed energy to the city rather than to organic life and ritual
action, the New York School painters of the 19505 distilled gestural move-
ment, as in Franz Kline's (1910-1962) Figure Eight. The conventional grace,
beauty, and rhythm associated in the 19505 with French painting were swept
aside by this intense gesturalism, just as Graham swept aside the seemingly
effortless leaps of classical ballet and the delicate, airy grace of curving fin-
gers, smiling faces, and toy characters in such works as Giselle.
Graham's dynamism sought to define and express the forces that lay be-
hind human action as her generation understood it. She emphasized the body
as an instrument of instinctive, primal, and modern experience and expres-
sion, a spokesman for the psyche as she defined it. While movement, of course,
is the basis of any dance, Graham regarded all her dances, and Dark Meadow
in particular, as representing a vitality, life force, and energy, a quickening that
is translated through action. One critic commented:

But while Dark Meadow takes introspection to philosophical heights, its

choreography is rooted in the visceral world of bodily sensation. Movement
bursts forth as though the choreographer had suddenly touched subterranean
springs of compulsive-impulsive gesture: angular, slicing motions, asymmetri-
cal jumps, rapid shifts in rhythms, and wild careenings through space.28

In bodily vitality Graham calls to mind another Abstract Expressionist

mode, Pollock's abstract paintings. Created by hundreds of curvilinear and
some angular sweeps made by the twists and turns of the artist's body, not just
his wrist, these paintings were also intended to represent instinctive, uncon-
scious, subterranean, and ritualistic vitality. They, too, were intentionally
made on the ground to suggest what Horst described as "mysterious powers
that abide in the earth." Susan Leigh Foster's observation applies to both Pol-
lock and Graham: "A moment of suspended balance is not a moment of ac-
complishment but rather a moment of transition in the dynamic tension be-
tween mental and physical efforts."29 Pollock's statement "I am nature" could
be Graham's. And Pollock, like Graham in her work from the 19405 on, repre-
sented inner space brought forth into the exterior world.
More than just form or nature or anthropological ritual, Dark Meadow of
the Soul, like Abstract Expressionist work in general, is a vision of human be-
havior, a vision of the primal past when, as Stodelle explains, "pagan rites set

500 1990s
the pattern of psychic [as well as physical] growth." Like most Abstract Ex-
pressionists, Graham recognized that these primitive rites were the original
means of growth and development. From the Sun Dance of the Plains Indians
to coming-of-age rites, ritual was a way to demonstrate and increase new
powers and advance to the next stage of life, often from puberty to adulthood.
Jung's psychology elucidated that connection. Pollock found innumerable ex-
amples of the use of ritual and myth to enhance life and transfigure personal-
ity in Jung and Frazer's work and the publications of the Smithsonian Bureau
of Ethnography. The flowering energies of Dark Meadow—like Newman's
Stem and Bloom series of 1944-46, Bradley Walker Tomlin's (1899-1953) Bloom
paintings of the 19503, and work by Pollock, Krasner, and Lip ton—symbolize
historical, cultural, spiritual, and psychic as well as physical change through
organic growth. Interior life and its needs in the wake of the most savage war
and most monstrous crimes in Western history underlie the structures of Ab-
stract Expressionist art. For the Abstract Expressionists, vitalist movement
symbolized the physical and spiritual rebirth the West required to step toward
the next stage of conscious life. Movement had the same meaning for Graham.
Her dancing, she claimed, "is the affirmation of life through movement."30
In the wake of the war, the darker side of Graham's imagination asserted it-
self. The result was the full transition to her great mythic and psychological
dances of the late 19405 and beyond: Errand into the Maze, Night Journey,
and Clytemnestra.
Errand into the Maze fuses myth and psychology in what is essentially a so-
liloquy of a woman's self-examination. The dance retells the myth of Theseus
and the Minotaur as Ariadne's psychological quest. Ariadne traces her steps
across a zigzagging string to a two-pronged upright bone gate that makes her
inner journey concrete. At the bone gate, she confronts her fear of the un-
known. She repeatedly throws off an especially aggressive Minotaur—the male,
the personification of her fears—until she steps through the gate, conquers
her doubts, and emerges psychologically stronger.
In Errand into the Maze, Graham created a modern parable of the labyrinth
of the mind. Such symbolic labyrinths were used by the Surrealists and the
Abstract Expressionists, especially by Gottlieb, whose pictographic structure
in Threads of Theseus (1948, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, New
York) and Labyrinth series of the early 19505 was partially intended to repre-
sent a historical and psychic labyrinth. Gottlieb and Rothko often alluded to
Greco-Roman antiquities as well as to Sophocles and Aeschylus in their work.
Most Abstract Expressionists used ancient myth and form (they "quoted"

1990s 501
 from ancient art, while Graham "quoted" movement from preclassical Greek
dance and vase painting) to suggest that the modern confrontation with the
labyrinth of the mind and the subterranean world of the unconscious had its
roots in the past. For them, myth united past and present experience.
Like the Abstract Expressionists, Graham reached for the large themes of
human life—themes from legend, the Bible, myth, ritual, and history—and
distilled them to create epic dramas of human life and experience. Her drama
and characters differ from Abstract Expressionism, however, in significant
ways. Some of her dramas constitute full literary narratives. Night Journey
and Clytemnestra, for example, present the story of Oedipus and the Oresteia
trilogy. Rothko and Gottlieb, in contrast, make much more selective use of the
Oedipus story and the Oresteia in their early work of the 19405. Another way
in which Graham's work differs from that of the Abstract Expressionists is
that the central characters are female, not male.
Graham uses heroines to universalize these stories of myth. Even more em-
phatically than Krasner, the most important female Abstract Expressionist,
Graham took up and recreated mythic female personae, whom she referred
to as the "ancestresses" of the world. She had made women the centerpiece
of her art from the beginning and, until the appearance of Erick Hawkins
in American Document, had worked with an all-female troupe. Her subjects
included a wide variety of women: the anti-Puritanical, sexualized figure in
American Document, the innocent and hopeful bride oí Appalachian Spring
(1944), the multisided but unhappy Bronte sisters of Deaths and Entrances,
the self-analytic, aging woman of Hérodiade, the jealousy-driven Medea of
Cave of the Heart, the fearful Ariadne of Errand into the Maze, the distraught
Jocasta ofNight Journey, the self-sacrificing, wily Judith of Legend of Judith
(1962), the vengeful queen Clytemnestra in Clytemnestra, the bewitching
siren Circe in Circe (1963), the quixotic Joan of Arc with three personalities
in Seraphic Dialogue, and the unlucky youth of The Rite of Spring (1984). Bet-
ter than any woman of her generation of artists, Graham revealed the land-
scape of female passion and experience. Men in her works—Oedipus, Jason,
Agamemnon—are often stereotyped as pompous, arrogant, overweening, and
insensitive, although some, such as the Husbandman in Appalachian Spring
and the lovers of Acts of Light (1981), have depth and complexity. Apparently
both sexes are capable of self-absorption. Graham's heroines are, however,
projected as universal, not simply female. They represent all people as they
battle their fears and limitations to grow or be reborn psychologically.
In Night Journey Graham restructured the Oedipus story to make Jocasta

502 1990s
its primary focus. This Greek drama of humankind's inability to alter fate, the
"night," takes place in the mind and the dark side of life. The dance drama
opens as Jocasta is about to hang herself—Graham repeatedly used such key
moments to begin her dramas. Before committing suicide, Jocasta reviews
her life and recalls the events that have sealed her fate. The dance is structured
as a psychic exploration in which the Oedipus complex is combined with
the Jungian idea of memories. The set consists of unusual shapes suggesting
archeological fragments and an hourglass, which Noguchi described as "the
spirits of his ancestors over whom Oedipus must mount."31 The steps lead to
a double bone shape that is joint, bone, reclining phallus, and vagina—a sym-
bol of incestuous love made primal and organic.
Graham further reshaped Sophocles' drama by transforming the chorus of
Theban elders into the Daughters of the Night. Tiresias, however, retains his
role as the physically blind but all-seeing prophet. Graham accentuated her
drama with symbols of multiple associations, such as the cord that stands for
the joint fate ofjocasta and Oedipus—the umbilical cord of birth and the rope
of death. Ultimately Jocasta realizes her guilt, faces it courageously, and takes
her own life. Night Journey is a mythic recreation of the interior journey in
search of understanding, the resulting revelation, and the heroic if tragic price
that must be paid for the knowledge.
The dance embodies additional Abstract Expressionist themes. The meta-
morphosis of an object or image with multiple associations can be found in
the work of Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists, most notably Baziotes
and Gottlieb. While Rothko referred to Tiresias's role in Tiresias (1944, pri-
vate collection), the symbolic use of eyes that seek sight can be found in Gott-
lieb's Oedipus series of the early 19403. These works consist of frontal or
profiled eyes distributed in pictographic compartments. Particularly effective
is Gottlieb's Troubled Eyes, in which bestial jaws wrap and enclose eyes to im-
ply that one must be "physically blind" and look inward—into the mind's
eye—to attain "in-sight" and truth. Like Graham's Night Journey, Gottlieb's
Troubled Eyes suggests that violence tragically begets insight; through it one
attains vision.
A moment of extreme emotional crisis opens Graham's greatest Greek
work, the epic, evening-length Clytemnestra. With Clytemnestra's condemna-
tion to Hades for reasons she does not understand, Graham begins the drama
at its end, thereby dispensing with linear chronology and plunging directly
into an exploration of the Mycenaean queen's consciousness (memories in
the unconscious) on stage. From that point, the dance drama is a retrospec-

1990s 503
 tive investigation, a journey not only through a series of events but into the
feelings and actions that determined the queen's present fate and disgrace.
The dance consists of a long prologue, two acts, and a short epilogue in which
Clytemnestra's roles as wife, mother, adulteress, and murderer are played
forth amid the pride, violence, disaster, evil, death, and revenge that plague
the House of Atreus—an archetype of the human family. In Clytemnestra, as
Graham noted in her study for The Eye of Anguish (1950), evil is portrayed not
only as a private reality, an emanation of the individual soul, but also as a
public force. Graham's Greek dramas explore the human psyche, historical
causation, human personality, and fate under the rule of impersonal gods. As
Stodelle points out:

By dispensing with chronological sequence except when necessary to her

purposes ... and by running off the entire sequence as if projected from
within the queen's consciousness, Martha was able to build a psychological
superstructure over the original Greek myth.32

The prologue begins with a modern chorus in evening dress. Chorus mem-
bers enter and, standing at opposite ends of the stages, sing in a ritual manner.
A Messenger of Death, virtually a cadaver, snakes across the stage. Wearing a
skull cap and skirt, he is more Egyptian than Greek. Clytemnestra stands be-
hind a curtain of gold threads that symbolizes the veiled underworld. After
her name is called and she is declared dishonored among the dead, she begins
ajourney into her past. She confronts key figures in her life as they move across
the stage: Paris, Agamemnon, and Iphigenia.33 The rest of the dance reenacts
the three parts of the Oresteia—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and the
Eumenides.
Again Graham displays a panoply of Abstract Expressionist symbols with
their multiple uses and associations—the red cloak of Clytemnestra as wrap,
shroud, carpet; the friezelike movement from Greek vase painting, which
Rothko also used; the kinds of male and female sexual traps—phallic spears
and thigh gates—seen in the work of several Abstract Expressionists; ghosts,
also used by Rothko; biers, depicted also by Theodoros Stamos (b. 1922) and
Pollock; totemic columns, also seen in works by Smith, Rothko, and Gottlieb;
juries of the gods, an image central to Gottlieb's Jury of Three (1945, private
collection); the kind of transparent veiled curtain to the underworld seen in
Gottlieb's post-1945 Pictographs and works by Rothko and Pollock; and the
mythic gods themselves—the Furies as the dark unconscious forces and their
transformation into the Eumenides or positive forces, a vital movement sum-

504 1990s
marized by the title of Gottlieb's Transfiguration series (1958). At the end of
Clytemnestra's journey of self-discovery and self-judgment, the chorus chants
"rebirth" as Clytemnestra escapes the underworld.
Graham's Clytemnestra is a modern parable of transformation through
knowledge and repentance, of resolution through inward examination, of rec-
ognition and acceptance of one's actions, and of growth through understand-
ing. As a drama of redemption, it is typical of Graham's mytho-ritualistic art.
Stodelle summarizes its structure thus:

Darkness has its counterpart in light, the luminous world of self-knowledge,

of understanding, of renewed identification with nature and its forces ... the
fighting spirit Out of darkness, light; out of light, rebirth ... the cyclical
dance of the universe, the psychical dance of Martha Graham.34

And, one could add, of Abstract Expressionism. For the generation of Ameri-
cans wrenched by crisis, economic collapse, and world war, by the collapse of
nineteenth-century civilization and thought, the principle of renewal was the
means of consolation.
Among the many additional connections, overlappings, and parallels be-
tween Martha Graham and the Abstract Expressionists, none is so permeat-
ing as their mutual quest. For both, to achieve psychological wisdom and
reassert moral values after laying bare the heights and depths of human be-
havior was to begin the arduous night journey of terrestrial and spiritual re-
birth.35 For a generation in search of salvation, understanding lay, as Graham
reflected in her notebooks, in
The eternal woman caught up into circumstances—
The resolving of the difficulties
The return to the original state.
(A Season in Hell) re-born36

Notes

Sections of this essay are excerpted from my book Abstract Expressionism and the
Modern Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

1. Martha Graham and Ernestine Stodelle, quoted in Stodelle, Deep Song: The
Dance Story of Martha Graham (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), p. 119.
2. Martha Graham, "Martha Graham," in Martha Graham: The Early Years, ed.
Merle Armitage (Los Angeles: Privately printed, 1937; reprint, New York: Da
Capo Press, 1978), p. 84.

1990s 505
 3- For a discussion of Ben Shahn's shift, see Francis Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal
Artist in a Cold World Climate, ^47-54 (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1989).
4. See Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Viking
Press, 1973), pp. 142-45-
5. Quoted in Stephen Polcari, "Gottlieb on Gottlieb," New York Night Sounds i
(October 1968): 11.
6. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 123. On Graham's stream-of-consciousness technique,
see Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience; Polcari,
Lee Krasner and Abstract Expressionism (Stony Brook, N.Y.: University Gallery
Publication, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1988). The symbol of
the Cup of Life may have been drawn from the symbol of the Grail as discussed
by Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1920; reprint, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), a book that Graham
knew.
7. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 121.
8. Martha Graham, "I am a Dancer ...," in Martha Graham Dance Company Pro-
gram (New York: Martha Graham Dance Center, 1986), n.p.; Geneviève Os-
wald, "Myth and Legend in Martha Graham's 'Night Journey,' " in Dance as Cul-
tural Heritage, vol. i (New York: Congress on Dance Research, 1983), p. 43.
9. Mark Rothko, quoted in Douglas MacAgy, "Mark Rothko," Magazine of Art 42
(January 1949): 21.
10. William Baziotes, quoted in Paula Franks and Marion White, eds., "An Interview
with William Baziotes," Perspective no. 2 (New York: Hunter College, 1956-57),
p. 29. See also Mona Hadler, "The Art of William Baziotes" (Ph.D. Diss., Co-
lumbia University, 1977), pp. 125-26,194-96.
11. Graham's analyst was Frances Wickes. The importance of Jungian psychology in
British and American intellectual life was highlighted by the establishment in
1943 of the Bollingen Foundation, which was devoted to the amplification and
dissemination of the Jungian program. See Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and
the Modern Experience, chap. 2.
12. Martha Graham, The Notebooks of Martha Graham, with introduction by Nancy
Wilson Ross (New York: Harcourt Bracejovanovich, 1973).
13. Ibid., p. 205. Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces was eagerly antici-
pated, according to the Abstract Expressionist magazine Tiger's Eye. It was read
by many Abstract Expressionists, and Campbell was immediately invited to lec-
ture at the artists' meeting place, The Club. Campbell remains an unacknowl-
edged major influence on the forms and themes of Abstract Expressionist art
and thought in the 19505, apparent in such works as The Path of the Hero (1950,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art) by Richard Pousette-Dart, The Hero (1951-
52, Brooklyn Museum) by David Smith, and The Hero (1957, Inland Steel Com-
pany, Chicago) by Seymour Lipton (b. 1903).
14. For a full discussion of their collaboration, see Martin Friedman, Noguchi's
Imaginary Landscapes (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1978), pp. 25-37. No-

506 1990s
 guchi designed the following sets for Graham: Frontier (1935), Chronicle (1936),
El Penitente (1940), Appalachian Spring (1944), Hérodiade (1944), Imagined
Wing (1944), Dark Meadow of the Soul (1946), Cave of the Heart (1946), Errand
into the Maze (1947), Night Journey (1947), Diversion of Angels (1948), Judith
(1950), Voyage (1953), Theatre for a Voyage (1955), Seraphic Dialogue (1955),
Clytemnestra (1958), Embattled Garden (1958), Acrobats of God (1960), Alcestis
(1960), Phaedra (1962), Circe (1963), and Cortege of Eagles (1966).
15. Isamu Noguchi's comments on Frontier and Seraphic Dialogue are cited in
Stodelle, Deep Song, pp. 154-55. Noguchi thought of sculpture "as transfigura-
tions, archetypes and mystical distillations." Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New
York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 29, also cited in Oswald, "Myth and Legend,"
p. 46. For Noguchi's comments on Cave of the Heart, see Friedman, Noguchi's
Imaginary Landscapes, p. 30.
16. Newman, quoted in Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1971), p. 17, n. i. See especially Gottlieb's Romanesque Façade (1949,
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign), Krasner's Gothic
Frieze (ca. 1950, private collection), and Newman's Cathedra (1951, Stedelijk Mu-
seum, Amsterdam) and Chartres (1969, private collection).
17. Graham, program note for Dark Meadow of the Soul, quoted in Don McDonagh,
Martha Graham (New York: Praeger, 1973; reprint, New York: Popular Library,
1975), p. 188. Graham once said that when "you've drunk deep enough of the
river of memory in the underworld, you will remember not only the actual fact,
but you will remember the past of thousands of years ago." Quoted in Friedman,
Noguchi's Imaginary Landscape, p. 29.
18. Graham defined archaic memory as "twilight— / ghost / memory of past acts /
memory of past experiences"; Notebooks, p. 235. For Dark Meadow of the Soul,
she noted, "This state of being one with the world is the reflection, in conscious-
ness, of the condition of that unconscious 'Vegetative Soul' in us which is the
foundation of our conscious life"; Ibid., p. 175. See also Marcia B. Siegel, The
Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979;
reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 192.
19. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: MacMillan, 1922); Jamake High-
water, Dance: Rituals of Experience, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred van der Marck,
1985), p. 191.
20. McDonagh, Martha Graham, p. 188; Graham, Notebooks, pp. 191,178.
21. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 74. For a discussion of "primitive" and modernist ideas in
dance, see Louis Horst and Carroll Russell, Modern Dance Forms in Relation to
the Other Modern Arts (San Francisco: Impulse, 1961; reprint, New York: Dance
Horizons, 1967).
In 1937 James Sweeney, an art and dance critic and one of the "discoverers" of
Jackson Pollock's work in 1943, wrote that Graham was dance's equivalent to the
modern artist who sought to strip "esthetic experience to its fundamentals," that
is, to primal forms thought to be most clearly found in non-Western cultures.
James Johnson Sweeney, "Sweeney, 1937," in Martha Graham, ed. Armitage,

1990s 507
 p. 69. Among other dance critics who wrote of the visual arts were Lincoln Kir-
stein and Edward Denby.
22. Rothko, quoted in Dore Ashton, "The Rothko Chapel in Houston," Studio In-
ternational 81 (June 1971): 274; Graham, quoted in Anna Kisselgoff, "Martha
Graham at 95: Work, Work, Work," New York Times, 11 May 1989, p. Ci7. For
Rothko, see Stephen Polcari, "Mark Rothko: Heritage, Environment, and Tradi-
tion," Smithsonian Studies in American Art 2 (Spring 1988): 33-64; and Polcari,
Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, chap. 4. For human action as
a cyclic process, see Horst and Russell, Modern Dance Forms, p. 18.
23. Stanley Kunitz, quoted in American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work, ed.
Joe D. Bellamy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 146.
24. Rothko, quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York:
Capricorn, 1961), p. 93; Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 247.
25. Oswald, "Myth and Legend," p. 43. Edward Denby, the dance critic and good
friend of Willem de Kooning, noted that as early as 1943 Graham's Deaths and
Entrances was discussed as consisting of "the rapid succession of curiously ex-
pressive and unforeseen bursts of gesture." Quoted in Ashton, New York School,
p. 145. Critic Anna KisselgofF said Graham's forms were "raw, powerful and
dynamic—more jagged and filled with tension than even Picasso's forms." Kis-
selgoff, "Martha Graham," New York Times Magazine, 19 February 1984, p. 46.
26. Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary
American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 25. Graham,
like the Abstract Expressionists, wanted to be felt, not merely understood, so
much so that she, like they, expected the audience to respond psychologically
and emotionally to the work and thus complete it within themselves. See Kissel-
goff, "Martha Graham," pp. 50,54.
Graham's creative method was in many ways similar to that of the Abstract
Expressionists. Both were intuitive. The artists painted as a way of working
through problems; Graham danced a problem first and thought it through later.
See Edith J. R. Isaacs, cited in George Beiswanger, "Martha Graham: A Perspec-
tive," in Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs, ed. Barbara Morgan
(New York: Duell, Sloan &, Pearce, 1941; reprint, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Morgan and
Morgan, 1980), p. 144. Foster's interpretation of Martha Graham, however, un-
wittingly approximates the misinterpretation in the 19508 of Abstract Expres-
sionism as "Action Painting" by limiting her creative process largely to these in-
tuitive, psychological elements (pp. 43-44).
27. Spirals were also an element in Graham's dance. In the late 19408, Graham rec-
ommended the French film Fabrique to her dancers, including Stuart Watson* At
a recent symposium Watson noted that the film recorded the growth of plants
and their birth and death. He remembers Graham saying, "Life flows along a
spiral path." Comments at symposium, "Sixty Years of Martha Graham Tech-
nique," 19 May 1988, Asia Society, New York.
28. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 140.
29. Horst and Russell, Modern Dance Forms, p. 61; Foster, Reading Dancing, p. 25.

508 1990s
30. Stodelle and Graham, quoted in Stodelle, Deep Song, pp. 139, 52. For a discus-
sion of Pollock's use of publications of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnography,
see Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. W.Jackson Rush-
ing independently found that these publications influenced Pollock; see his arti-
cle "Ritual and Myth: Native American Culture and Abstract Expressionism,"
in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, iSgo-igSs (Los Angeles: Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, 1986), p. 281.
31. Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, p. 29.
32. Graham, Notebooks, p. 47; Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 185.
33. The character Iphigenia is a reference to sacrifice, a frequent Abstract Expres-
sionist subject, seen, for example, in Rothko's Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942, private
collection), and ultimately a mytho-ritualistic allusion to the victims of World
War II. Graham, Rothko, Theodoros Stamos, and Lipton recognized the conti-
nuity of ancient and modern sacrifice of the innocent and its purposes. In Altar
(1965, present whereabouts unknown) Lipton referred to the ritual practice of
sacrificing life ultimately to renew life. For a discussion of sacrifice and its role in
Abstract Expressionist culture, see Stephen Polcari, "Adolph Gottlieb's Allegor-
ical Epic of World War II," Art Journal 47 (Fall 1988): 206. Recently Graham
said, "We don't bury the flesh in the fields ... but I have to cope with the act of
sacrifice today. It is a curious lust for blood that goes back thousands of years."
Quoted in Kisselgoff, "Martha Graham," p. 44.
34. Stodelle, Deep Song, p. 265.
35. One particularly important affinity can be detected in Graham's overwrought
and bluntly sexual melodramas of the 19505 and 19608. In Phaedra (1962), for
example, Pasiphae's aging daughter's graphic passion and lust lead to disaster.
This dance, performed on a tour under the auspices of the U.S. State De-
partment, raised objections from members of Congress Edna Kelley and Peter
Freylinghusen, who considered it vulgar and carnal. Graham's conception is
analogous to de Kooning's Women series of the 19508. Both works represent the
absorption of wartime carnal sexuality into the postwar world.
Another affinity is the use of color and light to depict rites of passage. Graham
specifically indicated such a transformation in The Rite of Spring. At the end of a
human sacrifice, the cape of a central character, a shaman, changes from black to
fertile green, suggesting, as Graham had written earlier about Voyage, the "souls
[sic] rite of passage from the death of color into birth of new color." Notebooks,
p. 133. Newman's ritualistic Stations of the Cross series (1958-66, National Gal-
lery of Art), in which fourteen black-and-white canvases are followed by the only
appearance of color—red-orange—in a fifteenth, entitled Be II (1961,1964), pro-
nounces a similar ritualistic transformation of the soul through the symbolic use
of color. Graham uses light itself as the symbol in Acts of Light, with its sun cere-
mony and radiant dancers. Sacred light radiance also forms the basis of the work
of Abstract Expressionist color painters, including Pousette-Dart and even Pol-
lock, as his White Light (1954, Museum of Modern Art) testifies.
36. Graham, Notebooks, p. 185.

1990s 509
 DAVID CRAVEN 'Introduction/' "AbstractExpressionism
and Afro-American Marginalisation," and
"Dissent During the McCarthy Period"

Introduction

Just as modern art stands as an island of revolt in the narrow stream of Western
aesthetics, [so] the primitive art traditions stand apart as authentic aesthetic
accomplishments that flourished without benefit of European history... .*

There is an answer in these works to all those who assume that modern ab-
stract art is the esoteric exercise of a snobbish élite, for among these simple
peoples, abstract art was the normal, well-understood dominant tradition.
Shall we say that modern man has lost the ability to think on so high a level?2
—Barnett Newman (1946)

In the course of the last fifty years the painters who freed themselves from the
necessity of representation discovered wholly new fields of form-construction
and expression That kind of view made possible the appreciation of many
kinds of old art and of the arts of distant peoples—primitive, historic, colonial,
Asiatic and African, as well as European—arts which had not been accessible
in spirit because it was thought that true art had to show a degree of conformity
to nature and a mastery of representation which had developed for the most part
in the West. ... [Now these non-Eurocentric arts] were seen as existing on the
same plane of creativeness and expression as "civilised" Western art. [my
italics]3
—Meyer Schapiro (1957)

In many parts of the world, Abstract Expressionism signifies the ascen-

dancy to cultural pre-eminence of United States art. Yet it is also viewed with
disfavour or indifference by the majority of the people in the U.S. whose cul-
ture this art presumably represents.4 Equally paradoxical is the relation of
Abstract Expressionism to contemporary Latin American art. At a time when
U.S. intervention throughout the Americas has intensified, the receptivity
of progressive Latin American artists to certain aspects of post-war U.S. art

SOURCE: "Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to

'American' Art," Oxford Art Journal 14, no. i (1991), 44-46,57-60 (for "Introduction"
and "Abstract Expressionism"); Abstract Expressionism and Cultural Critique (1991),
128-30 (for "Dissent"). Reprinted with the permission of David Craven.

510
(even as these same artists vigorously oppose U.S. hegemony) raises new ques-
tions about the nature of art produced in the U.S. since 1945.
At present, the literature on Abstract Expressionism is becoming circum-
scribed by a new orthodoxy that treats this art as a monolithic expression of
Cold War ideology, whether the artists themselves intended this or not.5 For
these authors, then, Abstract Expressionism was either conceived to be, or
has since become, little more than a conduit of the cultural imperialism that
helps sustain U.S. dominance in the Americas. Ironically, however, there are
major artists and intellectuals from revolutionary movements (such as in Cuba
and in Nicaragua), who view Abstract Expressionism in quite different terms,
as decentred vocabularies of visual conventions capable of development in a
variety of directions. And in some of these cases Cuban and Nicaraguan art-
ists have actually drawn on post-war U.S. art to advance their own national
self-determination culturally in the face of foreign intervention and ideologi-
cal underdevelopment promoted by Western capital in concert with the U.S.
government. It is precisely this contradictory use of U.S. art by progressive
Latin Americans that has led Coco Fusco to warn North American leftists
against seeing such art as "necessarily a symptom of dependency."6
The complex irony of this inter-relationship is obvious enough if we sim-
ply compare an all-over painting by Jackson Pollock with a painting by René
Portocarrero of Cuba or an award-winning 1986 work by Boanerges Cerrato
of Nicaragua. Of the new generation of painters in this Central American
country until he died unexpectedly in 1988 while still in his thirties, Cerrato
drew on an inter-image dialogue more related to North American Abstract
Expressionism than to the Spanish arte informal that continues to be influen-
tial on many of the older painters now active in Nicaragua. As Nicaraguan
critic Luis Morales has observed, the visual vocabulary and formal syntax of
Cerrato's paintings were intended to foster "spectator participation" in the
constitution of the work's meaning.7 While Cerrato's work, which was given a
prize in 1986 by the Sandinista Union of Cultural Workers (ASTC), certainly
recalls compositionally the all-over drip paintings of Pollock, this triptych is
also marked by more measured, no less densely interlaced brushwork. The
anguished sensibility expressed by Pollock's all-over through skeins of coiled
paint is displaced in Cerrato's all-over by fluent, non-frenetic brushstrokes
that notably shift the signification of his work.
Instead of the forceful, even harried human movements of which Pollock's
lines are well-composed traces, Cerrato's artwork evokes the fluency of or-
ganic motion, the density of undomesticated flora. As such, to many Nica-

1990s 511
 raguan viewers the painting by Cerrato signifies the organically intermeshed
outlines of impenetrable tropical terrain. The visual result is a two-dimensional
effect not unlike that associated with the imbricated space oí campesino primi-
tivist paintings, such as those by Alejandro Guevara or Olivia Silva, both of
whom are from the well-known Solentiname School.8 Consequently, Boan-
erges Cerrato's triptych permits a discursive interchange between the Abstract
Expressionism of post-war, industrialised North American culture and a type
of art connected to the experience of non-Western campesino cultures, which
have yet to be extensively industrialised. Here as elsewhere in revolutionary
Nicaraguan art, there is a sophisticated dialogical enjoinment of Western cul-
ture with Third World culture, of high art with popular traditions.
An intermediary step toward the above synthesis can be found in an adroit
painting by Boanerges Cerrato that once hung in a hall of the National School
of Plastic Arts in Managua. This earlier work is an all-over drip painting with
brushstrokes that quite self-consciously echo those of Pollock. Yet in the up-
per register of this painting, where the all-over stops, are trees sprouting forth,
so that the all-over suddenly represents the gnarled forms and twisted move-
ments of undominated nature—a nature that in turn signifies anti-imperialist
values in contemporary Nicaraguan culture. Such a reading of unbroken na-
ture as a force for national liberation and against foreign intervention is found
in much of the recent literature there, as for example in the famous testimonio
of Omar Cabezas or in the "geographical" poetry of Ernesto Cardenal.9
As all these unwieldy comparisons (and many others we shall explore) dem-
onstrate, it is quite simplistic to view post-war North American art, such as
Abstract Expressionism, as a cohesive and self-consistent expression of the
ideology of the ruling class in the U.S., and even more specifically as the seam-
less claims of Cold War liberalism concomitant with the predominance of
U.S. multinational capitalism throughout the Americas. Instead, we must
adopt a more sophisticated conceptual framework that allows us to analyse
what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed the "dialogical" nature of art.10 According
to this model, an artwork is not a unified whole, but rather an open-ended site
of contestation wherein various cultural practices from different classes and
ethnic groups are temporarily combined. Any visual language in the arts is
thus understood as a locus for competing cultural traditions along with con-
flicting ideological values. Hence, any artwork, regardless of how much it is
publicly identified with one class or society, signifies not only for the domi-
nant sectors but also for the dominated classes and different class fractions.
Consequently, artwork such as that by the Abstract Expressionists should be

512 1990s
approached as an uneasy synthesis—more or less stable but not conclusively
resolved—of hegemonic values with subordinate ideological tendencies, out
of which broader signification is constructed.
In keeping with this dialogical conceptual framework, every visual lan-
guage is not merely a tool for political struggle, but by its very nature a location
of ongoing political conflict. All visual languages are unavoidably shaped by
cultural, ethnic, and class tensions, so that they are necessarily decentred, to
quote Macherey.11 Accordingly, art does not simply reflect, embody, or paral-
lel any one ideology, but rather signifies various ideological values, which are
in alliance with each other, none to the complete exclusion of all others. Un-
like a reflectionist view of cultural practices that always reduces these values
to a passive, largely reproductive role in history, a dialogical analysis treats the
production of art as a fundamental means whereby a society materially con-
structs itself through the absorption, then reconstitution of earlier visual lan-
guages (which are none the less capable of being extended in divergent di-
rections). In this way, art, like language, is addressed as a material force that
unevenly shapes the social sphere no less significantly than economic or po-
litical developments and sometimes in contradistinction to them. (In this re-
spect, a dialogical analysis recalls what Marx termed the "law of uneven de-
velopment" among various spheres of society.)12
It will be demonstrated in this article, then, that post-1945 U.S. art has
not been predicated on the reductive process of "medium purification" out-
lined by formalists like Clement Greenberg, much less on escapist "apoliti-
cism" or ethnocentric values. Rather, post-1945 U.S. art has emerged from an
expansive and highly "impure" process of cultural convergences in which
Third World artistic practices—Native North American, Latin American, Afro-
American, and South Pacific in origin—have been enjoined with the Euro-
pean artistic traditions so ethnocentrically privileged by formalist apologists
for U.S. art. Consequently, a sustained critique of Abstract Expressionism
will not disclose a unified, white "American" (and ultimately Eurocentric) style
leading inevitably to the "triumph" of U.S. culture.
Instead, such a deconstruction of Abstract Expressionism will divulge
multiple cultural practices, both Western and non-Eurocentric, which, while
mediated by U.S. institutions, none the less provide a multivalent and poly-
centric legacy replete with various possibilities. Furthermore, some of these
cultural possibilities of North American art, particularly those originating
outside of Western cultural practices, contradict profoundly the dominant
logic of U.S. society that post-war U.S. art is often said to "reflect." Abstract

1990s 513
 Expressionism, for example, has not only served but subverted U.S. hege-
mony in the Americas, because this North American visual vocabulary has
provided noteworthy points of development for progressive artists from the
"other Americas," whose work exists in fundamental opposition to the pres-
ent hierarchy of relations that sustain U.S. dominance through Latin Amer-
ica. This process does not entail simply the "influence" of Abstract Expres-
sionism on dependent cultural traditions, but rather the critical reclamation
by Latin American artists of artistic practices that the Abstract Expressionists
earlier borrowed from a variety of non-Western, Third World cultures. Nor is
it unimportant politically that the Abstract Expressionists drew extensively
on "foreign" experiences and "un-American" culture at the very time in his-
tory when the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities was terror-
ising the U.S. with tales of foreign subversion and anti-American conspira-
cies, while the Truman Doctrine of 1947 initiated an unprecedented military
assault by the U.S. on Third World liberation movements.13
In the 19305, Meyer Schapiro rejected the possibility of any national
"American Art" as an insidious idea.14 He observed that such a claim would
constitute, at best, a veil of fictitious unity in a highly stratified society with
considerable racial, class, and gender divisions. Owing to these circumstances,
Schapiro noted that the designation of "American Art" would simply publi-
cise the singular interests of those at the top of the economic structure, who,
because of attendant political power in a comparably disproportionate amount,
would simply speak for everyone else, as if there really were a homogeneous
national culture. As subsequent events attest, Schapiro's point was both quite
accurate and largely ignored. Indeed, Clement Greenberg, for one, has even
insisted that the term "Abstract Expressionism" be replaced by the title
"American-Type Painting."15

Abstract Expressionism and Afro-American Marginalisation

Just as Barnett Newman contended that "Picasso may have dreamed of
a half dozen Utopias but his primary dream—the one that gave him his voice
—was Negro sculpture,"99 so most Abstract Expressionists established links
with Afro-American culture and some actively supported the Civil Rights
movement of the late 19503 and early 19605. Indeed, one of the painters who
participated in the Artists' Session at Studio 35 in 1950 (the transcript of
which was edited by Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt for publication)
was Norman Lewis, the only African-American artist among the first genera-

514 1990s
tion of Abstract Expressionists. Perhaps it is not surprising that the one major
Abstract Expressionist who was Black would be the one member of the group
who has been consistently ignored in accounts of this period in U.S. art.100
As was recently noted in a catalogue accompanying a major retrospective of
Lewis's paintings, the reasons for this omission seem clear enough:

It could be posed that his work was overlooked because of his active political
involvement [on the left]; but in the final analysis, given the place and time in
which he lived, there is the overwhelming fact that his race and the color of
his skin took precedence and caused due recognition to be denied.101

As the large 1989 exhibition at the Kenkeleba Gallery of Norman Lewis's

oeuvre demonstrated, he was painting all-over compositions in a fluent ges-
tural style with a very distinctive touch as early as 1946-47. Among the no-
table works from this period in his career are Metropolitan Crowd (1946), Un-
titled (1947), Jazz Musicians (1948), and Mumbo Jumbo (1950), the latter two
of which directly engage in a subtle inter-image dialogue with the improvisa-
tional structure of Afro-American music and also with the oblique figuration
of much African Art. Furthermore, Lewis, who was the son of a longshore-
man from Harlem, studied in the art school of the John Reed Club and later
rejected social realism (which he had practiced in the 19303 and early 405)
from a leftwing perspective.102
After 1945 he considered Western realism in art to be "reactionary" be-
cause of its provincialism, and by implication its Eurocentrism, or what he
termed its lack of "universalism." Nor did he consider his new efforts at creat-
ing a multi-cultural art to be "apolitical," however much this new concept of
art shifted social engagement to the meta-political, or rather ideological, level
on which he was constructing a more internationalist and less Eurocentric vi-
sual language capable of synthesising non-Western cultural forms with West-
ern pictorial traditions. In an exemplary essay, Ann Gibson has summarised
well the novelty of Lewis's Abstract Expressionist paintings, by observing
that the anti-hierarchical field of his all-over canvases "assert that the aesthetic
of a specific African people has a status equal to that of dominant European
modes such as social realism and expressionism."103 Hence, by intermeshing
these divergent sets of images, "Lewis parodied the claim of each of these
styles to authority" and created "content by contradiction."104
The multi-cultural and post-colonial aims motivating his own internation-
alising project were summarised by Norman Lewis, who envisioned art in the
following terms:

1990s 515
 not as reproduction or as a convenient but entirely secondary medium for
propaganda but as the production of experiences which combine intellectual
and emotional activities in a way that may conceivably add [...] to a universal
knowledge of aesthetics and the creative faculty which I feel exists for one
form or another in all men.105

It was Lewis who later collaborated with Romare Bearden to found the
Spiral Group of 1963 (the spiral meant "up and out for Black artists") and the
Cinque Gallery to provide exhibition space for younger African-American
artists. Significantly, in the group session of 1950 held by the Abstract Expres-
sionists, when everyone was voicing the view that they felt cut off from the
public during the Cold War period, it was Norman Lewis and Ad Reinhardt
(longtime friends and union activists) who were most preoccupied with reach-
ing the public somehow. Lewis, for example, lamented the passing of the W.P.A.
period and stated:

People no longer have this intimacy with the artists, so that the public does
not know actually what is going on, what is being done by the painter. I re-
member organising for a union on the waterfront. People then didn't know
the function of a union, or what was good about it, but gradually they were
made aware of it. The same is true of our relationship with the people; in
making them aware of what we are doing [in art].106

After Reinhardt declared, "I think everybody should be asked to say some-
thing about this,"107 the responses mostly dealt either with the undesirability
of being integrated into mainstream North American culture or the impossi-
bility of escaping marginalisation by U.S. society. While David Hare said: "It
is not always such a good thing to find yourself an accepted part of the cul-
ture,"108 Jimmy Ernst added, "I would rather be unattached to any part of
society than to be commissioned to carve a picture of Mr Truman."109 But it
was de Kooning who eloquently summed up their historical predicament
(rather than just existential sentiments) when he declared: "We have no posi-
tion in the world—absolutely no position except that we just insist upon being
around."110
As we shall see, it was this awareness of being marginalised that accounted
at least in part for the way some of the white Abstract Expressionists em-
pathised with Afro-Americans (and also Native Americans). References to
African-American culture went from the topical, such as was true of Pollock's
Lavender Mist of 1950 that was named after a 1947 composition by Duke

516 1990s
Ellington (Romare Bearden has stated that he knew several Abstract Expres-
sionists who used to paint while listening to Black jazz),111 to the quite pro-
found way (as Dore Ashton has pointed out) in which Willem de Kooning
identified with a Black protagonist in one of Faulkner's finest novels.112
Titles for de Kooning's paintings often had little connection to ideas that
originally motivated the work, but such was not the case with his famous 1947
painting, Light in August. One of ten major paintings (along with an unre-
corded number of drawings) at de Kooning's first one person exhibition,
which was held in 1948 at the Charles Egan Gallery, this painting was predi-
cated on a deep knowledge of Faulkner's 1932 novel, Light in August. In fact,
twenty years later, in 1967, de Kooning was still fascinated with this particular
book by Faulkner and he declared in an interview: 'I'd like to paint Joe Christ-
mas one of these days.'113 As Elaine de Kooning has observed, there were
other influences from different novels by Faulkner on de Kooning's paintings
from the late 19405. On one occasion in this period, for example, she observed
that the anvil-like shapes in one of his paintings evoked the image of a particu-
lar forest described by Faulkner. In expressing agreement with her insight,
Willem de Kooning pointed out this particular passage in his own copy of
Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931).114
The convergences between de Kooning's Light in August and Faulkner's
novel have been perceptively discussed by Charles Stuckey.115 In noting how
de Kooning's painting formally interrelates with the book, he has compared
the ambiguous figurative shifts of the oil painting in black and white with the
constant fluctuations in Joe Christmas' uncertain sense of self as he moves be-
tween the Black and White communities of the South. Furthermore, amor-
phous intimations of these switches in Faulkner's Light in August are repeat-
edly based upon visual metaphors limited to black and white. One febrile
passage by Faulkner involving a sexual fantasy of Joanna Burden about Joe
Christmas refers to "the slow shifting from one to another of such formally
erotic attitudes and gestures as Beardsley at the time of Petronius might have
drawn."116 (And, in fact, Faulkner himself was a visual artist who in his early
twenties published several drawings in a Beardsley-like style.)117
About de Kooning's Light in August as well as many of his other paintings
from this period, contemporaries noticed that the internal shapes of these
works so completely interlocked that neither black nor white functions as
figure or ground. As Thomas Hess (an early and eloquent defender of these
paintings) noted of their forms: "the 'line' that evokes them becomes, in turn,
legible as a negative of the shape it defines, and then as a shape of its own."118

1990s 517
 It has been further observed by Stuckey that there is an arresting and hardly
deniable inter-image dialogue between de Kooning's 1947 painting and the
dust jacket designed by Alvin Lustig for the 1946 New Directions edition of
Faulkner's Light in August.119 Explosive filaments of lighting interwoven with
primitive graffiti-like forms on this cover are similar to formal elements in de
Kooning's painting. Such an interchange with mass culture was not uncom-
mon. On other occasions, he also expressed a qualified admiration for mass
cultural phenomena like highway billboards.120
What most attracted de Kooning to Joe Christmas of Light in August, how-
ever, was the way this fictional character so brilliantly embodied marginalisa-
tion from mainstream U.S. culture. As such, Joe Christmas was the paradig-
matic victim of social hierarchies, racist values, and repressive forces that
both spawned the domestic repression of the McCarthyist period and sus-
tained Cold War liberal interventionism abroad. Just as de Kooning could say
of the Abstract Expressionists that they were on the fringes of U.S. society in
this period, so William Faulkner movingly presented the tragic mulatto Joe
Christmas in even more desperate terms in Light in August:

There was something rootless about him, as though no town nor city was
his, no street, no walls, no square of earth his home. And that he carried this
knowledge with him always as though it were a banner with a quality ruthless,
lonely, and almost proud.121

For Faulkner, the racial problem of the South in particular and of the U.S.
in general was not any "timeless" struggle between "naturally" antagonistic
groups. Rather, racial discrimination in both its individual and institutional
forms was seen by Faulkner as the social manifestation of economic exploita-
tion overdetermined by misguided religious values and reactionary cultural
traditions. In contending that "people can always be saved from injustice,"
Faulkner stated in a well-known 1955 interview that "if the problem of black
and white existed only among children, there'd be no problem."122 Hence, he
said of Southern Whites:

It's only when they get old and inherit that Southern economy which de-
pends on a system of peonage do they accept a distinction between the black
man and the white man[ ] [Sure] there are certain ignorant people that
can be led to believe that one man is better than another because the Chris-
tian Bible says so, they believe all sorts of delusions But it's primarily,
123
I think, economic.

518 1990s
 In a letter to critic Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner referred to Percy Grimm, the
supremely self-assured leader of the Whites who murder Joe Christmas, as a
Nazi avant la lettre.124 Conversely, Joe, because of his mixed lineage, inter-
nalised the racist views of Southern society and tortured himself with feelings
of insufficiency. Unlike the "well adjusted" Percy Grimm, Joe Christmas was
an unceasingly introspective and deeply unsettled man of interracial parent-
age seeking a place in a resolutely segregated society. Subsequently, Faulkner
himself spoke of Joe Christmas as a commentary on institutional racism:

That was his tragedy, that to me was the tragic central idea of the story—that
he didn't know what he was, and there was no way possible in life for him to
find out. Which to me is the most tragic condition a man could find himself
in.... 125

Faulkner himself not only wrote of these problems, he also worked on behalf
of structural change. One such endeavour entailed financial aid for sending
Black students to college. As contemporary African-American leader William
Fox has stated: "Faulkner was a link to a healthier reality. When it was impos-
sible to penetrate caste and class, he helped us believe in possibilities."126 Just
as in the 19305, Faulkner declared: "I most sincerely wish to go on record as
being unalterably opposed to Franco and Fascism"127 (here one is reminded
of Motherwell's Spanish Elegies), so in 1954 he denounced McCarthyism in
a public interview (Washington Evening Star, 11 June 1954). In the course of
this same interview, Faulkner was asked why Blacks generally seemed to be
superior in his novels. He replied: "Maybe the Negro is the best. He does more
with less than anybody else."128
A profound point of intersection exists not only between Faulkner's treat-
ment of displaced Afro-Americans and de Kooning's empathy with them, but
also and equally significantly between Faulkner's focus on Native American
culture and the aforementioned values of Pollock. When asked about the ety-
mology of the word for the legendary county, Yoknapatawpha, which appears
in his novels and stories, Faulkner explained: "It's a Chickasaw Indian word.
They were the Indians that we dispossessed in my country. That word means
'water flowing slow through the flatland.'"129 Furthermore, some of Faulk-
ner's early stories and novels deal specifically with the alarming situation of
Native Americans in U.S. society. In a lengthy 1957 statement about the way
that European civilisation was transplanted in what is now the U.S., Faulkner
observed that this White culture had never been integrated with nature as had
that of the Native Americans (who held land communally before the advent of

1990s 519
 colonialism). Faulkner elaborated: "I think the ghost of that ravishment lingers
in the land, that the land is inimical to the white man because of the unjust
way in which it was taken."13°
Thus, de Kooning's identification with African-Americans and Pollock's
concern with Native Americans helps to understand much more fully why de
Kooning, for example, painted what he called the "no-environment" and "no-
figures" of modern Western society.131 His paintings from 1947-51 about the
anxious rootlessness of urban life, with their partially obliterated letters de-
rived from scrawled graffiti, along with old billboards, evoke an alien environ-
ment. But while many critics would like to see de Kooning's works and those
of all the other Abstract Expressionists as signifying the ahistorical "condi-
tion humaine" of some existentialist authors, it would be more illuminating to
look at these works as signifiers for specific historical problems intrinsic to
post-war U.S. society and to the logic of domination on which late capitalism
is structurally based. Furthermore, if we do in fact examine the position on
racism and capitalism of the existential writer with whom the Abstract Ex-
pressionists were most familiar (as Dore Ashton has compellingly shown in
some of her books), we find that Jean-Paul Sartre attributed neither the exis-
tence of domestic racism nor that of Western imperialism to an unavoidable
"human condition."132
Sartre, who was a lifelong socialist, wrote one of his first plays, The Respect-
ful Prostitute (1946), about the quite objectionable and historically avoidable
race relations in the Southern part of the U.S. An intense admirer of William
Faulkner's novels, about which he wrote some fine literary criticism, Sartre
was always in the vanguard of international support for Third World liberation
movements in Algeria, in Cuba, and in Vietnam.133 Consistent with this view
was the publication by Sartre in the inaugural issue of his journal, Les Temps
modernes (i October 1945), of an essay by the Afro-American writer Richard
Wright, who at one point was a member of the Communist Party as well as au-
thor of an extremely controversial novel on race relations in the United States,
Native Son (1940). Similarly, in 1961, Sartre wrote a striking preface to Franz
Fanon's Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth).134

Dissent During the McCarthy Period

Several interchanges during this period with artists of color are indicative
of why the Abstract Expressionists and Ad Reinhardt would be among the

520 1990s
most forceful supporters in the art world of the civil rights movement of the
19505 and ig6os.
In 1949, Robert Motherwell met (as had Jackson Pollock) with the artist
Wifredo Lam, who was then a supporter of the Communist movement in
Cuba and who was also a member of the French Surrealist group that had ear-
lier been exiled in New York City. Motherwell's disquisition on their meeting
is highly instructive along the above-noted lines:

The conditions under which an artist exists are nearly unbearable; but so
they are everywhere in modern times. Sunday last I had lunch in a fisher-
man's inn in Montauk overlooking Gardiner's bay with Wifredo Lam, the
Cuban and Parisian painter, who is half-Chinese, half-Negro; he has difficulty
in remaining in this country because of the Oriental quota; I know he is hu-
miliated on occasion in New York, for example, in certain restaurants
[A] refrain that ran through his questions is less easy to answer, whether
artists were always so "unwanted." I replied that artists were more wanted in
the past when they spoke for a whole community ... we modern artists con-
stitute a community of sorts.... Lam and I parted advising each other to
keep working; it is the only advice one painter ever gives another....
Until the structure of modern society is radically altered, these will con-
tinue to be the conditions under which modern artists create. No one now
creates with joy; on the contrary, with anguish.... In so doing, one discovers
who one is, or, more exactly, invents oneself. If no one did this, we would
scarcely imagine of what a man is capable.110

Similarly, Franz Kline commiserated with the African-American painter

Sam Middleton, a longtime friend, about the stark racial divide in the United
States during this era. Indeed, the latter still remembers Kline saying in the
19505 that Middleton would have a better chance of making it in Europe than
in the United States. Kline said: "It won't matter if you're good here. If you're
a Negro they'll only take you one at a time: like Richard Wright, then Bald-
win." Furthermore, Kline contended that "They'll only take realistic images
[from black artists]."111
There was no extensive socializing between black and white artists in the
New York art world, despite the fact that several white dealers did have shows
of work by African-American artists—Marian Willard showed Norman Lewis
from 1946 through 1964; Samuel Kootz exhibited the work of Romare Bear-
den between 1946 and 1948; Betty Parsons of Wakefield Gallery featured work

1990s 521
 by William H. Johnson in 1943-4. Although Hale Woodruff, for example,
taught at New York University along with William Baziotes and Tony Smith,
and sometimes drank at the Cedar Tavern Bar, "he was not part of the gang"
(to quote one of his former students).112
The reasons for this relatively small amount of multiethnic socializing evi-
dently had much to do with the unspoken strictures of institutional racism in
this period. Indeed, recently an African-American comedian wittily summa-
rized this state of social invisibility when he related how he went to a Holly-
wood studio to try out for a part in a movie about the 19505. The director of
the movie, according to this joke, replied to him: "You don't understand. There
were no Blacks in the 19505/"ш The artist Ronald Joseph, who like Lewis and
Bearden lived in Harlem at this time, gave a more somber but related assess-
ment of this period:

I would like to explain ... we didn't mix socially.... Now, if you don't mix
into a group, I suppose there are only two reasons. Either you don't want to,
or you cannot. Well, if I look back and explain it now, it seems to me a mixture
of everything What is the common denominator? Is it social life? Is it
education? Is it being in the same neighborhood? Probably the neighbor-
hood. Neighborhood is direct and explicit.114

Notwithstanding the infrequency of socializing across ethnic lines owing

to these social barriers, the Abstract Expressionists and Ad Reinhardt (a life-
long friend of Norman Lewis and probably the person most responsible for
encouraging Lewis to participate in the Artists' Sessions at Studio 35 in 1950)
were exemplary supporters of two of the national groups in the vanguard of
the civil rights movement during the early 19605, namely, the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commit-
tee (SNCC). During May 23-29, 1963, for example, at the Martha Jackson
Gallery in New York, there was an art exhibition and sale to benefit CORE.
The artists who donated works for the cause included Mark Rothko, Ad Rein-
hardt, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning,
James Brooks, and Hans Hofmann.115 About these art exhibitions on behalf of
CORE, national director James Farmer said:

The wonderful generosity of the contributing artists helped to make our

Freedom Rides possible. The results of those rides, I think, are well known
... the courage and the restraint of the Freedom Riders, in the face of the most

522 1990s
 dreadful violence and abuse, gave an immense forward thrust to the whole
civil rights movement.116
A similar art exhibition and sale was organized in 1963 by the Artists Com-
mittee of SNCC. The chair of this committee was Jacob Lawrence, and the
vice-chair was Ad Reinhardt; Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden were com-
mittee members. Among the sponsors were Elaine de Kooning and critic
Dore Ashton. The letter of appeal by the Artists Committee of SNCC re-
counted its support of the Freedom Rides, sit-ins, and the voter registration
drive, and declared:

Artists, too, yearn for an end to racial injustice and the birth of equality for all
men. Inspired by the students, we pledge ourselves to guarantee support for
this vital effort in which we deeply believe and upon which our futures hinge.117

In light of the above-noted ethnic situation, it is not surprising that many

members of the New York School who were not African-Americans none-
theless had to contend with ethnocentric remarks about their own work. As
Harold Rosenberg ironically observed of "the New York School," it actually
originated elsewhere, since it was largely made up of immigrants and sons or
daughters of immigrants. Furthermore, most of them came not from Western
Europe but from points further east or south.118 In 1947, for example, when
William Baziotes won First Prize at an exhibition in the Art Institute of Chi-
cago, his modernist paintings (which drew on non-Western and preindustrial
art) were denounced in the Daily News as "foreign art," thus recalling the per-
vasive period view that modernism was "Ellis Island Art."119
In 1947 when the U.S. government was pressured into canceling an exhibi-
tion of contemporary artwork to be sent abroad—which included paintings
by Adolph Gottlieb and Philip Guston—ethnocentrism was among the factors.
Indeed, President Truman himself (who does not deserve credit for desegre-
gating the U.S. military) used a racist remark to denigrate one painting in the
show—a work by the Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi—saying: "the
artist must have stood off from the canvas and thrown paint at it... if that's art,
Fm a Hottentot."120 Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marshall, the author
of the Marshall Plan, declared that henceforth the U.S. State Department
would use "no taxpayers' money for modern art."121 Accordingly, in 1948 the
Boston Institute of Modern Art changed its name to the Institute of Contem-
porary Art, because the term "modern art" was seen as too "foreign," that is,
as "subversive" and thus likely to attract unwanted attention.122

1990s 523
 Notes to "Introduction" and "Abstract Expressionism
and Afro-American Marginalisation"

1. Barnett Newman, Introduction, Northwest Coast Indian Painting (Betty Parsons

Gallery, New York, 1946), n.p.
2. Ibid.
3. Meyer Schapiro, "The Liberating Quality of Abstract Art" (1957), in Modern
Art, New York, 1978, p. 215.
4. Lawrence Kilman, "U.S. Poll Shows Majority Don't Care for Abstract Art," The
International Herald Tribune (14 May 1985), p. 3.
5. This is the case, for example, in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of
Modern Art (Chicago, 1983). None the less, it must be noted that this book con-
tains some very important research and many significant insights. In short, Guil-
baut's study is a valuable one for many reasons.
6. Coco Fusco, Introduction, Signs of Transition: 8os Art from Cuba (New York:
Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, 1988), n.p.
7. Luis Morales, "Arte Nicaragüense," La Segunda Bienal de la Habana (Havana,
1986), pp. 420-1.
8. For an extended discussion of the Solentiname School, see: David Craven, The
New Concept of Art and Popular Culture in Nicaragua Since the Revolution in
1979 (Lewiston, New York), 1989, pp. 72-106.
9. Ernesto Cardenal, "Cántico del sol," Ventana, 19 July 1986, pp. 12-13. Also see:
David Craven, op. cit., pp. 140-55.
10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), translated by Hélène Iswolsky
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1984).
11. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (1966), translated by Geoffrey
Wall (London, 1978).
12. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 10-11.
13. Richard Barnett, Intervention and Revolution: The U.S. and the Third World
(New York, 1964). Also see Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, The Political
Economy of Human Rights, 2 vols. (Boston, 1979).
14. Meyer Schapiro, "Race, Nationality and Art," Art Front (New York, 1936), pp.
38-41.
15. Clement Greenberg, "American-Type Painting," Art and Culture (Boston, 1961),
pp. 208-9.

99. Barnett Newman, "Art of the South Seas," Studio International, no. 179, Febru-
ary 1970, p. 70.
100. Corrine Jennings, Foreword, Norman Lewis (Kenkeleba Gallery, New York,
1989), p. 8.
101. Norman Lewis is not mentioned in either Irving Sandier's Triumph of American
Painting or in Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art.
102. Ann Gibson, "Norman Lewis in the Forties," in Norman Lewis, p. 17.

524 1990s
103. Ibid., p. 16.
104. Ibid., p. 20
105. Norman Lewis, "Thesis, 1946," in Norman Lewis, p. 63.
106. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, editors, op. cit., p. 16.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid.
no. Ibid.
111. Gerald Fraser, "Romare Bearden, Collagist and Painter," The New York Times,
13 March 1988, p. 36.
112. Dore Ashton, The New York School, p. 194.
113. David Shirey, "Don Quixote in Sprints "Newsweek (20 November 1967),p. 80.
114. Charles Stuckey, "Bill de Kooning and Joe Christmas," Art in America, vol. 68,
no. 3, March 1980, p. 71.
115. Ibid.
116. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York, 1932), p. 245.
117. Lother Hônninghausen, William Faulkner: The Art of Stylization in His Early
Graphic and Literary Work (Cambridge, 1987).
118. Thomas Hess, Willem de Kooning Drawings (Greenwich, Conn., 1972), p. 17.
119. Charles Stuckey, op. cit., p. 72.
120. Lawrence Alloway, "Marilyn Monroe as Subject Matter," in Topics in American
Art, pp. 140-4.
121. William Faulkner, Light in August, p. 27.
122. James Meriwether and Michael Millgate, editors, Lion in the Garden: Interviews
with William Faulkner (New York, 1968), p. 130.
123. /Wd.,p.i83.
124. William Faulkner, Letter to Malcolm Cowley, in The Portable Faulkner (New
York, 1946), p. 652.
125. Frederick Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, editors, Faulkner in the University (New
York, 1959), p. 72.
126. Michael Pearson, "The Shrine of Faulkner," The Atlanta Constitution (14 Feb-
ruary 1988), p. 5H.
127. Cited in Herbert Mitgang, "Books on the Spanish Civil War," The New York
Times (18 August 1986), p. i8C.
128. James Meriwether and Michael Millgate, op. cit., p. 79.
129. Ibid., pp. 133-4.
130. Frank Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, op. cit., p. 43.
131. Irving Sandier, op. cit., 1970, pp. 131,133.
132. Dore Ashton, The New York School, pp. 174-92.
133. Jean-Paul Sartre, On Cuba (1960) (Westport, Conn., 1974).
134. Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans-
lated by Constance Farrington (New York, 1968), pp. 7-34.

1990s 525
 Notes to "Dissent During the McCarthy Period"

no. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 68; emphasis added. On Lam, see: Wifredo
Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952 (New York: Studio Museum of
Harlem, December 6,1992-April n, 1993); and also Julia Herzberg, "Wifredo
Lam," Latin American Art, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 18-24.
in. Interview with Sam Middleton by Ann Gibson (March 3,1988), Amsterdam,
Netherlands. Cited by Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 13, 40. See also: Akua
McDaniel, "Institutional Support of African American Art: 1930-1945," in Se-
lected Essays: Art and Artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the igSos (Atlanta:
National Black Arts Festival, 1988), pp. 19-27.
112. Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 12-13 (quote on p. 12).
113. Richard Pryor, television appearance, c. 1991.
114. Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 12-13.
115. Artists for CORE (New York City, Martha Jackson Gallery, May 23-29,1963).
The announcement for the show, which includes an introduction by James
Farmer of CORE, lists the artists who contributed to the show as well as its
patrons (like Dore Ashton, James Baldwin, and Thomas B. Hess). A copy of
this announcement is in the Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art,
N/69-100: 0687-9.
116. Ibid., N/69-100: 0688.
117. Jacob Lawrence, An Open Letter on Behalf of the Artists Committee for Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1963), New York City, p. i. A copy of this
letter, which lists Ad Reinhardt as an officer and Norman Lewis as a member
of the Committee at Large, is found in the Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of
American Art, N/69-100: 736.
118. Harold Rosenberg, "Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art" (1954), in Dis-
covering the Present, pp. 101-2. For a discussion of the nature of art-world insti-
tutions, see: Harold Rosenberg, "The Art Establishment" (1965), in The Sociol-
ogy of Art and Literature, edited by M. C. Albrecht,J. H. Barnett, M. Griff(New
York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 388-95.
119. These derisive comments about Baziotes by C. J. Bulliet of the Daily News of
Chicago are cited in Dore Ashton, New York School, p. 147.
120. The comment by President Truman is cited by Jane DeHart Mathews in "Art
and Politics in Cold War America," American Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 4
(October 1976): 762-87, at p. 777. William Leuchtenberg, Distinguished Pro-
fessor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a past
President of the American Historical Association, has written a forthcoming
book on Truman's racialist views.
121. "Announcement of Secretary of State Marshall: No More Government Money
for Modern Art," New York Times (May 6,1947), p. 24. Cited in DeHart Math-
ews, "Art and Politics," p. 778.
122. Mathews, "Art and Politics," p. 774. On this issue, see: Serge Guilbaut, "The
Frightening Freedom of the Brush: The Boston Institute of Contemporary and
Modern Art," in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston: Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1985), pp. 52-93-
526 1990s
MICHAEL LEJA Modern Man Discourse and the New York School

Barnett Newman's observation that he and the other New York School paint-
ers had "made cathedrals of ourselves" attests to their participation in the di-
vinization of the self. Schematic though it may be, the outline of some of the
varied strands within Modern Man discourse provides an illuminating cul-
tural matrix for the interests and works of the New York School painters. Like
the Modern Man authors, these artists saw their work as responsive to the war
and other contemporary stresses. One might assume that this was true to
some extent of all art made during the war, but this was not the case. Review-
ing the "Artists for Victory" show at the Metropolitan Museum in 1942,
Manny Farber remarked on the paucity of images addressing the war and its
implications.

It is interesting how few of these painters were influenced by the war.

(Though perhaps the hands of the selection jury may be felt here.) Out of
468 I think there are only three war pictures, yet nothing else is so constantly
on our minds and in our feelings. It is as though American painters are so
tied to copying scenes on tables, out the window, or on the model stand that
they will have to see the war to paint it. But it is just such profound and
close to terrifying emotions that Americans seem to be afraid to respond to.
These people are artists: they are supposed to have gone beyond the stric-
tures of our culture. Yet there seems to be a definite fear behind the pictures
in this exhibit of saying something the spectator will have to look at silently
and without even mental phrases, of exposing the emotions we do not talk
of politely, of, in other words, being at all profound and personal.101

To be profound and personal was the challenge that Rothko, Gottlieb, Pol-
lock, and others were then taking up with a vengeance, as the numerous mani-
festoes of the following year make clear. Gottlieb's remark in Tiger's Eye in
1947 makes vivid the relation between the painters and the discourse on mod-
ern man: "Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate at-
tempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subter-
ranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is

SOURCE: Excerpted from Refraining Abstract Expressionism, 249-52,270-72. Reprinted

with the permission of Yale University Press.

527
 our reality."102 To cope with the perception of pervasive evil by looking to the
subterranean interior, thereby expressing the neurosis of the time, was a pre-
ferred strategy of Modern Man authors as well as New York School artists.
While histories of this art commonly have traced its notions of self and the hu-
man situation to new "existentialist" philosophies filtering into the U.S. from
Europe in the wake of the war, there is reason to argue that the subjective
identities shaped by the artists and imbricated in their paintings were already
highly developed and thoroughly implemented by then. Nor is an existential-
ist influence necessary (or even able) to explain the formal changes witnessed
in New York School art during these postwar years, specifically the gravita-
tion toward system, simplification, and abstraction
The paintings and statements seen in the broader context delineated just
above indicate that the work and thought of the New York School artists were
deeply rooted in the discourse about modern man. Questions about primitive
instincts and unconscious impulses and the role of these in mental processes
are the principle links between the artists and this broad discourse. These
links were not lost on contemporary observers. "The subject of the paintings
of Adolph Gottlieb is without question an attempt at revelation of the psy-
chiatric configurations of the 'id' or inner panorama of the mind of modern
man," wrote one reviewer.103 The locution modern man was ubiquitous in
1949; in itself it signifies little and is not sufficient to fix a text as part of Mod-
ern Man discourse unless it conjures, as here, the particular terms of the dis-
course. Even in this narrower sense, the locution permeated the criticism and
commentary on New York School painting with fluid ease—a mark of con-
gruence between the art and the discourse that engendered the term and gave
it meaning.
The differences in priorities and attitudes among the artists, some of which
I pointed out as obstacles to group identity, become less obtrusive when situ-
ated within the enveloping discourse. Whether an artist focuses on primi-
tivism or unconsciousness, whether science and reason are seen as causes or
solutions to modern problems—such discrepancies matter less once an over-
arching discursive frame situates them as different positions within a circum-
scribed network of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and interests. Furthermore,
other interests, which formerly seemed idiosyncratic or irrelevant, may ac-
quire new significance as a result of réintégration into the discourse. One ex-
ample is the penchant for intellectuality and philosophy in the work of many
of the artists—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, in an insistence on the
importance of the "subject" in their work. Philosophical ambitions motivated

528 1990s
much New York School work, and the philosophy engaged tended to be that
of Modern Man discourse. Like the Modern Man authors, many of the artists
exhibited a tendency toward idealism—if the realm of ideas was the terrain on
which the major work of reconstruction would take place, then some painters
with "reconstructive" interests and ambitions might want to stake a claim to
intellectual territory. This ambition could mean more than merely becoming
involved with powerful ideas, as the Mythmakers made explicit in the mid to
late 19403: it might also justify devising a deliberately idea-based art. This is, I
believe, the proper frame for understanding Newman's insistence on the in-
tellectual character of art. In essay after essay, he made the claim in no uncer-
tain terms.

In short, modernism brought the artist back to first principles. It taught that
art is an expression of thought, of important truths, not of a sentimental and
artificial "beauty."104

Art is the realm of pure thought.105

I therefore wish to call the new painting "plasmic," because the plastic ele-
ments of the art have been converted into mental plasma. The effect of these
new pictures is that the shapes and colors act as symbols to [elicit] sympa-
thetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist's vision The
new painter owes the abstract artist a debt for giving him his language, but
the new painting is concerned with a new type of abstract thought.... If it
were possible to define the essence of this new [American] movement, one
might say that it was an attempt to achieve feeling through intellectual con-
tent. The new pictures are therefore philosophic.106

Motherwell wrote of Pollock that "painting is his thought's medium," and

Harold Rosenberg described the action painter's canvas as "the 'mind' through
which the painter thinks."107

Mind/body unity was part of the new knowledge that seemed to have value in
the reconstruction of modern man's belief and behavior—sometimes as a way
of addressing the pervasive sense of dislocation, sometimes as part of the ex-
planation of instincts and drives. Rothko, too, asserted his support for a ver-
sion of the idea in his statement for the David Porter exhibition in early 1945:

1990s 529
 "I insist upon the equal existence of the world engendered in the mind and
the world engendered by God outside of it."113 And Robert Motherwell saw
the mind-body connection as the answer to the anti-intellectualism of Ameri-
can artists.

The anti-intellectualism of English and American artists has led them to the
error of not perceiving the connection between the feeling of modern forms
and modern ideas. By feeling is meant the response of the "mind-and-body"
as a whole to the events of reality.114

In short, idealism in general, and the mind-body problem in particular, mark

a philosophical interest and ambition that link Modern Man discourse and
the theory and practice of some of the young artists of the New York School.
The various ties that bound New York School painting to Modern Man
discourse would also make it susceptible to criticisms lodged against the lat-
ter. Sidney Hook's charge that it represented a failure of nerve was extended
to the arts; he asserted that literature and the arts had been deeply affected by
the shifts that constituted what I have been calling Modern Man discourse.

In the literary arts, the tom-tom of theology and the bagpipes of transcenden-
tal metaphysics are growing more insistent and shrill. We are told that...
none of the arts and no form of literature can achieve imaginative distinction
without "postulating a transcendental reality." Obscurantism is no longer
apologetic; it has now become precious and wilful.115

Hook's article preceded by only a few months the letter to the art editor of the
New York Times written by Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman which defended
their work as "an adventure into an unknown world," a world of imagination,
which is "fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense." Their "ob-
scurantist" (so Jewell found it) art, with its allusions to "myth," and their pro-
fession of "spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art" would have
made these artists appropriate targets for Hook's criticisms. Likewise Robert
Motherwell's defense of the modern artist as "the last active spiritual being in
the great world . . . it is the artists who guard the spiritual in the modern
world."116

The subjectivity conceived, explored, experienced, and represented by

these artists was not a natural phenomenon but a specific social and cultural
construction. That construction—"modern man"—has been a primary ob-

530 1990s
ject, one might say the protagonist, of my study. I have aimed to illuminate this
figure's internal architecture. Its basic structural element, I have argued, was a
matrix of primitive instincts, habits, and unconscious impulses. These com-
ponents, as I have also tried to show, were responses to specific historical and
cultural conditions. The restabilization of bourgeois ideology in the face of
the shock of modern historical events depended upon the construction of
psychologizing explanations for those events; crucial to this project were the
insights offered by the study of "primitive" human life and the unconscious
mind. This construction of the problem and its solution achieved wide cur-
rency in 19405 America. I have tried to suggest how profound were the effects
of its positing the human (white, middle-class, male) individual as the subject
—in the sense of a real, identifiable, coherent entity—of reflection upon moder-
nity. This male individual was portrayed as the locus of the conflicts at the
source of modern life's tragedies. He was understood to be both agent and
victim of the mysterious impulses or forces producing those conflicts.
Much as modern man was believed to be both agent and victim of power-
ful internal and external forces, the New York School painters—as well, for
that matter, as the authors of Modern Man literature and the makers of film
noir—were, inevitably, both subjects and agents of ideology. I [have] used
the Gramscian notion of "hegemony" to describe the process: the dominant
middle-class ideology had so permeated the institutions and discourses that
shaped the New York School painters that its constraints were part of the very
fabric of their experience, development, ambition, and subjectivity. In the ab-
sence of deliberate, direct, sustained, radical deconstructive work on that ide-
ology by the artists themselves, its limits were bound to contain their authen-
tic efforts to produce art that would convey something of the difficulty of their
lived experience. In the end, those efforts contributed to the renovation and
elaboration of the dominant ideology and its models of human nature, mind,
and subjectivity.
Another way of envisioning the relation between the dominant ideology
and the New York School artists is suggested in the work of Michel Foucault.
Near the opening of this study I quoted Foucault's injunction to question re-
ceived syntheses, a challenge that dates from the late 19605—the period of
his structural analysis of the discourses of the human sciences. It is fitting that
he return here, as the preeminent analyst of "discourses"—that critical con-
cept enabling the analysis of thought and language as a social and political
practice—this time with insights dating from the mid-igyos, the period of his
preoccupation with the nature of power.147

1990s 531
 Power must be analyzed as something which circulates, or rather as some-
thing which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or
there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece
of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation.
And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in
the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They
are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of
its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its
points of application.
The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a
primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten
or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes in-
dividuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain
bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be iden-
tified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-
a-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects. The individual is an
effect of power, and at the same time, or precisely to the extent to which it is
that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power
has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.148

I introduce this passage because I find it an indispensible description of cer-

tain fundamental aspects of the historical phenomena under analysis. Fou-
cault's picture of power as thoroughly diffused throughout the social body—
as constituting entities (discourses, subjects) within the threads of power's
web, articulating it, acting as its vehicles as well as its effects—fits the processes
of ideological reconstruction I have been tracing. A subject's preference for
one form of explanation over another, a preference conditioned by the sub-
ject's ideological constitution, is one form in which the constitutive power is
articulated and exercised. What I have called the "momentum" of discourses
and ideologies—although "inertia" may be more precise—is preserved through
such quotidian and apparently insignificant activities.
Foucault's statement encapsulates the relation observed in the present
study between the constitution of the subject and the subject's participation
in the circulation of power. The New York School painters were, speaking
generally, Modern Man subjects, constituted by the dominant ideology and its
model of subjectivity, both of which their art reproduced, elaborated, and
promoted. Their representations of their conflicted interior worlds or inner
selves as dominated by particular primitive and unconscious components

532 1990s
helped to consolidate evolving notions of the human individual's nature and
mind.
Through this complex interlocking of subjectivity and ideology, New York
School painting illuminates fundamental mechanisms of culture in a modern
bourgeois capitalist society—or at least in a society whose dominant ideology
is as secure in its hegemony as is bourgeois ideology in the United States.
Consent was not so much manufactured or engineered in the wartime U.S.
as it was self-sustaining, so deeply was the dominant ideology embedded in
the very subjectivity, mentality, and experience of the subjects it constructed.
Those subjects "instinctively" acted as its agents, identifying its interests
closely with theirs. Certain subjects employed in characterizing and repre-
senting collective experience for large segments of the population—the cul-
tural critics, journalists, popular authors, fiction writers, artists, filmmakers
—engaged in "democratic" processes of exchange (including debate and dis-
pute as well as friendly give and take) which functioned ultimately to promote
the efficient and continual calibration of integral elements in the hegemonic
ideology. Radical critique was not impossible, certainly, as some of the voices
heard in this chapter reveal. It could issue from the conflicts and gaps among
the various subject positions that individuals were called upon to inhabit, ne-
gotiate, and reconcile as members of collectivities and as isolated monads.
Most commonly, however, radical critique was overshadowed and under-
mined by reformist proposals. Resisting the key elements of Modern Man dis-
course was evidently far more difficult and unusual than succumbing to their
seductions.

Notes

101. Manny Farber, "Artists for Victory," Magazine of Art (December 1942): 280.
102. Adolph Gottlieb, "The Ides of Art," Tiger's Eye (December 1947): 43.
103. Alfred Valente, Review of Gottlieb exhibition at Seligmann Galleries, in Prome-
nade (February 1949): 40. Because this review is telling, in my view, and diffi-
cult to locate, I will quote it at length: "[Gottlieb's] method is similar to the re-
clining couch technique of the psychiatrist who recalls the most fugitive,
obscure, personal, sexual, atavistic memories. Drawing from the past with a
certain naïveté that is lost almost by its directness, Gottlieb contains complete
fragments of experiences in squares, one against the other, which derive from
the arrangements of medieval books of hours; or again, he will insinuate details
in episodic totem pole story-telling arrangements with cubistic overtones. The
very use of some of these alien art forms is supposed to imply certain throwback
meanings. See Pictograph. Gottlieb's work is primarily individualistic in its pre-

1990s 533
 occupation with itself and, more egotistically, with the painter himself. The hu-
manities are overlooked; love, hate, religion, man's hopes, morals and fate are
secondary matters in the play of aesthetic form and experiment. Nevertheless,
for those clinically interested, this show is outstanding for what is happening in
the neon-lighted ateliers."
104. Barnett Newman, "Sobre el arte moderno: Examen y ratificación," La Revista
Belga (November 1944): 20. English original published in Barnett Newman, Se-
lected Writings and Interviews, ed.John P. O'Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1990): 67. Hereafter BN-SWI.
105. Newman, "La pintura de Tamayo y Gottlieb," La Revista Belga (April 1945): 17
("El Arte es dominio del pensiamento puro"). English original published in
BN-SWI: 72.
106. Newman, "The Plasmic Image" (1945), BN-SWI: 141-42,155.
107. Robert Mother well, "Painters' Objects," Partisan Review (Winter 1944): 97;
Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters," Art News (December
1952): 22.

113. David Porter, éd., Personal Statement (Washington D.C.: David Porter Gal-
lery, 1945), unpaginated. (Pamphlet prepared for the exhibition "A Painting
Prophecy—1950" at the David Porter Gallery in February, 1945.)
114. Robert Motherwell, "The Modern Painter's World," Dyn (November 1944): 9.
The italics are Motherwell's.
115. Sidney Hook, "The New Failure of Nerve," Partisan Review (January-February
1943): 3. The italics are Hook's.
116. Motherwell, "Modern Painter's World," 10.

147. For a valuable discussion of the arguments in Foucault's work relevant to the
issues under consideration here, see Peter Dews, "Power and Subjectivity in
Foucault," New Left Review (March-April 1984): 72-95 and the same author's
"Adorno, Post-Structuralism and the Critique of Identity," New Left Review
(May-June 1986): 28-44. Also influential in my thinking about the relation of
subjectivity and ideology in New York School painting was Steve Burniston
and Chris Weedon, "Ideology, Subjectivity and the Artistic Text," in On Ideol-
ogy (London: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1978): 199-229. A
useful reference with a wide scope is Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and
David E. Wellberry, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy} Individuality,
and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press,
1986).
148. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
igjz-igyj, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980): 98.

534 1990s
T. J. CLARK In Defense of Abstract Expressionism

I assume you speak of the age in which great forms

appear, only to be taken apart ten years later ...

The angriness of the captive is felt,

is very plain, it is a large feeling
like a light in a toe, a voice of the sky;
now it has yielded all its bars, its robes,
and become the gentle sentiment of a class.
Frank O'Hara, "About Courbet" Ait News, 1958

We are forty years away from Abstract Expressionism, and the question of
how we should understand our relationship to the movement starts to be in-
teresting again. Awe at its triumphs is long gone; but so is laughter at its cheap
philosophy, or distaste for its heavy breathing, or boredom with its sublimity,
or even resentment at the part it played in the Cold War. Not that any of those
feelings has dissipated, or ever should, but that it begins to be clear that none
of them—not even the sum of them—amounts to an attitude to the painting in
question. They are what artists and critics went in for because they did not
have an attitude—because something stood in the way of their making Ab-
stract Expressionism a thing of the past.

Not being able to make a previous moment of high achievement part of the
past—not to lose it and mourn it and, if necessary, revile it—is, for art in mod-
ernist circumstances, more or less synonymous with not being able to make
art at all. Because ever since Hegel put the basic proposition of modernism
into words in the iSsos—that "art, considered in its highest vocation, is and
remains for us a thing of the past"1—art's being able to continue has de-
pended on its success in making that dictum specific and punctual. That is to
say, on fixing the moment of art's last flowering at some point in the compara-
tively recent past, and discovering that enough remains from this finale for
a work of ironic or melancholy or decadent continuation to seem possible

SOURCE: Copyright © 1999 T. J. Clark (as part of Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a
History of Modernism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999]), 371-403,441-42.
Reprinted with the permission of T. J. Clark.

535
 nonetheless. The "can't go on, will go on" syndrome. I think of the relation of
nineteenth-century orchestral and chamber music to the moment of Mozart
and Beethoven; or of how nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature man-
aged to continue living on the idea of "the Romantics," or on the terminal im-
ages it fashioned of Baudelaire and Rimbaud; or of the past that "Impression-
ism" went on providing for French painting deep into the twentieth century
(till the deaths of Bonnard and Matisse); or of the feeding of later modernisms
on the myth of the Readymade and the Black Square.
Hegel's dictum had to be localized, in other words. And pointing to the fact
that it can be localized, and therefore in a sense evaded, is of course to confirm
the Hegelian thesis, not to refute it. For Hegel did not anticipate any literal
ceasing, or even withering-away, of activities calling themselves art. He just
did not see that they could possibly be the form any longer in which men and
women articulated the relations of mind and body to possible worlds. Or
rather, articulated them to good effect. What he did not see, I think, was that
the full depth and implication of this inability—the inability to go on giving
Idea and World sensuous immediacy, of a kind that opened both to the play of
practice—would itself prove a persistent, maybe sufficient, subject. That was
because he had a naive hubris about philosophy, and because he could not de-
tach himself from the sense of world-historical beginnings and endings that
came with an adulthood passed in the shadow of the French Revolution. And
other reasons besides. He could never have guessed that the disenchantment
of the world would take so long.
Modernism, as I conceive it, is the art of the situation Hegel pointed to,
but its job turns out to be to make the endlessness of the ending bearable, by
time and again imagining that it has taken place—back there with Beethoven
scratching out Napoleon's name on the Eroica symphony, or with Rimbaud
getting on the boat at Marseille. Every modernism has to have its own proxi-
mate Black Square.
Therefore our failure to see Pollock and Hans Hofmann as ending some-
thing, or our lack of a story of what it was they were ending, is considerably
more than a crisis in art criticism or art history. It means that for us art is no
longer a thing of the past; that is, we have no usable image of its ending, at a
time and place we could imagine ourselves inhabiting, even if we would prefer
not to. Therefore art will eternally hold us with its glittering eye. Not only will
it forego its role in the disenchantment of the world, but it will accept the role
that has constantly been foisted upon it by its false friends: it will become one

536 1990s
of the forms, maybe the form, in which the world is re-enchanted. With a magic
no more and no less powerful (here is my real fear) than that of the general
conjuror of depth and desirability back into the world we presently inhabit—
that is, the commodity form. For one thing the myth of the end of art made
possible was the maintenance of some kind of difference between art's sensu-
ous immediacy and that of other (stronger) claimants to the same power.

The situation I have just been describing may not be remediable. It may
be that we have lost Abstract Expressionism because we have lost modern-
ism tout court, and therefore the need to imagine art altogether—whether con-
tinuing or ending. I have my doubts. But my question here is more limited. I
want to mount a defense of Hofmann and Pollock and others, couched in his-
torical terms. Whether the defense makes any of them usable, in the sense I
have been proposing—whether it makes them a thing of the past—depends on
whether it tallies in the long-term with art practice. At the moment I see no
reason why it should; but equally, I find it hard to believe that the present myth
of post-ness will sustain itself much past the year 2000. All this remains to be
seen—it is not art historians' business: I can only bring it up because it would
be futile to pretend that I do not think a great deal hinges on somebody, even-
tually, giving this painting its due.

A word about interpretations, then. There has been a feeling in the air for
some time now that writing on Abstract Expressionism has reached an im-
passe. The various research programs that only yesterday seemed on the verge
of delivering new and strong accounts of it, and speaking to its place (maybe
even its function) in the world fiction called America, have run into the sand.
Those who believed that the answer to the latter kind of question would
emerge from a history of Abstract Expressionism's belonging to a Cold War
polity, with patrons and art-world institutions to match, have proved their
point and offended all the right people. But the story, though good and neces-
sary, turned out not to have the sort of upshot for interpretation that the story-
tellers had been hoping for. It was one thing to answer the question, "What
are the circumstances in which a certain national bourgeoisie, in the pride of
its victory after 1945, comes to want something as odd and exotic as an avant
garde of its own?" It is another to speak to the implications of that encounter
for the avant garde itself, and answer the question, "To what extent was the
meeting of class and art-practice in the later 19405 more than just contingent?

1990s 537
 To what extent does Abstract Expressionism really belong, at the deepest level
—the level of language, of procedure, of presuppositions about world-making
—to the bourgeoisie who paid for it and took it on their travels?"
Not that answers to the latter questions will never be available, in my view,
not that writers have given up looking for ways to ask them more convinc-
ingly. Work is getting done. And certainly they seem to me the kind of ques-
tions still most worth asking of the paintings we are looking at—far more so
than going through the motions of discovering, for the umpteenth time, that in
Vortex or Lent "paintings . . . are made . . . to block the viewer's impulse to
constitute an imaginary object out of the painting's sensory reality, the eye be-
ing led back incessantly to painting's constitutive elements—line, color, flat
surface [les tableaux. . . sont faits. . . pour entraver le mouvement de constitu-
tion d'un objet irréel à partir de la réalité sensible du tableau, l'oeil étant inces-
samment reconduit aux éléments constitutifs de la peinture, la ligne, la couleur,
le plan]"2 Once upon a time even this semiotic fairy tale evoked a faint sen-
sation of wonder. But that was in another country ...
At least the tellers of the historical story (the New-York-in-the-age-of-Joe-
McCarthy-and-Nelson-Rockefeller story) recognize that their researches have
landed them in a quandary; at least they are aware their objects resist them.
The semioticians, it seems to me, are frozen in the triumph of their pre-
arranged moments of vision.

Sometimes the way out of this kind of impasse in historical work comes
from proposing another set of possible descriptions that the painting in ques-
tion might "come under"—making the proposal, especially in the beginning,
with no very clear sense of where it may lead. How would it alter things, one
asks, what sort of new orders in the objects would be set up, if we chose to
look at them this way? How different would they look? Would they look bet-
ter? Or properly worse? (Sometimes the way out of an impasse of understand-
ing involves putting an end to a false, or even true, cathexis of the object. F. R.
Leavis said more about Milton, and Fénéon more about Monet, than all Mil-
ton's and Monet's admirers put together.) The theses that follow are offered in
a similar speculative spirit.

I think we might come to describe Abstract Expressionist painting better if

we took them, above all, to be vulgar. The word for us is pejorative, and to be
understood as such in the arguments that follow. But this should not present

538 1990s
an insuperable problem, especially for anyone used to thinking about mod-
ernism in general. After all, modernism has very often been understood as de-
riving its power from a range of characteristics that had previously come un-
der the worst kind of pejorative descriptions—from ugliness, for example, or
from the merely fragmentary and accidental; from the material as opposed to
the Ideal; from the plain and limiting fact of flatness, from superficiality, from
the low and the formless.
Nonetheless there still may be a slight frisson to the idea that the form of
Abstract Expressionism's lowness is vulgarity. It is not clear how character-
izing Willem de Kooning's Woman, Wind and Window //, for instance, or
Bradley Walter Tomlin's All Souls' Night, No. 2, as "vulgar" is to do anything
besides denigrate them. That is fine by me. Not to be certain, for once, that
the negative term brought on to describe a modernist artifact can ever be made
to earn its positive keep—to emerge transfigured by the fact of its having been
attached to a difficult painting or sculpture—may mean we are on to some-
thing. To call an artwork vulgar is obviously (at least for now) to do something
a bit more transgressive than to call it low or informe. To have made it vulgar
in the first place—to have had vulgarity be the quality in it (maybe the only
quality) that raised the work from inertness and had it speak a world—this
surely must have felt weird to those doing the job, and for much of the time
was barely recognized or tolerated by them, at least when it came to finding
words for what they were up to. Pollock's drip paintings, for instance, as I ar-
gued previously, seem to me to have been begun at the end of 1947 in a mood
of triumphant access to the gaudy and overwrought. Vortex is typical; and yet
the title Pollock settled for, beautiful as it is, somewhat naturalizes the paint-
ing's mad centrifugal force. The same is true, ultimately, of most of the titles
he and his friends dreamed up at this moment—of Phosphorescence and Reflec-
tion of the Big Dipper, or Galaxy and Watery Paths, or even Sea Change and
Full Fathom Five. They all try to conjure back depth and tactility (I mean
natural tactility, the look and feel of the elements) into paintings that hinge, in
my view, on not having much of either. They offer the sea and stars, not an in-
door (Unfounded) fireworks display.

It is an advantage to the term "vulgar," as far as I am concerned, that dis-

cursively it points two ways: to the object itself, to some abjectness or absurd-
ity in its very make-up (some tell-tale blemish, some atrociously visual quality
which the object will never stop betraying however hard it tries); and to the

1990s 539
 object's existence in a particular social world, for a set of tastes and styles of
individuality which have still to be defined, but are somehow there, in the
word even before it is deployed. Herein, I hope, lies the possibility of class as-
cription in the case of paintings like The Oracle and Woman—the possibility
of seeing at last, and even being able to describe, the ways they take part in a
particular triumph and disaster of the petty bourgeoisie. But I am coming to
that.

In Abstract Expressionism—and here is the painting's continuing (maybe

intensifying) difficulty for us—a certain construction of the world we call
"individuality" is revealed in its true, that is to say, contingent, vulgarity. And
so is painting; or rather, so are paintings like Hofmann's The Garden and
Adolph Gottlieb's Black, Blue, Red—dont as they were under the sign or spell
of such a construction, by "individuals" believing utterly (innocently, idioti-
cally) in its power.

I should try to define my terms. It will not be easy. The entries under the
word "vulgar" and its cognates in the Oxford English Dictionary revel, really
a bit vulgarly, in the slipping and sliding of meaning over the centuries, and
in the elusiveness (but for that very reason, the intensity) of the panics and
snobberies built into them. The three quotations that seem to help most with
what we are looking at are, first, Jane Austen in 1797, in Sense and Sensibility,
having Elinor reflect on "the vulgar freedom and folly" of the eldest Miss
Steele and decide it "left her no recommendation"—I think it was the lady's
freedom even more than her folly that Elinor objected to, and needed the
word "vulgar" to dispatch. Then Matthew Arnold in 1865, making the link
between vulgarity and expressiveness that particularly concerns us here:
"Saugrenu [it means 'preposterous'] is a rather vulgar French word, but like
many other vulgar words, very expressive." And lastly, George Eliot, quoted
in Cross's Life as saying of Byron, in a letter of 1869, that he seemed to her
"the most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in litera-
ture." Everyone will have their own favorite candidate—Clyfford Still, Willem
de Kooning, Franz Kline, Hofmann, Pollock when things went best for him—
for the proper substitution in the case of visual art.
Scanning the columns, the eye stops at OED usage 13: "having a common
and offensively mean character; coarsely commonplace; lacking in refinement
or good taste; uncultured, ill-bred." Of actions, manners, features, recorded

540 1990s
from 1643; of persons, from 1678; of language, from 1716; of mind or spirit,
from 1764. The key idea, from the present point of view, is of vulgarity as be-
trayal, on the part of those who by rights ought to be in the vanguard of good
taste. The dictionary does not seem quite cognizant of this shift, though it
provides the evidence for its taking place. It is there already in Coleridge's
complaining, in 1833, of the "sordid vulgarity of the leaders of the day!" and it
becomes a nineteenth-century commonplace. Ruskin in volume 5 of Modern
Painters, we shall see, has a great climactic chapter, "Of Vulgarity," struggling
with the shades of Quilp, Chadband, and Mrs. Gamp—and of Dickens him-
self behind them—and speaking to his deepest fears and hopes for art. The
noun "vulgarian"—"a vulgar person; freq., a well-to-do or rich person of vul-
gar manners"—is coined around 1800.1 guess it is what Ruskin and George
Eliot most have in mind.

I am proposing that one main kind of intensity in Abstract Expressionism

is its engagement with the dangers and falsehoods just catalogued. And what
is special about Abstract Expressionism—what marks it off from all other
modernisms—is that the engagement is with the vulgar as opposed to the "pop-
ular" or "low." I think we should understand the "popular" in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century art as a series of figures of avoidance of the vulgar: that is,
figures of avoidance of art's actual belonging to the pathos of bourgeois taste:
a perpetual shifting and conjuring of kinds of simplicity, directness, naivety,
sentiment and sentimentality, emotional, and material force, in spite of every-
thing about art's actual place and function that put such qualities beyond its
grasp. Abstract Expressionism does little or no such conjuring. That is what
makes it hard to bear. We are used to an art that always sets off again in search
of the true underlying the tawdry, and where the tawdry may divulge the true
(to the artist) just because the tawdriness is someone else's, out there in the
mass or the margin. But Abstract Expressionism does not go elsewhere for its
language, and at its best (its most appalling) it seems in search of the false un-
derlying the vehement; where the point is that cheap vehemence, or easy
delectation, are what painting now is—the only values, the only forms of indi-
viduality, that it can stage without faking. Only those Abstract Expressionist
canvases will do that are truly consumed with their own empty intensity, with
painting as posturing, with a ludicrous bigness and lushness and generality.
(Pollock's big paintings of 1950 are no longer ludicrous and self-consuming
enough: they have become almost comfortable with their scale and degree of

1990s 541
 generalization of touch: the "true" is leaking back into the paintings, giving
them depth and coherence, displacing the great empty performatives of 1948
and 1949. This again is one way of saying why the big paintings could not be
continued.)

Nobody would expect the terms and issues I am claiming as most deeply
Abstract Expressionism's own to be readily available in the discourse of the
time, any more than issues of flatness and modernity were, for example to
even the best of Manet's critics. But one would at least expect to find the
traces in discourse of the issues being avoided. Here is a New York critic in
1951, writing of an artist he greatly admires.

In this case the background is without question the most outrageously

overwhelming the artist has ever contrived. Inspired by the most flagrant
and bombastic French Baroque wallpaper, [he has] intensified to a maxi-
mum its brown and orange arabesque which surrounds areas of the harshest
blue in the centers of which cluster pink and red roses ... All these gratu-
itous incidents superimposed on the wall and floor serve to break up and
confuse the patterns on these surfaces so that the eye can find no security
even in the repetition of ornamental motif—a comfort afforded in ... earlier
compositions ...
Visually the Decorative Figure is a garish, violent, and upsetting picture.
The rather mild problems which [the painter] had been posing for himself
during the previous five years are here suddenly exacerbated almost to the
point of burlesque. Luxe, calme et volupté have disappeared and in their
places discomfort, excitement, and tension reign. The ... Seated Nude of the
year before had expressed [the painter's] rebellion against ease and softness;
this big odalisque adds a revolt against charm and good taste. It represents a
triumph of art over factitious vulgarity. Yet because the picture is so clearly
an act of will in a field of artifice, the victory seems Pyrrhic.3

The last two sentences in particular—"It represents a triumph of art over

factitious vulgarity. Yet because the picture is so clearly an act of will in a field
of artifice, the victory seems Pyrrhic"—seem to me to provide the terms for a
description of Abstract Expressionism. The key question, of course (which
this critic understandably skirts) is whether the victory over vulgarity is meant
to seem Pyrrhic—whether the hollowness of the victory is what the picture

542 1990s
wants to figure most urgently. But of course it is right and proper that even
though these words were written at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and
from what has to become the seat of the movement's institutional power—by
Alfred H. Barr in a MoMA catalogue—they precisely could not be written of
Gottlieb or Hofmann or de Kooning, but only of Matisse, of his Decorative
Figure on Ornamental Ground done a quarter of a century earlier.

I realize that it is still not clear what Barr or I mean by the word "vulgarity"
as applied to paintings. And I do not think it ever will be. The word is opaque:
it points, as Ruskin knew, to a deep dilemma of bourgeois culture: it is as close
to an ultimate term of ethics or metaphysics as that culture maybe will ever
throw up. "Two years ago," ends Ruskin's chapter "On Vulgarity" in Modern
Painters,

when I was first beginning to work out the subject, and chatting with one
of my keenest-minded friends [Mr. Brett, the painter of the Val d'Aosta in
the Exhibition of 1859], I casually asked him, "What is vulgarity?" merely
to see what he would say, not supposing it possible to get a sudden answer.
He thought for about a minute, then answered quietly, "It is merely one of
the forms of Death." I did not see the meaning of the reply at the time; but
on testing it, found that it met every phase of the difficulties connected with
the inquiry, and summed the true conclusion. Yet, in order to be complete,
it ought to be made a distinctive as well as conclusive definition; showing
what form of death vulgarity is; for death itself is not vulgar, but only death
mingled with life. I cannot, however, construct a short-worded definition
which will include all the minor conditions of bodily degeneracy; but the
term "deathful selfishness" will embrace all the most fatal and essential
forms of mental vulgarity.4

I do not bring on this passage of Ruskin in hopes of solving our problem of

definition, but more because it shows (more clearly than anyone nowadays
would dare to) what the problem is—what terrible cocktail of class ascrip-
tions and bodily disgust the word "vulgar" is empty container for, and how fa-
tal and essential is the sliding within it between a handy form of class racism
and a general sense of class doom. Vulgarity is foulness and degeneracy, it is a
"dulness of bodily sense," "all which comes of insensibility." "The black bat-
tlestain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is."5

1990s 543
 But Brett's dictum is ultimately impatient of such distinctions. We are all house-
maids now.

"Vulgarity is merely one of the forms of death." Beware of taking Brett's

dictum too literally in the case of Abstract Expressionism, and, above all, be-
ware of converting it back into some ridiculous (vulgar) retelling of Abstract
Expressionists' life stories. I think there may be some kind of fatal connection
between this painting's vulgarity and its incessant courting of Death; but that
is not to be understood as a biographical proposition but a formal one. It is a
way of thinking again about Pollock's or Kline's repetition compulsion, their
constant (fruitful) drive toward emptiness, endlessness, the non-human, and
the inorganic.

Perhaps the last paradox these works contain is that of death [this is the nov-
elist Parker Tyler once again, writing of Pollock's drip paintings some time
early in 1950, before the last show of them at Betty Parsons]. For in being a
conception of ultimate time and space, the labyrinth of infinity, Jackson Pol-
lock's latest work goes beyond the ordinary processes of life—however these
might be visualized and recognized—into an absolute being which must con-
tain death as well as life. Hence the spatial distinctions achieved by lines and
spots of color within Pollock's rectangles go as much beyond mere optical
vision as seems possible to painting ...
Jackson Pollock has put the concept of the labyrinth at an infinite and un-
reachable distance, a distance beyond the stars—a non-human distance ... If
one felt vertigo before Pollock's differentiations of space, then truly one would
be lost in the abyss of an endless definition of being. One would be enclosed,
trapped by the labyrinth of the picture-space. But we are safely looking at it,
seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, from a point outside. Only man, in his
paradoxical role of the superman, can achieve such a feat of absolute contem-
plation: the sight of an image of space in which he does not exist?

It would be easy to make fun of this. Its metaphysics are vulgar. But the
terms and tone seem to me as close as Pollock got to appropriate criticism in
his lifetime. It is fitting, again, that these were paragraphs deleted from Tyler's
article in 1950 by Robert Goldwater, editor of the Magazine of Art. They only
survive at all as part of Pollock criticism because the artist seems to have been
given a typescript by the writer, and kept it in his files.

544 1990s
 Maybe the Death in Brett's dictum is simply or mainly that of painting.
Maybe it always was, for Brett and Ruskin as much as Pollock and Parker Tyler.

Death makes a bad metaphor. Pictures that summon it up too readily—

Newman's passim, Rothko's from 1957 on—get to look Gothick before their
time. That we are meant to take the portentousness as ultimately having to do
with "painting," or "signification," or some such, only makes matters worse.
Death is enlisted to make vulgarity look deep.

The trouble with Barnett Newman is that he was never vulgar enough, or
vulgar only on paper. "The First Man Was an Artist," "The Sublime Is Now,"
"The True Revolution Is Anarchist!" etc.

The great Rothkos are those everybody likes, from the early 19505 mainly:
the ones that revel in the new formula's cheap effects, the ones where a hector-
ing absolute of self-presence is maintained in face of the void; with vulgarity—
a vulgar fulsomeness of reds, pinks, purples, oranges, lemons, lime greens,
powder-puff whites—acting as transform between the two possibilities of
reading. The Birth of Tragedy redone by Renoir.

When they are hung in tight phalanx, as he would have them hung, and
flooded with the light he demands that they receive, the tyranny of his ambi-
tion to suffocate or crush all who stand in his way becomes fully manifest...
It is not without significance, therefore, that the surfaces of these paintings
reveal the gestures of negation, and that their means are the devices of seduc-
tion and assault. Not I, but himself, has made it clear that his work is of frus-
tration, resentment and aggression. And that is the brightness of death that
veils their bloodless febrility and clinical evacuations.

Thus Clyfford Still on Rothko, in a letter to Sidney Janis, written in 1955.7

It puts me in mind of Fénéon on Monet: which is to say, it is mean-spirited,
partial, and tendentious, but somehow for that very reason (because it steps
out of the circle of deference for once) the best criticism Rothko ever received.

And so to the question of class. "While formal analysis," says Adorno in

his Introduction to the Sociology of Music, "was learning to trace the most deli-
cate ramifications of [a work's] manufacture,... the method of deciphering

1990s 545
 the specific social characteristics of music has lagged behind pitifully and
must be largely content with improvisations."8 Quite so—and maybe improvi-
sation will turn out to be its method. But equally (this is Adorno in the same
paragraph): "If we listen to Beethoven and do not hear anything of the revolu-
tionary bourgeoisie—not the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the
cry for that totality in which reason and freedom are to have their warrant—
we understand Beethoven no better than does the listener who cannot follow
his pieces' purely musical content, the inner history that happens to their
themes."

What remains to be thought about Abstract Expressionism (though the

thought haunts everything written on the subject, especially those texts most
anxious to repress it) is the painting's place in a determinate class formation;
one which, though long prepared, took on the specific trappings of cultural
power in the years after 1945.1 said "its place in a determinate class forma-
tion," not in a state apparatus, or a newly improvised system of avant-garde
patronage, or a museum/art-world superstructure. Not that the latter are ir-
relevant. But they cannot be what we mean, fundamentally, when we talk
about a certain representational practice inhering in the culture of a class. We
mean that the practice somehow participates in that class's whole construc-
tion of a "world." We are talking of overlap and mutual feeding at the level of
representational practice—at the level of symbolic production (ideology).
When we say that the novel is bourgeois, the key facts in the case are not eigh-
teenth-century subscription lists, or even the uses early readers made of The
Sufferings of Young Werther.

Clement Greenberg begins a review of an exhibition of Courbet at Wilden-

stein's in January 1949 by saying that "Bosch, Brueghel, and Courbet are
unique in that they are great artists who express what may be called a petty
bourgeois attitude."9 Like Barr, he seems to me to be averting his eyes from
Pollock and Clyfford Still. What is new in their case, of course, is that now a
particular (hybrid) form of petty-bourgeois culture—I am including in the term
"culture" a set of political and economic compromise-formations, with myths
and duplicities to match, as well as a set of established styles of personhood—
has become the form, the only viable medium, of bourgeois class power. It is
not that the petty bourgeoisie in America has power, but that its voice has be-
come, in the years after 1945, the only one in which power can be spoken: in it,

546 1990s
and only in it, can be heard the last echoes of what the bourgeoisie had once
aspired to be—"the echo of its slogans, the need to realize them, the cry for
that totality in which freedom [no longer reason] is to have its warrant."10

Abstract Expressionism, I want to say, is the style of a certain petty bour-

geoisie's aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cultural power. It is the art of
that moment when the petty bourgeoisie thinks it can speak (and its masters
allow it to speak) the aristocrat's claim to individuality. Vulgarity is the form
of that aspiration.

Or could we say: Abstract Expressionism is the form of the petty bour-

geoisie's aspiration to aristocracy, at that fateful moment when the bourgeoi-
sie itself no longer so aspires; when the petty bourgeois has to stand in for a
hidden—nay, vanished—bourgeois elite. (Of course we are dealing here with
two class formations, two fictions or constructions, not two brute sociological
entities. We are dealing with forms of representation; which is not to say that
the kind of representational doubling described here does not have specific,
often brutal, sociological effects. McCarthyism was one of them in which the
bourgeois Frankenstein was for a while really paralysed by its petty-bourgeois
Monster.)

Vulgarity, then (to return to our subject), is the necessary form of that indi-
viduality allowed the petty bourgeoisie. Only that painting will engage and
sustain our attention which can be seen to recognize, and in some sense to
articulate, that limit condition of its own rhetoric. Maybe it will always be
a painting that struggles to valorize that condition even as it lays bare its
deficiencies—for here we touch, as Adorno never tired of telling us, on some
constitutive (maybe regrettable) link between art and an ethics of reconcilia-
tion or transcendence—but what we shall value most in the painting is the
ruthlessness of (self-)exposure, the courting of bathos, the unapologetic ba-
nality. The victory, if there is one, must always also be Pyrrhic.
You see now why the concept "vulgarity" has more and more the notion of
betrayal written into it as the nineteenth century goes on. For the bourgeoi-
sie's great tragedy is that it can only retain power by allowing its inferiors to
speak for it: giving them the leftovers of the cry for totality, and steeling itself
to hear the ludicrous mishmash they make of it—to hear and pretend to ap-
prove, and maybe, in the end, to approve without pretending.

1990s 547
 If this frame of reference for Abstract Expressionism turns out to work at
all, one of the things it ought to be good for is rethinking the stale comparison
between America and Europe. European painting after the war, alas, comes
out of a very different set of class formations. Vulgarity is not its problem. In
Asger Jorn, for example—to turn for a moment to the greatest painter of the
19505—what painting confronts as its limit condition is always refinement.
Painting for Jorn is a process of coming to terms with the fact that however
that set of qualities may be tortured, exacerbated, or erased, they still end up
being what (European) painting is; and the torture, exacerbation, and erasure
are discovered in practice to be refinement—that is, the forms refinement
presently takes if a painter is good enough. They are what refines painting to a
new preciousness or dross (it turns out that preciousness and dross are the
same thing).
In calling Jorn the greatest painter of the 19505 I mean to imply nothing
about the general health of painting in Europe at the time (nor to deny that
Jorn's practice was hit and miss, and the number of his works that might qual-
ify as good, let alone great, is very small).11 On the contrary. The clichés in the
books are true. Jorn's really was an end game. Vulgarity, on the other hand,
back on the other side of the Atlantic, turned out to be a way of keeping the
corpse of painting hideously alive—while all the time coquetting with Death.
An Asger Jorn can be garish, florid, tasteless, forced, cute, flatulent, over-
emphatic: it can never be vulgar. It just cannot prevent itself from a tampering
and framing of its desperate effects which pulls them back into the realm of
painting, ironizes them, declares them done in full knowledge of their empti-
ness. American painting by contrast—and precisely that American painting
which is closest to the European, done by Germans and Dutchmen steeped in
the tradition they are exiting from—does not ironize, and will never make the
(false) declaration that the game is up. Hofmann and de Kooning, precisely
because they are so similar to Jorn in their sense of "touch" and composition,
register as Jorn's direct opposites.

It is my hope that conceiving of Abstract Expressionism as vulgar will lead

to a new set of discriminations between particular painters within the group,
and between moments in the work of a single artist. I have already referred to
one or two such possibilities—for instance, the difference between Pollock's
drip paintings in 1947 and 1948 and their final appearance in 1950. I have
tried also to give a preliminary sense of the new priorities, and the new kinds

548 1990s
of belonging together under the general (too capacious) banner, by means of
the pictures accompanying this chapter's text. Let me say a word or two more
about this.
Gottlieb, you will have noticed, emerges as the great and implacable maes-
tro of Abstract Expressionism. He is Byron to Greenberg's George Eliot—the
most vulgar-minded genius that ever produced a great effect in oils. A Man-
tovani or a Lawrence Welk. Charlie Parker playing insolent variations on
the theme of "I'd Like to Get You on a Slow Boat to China"—feeling for a way
to retrieve, and make properly unbearable, the pop song's contempt for the
masses it aims to please. Gottlieb is at his best when he goes straight for the
cosmological jugular, straight for the pages of Time or Life—his worlds on fire
so many atomic-age parodies of El Lissitzky's Story of Two Squares, ghastly in
their beautification of destruction.

Certain moments and sequences of work in Abstract Expressionism that

everyone, then and since, agrees to have been a turning-point for the new
painting begin, in this light, to take on a different valency. For example, De
Kooning's Woman series, and the vehemence of Clement Greenberg's reac-
tion to it. (Actually the "vehemence" is mainly a matter of Greenberg's con-
versation as recalled by witnesses. He said little in print about the Women. But
that, of course—coming from the person chosen to write the catalogue essay
for de Kooning's 1953 retrospective—was felt to be the point. Greenberg's si-
lence, or his occasional offhandedness, was telling above all by contrast with
the general run of journalism at the time, which took it for granted that, love
'em or hate 'em, the Women were Abstract Expressionism's truth.) What Green-
berg was recoiling from, I think, is the way in which choosing Woman as his
subject allowed de Kooning to extrude a quality of perception and handling
that stood at the very heart of his aesthetic, and fix it onto an Other, a scape-
goat. "The black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face
of a housemaid is." For "dirty face of a housemaid" read "perfect smile of the
model in a Camels cigarette ad." Greenberg drew back from this not, need I
say it, out of concern over de Kooning's misogyny, but from an intuition that
such splitting and projection would make it impossible for de Kooning's
painting to go on sustaining the right pitch of tawdriness, idiot facility, over-
weening self-regard. I think he was right. Only when de Kooning found a way
to have the vulgarity be his own again—or rather, to half project it into cliché
landscape or townscape formats, which were transparently mere props—did

1990s 549
 he regain the measure of meretriciousness his art needed. The male bragga-
docio, that is to say, had to be unfocused if he was to paint up a storm. It had
to be a manner in search of an object, and somehow aggrieved at not finding
one. What was wanted was generalized paranoia, not particular war of the
sexes.

Vulgarity is gendered, of course. At the moment we are looking at, the at-
tribute belonged (as a disposable property) mainly to men, or, more precisely,
to heterosexual men. Not that this meant the art done under vulgarity's aus-
pices was closed to reading from other points of view. What Beaton and Al-
fonso Ossorio and Parker Tyler and Frank O'Hara did to Pollock, with or
without Pollock's permission, is clearly part—sometimes, as I have said, a
central part—of any defensible history of the New York School. It seems im-
portant that, apart from Greenberg, the strongest early readings of Pollock's
work (the strongest, not necessarily the best) all came from gay men. Na-
muth's films and photographs partake of the same homosocial atmosphere.
Perhaps the deep reason why Greenberg was never able to realize his cher-
ished project of a book on Pollock was that he found no way to contain, or put
to use, the erotic hero-worship that sings in the prose of his shorter pieces
about his friend.12

By talking as I have about Pollock's 1947 titles, or Alfred Barr's 1951 treat-
ment of Matisse, I do not mean to give the impression that the set of issues I
see as central to Abstract Expressionism simply never appeared in critical
discourse at the time, or did so only in utterly displaced form. Now and again
they surfaced directly; but what is striking when that happens is how the
writer seems not to know what to do with the issues and terms once they show
up. The terms are embarrassing. Greenberg, for instance, has the following
to say about Clyfford Still's color and paint handling in his great essay,
" 'American-Type' Painting," published in Partisan Review in 1955:

I don't know how much conscious attention Still has paid to Monet and Im-
pressionism [Greenberg has just been musing on the power within Abstract
Expressionism of "an art like the late Monet's, which in its time pleased banal
taste and still makes most of the avant-garde shudder"], but his ... art likewise
has an affiliation with popular taste, though not by any means enough to make
it acceptable to it. Still's is the first really Whitmanesque kind of painting we
have had, not only because it makes large, loose, gestures ... but just as much

550 1990s
 because, as Whitman's Poetry assimilated, with varying success, large quan-
tities of stale journalistic and oratorical prose, so Still's painting is infused
with that stale, prosaic kind of painting to which Barnett Newman has given
the name of "buckeye." Though little attention has been paid to it in print,
"buckeye" is probably the most widely practiced and homogeneous kind of
painting seen in the Western world today ... "Buckeye" painters, as far as I
am aware, do landscapes exclusively and work more or less directly from na-
ture. By piling dry paint—though not exactly in impasto—they try to capture
the brilliance of daylight, and the process of painting becomes a race between
hot shadows and hot lights whose invariable outcome is a livid, dry, sour pic-
ture with a warm, brittle surface that intensifies the acid fire of the generally
predominating reds, browns, greens, and yellows. "Buckeye" landscapes can
be seen in Greenwich Village restaurants (Eddie's Aurora on West Fourth
Street used to collect them), Sixth Avenue picture stores (there is one near
Eighth Street) and in the Washington Square outdoor shows ... I cannot un-
derstand fully why [these effects] should be so universal and so uniform, or
the kind of painting culture behind them.
Still, at any rate, is the first to have put "buckeye" effects into serious art.
These are visible in the frayed dead-leaf edges that wander down the margins
or across the middle of so many of his canvases, in the uniformly dark heat of
his color, and in a dry, crusty paint surface (like any "buckeye" painter, Still
seems to have no faith in diluted or thin pigments). Such things can spoil his
pictures, or make them weird in an unrefreshing way, but when he is able to
succeed with, or in spite of them, it represents but the conquest by high art of
one more area of experience, and its liberation from Kitsch.13

There is a lot going on here, and no one interpretation will do it justice (the
tangents and redundancies in Greenberg's text, which I have left out for the
sake of brevity, are actually vital to its detective-story tone). But what I see
Greenberg doing essentially is struggling to describe, and come to terms with,
a specific area of petty bourgeois taste. He rolls out the place names and pieces
of New York City geography with a cultural explorer's relish, all the better to
be able to plead class ignorance in the end—"I cannot understand fully... the
kind of painting culture behind them." Readers of Greenberg will know that
the final enlistment of the word kitsch is heavily loaded. Kitsch equals vul-
garity, roughly. In Greenberg's original Trotskyite scheme of things the word
had strong class connotations. But 1955 is too late, by several years, for Green-
berg to be willing to pursue this any further. It is interesting that he pursues

1990s 551
 it at all—that Still's painting seemingly forces him to think again, at some
length, about high art's courting of banality. And he is in no two minds, at this
point about the importance of such a tactic, for all its risk. The next sentence
after the one on Still and kitsch reads as follows: "Still's art has a special im-
portance at this time because it shows abstract painting a way out of its own
academicism."
This sentence is altered out of all recognition in the version of " 'American-
Type' Painting" Greenberg put in his book^4rf and Culture six years later.14
All of the section on Still is given heavy surgery. The word kitsch gives way
to "one more depressed area of art"—where surely "depressed" is exactly the
wrong word. (Kitsch is manic. Above all, it is rigid with the exaltation oí art. It
believes in art the way artists are supposed to—to the point of absurdity, to the
point where the cult of art becomes the new philistinism. This is the aspect of
kitsch that Still gets horribly right.) The "buckeye" of the Partisan Review
text is abandoned in favor of "demotic-Impressionist" or "open-air painting
in autumnal colors." (Or almost abandoned—Greenberg cannot resist a sin-
gle, unexplained appearance of the word toward the end.) There are no more
names and addresses on Eighth Street. No more baffled talk of a separate, im-
penetrable "painting culture." This is a critic in flight from previous insights,
I feel. And I think I see why.

Then, finally, there is the problem of Hans Hofmann. You will not be sur-
prised to hear that it was in coming to terms with Hofmann in particular that
the vocabulary of the present argument first surfaced. For everyone who has
ever cared at all about Hofmann (including Greenberg, who cared very much)
has always known that in Hofmann the problems of taste in Abstract Expres-
sionism come squawking home to roost. A good Hofmann is tasteless to the
core—tasteless in its invocations of Europe, tasteless in its mock religiosity,
tasteless in its Color-by-Technicolor, its winks and nudges toward landscape
format, its Irving Stone title, and the cloying demonstrativeness of its hand-
ling. Tasteless, and in complete control of its decomposing means.15

Seen in its normal surroundings, past the unobtrusive sofas and calla lilies,
as part of the unique blend of opulence and spareness that is the taste of the
pic ture-buy ing classes in America, a good Hofmann seems always to be blurt-
ing out a dirty secret which the rest of the decor is conspiring to keep. It
makes a false compact with its destination. It takes up the language of its users

552 1990s
and exemplifies it, running monotonous, self-satisfied riffs on the main tune,
playing it to the hilt—to the point of parody, like Mahler with his sentimental
Viennese palm-court melodies. A good Hofmann has to have a surface some-
where between ice cream, chocolate, stucco and flock wallpaper. Its colors
have to reek of Nature—of the worst kind of Woolworth forest-glade-with-
waterfall-and-thunderstorm-brewing. Its title should turn the knife in the
wound. For what it shows is the world its users inhabit in their heart of hearts.
It is a picture of their "interiors," of the visceral-cum-spiritual upholstery of
the rich. And above all it can have no illusions about its own status as part of
the upholstery. It is made out of the materials it deploys. Take them or leave
them, these ciphers of plenitude—they are all painting at present has to offer.
"Feeling" has to be fetishized, made dreadfully (obscenely) exterior, if paint-
ing is to continue.

I do not believe that what I have just offered is an account of Hofmann's in-
tentions; any more than if my subject had been, say, the coldness and hardness
of Matisse's hedonism in the 19205, or the pathos of Picasso's eroticism in
1932. (Of course it would be possible to give an account of all three phenom-
ena which argued that up to now our understanding of the artists' intentions
had been deficient, and ought to include the pathos or the coldness or the ca-
pacity for self-parody. I just do not think the inclusions are necessary or plau-
sible in Hofmann's case.) No doubt Hofmann believed in his own overblown
rhetoric. (What would it be like to go in for it at this pitch of intensity without
believing in it? Like Asger Jorn, maybe—not like And Thunderclouds Pass.}
I dare say Hofmann thought his titles were wonderful. (Who is going to quar-
rel with Nikolaus Lenau and the Sonnets to Orpheus? Only a modernist cynic
like me.) And as for the place of his paintings in Marcia Weisman's sitting
room? He surely assumed that at the level that really mattered—the level of
taste, as opposed to day-to-day preference—there was a profound community
of interest between himself and the best of his clients. And so there was. He
could not have painted their interiors if they were not his interior too.
These are not the matters at issue, ultimately. The task for the critic is to
find an adequate language for the continuing effect of, say, Hofmann's over-
blownness (I am not even saying that this is the sole or primary quality of
Hofmann's version of Abstract Expressionism, but it is the one that gets more
interesting over time). The overblownness matters only because it seems to be
what lends the pictures their coherence, maybe their depth. Nor am I meaning

1990s 553
 to congratulate Hofmann on getting a quality to petty-bourgeois experience
somehow "right." The quality is not hard to perceive and mimic. What is hard
(what is paradoxical) is to make paintings out of it. That is what Hofmann
did. Of course I am saying that doing so involved him in an encounter with
the conditions of production and consumption of his own art. That is my ba-
sic hypothesis. But the encounter could take place only at the level of work, of
painterly practice—the encounter was getting the overblownness to be picto-
rial, or discovering that it was the quality out of which paintings now had to
be made. Even to call this an "encounter" is to give it too much of an exterior
or discursive flavor. It was what Hofmann did, not what he discovered.

Still less is this chapter as a whole an argument about Abstract Expression-

ists' social or political opinions. Of course I relish the fact that Clyfford Still
supported Joe McCarthy, and that Pollock, in Greenberg's opinion, was "a
Goddamn Stalinist from start to finish"16; in much the same way that I like to
know Manet was a frightful Gambettist, and Renoir believed that "siding with
the Israelite Pissarro, that's revolution [rester avec l'israélite Pissarro, c'est la
révolution]."17 But I know my interest does not count for much in under-
standing what any of the four did as painters. At best the facts may strike us as
dimly consonant with one or other aspect (usually a surface aspect) of their
subject-matter or handling—with Manet's epigrammatic brittleness, say, or
Renoir's over-anxiousness to play. But they get us nowhere with what really
matters, which is the artists' ability to have these surface qualities coexist with
others seemingly at odds: Manet's pessimism and compassion, for instance,
or Renoir's uncomplicated monumentality.

I am not saying that Abstract Expressionists' social attitudes are just irrele-
vant. No doubt it helps to know that Rothko, for instance, had his own vision
of the petty-bourgeois future; and again, the fact that he saw it in the shape of
the university—the University of Colorado at Boulder—is for me irresistible:

The University ... is on the hill. At its base are the faculty apartments which
are shells around appliances facing a court into which the children are emp-
tied. Two hundred yards away is Vetsville, in which the present faculty itself
had lived only four or five years ago when they were preparing to be faculty.
Vetsville itself is occupied by graduates from army headquarters, already mar-
ried and breeding who will be faculty in faculty quarters three or four years

554 1990s
 hence. They breed furiously guaranteeing the expansion which will perpetu-
ate the process into the future.
The faculty itself is allowed to stay here only 2 years whereupon they must
assume mortgages in similar housing slum developments where thereafter
they must repair their own cracks and sprinkle their grass ...
Here is a self-perpetuating peonage, schooled in mass communal living,
which will become a formidable sixth estate within a decade. It will have a
cast of features, a shape of head, and a dialect as yet unknown, and will propa-
gate a culture so distorted and removed from its origins, that its image is
unpredictable.18

Anyone familiar with nineteenth-century styles of irony at the expense of the

nouvelles couches sociales will recognize this as generic (solecisms and all).
Condescension just is the form of the petty bourgeoisie's self-recognition. Com-
pare the 19805 literature on yuppies. All the same, even this passage does not
help me with what is really interesting, and ultimately baffling, about Rothko
as an artist: why the same banal loftiness could lead to the brightness of death
at one moment (1950), and to clinical evacuation at another (1965).

My chapter title, "In Defense of Abstract Expressionism," is not meant

ironically. I have offered what I think is the best defense possible of this body
of work, and of course I am aware that in doing so the noun "vulgarity" has
turned into a term of value, whether I wanted it to or not. If the formula were
not so mechanical, I would say that Abstract Expressionist painting is best
when it is most vulgar, because it is then that it grasps most fully the condi-
tions of representation—the technical and social conditions—of its historical
moment.
The moment was brief. By the time of the two paintings I choose to end
with—1961 and 1962—it was almost over. The mode, and indeed the titles, of
the two pictures—Memoria in Àeternum and Coalescence—are nothing if not
valedictory. Death puts in its usual appearance. The coffin is straight out of
Evelyn Waugh. And this overstuffed, unctuous, end-and-beginning-of-the-
world quality seems to me, to repeat, the key to these paintings' strength.
They have a true petty-bourgeois pathos. One can see why art in New York
felt obliged to retreat from such dangerous ground in the years that immedi-
ately followed and why a last effort was made to restabilize avant-garde prac-
tice in its previous (exhausted) trajectory. The "popular" was easier to handle

1990s 555
 than the vulgar—it had more of the smell of art about it. Reduction was a bet-
ter way to generate recognizable modernist artworks than this kind of idiot
"Ripeness is all." The site-specific was preferable to the class-specific. Art
had to go on, and that meant returning art mainly to normal avant-garde chan-
nels.19 But for some of us—certainly for me—the price paid for this accommo-
dation in the 19605 and after seems prohibitively high. The ridiculous mo-
ment of coalescence, or of mourning, or of history, is what we still want from
painting, and what Abstract Expressionism managed to provide.

So now I think I understand what I have been defending all along. It seems
that I cannot quite abandon the equation of Art with lyric. Or rather—to shift
from an expression of personal preference to a proposal about history—I
do not believe that modernism can ever quite escape from such an equation.
By "lyric" I mean the illusion in an artwork of a singular voice or viewpoint,
uninterrupted, absolute, laying claim to a world of its own. I mean those
metaphors of agency, mastery, and self-centeredness that enforce our accept-
ance of the work as the expression of a single subject. This impulse is ineradi-
cable, alas, however hard one strand of modernism may have worked, time af-
ter time, to undo or make fun of it. Lyric cannot be expunged by modernism,
only repressed.
Which is not to say that I have no sympathy with the wish to do the ex-
punging. For lyric in our time is deeply ludicrous. The deep ludicrousness of
lyric is Abstract Expressionism's subject, to which it returns like a tongue to a
loosening tooth.
This subject, of course, is far from being the petty bourgeoisie's exclusive
property. That is not what I have been arguing. Anyone who cares for the
painting of Delacroix or the poetry of Victor Hugo will be in no doubt that
the ludicrousness of lyric has had its haut bourgeois avatars. But sometimes it
falls to a class to offer or suffer the absurdities of individualism in pure form—
unbreathably pure, almost, a last gasp of oxygen as the plane goes down. That
was the case, I think, with American painting after 1945.

Notes

1. Georg W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. Malcolm Knox
(Oxford, 1975), i: 11.
2. Hubert Damisch, "L'éveil du regard," in Fenêtre Jaune cadmium ou les dessous de
la peinture (Paris, 1984), 69. The subject is Mondrian, but much the same ver-

556 1990s
 diet and form of words are applied, by Damisch and others, to Pollock, Newman,
Rothko, et al.
3. Alfred H. Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York, 1951), 214.
4. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols. (1860; Boston and New York, n. d.), 5:
347-49-
5. Ibid., 344.
6. Parker Tyler, unedited typescript of "Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth,"
in Archives of American Art, Pollock Papers 3048: 548-49. (The edited text was
published in Magazine of Art, March 1950.) For full text and discussion, see Leja,
Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 315-16,368-69.
7. Clyfford Still to Sidney Janis, 4 April 1955, in Archives of American Art, Alfonso
Ossorio papers, quoted in James Breslin, Mark Rothko, A Biography (Chicago
and London, 1993), 344. Copies of the letter seem to have been circulated at the
time, either by Still or Janis.
8. Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. Edward Ashton
(New York, 1976), 62, translation slightly modified. For a reply to an earlier ver-
sion of this chapter, using Adorno's frame of reference, see Jay M. Bernstein, "The
Death of Senuous Particulars: Adorno and Abstract Expressionism," Radical
Philosophy, no. 45 (March-April 1996): 7-16.
9. Clement Greenberg, "Review of an Exhibition of Gustave Courbet," in O'Brian,
éd., Clement Greenberg, 2: 275. A month later Greenberg reviewed Gottlieb and
Pollock. "I feel that Gottlieb should make the fact of his power much more obvi-
ous," he wrote, though he welcomed the painter's Totemic Fission—my choice
for the quintessential Abstract Expressionist title—Ashes of Phoenix, and Hunter
and Hunted as pointing in the right direction. Greenberg's review of the Pollock
show at Betty Parsons is the one in which he took Number i, 1948—"this huge
baroque scrawl in aluminum, black, white, madder, and blue"—as final proof of
Pollock's major status. The words "baroque scrawl" seem to me to be feeling for
the qualities in Pollock's work that I am insisting on here. See Clement Green-
berg, "Review of Exhibitions of Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Joseph
Albers," in ibid., 285-86.
10. Obviously there are difficulties to making, and sustaining, a distinction between
"bourgeois" and "petty bourgeois" as terms of class analysis. But I believe the
distinction is real, and I do not want my talk in the text of class "cultures" and
"formations" to give the impression that I fail to see the distinction is ultimately
one of economic power. A bourgeois, for me, is someone possessing the means to
intervene in at least some of the important, large-scale economic decisions shap-
ing his or her own life (and those of others). A bourgeois, for me, is someone ex-
pecting (reasonably) to pass on that power to the kids. A petty bourgeois is
someone who has no such leverage or security, and certainly no such dynastic
expectations, but who nonetheless identifies wholeheartedly with those who do.
Of course this means that everything depends, from age to age and moment to
moment, on the particular forms in which such identification can take place. The
history of the petty bourgeoisie within capitalism is therefore a history of man-

1990s 557
 ners, symbols, subcultures, "lifestyles," necessarily fixated on the surface of so-
cial life. (Chs. 3 and 4 of Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris
in the Art of Manet and His Followers [New York, 1948] were intended to begin
such a history for the late nineteenth century. The material on "Modern Man dis-
course" in Leja, Refranting Abstract Expressionism strikes me as providing some
of the elements for a parallel description of the 19408 and 19505.)
No need to be oversubtle about these things. Sometimes symbols and life-
styles still have class inscribed on them in letters ten feet tall. What could be
more disarmingly bourgeois, in the old sense, than the First Class section on an
international airflight? And what more dismally petty bourgeois than Coach?
(Those in Business Class—or what one sardonic airline calls Connoisseur—would
take a bit more ad hoc class sorting, some going up, some going down. A lot de-
pends in this case on particular styles of corporate reward to middle manage-
ment, which vary from country to country and phase to phase of the business cy-
cle.) Anyway, the rough balance of numbers on a 747 over the Atlantic seems to
me instructive for the balance of numbers in the world at large.
11. You could apply the same rule of thumb to Jorn as Greenberg was fond of doing
to abstract painting in general: most Jorn paintings from the 19505 and early
19605 are considerably worse than most from the same period by Gottlieb, Still,
Hofmann, de Kooning, Kline, even Tomlin; but a very few Jorns are better than
anything by any of the above—in my view, decisively better. (I leave Pollock out
of it, mainly because he painted so little, and, by his standards, so badly, after
1951.) A short, though certainly not exhaustive, list of the Jorns I have in mind
would include, besides the ones I illustrate: La Grande Victoire: Kujafski, Lodz
(1956), Shameful Project (1957), Alcools (1959), The Abominable Snowman (1969),
Dead Drunk Danes (1960), L'Homme Poussière (1960), Faustrold (1962), Les
Pommes d'Adam (1962), Triplerie (1962), Deux Pingouins. Avant et d'après David
(1962), The Living Souls (1963), Something Remains (1963), probably several
other Modifications and Défigurations, if I could get to see them, and one or two
late works, like the great Between Us (1972). This list is skewed and limited by ac-
cidents of availability, but I have a feeling that even if my knowledge of Jorn was
more comprehensive it would not swell enormously.
12. It would be too easy to catalogue the more flagrant phrases here ("His emotion
starts out pictorially; it does not have to be castrated and translated in order to
be put into a picture," and so on), and the result would inevitably have the flavor
of Freudian "now-it-can-be-told." Whereas the point is the obviousness of the
verbal love-affair, and the fact that the obviousness (which is integral, I think, to
Greenberg's insights and descriptions from 1943 to 1955) was only allowable, or
manageable, when it went along with a no-holds-bar red, take-it-or-leave-it tone
about everything—the tone Greenberg perfected as a writer of fortnightly col-
umns and occasional aphoristic surveys. In a book—even one as brief and essay-
istic as Greenberg's on Miró had been—there would have been too obvious a
seam between the documentary mode (Greenberg, understandably, was more

558 1990s
 and more anxious to disinter Pollock from a mountain of biographical filth) and
awe at Pollock's energy and maleness.
13. Clement Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting," in O'Brian, éd., Clement
Greenberg, 3: 230-31. For reasons not given, but not far to seek, Mrs. Clyfford
Still refused me permission to reproduce any of her late husband's paintings.
This strikes me as a happy arrangement. Still, I now realize, will do best as this
chapter's invisible ghost, sulking and shrieking in characteristic fashion from be-
yond the grave.
14. See Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston, 1961), 223-24. Part of the rea-
son for the changes was the vehemence of Still's and Newman's reaction to
Greenberg's original form of words. See Greenberg's reply to a typical blast from
ClyfFord Still (dated 15 April 1955), which suggests that Still's original letter may
have been sent off at much the same time as the one to Sidney Janis on Rothko),
quoted in Clifford Ross, éd., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New
York, 1990), 251-53. The term "buckeye" was one of the main bones of conten-
tion. Still suspected that Greenberg borrowed not only the term from Barnett
Newman (which Greenberg acknowledged), but also its application to his work.
Greenberg said No. "Barney was the first one I heard name a certain kind of
painting as buckeye, but he did not apply the term to yours. When I, some time
later, told Barney that I thought there was a relation between buckeye and your
painting, or rather some aspects of it, he protested vehemently and said your
stuff was too good for that." Since Greenberg regularly gets told off these days for
being, in later years, waspish and superior about the Abstract Expressionists (as
conversationalists and letter-writers), it is worth pointing to the well-nigh saintly
patience of his 1955 dealings with Still on the rampage. For more in the same
vein, see Barnett Newman to Clement Greenberg, 9 August 1955, in Barnett
Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John O'Neill (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1990), 202-4. "Buckeye" was again the offending term.
Marnin Young points out to me that in his spirited 1964 attack on Still,
Max Kozloff seized on Greenberg's comparison to "Greenwich Village landscap-
ists" (he quotes a few sentences from the Art and Culture text) and went on:
"Critical attempts to portray [Still] as an artist who bursts forth into a new free-
dom, or as an exponent of the 'American sublime,' overlook his terribly static,
one ought to say, vulgar, exaltedness." See Max Kozloff, "Art," The Nation (6 Jan-
uary 1964), 40. But is not the vulgar exaltedness what makes him an exponent?
(Of course—especially given the date Kozloff was writing—one sympathizes
with his distaste.)
15. For example,. . . And Thunderclouds Pass comes from a poem by the Austrian
Romantic Nikolaus Lenau, And Out of The Caves from Rilke's Sonnets to Or-
pheus.
16. On Still's McCarthyism, see Susan Landauer, "Clyfford Still and Abstract Ex-
pressionism in San Francisco," in Thomas Kellein, éd., Clyfford Still 1904-1980.
The Buffalo and San Francisco Collections (Munich, 1992), 93. Greenberg's ver-

1990s 559
 diet on Pollock's politics was given in a 1981 interview with me. I think he meant
it seriously.
17. Auguste Renoir to Paul Durand-Ruel, 26 February 1882, discussing participa-
tion in that year's Impressionist exhibition. See Lionello Venturi, Les Archives
de Vlmpressionisme, 2 vols. (Paris and New York, 1939), i: 122. (The sentence oc-
curs in a rough draft of the letter, and was omitted in Renoir's final version.)
18. Mark Rothko to Herbert and Mell Ferber, 7 July 1955, Herbert Ferber papers, in
Archives of American Art, quoted in Breslin, Mark Rothko, 352.
19. This defense is not intended as a covert attack, and these sentences do not claim
to characterize what was most productive (and genuinely excessive) in the art of
the 19603, especially from 1967 onwards. But I let them stand, because I do not
think that part of the history of the 19603 is bound up with art's withdrawal from
Abstract Expressionism's impossible class belonging—its dreadful honesty about
art and its place. I do mean "part." Because ultimately I believe that the project of
"returning art mainly to normal avant-garde channels" was and remains a hope-
less one in the United States. The grounds (always shaky) for an enduring avant-
garde autonomy, or even the myth of one, simply do not exist here. In the later
19603 and early 19708 in New York, the project imploded. Frantic efforts have
subsequently been made to reconstitute avant-gardism around some "new" tech-
nology, or set of art forms, or refurbished critical discourse; but what is striking
is the way these efforts cannot in practice escape the gravitational pull of the later
19605. And I am saying that the later 19605 are a satellite, or a form of anti-matter,
to the preponderant black star of Coalescence and Memoria in Aetumum.
A final thing I do not want to be taken as saying, or implying, is that art could
make Abstract Expressionism a thing of the past by imitating it, or trying to go
one better than it in the vulgarity stakes. That has been a popular, and I think fu-
tile, tactic in the last two decades.

LISA SALTZMAN Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender,

Identity, and New York School Painting

Consider, for just one moment Jackson Pollock's Gut-Out of 1948-1950. Don't
flip to look at a reproduction. Instead, and perhaps more appropriately, con-
jure it in your mind. For though Pollock's Cut-Out is a painting, it is a work
from which the center, the figure, has quite literally been excised, extin-

s o URCE: Friedel Dzubas: Critical Painting (Medford, MA: Tufts University Gallery,
1998), 9-24. Reprinted with the permission of Lisa Saltzman.

560
guished, a work with nothing more at its core than a ghostly trace, figuration
as corpse. Emptied of its bodily fullness, its corporeality, its life, Cut-Out
leaves us with nothing other than figuration as a hollow shell, a specter which
can only haunt abstraction. Framed by the marginal remains of the spattered,
all-over canvas that configures the non-figure, the body which is not a body,
the absence at the center of Pollock's Cut-Out reads like the missing body sig-
naled by the chalk drawing at the scene of a crime, where blood and indexical
trace give way to the tools of representation.
Pollock's Cut-Out could be seen as a response both to his own body of ma-
ture abstractions and to the body of critical writing amidst which such work
had evolved and flourished, that is, the nascent context of Greenbergian mod-
ernism. An aesthetic ideology which might more generously be termed a vi-
sion of aesthetic utopia, formed as it was amidst a world political context of
intensifying totalitarianism, Greenberg's modernism posited abstraction as a
form, a place, a space in which, were it to maintain a position of unqualified
purity, autonomy, media-immanency and self-reflexivity, art would serve as a
life boat, preserving not simply the values of high culture, but of humanity.
Ironically, perhaps even tragically, Greenberg's critical paradigm offered a
humanism paradoxically devoid of the human, a conundrum figured, or pre-
cisely not-figured, in Pollock's Cut-Out.
Of course, a retrospective glance at the postwar years of American cultural
ascendancy suggests that even before Pollock's Cut-Out, neither painting nor
its critics had been willing to accede entirely to the rigorous regime of renun-
ciation demanded by an ethics and aesthetics of pure abstraction. Not only
had insistently metaphoric titles ensnared abstraction in a web of meaning and
reminded the viewer of the inevitable operations of likeness and analogy to
which even the most obdurately abstract surface remained prey. But as we
know from the very first social art historical accounts of New York School
painting, abstraction, particularly gestural abstraction, with its available trace
signifiers of individuality and personal freedom, had all too easily been co-
opted by cultural cold warriors.1
But if social art historians retrospectively revealed an idealized American
body, or body politic, at play and at stake in the critical and institutional sup-
port for and reception of New York School painting, their revisionist account
and critique ultimately identified that body as nothing more than the ideo-
logical abstraction that it was. For like the absent center of Pollock's Cut-Out,
a form which at its most particular could be described as roughly humanoid,
the body politic at the heart of the revisionists' accounts, a body politic made

1990s 561
 up of risk-takers and individualists imaged and imagined as the "vital center"
of Arthur Schlesinger's postwar account, was at once everyman and no man.
Or was it? As abstract and idealized as the vital center of Schlesinger's lib-
eral ideology may have been, as indistinct as the emblematic body that was no
body at the center of Pollock's Cut-Out may have appeared, I would contend
that the body at stake was far more particular and far more literal than the
contexts of either cold war cultural politics or formalist criticism and prac-
tice would seem to suggest. That body was the gendered body, or bodies, of
American postwar society, bodies whose social roles were as blurred by the
changes wrought by World War II as was the face of painting.2
That is to say, I would contend that the demographic shifts that took place
throughout America during and after the war saw their reproduction and in-
tensification in the aesthetic microcosm of New York School painting, where
women emerged alongside men as principle practitioners. Although women
artists did not perform the same vital function for the national economy as
Rosie the Riveter, the war did afford women artists opportunities they might
otherwise not have had. As John Elderfield would note years later in his
monographic study of Helen Frankenthaler, one of the factors that contributed
to her artistic development in the 19405 was precisely "her sex, which spared
her military service."3 As in other industries and professions, once estab-
lished in their careers, Frankenthaler and other women artists did not retreat
from their newly-attained positions, nor did their continued presence in the
artistic sphere after the war go unnoticed.
During the 19508, as the careers of these women artists took shape, a num-
ber of articles appeared in the popular press, in magazines such as Life, Time,
and Cosmopolitan^ These articles, which typically focused on Helen Frank-
enthaler, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner, and Joan Mitchell, highlighted and
even celebrated the ascendance of women artists within the ranks of the New
York School. Nevertheless, despite the ostensibly congratulatory premise and
tenor of these articles, they articulated a very different message about these
"lady artists" and "vocal girls." The art world was described as under siege,
threatened by a "feminist invasion,"5 such anxious language reflecting the
broader social message that the former preserves of men were rapidly losing
their insularity, or, more pointedly, that a woman's true place was not in the
studio, but in the home.
At the same time that these articles treated the social phenomenon of the
changing face of the art world, they described the changing face of painting it-
self. In an era of painting characterized as "dealing more directly with emo-

562 1990s
tions and intuitions,"6 these articles offered up descriptions of the canvases
which ascribed to their surfaces the very characteristics attributed to their fe-
male makers. For example, a Cosmopolitan reader learned that "the slender,
chestnut-haired Helen Frankenthaler, born in New York City thirty-two years
ago, is the wife of abstract painter Robert Motherwell," as a prelude to a simi-
larly indexed description of her "impetuous technique" and her "delicate and
subtle" paintings.7 Within the popular press, abstract painting in the hands
of these "lady artists" and "vocal girls" became a site for the painterly inscrip-
tion of femininity. In the perceived impetuosity of this emotional and intuitive
form of painting, women artists were regarded as perhaps uniquely suited to
its formal demands. Moreover, the perceived subtlety and delicacy achieved
in their work was seen as inextricably linked to their identities as women.
It is this tendency to ascribe femininity to the canvases of female abstract
painters that unites the writing in the popular press with the more rarified dis-
courses of academic art criticism, as is dramatically manifested in the recep-
tion of Helen Frankenthaler. Consider, for example, the following discussion
of Frankenthaler's unique contribution to the history of Western painting in
an article in Art International by E.G. Goossen:

Frankenthaler's painting is manifestly that of a woman Without Pollock's

painting hers is unthinkable. What she took from him was masculine; the al-
most hard-edged, linear splashes of duco enamel. What she made with it was
distinctly feminine; the broad, bleeding-edged stain on raw linen. With this
translation she added a new candidate for the dictionary of plastic forms,
the stain.8

If the passage is interesting for its attention to patterns of influence, position-

ing Frankenthaler's work as distinct from yet inextricably bound to Pollock's
methodological innovations, it is even more noteworthy for its establishment
of sexual difference as determinative of artistic product. Frankenthaler's paint-
ing may have been deeply indebted to Pollock's, but, at the same time, it was
"manifestly that of a woman." Their painting is distinguished, and distinguish-
able, according to culturally constructed notions of gender. Pollock's painting
is masculine, as characterized by a linear, hard-edged splash. Frankenthaler's
is feminine, as characterized by a seeping, bleeding-edged stain.9 In focusing
exclusively on the "stain," on the fluid and coloristic aspects of her work, crit-
ics like Goossen leveled the diffuse, complex, and varied surfaces into mono-
lithic entities.
If we turn, for a moment, not to criticism, but to its purported object, the

1990s 563
 actual paintings, we might note that Frankenthaler's work was characterized
by more than the fluid emblem of the stain. In what was considered her break-
through painting, Mountains and Sea of 1952, conceived and painted after
Greenberg introduced her to Pollock and his paintings,10 it is undeniable that
thin, dark lines trace or subdivide areas of color, the so-called stains. Yet de-
spite this dialectical pull between wide pools of colored pigment and thin
lines of black paint, between automatism and rigorous control, it was the
aspect of automatism embodied in the liquid areas of color, the perceived
fluidity of Frankenthaler's soak-stain technique, that continually captured the
imaginations of the critics. In other words, it was less the thematic and formal
invocation of the rugged terrain and outline of the mountain than the watery
depths of the sea to which critics were drawn.
It was this fluidity, specifically the emblematic form of the stain, that pro-
vided the touchstone for what became a significantly gendered discourse, one
which set Frankenthaler's work apart from that of her modernist male col-
leagues, past and present. In Frankenthaler's case, the metaphor of the stain
was given a particular valence. As Goossen's criticism suggests, Frankenthaler
did more than pour paint onto a canvas. She bled onto the "linen." She stained
the sheets. In the slippage between literal and metaphorical language which
pervaded the majority of the criticism surrounding Frankenthaler's painting,
and which I take this passage by Goossen to bring into particularly sharp fo-
cus, Frankenthaler's painting became an extension of her differently female
body. Insofar as the stain was also culturally coded as menstrual,11 its invoca-
tion functioned as an index of a thwarted or ineffectual creative process, signi-
fying not creative inception or biological conception, but their refusal, the
flushing of an empty womb. Moreover, her menstrual painterly fluids came to
signify the trace of an involuntary bodily function, of uncontrolled nature,
turning painting into the record of an accident.
This metaphor of automatism, of relinquishing control, of accident, be-
came central to the critical reception of Frankenthaler's creative process. As
Harold Rosenberg wrote of Frankenthaler, referring first, as a point of com-
parison, to those occasional male stainers, Pollock, Gorky and Kandinsky:

The early paintings with their borrowing from Pollock, Gorky, Kandinsky
and other occasional stainers, are sensitive, but more timid than sensitive ...
with Frankenthaler, the artist's action is at a minimum; it is the paint that is ac-
tive. The artist is the medium of her medium; her part is limited to selecting
aesthetically acceptable effects from the purely accidental behavior of her

564 1990s
 color. Apparently, Miss Frankenthaler has never grasped the moral and meta-
physical basis of Action painting, and since she is content to let the pigment
do most of the acting, her paintings fail to develop resistances against which
a creative act can take place.12

In this passage, the presence of the stain is acknowledged in work by male art-
ists. In contrast to Frankenthaler, however, in the hands of Pollock, or Gorky
and Kandinsky before him, the stain, if only the occasional stain, could still be
redeemed for art, the actions of these men taking place under the aegis of mas-
culinity that protects and defines their work.
As the passage continues, two radically different portraits of Pollock and
Frankenthaler emerge. Pollock may have flung paint about in a bacchanalian
frenzy, but that was part of his mythic, male genius, his actively creative artis-
tic persona, impregnating the virgin canvas with his life-giving painterly seed.
Frankenthaler, in contrast, merely allowed accidents to happen, passively
staining the canvases with seeping, bodily fluids.
Rosenberg's descriptive summation of the divergent painterly processes
of Pollock and Frankenthaler sees it visualization in various photographs of
the artists in their studio spaces. For example, in characteristic photographic
stills from Hans Namuth's filming of Pollock at work, Pollock emerges as ac-
tive, frozen in time at one point in his rhythmic dance of creation, can and
brush in hand, paint, like artist, arrested in flight. In contrast, in a shot accom-
panying an article in Life, Frankenthaler is depicted sitting demurely atop a
canvas, posed against her work less as an artist than as mere vessel for the
fluids which seep from her body onto the canvas beneath her.
Both Rosenberg's critical description of Frankenthaler's painterly process
and the photographic image of Frankenthaler in the studio deny her self-
consciousness and agency in the symbolic field, the arena of language, be it
written or painterly.13 If there were some thought or agency behind Franken-
thaler's work, it was seen simply in her selection of "aesthetically acceptable
effects," suggesting the affinity of her practice to the historical and stereotypi-
cal female domain of the decorative arts, to the tasks of the choosing of colors
and the dyeing of fabric. Such work had little, on Rosenberg's account, to do
with the "moral and metaphysical" project of painting.14
The critical gendering of the stain becomes more problematic when it is
taken up as a frequent, rather than occasional form by a male artist, as was the
case with Morris Louis. For no sooner had Frankenthaler begun working with
her stain technique did Greenberg take Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland

1990s 565
 away from their studios in Washington, D.C. and into New York to see her
work. Louis's early paintings, dubbed the veils and florals, created delicately
fluid and watery surfaces which, were I to invoke the same metaphors as the
critics whom I have been citing, might be described as equally, if not far more
"feminine" than Frankenthaler's characteristically bolder, more saturated
paintings. Yet despite the undisputed artistic lineage of Louis's paintings, the
acknowledged formal similarities between Louis's and Frankenthaler's work,
and what I take to be overall the more stereotypical "femininity" of Louis's
paintings, his work was received in thoroughly different terms than was
Frankenthaler's.
Typically described as massive, solid, hard, and sharp, Louis's paintings
were seen to demonstrate control, strength, clarity, and firmness, quite a de-
parture from Frankenthaler's accidental, soft, watery, decorative forms.15 As if
directly responding to Rosenberg's diagnosis of the absence of a deliberate
"creative act" in Frankenthaler's stain paintings, one critic came to describe
Louis's stain paintings as "stiffened by intelligence and consistent formal-
ity." 16 In the most decisive ascription of masculinity to Louis's formal project,
Noland referred to Louis's paintings as "single-shot" images,17 in effect, re-
ducing and transforming the complex, temporally durational, additive pro-
cess of the soak-stain method into an artistic enactment of male orgasm, al-
lowing Louis to join the ranks of the virile New York School painters.18
At times, the critical attempt to maintain aesthetic differences between the
canvases of male and female artists produced a confused critical language,
one that revealed the utter instability of the gendered categories upon which
it so heavily relied. As E.G. Goossen wrote, in a piece which sets Franken-
thaler's work against Gorky's:

The thin, curvaceous, form-suggesting line in her early canvases (ca. 1952-53)
comes directly from Gorky's mid-40's work. During that period Franken-
thaler's colors, similar to Gorky's in their dry feel and tone, were yet paler and
more feminine than Gorky's hues. This sounds like a totally unnecessary re-
mark but it is true that many of his later pictures, Agony (1947) and The Calen-
dars (1946-47), for example, have a feminine delicacy in the sensuous line
that only a man could have produced.19

In stating that a picture could have "a feminine delicacy . . . that only a man
could have produced," Goossen makes the claim that if a painting by a man
displays "feminine" aspects, it does not mean he is innately feminine, but in-
stead, that he is solely capable, in his masculinity, of enacting femininity, of

566 1990s
taking its culturally-coded trappings and representing them with admirable,
if not superior skill.
Rather than suggesting that such criticism posits "feminine" painting in
the hands of a male artist as an act of travesty,20 camp, or painterly trans-
vestism, or as a préfiguration of French feminist criticism in its valorizing of
the feminine within modernist practice,21 I am suggesting that its seeming il-
logic reveals the difficult task criticism took on in rendering stable such fun-
damentally instable paintings. It would seem the only way to conceptualize
and control these slippages between categories of gender was to somehow re-
deem them by incorporating them back into traditional narratives of artistic
mastery. Rather than constituting "unnecessary remarks," such remarks were
instead of utmost urgency during the years when the changing face of abstract
painting undermined the binary logic which had previously afforded clearer
demarcations between masculinity and femininity.
Of course, Morris Louis was not the only male artist to pursue the pictorial
idiom pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler. I have focused, albeit somewhat
briefly, upon Morris Louis as a comparative figure, and will shortly turn to
Friedel Dzubas as well, precisely because [the work of] both was so deeply
and directly indebted to that of Frankenthaler. My discussion could be broad-
ened to include not just Louis and Dzubas, but such artists as Jules Olitski,
Kenneth Noland, Paul Jenkins, Jack Bush, or Sam Francis.
If we look only in passing at Francis, it is interesting to note that although
some of his paintings and watercolors elicit such descriptions as possessing
a "flowery lightness that no other Action Painter shows,"22 such infelicitous
moments of femininity are later attributed to his time spent in Paris, tenden-
cies which his work overcomes by the time of his retrospective at the San
Francisco Museum of Art in 1959. As Herschel Chipp writes, triumphantly
reclaiming Francis for America and masculinity, his later work is "more like
the New York School in its aggressive far-flung patches thrusting out into vast
white spaces ... contrasted to the centrifugal action of these works, the earlier
Paris paintings reveal the passivity of an atmospheric veil."23
If Francis's standing and difference from Frankenthaler were restored by
his return to America, and with that, to a rugged American masculinity, the
case was slightly different for Friedel Dzubas. It would seem that his differ-
ence from Frankenthaler, with whom he had even shared a studio space in the
early 19503, was not so much, or not only, a function of his male identity.
Rather, Dzubas's surfaces were controlled by the critical invocation of his
differently foreign body, his German body, the body of an emigré artist who

1990s 567
 had come to this country in 1939, at the age of 24. For again, although remark-
ably similar in appearance and effect to Frankenthaler's canonical stain paint-
ings, particularly before Dzubas moved to working on the truly monumental
scale of his mature work, his paintings were received in entirely different terms.
If in 1973, Laurie Anderson would claim Dzubas's project as more rigorous
and intellectually challenging than Frankenthaler's, writing, "the bold and
abrupt transitions snatch the work at the last minute from a Frankenthaler-like
lushness and thrust it into a more problematic dialectic of its own,"24 she was
only following the cue of earlier criticism, which took up his German identity
as a means of situating his work in a context far removed from the watery,
feminine stains of Frankenthaler's color field painting. Reviewing a show at
the Elkon Gallery in 1961, Jack Kroll wrote:

These paintings are comparable to Helen Frankenthaler's in their attempt

to declaim a poetry of plastically sentient signs, resonating in a Lebensraum
of bare canvas ... it is as if an essentially Expressionist esthetics were being
deftly raided for its smoothest sovereigns.25

Or, as Kenworth Moffett would later write:

Still another artistic affinity present in these pictures is that with German
romantic painting, specifically Der Blaue Reiter, Dzubas' first influence:
Some of Dzubas' earlier pictures are dark, moody landscapes and abstrac-
tions related to Klee and Feininger. The somber, heavy, smoldering warmth
and the sense of some grand cosmic event present in his late paintings are
reminiscent of the world of northern romanticism and expressionism.26

While we might now cringe at the metaphorical invocation of Dzubas's picto-

rial bases and spaces as "a Lebensraum of bare canvas" and attempt instead to
situate Dzubas and his criticism more firmly within a community of exile and
emigré artists,27 what emerges from this criticism more broadly is a vision of
Dzubas as an artist whose true identity comes not from his close affiliation
with Frankenthaler, though she is perhaps the most significant figure in his
artistic development, but from his German forefathers. That is to say, even if
he stained, Dzubas did so with the coloristic, spatial, and intellectual sense
and sensibility of a male artist, steeped in the traditions of German Expres-
sionism or Romanticism.
That Dzubas's, Francis's and Louis's painting, despite its indebtedness
and similarity to Frankenthaler's stain painting, could be constructed as
supremely and singularly different, and ultimately, supremely and singularly

568 1990s
masculine, was a critical fiction which persisted despite the more nuanced in-
terpretations of later critics. For example, in 1971, Michael Fried would come
to acknowledge the dualities of Louis's painting, describing his canvases in
the following terms:

Intrigue ravishes the beholder with its fullness of something like detail: the
subtle, modulating color, simultaneously metallic and floral, the warm soft
sepia graining of what may have been the last wave of pigment, the delicate,
irregular, fugitive pattern of the overlapping configurations, the fragile, cloud-
like crests of those configurations, aureoled by faint bleeds of thinner, evoking
distance Terranean on the other hand strikes one as wholly devoid of
incidental felicities. The stained portion looms as though just risen, its pro-
portions together with the dense brown tonality of the whole connoting over-
whelming mass, its internal figuration stark, sharp, almost menacing, at once
flame-like and mineral in character. And yet, for reasons I have tried to make
clear, one's perception of the stained area as a whole and of the figuration it
contains is not of things that are precisely tangible. Rather, it is as though the
apparent massiveness and solidity of the one and the apparent hardness and
sharpness of the other are experienced by eyesight alone, without reference
to the sense of touch; as though, one might say, massiveness and solidity and
hardness and sharpness as such were known to eyesight alone and not to
touch; as though the sense of touch itself were strictly visual.28

If the formal dualities of Louis's paintings are acknowledged in Fried's treat-

ment of Intrigue, a painting which is at once "metallic and floral," these ele-
ments of difference are ultimately leveled in the interest of establishing, for
Louis, a certain conquest of the "incidental felicities" of the stain, enabling
Fried to then put forth Terranean as the painting which "establishes a magni-
tude of realized ambition which only Pollock, perhaps, among Americans had
previously achieved."29 In Terranean, the stain "looms as though just risen,"
firmly reinscribed within a gendered metaphorics of masculinity, devoid of its
previously feminine associations.30
Fried's 1971 text on Louis thus displays in the metaphorics of its prose the
unacknowledged preoccupation with gender that pervaded discussions of ab-
straction since its re-emergence in America after the war, and moreover, the
unacknowledged preoccupation with controlling, through endless catego-
rization, the potency of the feminine. Albeit in quite elegant and sophisticated
terms, the move Fried makes in celebrating Louis's handling of the stain in
the name of opticality, in redeeming the feminine in the name of the mascu-

1990s 569
 line, is in the end altogether typical of an entire era of formalist criticism. For
although painting, rather than the painter, was the expressed subject of na-
scent high formalist criticism, and opticality, rather than corporeality, was its
privileged object,31 it seems that analyses of these paintings were in fact re-
peatedly suffused with discussions of the body, of masculinity and femininity,
locating and displacing gender and artistic subjectivity in and upon the pur-
portedly pure, self-reflexive, autonomous surfaces of high modernist paint-
ing. Moreover, in linking artistic practice to the male and female body, critics
inscribed gender within, and ascribed essentialized gender difference to a
school of painting whose shared formal practices rigorously undermined the
rigid boundaries of codified sexual difference.32
I should point out that my intent in excavating and interrogating an opera-
tive metaphorics of gender in the critical reception of New York School paint-
ing is certainly not to deny the way in which these paintings can or do func-
tion as metaphorical evocations of an artist's experience of his or her body. As
Frankenthaler herself has variously stated in queries about her identity as a fe-
male artist, or the femininity or "female quality" of her work:

Obviously, first I am involved in painting, not the who and how. I wonder
if my pictures are more "lyrical" (that loaded word!) because I'm a woman.
Looking at my paintings as if they were by a woman is superficial, a side issue,
like looking at Klines and saying they are bohemian. The making of serious
painting is difficult and complicated for all serious painters. One must be
oneself, whatever.33
Every fact of one's reality is in one's work: age, height, weight, history,
nationality, religion, sex, pains, habits, attractions, and being female is one
of many in this long list for me, but has never been a specific issue by itself.
What you call the "female quality" is a serious fact that I enjoy, and part
of a total working picture.34

Without either completely effacing or upholding the humanist assumption

of a foundational artistic/authorial subjectivity, I have sought with my exam-
ples from criticism and painting to reveal that very few of these New York
School canvases are exclusively masculine or feminine in their characteris-
tics, nor, if they seem to be, is one set of traits necessarily linked to either the
male or the female artist. Whether through metaphors of urination, ejacula-
tion, or menstruation, the body, male and female, is inscribed in multiple and
various ways in the drips, spills, sprays, and stains that coat the majority of
the canvases of the New York School painters. And it is precisely this inter-

570 1990s
mingling and breakdown of properties of line and color, this breakdown of
boundaries, that I believe led critics to at least try to assert, ascribe, and in-
scribe sexual difference upon the surfaces of these paintings.
As a gesture toward a conclusion, I would like to reiterate and then theorize
the implications of my assertion, namely, that during the years when New York
School painting reigned triumphant, categories of gender and their stabiliza-
tion were a persistent, if unacknowledged, critical preoccupation. As criti-
cism surrounding the re-emergence of abstraction restrospectively reveals, it
was the ubiquitous emblem of the stain which once served as an available sign
through which to clearly delineate categories of gender, as is made manifest in
the reception of stain painting and its practitioners. Although it could be ar-
gued that gender was simply an available metaphor with which to describe
abstract painting, or that characteristics associated with masculinity and
femininity were simply appropriate and evocative adjectives with which to
give critical voice to the mute surfaces of abstraction, I would suggest that the
recurrent critical discourse of gender and corporeality surrounding New York
School painting signaled something more.
Yet what does it mean to suggest that "something more" was at stake in this
body of emergent formalist criticism, particularly if it was taking as its self-
proclaimed subject neither the social fabric of postwar America, nor the visi-
bly co-ed ranks of the New York School, but the abstract paintings them-
selves? Such an assertion of "something more" would imply that criticism
had unwittingly ascribed to these purportedly autonomous, self-reflexive, and
hermetic paintings the unmistakable presence, the unmistakable legibility, of
an underlying and foundational artistic subjectivity. It would imply that criti-
cism had perhaps projected onto the abstract surfaces of New York School
painting broader societal concerns about the dissolution of gender bound-
aries in postwar America.
In the end, it is precisely to that moment of social dissolution that I want to
return. In invoking postwar America, the historical context with which I in-
troduced my discussion of abstraction, Frankenthaler, and the stain, I want to
suggest that criticism embodied a response not simply to painterly change,
but indeed, to societal transformation as well. I want to suggest that the strictly
delineated gender metaphorics of critical language, its seeking and establish-
ing of order, masked and controlled what was, in artistic practice and in the
social sphere, a shifting terrain, far less fixed and stable than the criticism
would initially seem to allow. I want to suggest that the diffuse, de-hierarchized,
all-over canvases of the New York School, in evincing some combination of

1990s 571
 masculine and feminine characteristics, would seem to have transgressed the
normative, stabilizing principles of modernist, patriarchal society, principles
already under siege in society at large.
In their critical perception and attribution of masculinity to canvases
painted by male artists, and femininity to those painted by female artists,
critics asserted the fundamental primacy of sexual difference, and did so at
precisely a moment when gender boundaries were seen as in danger of disap-
pearing, both artistically and societally. More specifically, in the deeply gen-
dered and fundamentally conservative critical language with which postwar
abstraction was received, it was the metaphoric invocation of the stain which
was instrumentalized to serve as a particularly powerful signifier of gender,
and through that, of difference. More generally, the critical tendency to per-
ceive and locate gender in the all-over canvases of the New York School paint-
ers can be read as an almost desperate, albeit unacknowledged attempt to
identify and establish difference and maintain order, at precisely a moment
when aesthetic practice and social structures emerged radically altered from
the Second World War.
In many respects, this anxious critical response should not surprise us.
Feminist readings of social and cultural history have sought to demonstrate
that when a threat to patriarchal society is perceived, an attempt is made to
preserve the social order, to reconstitute its boundaries and hierarchies.35
Similarly, and perhaps more broadly, anthropological writings have analyzed
and theorized how the establishment of difference, or the creation of hierar-
chical distinctions, both of which can be conceptualized as the making of
order out of disorder, are basic characteristics of human behavior. As Mary
Douglas wrote in 1966, "It is only by exaggerating the difference between
within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a
semblance of order is created."36
Interestingly, despite the prevalence of a gendered metaphorics in the re-
ception of postwar abstraction, very little has been done to analyze its impli-
cations, either for New York School painting, or, more broadly, for the inter-
pretation of abstraction.37 Even in the work of the first generation of feminist
scholars who explicitly took on questions of gender, the interpretation of ab-
straction was shrouded in critical and theoretical silence. Susan Gubar's 1982
essay " 'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity"38 is a case in point.
In her examination of Isak Dinesen's short story, "The Blank Page,"39 which
tells the tale of a Carmelite convent which produces fine linens as bridal
sheets for royal families and then displays the blood-stained sheets as visual

572 1990s
testimonies to the virginity of each princess, Gubar analyzes the metaphors
through which women writers, poets, and artists image and imagine their
creativity. In Gubar's examples of blood as metaphor, that blood is consis-
tently seen as the result of a painful wounding, a violent penetration. Although
her examples are primarily literary, Gubar does include visual artists as well,
referring first to the performance artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Carolee
Schneeman, and Eleanor Antin, then to Judy Chicago's sculptural installation
The Dinner Party, and finally, to Frida Kahlo.40 Without making direct refer-
ence to the 1939 canvas, The Two Fridas, Gubar writes that Kahlo, "who pre-
sents herself as bound by red cords that are not only her veins and her roots
but also her paint, is a painter whose tragic physical problems contributed to
her feeling wounded, pierced and bleeding."41
In an article whose very basis is a fictional picture gallery of blood-stained
"paintings," the actual painters of such visual analogues go unmentioned.
Helen Frankenthaler, whose stain paintings were seen to "bleed" onto white,
unprimed canvas, is not included. Moreover, despite the fact that Gubar
centers her discussion of the metaphoric potential of the framed, bloodied,
wedding-night sheets hung by the nuns in Dinesen's Carmelite convent gal-
lery, it is ultimately not to this metaphor of the feminine stain that she returns.
Instead, in what becomes in retrospect a self-reflexive metaphor for her own
interpretive silence, Gubar concludes her examination with a discussion of
the lone unstained sheet in the Carmelite gallery, the sheet that tells a different
story, positing it as a subversive model of female creative potential.
The silence in the conclusion of Gubar's own text, then, regarding Dine-
sen's literary image of the stain as an analogue of abstraction, is as laden with
meaning as the lone white sheet of her Carmelite sisters insofar as it calls our
attention to a pervasive scholarly silence shrouding questions of gender and
abstraction. For Gubar is not alone among feminists in her omission, be it of
Frankenthaler specifically, or abstraction more generally. Until recently, an
Anglo-American feminist, materialistic hermeneutic has insistently privileged
the analysis of figuration over abstraction, leaving as an unchallenged whole
the Greenbergian hermeticism of high modernist criticism.
As my preceding discussion would suggest, I believe we can begin to re-
dress this art historical and feminist lacuna regarding questions of gender and
abstraction by looking back at the historical context in which both New York
School painting and its criticism emerged, namely postwar America, and di-
recting a particularly focused gaze on the critical reception of color field
painting. Once there, we can see that in the face of radical societal transfor-

1990s 573
 mation, as well as radical artistic developments, art criticism turned these
complex paintings into either heroic symbols of masculinity or denigrated
emblems of femininity.
Although from our position in the present, we might now want to recog-
nize and valorize, in their combinations of tangled skeins of paint, drips, and
stains, the painterly invocation and intermingling of gender-coded forms, we
must acknowledge that we face New York School painting in a fundamentally
different moment than did its original critics. Our critical preoccupations,
some acknowledged and others still unacknowledged, have changed. So too,
I might add, has the practice of abstraction.
Contemporary abstract practice showcases, often in exacting and even mi-
croscopic detail, the body and its essential fluids. In the work of Kiki Smith,
Mike Kelley, Curtis Mitchell, and Andres Serrano, for instance, liquid traces
of the body are duly evoked, inscribed, contained, or rendered, in pieces
ranging from the sculptural and the painted to the printed and the photo-
graphic. A vivid testimonial to the emancipatory politics and concomitant
artistic practices of the late 19603 and 19705, today's work marks as well a de-
parture. For although contemporary artists have returned to the representa-
tion of the body and identity, the invocation of the corporeal is less to cele-
brate difference in the name of creating equality, as it was circa 1968, than to
expose similarity in the name of dismantling the binary logic that produced
such inequalities in the first place. In other words, contemporary artists use
the body and its fluids to explore, despite the inherent binarism of sexual diff-
erence, the very fluidity of categories of gender. In these contemporary Amer-
ican works, it is often the stain, the fluid trace of the body, male and female,
that serves as an available form, an available sign, through which to screen, ar-
tistically and theoretically, a deconstruction of gender. While the body re-
mains an anatomical constant, gendered identity is revealed to be historically
and culturally variable, the product of social construction.42
During the era of New York School painting, neither painting nor its criti-
cism was armed with the political or theoretical knowledge, or self-knowledge,
with which painters and critics now practice their respective crafts. In those
years, the stain served as an available sign through which to reconstruct,
rather than deconstruct, categories of gender. Within the male bastions of
the art world, it was art criticism which assumed the task of preserving tradi-
tion, of critically constructing, or reconstructing, through the use of gendered
metaphor, a form of painting where men could be men and women could be

574 1990s
women. And that critical practice had a particular urgency, if not poignancy.
For its reconstruction of gender difference was achieved by locating and as-
serting difference at precisely a moment when painting and society seemed
on the brink of blurring and effacing those formerly rigid boundaries, a mo-
ment when painting may have been envisioned not so much in its social pres-
ent, as its future.

Notes

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the College Art Association Annual
Conference in February 1992 and at the Whitney Symposium on American Art in
May 1992, and I am indebted to Anna Chave both for these opportunities and for her
valuable criticisms. I am grateful as well to Steven Z. Levine and Isabelle Wallace for
their comments and suggestions, many of which contributed to the development of
the essay into its present form.

1. For the social art historical accounts which take up most fully the relationship of
postwar art to its political context, as well as the more specific context, intellec-
tual and ideological, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern
Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, Arthur Goldhammer,
trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), as well as the following an-
thologized essays: Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," Eva
Cockroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," David and Cécile
Shapiro, "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," Serge
Guilbaut, "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," and Fred Or-
ton and Griselda Pollock, "Avant-Gardes and the Partisans Reviewed," all of
which have been republished in Pollock & After: The Critical Debates, Francis
Frascina, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 107-151. Central to Guil-
baut's account in particular is Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center: Our Pur-
poses and Perils on the Tightrope of American Liberalism (Cambridge, Riverside
Press, 1949).
2. That the body politic is, at its metaphorical essence, a male/masculine body, is
taken up by Moira Gatens in her essay, "Corporeal Representation in/and the
Body Politic," in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory,
Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, eds. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1997), pp. 80-89.
3. John Elderfield, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), p. 12. Of
course, there had been a long and varied history of women artists, which might
suggest that the presence and concomitant treatment of women artists represents
more an instance of historical and critical repetition than uniqueness. See, for
example, Griselda Pollock and Rozsicka Parker, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and
Ideology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). But, such studies not with-

1990s 575
 standing, it would seem that the level of emancipation occasioned by the war
afforded women heretofore unprecedented opportunities in the public sphere,
including the arena of artistic practice.
4. See, for example, "Laurels for Lady Artists: Women Artists in Ascendance:
Young Group Reflects Lively Virtues of U.S. Painting," Life, Vol. 42, No. 19 (May
13,1957), PP- 74-77, "The Vocal Girls," Time, Vol. 75, No. 18 (May 2,1960), p. 74,
and Jean Lipman and Cleve Gray, "The Amazing Inventiveness of Women
Painters," Cosmopolitan, Vol. 151, No. 4 (October 1960), pp. 62-66.
5. Lipman and Gray, p. 62.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p. 66.
8. E.G. Goossen, "Helen Frankenthaler," Art International, Vol. 5, No. 8 (October
20,1961), p. 78.
9. Of course, men too, including Pollock, could be stainers. Women were not the
exclusive practitioners of the technique. The most notable stainers, if notability
is registered in terms of critical and institutional support, are in many respects
Frankenthaler's male followers, to whose work and reception I will turn shortly.
The stain, in French the tache, had been an operative term in modernist criti-
cism since the time of Manet and the Impressionists, and was taken up to de-
scribe the importation of Abstract Expressionism into France as Taschisme. It
is also the case, as Thierry de Duve notes in his "Time Exposure and the Snap-
shot: The Photograph as Paradox," October § (Summer 1978), p. 116, that the Ger-
man word Mai (which yields malen, to paint) comes from the Latin mascula,
stain. As such, painting is, at its etymological if not ontological essence, staining.
In regard to the first generation of New York School painters, Michael Fried
employs the term "stain" to describe a form in Pollock's work of the early 19505.
But it is done in the name of identifying a form, a formal development, which
overcomes the opposition of line and color. See Fried, Three American Painters:
Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Museum of
Art, 1965), p. 19. In opposition to Fried, Rosalind Krauss points out, in her repu-
diation of a rigorously formalist reading of a presumptively autonomous mod-
ernist practice, that Andy Warhol's Oxidation Paintings reveal to us that the
liquid gesture in the work of "Jack the Dripper" always encoded a certain mas-
culine potency. See Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1993), pp. 269-277.
10. As Frankenthaler herself stated after seeing Pollock's canvases at the Betty Par-
sons Gallery in 1951, "It was as if I suddenly went to a foreign country and didn't
know the language, but had read enough, and had a passionate interest, and was
eager to live there. I wanted to live in this land; I had to live there, and master the
language." As cited in Barbara Rose, Helen Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1972), p. 29. The statement is intriguing both for the way in which
Frankenthaler articulates her own sense of indebtedness to Pollock, and her ex-
perience of his paintings as a "language," a foreign language which she wants to
"master."

576 1990s
11. See Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, eds., The Curse: A Cul-
tural History of Menstruation (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1988), as well
as Emily Martin, "Medical Metaphors of Women's Bodies: Menstruation and
Menopause," in her The Woman in the Body (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
12. Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words," in The De-Definition of Art (New York:
Horizon Press, 1972), p. 64.
13. The critical discourse and its construction of Frankthaler's manifest lack of
agency would seem to replay, or play out, a telling witticism of Jacques Lacan,
who wrote, "[T]hey don't know what they are saying, which is all the difference
between them and me." See Lacan's "God and the Jouissance of The Woman: A
Love Letter," in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the écolefreudienne (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 144.
14. In similar terms, although Frankenthaler worked on an extremely large scale typ-
ical of the postwar abstract painters and used oil and acrylics, and bore the
legacy not just of Pollock, but of Masson, Miró, and Gorky, her technique was
seen to bear a resemblance to that of watercolor. It was precisely this resemblance
that critics seized upon, providing them an effective means by which to isolate
her from the mainstream of the New York School. Deploying this watercolor
analogy, critics were able to link her work to such American landscape artists as
Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe, establishing a lineage outside
of European modernism and implying an intimacy and softness in her paint-
ings despite their monumental scale. The fluidity that characterized her paintings
could thus be linked specifically to her identity as a woman, providing another
means by which to isolate her, not just from a tradition of early twentieth-century
European modernism, but from postwar American high modernism.
15. Like the criticism surrounding Frankenthaler on which I have already drawn,
the majority of the articles on Louis to which I refer were published in Art Inter-
national, Arts Magazine, and Art News during the 19505 and 19608, as well as in
exhibition catalogues.
16. Elizabeth C. Baker, "Morris Louis: Veiled Illusions," Art News, Vol. 69, No. 2
(April 1970), p. 36.
17. As cited in E.A. Carmean, Jr., "Morris Louis and the Modern Tradition: I: Ab-
stract Expressionism," Art Magazine, Vol. 51, No. i (September 1976), p. 75.
18. Here we might think specifically of the critical and biographical construction of
Jackson Pollock, who came to be seen as a sort of cowboy figure, arriving in New
York from the American West and reinvigorating American painting. In addi-
tion to his persona, his poured and dripped paintings were described in ways
which constructed, foregrounded and celebrated his virility and masculinity.
With such a deeply gendered personal and critical history, it is not surprising
that his skeins of paint, and his method for applying them to the canvas, came to
be described in explicitly sexualized terms, the process of creation the act of
"casting paint like seed ... onto the canvas spread at his feet. This was no sissy
... it was, demonstrably, the real thing . . . painting composed of (a) ... mainly
ejaculatory splat." See William Feaver, "The Kid from Cody," review of the Jack-

1990s 577
 son Pollock: Drawing into Painting exhibition in its Oxford, England, Museum
of Modern Art venue, 1979, as recorded in the artist's file on Pollock at the library
of the Museum of Modern Art New York. These quotations, as well as an incisive
critique of the masculinist construction of Jackson Pollock, are found in Anna
Chave's article "Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript," Res 2,4 (Autumn
1993), PP. 95-111.
19. E.G. Goossen, "Helen Frankenthaler," Art International, Vol. 5, No. 8 (October
20,1961), pp. 77-78.
20. It is interesting to reflect for a moment here on Clement Greenberg's critical
assessment of "the travesty that was cubism," in "Towards a Newer Laocoon"
(1940) as reprinted in Frascina, Pollock and After, p. 44. For is not the "travesty"
that was cubism perhaps analytic cubism's quite literal effacing of the recogniza-
ble signifiers of the differently male and female body?
21. I refer here to the work of the French theorists Hélène Cixous, Catherine Cle-
ment, Luce Irigary, and Julia Kristeva, among others, each of whom posits,
though in fundamentally different ways, the emergence or eruption of a "femi-
nine" impulse in modernist writing, an impulse which has been further theo-
rized in this country in the work of Alice Jardine and Susan Rubin Suleiman,
among others.
22. Fairfield Porter, "Sam Francis," Art News, Vol. 56, No. 7 (November 1957), pp.
12-13.
23. Herschel Chipp, "Sam Francis," Art News, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Summer 1959), p. 24.
24. Laurie Anderson, "Friedel Dzubas,'Mr¿News, Vol. 72, No. 4 (April 1973), p. 86.
25. Jack Kroll, Art News, Vol. 60, No. 7 (November 1961), p. 37.
26. Kenworth Moffett, "New Paintings by Friedl Dzubas," Art International, Vol. 19
(May 1975), p. 91.
27. Dzubas was included, for example, in the 1976 exhibition The Golden Door:
Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876-1976, Cynthia Jaffee McCabe and Daniel J.
Boorstin, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976). Al-
though Dzubas was not included in the recent show, Exiles and Emigres: The
Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann,
eds. (Los Angeles and New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and
Harry Abrams, 1997), many of the essays contained therein would be extremely
useful in contemplating his status and identity as an emigré (non-Jewish) Ger-
man artist in postwar America.
28. Michael Fried, Morris Louis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), pp. 25-26.
29. Ibid.
30. That it is criticism which sees and yet does not see the inherent dualism, the
bi-gendering, of New York School painting, that criticism recognizes gender
yet is ultimately blind to the theoretical and ideological implications of these
painterly surfaces, places roughly contemporaneous criticism in a troubled and
precarious relationship to the painting it takes as its subject. If, as Michael Fried
himself wrote several years before his essay on Louis, "It is one of the most im-
portant facts about the contemporary situation in the visual arts that the funda-

578 1990s
 mental character of the new art has not been adequately understood," Three
American Painters, p. 4, the present theoretical context may retrospectively re-
veal his own temporally-bound inability to "adequately understand" New York
School painting, his inability to see how his own gendered metaphorics were
participating in a broader critical practice and societal context.
31. Again, see Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, for her discussion of the masculini-
zation of opticality in Greenbergian modernism.
32. On the issue or the question of essentialism, see, for example, the special issue of
differences, "The Essential Difference: Another Look as Essentialism," Vol. 1,
No. 2 (Summer 1989), which has since been reissued in book form as The Essen-
tial Difference, Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Woods, eds. (Bloomington: Univer-
sity of Indiana Press, 1994) and the special issue of Critical Inquiry "Writing and
Sexual Difference," Vol. 8, No. 2 (Winter 1981).
33. Henry Geldzahler, "An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler," Artforum, Vol. 4,
No. 2 (October 1965), p. 38.
34. Cindy Nemser, "An Interview with Helen Frankenthaler," Arts Magazine, Vol.
46, No. 2 (November 1971), p. 54.
35. In addition to Betty Friedan's path-breaking study on the 19508, The Feminine
Mystique (New York: Norton, New York, 1963), we might look to more recent
work like Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), or Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Unde-
clared War Against American Women (New York: Anchor Books, New York, 1991).
36. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Ta-
boo (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 4.1 am indebted to Mark Cheetham's Rhetoric
of Purity: Essential Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, En-
gland: Cambridge University Press, 1991), both for the reference, and, more gen-
erally, for ways of re-thinking abstraction.
37. In recent years, there has been an emergent body of work within the discipline of
art history that addresses questions of gender in relation to abstraction and its
interpretation. See, for example, Michael Leja, "Barnett Newman's Solo Tango,"
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Spring 1995), pp. 556-580; Anna C. Chave, "Pol-
lock and Krasner: Script and Postscript," Res 24 (Autumn 1993), pp. 95-111; and
Anne M. Wagner, "Lee Krasner as L.K.," Representations No. 25 (Winter 1989),
pp. 42-57. A discussion of gender, particularly as it relates to the feminization of
the Jungian unconscious and its representation in Pollock's painting, is taken
up as well in Michael Leja's Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Painting and
Subjectivity in the 1940$ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). And, of
course, although a generation of social art historians re-interpreted New York
School painting and its reception, their concern was Cold War politics, not sex-
ual politics.
38. Susan Gubar, "The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," The New
Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, Elaine Showalter,
ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 292-313. The essay first appeared in Criti-
cal Inquiry 8 (Winter 1982).

1990s 579
 39- Isak Dinesen, "The Blank Page," Last Tales (New York: Random House, 1957),
pp. 99-105.
40. It should be noted that " 'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity"
is not the only piece by Gubar to take up the visual arts. For example, we might
look as well to her article involving Magritte's Le Viol, "Representing Pornogra-
phy: Feminism, Criticism and Depictions of Female Violation," Critical Inquiry
13 (Summer 1987).
41. Gubar, p. 302.1 should add to Gubar's reading that Kahlo's deeply personal sym-
bolism of martyrdom owes its power not only to Kahlo's own resonant iconogra-
phy, but to the pictorial archetype of the crucified Christ, based not only in a his-
tory of visual images, but in Christian exegetical and liturgical tradition.
42. See, for example, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the
Nineteenth Century, Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body
and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990). We might look as well to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

DAVID AN FA M "Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated":

Aspects of Clyfford Still's Earlier Work

Despite its importance, Clyfford Still's work poses greater problems for schol-
arship than that of any other artist associated with Abstract Expressionism.
Secondary sources remain either scarce or obscure, while the complete
corpus of his works has neither been shown nor published.1 What is known
stems largely from Still himself, who thereby sought to pre-empt the mosaic
of art-historical interpretation. He replaced it with a canon whose main agents
are the gifts totalling sixty-nine paintings, together with their catalogues, made
to three North American institutions: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buf-
falo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York's Metropolitan
Museum.2 If highly imposing, all are partial representations. Indeed, Still
wrote his own history so clearly that its subtexts and probable sources have al-
most disappeared. For no period are these more relevant than his earlier ca-
reer where, once reinscribed, they affect a reading of the whole.
Shortly after his birth in a tiny North Dakota village in 1904, the Still family

SOURCE: Burlington Magazine (April 1993), 260-69. Reprinted with the permission of
The Burlington Magazine. British spelling retained.

580
moved to Spokane, Washington state.3 His childhood and youth were spent
there and on a wheat ranch across the Canadian border in southern Alberta
until, having studied and then taught at Washington State College in Pullman,
he left for California in 1941.4 Rather than emphasizing his origins per se, the
details that Still added to this sparse biography reinforce a persona that mir-
rors the long-established "type" of the autonomous creator.5 When embed-
ded in a broader yet less familiar historical context, the same biographical
facts yield another perspective—one which suggests a dialectic between intel-
lectual growth and workaday life, as well as a sense of how acute an experi-
ence the latter must have been.
The migration of Still's family reflects the settlement of the Canadian
prairies, for they moved to the Bow Island area in 1909, the first year after the
south-western states were opened to homesteading. Such colonisation par-
alleled that of the American West except for one major difference: Canada's
relatively late development meant that pioneer conditions extended well into
the twentieth century. An isolated environment bore down on the homestead
unit, which was typically governed by a more unrelenting patriarchal system
than its American counterpart. This led to domestic tensions of a kind that
may have been at the root of Still's much later avowal: "I had learned as a
youth the price one pays for a father, a master, a Yahweh.... I must add that
the onlooker should bear in mind that the prodigal son has not returned to the
father."6 Most crucially, the family must have faced virgin semiarid land on a
high plain marked by an extreme climate.7 Harvests during the first six years
were good but a drought begin in 1917 which lasted until 1926.8 A return to
arid conditions in 1931 coincided with the toll of the Depression on a faltering
agrarian economy: already precarious communities went back to a frontier
stage and the soil degenerated to a "dust bowl."9 Existence had become mar-
ginal, an everyday hell.10
Diverse clues attest the impact of that ecological and social catastrophe, in-
cluding Still's reminiscences about the period's "hardness" when his arms
were "bloody to the elbows shocking wheat" and "men and... machines ripped
a meager living from the thin top soil."11 Moreover, he once returned—"very
upset"—from his father's ranch to classes at Pullman to be told that the "wheat
in Canada isn't dependent on you"; and a pronounced pessimism from then
on would persist, a decade thence, as "a strange dark kind of bitterness which
the paintings reflected."12 The paintings of the later 19203 and early 19305
certainly embody a severe outlook.13 They show such prairie scenes as wheat
rising against massive overcast skies, freight trains, grain elevators, and single

1990s 581
 figures or groups engaged in hard labour. Trenchant contours, silhouettes and
value contrasts are exploited to the extent that draughtsmanship and painter-
liness vie with each other. Although the subjects at first recall Regionalism,
the tenor throughout is more elemental and expressionistic.14 In particular,
often emaciated and distorted figures speak for a despair which is rendered
topical by details that include axes, spanners, disc ploughs and the crops
themselves.15 Machinery, it should be noted, was indispensable to prairie
routine and much preoccupied Still.16 This adds another and unexpected ini-
tial component to what could appear as the exclusively geological or organic
cast of his mature imagery.17
A striking 1936 Untitled composition mediates a turn towards the alto-
gether more imaginative phase which had begun when Still spent the sum-
mers of 1934-35 at the retreat called Yaddo (then known as the Trask Founda-
tion) in Saratoga Springs, New York State.18 Two precedents are implicit:
primarily, Picasso's La vie and, in the woman's pose, perhaps Van Gogh's well-
known 1882 lithograph Sorrow.19 The earlier work of Van Gogh and Cézanne,
alongside Courbet, were already influences.20 The intertwined male-female
arrangement may well have evolved from the uppermost picture-within-a-
picture in La vie. Hitherto problematic or academic organisational factors
now became expressive devices. Among them are densely compressed design
and the use of a repoussoir, as manifest for instance in the lateral motifs fram-
ing previous, more realistic pictures such as Row of Grain Elevators (National
Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).21 Such
a disposition of elements, notably the woman's yellow hair falling parallel to,
and alongside, the canvas edge in Untitled, anticipates the abstract marginal
forms that emerged during the 19405. The foreclosed space thrusts the pro-
tagonists onto a frontal plane so that an equation arises between the body's
surfaces and the canvas's.
In the year before he executed Untitled, Still had written of Cézanne: "Feel-
ing his way around the forms, plane by plane, he was compelled to crowd
many segments into a unified whole."22 Crudely vigorous drawing and a few
bright focal points such as the three crimson nipples counterbalance an al-
most monochromatic pictorial fabric. Despite the emphasis on flatness, indi-
vidual areas press into or unfold within each other in a spatially provocative
manner (note the schematic hint of the man's rib-cage in the three horizontal
strokes towards the upper left). This implosion of tactile paint and the figure's
cartography, of raw expanses and breaks or eruptions, proved seminal.23
Untitled also echoes La vie by evoking an allegory of the human condition.

582 1990s
Behind it seems to lie the pressure of a narrative, no less tragic for being more
secretive than before.24 There is an intensity about Still's early output at once
graphic yet hard to define. Apart from Orozco, few of his contemporaries ex-
ceeded it. With the figures petrified by their plight, disturbance is localised in
gestures, in the cadaverous anatomy and in the man's mutilated head. His eye-
lessness is a negative announcement of Still's stress on "vision" as a driving
force.25 The blind "gaze" recurs in the rendering of a single male countenance
known as Brown Study (1935, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of
Art, Utica).26 Through the next decade this theme underwent an uncanny re-
versal, part of a rhetoric of insight and blindness. By the mid-i94Os eye-like
dots (schemata traceable to Picasso from the Cubist years onwards and to
Max Ernst's One Night of Lové) stare from façades which therefore acquire
an embodied presence, comparable to that inherent in certain "primitive"
fetishes and totems. To return their "gaze"—inverting the customary relations
between an active spectator and an inert image—courts transgression. Sight,
or the lack of it, eventually engendered a whole metaphysics. At stake was the
principle of inwardness found in what Still described as a "metaphor" from
William Blake: "The Vision of Christ that thou dost see/Is my Vision's
Greatest Enemy: / Thine is the Friend of All Mankind, / Mine Speaks in Para-
bles to the Blind... ."27
"Vision" is among several leitmotifs traceable to Still's intellectual inter-
ests at the time of Unfitted (1936). In fact, a strategy that came to dominate all
his subsequent aesthetic manoeuvres perhaps first took shape here: the dy-
namic that turns a prosaic image into hermetic representations or metaphor
until his vocabulary, pictorial as well as verbal, ranges at will across both car-
nal and spiritual levels.28 As Jacques Derrida has observed, "life" necessitates
metaphor because it is invisible.29 Although the artist noted it (and never did
so without good reason), commentators on his art have said little about his
education in philosophy and in literary criticism of the kind which empha-
sised the classics (one of its lasting effects was an erudite, esoteric diction).30
Such a formative framework is all the more pertinent given Still's youthful in-
difference to much modern or then-contemporary thought.31 Metaphors of
"vision" were analysed in a treatise by a scholar whom Still cited and kept in
high regard—his college tutor, Murray W. Bundy.32 In his principal book, The
Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought, Bundy remarks
how "Plato insists that truth is a matter of right vision and is the first... to talk
about the eye of the mind."33 Bundy furthermore explores two other key con-
cepts for his student's future aesthetic: "imagination" itself and the "idea" as

1990s 583
 basis for the "image."34 And behind the classical texts stood the more funda-
mental realm of myth, the aftermath of human contact with nature.35
For Still's generation mythology meant Sir James Frazer and his heirs, Jane
Harrison, F.M. Cornford and Gilbert Murray.36 Frazer's The Golden Bough
and Harrison's Themis revolve around earth's fertility and wasting as catalysts
for myth and ritual, themselves deemed to be the rudimentary types of artistic
creativity. Not only might those topics have struck a special chord in anyone
who had known Canada's recent agricultural disasters; it would also have
been logical to proceed from classical thought and literature to writings which
sought to elucidate their genesis. In Harrison, even more vividly than in
Frazer, the forces of the natural world (dike), their bearing on the social order
(themis) and on the artistic imagination, coalesce.
It must be said, though, that any discussion of "sources" entails likelihood
rather than ironclad proof because Still denied the rôle of nearly all external
causes in an extreme version of what the literary critic Harold Bloom has
termed a "strong" response to the "anxiety of influence."37 In the absence of
first-hand verification (which, a fortiori, will almost certainly never materi-
alise), what does exist is a network of internal connexions, echoes and proba-
bilities whose design otherwise amounts to sheer coincidence. First, Wash-
ington State College library had acquired Themis in iQiy.38 Secondly, opaque
aspects of Still's art and discourse only make the fullest sense once a rationale
embracing literary allusion, social background and pictorial stimuli is un-
ravelled. When he made his New York début at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery
in 1946, Still was credited with the famous remark that the paintings were "of
the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated."39 The phrase may read as a
clue that rather than joining the Abstract Expressionist "myth-makers," he
had pre-empted them, as it parallels an almost identical triadic sequence
("Earth . . . eternal Hell . . . rise again") twice set forth in Themis.40 Lastly,
does not Still's epigraph to the Albright-Knox donation drop another hint?
There he quoted the painter Clay Spohn—a friend and fellow teacher privy to
Still's thoughts—who had said in 1947: "After seeing many of Clyfford Still's
works I have come to the conclusion that he is a sorcerer with powerful magic.
... Nay! An Earth Shaker."41 In chapter IV of Themis, itself entitled "Magic,"
one guise of the lightning-god (associated with the heavens and therefore
also, tellingly, rain and the land) is the "Earth-shaker."42
Controversy over the titles in the 1946 Art of This Century gallery, for ex-
ample, could perhaps be settled if they were understood as indices to the
cyclical destiny of the earth—in turn allegorising their author's own regenera-

584 1990s
tive odyssey.43 At first the title Jamais seems to have no ties whatsoever to the
image it designates; but Frazer's account of the Persephone legend twice uses
the fateful word "never" about Demeter's power to waste the corn.44 The
seven vertical yellow strands of the painting's background resemble corn
stalks (at least three have slightly thicker tops, suggesting ears of grain), logi-
cal attendants to the baleful dark creature and, in turn, to the title's proposed
cryptic allusion. The embodied blackness and the rich yellow accord with
the dualities of Frazer's account, which passes from "leafless" desolation to
"a vast ruddy sheet of corn" once Persephone is restored to Demeter.45 The
grass widow, with its blatant vegetational reference, is explicable via Themis,
in which the earth is termed "mother and husbandless."46 Likewise, Buried
Sun recalls the myths in Frazer and Harrison—variations of the same funda-
mental notions given narrative form in the Persephone legend—personifying
the sun and its demise at night or at a solstice.47 Frazer again offers a potential
key to Nemesis of Esther III, citing the Biblical protagonists Esther and Mor-
decai as symbols of "the dying or dead vegetation of the old and the sprouting
vegetation of the new year."48 That he should regard Vashti and Haman as
"doubles" of the Esther-Mordecai pair might clarify the titular "III" as de-
noting a new, third enactment of the tale. The apparent connecting thread—
dissolution and rebirth—is as straightforward as its encoding proves to be
recondite.
Four other titles from the 1946 exhibition remain hard to decode without
recourse to Gilbert Murray's celebrated Excursus within Themis treating the
fortunes of a vegetation god, the "year-spirit." These four are The Comedy of
Tragic Deformation, Elegy, Theopathic Entities and Premonition. Each sug-
gests an allusion to unfolding stages in the ritualistic Greek tragedies that
memorialise the year-spirit's fate. According to Murray their train of events
encompass [es] both "comedy" and "tragedy," a threnos (that is, an "elegy"), a
ritual death and sudden resurrection respectively termed pathos and theo-
phany (Still's "theopathic" may be a conflation of these two distinct words),
and sometimes a moment when the discovery of the slain god and the subse-
quent volte-face in the action, though not actually stated, "continue to haunt
the atmosphere" so that there remains, in other words, the premonition of
rebirth.49 The title Biomorphic Mechanism openly conjoins "life" and the
"machinery" that sustained it on the prairies, whereas The Spectre and the
Perroquet sounds more arcane. A perroquet is a rather obscure name for a
parakeet: it echoes the equally uncommon occurrence of a "parroquet" totem
in a passage in Themis which also discusses ghosts and so may account for the

1990s 585
 titular "spectre."50 Finally, Quicksilver (probably the canvas now entitled
July-1945-R) is a synonym for "mercury," otherwise the Greek Hermes.51 To
Harrison, Hermes is a chthonic deity who accompanies souls, including
Persephone, to and from the underworld. The "very daimon of reincarna-
tion" in her view, he subsumes the "Earth-Damned-Recreated" complex.52
Refracted through a prism of such potential covert meanings, Rothko's own
prefatory words for the exhibition also gain a greater resonance: "To me they
form a theogony [author's emphasis] of the most elementary consciousness,
hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live—a profound and moving experi-
ence."53 In sum, all the foregoing connotations, if such they are, traverse in
more specific ways the polarities of "life" and "death" that Still was to identify
as the crux of his art.54
What else might Themis have lent to the multifarious images prior to 1946?
From the later 19305 until then, Still and Harrison seem to tread common
ground, distinguished by a similar dramatis personae and uncanny mood, as
found in a 1945 lithograph based on an earlier work and, thus, of dual im-
port.55 Here the down-thrust hand, a single eye (barely visible in reproduc-
tion), the grisly shoulder area and the hatched shading derive from the older
world of Brown Study (1935) and Untitled (1936). But they blend with some-
thing less quotidian.
Like Still's daimon (a term from Harrison that suits these presences), the
half-humanised forces of Themis often incarnate "Earth" and confront their
supernal opposites, usually the sky or sun. Both proclaim a dramaturgy of
massy forms risen from the depths and mercurial ones flashing down from
above which, during the 19505, became the gist of Still's most abstract style.
Their emblems are the snake and a magical stone called an omphalos, both
chthonic symbols to Harrison.56 A snake is poised in profile at the lower right
of The Spectre and the Perroquet below a lurid, hovering and questionably
avian creature which opposes an upright stick-like being on the left. An odd
ghostly trio, they provoke speculation as to whether the Themis "perroquet"
passage merely sparked a title: the text mentions a day when the "spirits of the
dead rose up" and has a line illustration of two, albeit Attic, figures facing one
another with a snake at their base.57
The omphalos is among Harrison's richest syncretic cult objects, identified
by turns with the body, the earth, death and fertility. To an artist fascinated by
stone since he had depicted a still life of rocks in 1925, its lure would be obvi-
ous.58 Starting as the grey leftward sentinel of Oil on Burlap (i936),59 recog-
nisable by its volumetric shading and narrower waist, the bullet-like profile of

586 1990s
 the omphalos is in time either truncated or becomes a mere template. The
twin mounds at the base of Figure (1945) at any rate conform with the idiosyn-
cratic "blunt cone" of its top and the fact that, at one point, Harrison has a
sun-god (Apollo) surmount the omphalos is intriguing in the context of the
juxtaposition here of celestial radiance and gloom.60
Ultimately, however, it is the poetic axes of Themis as much as any minutiae
that match Still's earlier universe. Elemental cosmogonies, grim phantasms, a
mineral realm instinct with animistic power (mana) and signs given emblem-
atic life, such as the flash of July-iQ45-R "trembling on the verge of personal-
ity," comprise their mutual foundations.61 Upon them, both Still and Harri-
son built a broad pattern. Whether pointing the dialogue between individual
pictures or orchestrating the layout of his final Metropolitan retrospective,
Still targeted maximal contrasts of darkness and brilliance.62 The previous
year he had also invoked the "vastness and depth" of a "Sophocles drama."63
That epic attitude was well rehearsed in Themis, where Euripides's "voices of
the night" and "sunlit song" contend.64
A stylistic development which reveals Still's art-historical shrewdness
complicates this iconography.65 Modernist paradigms quickly absorb vesti-
gial symbols during the War years until a stage comes around 1946 when Still
lets the energy of the actual image hold sway. How once disparate ideas are
fused in the process shows the drift of his originality. Two examples illustrate
it in microcosm. Another lithograph from the 1943-45 series again deals with
a strongly gendered type of daimon, except that now the conception is less
literal and, in this respect, perhaps informed by Picasso and Matisse. If Pi-
casso's Seated Woman may have influenced the basic composition, with each
figure caught in a twisting or downward slipping movement despite the bright
wedge motif that anchors their heads, Matisse's Yvonne Landsberg may be the
source of the striations that arc outward from the neck area.66 Lines stream
from the armpit into mechanical silhouettes at the lower left.67 Capricious
parts are compacted into a unity.
In marked contrast to these shredded effects, linearity and intricate chiaro-
scuro are the paintings from the first half of the 1940s.68 Their concision is
analogous to the "pictographic" and "ideographic" moments of Abstract Ex-
pressionism. A reductive Untitled (c. 1945-46) employs unbroken black, tan
and brown planes enlivened by a few focal accents such as the haloes crown-
ing each pinnacle.69 Given the air of enigma, it might look extravagant to sug-
gest any model. Nevertheless, a detail from the New York version of Arnold
Bocklin's Isle of the Dead shows cypress trees of comparably notched outline;

1990s 587
 a single light touch below might have prompted the eye-catching red wedge at
the bottom left of Untitled. One more link clinches this connexion. The ger-
minal canvas now known as ig4i-2-C in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery—
a dark brown mass against a blue-black ambience—had evidently already
translated, in its configuration, choice of hue» and internal markings, the fore-
most cliff face which looms to the left of Bocklin's trees.70 That monolith may
have caught Still's attention because its profile approximates the shape of the
omphalos. Metamorphosis of this sort pervaded his working habits in general,
pulling the most far-flung ideas into a tight nexus.
Nineteen forty-six was a turning-point and such paintings as Untitled
come just before remarkable developments. Faint mimetic traces are present;
but so, too, is a clash between flatness and a sculpturesque palette-knife tech-
nique. This held the potential for an aggressively physical approach wherein
painterly vectors replace modelling. In the canvases dating from around
1943-45, seen in the 1947 show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
strange entities spring up from the ground, a mixture of negative and positive
spaces. In spirit they belong to the past. In fact, by the time of that exhibition,
Still had already done away with titles and was entering a highly productive
phase initiated by such works as the Metropolitan's superb Untitled. Here we
find a gamut of literal earth hues, volatile contours, areas driven to the mar-
gins (denoting a domain of activity, an otherness beyond the edge), and lumi-
nous outbursts held, like the twin rising presences themselves, amidst the
dense pigment.71 A subtle play of balance and asymmetry is underway. These
continued to be among the essentials of Still's abstraction which, by the end
of the decade, went to extraordinary and audacious limits. Yet its key always
struck registers set up long before—the figuration through metaphor of life's
resurgence against a mortal world.72

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Notes

This article draws on research incorporated in D. Anfam, Clyfford Still, unpublished

Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1984—cited as Anfam 1984.1 remain grateful to
John Golding for his supervision of that work.

1. B. Heller, Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Mary Boone Gallery, New York (1990), n.p. ,
note3.
2. See The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy: Paintings by Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Albright

588 1990s
 Art Gallery, Buffalo (1959); The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy: Clyfford Still; Thirty-
three Paintings in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1966), n.p. ; Clyfford
Stilly San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (1976); J. O'Neill,
éd., Clyfford Stilly exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1979):
T. Kellein, éd., Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1992)
—henceforth respectively Buffalo (1959), Buffalo (1966); SFMoMA (1976), Met-
ropolitan (1979) and Kellein (1992).
3. His birthplace, Grandin, is some thirty miles north of Fargo and so small as to
appear only on detailed maps. Vital records for North Dakota were not main-
tained until c. 1908. According to Buffalo (1966), p. 13, Still's parents were origi-
nally Canadian immigrants.
4. SFMoMA (1967), pp. 107-8.
5. See E. Kris and O. Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist (1934,
trans, and reprinted New Haven, 1979). Still's biography appears, progressively
expanded, in the catalogues cited at note 2 above. Its details and logic accord
with numerous ancient hallmarks of the artistic "type" enumerated by Kris and
Kurz: an heroic persona, rustic background, a battle against material odds, initial
studies from nature, the lack of a teacher, a marginal or problematic father,
exceptional rapport between the creator and his creations, recognition by a
connoisseur and ultimate control of primal forces, including symbolic fire (cf.
SFMoMA [1976], p. 122).
6. Buffalo (1966), pp. 17-18. In interviews with the author, Thomas B. Hess (4th
August 1977) and John Schueler (3ist January 1978) observed that Still's rela-
tionship with his father was problematic. On the social and economic inequali-
ties associated with the Canadian partriarchal system see J. Burnett, Next Year
Country, Toronto (1969), pp. 30 and 33.
7. In 1911 Bow Island had 307 inhabitants and the Stills lived outside the village.
Summer temperatures exceed ioo°F and in winter may drop to ~45°F: evapora-
tion during the growing season is exacerbated by hot, dry winds. See F. Jakunis,
éd., Southern Alberta: A Regional Perspective, Lethbridge (1972), pp. 2O and 78.
8. For example, the wheat yield at Medicine Hat (thirty miles from Bow Island) in
1915 was 37.5 bushels per acre; by 1919 it had fallen to 2.4 bushels. See W. Mack-
intosh, Prairie Settlement. The Geographical Setting, i, Toronto (1934), p. 128.
9. Ibid., pp. 108 and 130. The net income from farm operations in Manitoba, Sas-
katchewan and Alberta in 1928 was $363 million, dropping to a $10.7 million
deficit in 1931; see M. Urquhart, Historical Statistics of Canada, Toronto (1965),
P. 357-
10. See, for example, L. Grayson and M. Bliss, eds., The Wretched of Canada, To-
ronto (1971).
11. Still in conversation with H. Hopkins, MS in the Library files, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, n.d.: D. Ashton, The Life and Times of the New York
School, Bath (1972), p. 34; Statement by the artist (1972) in A. Lerner, éd., The
Hirshhorn Museum ¿7 Sculpture Garden, New York (1974), p. 752; Ernest Briggs,
interview with the author (igth February 1978). See also E. Stevens, "Still's In-

1990s 589
 tense Vision," The Sunday Sun, Baltimore (2nd December 1979), p. 6: " 'Art was
hated there [the Alberta farm] as a waste of time.' "
12. A. Askman, "Still Life," Spokane Magazine (June 1980), p. 22; Murray Bundy,
letter to the author (3rd February 1978); T. Pollak, An Art School: Some Remi-
niscences, Richmond (c. 1969), p. 46. My thanks to Ted Dalziel of the National
Gallery of Art Library for tracing the first citation.
13. These observations are based partly on examination of the Still photographic
archive: I am grateful to Mrs. Still for access to this record, a self-made catalogue
raisonné, in 1989.
14. Certain early titles have a Regionalist sound, such as Moving, submitted to the
noth Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Art and Design, 1935, no.
187; and A Funeral, North Dakota, shown at the Faculty exhibition, Washington
State College, 14th to 27th April 1937, no. 54.
15. See the early works reproduced in S. Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the
Modern Experience, Cambridge (1991), p. 94: the details of a plough are visible
behind the man in the central left (reading the entire illustration vertically) pic-
ture. In one 19305 painting (seen by the author in the Still photographic ar-
chive) the female figure, a more realistic precursor of the formidable presence in
1938-N-No. i, reproduced in SFMoMA (1976), no. 5, wields an axe. Still showed
Wheat at Washington State College in 1937, and Man with Sheaf and Green
Wheat at his 1943 San Francisco retrospective.
16. T. Albright, "A conversation with Clyfford Still," Art News, 75 (March 1976), p.
32: "I've spent a lot of my life around machinery." Also, The Prescript (the jour-
nal of the Richmond Professional Institute, 12th November 1943), p. 3, cites
Still's hobby as "mechanical things." Other 1943 retrospective titles were The
Yellow Plow and The Yellow Elevator, Burnet, op. cit. at note 6 above, p. 12, ob-
serves: "A farmer's son, one of the few from the area to go to university explained
his interest in engineering in terms of the mechanization of the farm: 4. . . You
grow up with machinery and you get interested in machines.'"
17. The claw-like motifs of the mid-i94Os primarily develop from the downward ex-
tended hand as seen in Untitled (1936). But the prominent claw form in the 1946
work in the Peggy Guggenheim show (see SFMoMA [1976], p. 23, top installa-
tion photo, far right) resembles an open-end wrench which is, indeed, what a
figure appears to hold in an early composition reproduced by Polcari, op. cit. at
note 15 above (p. 94, centre). The first canvas in Metropolitan (1979) has mecha-
nistic overtones and may be abstracted from a grain elevator, or related to the
studies which Still reportedly made (according to Robert Neuhaus, letter to the
author, 13th February 1979) based on the cranes, booms, blocks and cables of his
wartime work in the shipbuilding industry.
18. The painting's former owner, the late Mrs. Lois Katzenbach, taught at Washing-
ton State College and noted that it was shown there (interview with the author,
4th April 1978). Unfortunately, Yaddo's files remain closed to the public.
19. As with several other works that Still presumably explored, the Picasso was re-
produced in Cahiers d'Art, 5-6 (1928), p. 209. For the Van Gogh, see J.-B. de la

590 1990s
 Faille, Vincent Van Gogh: The Complète Works on Paper; Catalogue Raisonné, San
Francisco (1928, reprinted 1992), no. 1655.
20. The treatment of the breasts is also closer to the Van Gogh. For Cezanne's rele-
vance see Anfam 1984, pp. 39,49 and 217-26. By 1929 the Metropolitan had ac-
quired eight Courbet landscapes.
21. Reproduced in D. Anfam, Abstract Expressionism, London (1990), pp. 36-37; for
the second trait especially, see also Houses atNespelem in ibid., p. 34. Both prac-
tices may owe something to Benton's tenets regarding spatial equilibrium: see
Anfam 1984, pp. 35-36.
22. C. Still, Cézanne: A Study in Evaluation, unpublished M.A. thesis in Fine Arts
for State College of Washington, 1935, p. 18.
23. Consider Still's statement that "the figure stands behind it all" in T. Albright,
"Clyfford Still," Art News, 79 (September 1980), p. 160; Mrs Still lately recon-
firmed this tenet in conversation with the author (loth September 1989). Conser-
vator Dana Cranmer kindly observed to me that the pigment of Untitled (1936)
appears in places to have an admixture of a gritty substance, perhaps sand.
24. To adopt a distinction from literary theory, narrative has here become a kind of
"plot" where structural relations replace anecdote, so that what was previously
sub specie temporis is now occulted sub specie aeternitatis; see F. Kermode: An
Appétite for Poetry, Cambridge (1989), pp. 208-23.
25. Figures of speech concerning uvision"and other somatic capacities such as
"grasping" and "walking," allied to "instruments" that lance and cut (the physi-
cal body, or the body social) pervade Still's writings. Such metaphors have ex-
emplars in Nietzsche: see Anfam 1984, pp. 48-49 and Chapter 7, passim.
26. An eyeless head reappears in an Untitled (1938), sold Sotheby's, New York, 27th
February 1990, lot 15; its features are very close to an Indian stone face from Ken-
tucky reproduced in F. Douglas and R. D. Hardoncourt, Indian Art of the United
States, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1941), p. 73.
27. Buffalo (1959).
28. A quintessential instance is the "journey" theme. Its prosaic types are the west-
ward voyages of American social history, including that of Still's family. In a pas-
sage in Buffalo (1959) ("It was as a journey that one must make ...") this becomes
outright allegory reiterated, nonetheless, by the first image of the San Francisco
donation, the quester of Oil on Canvas (1934). Both are prefigured in a 1932 Spok-
annual (of Spokane University) book cover, designed by Still, where a classical
figure directs a neophyte across a mountainous scene. I am indebted to Robert
Sandberg for bringing this item to my attention.
29. J. Derrida: Margins of Philosophy, Chicago (1982), pp. 264-65.
30. SFMoMA (1976), pp. 107-8; T. Albright, "The Painted Flame," Horizon, 22
(November 1979)^.32: "... [Still's] familiarity with the early Greeks—Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle, Longinus." See also Metropolitan (1979), p. 27: "I [Still] pro-
posed to him [Andrew C. Ritchie] that he take also the catharsis of Aristotle's
Poetics. . . ." Words such as "apostasy," "thesauri," "ontogeny," "phylogenic,"
"Pyrrhic," "encysted" and "peristalsis" populate Still's statements.

1990s 591
 31. Albright, loe. cit. at note 30 above: "... He [Still] was uninterested in Marx, hos-
tile to Freud, and cold to avant-garde idols like Eliot and Pound."
32. Still invited Prof. Bundy (who generously aided my research), over forty years af-
ter their initial relationship, to the opening of his 1979 Metropolitan retrospec-
tive. See Askman, op. cit. at note 12 above, p. 23.
33. M. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought,
Champaign-Urbana (1927), p. 24.
34. Ibid., passim, and p. 53. Cf. Still in Buffalo (1959): "The work . . . as image of
idea." Bundy also discusses "phantasy" at length: Still's ig^S-N-No.i in the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art was originally titled Totem Fantasy.
35. Bundy, op. cit. at note 33 above, p. 143.
36. To these may be added the medievalist, Jessie L. Weston, best known for From
Ritual to Romance (1920).
37. N. Marnier, "Clyfford Still: The Extremist Factor," Art in America, 68 (April
1980), p. 105: " 'My work,' said Still at his opening, 'is not influenced by any-
body' "; see H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, New York (1973).
38. Information supplied by Washington State University Library, 28th April 1982.
J. Harrison, Themis, Cambridge (1912, reprinted London, 1977)—henceforth
Harrison (1912). Polcari, op. cit. at note 15 above, p. 38, gives evidence suggesting
Still knew The Golden Bough.
39. Still quoted in M. Rothko, Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Art of This Century Gallery,
New York (1946).
40. Harrison (1912), pp. 528-29, and pp. 414-15: "Earth-spirits ... damnation ... in-
crease." Still's penchant for capitalised nouns also follows Harrison's usage.
41. Buffalo (1966); these are the catalogue's first words of text. Polcari, op. cit. at note
15 above, p. 95, states that Still told Spohn at the time that he was the only one
who understood his work.
42. Harrison (1912), p. 92. Polcari suggests an American Indian source for this. In-
digenous local culture was an indubitable stimulus, but a host of ostensibly
primitivist elements (including "life forces," "magic," Lévy-Bruhl and animism,
the "spirit world," thunder and lightning deities) occur—seminally, I would
argue—in Harrison.
43. A. Rudenstine: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, New York (1985), pp.
707-9, summarises the debate over the titles' authenticity.
44. J. Frazer, Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild, i, New York (1935), p. 36. Frazer re-
lates that Demeter learnt her daughter's fate from the Sun: a solar disc is promi-
nent in Jamais.
45. Cf. Rothko, loe. cit. at note 39 above: "For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an ex-
tension of the Greek Persephone Myth." If correct, my reading throws another
light on the chromatic dualities that culminate, in the late 19408 and earlier
19503, in nocturnal canvases and those such as 1Q48-D (reproduced in Heller,
op. cit. at note i above) engulfed by a singular, organic yellowness. The figure of
ig^S-N-No.i grasps a single yellow stalk at left which is twisted or broken and

592 1990s
 conspicuously devoid of an ear at its top. At the left of Oil on Canvas (1937) (see
SFMoMA [1976], no. 4) is a hitherto unnoticed figure, with upraised arms be-
neath three horizontal strokes suggestive of earth furrows, limned in yellow
ochre.
46. Harrison (1912), p. 423.
47. See Harrison (1912), pp. 524 and 395~96.
48. J. Frazer, The Scapegoat, New York (1935), p. 405.
49. G. Murray, "Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy," in Har-
rison (1912), pp. 341-63. Only the titles Apostate, Siamese Cat and Daughters and
Self Portrait still elude explication, although the first and last may be read as
completing a kind of symbolic self-representation.
50. Ibid., pp. 289-91.
51. Buffalo (1966), p. 85, indicates that July-iQfâ-R was in the 1946 show, while one
contemporary review mentions that "Quicksilver, using a white-to-black palette,
is a simple striking impression of fleeting matter." J. K. R[eed], "Extending a
Myth,'Mrf Digest, 20 (ist March 1946), p. 17.
52. Harrison (1912), p. 295. Subsequently, the flash of July-ig4$-R passes into Still's
verbal metaphors of revelation which, while more akin to precedents in Blake
and Nietzsche, are present in Harrison. On metaphor, see Anfam 1984, pp.
438-41.
53. Rothko, loc. cit. at note 39 above.
54. Buffalo (1959). And Murray's excursus concludes: "By this train of ideas Diony-
sus comes to be regarded not as a mere vegetation spirit or Year-Daimon, but as
representing some secret or mysterious life, persisting through death or after
death."
55. One of twenty-one drawn in Richmond, Virginia, between Fall 1943 and Spring
1945, according to SFMoMA (1976), p. no.
56. Harrison (1912), pp. 396-424 and p. 41: "He [the snake] is clearly a daimon of
fertility; to his right springs up a tree."
57. Harrison (1912), p. 291. With its sinuous body, thinner tail end and poised top,
the snake is one of the least vague forms in this painting, unseen since the 1946
exhibition.
58. Cited by K. Kuh as being at the Stills' New Windsor house in "Clyfford Still," in
The Open Eye: In Pursuit of Art, New York (1971), p. 29 and probably the paint-
ing that I saw there on loth September 1989. The stones are piled, curiously, into
a mound. Petrified presences recur throughout the 19305 oeuvre.
59. SeeKellein(i992),no.35.
60. Harrison (1912), p. 411.
61. Ibid., p. 6j, passim.
62. Kellein (1992), p. 35. The Metropolitan installation was structured so as to shift
from initial small rooms with darker canvases to glowing images spaced farther
apart in the largest galleries.
63. Albright, op. cit. at note 23 above, p. 159.

1990s 593
 64. Harrison (1912), p. 395.
65. Mrs. Lois Katzenbach (see at note 18 above) spoke of Still's exceptional gift for
analysing paintings in detail.
66. The Picasso was reproduced in A. Barr, éd., Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, exh.
cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1939), p. 207; the Matisse in Cahiers
d'Art, 7-8 (1927), p. 258. John Golding first made the latter comparison.
67. See note 69 below.
68. E.g., 1941-R, oil on denim, 1942 and 1Q45-K, reproduced in Kellein (1992), nos.
39,40, and 3.
69. An attached Betty Parsons label suggests it was perhaps shown at her gallery.
Dated 1946 when auctioned at Sotheby's, New York (6th November 1990, lot 5),
this seems slightly too late. The verso has an earlier composition with figurative
and mechanical schemata, including angles identical to those at the base of Fig-
ure (1944) and ranked lines resembling a plough's discs seen head-on.
70. 1941-2-C is reproduced in Kellein (1992), no. 2. It transposes the two main
crevices in Bôcklin's cliff, respectively straight and meandering, as blood-like
red rivulets (and blood is another vital cult substance in Themis).
71. See M. Camille, Image on the Edge, Cambridge (1992) for some thought-provoking
and apposite observations about marginality in a distant context.
72. Hence, Still's relentless pursuit of an ethics. Fittingly, Harrison (1912) traces
Themis's evolution from a chthonic force to a deity of ethos, "morality" and "Jus-
tice," pp. 482 and 534. See also, Anon., "Clyfford Still: Parsons Gallery," Art
News, 46 (May 1947), p. 50: "He [Still] states he is preoccupied with . . . man's
struggle against and fusing with nature."

R I C H A R D S HI FF Excerpt from "Water and Lipstick:

De Kooning in Transition"

For de Kooning, the paint must be on the surface:

he rejects any form of illusionism.
33
—Thomas В. Hess, 1967
It is in the flesh that the real and painterly values
merge most significantly....
—Lucy R. Lippard, 1965^

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

—Susan Sontag, 1964^

SOURCE: Maria Prather, éd., Willem de Kooning: Paintings (National Gallery of Art,
1994), 38-56,66-69. Reprinted with the permission of Richard Shiff.

594
The personal collection of the painter and critic Elaine de Kooning, Willem
de Kooning's wife, included Woman—Lipstick, a small graphite drawing Wil-
lem executed while at work on his Woman series of the early 19505. It has
a unique feature: the female figure has been surrounded by red lipstick im-
prints, with one imprint lying within it, tinting the torso. The image might be
considered a collaborative creation, a joint representation of and by Willem
and Elaine. When it was auctioned in 1989 Elaine de Kooning's explanation
accompanied it: "Bill asked me to put on lipstick &, 'kiss' this drawing, care-
fully picking the exact spots where I should press my lips, six times—each
one fainter, ending finally with the mid-section (going counter-clockwise)."36
There is no further indication as to what Elaine de Kooning's action
accomplished—whether, at that particular moment in the couple's personal
history, this drawing constituted a bond of affection (Elaine often signed notes
to Willem with lipstick kisses), a private joke of some kind, or a visual play on
either gender relations or the nature of representation.37 The lipstick im-
prints can represent Elaine de Kooning's touch, Willem de Kooning's touch
(since he guided the marking), a mouth (Elaine's or anyone's), and any part of
the body or anything else that, when painted, resembles a mouth. Each im-
print also represents a kiss and, by extension, any other physical act of press-
ing against a resistant surface. Is Elaine de Kooning kissing the female figure
that Willem de Kooning has drawn, as if to enact its fetishization by adding a
sign of her being? Or is she adding red accents to his composition of black
marks, intensifying the pictorial effect while covering and therefore complet-
ing the sheet? Perhaps the final kiss is meant to locate a center for the repre-
sented body, and simultaneously for its paper support: Willem tended to be
conscious of both kinds of center and to conflate them.38 Pressing one's lips
against a piece of paper is an experience analogous to acts of painting and
drawing, which press pigment and graphite into the same kind of surface.
The correspondences go beyond the tactile to the synesthetic; Willem be-
lieved, as do many artists, that the richness of paint elicits sensations of taste.39
Because the act of kissing must draw its agent flush with the image (the object
of affection), perspectival distance is temporarily suspended. This is the kind
of intimacy—visual, tactile, even gustatory—that Willem de Kooning desired
in his art. It is a smallness, a closeness, a sensory concentration on the other-
wise excluded detail. There are innumerable ways to make a mark, just there
are innumerable ways to experience the pleasures of one's sensibility. The
point of attention can be precise and, as de Kooning might say, "tiny."40
Colloquially, lipsticked lips are often called a "painted mouth" or "painted

1990s 595
 lips." People seem to utter these phrases with a certain self-consciousness, as
if they were making a clever metaphor, or perhaps a character judgment (for
Euro-Americans, "painting" one's lips, or any other part of the body, con-
notes an aggressive and even illicit sexuality, whereas lipstick and cosmetics
in themselves do not). Referring to "painted lips" may well entail passing a
judgment, but it cannot create much of a metaphor since this description is
straightforward—lipstick is oil- or wax-based pigment applied externally to
color the lips, painting their surface. Invoking the capacity of cosmetics to
standardize and anesthetize the look of people, de Kooning's friend Harold
Rosenberg once alluded to "painted lips, masks of feeling," in relation to the
artist's practice of collaging bright red lips cut from magazine advertisements.41
The most notorious example dates from 1950: de Kooning's small, intense
Woman, for which the artist cut a mouth from the "T-zone" (a combination of
mouth and throat) featured in a long-running promotion for Camel cigarettes.42
Rosenberg subtly ironized these mass-culture lips by putting them in the
category of "academic art," presumably because photography had rendered
them suited for Salon painting—perfectly beautiful, static, insipid. When de
Kooning himself was asked about his collaged mouths, he alluded to much
more: being photographic, the lips would function metaphorically ("like a
pun") within the context of the painting, since they play on the difference be-
tween what custom takes to be natural and real (photographic detail) and
what it takes to be imaginary (painters' inventions and liberties), even though
the advertisement and the painting are both human constructions. The cut-
and-pasted lips refer back, in a literal way, to the perfect American beauty
grafted onto the artist's personal vision and visceral understanding. De Koon-
ing also acknowledged coyly that these lips are sexualized like the ones people
call "painted." They are either sexual in their préexistent cultural significa-
tion or have been eroticized by the painter's immediate cut and touch. All this
is implied in the artist's typically off-hand statement:

I cut out a lot of mouths. First of all, I felt everything ought to have a mouth.
Maybe it was like a pun, maybe it's even sexual 1 put the mouth more or
less in the place [within various images of Woman] where it was supposed to
be. It always turned out to be very beautiful and it helped me immensely to
have this real thing ... it was something to hang on to.43

The mouth is one of a number of human features de Kooning habitually

privileged, reaffirming the conventional sexuality of certain parts of the body
or—as his act might better be conceived—investing their representation with

596 1990s
 his own, perhaps idiosyncratic, sensuality and eroticism. The viewer recog-
nizes de Kooning's special attention to or investment in certain parts of the
body since they so often receive pictorial stress. Enhanced visibility of a given
anatomical feature might derive from color or value contrast, striking linear
configurations, or a disproportionate prominence within the general scheme.
De Kooning's privileged features are these: eyes, mouths, breasts, genitals, feet.
Indeed, the list seems to justify the 1959 judgment by Thomas Hess, promoter
and friend of both Elaine and Willem, that "the theme of sexuality ... is a ma-
jor part of de Kooning's painting."44 So there can be no surprise when the art-
ist offers an interviewer a commonplace metaphor: "A woman has two mouths,
one is the sex."45 Substitution and analogy characterize de Kooning's art and
thought: one thing changes or passes into another. During the greater part of
his career, he traced, retraced, and exchanged his set of connotatively sexual
features, which are the figurative motifs most central to his painting process.
Two of these body parts, genitals and feet, require some qualification. Be-
ginning around 1964 de Kooning made many pictures, both drawings and
paintings, of women with legs spread apart, and a lesser but significant num-
ber of analogous pictures of men (Man, 1967).46 In the cases of both women
and men the genital area becomes particularly marked, a focal point for all po-
tential viewers, because this spread-legged posture is relatively uncommon in
conventional imagery and is avoided too by people actually conscious of be-
ing viewed; being unexpected, it is all the more noticeable for the interpreter,
although many do not mention it. De Kooning sometimes indicated the ana-
tomical details of his spread-legged women and men with precision, in other
instances only vaguely, and sometimes without any specificity whatever so
that painted man closely resembles painted woman ("There isn't much dif-
ference when you paint between a man and a woman").47 Many of the women,
especially in drawings, appear in a configuration that renders vulva, anus, and
buttocks all visible. In both drawings and oil paintings, the configuration in
question can readily be recognized as a bold, thick stroke (or set of strokes) in
the form of a curving W; sometimes it will look more like an M or like a J back
to back with its mirror image.
At least three different versions of this stroke are each visible in a painting
of 1968, Woman in Landscape III. In the first instance, near the bottom of the
canvas de Kooning had drawn an M in a wet-on-wet mixture of yellow and
blue, which might be outlining a "seat" supporting the woman's body. My de-
scription should not be taken too literally; there need not be a chair. "Seat" is
a proper term for this detail because it can refer either to a device for sitting

1990s 597
 (such as a lawn chair) or to that part of the body on which, and with which, a
person sits.48 Given de Kooning's practice, there are advantages to choosing
descriptive terms subject to shifting reference, fluid terms that pass between
different realms of experience and material reality. They offer in themselves a
sense of ambiguity and transition.
In the second instance, above the M lies a reverse J in dark blue, partially
obscured, probably once a double J form. Among its other actions, this mark
articulates a seated figure's buttocks and thighs. In Woman in Landscape HI
de Kooning has characteristically shifted the configuration of the spread (or
drawn up) legs several times so that at least three "legs" remain visible—for
him, a rather common motif. One leg reaches the left margin, while the other
two end at the bottom in large high-heeled shoes, which have themselves been
boldly contoured.
In the third instance, above the reverse J is another wet-on-wet stroke of
yellow and blue, taking the form of a curving W. Here, within the specific fig-
urative context, this line indicates breasts, not buttocks, and reveals the pos-
sibility of a type of substitution (by analogy or contiguity) typical of the art-
ist: he can transform painted eye into mouth, painted leg into arm, painted
shoulders into breasts, painted breasts into buttocks. One or two strokes can
accomplish the most dramatic shifts in a figure's orientation, sometimes com-
pressing the anatomy, sometimes stretching it out.
In each of its variations de Kooning's energetic "spread-leg" line—most of-
ten formed by a continuous but complex directional movement (imagine the
action required of hand, wrist, and arm)—becomes an effective shorthand for
describing the contour of buttocks, from which the painter usually extends a
figure's legs outward to the left and right, with flexes at the knees (compare
The Visit). (I will return to the question of de Kooning's preference for sum-
mary anatomical notations of this type.) The artist retained his W, M, and J
forms late into his career as a favored motif, which, with effort, can be dis-
cerned in densely abstracted works of the later 19705 and even the tauter com-
positions of the early igSos ( Untitled I, 1977; Untitled XIV, 1977; Morning:
The Springs, 1983; Untitled VI, 1983).
It appears likely that de Kooning invented his spread-leg configuration in
1964 while composing pictures on the theme of Woman in a Rowboat, a sub-
ject inspired or at least influenced by something seen in Springs, where he
moved permanently in June 1963. Several who knew the artist at the time tes-
tify to the depth of his investment in this particular image and his painstaking
efforts to arrange its details.49 An example is a large charcoal drawing on vel-

598 1990s
lum from the collection of James and Katherine Goodman. It generated other
studies on vellum of the same width, with changes in the basic image some-
times resulting from the fact that bold linear outlining replaced nuanced pas-
sages of charcoal and erasure: compare the charcoal and oil version from the
collection of Alvin Ukman, particularly the rendering of the figure's hair.50 In
a small pencil drawing of the theme, presumably preceding the large char-
coals, de Kooning extended his figure's legs downward from the torso, but in
such a way (with foreshortening?) that one struggles to determine whether the
woman sits upright or reclines. The Goodman charcoal sets the woman more
emphatically into the rowboat's cradling frame, with the spatial relationship
of the two elements (woman and boat) becoming even more ambiguous. To
this end, the artist shifted the legs from vertical to horizontal orientation by
analogy with the boat seat(s) and ribbing. Ribbing and boat frame seem to fix
the position of the figure's head and arms as well. De Kooning erased and
adjusted the boat rim where his figure's now horizontal legs met it, as if to
reestablish a certain primacy for the woman's configuration and place. He
also added broad curving strokes at the base of his drawing, recreating the
boat's stern in correspondence to the pattern of the spread legs. In this image
of cradled, floating weightlessness, boat frame and woman's body flow to-
gether as a set of analogous lines and shapes without hierarchy, while de
Kooning's charcoal glides across his vellum.
The spread-leg configuration may also derive from observations of women
sitting or lying on grass, or in lawn chairs, or on the beach—all Long Island
commonplaces. Women sunbathing, whether reclining (and seen from above)
or perhaps extending their legs over the side edges of chairs, would be assum-
ing poses much like the one de Kooning kept rendering.51 In 1968 Hess, who
knew the artist's imagery as well as anyone, described a contemporary pos-
ture, women sitting with "their knees up to their chins."52 Hess' verbal image
is sexually charged, but it also caricatures fashions in clothing and comport-
ment of the late 19603—those exaggerated signs of a sexual revolution that
had more to do with desire for liberties denied during the "conformist" 19505
than with sexual desire specifically. Hess acted not only as a critic of Ameri-
can conformism but as a journalist with a concern to report the peculiarities
of the moment. The tone of his remark on body language is appropriate to de
Kooning because he too had a caricaturist's eye for the fashions around him
("how summer clothes—shorts, shirts—fit on the body").53 He noticed the lit-
tle things.
If, as Hess implies, one could observe Long Island women with spread or

1990s 599
 drawn up legs, there are also pictorial precedents among artists de Kooning
admired: Cézanne and Picasso, for instance.54 But the availability of sources
in either contemporary life or the history of art cannot explain the prevalence
or insistence and even stridency of this motif as de Kooning renders it. Crit-
ics, including very good ones, have repeatedly described de Kooning's women's
legs as "splayed."55 Such characterization evokes specimens from the biology
lab—dead things fixed in place, rather than active and reactive forces. It fails
to attend to de Kooning's way of viewing and manipulating bodies and ob-
jects, and it misses much of the kinesthetic challenge of his art. To refer in-
stead to "spread legs" seems more apt because spreading is an action applied
not only to parts of the body but also to artists' materials—graphite, ink, oil
paint, paper, canvas, even clay. De Kooning's long-legged types (such as
Woman Accahonac) can be regarded as "spread" in the sense of having their
legs stretched or extended, spread out. The concept of spreading collapses a
distinction between acts of human posturing and the drawing or painting of
images.
De Kooning occasionally reasserted this very same distinction as if to de-
fend the liberties he took with the real bodies (men's as well as women's) that
viewers assumed were his models: "the drawing of a face is not a face. It's the
drawing of a face."56 He meant both that drawing removes itself from mimetic
representation and that figuration emerges from within drawing, whether or
not a particular image, such as a face, is intended. His notion of the inevitabil-
ity of figuration led him, as we know, to dismiss Clement Greenberg's remarks
concerning a present historical demand for abstraction. How can the viewer-
interpreter see and understand that "the drawing of a face is not a face"? The
trick is to avoid projecting artists' configurations into an unbounded space of
human action—action taking place at a distance and in ideal perspective, as
Cartesian or Kantian minds habitually conceive. Conceptual abstraction was
never de Kooning's mode ("A picture to me is not geometric—it has a face").57
He viewed things from within the personalized perspective of his studio ma-
nipulations. This is to see "intimately," from no farther than the end of one's
arm, brush, or charcoal in hand. It is why the artist could succeed in drawing
with eyes closed, as he sensed his hand "slip over the paper."58
To see from the end of an arm, intimately. De Kooning warned his viewers
not to mistake representations for distanced projections of objects. The de-
gree to which viewers have ignored his admonition underscores the seduc-
tiveness of a familiar analogy, one that surely affected him as much as anyone

600 1990s
else. Since you draw out a line or a passage of paint just as you draw out (ex-
tend, spread) your arms or legs, to follow a movement of paint from a distance
with the eyes induces a feeling of movement in the limbs. So if a line stretches
a drawn limb too far, the naïve viewer may well feel a sympathetic pain, a vio-
lation. Think of spreading your own body to its maximum extension: it will
help to imagine flattening yourself as much as possible against a resistant sur-
face, such as a wall or a wooden panel, the same kinds of backings used by
de Kooning in his studio to support his canvases and sheets of paper. This
stretching or spreading makes a sentient body very conscious of its existence
as physical matter. De Kooning had such awareness of his own body's com-
pressed solidity in relation to his materials' contrasting fluidity; he could con-
vert the one into the other through a flow of energetic drawing or painting. He
could also perform the conversion through an act of imagination, as when he
described a particular bodily gesture for the Museum of Modern Art sympo-
sium conducted in February 1951, "What Abstract Art Means to Me."
In de Kooning's mind, things were never very abstract. For the symposium
he established a concrete principle: "If I stretch my arms next to the rest of
myself and wonder where my fingers are—that is all the space I need as a
painter."59 The resulting art becomes less a matter of representing other peo-
ple's bodies as observed, projected, and abstracted, and more about coming
to terms with the feelings of the painter's body, its specific physicality. It was
de Kooning's custom to internalize things seen, trying to experience them in
his own body as a stimulus to rendering: he would attempt to "feel" the dis-
tance between a hip and a knee, a waist and an armpit.60 What kind of body
was he experiencing around the time of the 1951 symposium? De Kooning
imagines himself assuming an oddly compact posture, with his physical align-
ment corresponding to the simplest kind of pictorialism: all figure, all materi-
ality, all positive, centered, no negative space, no perspective depth or ground.
The painter refers to stretching his arms not outward—in the typical gesture
of an encompassing appropriation or an act of drawing—but "next to the rest
of" himself within a single plane. The body may be extended as straight as
possible, yet volumetrically it remains within a very confined area, flattened.
To my knowledge, the specificity of de Kooning's description has never been
noted by historians or critics, who either cite it without any qualification or
mistake it for the more common image of a man with outstretched arms.61 In a
case of self-assisted misinterpretation, one reviewer simply eliminated the es-
sential qualifying phrase ("next to the rest of myself "), effectively transform-

1990s 601
 ing de Kooning's symposium statement into a reference to extended reach
(arms horizontal), the very opposite of the position he was actually indicating
(arms vertical, held tight in).62
Although the artist's image is of bodily containment, it nevertheless sug-
gests, by virtue of its flattened state, the two-dimensional spread of paint on
canvas, or perhaps the spread and yet compact enclosure of a compositional
scheme like the Woman in a Rowboat. De Kooning's posture corresponds to
an attempt to fit as much as possible into a small bounded area, as if to create
an economy of copiousness (certainly a quality of his densely painted sur-
faces). As with many of his descriptions or explanations, he invoked this one
more than once; its other instances confirm that it was intended to link an
internalized experience of physicality to pictorial sensations, not to any
real, volumetric body ("the drawing of a face ... not a face"). De Kooning ac-
tually performed the gesture in answer to David M. Solinger, when the collec-
tor asked toward what effect the painter was struggling as he labored over
Woman I: "Like this," he responded intently, drawing his arms close into his
sides, stiffening his body as if it were pressed flat or stretched taut.63 He made
his body like paint.64 Later, during a 1968 interview, de Kooning used this
same gesture to illustrate the effect of Alberto Giacometti's elongated figures,
which existed not only as sculptural forms but also stretched out on paper or
canvas surfaces. As he had done previously, he was acting out how the repre-
sented image should feel. He referred to his own custom of drawing the figure
kinesthetically while watching television; Giacometti too, he noted, eventu-
ally had no need to look at a model.65 It seems that de Kooning identified so
closely with the actual materiality of paintings and drawings that the imagina-
tive space he required for a figure was never greater nor more abstract than the
length and width of the working surface already facing him. To sense lines
spreading across a unit of paper, even when blinded or in a distracted state,
was analogous to the internalized bodily sense of the space from one joint to
another.
When de Kooning did actually reach out, spreading paint across the inti-
mate space at the end of his arm—to spread, extend, or stretch a form or
figure—his action amounted to a focusing or concentrating of attention.
Spreading does not necessarily dissipate or diffuse materiality but can instead
particularize and intensify the physical sense of a thing by involving hand and
eye in its active production (or, if one thinks of working from a model of some
kind, its independent reproduction in a second medium). Such insistence
results in the unconventional perspective and proportion of de Kooning's

602 1990s
figures, which require more than just one look and more than a single inter-
pretation. Many of his women, for example, have broadened torsos that re-
semble faces, with the breasts becoming prominent eyes (Woman, 1952-1953;
Woman, 1953; Two Women in the Country, 1954; Two Women, 1954-1955).66
This curious exchange of anatomical identities can operate in both directions
since a shift in context converts a face back into a torso. Imagine de Kooning
constructing a figure by focusing first on the torso; since that form in isolation
would have no scale, it might indicate eyes with large pupils as much as breasts
with large nipples. So a viewer discerns a face (or, better, "the drawing of a
face"). By adding head and legs at either end of such a torso/face, de Kooning
reorients the context and reestablishes the form as the trunk of a body. In the
Fleischman collection's Woman the head and legs remain undersized and
summarily articulated with respect to the more complicated torso, as if to dis-
tinguish between something the artist focused or concentrated on (spread
out, extended, enlarged) and what he saw peripherally in the field of observa-
tion.67 Differentiation of scale and proportion within the figure implies that
the viewer's position must lie extremely close to the central torso; otherwise
the perspective would be less dramatic. As a result, the viewer feels drawn
close to the paper surface, into the painting's materiality, as close as the painter
worked to scrape and spread the paint along its knife-sharp edges.
As with torsos, so with lips. When Elaine de Kooning kissed Willem de
Kooning's drawing she performed a delicate but familiar act of focusing on a
part of the body and spreading it out. She came up close to the drawing and
pressed against its resistant surface, face to face, slightly flattening her lips to
leave a spread of lipstick-red pigment. Willem directed Elaine to position the
last of her six kisses on the torso, center of both the drawn figure and its paper
support. The action drew Elaine and the implied viewer in close to figure and
paper. This combination of kissing and drawing simulated the effect of the
spread of parts of a body (or of its entirety). Such physical action can also be
represented kinesthetically by spreading paint across a surface, extending it
toward the margins.
The last of the human features de Kooning privileges is itself an extension,
which, within a tradition of representing the figure, is usually pushed to a
pictorial edge: the foot. Outside the fine arts, however, and within a culture of
commercial imagery, feet and their shoes often occupy a center. Some of the
artist's paintings of the late 19605 focus on feet to the exclusion of anything
else, probably because they derive from transfers of the lower part of works
such as Woman Sag Harbor and Woman Accabonac, both of which had al-

1990s 603
 ready assigned to feet a disproportionately large part of the figure's pictorial
field (see East Hampton XXII,iQ68). The artist often paints these female feet
in stylish high heels, sometimes with ankle straps. Such is the case with Woman
Sag Harbor, from which a number of independent transfer images were
taken; some of them, naturally enough, show the shoes in reverse (see Woman-
Torso, c. 1964-1966).
There are hints that shoes held more than casual aesthetic interest for de
Kooning; they figure not only in his paintings but also, with a vague, nagging
insistence, in anecdotes and biographical details. As I have implied, shoes
were one of a number of themes—lipstick was another—that linked the painter
to his years in New York as a commercial illustrator.68 Beyond that, like water,
shoes may have evoked the artist's childhood. Asked by a journalist in 1968
about his observations upon returning to Holland, de Kooning remarked,
"they wear better shoes": was he being facetious or were shoes a focus of old
memories (or both)?69 Wooden Dutch shoes could be found in his studio dur-
ing the 19603, but probably only because someone considered them a proper
house gift for a Dutchman; still, he chose to demonstrate techniques of illus-
tration by drawing them.70 One can easily image de Kooning fascinated by
shoes as a child—many children are—and he had cause to remember them
with pain as well since his mother once surprised the small boy on the floor
with a strong and seemingly spontaneous kick.71 If shoes were something
more than neutral objects for Willem, they were for Elaine de Kooning too;
indeed they were a focal point of the couple's aesthetic agreement. Elaine
appreciated shoe design, enjoyed its variety, and happened to wear types
Willem like to depict: high heels, platforms, ankle straps.72 Both Elaine and
Willem's mother (Cornelia Nobel Lassooy) were suspected to be imaginary
models for Woman I—an imposing figure, seated, shown in high heels. In
public statements Elaine de Kooning distanced herself from the elder Mrs. de
Kooning, perhaps in recognition that the two might somehow be regarded as
playing exchangeable roles in Willem's life. "That ferocious woman he painted
didn't come from living with me," Elaine quipped, "It began when he was
three years old."73
Whatever the associations with his personal history, de Kooning's images
of women frequently connote contemporaneity (American more than Dutch)
because of keenly observed elements of fashion—not only styles of shoes, but
dresses, lipstick, and even nail polish.74 In this respect he represented the
women and men of his generation as they saw themselves, following social
codes of gender identity that appear exaggerated by today's standards. The

604 1990s
painter's interest in women's dress and the brilliant colors of cosmetics was
quite genuine, a nuanced aesthetic appreciation directed toward men's cloth-
ing as well.75 Like Baudelaire—who argued that great classical painters had
always represented their own contemporaneity, "from costume and coiffure
down to gesture, glance, and smile"—de Kooning saw his artistic heroes, a
Rubens or Bernini, as observers of body language and fashion.76 His own art
combines the classical tradition of female nudity with passing styles in adver-
tising and popular imagery. De Kooning remained proud of his expertise in
illustration and took his aesthetic pleasure beyond clothes and cosmetics
into the realm of commercial layout, lettering, and cartoons (both on televi-
sion and in the comics).77 His engagement with mass visual culture did not
originate in bourgeois chic, camp, or elitist ironies but in his vocational edu-
cation and the working-class identity he preferred to maintain, despite in-
creasing wealth ("I like Springs [as opposed to East Hampton] because I like
people who work").78 He enjoyed explaining studio "secrets" in terms of pop-
ular culture, converting the ordinary into the ingenious and back again. "I got
an idea for preparing colors ... at Howard Johnson's, the ice cream makers,"
he said, referring to the restaurant's famous display of twenty-eight different
flavors. To his painter's eye they were twenty-eight colors, just like the colors
he would arrange in common glass bowls on his studio table.79
The convergence in de Kooning's painting of what is now loosely referred
to as the high and the low was for many years a theme in reviews by Hess and
Rosenberg, who sometimes described the pop generation of artists as shal-
low followers of their friend's initiative.80 De Kooning's yoking of timeless
Woman-in-art (elite culture), to fashionable woman-on-the-beach (bourgeois
culture), to sexually stylized pinup-with-lipstick (mass culture) combined con-
flicting features without pretending to mediate between them or transcend
their differences. De Kooning worked toward all-inclusiveness, toward the
pleasure of an anarchic dissonance, not utopie harmony. To his supporters, he
not only flouted the "high" academic tradition's conventions and intellectual
self-importance but also parodied "low" culture's inducements to conform-
ism (mass culture being no more liberating for the working and consuming
middle class than products sanctioned by elite institutions).81
Hess, parading his own broad knowledge and experience, often linked
chains of references to de Kooning's paintings in which high and low, erudite
and popular, follow one another in impressively random order: "the Theban
goddess Nut and Marilyn Monroe, Aztec dolls, Kali, Artemis-Isis, Willendorf,
Jigg's Maggie."82 He fantasized that de Kooning's Women should replace the

1990s 605
 cloying models covering highway billboards and the sides of delivery trucks.
The advertisers' paper confections shared the blankness of the well-mannered
"girl at the noisy party who ... simply sits, is there, and smiles, because that is
the proper thing to do in America."83 Hess' biting commentary appears in a
gender-specific form but was intended to extend to all Americans: he was
making a statement against mindless conformism ("the proper thing to do"),
for which artists like Willem and Elaine de Kooning represented the antitypes.
Placing Woman I on signboards would challenge the mainstream American
ethos with a countercultural "ugliness" that could not be consumed. Woman I
sits and even smiles, but would hardly do "the proper thing."
From its first public appearance de Kooning's Woman /raised questions of
the artist's personal attitude toward women because it seemed to render its
subject as aggressively unappealing or to treat it with violence so that de-
tached aesthetic analysis became impossible.84 In consequence, journalists
repeatedly asked the artist about his "true" feelings toward women, as if the
women in the pictures were intended to be transformations of the real, and
as if the public had a need to know. Was the problem the mother, the wife, or
all women in the artist's life? De Kooning's replies always seem a bit dumb-
founded, as if, for an artist, to fix the counterpart for an image in a living indi-
vidual is itself a kind of violation, a betrayal of the independent image and its
right to live and grow in the paint apart from other realities. Elaine de Koon-
ing put it this way: "They [the Woman paintings] do have a certain ferocity,
but that has to do with paint."85 De Kooning himself admitted to no more
than being "irritated" at times by women, whom, he stated, he actually like
very much (no doubt, genuinely).86 He also deflected the issue by alluding fre-
quently to the woman or feminine in himself: "I was painting the woman in
me? As stated in 1956, this remark is a recognizable derivation of Jung's popu-
lar theory of the anima, the inherited unconscious feminine in all men, no
matter how masculine.87 De Kooning seems to have worried, at least during
the 19505, that if he were regarded as a misogynist, he would also appear to be
homosexual: "If I painted beautiful women, would that make me a nonhomo-
sexual?"88 Ever wary of journalists and even photographers, he may have in-
tended his odd question to ridicule an interviewer's visual literalism and stiff
deduction.
It is not my aim to reach de Kooning's deepest psychological motivations,
despite the existence of abundant documentary material to support specula-
tion. In referring to Elaine de Kooning's kisses I chose to introduce the topic

606 1990s
of sexuality, because a certain sexuality has already become part of the public
meaning of de Kooning's imagery, whether he intended it or not.89 When
Elaine "kissed" Willem's drawing, this was hardly a matter of sexual gratifica-
tion: instead she participated in a playful act of figuration appropriate to the
environment of an artist's studio. She also contributed to Willem's curiously
obsessive material practice. Its private side is de Kooning's emotional devel-
opment, his feelings about the women and men he knew, and reasons why
their presence might have found its way into his representations: its public
side is something we can call, in the 19605 spirit of Susan Sontag and others,
not sexuality but eroticism.
In "Against Interpretation," an essay quite characteristic of its moment
(1964), Sontag opposed "an erotics of art" to "a hermeneutics"; she was con-
trasting the liberating pleasure of sensory experience to the distancing pro-
cess of intellectual understanding.90 Her position suits de Kooning well. He
had already made this opposition the theme of his statement for the 1951 sym-
posium on "What Abstract Art Means to Me." At that time de Kooning was
known as an abstract artist (Excavation, 1950) as well as a figure painter but
would not accept this or any other designation easily. In his statement abstrac-
tion becomes something intellectual and therefore detrimental; it results not
from an immediate act of painting, but from an artist's pondering what has
been done, giving it a name, allowing it to become a doctrine and finally
dogma. De Kooning sustained his points with irony and double entendre.
Consider these thoughts: during the nineteenth century painters "were not
abstract about something which was already abstract"; that is, painters were
guided by intellectual theories (something "already abstract") but did not yet
use abstraction to represent them. "When they got those strange, deep ideas,
they got rid of them by painting a particular smile on one of the faces in the
picture"; that is, they countered their own intellectual pretensions ("deep
ideas") with a bit of surface cartooning.91 De Kooning's ultimate message is
this: he paints whatever he feels like painting at the moment (high, low, what-
ever); the important thing is to paint, "paint so fast you couldn't think."92
In fact, Sontag regarded de Kooning's painting as an obvious promotion
for erotics and turned to another of his statements to begin her argument
against the intellectuals'practice of interpretation. The epigraph to her essay
read: "Content is a glimpse "93

1990s 607
 Note s

33. Thomas В. Hess, in De Kooning Recent Paintings (New York: Knoedler, 1967), 39.
34. Lippard 1965,29. Compare Willem de Kooning, "The Renaissance and Order"
[1950], trans/formation i, no. 2 (1951), 86 ("Flesh was the reason why oil paint-
ing was invented"); Thomas B. Hess, introduction to Recent Paintings by Willem
de Kooning [exh. cat., Sidney Janis Gallery] (New York, 1962), n.p. ("the moving
flesh of pigment").
35. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," Evergreen Review 8 (December 1964),
93-
36. Christie's auction catalogue, "Contemporary Drawings, Watercolors, and Col-
lages," New York, 8 November 1989, note to cat. 136. Edvard Lieber (letter to au-
thor, 28 August 1993) confirms that Elaine de Kooning wrote this note in August
1985. The drawing also contains traces of pink pastel in the figure's torso and
hair.
37. According to Conrad Friend (AI), Elaine de Kooning recalled that Woman—
Lipstick had been produced in a spirit of play; Fried attests to Elaine's practice of
leaving lipstick imprints on notes. AI: author interview, 1993.
38. Introducing some of the kinesthetic drawings he made during the 19608 with
eyes closed, de Kooning wrote: "The drawings often started by the f e e t . . . but
more often by the center of the body, in the middle of the page"; see Willem de
Kooning, De Kooning Drawings [facsimile reproductions] (New York, 1967),
n.p. A July 1963 photograph by Hans Namuth shows the artist drawing with eyes
closed, maintaining his orientation, as Judith Wolfe noted, "with one finger held
to the center of the paper"; see Wolfe's Willem de Kooning: Works from 1951-1981
[exh. cat., Guild Hall Museum] (East Hampton, 1981), 14. Compare Elaine de
Kooning, in Fox 1984: "he knew exactly where, he remembered where his hand
had been."
39. John McMahon, AI. Conrad Friend (AI) stresses how much de Kooning liked
every sensory aspect of paint, including its smell and touch.
40. On de Kooning's "intimate proportions" and the association of "intimate" with
"commonplace" and "ordinary" see Hess, "De Kooning," 1953, 32, 64, 66. De
Kooning stated that he wanted his "big" paintings to look "small" and "inti-
mate" (Rosenberg 1972,56), and he was fascinated by the use of a reducing glass
(Joan Ward, AI; Hess 1959,27). On preferring things small see also de Kooning,
letters to Joseph and Olga Hirshhorn, 13 May 1965 and undated [January 1969?],
in Washington 1993,159,167. On "tiny" see the text.
41. Harold Rosenberg, "Painting Is a Way of Living," New Yorker, 16 February 1963,
136.
42. See Hess, "De Kooning," 1953,66; Hess 1959,2i; Hess in New York 1968,77-79.
Hess' numerous essays and reviews of de Kooning are quite repetitious, although
his accounts of the painter's characteristic practices vary somewhat—often, it
seems, in subtle response to changes in the art world, particularly the emergence
of pop art in the early 19605 (see my note 80 below).
Over the years there were shifts in Hess' facts as well as in his interpretations:

608 1990s
 in 1953 he incorrectly identified the "T-zone" advertisement with Lucky Strike
cigarettes; in 1959 and 1968 it became Camel (the two brands actually had some-
what different connotations, since Camel was traditionally targeted at a male con-
sumer, whereas Lucky Strike often pitched its advertising to a female consumer).
In 1959 Hess suggested Life as the source magazine; in 1968 it became Time. In
the remainder of this essay I will not necessarily indicate such variations but will
cite only the most relevant of Hess' statements, given the issue under immediate
consideration. I will apply the same principle to the writings of Harold Rosen-
berg and Elaine de Kooning, which exhibit analogous patterns of repetition and
variation. Comparison of the writings of the three makes it evident that they freely
borrowed both information and formulations from one another. It also seems
evident that the three freely elaborated on or adjusted whatever statements de
Kooning may have made in their presence. They were close enough to him per-
sonally to have done so without believing they were violating his intentions.
Moreover, it is likely that aspects of de Kooning's writings and his statements to
various other interviewers derived from formulations reached in conversations
with Hess, Rosenberg, and Elaine de Kooning. De Kooning himself warned in-
terpreters to attend to the context in which he made his various recorded re-
marks and not to regard any one statement as definitive (Bibeb 1968,3).
43. Willem de Kooning, interview by David Sylvester, "Painting as Self-Discovery,"
BBC broadcast, 3 December 1960, published in David Sylvester, "De Kooning's
Women," Sunday Times Magazine (London), 8 December 1968, 57. The actual
interview took place in March 1960. Parts of it (including material not in the
Sunday Times version) appear, but with editorial changes, as Willem de Koon-
ing, "Content Is a Glimpse ...," Location i (Spring 1963), 45-53 (Location was
headed by Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg; Hess edited de Kooning's
statement). In the Sunday Times de Kooning states, "Maybe it's even sexual,"
whereas in Location he says, "Maybe it's sexual." The Times version, presumably
the more accurate, better captures de Kooning's irony and mockery of his pub-
lic's probing seriousness. In a later interview de Kooning said: "I find that every-
one has to have a mouth, and I put the mouth where I want" (Bibeb 1968, 3).
Hess, "De Kooning," 1953, 66, prefigured de Kooning's thoughts concerning a
collaged mouth as "a point of rest, the center," "a center of realism," or, in the
painter's words, "something to hang on to." See also de Kooning's variant ac-
count of 1970 ("a point of reference ... something to hold on to") in de Antonio
and Tuchman 1984, 53. De Kooning's own commercial illustration during the
early 19405 had qualities similar to the kind of imagery he cut from magazines a
decade later; for instance, mouths figure prominently in his Model pipe tobacco
advertisement for Life magazine, i February 1943, 97 (identified by Conrad
Fried, letter to author, 5 September 1993). With the mouth de Kooning was in-
deed on familiar ground.
44. Hess 1959,30. See also Thomas B. Hess, "Pinup and Icon," Woman as Sex Ob-
ject: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 [Artnews Annual 38], ed. Thomas B. Hess
and Linda Nochlin (New York, 1972), 229.

1990s 609
 45- Bibeb 1968,3. De Kooning continues, "A man has something else, a fascinating
thing."
46. Some of de Kooning's sculptures show the same pose, for example, the small
bronze of 1969, Untitled VI, Collection of the Artist.
47. De Kooning [1970], in de Antonio and Tuchman 1984,53. Compare de Kooning,
in Hunter 1975,70: "Many of my paintings of women have been self-portraits. I
never thought very much about what sex they were" [my translation]. De Koon-
ing expressed fascination with (male) figures on horseback, generic cases of
spread-leggedness, both painted and sculpted: see William Barrett, The Truants:
Adventures among the Intellectuals (New York, 1982), 142; and Peter Schjeldahl,
"De Kooning's Sculptures: Amplified Touch," Art in America 62 (March-Apr il
1974), 61-62.
48. The ambiguity here is a result of a creative and apparently very natural play of
language for which the most relevant rhetorical term is metonymy (and second-
arily, catachresis). Metonymy occurs when an active cause is substituted for its
effect, as in regarding lipstick traces as actual lips or a kiss; metonymy also occurs
when a thing is identified by what is contiguous to it (what touches it, what
shares in its action), as in calling the part of the chair on which one seats oneself
its "seat." For application of such rhetorical analysis in ways relevant to the pres-
ent essay, compare my "Cezanne's Physicality: The Politics of Touch," in Salim
Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds., The Language of Art History (Cambridge, 1991),
129-180.
49. Susan Brockman (AI), John McMahon (AI), Allan Stone (AI), and James Good-
man (dealer, friend of de Kooning, especially during 19608, AI) all recall that this
image obsessed the artist more than any other of the moment. According to Brock-
man, he was not involved with it until 1964, sometime after moving into his new
studio (Hess 1965,64, had dated the image to 1963-1964). Brockman remembers
that in spring 1964 or shortly thereafter de Kooning told her of having viewed a
specific scene at Louse Point—most likely a woman and man together in a row-
boat, possibly also a child—which he wished to develop as a theme for painting:
she remembers as well his interest at the time in outdoor nativity scenes and
other popular religious images, which involve a sense of the enclosing, shelter-
ing, or cradling of a woman or child. It is entirely characteristic of de Kooning to
combine references and associations in a single image, letting the complexity de-
velop as it will; in addition to alluding to cradling and floating, the Woman in a
Rowboat evokes the form of Dutch shoes, another kind of protection from water.
One thinks as well of the cagelike or riblike structures of early Giacometti sculp-
tures, which the artist admired (this suggested by Joop Sanders, AI). It may or
may not be relevant that de Kooning had an adult fear of open water and boating
and had also had a frightening childhood experience that involved his being
forced by other children into a manhole or sewer (Conrad Fried, AI).
50. The addition of a foot at the right in the Ukman version became possible be-
cause de Kooning shifted the entire image to the left. A transparent layer of oil
paint, perhaps transferred from one or more other surfaces, covers the charcoal.

610 1990s
51. Some of the positions assumed by women's arms in de Kooning images also
seem related to sunbathing—arms held in front of the face, raised and folded in
back of the head, or stretched along the torso or the sides of chairs. De Kooning
himself was not a sunbather (see Hess in New York 1968,122).
52. Hess in New York 1968,124.
53. Hess in New York 1967,30.
54. "I can open almost any book of reproductions and find a painting I could be
influenced by" (de Kooning, in Rosenberg 1972,54).
55. Although I find the term "splayed" misleading, it does succeed in connoting
an ungainliness that de Kooning found preferable to conventional beauty; with
similar effect, a number of critics have referred to his figures as "squatting." For
an example of "splayed," see Schjeldahl 1974,62; for "squatting," Andrew Forge,
"De Kooning in Retrospect," Artnews 68 (March 1969), 44. The two descriptive
terms appear in a single paragraph in Hess in New York 1967, 21, but applied
somewhat differently.
56. Rosenberg 1972,56.
57. Willem de Kooning, in Robert Goodnough, éd., "Artists' Sessions at Studio 35"
[1950], Modern Artists in America, ed. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt
(New York, 1951), 20.
58. De Kooning, quoted in Hunter 1975, 69. At Black Mountain College, where de
Kooning taught during summer 1948, Josef Albers expressed a similar interest in
demonstrating that "drawing is kinetic rather than visual"; see Elaine de Koon-
ing 1983,394. See also de Kooning [facsimile reproductions] 1967, n.p.
59. Willem de Kooning, "What Abstract Art Means to Me," Museum of Modern Art
Bulletin 18 (Spring 1951), 7. It was de Kooning's custom to explore an idea through
mimicking something seen: "He could take an idea only as a visual image" (Bar-
rett 1982,141).
60. Susan Brockman (AI) states that during the 19608 de Kooning talked about un-
derstanding the body by means of such inner feeling.
61. The latter tendency derives from Hess' allusion to "the arms-spread gesture of
man" in Hess, Recent Paintings by Willem de Kooning, 1962, n.p.: compare also
T.B.H. [Thomas B. Hess], "Six Star Shows for Spring," Artnews 61 (March
1962), 61; and Thomas B. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American
Phase (New York, 1951), 100.
62. David Rosand, "Proclaiming Flesh," Times Literary Supplement, 17 February
1984,167.
63. The exchange took place in de Kooning's studio during the period of his work
on Woman I (1950-1952), that is, around the time of the Museum of Modern Art
symposium (David M. Solinger, early collector of the artist's works, beginning in
the late 19408, AI). It may be significant that Woman I shows arms tight against
the figure's torso and bordered by parallel strokes of paint, an effect of both com-
pression and spreading.
64. Conrad Fried (AI), familiar with de Kooning's studio practice at the time,
confirms that the artist wanted the image of Woman I to lie on its fictive picture

1990s 611
 plane the way paint lies flat on a surface; de Kooning believed that vigorous
brushwork kept the viewer's eye concentrated on the surface.
65. De Kooning, in Bibeb 1968,3. According to Elaine de Kooning, her husband's
admiration for Giacometti was sparked by a 1948 exhibition at the Pierre Matisse
Gallery; see Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning: The First Twenty-Six Tears in New
York, 1927-1952 (New York, 1986), 181-182.
66. Compare Forge 1969,61.
67. Hess, apparently alluding to conversations with the artist, described de Koon-
ing's figure style in a closely related way, as conveying the "wide, concave el-
lipse" of natural vision (Hess, De Kooning's Drawings, 1972,19).
68. Joop Sanders (AI) recalls de Kooning's having worked on advertisement layouts
for both shoes and lipstick. An untitled de Kooning charcoal on paper (c. 1975)
combines a pair of slip-on shoes, rendered in the style of commercial illustra-
tion, with a figure drawn in an irregular, "artistic" manner.
69. See Frisco Endt, "Royal Welcome for Prodigal de Kooning," Life International,
28 October 1968,72.1 thank Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan for this reference.
70. Lisa de Kooning, AI; John McMahon, AI; Susan Brockman, AI. De Kooning's il-
lusionistic rendering of the Dutch shoes exhibits a combination of angularity
and curvature characteristic of his abstract linear style. Those close to the artist
believe he would not himself have sought out a nostalgic item like Dutch shoes.
Joan Ward (AI) recalls, however, that during the early 19705, for whatever reason,
de Kooning wanted to find an old-fashioned shoeshine box.
71. According to Robert Dash (AI), de Kooning recounted the incident in 1986. De
Kooning remembered his mother as stern and unwilling to let him do things in
his own way or at his own pace when he was a child (Conrad Fried, AI). The art-
ist's sister and half-brother regarded their mother as a "tyrant"; see Ken Wilkie,
"Willem de Kooning: Portrait of a Modern Master," Holland Herald 17, no. 3
(March 1982), 24.
72. Connie Fox, longtime friend of Elaine de Kooning, AI. According to John Pow-
ers, de Kooning once referred to posing nudes as if they were elevated by high-
heeled shoes; see John G. Powers, Pop Art, Op Art: 12 Paintings from the Powers'
Collection (Aspen, n.d.), n.p. De Kooning also told Peter Schjeldahl that he had
considered making a monumental sculpture based on the form of women's shoes
(Schjeldahl 1974,61). Among the many sensory details that fascinated the painter
in Michelangelo Antonioni's film UAvventura was the click of actress Monica
Vitti's high heels (Susan Brockman, AI).
73. Elaine de Kooning, in Pepper 1983, 70. The de Koonings were visited by Wil-
lem's mother during summer 1954 (Elaine de Kooning, unpublished interview
by Ann Gibson, 3 October 1987): this afforded Elaine a first-hand experience
that may be the basis of her remarks in the Pepper interview ("That was no pink,
nice old lady. She could walk through a brick wall"). Willem de Kooning once
stated that Woman I "reminded [him] very much of [his] childhood, being
in Holland near all that water," an association that might link the figure to the
painter's mother. He added that his friend Joop Sanders showed he understood

612 1990s
 the relevant allusions by singing a Dutch song about a brook (Rosenberg 1972,
57). Sanders (AI) states that the folk song in question concerned a woman sitting
by water and had no hidden implications for Woman I.
74. Elaine de Kooning stated that her nail polish had inspired the corresponding
feature (rendered in oil paint) in Willem de Kooning's Woman, c. 1944 (Edvard
Lieber, letter to author, 28 August 1993).
75. Susan Brockman, AI;John McMahon, AI.
76. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life" [1859-1860], in The Painter
of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964),
13. De Kooning, in Rosenberg 1972, 54: "Rubens is an illustrator too." On
Bernini see de Kooning quoted in Bert Schierbeek, "Willem de Kooning," in
Willem de Kooning [exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum] (Amsterdam, 1968), n.p. De
Kooning was also fond of the figurai poses in Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard
(Susan Brockman, AI). Rosenberg's account of de Kooning's Woman /as (among
other things) an attractively dressed Fourteenth Street shopper and a "madonna
studied in a reproduction" recalls the Baudelairean formula for modern beauty, a
combination of transitory and eternal; see Harold Rosenberg, "De Kooning,"
Vogue, September 1964,186.
77. On cartooning see Hess in New York 1967, 30; Hunter 1975, 70; Rose C.S.
Slivka, "Willem de Kooning" Art Journal 48 (Fall 1989), 220.
78. Rosenberg 1972,57.
79. De Kooning, in Amsterdam 1968, n.p. John McMahon (AI) tells of the purchase
of a large number of bowls in 1964.
80. See Thomas B. Hess, "Pop and Public," Artnews 62 (November 1963), 23,59-60;
Hess 1965, 36; Rosenberg 1964, 186. De Kooning and his critic-friends were
sensitive on the topic of pop art because they believed it had attracted unde-
served attention, drawing the art market away from the older generation (Allan
Stone, AI); de Kooning himself thought pop art had "no innocence" (Susan
Brockman, AI). Hess particularly resented the claim that abstract expressionism
amounted to little more than a passing style, as implied by Robert Indiana, in
"What Is Pop Art? Interviews by G. R. Swenson—Part i," Artnews 62 (Novem-
ber 1963), 27. He argued that de Kooning led the way in introducing popular im-
agery into postwar American painting (Hess in New York 1967,17, 20). Robert
Rauschenberg, however, noted a telling difference: de Kooning found materials
for collage within his own studio, whereas the younger pop generation looked
outside to the urban environment (Rauschenberg, interview by Catherine Bom-
puis, Ann Hindry, and Claire Stoullig, 1983, in Stoullig 1984, 222). Among pop
artists, Tom Wesselman derived "content and motivation" from de Kooning: see
Wesselman's statement (sometimes incorrectly attributed to Andy Warhol) in
"What Is Pop Art? Interviews by G. R. Swenson—Part 2," Artnews 62 (February
1964), 64.
81. See, as an example, Rosenberg's critique of American intellectuals and political
militants who adopt the exaggerated signs of sexual difference associated with
mass-culture gender identities. He concludes, rather like de Kooning, that "true

1990s 613
 maleness is never without its vein of femininity"; see Harold Rosenberg, "Mas-
culinity: Real and Put On," Vogue, November 1967,159.
82. Hess 1959, 29 ("Maggie" is a comic-strip character). De Kooning's eclecticism
allowed him to admire the art of Norman Rockwell along with that of his abstract
expressionist friends; see Avis Berman, "Willem de Kooning: 'I Am Only Half-
way Through,' " Artnews 81 (February 1982), 71.
83. Hess, "De Kooning," 1953,66; compare Hess in New York 1967,20.
84. Reviewing the Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition, for example, James Fitzsimmons,
"Art," Arts and Architecture 70 (May 1953), 6, described Woman I as "fantasti-
cally gross and ungainly" and regarded Hess' stylistic analysis as inappropriate.
On the history of response to Woman I and related issues of gender see Eleanor
Kathryn Siegel, "Willem de Kooning's 'Woman' Paintings of 1950-1953" (mas-
ter's thesis, University of Texas at Augtin, 1990). On "violence" in de Kooning's
paintings of the 19605 see Forge 1969,44,62. See also Sylvester 1968,48 (woman
as both violator and violated).
85. Elaine de Kooning, recorded in the film De Kooning on de Kooning, directed by
Charlotte Zwerin, produced by Courtney Sale, 1981. Compare Hess, De Kooning
Drawings, 1972,45.
86. Willem de Kooning [1956], in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New
York, 1961), 102. On de Kooning's "enjoyment of women" see Slivka 1989,220.
87. De Kooning, in Rodman 1961,102. See also Shirey 1967, 80; Bibeb 1968,3. On
the anima, a concept first developed in 1916, see C. G.Jung, "The Relations Be-
tween the Ego and the Unconscious," Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New
York, 1966), 188-211. Jung stated that "an inherited collective image of woman
exists in a man's unconscious, with the help of which he apprehends the nature
of woman" (p. 190). De Kooning's knowledge of Jung probably had multiple
sources, including the painter John Graham, a friend from early years in New
York. See Irving Sandier, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Ab-
stract Expressionism (New York, 1970), 22-23; and Stephen Polcari, Abstract Ex-
pressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge, 1991), 43~47- See also my
note 81 above.
88. De Kooning [1956], in Rodman 1961,102. Since Rodman worked from memory,
his quotation may only be approximate; his general reliability was challenged by
Herman Cherry, "U.S. Art Confidential," Artnews 56 (April 1957), 36-37, 61-63.
Concerning de Kooning's sensitivity to suggestions of homosexuality see also de
Hirsch 1955, i; and Potter 1985,214.
89. Carol Duncan's essay, "The MoMA's Hot Mamas," Art Journal 48 (Summer
1989), 171-178, represents a recent stage in the gradual process of the public sex-
ualization of de Kooning's art; for analysis of this process see Siegel 1990. De
Kooning's images of women also suggest the painter's own immersion in materi-
ality and hence a primitive infantilism; Fitzsimmons 1953, 6, saw in Woman I
"the female personification of all that is unacceptable, perverse, and infantile in
ourselves." See also Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, 1987),
348-350.

614 1990s
go. Sontag 1964, 93. Lynne Cooke, building on an important review by Andrew
Forge (see Forge 1969), has similarly focused on the eroticism of de Kooning's
work, relating it to the writings of Sontag and especially Norman O. Brown; see
Lynne Cooke, "De Kooning and the Pastoral: The Interrupted Idyll," in Wash-
ington 1993,89-109.
91. De Kooning, "Abstract Art," 1951,5.
92. De Kooning's words as recalled by Garner Tullis, printmaker who worked with
the artist in the 19605 and 19705 (AI). Harold Rosenberg made a similar argu-
ment in "The American Action Painters " Artnews 51 (December 1952), 48.
93. Sontag 1964,76.

MATTHEW . AI G ELL Barnet t Newman' s Stripe Paintings

and Kabbalah : A Jewish Take

Barnett Newman's (1905-1970) famous stripe paintings are based on the eso-
teric teachings of mystical Judaism known as Kabbalah. We know this from
Thomas Hess's account of Newman's career published in 1971. Since then,
this startling piece of information has barely been mentioned and, equally
startling, never been explored further.1 I want to ask here one question: Just
how Jewish was Newman's use of Jewish sources? My conclusions will sug-
gest that neither the artist nor his biographer used Kabbalah from a normative
Jewish point of view, or, to say it differently, neither used Jewish sources in a
way acceptable to traditional Jewish thought.
I use the term normative Judaism to imply acceptance of Jewish interpre-
tations of one's relationship with God. Equally important in my analysis are
esoteric kabbalistic interpretations of the creation of the universe. Most pro-
fessing Jews, however, rarely study and know little of the mystical Jewish writ-
ings collected under the rubric of Kabbalah, and if they did, they might not
accept very much of it. But, at the same time, normative Judaism and kabbalis-
tic writings share certain assumptions about one's relationship with God
Thomas Hess, no doubt with Newman's full cooperation, based his analy-
sis of the vertical stripe on Gershon Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysti-
cism, particularly Scholem's discussions of Rabbi Isaac Luria, a sixteenth-

SOURCE: American Art (Spring 1994), 32-43. Reprinted with the permission of Matthew
Baigell.

615
 century mystic from Safed, a community now part of modern-day Israel. Ac-
cording to Scholem (and Hess), Rabbi Luria explained how the world was
created from nothing by postulating the concept of Tsimtsum. To create a pri-
mordial space for the universe, God contracted into himself. Tsimtsum is the
contraction, the withdrawal, the shrinkage of God. Next, God sent out a ray
of light in which he revealed himself as God the Creator. This act set the "cos-
mic process in motion." Subsequently, "the first being which emanated from
this light was Adam Kadmon, the man.... He is the first and highest form in
which the divinity begins to manifest itself after the Tsimtsum"2
Newman's stripe paintings accord with Scholem's explanation of creation
up to this point. The single stripe may be understood as representing the first
ray of light and the first man. But Scholem goes on to say that from Adam's
eyes, mouth, ears, and nose, the lights of the divinity burst forth in an undiffer-
entiated mass. This image calls to mind the random and diffused focal points
of Mark Tobey's white-writing paintings. Clearly, Newman preferred to visu-
alize the moment immediately before light multiplied, that is, the space into
which depth had not yet been introduced. In a virtually perfect match of style
and content, Newman suggested a pictorial surface in which all forms seem to
be on the same plane.
To achieve this surface, Newman manipulated depth cues based on the size
and color intensity of the forms. Normally, we read both large shapes and in-
tense colors as projecting toward us, and small shapes and weak colors as re-
ceding into the distance. But in his stripe paintings, such as Dionysius, New-
man deemphasized the color intensity of the larger rectangular shapes and,
by contrast, emphasized the color intensity of the stripes so that the size cues
of the large shapes are balanced by the intense color cues of the stripes. The
stripes, then, seem to lie on the same plane as the larger rectangular fields,
which, despite their size, are held in check because of their more subdued
color. Thus, color intensity cues and size cues for suggesting depth cancel out
each other. By making the stripes and the rectangular fields appear to be on
the same plane, Newman captured on the pictorial surface the very moment
of creation that Rabbi Luria described—the moment of the first ray of the light
of creation, before matter, and therefore space, became differentiated. This
was a brilliant formal solution on Newman's part to a spatial conundrum—
how to make forms without suggesting depth. But it had nothing to do with
Jewish influences on Newman's thinking.
Hess described Newman's OnementI, the first stripe painting, as

616 1990s
 a complex symbol, in the purest sense, of Genesis itself. It is an act of division,
a gesture of separation, as God separated light from darkness with a line
drawn in the void. The artist, Newman pointed out, must start like God, with
chaos, the void.... Newman's first move is an act of division, straight down,
creating an image. The image ... reenacts God's primal gesture He [New-
man] has taken his image of Genesis, of the creative act, of the artist as God.

In normative Judaism, however, Jews do not try to act like God, except in the
sense of leading holy lives, nor do they merge with him. There is instead a clear
distinction between humans and God. Hess understood this key distinction
between Jewish and Christian mysticism when he acknowledged that, in Jew-
ish mysticism, there is no union with God.3 What kind of Jewish artist would
violate a basic tenet of Judaism by confusing his own creative powers with
those of the deity? A Jew might answer, one possessed by a dybbuk (a demon)
or, far more likely, one who read and thought about Jewish writings very selec-
tively. The latter possibility gains credibility if we examine Newman's think-
ing as it evolved in the years just before he began to make the first stripe paint-
ings in 1948.
To see Newman assuming a God-like role in the creation of art, we need go
back no further than 1945. By that time, Newman had already begun to speak
of himself and of his fellow artists, including Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hof-
mann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Rufino Tamayo, as creating a new
American religious art,

a modern mythology concerned with numinous ideas and feelings The

present movement in American art transcends nature. It is concerned with
metaphorical implications, with divine mysteries. These new painters have
brought the artist back to his original primitive role as the maker of gods.4

This is a very immodest statement, as Newman is asserting that the artist pos-
sesses transcendent power. But Newman also implies a distinction between
humans and divine beings, between humans and forces or energies in the
universe.
By early 1947, Newman began to identify the artist with those forces,
specifically with a vaguely identified sense of nature. In his review of an exhi-
bition of Theodoros Stamos's paintings, Newman appeared to be drifting
toward a secular pantheism. Stamos, according to Newman, "redefines the
pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural

1990s 617
 phenomenon." Of such communion with nature, "one might say that instead
of going to the rock, he comes out of it."5 Here, Newman seems to be saying
that the artist is either on equal terms with nature's creative forces or at least
an intimate part of them.
But by the end of 1947 or the beginning of the next year, Newman began to
foreground the artist to the exclusion of all else. Writing about an exhibition
of Herbert Ferber's sculpture, Newman said:

By insisting on the heroic gesture, and on the gesture only, the artist made the
heroic style the property of each one of us, transforming, in the process, this
style from an art that is public to one that is personal. For each man is, or
should be, his own hero.6

By becoming his own hero, Newman asserted, each man emphasizes his own
centrality in the universe and, by implication, his need for self-realization. In
this statement, communion with whatever is out there is replaced by a defiant
need for self-aggrandizement and self-assertion. The artist now, according to
Newman, creates, or recreates, himself.
In 1948, Newman's evolving thought achieved its definitive formulation
when he wrote "The Sublime Is Now":

We are asserting man's natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our
relationship to the absolute emotions We are creating images whose real-
ity is self-evident and which are devoid of props and crutches that evoke asso-
ciations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. We are freeing
ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth,
or what have you Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or
"life," we are making [them] out of ourselves, out of our feelings.

The key phrase here—"making cathedrals . . . out of ourselves"—is an ex-

traordinary assertion of self-willed strength that has no precedent in the his-
tory of American art. Earlier artists clearly distinguished their creative acts
from the divine, their paintings from God's handiwork in nature. Thomas
Cole, for example, a deeply religious artist associated with the Hudson River
school, wrote, "Art is in fact man's lowly imitation of the creative power of the
Almighty."7
Newman's idea of the artist as creator can be positioned with the individu-
alism, self-worship, and self-creation associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Walt Whitman. Newman had great respect for Emerson, whose home he
visited in 1936. He may well have been familiar with Emerson's essay "Cir-

618 1990s
cíes," which claims, "No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply ex-
periment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back." Newman may also have
known these lines from Whitman's Leaves of Grass: "There will soon be no
more priests. Their work is done A new order shall arise and they shall be
the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest."8
But the ideas of Emerson and Whitman do not explain why Newman be-
gan to make stripe paintings in 1948. I think, rather, that three important
books published in 1946 and 1947—Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism, Martin
Buber's Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, and Scholem's Major Trends
in Jewish Mysticism help us better understand Newman's developing sense of
self-exaltation.9
In the aftermath of World War II, conventional morality and public values
were being called into question. By the late 19405, Sartre and his philosophy
were widely discussed in the periodical literature. As a high school student at
the time, I remember clearly the interest that Sartre generated, and I assume
that Newman, too, was familiar with Existentialism's exhortations to inde-
pendent action and personal responsibility, modified by an accountability to
society. Quite possibly, Newman was moved by passages such as this: "Man is
nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself;
he is nothing else than the ensemble of his acts; nothing else than his life."10
It would seem a short step from these words to "making cathedrals ... out
of ourselves," but to get from Sartre's secularism to the Jewish elements in
Newman's stripe paintings, we must pass through the books of Martin Buber
and Gershon Scholem.
As with Sartre's book, I cannot confirm that Newman read Buber's account
of the early history of the pious and ultrareligious Hasidim, whose mysticism
has strong kabbalistic roots, but by recalling the response to Buber by New-
man's contemporary and acquaintance, the critic Harold Rosenberg, we might
find some explanation for Newman's desire to make cathedrals out of the self.
Reviewing Tales of the Hasidim for Commentary, Rosenberg found—quite
mistakenly I believe—confirmation for the seeking of self-fulfillment. For Ro-
senberg, Hasidism turned out to be a quite modern religious movement that
"was primarily a training of individuals in the direction of an infinitely ex-
tended subtilized discovery and recreation of the self." According to Rosen-
berg, one of the principal tenets of Hasidism was to claim one's own identity.
As an example, he cited a passage from Buber about a certain Rabbi Zusya.
When near death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the world to come they will not ask
me 'why were you not Moses?' They will ask 'why were you not Zusya?' " For

1990s 619
 Rosenberg, the "Hasid reached toward his highest possibility ... through the
world itself, through his way of appropriating concrete things and relations
into his subjective experiences."11
The modern secular reader, following Rosenberg, might imagine that mak-
ing cathedrals out of the self has roots in Hasidism. But it does not. My own
studies indicate that Rosenberg misunderstood the movement and totally
misread Buber's account of Hasidism, missing entirely Buber's insistence
both on finding personal fulfillment within religious channels and on discov-
ering the right paths to God. In addition, Rosenberg ignored the fulfillment
that members of the various Hasidic groups find in community religious wor-
ship, their service to God, and, as an ideal, their efforts to be Godlike in their
behavior. Self-fulfillment comes through service to God, not to the self.
Rosenberg also singled out the one anecdote in Buber's entire book—the
deathbed statement by Rabbi Zusya—that, removed from context, lent itself
to a secular, existential interpretation. A more typical anecdote from Tales of
the Hasidim concerns Rabbi Dov Baer, an early major figure of the movement.
Rabbi Dov Baer is reported to have said:

I shall teach you the best way to say Torah [the first five books of the Bible].
You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear
which hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you.
The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, you must stop.

Rosenberg also gave scant regard to Buber's exhortations in his introduction

concerning one's relationship to God, which Buber claimed was above and
beyond all individual experience.12 In effect, Rosenberg interpreted Buber's
concern for personal fulfillment at the expense of religion.
Almost twenty years later, Rosenberg explored the same issues in an article
for Commentary entitled "Is There a Jewish Art?" He held that the most seri-
ous theme in Jewish life was the problem of identity, but he noted that this
problem was as much a modern dilemma as it was a Jewish one. Rosenberg
believed that Jewish American artists asserted "their individual relation to art
in an independent and personal way." They and other American artists who
retained their ethnic identities were creating, Rosenberg proposed, "a gen-
uine American art by creating as individuals." This enterprise amounted to
an "aesthetics of self." Rosenberg then came full circle in his argument by say-
ing that this type of independent creativity amounted to "a profound Jewish
expression."13 For Rosenberg, the Jew was a modern everyman searching for
identity in the modern world, an identity based on the self as the source of its

620 1990s
own creation—through, as Newman would have it, making cathedrals out of
the self.
As a Jew, Rosenberg undoubtedly had some knowledge of Jewish culture.
But in sorting out his identity he recognized himself also as an acculturated,
though not fully assimilated, American and as a citizen of the world. To rein-
vent himself as a citizen of the larger American and world communities, he
had to exalt his independent self at the expense of his parochial Jewish cul-
tural and religious identity. Rosenberg and Newman belonged to the genera-
tion of my parents, a generation that knew it was Jewish but at the same time
wanted, desperately sometimes, to transcend its origins and gain access to
those larger communities. I should also add that Buber was immensely popu-
lar among Jews of that generation because he wrote within a Jewish milieu
but demanded minimal responses and responsibilities from his largely secular
Jewish readers. Traditional Jews, on the other hand, do not respond favorably
to Buber.14
Just as Rosenberg misread Buber in 1947, Newman misread Scholem the
following year. For Newman, the misreading was in assuming a God-like pose
of creativity, a pose foreign to normative Judaism. In addition, in his stripe
paintings Newman disregarded one of the most important parts of Rabbi
Luria's cosmogony—the concept of Tikkun, which completes the process of
creation, of Tsimtsum, by restoring the harmony that existed before the crea-
tion of the universe. According to Rabbi Luria, in the creation just after the
great contraction, some divine sparks were lost. Mankind was responsible for
their restitution. That is, every Jew shared responsibility to

prepare the way for the final restoration of all the scattered and exiled lights
and sparks. The Jew who is in close contact with the divine life through the
Torah, the fulfillment of the commandments, and through prayer, has it in his
power to accelerate or to hinder this process.... The individual's prayers, as
well as those of the community, but particularly the latter, are under certain
conditions the vehicle of the soul's mystical ascent to God.15

This responsibility of the Jew was not a part of Newman's vision. Newman, a
secular person, happened upon a concept of creation in a book by Gershon
Scholem that allowed him to visualize the moment of creation. The artist's
connection to Kabbalah was nothing more and nothing less.
Newman was consistent in his misreading of Rabbi Isaac Luria. In 1963,
while explaining the kind of ritual that might take place in a synagogue he had
designed, Newman echoed Rosenberg's misreading of Buber by asserting that

1990s 621
 personal fulfillment equaled religious exaltation. But Newman's description
of the latter bears little resemblance to the true nature of kabbalistic ecstasy:

[In the synagogue] each man sits, private and secluded in the dugouts [along
the side walls] waiting to be called, not to ascend a stage, but to go up on the
mound, where, under the tension of that "Tzim-Tzum" [sic] that created light
and the world, he can experience a total sense of his own personality before
the Tor ah and His name.

This is the existentialist in Newman talking. But then, wanting to connect to

that sense of exalted spiritual ascendance one can find in Kabbalah, Newman
said: "My purpose is to create a place, not an environment, to deny contem-
plation of the objects of ritual for the sake of that ultimate courtesy where each
person, man or woman, can experience the vision and feel exaltation of 'His
trailing robes filling the Temple.' "16
In Judaism, one cannot experience that vision by exalting oneself. Only
through God can one begin to approach the fulfillment of the self. Newman's
thoughts and ultimate sources here seem to lie not in normative Judaism or
even in Buber's religious existentialism but in nineteenth-century Romanti-
cism, in Emerson and Whitman and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth, who portray the artist as a God-like creator.
In addition to the discussions of Rabbi Luria, Hess found a possible source
for Newman's stripe paintings in Scholem's discussion of the hymn "Zo-
harariel, Adonoi, God of Israel," derived from the Greater Hekaloth (sixth
century C.E.), a compilation of texts that includes apocalyptic writings. Hess
cites these two lines as the likely genesis of Newman's stripe:

With a gleam of His ray he encompasses the sky

And his splendor radiates from the heights.17

But the hymn "Zoharariel" describes God on his throne surrounded by atten-
dants, not God in the act of creation. And as all of the hymns in the Greater
Hekaloth celebrate God, not man, they are an unlikely source for Newman's
stripes.
Hess found justification of his claim for Kabbalah as the source of New-
man's stripes in another book by Scholem—On the Kabbalah and Its Symbol-
ism, published in 1965, long after the first stripes were painted in 1948. The
passage that Hess found relevant comes from Scholem's discussion of the
Book ofYetsirah, or Book of Creation (third through sixth centuries C.E.), con-
cerning Abraham's presumed ability to imitate God's powers to create human

622 1990s
forms. But Scholem's discussion is about the creation of a golem, the hu-
manoid figure made from clay that has a long history in Jewish esoteric litera-
ture and folklore.18 The golem, always a flawed creature, can hardly stand as
a model for Rabbi Luria's version of the creation of the world and of the
Adamic figure. And Newman would hardly have wanted to exert God-like
powers to make cathedrals out of the self that would be imperfect.
Yet this book by Scholem includes a passage that might help explain New-
man's frame of mind in 1948, if not the image of the stripe. Considering me-
dieval interpretations of the legend of the golem, Scholem wrote:

The members of the strong esoteric movements that sprang up among Jews
in the age of the crusades were eager to perpetuate, if only in rites of initiation
which gave the adept a mystical experience of the creative power inherent in
pious men, the achievement attributed to Abraham ... and other pious men
of old in apocryphal legends.19

I take this passage to mean that in times of stress—and here stress includes the
pogroms of the Crusaders—people imagine mythical or mystical powers that
can overcome the oppressor. In the late 19405, as Newman began his stripe
paintings, Jews throughout the world remained profoundly affected by the
Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel. No Jew could have remained
unmoved or neutral to either event. Even today, as Donald Kuspit has sug-
gested, "every Jew has a Holocaust within him; in his innermost heart he has
gone up in smoke or been starved to death, after being castrated by society."20
Newman's stripes, then, might be understood as an act of resistance as well
as a celebration of renewal and rebirth, an affirmation of life during a time of
Jewish trauma and national revival. Nourished by his cultural rather than his
religious identification as a Jew, Newman created the stripes as one person's
single and solitary gesture, a raw assertion of the self against a society and a
god that did not merit his full respect. His desire to make "cathedrals ... out
of ourselves" is a reproach as well as a universalizing gesture that reaches
beyond his Jewish identity to all humanity. It is an affirmation of individual
strength and spirit in a world he wanted metamorphically to recreate.

Notes

Thomas Hess, Bamett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971). See
also Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition
(New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 209; Annette Cox,Art-as-Politics: The Ab-
stract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research

1990s 623
 Press, 1977), p. 69; and Avram Kampf, Jew ish Experience in the Art of the Twenti-
eth Century (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1984), p. 197.
2. Gershon G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken,
1946), pp. 263,265; see, generally, pp. 260-76.
3. Hess, pp. 56,71; see pp. 52-61,83.
4. Barnett Newman, "Memorial Letter for Howard Putzel" (1945), in Barnett New-
man: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed.John O'Neill (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), pp. 97-98.
5. Barnett Newman, "Stamos" (1947), in ibid., p. 109.
6. Barnett Newman, "Ferber" (1947), in ibid., p. in.
7. Barnett Newman, "The Sublime Is Now" (1948), in ibid., p. 170; Thomas Cole,
"Thoughts and Occurences" (ca. 1842), quoted in Barbara Novak, Nature and
Culture in American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1980), p. 10.
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles" (1841), in Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York:
Library of America, 1983), p. 412; and Walt Whitman, preface to the 1855 edition
of Leaves of Grass, in Walt Whitman (New York: Library of America, 1982),
pp. 24-25. See also Matthew Baigell, "The Emersonian Presence in Abstract Ex-
pressionism," Prospects 15 (1990): 91-108; and Baigell, "The Influence of Whit-
man on Early Twentieth-Century American Painting," Walt Whitman and the
Visual Arts, ed. Geoffrey M. Sills and Roberta Tarbell (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1992), pp. 121-41.
9. John Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philo-
sophical Library, 1947); Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidim: The Early Masters,
trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1947); and Scholem, cited in n. 2.
10. Sartre, pp. 37-38. See also the following articles published in the New York Times
Magazine (section 6): John L. Brown, "Chief Prophet of the Existentialists," 2
February 1947, pp. 20-21, 50-52; Simone de Beauvoir, "An Existentialist Looks
at Americans," 25 May 1947, pp. 19, 51-53; and Paul F.Jennings, "Thingness of
Things," 13 June 1948, pp. 18-19.
n. Harold Rosenberg, "Mystics of the World" (1947), reprinted in Rosenberg, Dis-
covering the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 239, 240,
quoting Buber, p. 251.
12. Ibid., p. 240, quoting Buber, pp. 107,2,4.
13. Rosenberg, "Is There a Jewish Art?" (1966), reprinted in Rosenberg, Discover-
ing the Present, p. 230.
14. For this reading of Buber, see Gershon G. Scholem, "Martin Buber's Interpreta-
tion of Hasidism," in Scholem, The Messianic Idea of Judaism and Other Essays
on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), pp. 240-45.
15. Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 274,276.
16. Barnett Newman, Recent American Synagogue Architecture (1963), in Newman,
ed. O'Neill, pp. 181-82. Newman quotes Isaiah 6:1.
17. Hess, p. 52, quoting Scholem, Major Trends, p. 59.
18. Ibid., p. 61, quoting Gershon G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism

624 1990s
 (New York: Schocken, 1965), pp. 159-204. See also Scholem, Major Trends, pp.
69,75,99,127,138,145.
19. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, p. 173.
20. Donald Kuspit, "The Abandoned Nude: Natán Nuchi's Paintings," in Kuspit,
Matan Nuchi (New York: Klarfield Perry Gallery, 1992), unpaginated.

JOAN M. MARIER Arcadian Nightmares: The Evolution

of David Smith and Dorothy Dehner's
Work at Bolton Landing

David Smith and Dorothy Dehner and their years together at Bolton Landing
rival the dramatic accounts of many artist-couples, given the volatile tempera-
ment of Smith, the physicality of his work, Dehner's determination to survive,
and her vital imagery.1 Marriages far less tumultuous have been fodder for
books on the Abstract Expressionists. The De Koonings have been discussed
in several publications: their drinking habits and romantic liaisons exposed,
while no attempt was made to explore the relevance of their personal lives to
their artistic achievements.2 In Andrea Gabor's Einstein's Wife, Lee Krasner's
physiognomy and Jackson Pollock's alcoholism and psychological problems
are discussed with virtually no references to paintings by either artist.3
In this investigation of Dorothy Dehner and David Smith, my purpose is
not to document the violence, threats, and reconciliations, but to consider the
creative interaction of this couple. The intention is to probe beyond the cir-
cumstances of their lives to the impact of each artist's work on that of the
other. Attempts must be made to dismantle stereotypes about the interrela-
tionships of artist-couples. Questions of aesthetics, theories that explain con-
cepts of femininity and masculinity, and the social conditions that support or
impede creativity must be explored.4 Investigation of works by women mar-
ried to modernists have contradicted assumptions that "significant others"
are typically derivative of their husbands' works, and never achieve a personal
aesthetic.
The intimacy of a sexual involvement is far more profound than the inter-
action of friends. Smith's connections with artist-friends such as Robert Moth-

SOURCE: Unpublished lecture, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1995 (revised 2002). Reprinted
with the permission of Joan M. Marter.

625
 erwell and Kenneth Noland have repeatedly been acknowledged. For exam-
ple, Smith's friendship with John Graham—who was a neighbor in Bolton
Landing during the 19305—has been considered in essays on Smith.5 Ken-
neth Noland's camaraderie with Smith in the 19505 and 19605 probably re-
sulted in the sculptor's Circle constructions, which parallel Noland's Target
series.6 But in previous literature on David Smith, his marriage to Dorothy
Dehner has not been examined to determine how that relationship affected
his work. What impact did their twenty-three years of shared intimacy have
on changes of medium and approach, and the search for a personal style?
For Dorothy Dehner, who never ceased making drawings and paintings
from her student years in the 19205 until her death in 1994, the shadow of David
Smith loomed large. Her sculpture has been compared to Smith's despite
their divorce in 1952, three years before she began to make sculpture. While it
was not the case during Smith's lifetime, since 1970 critics seldom fail to men-
tion Dehner's marriage to Smith when reviewing her exhibitions.7 Smith's di-
vorce from his second wife in 1961 and his death in 1965 meant that Dehner
became directly connected with his personal and artistic legacy.8
Can women artists measure up to the genius of their celebrated husbands?
The answer is frequently no, but then many male artists among the Abstract
Expressionists do not parallel the achievements of a few stellar individuals.
Somehow the "second string" status of white males in the artworld varsity has
not been held against them. But certain critics express outrage that a woman
consort to a renowned male artist was anything more than a disciple. And the
idea that the wife may have had something important to contribute to her hus-
band's creative achievements causes hostile reactions.9
Unlike the "action widows," as B. H. Friedman has characterized Lee Kras-
ner after Pollock's death, and others married to Abstract Expressionists,10
Dehner survived Smith's death by almost thirty years, but was never the offi-
cial widow. Having been divorced from Smith after twenty-five years of mar-
riage, she was superceded by a second [estranged] wife, who became the
mother of Smith's daughters. These young girls, Rebecca and Candida Smith,
who were ten and eleven at the time of their father's death in 1965, became the
sole heirs to the Smith estate.11 Any career assistance Dehner could have re-
ceived from her ambitious ex-husband, Smith offered only in the decade fol-
lowing her departure from Bolton Landing. At this time David Smith was es-
tablishing himself as a renowned artist of his generation, and his help was
limited to mentioning Dehner to critics or giving her advice about dealers.
Marian Willard showed the work of Dehner and Smith separately during the

626 1990s
1950s. But Dorothy Dehner, unlike Lee Krasner, never experienced the career
advantages (or disadvantages) of being the heir to Smith's substantial body
of work—the sculpture, drawings, and paintings which remained after his
death.
Significantly, despite the presence of a second wife, and their shortlived co-
habitation (Smith and Jean Freas spent less than five years together), Dehner
remained "Dave's wife" to the Cedar Bar crowd. Her artistic identity was con-
structed by colleagues as well as critics and dealers to include David Smith on
a permanent basis. Contributing to the misunderstanding, admittedly, was
Dehner herself, who was eagerly interviewed by art historians, writers, and
curators seeking information on David Smith. With her sharp mind, and im-
pressive recall, she interlaced facts with interpretations of David Smith, serv-
ing inevitably as the main repository of Smith's creative legacy, without the
financial security resulting from stewardship of the objects themselves.
As the author of an article on David Smith's Medals for Dishonor12 as well
as texts on John Graham and Jan Matulka,13 Dehner was consulted for virtu-
ally every book on Smith, beginning in the 19705 with those of Rosalind Krauss
and Garnett McCoy, and continuing with monographs by Stanley Marcus and
Karen Wilkin in the following decade.14
Yet David Smith's artistic identity and reputation have never been bound
to her or to any other of his relationships. Although the importance of John
Graham to his early years and an association with Clement Greenberg are al-
ways mentioned, these friendships are not seen to detract from Smith's cre-
ative genius. Most monographs on David Smith parallel those for other male
artists by presenting the myth of a solitary struggle for self-expression; and
the complexity of partnership with another artist has not been an issue.
Typical stereotypes have been constructed for this artist-couple, and they
focus on the alliance of two very different individuals. David Smith, an ag-
gressive, even violent man born in Decatur, Indiana in 1906, who spent his
teenage years in Paulding, Ohio, and Dorothy Dehner, the far more sophisti-
cated young woman who studied art, dance, and drama. Smith had limited
opportunities to see works of art in his youth. Art instruction during his
adolescence came via a correspondence course in drawing from the Cleve-
land Art School. He spent two semesters at Ohio University in Athens, and a
summer working at the Studebaker factory in South Bend before entering
Notre Dame University. There he remained only a few weeks before leaving for
Washington, D. C. and New York. Smith was a deeply troubled man subject
to fits of jealousy, who eventually sublimated his anger by making direct metal

1990s 627
 constructions. He created sculptures in a studio Dehner dubbed "The Iron
Woman," denoting a place where Smith could beat metal rather than his
partner.
Dehner was born in 1901 in Cleveland, where her father was a pharmacist.
Her youth was spent in Cincinnati and her teenage years in Pasadena, Cali-
fornia. Dehner was raised by an affluent family, given art and ballet lessons
from an early age, taken to museums, and sent to Europe in the 19205. While
David Smith was exploding dynamite to impress teenage girls, Dehner was
studying drawing and painting, performing at the Pasadena Playhouse, and
in off-Broadway productions in New York. Their life can be viewed as the
joining of a cultivated, talented, and attractive young woman with a blustery
young artist doggedly ambitious, arrogant, and often crude.
Smith's childhood and adolescent memories focused on the place of twen-
tieth century technology in his life, in particular, railroads and automobiles.
In retrospect, his summerjob at a Studebaker factory in 1925 was most impor-
tant to him. Contrary to his later invented persona as a blue-collar worker,
and a heavy drinker in a workshift, after dropping out of Notre Dame, Smith
returned to the Studebaker Company, not to the assembly line, but to the
finance department. He was transferred to a bank in Washington and took po-
etry courses at The George Washington University before moving to New
York in 1926, where he met Dorothy Dehner. She encouraged him to take art
classes at the Art Students League, where she was enrolled. Dehner had in-
tended to study sculpture at the League, but after seeing instructor William
Zorach's sculpture, she decided to study drawing and painting. Smith ini-
tially took night classes at the League while working during the day at the In-
dustrial Acceptance Corporation on West 57th Street.
Dehner must have seemed the perfect partner for Smith; she was four years
older, attractive, with a family income at her disposal.15 Dehner had decided
to become an artist after some disappointing experiences as an actress. She al-
ready had been to Paris, and was familiar with the most avant-garde art, mu-
sic, and literature. Smith was enchanted by this young woman whom he mar-
ried in December of 1927. Their drawings of similar subjects at the League
indicate shared directions. Even more important than their classes together
with Jan Matulka and Kimon Nicolaides was the influence of Dehner herself.
Her intelligence and creativity supported Smith's own prodigious energies as
a painter. Her unorthodox, intellectual background and leftist politics pro-
vided the intellectual stimulation that his own background had failed to offer.
Smith's immediate assimilation of modernism can be attributed to Dehner

628 1990s
and certain associates at the League. From the beginning of their relationship,
Dehner encouraged Smith's artistic productivity. Through the sale of family
bonds, she arranged two trips for Smith and herself: one to the Virgin Islands
in 1931 for ten months, and in 1935 another ten months in Europe and Russia.
Smith, of course, resigned from his part time jobs during these sojourns
abroad.
By the 19305 the Smiths were part of a coterie of artists in New York, which
included Adolph Gottlieb, Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky and Willem De Koon-
ing. The male artists formed a shortlived group in 1935 which included Smith,
John Graham, de Kooning, Gorky and Edgar Levy, and these men proclaimed
their intention to exhibit together at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Dehner was not invited to join in this ambitious goal. However, earlier in his
private life with Dehner, Smith had begun to find a new direction for his art in
his experimentation with constructions.
When the couple journeyed to the Virgin Islands in 1931, they both made
paintings of still life subjects. Dehner worked on gessoed crates, introducing
textural effects by adding sand to the pigments in the manner of Jan Matulka.
Their paintings were accomplished abstractions, still indebted to synthetic
cubism, but with organic forms predominating—particularly shells and ma-
rine life. The lumps of coral David Smith brought back to New York resulted
in his first sculpture. He did not adopt welding with the oxyacetylene torch, a
factory process, until 1933, when he began an association with the Terminal
Iron Works in Brooklyn. Throughout the early 19305, Smith and Dehner were
living in Brooklyn Heights. When Smith began welding initially in their apart-
ment, Dehner had to stand by with a watering can to douse the sparks from
the equipment.
During the Depression, Dehner and Smith divided their time between
apartments in Brooklyn Heights and the Fox Farm, which they purchased in
Bolton Landing, New York in 1929. By 1940 they had moved to Bolton Land-
ing permanently. Their property near Lake George was 86 acres, including a
farmhouse dating to 1820 and a barn. The house was drafty with neither elec-
tricity nor running water. A well outside the house would run dry in the sum-
mer. Nevertheless, the couple lived in this old farmhouse until 1949, when
their new house was constructed adjacent to it.
Regarding the purchase of the Bolton Landing farm for $3,000.00, Dehner
never acknowledged that it was she who wrote the check for the initial de-
posit, probably from the sale of family property. The mortgage, dated April i,
1930 lists only Dorothy Dehner Smith as the principal.16 She was never forth-

1990s 629
 coming with a full accounting of their financial situation, including the regu-
lar income from Dehner family investments that gave both artists some finan-
cial security. Smith's freedom to remain in Bolton Landing after 1940 was
facilitated by the steady support of Dehner's income. For example, Smith
turned down a teaching position offered by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in Chicago
in 1944, and also refused many invitations to lecture in other parts of the
country.17
Although Dehner's art has been acknowledged only in recent years, the full
range of Smith's achievement has been explored for several decades. A com-
plex artist emerges—an artist with a lifelong interest in polychromy. Smith
said that he "belonged with painters" and it is therefore as an artist of the
Abstract Expressionist generation that he is considered.18 Karen Wilkin has
stated: "Smith's insistence that he 'belonged with painters' may be open to in-
terpretation, but what is unequivocal is that he was a painter before he was
a sculptor."19 Noting that some of the most successful modern sculpture was
made by painters, he attempted to fuse the two—teaching himself sculpture
and working on polychrome examples. Smith refused to be bound to tradi-
tional categories of painting and sculpture, and often fused pictorial elements
with sculptural techniques. Dehner was his collaborator in the exploration of
experimental methods, beginning with her paintings on gessoed crates, to
her monoprints and pressed-paper reliefs. Wilkin observed about Smith:
"Fundamental aspects of his life as an artist are full of contradictions. He is
generally thought to have been exclusively a sculptor in steel . . . yet he saw
himself as an artist who could do anything, as someone who transformed
whatever he turned his hand to by the force of his individuality. He was always
ready to explore new media, new approaches, and new techniques."20
Dehner and Smith both drew and painted throughout the 19305 and 19405,
and therefore the competitiveness was always present—even though, as noted,
Dehner did not begin to make sculpture until after their divorce. David Smith's
paintings and drawings show a change from a cubist-constructivist interest to
abstract expressionist gesturalism, and the themes of his early sculpture are
related to painters and other sculptors associated with Abstract Expression-
ism, including Jackson Pollock and Ibram Lassaw. Smith's close association
with painters in the 19305 can be acknowledged, and for both Dehner and Smith
these interactions were essential. When Smith turned to making sculpture—
as one of the first Americans to use the oxyacetylene torch—he found Picasso,
Gonzalez and Gargallo as influential precedents.

630 1990s
 The major portion of Dehner and Smith's creative activity took place dur-
ing the 19405 in Bolton Landing, an isolated site in the Adirondack Moun-
tains. During the decade spent together and in subsequent years apart, they
both developed themes, explored abstract imagery, and used improvisational
methods that can be identified with Abstract Expressionism. These interests
include Smith's use of prehistoric imagery and atavistic references. Smith
found himself not only using Dehner as a model (the traditional role of an art-
ist's wife), but urging her to come to his studio, where she was asked for advice
about his sculpture. She suggested where certain elements should be added,
provided visual judgements, and eventually titled the works. Using her liter-
ary background, knowledge of mythology and other active intellectual inter-
ests, she provided titles for virtually all of Smith's sculpture during their years
together.21
The extent of Smith's competitiveness with Dehner and his need to control
her artistic production during the Bolton Landing years must be considered,
but first the politically charged, war-related themes found in the works of
both Dehner and Smith are important to discuss to establish the ferocity of
their political activism. Both artists were active in leftist politics of the 19303.
A trip to Greece in 1935, where they met emigres from Nazi Germany who
had been forced into exile after release from concentration camps, introduced
them to Hitler's suppression of political dissidents. Because of their friend-
ship with expatriate John Graham (born Ivan Dabrowsky), and their growing
curiosity about socialism, Dehner and Smith visited the Soviet Union in 1936.
After returning to New York, David Smith became active with the American
Artists Congress, the Artists Union, and the United American Artists-CIO.
In 1937 Smith began work on his Medals for Dishonor. In a letter to William
Blake, who was to write the introduction to an exhibition catalogue for these
medals, Smith described them as "a series of bronze medallions depicting
the horrors of war, its causes, those who inspire it and lead it, its resulting
destruction."22 Marian Willard, Smith's dealer, wrote to him in June 1941,
"Seven of your medals were on display at an anti-war show which the Con-
gress of American Artists gave at the Hotel Commodore."23 After Pearl Har-
bor and the declaration of war by the United States, Smith found more dif-
ficulties in showing his medals. In other correspondence to curators and
critics, Smith always emphasized that their conception was anti-fascist and
pro-democratic.
In actuality, from his choice of steel and his disdain for elitist artforms to

1990s 631
 his political views, Smith was anti-authority and anti-establishment. In his
Medals for Dishonor he attacked not only the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, but
also American clergy, the New Deal, and the rich.
Dehner, who shared his political views, acknowledged their interest in the
Communist Party and sympathy for its goals during the 1930s.24 Drawings
and sculpture produced by both Dehner and Smith during that volatile pe-
riod suggest an anti-imperialist, decidedly leftist position. Dehner came from
a politically liberal family; her mother was an active suffragist, and her father
had socialist sympathies. In the 19303 both artists attended May Day celebra-
tions in Union Square, and Dehner recalled on a number of occasions not
only their involvement with the Communist Party, but also the experience of
being questioned about communists among their artists friends.
Dehner and Smith shared private symbols, including the use of a prehis-
toric creature, a photo of which they had purchased at the American Museum
of Natural History. In her ink drawings Country Living, Bird of Peace and
Threnody for the Royal House, both of 1946, Dehner, like Smith, used the im-
age of a prehistoric hesperonis regalis, presenting it as a predatory bird flying
over a war-torn landscape or, in Threnody, a medieval castle. The image of this
prehistoric reptile appears in the work of both artists. In Dehner's ink draw-
ings the soft contours of the Adirondack Mountains become ominous, jagged
peaks, with the spectral bird hovering above. Smith constructed large-scale
renditions in welded metals of this airborne predator: Jurassic Bird, 1945,
and Royal Bird, 1948.
David Smith's other war-related scenes include the Spectre of War, 1944,
and War Landscape, 1947. Images of women violated by phallic-cannons, or
lying prostrate on the ground while threatened by menacing soldiers, can be
found repeatedly in Smith's drawings and prints of the early 19405. Smith was
an inveterate photographer of his own work, but he made other camera stud-
ies, including details of the body of his wife. Dehner recalled that when Smith
was working on the Medals for Dishonor and other war-related sketches of the
early 19405, he asked her to pose naked atop a large pillar that was turned on
its side.25 The pillar used for sketching Dehner was changed into a cannon in
several of sculptures.
When Smith's war themes are compared with similar depictions of victims
of war created by Dehner herself—haunting images of women with emaciated
bodies, crying out in pain—it seems clear that Dehner's presentation of the
horrors of war is joined with a personal narrative of psychic turmoil. The "Ar-
cadian Nightmares" of my title can be found most explicitly in her "Dam-

632 1990s
nation Séries" of the mid-i94os. Among the most provocative drawings of
Dehner's career, this series consists of skillfully-rendered pen and ink studies
of nude figures, accompanied by vultures, bats, and other animals. One exam-
ple, "Suite Moderne," 1947-48, includes ghoulish figures dancing gigues, fan-
dangos, and gavottes, all of which become "dances of death." Such images, al-
though they relate to postwar tensions, may have more to do with her state of
mind in these final years of her marriage to David Smith.
Smith is known to have been a violent man.26 He was obsessed with guns,
mortars, cannons, and other weapons, and he exploded dynamite charges as a
teenager. Later he owned a cannon, and carried guns which he sometimes
fired in anger. Dehner recalled several incidents including one from his early
twenties—when he emptied a gun into the floor of a bank. Later he fired a gun
repeatedly into the back of a vehicle outside a Bolton Landing bar. When
Dehner and Smith traveled abroad in 1935, he forced her to tape a Browning
pistol under her brassiere so they could pass through customs with a weapon.27
In addition to gun imagery, other images of violence towards women appear
in Smith's art. These not only relate to war, but express an ambivalence about
the opposite sex. Smith, a known womanizer, could also be unnecessarily
volatile in his relationship with Dehner.28 His images of Dehner range from
graceful dancer to controlled victim.
Self-sufficiency was the order of the day for both artists in the early 19405.
During the war years, Smith worked in the design department of the Ameri-
can Locomotive Company in Schenectady, New York. When he was finally
called up for military service, he was judged unfit to serve.29 Until 1945, draw-
ings were more frequent than sculpture due to the scarcity of materials and
the distraction of his alternative war service. Home of the Welder, 1945, and
other sculptures produced in 1945 and '46 herald his new-found freedom
from the necessity of locomotive work, as well as the completion of his new
studio, dubbed Terminal Iron Works. This was a prolific period, when his art
was rife with allusions and variety. In works such as Reliquary House and Pil-
lar of Sunday, both of 1945, Smith made this complex imagery, rich with pri-
vate metaphors, to deal with personal torments. Messages were hidden, but
often his drawings are a clue to his state of mind. Art historical quotations
range from Egyptian funerary maquettes and canopic jars, to Pieter Bruegel's
Sloth and other Northern Renaissance sources, to Picasso's The Dream and
Lie of Franco.
Several shared themes can be found in the work of both artists in these
years, specifically in their joint exploration of nature and the figure to create

1990s 633
 organic abstractions in sculpted and painted form. Beginning with their Vir-
gin Island landscapes, and continuing through Smith's polychrome construc-
tions of the 19305 and landscape themes in three dimensions of the 19405,
Smith and Dehner explored organic forms such as shells and marine life.
Both had been students of Jan Matulka, who was inspired by Cubism, and en-
couraged the use of disparate materials and varied textural effects. Dehner
and Smith introduced collage elements and mixed sand with their pigments
to create a rich and varied surface. Smith incorporated not only pieces of
coral, but also bits of wood, wire and small stones in his small constructions.
Dehner recalled her earliest abstractions in the "Virgin Island Series" as filled
with biomorphs and marine creatures. Smith's expansive landscape-sculp tures
of the forties were decidedly innovative in their presentation of abstract im-
agery in three dimensions.
Of Smith's growing involvement with abstract imagery in his sculpture,
Dehner judged that abstraction was a vehicle he adopted for self-expression.
From his Interior., 1937, with figurative and abstract elements combined, to
the more famous Home of the Welder, 1945, Smith explored private symbolism
and a full range of emotions. By the late 19405, Smith had invented a new vo-
cabulary of structure and form in part derived from the nature of the medium,
rather than directly from natural forms. Wilkin notes: "Dehner subscribed to
the idea that abstraction appealed to Smith as a disguise, a subtle way of mak-
ing use of his strongest feelings without revealing himself completely—an idea
borne out by recurring images of masked figures in Smith's early work."30
After leaving Smith for five months in 1945 because of a violent incident,
Dehner stayed in New York City, where she returned to making abstract com-
positions in two dimensions. These drawings were inspired by the art of Paul
Klee, Mark Rothko, and William Baziotes. In addition, Dehner acquired a
copy of Ernst Haeckel's 1904 Kunstformen der Natur?1 and she began to in-
troduce diatoms [unicellular organisms] into her abstractions on paper. Us-
ing improvisational methods, and engaging in a "wet on wet" approach, she
combined "gestural" passages with areas of tightly interlaced structures de-
lineated in pen and ink. Dehner exhibited her work only a few times in the
19405. In 1944, for example, Smith wrote to her while she was in California,
"I'm glad you are getting reception with your work. It adds zest to working
doesn't it."32 She was in a number of group exhibitions in these years, and in
1949 the Audubon Artists awarded her a first prize for drawing. By the late
forties, Dehner was determined to devote more of her efforts to her artistic ca-
reer. She gained confidence in a new direction for her art, and created many

634 1990s
successful abstractions in gouache and ink. Unlike the surrealists, Dehner, who
adopted biomorphic imagery, did not emphasize its disquieting aspects; rather,
she celebrated the animate energy of unicellular life forms.
The art department at Skidmore College organized a solo exhibition of her
drawings and paintings in 1948, and David Smith wrote the following intro-
duction for the exhibition catalogue:

When I first met Dorothy Dehner she had been a successful dancer, she had
been to Europe and studied art for a year, and though younger, she was the
most sophisticated student I had met at the Art Students League where we
both were studying. Throughout our rough times and the good times, she has
painted seriously, and has been my most encouraging critic. I have always
intended that her career be as important as mine, whether it was in our stu-
dent days when I drove a taxi or when we lived in St. Thomas, Brooklyn,
Athens or Bolton Landing. In her work there are qualities of the dance, delica-
cies, refinements, and harmonies which I greatly admire because they are so
far from my own world. Certainly her paintings show the distinction of her
personality and direction.33

This statement represents a generous moment on Smith's part, for when

Dehner finally began to show her work more regularly in New York City, their
relationship fell apart. On one occasion Smith threatened to tear up all of her
drawings when she was transporting them to New York for consideration in
the Whitney Annual Exhibition.34
Both Dehner and Smith experimented with wax as a method of three-
dimensional construction in the 19405. But Dehner worked in secret, destroy-
ing her attempts to make sculpture before Smith could see them because she
was worried about his reaction. Yet her desire to make sculpture—dormant
since her disappointment with the sculpture instructors at the Art Students
League more than a decade earlier—became a burning necessity by the final
years of the decade. Making sculpture became an obsession—as indicated by
the dialogue that ensued when Smith admired one of her drawings. In 1949,
Dehner produced Star Gage, a watercolor of vividly-hued washes punctuated
by dots of bright yellow and streaking diagonals. Jagged lines in the composi-
tion evoke the constellations of the evening sky. Dehner recalled that Smith
came into her studio, spoke favorably of the drawing, and said that he would
like to make a sculpture related to it. When Dehner proposed a collaboration,
Smith declared himself "too jealous" for that.35 Three months later, Smith
made a painted steel sculpture also entitled Star Cage that was undoubtedly

1990s 635
 indebted to Dehner's drawing. Although Smith never acknowledged the con-
nection, clearly the illusion of interpenetrating planes was transformed into
linear elements of steel punctuated by small rectangles.
Nineteen-fifty was a crucial year for the personal and artistic lives of Dehner
and Smith. They had already moved into their newly-constructed house in
Bolton Landing with many conveniences, such as hot and cold running water.
In 1950 Smith was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the first time, and it
was renewed the following year, giving him a measure of financial freedom.
His works were beginning to sell. During his previous years with Marian
Willard Gallery, there had been few sales. He was 44 years old and no longer
so reliant on Dehner's money. And he was having an affair with Jean Freas,
a student at Sarah Lawrence College, where Smith began teaching in 1948.
By November of 1950 Dehner left Bolton Landing after a violent outburst
which left her with several broken ribs. Two years later Dehner and Smith
were divorced.
It is not easy to understand why Dorothy Dehner remained with David
Smith for 23 years; reading her letters provides some insight. In an unpub-
lished note of 1947 Dehner wrote:

David ... today is your birthday—happy birthday David—creator—genius is

the vulgar word—I watch you make and I watch you do—and I am filled with
wonder ... and pride—it is rare to watch that quality—so few have it—and I
am privileged. Thank you David. With the creation of your work comes life
to the world.36

When Dorothy Dehner left their home due to a violent episode (though there
had been previous incidents) Smith realized that her departure was a perma-
nent one. Within months he wrote sadly to Dehner:

Dear Dorothy,
So many times I feel so sorry for the hurts I've been guilty of in your life.
I truly hope you have happiness and tranquility in your new way. Just keep
painting, you've found your stride.37

In May of 1952, Smith wrote to Dehner: "I saw your show Tuesday when I
was down [to New York City] for the one day.... It was very fine. I'm sure you
will get very good reviews and I hope sales too 1 hope your breaks are bet-
ter than mine."38
In April 1953, Smith married Jean Freas. The following year Rebecca was
born, and fifteen months later a second daughter, Candida. The time spent to-

636 1990s
gether with his young wife was not to be much longer; Smith and Freas were
not divorced officially until 1961, but there was a permanent separation from
1958, when Freas returned to Washington, B.C. The two daughters remained
with their mother, although they did visit their father in Bolton Landing.
What was the effect of Dehner and Smith's separation on their work? For
Smith, the 19508 was a time of great productivity; this might additionally be
attributed to the stimulation of a romance with a woman more than twenty-
three years his junior, the birth of two daughters, as well as his growing finan-
cial success. The work become large, less deliberate and less cumbersome,
more abstract and bold. Smith's abstract constructions of the 19505 began
to feature "found objects." His "line drawings in space" replace the heavy-
handed symbolism of 19405 pieces with more attention to geometric forms.
Breaking from the planarity of earlier constructions, he produced three-
dimensional totems that result from the incorporation of machine parts and
address the methods and materials of their creation. Smith's concerns with
the spatial environment expand beyond those of the late 19405. Like such Ab-
stract Expressionists painters as Willem de Kooning, he removed the focal ar-
eas from the center of the composition, and transferred biomorphic elements
out to the periphery. Open frameworks were fully explored. In addition, the
welding of steel satisfied a psychological need for Smith, responding to the
work ethic of his Midwestern family, and also affirming masculine associa-
tions by identifying with industrial workers, and seeking their acceptance.
It might be necessary to challenge such traditional notions of masculinity
in dealing with Smith, who sought in fact to "masquerade" as a blue-collar
worker who made art.
Smith's sculptures soon came to occupy the viewer's space rather than be-
ing isolated on a pedestal, thereby asserting their psychological separation—
or otherness. By the mid 19505, however, Smith's vision began to involve pro-
liferation of his work. He started to install his sculptures on bases of cast
stone, welding them to their bases, and distributing them throughout the roll-
ing hills surrounding his home. On a practical level, these installations can be
seen as a necessity because of lack of storage space. But the dispersal all over
his property recognized a need to compensate for his loneliness. On a 1958
visit by Dehner to Bolton Landing, after his breakup with Jean Freas, Smith
referred to these sculptures in the fields as "girls" who would never run away.39
Titles suggest that among the sculptures of the last decade of his life many
should be viewed as female. For example, Smith produced a totemic work he
called The Iron Woman, 1954-58, referencing the name given decades earlier

1990s 637
 by Dehner to his studio at Bolton Landing. In 1957, Smith also created a to-
temic figure in silver he called Lonesome Man. This was constructed the same
year as a major retrospective of his work at The Museum of Modern Art, when
he should have been satisfied with the attention he was receiving. By the time
of his death in 1965, sculpture covered the Adirondack foothills surrounding
his house and studio in Bolton Landing.
In the final decade of his life, Smith achieved the recognition he had sought
throughout his artistic career.40 His personal life was still troubled, however,
and it was in these late years that Smith turned to Dehner again as a friend. He
saw her solo exhibitions, and encouraged art critics to see her work.41 She
visited him at Bolton Landing and they corresponded, primarily concerning
their art, but Smith commented on the loneliness he felt in these final years.
Smith wrote to Dehner on April 24,1961, "I'm working tonight because I'm
lonely and art is my only friend."42 Dehner wrote back six days later: "Hope
the mood of lonliness [sic] has passed. I am lonesome too ... in the middle of
10,000,000 people."43
Dorothy Dehner in the early 19505 realized that her departure from Bolton
Landing would be a permanent change. She also knew that she would finally
be able to pursue her art with freedom from the taunts of Smith.44 In 1952, she
had her first solo exhibition in New York, and began to study engraving at
Atelier 17. Dehner never completed any sculptures until after her divorce from
Smith, but by the mid 19505 she began to create small sculptures in wax,
adopting Smith's "drawing in space" approach. In 1955 Dehner started work-
ing at the Sculpture Center, and had a few pieces cast in bronze. Dehner re-
married in 1955, and in her second husband, Ferdinand Mann, she found a
partner supportive of her creative identity. Sculpture dominated Dehner's in-
terest after 1955, complemented by drawings and prints. Reviews of her first
New York exhibitions were very positive. In 1959, for example, James Mellow
wrote: "Cast by the lost-wax process, these sculptures in bronze have a sturdy
visual elegance."45 Although they were not together, Dehner's works from the
late 19505 and 19605 still share Smith's interest in totemic forms. Landscape
and still life subjects are also present (as they were for Smith) but Dehner's ap-
proach and imagery take more personal directions. In particular, the surface
of the bronze became all important. At times Dehner even incised hidden
messages into her sculpture, and worked the surface both before and after
the casting. By the late 19503, her work had increased in scale, and her per-
sonal imagery, with mythological and organic references, was developing. In

638 1990s
contrast to Smith, Dehner never welded steel. Few women of her generation
worked in direct metal, and Dehner preferred to work in wax as a preliminary
to bronze casting.46 In practical terms this method limited the potential scale
of her sculptures. Only when she engaged a fabricator in the mid 19805 did
Dehner's scale increase dramatically, and welded steel and eventually alu-
minum sculptures were constructed.
Even from the first, Dehner's works had a monumental aspect. What paral-
lels can be found with David Smith, and what do they reveal about artist-
couple relationships in general and theirs in particular? The monumentality
of Smith's sculpture is at times an illusion. Photographs of Smith's work made
by the artist himself were often take from below eye level to give them a power-
ful and heroic quality, exaggerating their flatness and their industrial an-
tecedents. In actuality his works are seldom larger than human size and often,
like Abstract Expressionist paintings, record the hand of the artist, suggesting
an intimacy that has rich associations with his life. Formal concerns, some of
them arising out of his working methods, are combined with intensity, sensu-
ality, and a search for the metaphorical image of the self. As Smith himself
said, "The work is a statement of identity."47
Although initially working smaller in scale, Dehner also demonstrated how
the appearance of monumentality can combine with intimacy and spatial com-
plexity. After a decade her work approached human proportions, and her
later heroic sculptures in fabricated steel stood up to twenty feet high. Like
Smith's her sculptures balance formal issues with self-referential, personal,
and metaphorical imagery. The serenity and inner harmony that came to Deh-
ner's life and art are amply reflected in her achievements of the 19605 and 19705,
particularly in her productivity and ambitious exhibition history.
Dehner's sculptures shared with those of Smith an interest in contour rather
than mass. She assembled her works of disparate parts, and approached the
use of wax as a constructivist using planar elements. Bronze casting provided
a certain elegance and refinement to her work. Beginning with her use of sand
in her compositions of the 19305, textural effects were explored by the artist in
order to bring attention to the surfaces of her works. In the 19605, she braised
and drew on wax slabs, introducing other textures by adding small pieces of
metal. To create a lively visual effect, she used faceted elements forming planes
that shimmer when reflecting light.
Dehner's abstract sculptures represent a personal iconography that recurs
over the decades. Imagery of circles, moons, ellipses, wedges, and arcs abounds.

1990s 639
 Like other artists of the New York School, Dehner made sculpture that ac-
knowledges that abstract symbols could communicate content that is private,
but holding universal implications.
In 1965, a major retrospective of Dehner's art was held at the Jewish Mu-
seum in New York City. The coherence of her artistic achievements was a
tribute to her progress in a medium48 she had only seriously explored for a
decade, and outside the direct influence of David Smith. Dehner now had
mastered the technical skills of creating sculpture, and had begun to make
larger pieces of singular presence and power. The scale of her works in-
creased as well as its monumentality. She evoked architectural forms, and
some of the totems became human-scale. David Smith visited the exhibition
and wrote proudly to Dehner:

Dear Dorothy,
Thanks for the catalog. I had gone to St. Thomas for 9 days, returned on a
Sunday night, went to Museum saw your show on Monday. It was great—you
had so many pieces ... you have sure been working hard and prodigiously.49

Certainly Smith's comment, "I have always intended that her career be as im-
portant as mine" (quoted previously) is affirmed by his messages to critics re-
garding Dehner's work, and his correspondence with her offering advice and
encouraging comments. For example, after her departure from Bolton Land-
ing, Smith wrote to Dehner in 1951: "Don't worry Dorothy—you can get an-
other show if this falls thru."50 In April of 1965—weeks before his death in a
truck accident—Smith wrote to Dehner about her intention to find a new dealer:
"Don't leave [Willard] until you locate better—Don't announce anything in
advance My own feeling about your work is to hold to the importances—
don't elaborate—don't art it up—don't put things in to design it ... such
things detract from the raw essence of content."51
In 1944, Smith had written to Dehner, "I owe my direction to you." The
twenty-three years Dehner and Smith spent together were mutually produc-
tive and critical. For Smith his marriage to Dehner coincided with the forma-
tive period and maturation of his sculpture, and his development of a per-
sonal style, which would later be fully shaped by his years in the Adirondack
Mountains. Landscapes and figures were his constant themes, and Dehner
was his companion in this search for significant form. For Dehner there was
much to learn: Smith encouraged taking risks; he stimulated their discussion
about new directions for abstract sculpture and painting. Both emerged from
their years together as mature artists. But Dehner had not realized the sculp-

640 1990s
tur al implications of her previous explorations with abstraction. After she left
Smith, and grew in confidence, her sculpture surpassed the human scale fa-
vored by Smith during the 1950s, taking on the heroic proportions found in
the work of younger artists of the 19703 and 19805.
With the intention of dismantling stereotypes about artist-couples, this
study has demonstrated how a woman artist who was often viewed as a fol-
lower of a creative genius was actually a full-fledged collaborator. There is no
question that David Smith's relationship with Dorothy Dehner was equally
significant for his art as vice-versa. Their life together is specifically reflected
in their shared imagery and the direction taken in their drawings, paintings,
and sculptures. Artistic issues of gender and identity were deeply intertwined
in their marriage of more than two decades.

Notes

1. I wish to thank the late Dorothy Dehner for many interviews dating from 1978 to
1993 that form the basis of this essay. Special thanks to the staff of the Watson Li-
brary, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Research Council of Rutgers
University. A grant from the Getty Research Institute enabled me to use Special
Collections and library resources, for which I am grateful.
2. See, for example, Lee Hall, Elaine and Bill, Portrait of a Marriage: The Lives of
Willem and Elaine de Kooning (New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
3. Andrea Gabor, Einstein's Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great
Twentieth-Century Women (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995), 35~99- The ex-
ception is Ellen Landau, who wrote numerous essays on the art of Pollock and
Krasner, including one in which she explores Krasner's collages made from frag-
ments of Pollock's discarded works. See Ellen G. Landau, "Channeling Desire:
Lee Krasner's Collage of the Early 19505," Woman's Art Journal 18 (Fall 1997-
Winter 1998): 27-30; Ellen G. Landau and Sandor Kuthy, Lee Krasner, Jackson
Pollock: Kunstlerpaare, Kunstlerfreunde, dialogues, d'artistes, resonances (Bern:
Kunstmuseum Bern, 1988). See also: Ellen G. Landau, "Jackson Pollock and Lee
Krasner: The Erotics of Influence," in Pollock's America (Geneva: Skira, 2002),
173-188.
4. For other artist-couples discussed in this context see Whitney Chadwick and
Isabelle De Courtivron, eds., Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Part-
nership (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
5. For example, Dehner herself wrote: "About 1931 John Graham and his wife Eli-
nor, both artists, bought a farm a few miles from ours, and we saw them con-
stantly in summer and developed a close relationship. Graham had a profound
influence on our thinking about art, and David had credited him often for the im-
portance of that friendship." Dehner's statement in David Smith ofBolton Land-
ing: Sculpture and Drawings (Glens Falls, New York: The Hyde Collection, July i-

1990s 641
 September 30,1973), n.p. Also see Garnett McCoy, éd., David Smith (New York:
Praeger, 1973), 19-20.
6. E. A. Carmean states: "The literature on these three Circles makes continued ref-
erence to their relationship to the target paintings of Kenneth Noland who was
a close friend of Smith's." See E. A. Carmean, David Smith (Washington, D.C.:
National Gallery of Art, 1982), 133-137.
7. John Yau, for example, in reviewing Dehner's exhibition at A. M. Sachs Gallery
noted: "During their marriage Dehner continued to paint but only occasionally
exhibited in group shows. One can sense even from these bare facts how domi-
nant a force Smith must have been in Dehner's life. Fortunately the story does
not end here. For the last three decades Dehner has been making sculpture. And
while connections between Dehner's sculpture and Smith's can be made in
terms of their frontality and figurative allusions, the comparison tends to di-
minish her own considerable accomplishments." John Yau, "Dorothy Dehner at
A. M. Sachs," Art in America 69 (April 1981): 145-146.
8. Grace Glueck wrote in 1970: "A shift to pure abstraction, now, in the work of
Dorothy Dehner (first wife of the late sculptor David Smith). In her spare, yet
spirited cast bronzes at the Willard Gallery, she continues her explorations of
abstracted landscape themes and totemic upright forms.... So 'shaped' and de-
cisive and eminently collectible is the work of Miss Dehner (who's had at least
forty one-man [sic] shows, including a ten-year retrospective at the Jewish Mu-
seum in 1965)." Grace Glueck, "Collectible versus Conceptual: New York Gal-
lery Notes," Art in America 58 (May 1970): 32. This review is the first I have lo-
cated that mentions the connection of Dehner to David Smith. At the time of her
1965 retrospective at the Jewish Museum no reviews mentioned Dehner's mar-
riage to Smith.
9. For a discussion of the critical reactions to women artists among the Abstract
Expressionists see, for example, Joan Marter, "Identity Crisis: Abstract Expres-
sionism and Woman Artists of the 19508," in Women and Abstract Expressionism
(Baruch College, City University of New York, 1997), 3-8.
10. В. Н. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1972), 245-
11. Three trustees were arranged to manage the estate until Candida and Rebecca
were 25. Clement Greenberg, Robert Motherwell, and the attorney Ira Lowe
were selected by Smith.
12. Dorothy Dehner, "Medals for Dishonor: The Fifteen Medallions of David Smith,"
ArtJournal 37 (Winter 1977-78): 144-150.
13. John P. Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1971) (Introduction by Dorothy Dehner, first published as
"John Graham: A Memoir,"Leonardo 2 [1969], 287-293). Dorothy Dehner, "Mem-
ories of Jan Matulka," in Patterson Sims, Merry A. Foresta et ú.^Jan Matulka
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), 77-80.
14. See Rosalind Krauss, Terminal Ironworks: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1971); Garnett McCoy, éd., David Smith (New York: Praeger,
1973); Karen Wilkin, David Smith: The Formative Years (Edmonton, Alberta:

642 1990s
 Edmonton Art Gallery, 1981); Stanley Marcus, David Smith: The Sculptor and
His Work (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Karen Wilkin, David Smith
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1984).
15. In an interview Dehner spoke of the $2,000 a year income she had from her fam-
ily. In the early years of her marriage to Smith she also earned money by making
small illustrations for the New Yorker magazine, interview with Dehner, January
7,1992.
16. See David Smith Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Roll NDi, frames 9,14-16.
17. In a letter to Moholy-Nagy dated c. April i, 1944, Smith wrote, "Dear Moholy, I
want to thank you for your interest, but I have decided that from now on I will do
only my own work; at least as long as I am financially able." See Garnett McCoy,
éd., David Smith (New York: Praeger, 1973), 195.
18. Smith said in an interview, "I talked with painters and I belong with painters, in
a sense, and all my early friends were painters because we all studied together."
McCoy, David Smith, 174.
19. Karen Wilkin, David Smith: Two into Three Dimensions (Miami Beach: Grass-
field Press, 2000), 13.
20. Ibid., 10-11.
21. David Smith wrote to Jean Paul Slusser of the University of Michigan Museum of
Art: "I have been thinking about Tahstvaat.... Actually the name was given to it
by my wife, who paints under the name of Dorothy Dehner." David Smith to
Slusser, April 1950 from the David Smith Papers, Archives of American Art,
quoted in McCoy, David Smith, 204.
22. David Smith to William Blake, c. 1940, David Smith Papers, Archives of Ameri-
can Art, Smithsonian Institution, NDi, frame 212. For additional discussion of
these medals see: Jeremy Lewison, David Smith: Medals for Dishonor 1937-1940
(Leeds City Art Galleries, 1991); and Dore Ashton and Michael Brenson, David
Smith Medals for Dishonor (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated,
1996).
23. Marian Willard to David Smith, June 12,1941, David Smith Papers, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Roll NDi, frame 240.
24. In various interviews with the author and others, Dehner spoke of the couple's
involvement with the Communist Party in the USA during the late 19305. For ex-
ample, Paula Wisotzki writes of David Smith: "Ample evidence exists to confirm
the influence of communist thought on his life and art. Smith's letters and note-
book entries from 1935 to 1946 indicate that he regularly sought out the writings
of communists and fellow travelers.... At issue, however, is not only the depth,
but also the longevity of Smith's allegiance to the Communist Party." Paula
Wisotzki, "Strategic Shifts: David Smith's China Medal Commission," The Ox-
ford Art Journal 17 (1994): 63.
25. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, October 5,1983.
26. "Smith's violent temperament grew over the years, and Dorothy became unable
to cope with it." Marcus, David Smith, 81.
27. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York, December 13,1981.

1990s 643
 28. In interviews with Dehner she spoke of incidents where David Smith severely
criticized her work, and later would seek forgiveness declaring her the "best
woman artist" around. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York City, June 13,
1985-
29. Contrary to the reasons given in the David Smith literature, Dehner later ac-
knowledged that military physicians questioned Smith about his violent tenden-
cies, and ultimately declared him unfit to serve. Interview with Dehner, October
5,1983-
30. Wilkin,27.
31. Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen de Natur (Leipzig and Wien: Verlag des Biblio-
graphischen, 1904).
32. Letter from David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, June 19, 1944. Archives of the
Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.
33. Statement by David Smith in Dorothy Dehner: Drawings and Paintings, Skid-
more College, Saratoga Springs, New York, December 6-14,1948, n. p.
34. Interview with Dehner, December 9,1979. Dehner repeated this story in many
subsequent interviews.
35. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York, October 5,1983.
36. Unpublished note of 1947, Dorothy Dehner Papers, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, Roll N0298, frame 882.
37. Quoted from David Smith letter to Dehner, c. 1951 in Dorothy Dehner Papers,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Roll N0298, frame 1709.
38. Letter from David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, May 7, 1952, Archives of the
Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.
39. Interview with Dorothy Dehner, New York City, December 6,1979.
40. David Smith had regular solo exhibitions, he represented the United States at
the Sâo Paulo Biennial, and twice at the Venice Bienniale. Smith was chosen for
the second Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany and in 1957 MOMA or-
ganized a 25-year retrospective of his work. By 1958 he had begun to make sculp-
tures in stainless steel and the Cubi joined with the Zig series and the Voltri's to
acclaim.
41. In a letter to Irving Sandier dated January 26,1959, Smith wrote: "Also enclosed
2+ announcements of Dorothy Dehner—See her show at Willard, may have bet-
ter photos and you might like her work. Her work quite small. And she has her
own nature, regards, David D." Irving Sandier Papers, Special Collections, The
Getty Research Institute, 2000.M.43, box 30/20.
42. David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, April 24,1961. Archives of the Dorothy Dehner
Foundation for the Visual Arts.
43. Letter from Dorothy Dehner to David Smith, April 30, 1961. Archives of the
Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.
44. In 1950 Dehner enrolled at Skidmore College, and quickly obtained a degree;
then came to New York City where she taught art at various private schools.
45. James R. Mellow, "New York Exhibitions: Dorothy Dehner," Arts Magazine 33
(February 1959): 57.

644 1990s
46. Claire Falkenstein may be something of an exception to this—and apparently Ger-
trude Greene experimented with welding in the 19305.
47. Wükin, David Smith, 9.
48. David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, April 9,1965 in archives of Dorothy Dehner
Foundation for the Visual Arts.
49. David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, 1951. Archives of the Dorothy Dehner Founda-
tion for the Visual Arts.
50. Letter from David Smith to Dorothy Dehner, April 13, 1965, archives of the
Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.
51. Smith wrote: "Dottie, your letter of last Saturday night about how I had made
you a better person was very touching. You've made me too—I owe my direction
to you." Letter to Dorothy Dehner, June 11, 1944 in Dorothy Dehner Papers,
Archives of American Art, Roll N0298, frame 1638.

ROSALIND E KRAUSS The Crisis of the Easel Picture

I remember the expression on Lee Krasner's face that afternoon in her apart-
ment. It was late spring of 1982. We were meeting over our shared conster-
nation at E. A. Carmean's efforts to link Jackson Pollock's black paintings not
just circumstantially but thematically—liturgically—to an abortive church proj-
ect by Tony Smith. Carmean's essay, published in French in the catalogue of
the big Pollock exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, was now to appear in Art
in America, and the magazine's editor, Betsy Baker, aware of Lee's as well as
my own vigorous objections, had asked me to write an accompanying reply.1
As we settled into our chairs Lee exploded. "First it was Carl Jung and
now, and now," she said, "it's Jesus!" The opening syllable of that name was
given as a protracted moan; but the second snapped the word shut: Je-e-e-zus.
It was not Jewish rage that sounded behind her pronunciation—although there
was some of that—but high modernist exasperation. As with so many other
artists and intellectuals who had developed in the 19305, modernism was for
her a creed, a belief, a deepest form of commitment. It was both a politics
and a religion; and Lee, in the closeness of her relationship with Clement
Greenberg from those days, would have agreed with the kind of thing he was

SOURCE: Pepe Karmel, éd., Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (Museum of Modern Art,
X
999X 155~79- Reprinted with the permission of Rosalind E. Krauss.

645
 expressing when he wrote, "The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo,
but kitsch," with the result that "today we look to socialism simply for the pres-
ervation of whatever living culture"—by which he meant avant-garde culture
—"we have right now."2
That scene returns to me as I puzzle over The Museum of Modern Art's
Pollock exhibition, in all its gorgeousness, its generosity, and its perversity. I
imagine Lee's response: "First it was Jung, then it was Jesus, but now it's ..."
who shall we say? Leonardo? Michelangelo? Raphael?
The climax of Pepe Karmel's essay in the catalogue makes the connection,
and the claim, in its barest form. Having tracked Pollock's working process by
means of digitized composites built up out of Hans Namuth's complete in-
ventory of still and cinematic photography, and having shown the occurrence
of vertical, figurelike constellations at various levels of the work (both at the
beginning, where Pollock is marking bare canvas, and at intermediary stages,
where they are superimposed over the developing web), Karmel freely identi-
fies these vertical bundles as a form of human figuration and characterizes the
line with which Pollock executed them as "a controlled and deliberate" mode
of drawing. And from this presentation of Pollock as a draftsman, with the
necessary control and deliberation that drawing's access to the representation
of the figure requires, Karmel slips over into the domain of the Renaissance.
Quoting William Rubin's remark that "Pollock's drawing derives from a tra-
dition in which space is not thought of as an autonomous void but in reci-
procity with solids," and further that Pollock's lines still carry "the connota-
tions of dissolved sculptural conceptions," Karmel asks triumphantly, "Need
it be said that the kind of space that exists 'in reciprocity with solids' is pre-
cisely the illusionistic space of Renaissance art?"3
Karmel does not of course just leave this characterization—in all its coun-
terintuitive strangeness—at that. The notion that Pollock's space is nothing
but another version of Renaissance illusionism would certainly play havoc with
the idea of his work as revolutionary, or as having broken through to some
new level of cultural experience. So the last three paragraphs of Karmel's es-
say hedge this a bit, reshaping this space according to something akin to late
Monet or early Cubism. "Up close," he says, "each line reasserts itself as a po-
tential contour, or a sculptural shape in its own right," yet as our eyes move
over the surface, "new contours emerge as old ones merge back into the web."4
Now, although Greenberg also sometimes used Analytic Cubism as a meta-
phor for what was happening in Pollock's work, from 1947 on he consistently
saw Pollock's importance as pointing "a way beyond the easel, beyond the

646 1990s
mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps."5 This idea of escaping the
tradition of the easel painting not only became Greenberg's central critical
model for explaining Pollock's radicality in the years between 1947 and 1950,
but would be the support for everything he saw as valuable in painting after
Pollock. In 1948 he linked the attack on the framed, illusionistic picture to a
kind of "allover, polyphonic" address which, in its "hallucinated uniformity,"
went even beyond Arnold Schoenberg's notion of compositional equivalence.6
This is to say, he focused his critique on what he saw as the conventions aris-
ing from the scale of the easel picture, its portability seeming to call for a cho-
reography between centers of interest inside the field and the frame that bound
or enclosed it. The allover picture dispersed those centers, just as it suggested
the dissolution of the specific medium of easel painting into a larger category
that would include architectural friezes and oriental scrolls or carpets.7 It was
not just the shared flatness of these objects that he found satisfying but the
openness of their surfaces to inspection—what he called their "positivity."8
By 1955, however, Greenberg had refined this idea of the repetitiveness
or polyphony of the allover picture to what he had begun to see as the deep
source of its transgressiveness, which was the elimination of value contrast:
the abrogation of that linear armature of dark against light that had formed the
structure of easel painting from the Renaissance onward. Saying that Cub-
ism's parody of shading had nonetheless sustained the importance of light
and shadow, Greenberg saw in the total suppression of value contrast "a new
kind of flatness, one that breathes and pulsates," one in which lines might
divide "but do not enclose or bound," and, further, one that creates "an en-
vironment" more than a picture. Pollock's great works of 1950, he said, had
participated in just this radical condition. Looking back to 1955, Greenberg
wrote, "In One and Lavender Mist Jackson Pollock had pulverized value con-
trasts in a vaporous dust of interfused lights and darks in which every sugges-
tion of a sculptural effect was obliterated."9
If I am going over this all-too-familiar ground, it is to underscore the stakes
involved in promoting the idea of Pollock as a draftsman, of deciding to read
his line as contour rather than its dissolution, of tying Pollock back into tradi-
tional practice through any one of the number of strategies that one finds in
the context of this exhibition.
One of these strategies occurred in the placement of the three drawing
cabinets within the exhibition, the middle one grouping work from a three-
year period, from 1944 to 1946, and presenting it as though it were a sketchlike
prelude to the onset of the classic drip pictures of 1947. Indeed this fore-

1990s 647
 grounding of the sketch—with all its connotations of the possibility of explo-
ration and variation, as an idea is moved through the successive phases of its
development—is central to the picture of the traditional artist's deliberation
and control, which is to say the picture of the artist as an intentional being.
That Pollock would have produced variations on essentially the same sketch-
like armature—with changes rung on what is limited to its stylistic decor, now
more of André Masson, now of Wols—implies just such a picture. It is only
when we ask what it means that this same armature recurs periodically over
three or more years, rather than in a single run of work, that it begins to feel
more like a rote formula to which he had recourse, even unconscious recourse;
like the repeated looping constellations that had, by 1943, become so auto-
matic a formal pattern for him that he could paint the twenty-foot-long Peggy
Guggenheim mural during a furious one-night stand of work.10
The emphasis on drawing not as this kind of device but as a form of con-
trolled variation, as the very vehicle of intentionality, is carried in the exhibi-
tion to the curious display of a group of conservators' failed attempts to imi-
tate Pollock's line. In the catalogue it is to be found in the repeated illustration
of sumptuous life-sized details of the drip pictures, as though in the very
gamut that the building up of the web can run, we will encounter—now dis-
placed to the technique of depositing the paint itself—the controlled variabil-
ity that drawing brings to a given conception. Thus through the twelve details
of the drip pictures (there are only two for work after 1950 and only four for
what precedes 1947), we are invited to explore at leisure the brushed scumbles
of wet-into-wet, the high-sitting ropes of tube-squeezed paint, the scabbing
and lifting of pockets of coagulation, the pulled surface of aluminum deposit,
the tarry pocketing within the matte graphics of pigment seeping into its
ground, the rivulets and spatters, the blurring, the marbleizing, the staining,
the running, the bleeding.
It would be churlish not to be grateful for details such as these; but it would
be naïve not to understand their gravitational pull. For the way they work,
along with the arguments in the catalogue texts and everything else to which
I've alluded, is to present Pollock as a draftsman, beginning—as one could
claim is true for the whole tradition of Western art—with line as the founda-
tion of expression and representation, indeed, of art's very claim to seriousness.
But Greenberg had lodged Pollock's claim to seriousness in negating this
tradition, or rather in transcending the oppositions on which it was founded.
If he spoke of Pollock's line as malerische—invoking Heinrich Wolfflin's word,

648 1990s
which went beyond the "painterly" to encompass the idea of "color"11—it
was because he saw this line not just paradoxically turning against itself but
dialectically sublating itself, becoming one with its opposite in a way that
moved both line and color beyond the physicality of their material substance
and into that particular phenomenological condition—or mode of address—
he would call first "hallucinated ," then "optical."12
Two other major lines of attack on the idea of Pollock as a draftsman fol-
lowed Greenberg's. One was produced by the action painting model, which
continued into the choreographic or "Happenings" idea of Pollock's legacy
promoted by Allan Kaprow, among others.13 Since in this model the work is
acting between art and life, it relegates line to nothing but the residue of an ac-
tivity of marking real space, rendering the whole question of drawing simply
irrelevant.
The other line of attack was the "anti-form" or informe interpretation first
laid out by Robert Morris in the ig6os14 and further theorized by myself and
Yve-Alain Bois in the iggos.15 Since this position has been reductively and
misleadingly presented in the Pollock catalogue—as in the critical literature
generated by the exhibition—and since it will form the basis of what I have
to say here, it is (alas) necessary to summarize it. Briefly, it is the idea that
Pollock's line, in undoing the traditional job of drawing (which is to create
contour and bound form, thereby allowing for the distinction between figure
and ground), struck not only against drawing's object—which is form—but
against form's matrix, which is verticality. Pollock's line produced the unheard-
of condition of burrowing itself into the domain of the horizontal. That the
import of the work should be this newly vectored horizontal dimension was
testified to by what we could call a series of strong misreadings that developed
in the ten years following Pollock's death. The "strong misreading"—the con-
cept of the critic Harold Bloom—is not a misunderstanding on the part of a
younger artist in his or her relation to powerful older one, but rather some-
thing more like a perverse, but very canny, deep understanding, which liber-
ates from within the target work a potential (often anarchic or transgressive)
that had been hidden or obscured by the official, even self-professed, idea of
the older artist's meaning.16 In accordance with this, one could notice that art-
ists as seemingly different as Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Morris were
drawing the same interpretive conclusion, based on the singularity of Pollock's
stroke and the way this stroke testifies to its own conditions of production:
that Pollock's importance was lodged in an axial rotation of painting out of

1990s 649
 the vertical domain of the visual field and onto the horizontal vector of what I
began to call (with one eye riveted on the stunning analyses of Georges Bataille)
formlessness.
Thus, though the particularities of the interpretive connection to Pollock
might differ—Twombly reading the aggressiveness of Pollock's stroke as graf-
fiti; Warhol recoding its liquidity as peeing; Morris understanding its perfor-
mative implications as unmaking or cutting—and though the mediums used
to instantiate these readings might range from painting to sculpture, all three
comprehend the horizontal itself as the condition of defeating form.
As Twombly develops the graffiti mark—from a mid-1950s expression of it
as violence done to the creamy body of the pictorial surface by scoring and
lacerating this physical ground, to a late-19505 implication of it as a scatter of
genital organs, to the early-igoos production of it as the scatological result of
the corps morcelé—the attack that graffiti consistently performs is on the bodily
gestalt: its visuality, its verticality, and its Prágnanz (or hanging-together ness).17
It is the failure of this unity that allows for the axis of instinctual behavior—a
horizontal axis—to preside over the body, now reconsidered as the domain of
the part object.
For Warhol, on the other hand, the testimony of the liquid puddles and
stains on Pollock's canvases (combined of course with the commentary of
Hans Namuth's photographs) renders these surfaces horizontal from the very
beginning, redoubling the implications of Pollock's process as choreographic
(as it is so often described in the critical literature). Further, his assumption
that the horizontal simply is the scatological (an assumption expressed in the
1961 "piss painting" and the later Oxidation series, 1977-78) liberates a differ-
ent form of violence from within this vector. Freud, in "Civilization and Its
Discontents," describes this kind of violence as homoerotic rivalry enacted by
peeing on the fire, in an unfettered instinctual drive that will subsequently be
sublimated into the cultural obligation to protect the fire—the verticality of its
flames now mirroring the erect posture of the civilized being.18
In Morris's case the nature of Pollock's stroke connected the "phenome-
nology of [its] making" to the pull of gravity, a force that produced the condi-
tion of the horizontal simultaneously with the scatter of formlessness. Morris
himself baptized this mode "anti-form." His own way of miming its opera-
tions was to follow the steps of Pollock's process by laying great rolls of felt
on the floor of his studio and veining their surfaces with an organized pattern
of cuts. Greenberg had explained that the brilliance of Pollock's line was its
avoidance of the hard edges that cut into space, thereby separating figure from

650 1990s
ground. Morris, by taking the idea of line-as-cutting right to the limit, pushed
it past the possibility of figuration, since as he lifted the felt from the floor,
gravity wrenched apart the very continuum of the vertical field within which
the gestalt could cohere, thereby cutting into the fabric of form.
The characterizations that have greeted this discussion have been, as I
said, reductive and caricatural, isolating the Warhol example as a way of inocu-
lating the entire analysis against its possible aesthetic relevance. Recoded
as an interpretation literalized around "abjection," "bodily excretion," and
"defilement," the complex structural issues of horizontality and the formless
have been read out simply as an argument for "anti-art."19
Rather than complaining, however, what I propose to do here is to make the-
oretical use of this reductiveness by tying it to another, parallel reflex that has
played an extremely important—and, I might say, increasingly destructive-
role in the development of the art of the last thirty years. This was the decision
to produce the most hypostatized possible reading of the outcome of what
Greenberg called the "crisis of the easel picture" by understanding the mod-
ernist idea of medium specificity as the radical contraction of specificity itself
into a physical characteristic (flatness) that would coincide with a material ob-
ject: the painting, which could now be seen as equivalent either to a sculpture
—Donald Judd's term was "specific object"—or to a readymade (Joseph Ko-
suth's reading of the monochrome).20 This literalized understanding emptied
out the idea of an aesthetic medium by simply making that medium synony-
mous with its material support.
The outcome of this understanding has been double. Either the very idea
of the medium is cashiered, since, contracted to the condition of a real object
in real space, the objectified work becomes the locus for operations on that
space in the mixture of mediums that defines the nature of the real world
itself—Judd's specific object now turned into the international practice of in-
stallation art. Or—in another way of declaring our current inhabitation of what
I would call a postmedium condition—the exploded concept of the medium is
simply folded into the fact of media, which is to say the complex vehicles of
broadcast, communications, and information technology.21 The result of this
semantic slippage between medium and media is that the loss of specificity is
presented as a natural outcome (after all the media, in the sense of "communi-
cations media," are already "mixed," the inevitable combination of word and
image); which means that the slide from the physical resistance of the aes-
thetic medium to the virtuality of the image world of media somehow goes
without saying.22

1990s 651
 That this reductive reading of the idea of a medium—of painting's specifi-
city as a medium—was done in Greenberg's name is particularly ironic. Be-
cause at the very moment when he was seeing that the modernist logic had led
to the point where "the observance of merely the two [constitutive conven-
tions or norms of painting—flatness and the delimitation of flatness] is enough
to create an object which can be experienced as a picture,"23 he had dissolved
that object in the fluid of what he was sometimes calling "openness," at others
"opticality," and ultimately, though perhaps least satisfactorily, "color field."
Which is to say that no sooner had Greenberg seemed to isolate the essence of
painting in flatness than he swung the axis of the field 90 degrees to the actual
picture surface to place all the import of painting on the vector that connects
viewer and object. In this he seemed to shift from the first norm (flatness) to
the second (the delimitation of flatness), and to give this latter a reading which
was not that of the bounding edge of the physical object but rather the projec-
tive resonance of the optical field itself—what in "Modernist Painting" he had
called the "optical third dimension" created by "the very first mark on a can-
vas [which] destroys its literal and utter flatness."24 This was the resonance he
imputed to the effulgence of pure color, which he spoke of not only as disem-
bodied and therefore purely optical, but also "as a thing that opens and ex-
pands the picture plane."25
Four things are to be observed in this axial rotation organized under the
rubric of "opticality." The first is that there is a shift from the object to the
subject, as the emphasis is displaced from a material surface to a mode of ad-
dress, namely viewing. The second is that the phenomenology of this mode of
address becomes the matrix out of which might be generated a new set of con-
ventions or norms, based not on the properties of the object but on the cate-
gories of the subject—such as Michael Fried's notion of a "primordial con-
vention that paintings are made to be beheld."26 The third is that insofar as
opticality is a visual vector, it is always subtended by a sense of verticality; that
is, the transcendental object it intends is something like the condition of pos-
sibility of form, or of the gestalt, and thus a kind of abstract matrix that is al-
ways organized as "fronto-parallel" to its viewer, the verticality of the field
that receives the gaze mirroring the posture of the upright subject.27
The fourth and last feature of this rotation is that, historically, it was meant
to sustain a continuation of painting not only beyond the crisis of the easel
picture but beyond the grip of the specific object. It was meant to allow some-
thing "powerful enough"—as Fried once put it—"to generate new conven-
tions, a new art."28 And this would mean that opticality was not simply afea-

652 1990s
ture of art, but had become a medium of art. It was, one could say, a supportive
matrix, the internal logic of which could be seen to generate its own expres-
sive possibilities or conventions. That neither Greenberg nor Fried explored
the optical as a new medium, but instead concentrated on color field painting
as something like a new possibility for abstraction, meant that a variety of
these expressive conditions were never theorized.29 The seriality uniformly
resorted to by the color field painters is a case in point. Another is the sense of
the oblique generated by fields that seemed always to be rotating away from
the plane of the wall and into depth, such that a perspectival rush in their sur-
faces caused critics like Leo Steinberg to speak of their sense of speed: what
he called the visual efficiency of the man in a hurry.30 I will return to these is-
sues later on.
At this point, however, I want to look at Pollock's own reaction to the crisis
of the easel picture, something that is possible to gauge from the two different
statements to which he was the signatory in the fall of 1947. Although both of
these located his work in relation to such a "crisis," they imagined this situa-
tion in diametrically opposite terms. This opposition underscores the diffi-
culty of seeing one person as the author of both declarations, and leads to the
locution about Pollock's merely being their "signatory." But then, at the vari-
ous junctures where he made any pronouncement about his work—including
these two—Pollock functioned as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy for the
opinions of others.
In the two cases—Pollock's application for a Guggenheim grant in 1947 and
his statement for the magazine Possibilities in 1947-48—the ventriloquists in
question were Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The former is clearly re-
sponsible for Pollock's announcement to the Guggenheim Foundation that he
intended "to paint large movable pictures which will function between the
easel and mural," as well as for his stated belief that "the easel picture [is] a
dying form and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or
mural."31 The latter, Rosenberg, acted as the goad to a quite different descrip-
tion of what a rejection of easel painting might entail; for in Possibilities, Pol-
lock's declaration is stripped of the earlier statement's sense of art-historical
imperative and located more in the domain of process. In separating his work
from the easel, Pollock speaks of tacking his unstretched lengths of canvas on
the floor, where he can work on them from all sides. Concluding that "this is
akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West," he strikes out into
an entirely different—what shall we call it?—dimension? modality? vector?
from Greenberg's verticalized notion of the wall picture.32 Instead he declares

1990s 653
 a connection to the horizontal, which Rosenberg would famously go on five
years later to elaborate as the arena of "action painting" but which the critic
was already groping his way toward in the late 19405 in relation to Existential-
ism's analysis of acts themselves.
So the difference between the two statements could just be chalked up to
the effect of Greenberg and Rosenberg arguing with one another over the
back, or out of the mouth, of Jackson Pollock, were it not for two additional
things. First there is the echo in the Possibilities statement—where Pollock an-
nounces his distance from "the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette,
brushes," stating instead his preference for "sticks, trowels, knives and drip-
ping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign
matter added"—of quite a different attack on the status of easel painting, this
one aligning the easel picture with class interests and locating alternatives to
it in relation to labor practice. The source for this vein of analysis is David
Siqueiros, with his famous slogans "Death to easel painting" and "Out with
the stick with the hairs on its end." It was Siqueiros, that is, who first made the
connection in Pollock's mind between easel painting as an elitist medium and
the floor as the locus of a practice that would defeat that medium.33
The second is that the example of Indian sand painting names as a me-
dium something as distinct from the easel picture as one can imagine produc-
ing at that moment; and that this new medium, to which Pollock fully oriented
himself beginning in January of 1947, is horizontal. Nothing about what Pol-
lock went on to do in his four-year-long campaign of working on the floor,
pushing to engage with ever larger formats that would strain all customary
forms of address to something like an easel picture both during the time of the
works' making and, by extension, over the course of their viewing, has much
to do—needless to say—with the precision and figurative character of Indian
sand painting. It is only the phenomenology of the axis of address that links
the one practice with the other. In fact Pollock would code horizontally into
his surfaces as the sand painters would never do. In constituting this code, the
puddling and scabbing that both result from and register the fact that the can-
vases were prone on the floor announce their difference from the celebrated
liquid runoffs that marked the other Abstract Expressionists' surfaces with an
index of their pictures' assumption of verticality, in process as well as in view-
ing. Pollock's decision to throw trash onto the surfaces of some of the works,
most famously Full Fathom Five (1947), is another declaration of horizontal-
ity, as are the palm prints of Number iAy 1948. Ironically these palm prints
have encouraged many recent Pollock scholars to reinstate his work's relation

654 1990s
to the figurative (itself always conducted within the vertical field of the visual
and of the gestalt), some projecting standing figures underneath the picture's
web, the palm prints the visible evidence of their need to escape.34 But the
strong misreading here was undoubtedly Jasper Johns's, as he expresses
the body registered in Number lA, 1948 via the response he himself makes in
the drawing Diver (1963), insisting thus on the falling body, the body sub-
merging itself within a medium that is horizontal.35
But can the horizontal itself be a medium, or are there insuperable difficul-
ties in referring to the horizontal axis in these terms? To speak of the horizon-
tality of Diver's medium is, of course, to enter the domain of metaphor and to
re-create the material surface over which Johns's hands passed as a horizontal
plane that is obdurately figurative in nature, transmuting the ashen velvet of
its charcoal into the transparency and flow of water. Does this mean that to ad-
mit this is to find ourselves in the position where either the horizontal is sim-
ply a metaphor (which is to say just another form of figuration) nestled within
the vertical axis of another medium, such as painting (which would be the po-
sition T. J. Clark takes in the discussion following his original presentation of
"Pollock's Abstraction"),36 or— as a function of Bataille's formless or Morris's
anti-form—the horizontal is so dedicated to the annihilation of all categories
and all structures that it cannot be linked to the redemptive aspirations of a
medium? Further, does a medium not have to have a technical, material sup-
port, such as canvas in the case of painting?
The point of thinking about two of the interpretive models of Pollock's
art in tandem—that of color field or opticality and that of formlessness or the
horizontal—becomes clear in relation to these questions. Just as opticality
dislodges the idea of the medium from a set of physical conditions and relo-
cates it within a phenomenological mode of address that can itself function as
the support for the medium, horizontality becomes such a phenomenological
vector once it articulates itself as a condition of the gravitational field, which is
to say, once its address can be felt to engage a distinct dimension of bodily ex-
perience and thus a specific form of intentionality. It is only from within this
dimension that the horizontal, as a medium, can be disengaged from other
horizontalized practices (like the flatbed picture plane, or the written field of
inscription) that nonetheless continue to base themselves within the figura-
tive. Similarly, only from within the phenomenological assumption that bod-
ily vectors are horizons of meaning will the horizontal-as-medium differenti-
ate itself from practices that assume the horizontal as real space, and thus as
the field within which to declare the suspension of the medium altogether—

1990s 655
 practices such as installation art, but not, as we will see in relation to the early
work of Richard Serra (below), earth or process art.
When I thought about horizontality as a medium in writing about Pollock
in the context of The Optical Unconscious, I saw it as something like a newly
isolated phenomenological vector that supported or enabled practice—not
only the practice of those 19605 artists who rang extraordinary changes on the
idea of horizontality by their own creative "misreadings" of Pollock's art, but
(moving into the tricky business of trying to determine Pollock's elusive in-
tentions) of Pollock as well. This, alas, was more of a negative demonstration
than in the cases of Twombly, Warhol, or Morris, since it turned on showing
that when Pollock lost touch with the import of the medium that had sustained
him for three and a half years, he utterly lost contact with his own ambitions as
an artist, entering a state of near paralysis.
My argument was that a horizontality that managed to escape the field not
only of the figurative but of the cultural—a horizontality that was in this sense
below culture—came to be associated for Pollock with the unconscious. If Pol-
lock saw himself over the course of the drip period working this field as no
one else could do, not even Picasso; if its elaboration meant that the figurative
could surge up within the oceanic pull of the skein only to be obliterated by
the powerful undertow of the formlessness that would wash over it in succes-
sive waves; if it meant that in the end, attacking Autumn Rhythm: Number 30,
1950, Pollock had no recourse to lifting the work up during its execution—no
need for the famous "get acquainted" periods in which the painting would be
viewed vertically, hanging on the studio wall (since on this occasion he was
content to leave the work attached to the heavy roll of canvas from which its
length had been unfurled)—all of this was because horizontality had become
the medium through which he could experience the unconscious as an attack
on form. After whatever happened to Pollock on November 28,1950 (the day
he finished making his second film with Namuth, and suddenly started to drink
again), he not only lost touch with his medium but explicitly declared that the
medium he had now entered, or to which he had returned, was drawing. Writ-
ing to Alfonso Ossorio in January of 1951, he characterized his work on the
Japanese paper Tony Smith had given him as "drawings," and again in June
he spoke of his black paintings as "drawing on canvas." That such drawing
now promoted his "early images coming thru" meant that he now understood
his field as vertical.37 The result of this was that when he tried to return to the
import of the drip technique his access was resolutely blocked. The verticality
within which he now thought and worked is attested to both by the runoff that

656 1990s
appears everywhere in Blue Poles: Number 11, ig$2 and by the figurative insis-
tence of the poles themselves, or again by the figurative nature of the web that
overlays the black and white ground of Convergence: Number 10,1952, a frieze
of rudimentary stick figures that Matthew Rohn's gestaltist analysis of Pollock
had pounced on some years ago, intuiting—without the need of a computer—
the pictogrammatic sign for the human figure that Karmel is now asking us to
see as the import of the drip paintings themselves from the classic period of
1947-50-38
Insofar as horizontality enabled Pollock, sustaining and compelling his
greatest work, it functioned—I am arguing—as a medium. And "medium" is
meant here not in some kind of reductive sense in which medium and physi-
cal support are collapsed into one another such that the medium of painting is
read baldly as flatness, or horizontality-as-a-medium is understood simply as
the real space of the floor. Rather, if a medium is taken as meaning a support
for practice, then it is a sustaining matrix generative of a set of conventions,
some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly
"specific" to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity.
It was Richard Serra, in the midst of his own creative misreading of Pollock
and his own exploration of horizontality, who first and most directly stated
those conventions. They are given in the list he drew up in 1967-68 in which
he understood the new medium in which he found himself working to be
articulated in the form of predicates rather than substantives—which is to say
of verb forms rather than objects or their attributes. Further, his list attaches
those predicates (or predicate events) to the idea of series, not only through
repetition—underscored by the recurrence of the grammatical prefix "to"
("to roll, to crease, to fold," etc.)—but through an assembly of references to
conditions of perpetual modulation or periodic flux, as when he writes, "of
waves, of tides, of electromagnetic, of ionization," and so forth.
Thus as Serra extends Pollock's gesture of throwing paint onto floor-borne
canvas into one of throwing molten lead against the crease between floor and
wall (in Casting, 1969), he repeats the material conditions of the medium: the
horizontality of the field, with its gravitational pull; the literal fact that matter
will settle onto that field as the residue of an event; the residue itself taking the
form of an index or trace, the physical clue to its having happened. These ma-
terial conditions, however, are not in themselves enough to make something
into a medium or expressive form. The tire tracks a car leaves on a snowy road
are certainly an index of its passage, but they are not thereby organized into a
work of art.

1990s 657
 The conceptual artist would say that to so organize them it is enough merely
to frame them in any one of the number of ways that have become fully avail-
able within the course of modernist practice. They could be photographed,
for example, or stanchioned off in some way that would fold them into one of
art's institutional spaces. Whatever one did would be tantamount to supply-
ing them with the enunciative label: "This is a work of art." And this strategy
of the ready-made would be enough to inaugurate the one convention that
turns anything whatever into an object of another order of experience.
The option of the frame, however, is not the one Serra is taking, since that
would be to defeat the pull of gravity and to reorganize the index as an image,
the picture or metaphor of an event rather than its resistant, literal occurrence,
a picture that, needless to say, would align itself with the vertical field of the
gestalt. Rather, for the horizontal conditions to stay in place, for gravity to
maintain its hold on the index such that it continues to operate as the mark of
an event rather than its picture, the work must find the syntax internal to the
event itself, and this is the syntax that it will then formalize. Such is the syntax
registered both in Serra's verb list and in a piece such as Casting, where it is
to be located not only in the transformation of the object produced by the
gesture into a form of serialization but in the understanding of series itself as
wavelike or periodic. The event, of which the cast is the index, Serra seems to
be saying, belongs to the logic of the series, which is not that of stamping out
identical objects, as in industrial production. Rather it is the series (or series
of series) in which the lead is heated to its molten state, in which the propul-
sion of the sling around the body of the standing artist assumes an elliptical
orbit, in which falling metal is shaped by the barrier of wall and floor as it
cools, and, most important, in which all of these different series are seen as
converging toward the specific point of the event. Thus it is in repetition itself
that the event's internal frame is discovered, and the index that marks that
event is exfoliated as series.
In a piece like Casting, I am claiming, Serra is reading the horizontalized
field of Pollock's work as a network of traces, each the index of an event, the
internal logic of which is serial or repetitive: wave after wave of looping falls
of paint. Further, he is expressing that logic as gerundive, or wholly unfolding
in the present tense, a quality captured by his own title, Casting, but echoed
as well in the lexicon consistently applied by critics to Pollock's line—as
in Greenberg's "whipping," "trickling," "dribbling," "blotching," and "stain-
ing," or Rubin's "pouring," "spattering," "criss-crossing," and "puddling."
That the gerund form is not just a present tense but a present progressive, one

658 1990s
that actively connects past to present and opens present to future, once again
displays the resistance of this form to enclosure, to the completion of a frame.
The index framed is the index as the picture of an event, which is distanced
from itself by having entered the condition of representation. It is only un-
framed that its openness to the variation of the series continues to be in play.
The gerund thus expresses a perspective on the series from the moment of the
present, since the series, parabolic in nature, is part of a continuing flux.39
If seriality and repetition are the syntax with which to formalize the event
within the field of the object, the gerund's perspectival nature, its character
as an axis or point of view onto the series, becomes the formal expression of
the subject's relation to variation. Theorizing the concept of the event, Gilles
Deleuze points to the fact that "a needed relation exists between variation and
point of view," which means that there is "not only variety in points of view
but every point of view is a point of view on variation." Arguing that "this is
not relativism as a variation of truth according to the subject," Deleuze says,
"rather it is the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to be the
subject."40
This, then, is the importance of the shift that occurs generally in the after-
math of the "crisis of the easel picture" as, whether in the practice of color
field painting or in that of process, the medium within which artists under-
stand themselves to be working becomes a phenomenological dimension, an
axis onto a field, rather than the physical limits of the field itself. In opticality,
that dimension involves the upright body, yet it also unleashes a relationship
between perceiver and canvas which seems to call for the illusion that the
pictorial field is turning, receding, speeding away, is in a relation to its viewer
that reinforces the perspectivalism of the viewer's relation to it. In process art,
such as Serra's or Carl Andre's or much of Eva Hesse's, the dimension is the
horizontal, which these artists continue to reinforce and work as a medium,
even when, as in Serra's prop pieces, they activate gravity in relation to stand-
ing elements. But more than anything else Serra's cutting pieces demonstrate
that the new medium he was inhabiting must also be recognized as one of an
utterly reorganized sense of drawing, drawing not as the boundary of a form
but as the expression of an event, a predicate, a serial variation.
So the issue of drawing is indeed at stake in our present understanding of
Jackson Pollock, just as it was at stake, I am arguing, in his own felt relation-
ship to his work. To recode the import of Pollock's drawing as having been
oriented all along to some notion of the figure, and to disqualify other charac-
terizations of it as merely "abject" or "anti-art," is not only to lose touch with

1990s 659
 the inner logic of Pollock's medium, as it first sustained and then withdrew
from him, but is seriously to denigrate the work of all those whose achieve-
ment it was to engage with Pollock's greatness in the dimension within which
they experienced its impact for art.

Notes

1. E. A. Carmean, Jr., "The Church Project: Pollock's Passion Themes," Art in

America 70 no. 6 (Summer 1982): no-22; Rosalind Krauss, "Contra Carmean:
The Abstract Pollock," in ibid., pp. 123-31.
2. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," 1939, reprinted in Perceptions
and Judgmentsy 1939-1944, vol. 1 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1986), pp. 14,22.
3. Pepe Karmel, "Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth,"
in Kirk Varnedoe with Karmel, Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: The Mu-
seum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 31.
4. Ibid.
5. Greenberg, "Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock," Feb-
ruary 1947, reprinted in Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, vol. 2 of Clement Green-
berg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, p. 125.
6. Greenberg, "The Crisis of the Easel Picture," April 1948, reprinted in ibid.,
p. 224.
7. See, for example, Greenberg, "'American-Type' Painting," 1955, reprinted in
Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, vol. 3 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected
Essays and Criticism, p. 235.
8. Greenberg, "The Role of Nature in Modern Painting," 1949, reprinted in Arro-
gant Purpose, 1945-1949, PP- 273-74.
9. Greenberg, " American-Type' Painting," 1955, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1961), pp. 221,226,228. In the version of the essay edited for Affirmations
and Refusals, 1950-1956 Greenberg excised these sentences.
10. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro (in Karmel, Jackson Pollock, p. 118) demonstrates the im-
possibility of Pollock's having painted the Guggenheim mural with the desper-
ate speed claimed by the artist and reported by his friends. But Pollock's own
sense of semiautomatism as he drove himself to make this very large work is reg-
istered in that claim, no matter how mythically and at variance from actual fact.
11. In his review of Pollock in 1949, Greenberg characterizes No. 1 (1948) (now usu-
ally called Number lA, 1948} as "baroque" (Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, p. 285).
This idea of the baroque is something Greenberg associates with the notion of
painterliness, or malterische (as used by Heinrich Wolfflin), in "After Abstract-
Expressionism," 1962, reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, vol.
4 of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays, p. 123.
12. In "Contribution to a Symposium," 1953 (reprinted in Affirmations and Re-

660 1990s
 fusais, 1950-1956, p. 156), Greenberg links the new openness of color in some
Abstract Expressionist painting to "optical illusions difficult to specify"; in
"Sculpture in Our Time," 1958 (reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-
1969, p. 60), opticality is given its earliest full-blown theorization; in "Louis and
Noland," 1960 (reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969., p. 90), the
idea of opticality is fully in place.
13. Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," Art News 57 no. 6 (October
i958):24-25,55-57.
14. Robert Morris, "Anti-Form," 1968, and "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of
Making," 1970, both reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings
of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, and New York: Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, 1993), pp. 41-49,7l~93-
15. See chapter 6 of my Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
1993), pp. 243-329, and Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's
Guide, exh. cat. (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
16. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973), p. 30.
17. Cy Twombly's exploitation of graffiti was, from the outset, focused on what the
semiologist would call its expressive form—namely that it is a defiling of a sur-
face of inscription (by cutting, smearing, spraying, or any other form of mark-
ing). His interest was therefore in its violence rather than its image content. Thus
although graffiti is often marked onto vertical walls, and although its figuration is
often representational, this content of the image was not what Twombly initially
used. Rather he was drawing a parallel between Pollock's gesture, or mode of
marking, and the violence of the graffiti gesture, its "criminal" overtones, so to
speak. See my discussion in The Optical Unconscious, pp. 256-60.
18. Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and Its Discontents," 1930, The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (Lon-
don: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1953-73), 2i: 90.
19. Varnedoe speaks of the analysis of formlessness in art as "associated, psychically,
with bodily excretion," going on to say, "Krauss and Bois see the drip paintings
as generating a scatological lineage of staining, as in Andy Warhol's 'oxidation'
paintings, made by urinating onto a metallic-paint ground" (Jackson Pollock,
pp. 54-55); Adam Gopnik links my position with Harold Rosenberg's as a call
for "anti-art" and speaks of my "praise of Pollock's art as 'abject' " ("Poured
Over," The New Yorker LXXIV [October 19,1998]: 76,80).
20. Thierry de Duve gives an account of this process in "The Monochrome and the
Blank Canvas." See de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press, 1996), pp. 199-279-
21. I began to speak of a postmedium condition in "And Then Turn Away? An Es-
say on James Coleman," October no. 81 (Summer 1997): 5-33.
22. See my "Welcome to the Cultural Revolution," October no. 77 (Summer 1996):
83-96.
23. Greenberg, "After Abstract-Expressionism," p. 131.

1990s 661
 24- Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," p. 90.
25. Greenberg, "Louis and Noland," 1960, reprinted in Modernism with a Vengeance,
1957-1969, F- 97-
26. See Michael Fried's discussion of this in "An Introduction to My Art Criticism,"
Art and Objecthood (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998),
P.48.
27. See my Optical Unconscious, pp. 246-47,324. In discussing color field painting,
Stanley Cavell expresses his own assumption that the axis called for in the trans-
action between the viewer and this kind of art is verticality: "For example, a paint-
ing may acknowledge its frontedness, or its fmitude, or its specific thereness—
that is, its presentness; and your accepting it will accordingly mean acknowledging
your frontedness, or directionality, or verticality toward its world, or any world."
Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking, 1971), p. no.
28. Fried, "Shape as Form," Art and Objecthood, p. 88.
29. It is not that nothing was addressed to the question of the medium; rather, the
medium continued to be organized in the field of the object. For example, in
ibid., p. 77, Fried raises the question of a medium, tying it to the relationship be-
tween literal and depicted shape in Frank Stella's irregular polygon paintings of
1966: "By shape as such I mean not merely the silhouette of the support (which
I shall call literal shape), not merely that of the outlines of elements in a given
picture (which I shall call literal shape), but shape as a medium within which
choices about both literal and depicted shapes are made, and made mutually
responsive."
In the context of the exchanges between Fried and Cavell in the mid-Kjoos,
Cavell addresses color field painting by arguing for an idea of the medium that
is closer to something like a phenomenological axis. Claiming that what a given
color field painter is inventing is a new automatism (Morris Louis's "pours" be-
ing modeled here on the example of Pollock's automatized dripped lines), he un-
derstands these automatisms as supplying not just new instances of art but new
mediums of art. See Cavell, The World Viewed, pp. 104-8.
30. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 79.
Fried too speaks of the speed of Kenneth Noland's striped pictures: "Approached
from the side (their length makes this inviting) what is striking is not their rec-
tangular ity but the speed with which that rectangle—or rather, the speed with
which the colored bands—appear to diminish in perspective recession." "Shape
as Form," p. 83.
31. The Guggenheim application is published in Francis Valentine O'Connor and
Eugene Victor Thaw, eds., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings,
Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1978), 4:238.
32. Jackson Pollock, "My Painting"Possibilities no. i (Winter 1947-48): 79.
33. Pollock worked in David Siqueiros's Manhattan studio/"laboratory" in 1936. His
use of gray enamel in works of the early 19403, like The She-Wolf, to mask around
shapes, thereby producing figures as the effect of a kind of stenciling, may be an

662 1990s
 adaptation of a technique of poster-making that was employed in Siqueiros's stu-
dio, where stencils and spray paint were applied to lengths of paper laid on the
floor.
34. See Charles F. Stuckey, "Another Side of Jackson Pollock,'Mrf in America 65, no.
6 (November-December 1977): 81-91, and Bernice Rose, Jackson Pollock: Draw-
ing into Painting, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980), p. 9.
35. In the discussion following the presentation of this paper, it was objected that
Pollock's palm prints in Number lA, 1948 might have been applied to the canvas
once it was vertical rather than during its making, so that they would register the
upright body rather than the falling one. This seems counterintuitive since the
prints appear under passages of white dripped skein, and thus would most likely
have been applied while the canvas was on the floor. It was also objected that
Jasper Johns's Diver, referring to Hart Crane's suicide (by jumping overboard
during an ocean voyage), is about a falling body that is therefore oriented verti-
cally, even though inverted head-to-foot. This seems a perverse reading of Johns's
space, in which the plunging body is rendered vertiginous precisely because it is
precipitating itself into a watery medium that is itself horizontal and toward
which the body must project a downward fall. Further, it ignores the point that
since Johns's field is in any case metamorphic, its charcoal surface constituting
the image of, the illusion of, water, the work ultimately relocates itself within the
terms of the easel picture, or vertical medium.
36. T. J. Clark, "Jackson Pollock's Abstraction," in Serge Guilbaut, éd., Reconsider-
ing Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 241-42.
37. O'Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné, 4: 094, p. 257, and
D99,p.26i.
38. Matthew L. Rohn, Visual Dynamics in Jackson Pollock's Abstractions (Ann Ar-
bor: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 48.
39. Gilles Deleuze formulates the connections between the predicate event, series,
variation, and point of view in his discussion of Leibniz's and Whitehead's con-
cept of the event, to which I am indebted here. See Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz
and the Baroque, trans. Ton Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
40. Ibid., pp. 19-20.

1990s 663
This page intentionally left blank
 Selected Bibliography

Bibliography entries are organized by decade in accordance with the divisions in

the introduction and the anthology section. Entries within each decade are sorted
by the author's last name (or title if no author is specified). Author's name is followed
by the date, and entries by the same author are listed in chronological rather than
alphabetical order to facilitate locating endote citation references. Information on
where articles, chapters, and catalogue essays have been reprinted is given in end-
notes unless required for citation location.

The 1930s
Graham, John. 1937. "Primitive Art and Picasso." Magazine of Art 30 (April): 236-39,
260.
. 1939. System and Dialectics of Art. New York: Delphic Studios.
Greenberg, Clement. 1939. "Avant-garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review 6 (Fall):
34-49-
Schapiro, Meyer. 1937. "The Nature of Abstract Art." Marxist Quarterly i (January-
March): 78-97.

The 1940s
Baziotes, William. 1947-48. "I Cannot Evolve Any Concrete Theory." Possibilities i
(Winter 1947-48): 2.
. 1949. "The Artist and His Mirror." Right Angles (June): 3-4.
Davenport, Russell, ed. 1948. "A Life Round Table on Modern Art." Life, 11 October,
56-79, especially "Young American Extremists," 62-63.
Ellsworth, Paul. 1949. "Hans Hofmann: Reply to Questionnaire and Comments on a
Recent Exhibition." Arts and Architecture 66 (November): 22-28.
Gorky, Arshile. 1941. Interview by Malcolm Johnson. New York Sun, 22 August.
Reprinted in Tuchman 1965.
Gottlieb, Adolph. 1948. "Unintelligibility." Mimeographed script of talk given 5 May
in Forum: The Artist Speaks, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Copy in MoMA
Library.

665
 Gottlieb, Adolph, and Mark Rothko. пдаа. "The Portrait and the Modern Artist."
Dialogue broadcast over radio station WNYC, 13 October. Published in Alloway
and MacNaughton 1981.
. I943b. "Letter to the New York Times" Quoted in slightly edited form in
Jewell I943b. Published in Alloway and MacNaughton 1981.
Greenberg, Clement. 1940. "Towards a Newer Laocoon." Partisan Review 7 (July-
August): 296-310.
. 1945. "Review of the Exhibition A Problem for Critics" Nation, 9 June,
657-59.
. 1947. "The Present Prospects of American Painting and Sculpture." Horizon
(London) 16 (October): 20-30.
Hofmann, Hans. 1948. The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts. Andover, MA:
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy.
"The Ides of Art: Six Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art." 1948. Tiger's Eye i
(December): 51-53.
"The Ides of Art: The Attitudes of ю Artists on Their Art and Contemporaneous-
ness." 1947. Tiger's Eye i (December): 42-46.
Janis, Sidney. 1944. Abstract and Surrealist Art in America. New York: Reynal &,
Hitchcock.
Jewell, Edward Alden. 1943a. "Modern Painters Open Show Today." New York
Times, 2 June, 28.
. I943b. " 'Globalism' Pops into View: The Realm of Art; A New Platform."
New York Times, 13 June, sec. 2,9.
. 1943C. "Globalism: Of Windmill Tilting and Cheshire Cats." New York
Times, 27June, sec. 2,6.
. 1945. "Toward Abstract, or Away?" New York Times, i July, sec. 2,2.
Kootz, Samuel M. 1941. "Letter to the Editor." New York Times, 10 August, sec. 9,
p. 7.
. 1943. New Frontiers in American Painting. New York: Hastings House.
Kootz, Samuel M., and Harold Rosenberg. 1949. The Intrasubjectives. New York:
Samuel M. Kootz Gallery.
Motherwell, Robert. 1944a. "The Modern Painter's World." DYN(November): 9-14.
. I944b. "Painters' Objects." Partisan Review 11 (Winter): 93-97.
. 1948. "A Tour of the Sublime." Tiger's Eye i (December): 46-48.
Motherwell, Robert, and Harold Rosenberg. 1947-48. "Editorial Statement."
Possibilities i (Winter): i.
Newman, Barnett. 1944. Adolph Gottlieb. New York: Wakefield Gallery.
. 1946. Northwest Coast Indian Painting. New York: Betty Parsons Gallery.
. I947a. "The First Man Was an Artist." Tiger's Eye i (October): 57-60.
. I947b. The Ideographic Picture. New York: Betty Parsons Gallery.
. 1948. "The Sublime Is Now." Tiger's Eye 6 (December): 51-53.
Pollock, Jackson. 1944. Interview. ^4rfo and Architecture 61 (February): 14.
. 1947-48. "My Painting." Possibilities i (Winter): 79.

666 Selected Bibliograph y

Porter, David, éd. 1945. Personal Statement: A Painting Prophecy, 1950. Washington
DC: David Porter Gallery.
Putzel, Howard. 1945. A Problem for Critics. New York: 67 Gallery.
R[iley], M[aude]. 1944. "Whither Goes Abstract and Surrealist Art?" Art Digest 19
(i December): 8,31.
. 1945. "The Mythical Rothko and His Myths." Art Digest 19 (15 January): 15.
Rosenberg, Harold. 1947. "Introduction to Six American Artists." Paris: Galerie
Maeght. Reprinted in Possibilities i (Winter 1947-48): 75.
. 1947-48. "The Shapes in a Baziotes Canvas." Possibilities i (Winter): 2.
Rothko, Mark. 1946. Clyfford Still. New York: Art of This Century Gallery.
. 1947-48. "The Romantics Were Prompted." Possibilities i (Winter): 84.
. 1949. "A Statement on His Attitude of Painting." Tiger's Eye i (October): 114.
Sieberling, Dorothy. 1949. "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the
United States?" Life, 8 August, 42-43,45.
"Spring Salon for Young Artists." 1943. Nation, 19 May.
Sweeney, James Johnson. 194.3. Jackson Pollock. New York: Art of This Century.
. 19443. "Five American Painters." Harper's Bazaar, April, 76-77,122,124,
126.
. I944b. Robert Motherwell. New York: Art of This Century.
. 1945. "Art Chronicle." Partisan Review (Spring): 240-42.
"A Symposium: The State of American Art." 1949. Magazine of Art 42 (March):
82-102.
Tyler, Parker. 1945. "Nature and Madness Among the Younger Painters." View, ser. 5,
no. 2 (May): 30-31.

The 1950s
Alfieri, Bruno. 1950. "A Short Talk on the Pictures of Jackson Pollock." U Arte
Moderna (Venice), 8June.
Alloway, Lawrence. 1958. "Some Notes on Abstract Impressionism." In Abstract
Impressionism, 4-8. London: Arts Council Gallery.
Ashton, Dore, and Bernard Dorival. 1959. New York and Paris: Painting in the
Fifties. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts.
Barr, Alfred H., Jr. 1950. "7 Americans Open in Venice: Gorky, de Kooning,
Pollock." ArtNews 49 (Summer): 22-23.
. 1959. Introduction to The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight
European Countries iQSS-igsg. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Baur, John I. H. 1958. Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and
Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth Century American Art. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art.
Baziotes, William. 1959. "Notes on Painting." It Is, no. 4 (Autumn): 11.
Black or White: Paintings by European and American Artists. 1950. New York: Kootz
Gallery.
Breton, Andre.1959. "The Eye-Spring: Arshile Gorky." It Is, no. 4 (Autumn): 56-57.

Selected Bibliography 667

 Brustein, Robert. 1958. "The Cult of Unthink" Horizon (New York) i (September):
38-45,134-35.
Celentano, Francis. 1957. "The Origins and Development of Abstract
Expressionism in the United States." M.A. thesis, New York University.
Crehan, Hubert. K)59a. "Barnett Newman." Art News 58 (April): 12.
. I959b. "Clyfford Still: Black Angel in Buffalo." Art News 58 (December):
58-60.
Coates, Robert M. 1951. "The Abstract Expressionists and Others."New Yorker,
29 December, 58-59.
de Kooning, Elaine. 1950. "Hans Hofmann Paints a Picture." Art News 49
(February): 38-40,5^-59-
. 1951. "David Smith Makes a Sculpture." Art News 50 (September): 38-51.
. 1957. "Two Americans in Action: Franz Kline, Mark Rothko." Art News
Annual 27 (November): 86-97.
de Kooning, Willem. 1951. "The Renaissance and Order." trans/formation i, no. 2:
85-87-
Ferren, John. 1958. "Epitaph for an Avant-Garde: The Motivating Ideas of the
Abstract Expressionist Movement in America as Seen by an Artist Active on the
New York Scene." Arts Magazine 33 (November): 24-26,68.
Finkelstein, Louis. 1950. "Marin and de Kooning." Magazine of Art 43 (October):
202-6.
. 1956. "New Look: Abstract Impressionism." Art News 55 (March): 36-39,
66-68.
Friedman, В. Н. 1954. "The New Baroque." Arts Digest 28 (15 September): 12-13.
Goldwater, Robert. 1959. "Everyone Knew What Everyone Else Meant." It Is, no. 14
(Autumn): 35.
Golub, Leon. 1954. "A Critique of Abstract Expressionism." Art Journal 14 (Winter):
142-47.
Goodnough, Robert, ed. 1950. "Artists' Sessions at Studio 35." Modern Artists in
America, edited by Bernard Karpel, Robert Motherwell, and Ad Reinhardt, 9-22.
New York: Wittenborn Schultz.
. 1951. "Pollock Paints a Picture." Art News 50 (May): 32-38,61.
. 1952. "Kline Paints a Picture." Art News 51 (December): 36-39,63-64.
Goossen, Eugene C. 1958a. "The Big Canvas" Art International (Lugano) 2
(November): 45-47.
. I958b. "The Philosophic Line of Barnett Newman." Art News 57 (Summer):
30-31.
. 1959. "Robert Motherwell and the Seriousness of Subject." Art International
(Lugano) 3 (January-February): 33-38,51.
Gottlieb, Adolph. 1951. "My Painting." Arts and Architecture 68 (September): 21.
Gray, Cleve. 1959. "Narcissus in Chaos: Contemporary American Art" American
Scholar 28 (Autumn): 433-43.

668 Selected Bibliograph y

Greenberg, Clement. 1950. "The European View of American Art" Nation, 25
November, 490-92.
. 1952. "Feeling Is All." Partisan Review 19 (January-February): 97-102.
. 1955. " 'American-Type' Painting." Partisan Review 22 (Spring): 179-96.
. 1956. "New York Painting Only Yesterday." Art News 56 (Summer): 58,
84-86.
. 1956-1957. "David Smith." Art in America 44 (Winter): 1956-57.
. iQSJ.Adolph Gottlieb. New York: Jewish Museum.
. 1958. Barnett Newman: First Retrospective Exhibition. (Bennington, VT:
Bennington College).
Heron, Patrick. 1956. "The Americans at the Tate Gallery." Arts Magazine 30
(March): 15-16.
Hess, Thomas B. I95oa. "Introduction to Abstract.'Mrf News Annual 49, pt. 2
(November): 158,186-87.
. I95ob. "Seeing the Young New Yorkers." Art News 49 (May): 23-60.
. 1951. Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. New York: Viking
Press.
. 1953. "De Kooning Paints a Picture." Art News 52 (March): 30-33,64-67.
, ed. 1958. "Is Today's Artist with or Against the Past?'Mr¿ News 57 (Summer):
26-46 ff.
. 1959. Willem de Kooning. New York: George Braziller.
Hess, Thomas В., and Harold Rosenberg. 1958. "Some Points about Action
Painting." In Action Painting... 1958. Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum for
Contemporary Arts, pp. 2-5.
Hofmann, Hans. 1951. "Space Pictorially Realized Through the Intrinsic Faculty of
the Colors to Express Volume." In Hans Hofmann. New York: Kootz Gallery.
. 1955. "The Color Problem in Pure Painting—Its Creative Origin." In Hans
Hofmann. New York: Kootz Gallery. Reprinted in Arts and Architecture 73
(February 1956).
. I959a. "Space and Pictorial Life." It Is, no. 4 (Autumn): 10.
. I959b. "Statement." It Is, no.3 (Winter-Spring): 10.
Hunter, Sam. 1954. "Painting by Another Name.'Mrf in America 42 (December):
291-95.
"The Irascible Eighteen." 1950. New York Herald Tribune, 23 May.
"Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Lead Fight Against Show."L¿f^ 15 January, 34.
Jackson Pollock et la nouvelle peinture américaine. 1959. Paris: Musée nationale d'art
moderne; Éditions des musées nationaux.
Jarrell, Randall. 1957. "The Age of the Chimpanzee: A Poet Argues as Devil's
Advocate Against the Canonization of Abstract Expressionism." Art News 56
(Summer): 34-35.
Kaprow, Allan. 1958. "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock." Art News 57 (October):
24-26,55-56.

Selected Bibliography 669

 Kramer, Hilton. 1953. "The New American Painting." Partisan Review 20 (July-
August): 421-27.
. 1959. "The Critics of American Painting." Arts Magazine 34 (October):
26-32.
Louchheim, Aline B. 1951. "Betty Parsons: Her Gallery, Her Influence." Vogue,
i October, 140-41,194-97.
Motherwell, Robert. 1951. The School of New York. Beverly Hills: Frank Perls Gallery.
. 1959. "Statement." It Is, no. 3 (Winter-Spring): 10.
O'Hara, Frank. 1950. Jackson Pollock. New York: George Braziller.
. 1958. "Franz Kline Talking." Evergreen Review 6 (October): 58-64.
Paintings ofClyfford Still 1959. Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery.
Pollock, Jackson. 1950. Interview by William Wright. Published in O'Connor and
Thaw 1978,4:230.
Rexroth, Kenneth. 1959. "U.S. Art Seen Across Time and Space: 22 Americans Seen
Abroad." Art New s 58 (Summer): 30-33,52,54.
Rodman, Selden. 1957. Conversations with Artists. New York: Devin-Adair.
Rosen, Israel. 1959. "Toward a Definition of Abstract Expressionism." Baltimore
Museum of Art News 22 (February): 3-13.
Rosenberg, Harold. 1952. "The American Action Painters." Art New s 51
(December): 22-23,48-50.
. 1953. "The New American Painting." Partisan Review 20 (July-August):
421-27.
. 1957. "Hans Hofmann: Nature into Abstraction." Art New s 56 (May): 34-35,
55-56.
. 1958. "Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art." Art News Annual
28:120-37,184-92.
. 1959. The Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon Press.
Rubin, William. 1958. "The New York School—Then and Now." Parts i and 2.
Art International (Lugano) 2, nos. 2-3,4-5 (March-April and May-June):
23-26,19-22.
Rudikoff, Sonya. 1957. "Tangible Abstract Art." Partisan Review 24 (Spring):
275-81.
. 1958. "Space in Abstract Painting." Partisan Review 25 (Spring): 297-304.
Sandier, Irving, ed. 1959. "Discussion: Is There a New Academy?" Parts i and 2.
Art News 58 (Summer/September): 34-37,58-59; 36-39,58-60.
Sawin, Martica. 1958. "In the Galleries: Franz Kline." Arts Magazine 32 (September):
57-58.
Schapiro, Meyer. 1952. "Rebellion in Art." In America in Crisis, edited by Daniel
Aaron, 203-42. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
. 1956. "The Younger American Painters of Today." Listener (London) 60,
no .1404,26 January, 146-47.
. 1957. "The Liberating Quality of American Art." Art News 56 (Summer):
36-52.

670 Selected Bibliography

Schwabacher, Ethel. 1951. Arshile Gorky, Memorial Exhibition. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art.
. 1957. Arshile Gorky. New York: Macmillan and Whitney Museum of
American Art.
Seitz, William. 1953. "Spirit, Time and Abstract Expressionism." Magazine of Art 46
(February): 80-87.
. 1955. "Abstract Expressionist Painting in America: An Interpretation Based
on the Work and Thought of Six Key Figures." Ph.D. diss., Princeton University.
Sieberling, Dorothy. 1959a. "Baffling U.S. Art: What It Is About." Life, 9 November,
68-80.
. I959b. "The Varied Art of Four Pioneers." Life, 16 November, 74-83,
85-86.
Smith, David. K)52a. "The Language Is Image.'Mrfo and Architecture 69 (February):
20-21,33-34.
. I952b. "Who Is the Artist? How Does He Act?" Everyday Art Quarterly
(Walker Art Center) no. 23:16-21.
. I954a. "Thoughts on Sculpture." College Art Journal 13 (Winter): 97-100.
. I954b. "Second Thoughts on Sculpture." College Art Journal 13 (Spring):
203-7.
Still, ClyfFord. 1952. "Statement." In 15 Americans, edited by Dorothy Miller, 21-22.
New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Sweeney, James Johnson. 1954. Younger American Painters: A Selection. New York:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Tyler, Parker. 1950. "Jackson Pollock: The Infinite Labyrinth." Magazine of Art 43
(March): 92-93.
"What Abstract Art Means to Me." 1951. Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 18 (Spring),
!5PP.
Wight, Frederick S. 1957. Hans Hofmann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
"The Wild Ones." 1956. Time, 20 February, 70-75.

The 1960 s
Alloway, Lawrence. 1960. "Sign and Surface: Notes on Black and White Painting in
New York." Quadrum, no 9: 49-62.
. I96ia. Jackson Pollock: Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours from the
Collection of Lee Krasner Pollock. London: Marlborough Fine Art.
. K)6ib. "Notes on Pollock." Art International (Lugano) 5 (May): 38-41,90.
. 1962. "Notes on Rothko.'Mrf International (Lugano) 6 (Summer): 90-94.
. К)6за. "The American Sublime." Living Arts i, no 2 (June): n-22.
. К)6зЬ. "Gorky." Artforum i (March): 28-31.
. K)65a. "The Biomorphic Forties." Artforum 4 (September): 18-23.
. K)65b. William Baziotes: A Memorial Exhibition. New York: Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum.

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 . 1966. "Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross and the Subjects of the
Artists." In Barnett Newman: The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani, 11-16.
New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
. 1968. "Melpomene and Graffiti: Adolph Gottlieb's Early Work." Art
International (Lugano) 12 (20 April): 21-24.
Anderson, Wayne. 1967. "American Sculpture: The Situation in the Fifties."
Artforum 5 (Summer): 60-67.
Armstrong, Richard. 1964. "Abstract Expressionism Was an American Revolution."
Canadian Art 21 (September-October): 262-65.
Arnason, H. H. 1961. American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists. New York:
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
. 19663. "On Robert Motherwell and His Early Work" Art International
(Lugano) 10 (20 January): 17-35.
. K)66b. "Robert Motherwell: 1948-1965." Art International (Lugano) ю
(20 April): 19-45.
. 1969. "Motherwell: The Window and the Wall." Art News 68 (Summer):
48-52,61-62,64,66,68.
Ashton, Dore. 1961. "Franz Kline." Cimaise 8 (May-June): 70-83.
. 1964. "Robert Motherwell: Passion and Transfiguration." Studio
International 167 (March): 100-105.
Bannard, Walter Darby. 1968. "Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, David Smith."
Artforum 6 (April): 22-32.
. 1969. "Hans Hofmann's Rectangles." Artforum 7 (Summer): 38-41.
Baro, Gene. 1966. "David Smith: The Art of Wholeness." Studio International 172
(August): 69-75.
Battcock, Gregory. 1969-1970. "Re-evaluating Abstract Expressionism." Arts
Magazine 44 (December-January): 46-48.
Calas, Nicholas. 1967. "Subject Matter in the Work of Barnett Newman." Arts
Magazine 42 (November): 38-40.
Campbell, Lawrence. 1968. "Of Lilith and Lettuce." Art New s 67 (March): 42-43,
61-64.
Chipp, Herschel B. 1968. "Contemporary Art: The Autonomy of the Work of Art."
In Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics, 501-89. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Cone, Jane Harrison. 1966. David Smith: A Retrospective Exhibition. Cambridge,
MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.
David Smith. 1966. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania.
David Smith, igo6-ig6^. 1966. London: Tate Gallery and Arts Council of Great
Britain.
Dawson, Fielding. 1967. An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline. New York: Pantheon
Books.

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de Kooning, Elaine. 1962. Franz Kline Memorial Exhibition. Washington, DC:
Washington Gallery of Modern Art.
de Kooning, Willem. 1963. "Content Is a Glimpse." Location i (Spring): 45-53.
Dillenberger, Jane. 1969. "The Stations of the Cross by Barnett Newman." In Secular
Art with Sacred Themes, 99-116. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
Donnell, Radka Zagaroff. 1964. "Space in Abstract Expressionism." Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23 (Winter): 315-19.
Dorothy Dehner: Ten Years of Sculpture. 1965. New York: Jewish Museum.
Doty, Robert, and Diane Waldman. 1968. Adolph Gottlieb. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art.
Du Plessix, Francine, and Cleve Gray. 1967. "Who Was Jackson Pollock?"Jr¿ in
America 55 (May-June): 48-51.
Franz Kline. 1963. Brussels: Palaix des beaux-arts société auxiliare des expositions.
Fried, Michael. 1965. "Jackson Pollock." Artforum 4 (September): 14-17.
Friedman, B. H. 1969. "An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock." In Jackson Pollock:
Black and White, 7-10. New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery.
Friedman, Martin. К)6за. Adolph Gottlieb. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center.
. К)6зЬ. "Adolph Gottlieb: Private Symbols in Public Statements." Jri JV^if s
62 (May): 5,32-35,52-53.
Fry, Edward. 1969. David Smith. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Geldzahler, Henry. 1969. New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970. New York:
E. P. Dutton in association with Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Glaser, Bruce. 1967. "Jackson Pollock: An Interview with Lee Krasner." Arts
Magazine 41 (April): 36-39.
Goldwater, Robert. 1960. "Reflections on the New York School." Quadrum no. 7-8:
17-36.
. 1967. "Franz Kline: Darkness Visible." Art News (March): 39-43,77.
Goossen, Eugene C. 1960. "Painting as Confrontation: Clyfford Still.'Mri
International (Lugano) 4 (Summer): 39-43.
Gordon, John. 1968. Franz Kline: 1910-1962. New York: Whitney Museum of
American Art.
. 1969. Franz Kline, 1910-1962. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
Gray, Cleve, ed. 1968. David Smith by David Smith. New York: Holt, Rinehart &:
Winston.
Greenberg, Clement. K)6ia. Art and Culture: Critical Essays. Boston: Beacon Press.
. I96ib. Hans Hofmann. Paris: Editions Georges Fall.
. K)62a. "After Abstract Expressionism." Art International (Lugano) 6
(25 October): 24-32.
. I962b. "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name." Second Coming i (March):
58-62.
. 19б4а. "The 'Crisis' of Abstract Art." Arts Yearbook 7:89-92.
. I964b. "David Smith's New Sculpture." In David Smith: Sculpture and

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 Drawings. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania.
. 1965. "America Takes the Lead, 1945-1965." Art in America 53 (August-
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Heller, Ben. 1963. Black and White. New York: Jewish Museum.
Hess, Thomas B. 1965. "De Kooning's New Women." Art News 64 (March): 36-38,
63-65-
. 1968. Willem de Kooning. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
. 19693. Barnett Newman. New York: Walker & Co. in association with
M. Knoedler & Co.
. i969b."The Outsider" [Clyfford Still]. Art News 68 (December):
34-37,67-69.
Hunter, Sam. 1963. Hans Hofmann. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
. 1964. "Abstract Expressionism Then-and Now." Canadian Art 21
(September-October): 266-68.
. 1967. "American Art Since 1945." In New Art Around the World, 9-58.
New York: Harry N. Abrams.
"Jackson Pollock: An Artist's Symposium." 1967. Parts i and 2. Art News 56
(April-May): 29-30,64-67; 27-29, 69-71.
Janis, Harriet, and Rudi Blesh. 1960. De Kooning. New York: Grove Press.
Judd, Donald. "Mark Rothko." Arts Magazine 37 (September): 57-58.
. 1964. "De Kooning." Arts Magazine 38 (March): 62-63.
. 1967. "Jackson Pollock." Arts Magazine 41 (April): 32-35.
Kavolis, Vytautas. 1963. "Abstract Expressionism and Puritanism." Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 21 (Spring): 315-19.
Kozloff, Max. 1964. "The Impact of de Kooning." Arts Yearbook 7:76-88.
. 19653. "An Interview with Robert Motherwell." Artforum 4 (September):
33-37-
. K)65b. "The Critical Reception of Abstract Expressionism." Arts Magazine
40 (December): 27-33.
. 19б5с. "The Problem of Color-Light in Rothko." Artforum 4 (September):
38-44.
Kramer, Hilton. 1962. "A Critic on the Side of History: Notes on Clement
Greenberg." Arts Magazine 3® (October): 60-63.
Krauss, Rosalind. 1968. "The New de Koonings." Artforum 6 (January): 44-47.
Kroll, Jack. 1961. "American Painting and the Convertible Spiral." ArtNews 60
(November): 34-37,66-69.
. 1962. "Some Greenberg Circles." A rtNews 61 (March): 35,48-49.
Kuh, Katherine. 1962. The Artist's Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists. New York:
Harper & Row.
Langsner, Jules. 1963. "Franz Kline, Calligraphy and Information Theory." Art
International (Lugano) 7 (March): 25-29.

674 Selecte d Bibliograph y

Levine, Edward. 1967. "Mythical Overtones in the Work of Jackson Pollock." Art
Journal 26 (Summer): 366-68,374.
Levy, Julien. 1968. Arshile Gorky. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Lichtblau, Charlotte. 1969. "Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman." Arts
Magazine 43 (March): 28-37.
McDarrah, Fred. 1961. The Artist's World in Pictures. New York: E. P. Button.
Motherwell, Robert. 1963. "A Conversation at Lunch." In An Exhibition of the Work
of Robert Motherwell, 10-19. Northampton, MA: Smith College Museum of
Art.
. 1966. "David Smith: A Major American Sculptor." Studio International 172
(August): 65-68.
Muías, Ugo, and Alan Solomon. 1967. New York: The New Art Scene. New York: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston.
Myers, John Bernard. 1960. "The Impact of Surrealism on the New York School."
Evergreen Review 4 (March-April): 75-85.
Newman, Barnett. 1962. "Frontiers of Space: An Interview with Dorothy Seckler."
Art in America 50 (Summer): 82-87.
. 1965. "The New York School Question: Interview with Neil A. Levine."
Art News 64 (September): 38-41,55-56.
. 1966. "The Fourteen Stations of the Cross." Art News 65 (May): 26-28,57.
O'Connor, Francis V. 1964. "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock, 1912-1943 Г Artforum
57 (May): 16-23.
. 1965. "The Genesis of Jackson Pollock, 1912-1943." Ph.D. diss., Johns
Hopkins University.
. 1967. Jackson Pollock. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
O'Hara, Frank. 1963. Franz Kline. Turin: Galleria civica d'arte moderna. Circulated
by MoMA International Council.
. 1965. Robert Motherwell: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Pavia, P. G. 1960. "The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism." It Is, no. 5
(Spring): 8-11.
Pavia, P. G., and Irving Sandier, eds. 1960. "The Philadelphia Panel." It Is, no. 5
(Spring): 34-38.
Rago, Louise. i96o."We Interview Lee Krasner." School Arts 60 (September): 31-32.
Read, Sir Herbert, and H. Harvard Arnason. 1960. "Dialogue on Modern U.S.
Painting." Art News 59 (May): 33-36.
Reiff, Robert Frank. 1961. "A Stylistic Analysis of Arshile Gorky's Art from 1943 to
1948." Ph.D. diss., Columbia University.
. 1966. "The Late Works of Arshile Gorky." Art Journal 22 (Spring): 148-52.
Reinhardt, Ad. 1965. "Reinhardt Paints a Picture." Art News 64 (March): 39-41,66.
Reise, Barbara. 1968. "Greenberg and the Group: A Retrospective View." Parts i
and 2. Studio International 175 (May-June): 254-57,314-16.
Robertson, Bryan. 1960. Jackson Pollock. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

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 . ig6i. Rothko. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Rose, Barbara. 1967. American Art Since 1900: A Critical History. New York:
Frederick A. Praeger (rev. 1975, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston).
, ed. 1968. Readings in American Art Since igoo: A Documentary Survey.
New York: Frederick A. Praeger.
Rose, Bernice. 1969. Jackson Pollock: Works on Paper. New York: Museum of
Modern Art in association with The Drawing Society.
Rosenberg, Harold. 1960. "Critic Within the Act." Art News 59 (October): 26-28.
. K)62a. "Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion." Art New s 61 (December):
42-45,62-63.
. Щ^Ъ. Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea. New York: Grove Press.
. 1963. "Hans Hofmann and the Stability of the New." New Yorker, 2 Novem-
ber, 100,103-5,108-10.
. 1966. The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience. New York: Horizon
Press.
. 1967. "The Art World: The Mythic Act." New Yorker, 6 May, 162-71.
. 1969. "The Art World: The Icon Maker." New Yorker, 19 April, 136-42.
, and Paul Goodman. 1962. "Gorky and History: An Exchange." Partisan
Review 29 (Fall): 587-93.
Rosenblum, Robert. 1961. "The Abstract Sublime." Art News 59 (February): 38-41.
Rubin, William. 1963. "Arshile Gorky, Surrealism and the New American Painting."
Art International (Lugano) 7 (25 February): 27-38.
. 1967. "Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition." Parts 1-4. Artforum 5
(February, March, April, May): 14-21,28-37,18-31,28-33.
Sandier, Irving. K)65a. "Baziotes: Modern Mythologist." Art News 63 (February):
28-30,65-66.
. I965b. "The Club." Artforum 4 (September): 27-31.
. 1968. "John D. Graham: The Painter as Aesthetician and Connoisseur."
Artforum 7 (October): 50-53.
Schuyler, James. 1968. "As American as Franz Kline." Art News 67 (October): 30-33,
58-59.
Seitz, William C. 1962. Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Drawings, Studies. New York:
Museum of Modern Art.
. 1963. Hans Hofmann. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Selz, Peter. 1961. Mark Rothko. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Sharpless, Ti-Grace. 1963. Clyffbrd Still. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary
Art, University of Pennsylvania.
. 1966. Clyffbrd Still: Thirty-three Paintings in the Albright-Knox Arts Academy.
Buffalo: Albright-Knox Arts Academy.
Simon, Sidney. 19б7а. "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School,
1939-1943: Interview with Peter Busa and Matta." Art International (Lugano)
10 (December): 17-20.

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 . 1967!). "Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School, 1939-1943:
Interview with Robert Motherwell." Art International (Lugano) 10 (December):
20-23.
Smith, David. 1960. "Notes on My Work" Arts Magazine 34 (February): 44-49.
. 1964. "The Secret Letter" [Interview by Thomas B. Hess]. In David Smith,
3-9. New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery.
. 1969. "Notes for 'David Smith Makes a Sculpture.' " Art News 43 (January):
46-48,56,
Still, Clyfbrd. 1963. "An Open Letter to An Art Critic." Artforum 2 (December): 32.
. 1964. "Letter to the Editor" Artforum 2 (February): 4.
Sylvester, David. 19бза. "Adolph Gottlieb: An Interview with David Sylvester."
Living Arts 1 (June): 2-10.
. 19бзЬ. "Franz Kline 1910-1962: An Interview with David Sylvester." Living
Arts i (Spring): 3-13.
Townsend, Benjamin J. 1961. "An Interview with Clyfford Still." Gallery Notes
[Albright-Knox Art Gallery] 24 (Summer): 8-16.
Tuchman, Maurice. 1965. New York School, the First Generation: Paintings of the
1940s and 1Q50S. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Valliere, James T. 1967. "De Kooning on Pollock: An Interview." Partisan Review
34 (Fall): 603-5.
Waldman, Diane. 1968. "Gottlieb: Signs and Suns." Art News 67 (February):
26-29,65-69.
Wasserman, Emily. 1968. "Lee Krasner in Mid-Career." Artforum 6 (March):
38-43.

The 1970 s
Albright, Thomas. 1976. "A Conversation with Clyfford Still." Art News 75 (March):
30-35.
Allentuck, Marcia Epstein, ed. iQji.John Graham's System and Dialectics of Art.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Alloway, Lawrence. 1972. "Gesture into Form: The Later Paintings of Barnett
Newman." Art News 71 (November): 42-44,112,115.
. 1973. "Residual Sign Systems in Abstract Expressionism." Artforum 12
(November): 36-43.
. 1975a. "De Kooning: Criticism and Art History." Artforum 13 (January):
46-50.
. i975b. Topics in American Art Since 1945. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Anderson, Wayne. 1975. American Sculpture in Process, 1930-1970. Boston: New
York Graphic Society.
Arnason, H. H. 1977. Robert Motherwell. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Ashton, Dore. 1971. "The Rothko Chapel in Houston." Studio International 181
(June): 273-75.

Selecte d Bibliograph y 677

 . 1973- The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. New York: Viking Press.
Baker, Elizabeth C. 1971. "Hans Hofmann: Abstract Expressionism and Color in
New York, 1945-65."^^News Annual 37:105-16.
Bannard, Walter Darby. 1971. "Touch and Scale: Cubism, Pollock, Newman, and
Still."Artforum 9 (June): 58-66.
. 1975. Hans Hofmann. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts.
Barkley, Lisa. 1977. Graham, Gorky, Smith, and Davis in the Thirties. Providence:
Daniel Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University.
Battcock, Gregory. 1974. "It Is." Arts Magazine 48 (April): 31-33.
Buettner, Stewart. 1976. "Arshile Gorky and the Abstract-Surreal." Arts Magazine
50 (March): 86-87.
Busignani, Alberto. 1971. Jackson Pollock. London: Hamlyn.
Carmean, E. A., Jr. 1972. The Collages of Robert Motherwell: A Retrospective
Exhibition. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts.
. 1976. "Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegies." Arts Magazine 50 (June):
94-97-
Carmean, E. A., Jr., and Eliza Rathbone. 1978. American Art at Mid-Century: The
Subjects of the Artist. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art.
Cavalière, Barbara. 1977. "An Introduction to the Method of William Baziotes."
Arts Magazine 51 (April): 124-31.
. 1979. "Early Abstract Expressionism: The 19405." Flash Art (Milan), nos.
86-87 (January-February): 26-32.
Cavalière, Barbara, and Robert C. Hobbs. 1977. "Against a Newer Laocoon." Arts
Magazine^i (April): 110-17.
Clyfford Still. 1976. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Cockcroft, Eva. 1974. "Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War." Artforum
12 (June): 39-41.
Cummings, Paul. 1979. David Smith: The Drawings. New York: Whitney Museum
of American Art.
Davis, Mary R. 1977. "The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb: A Synthesis of the
Subjective and the Rational." Arts Magazine 52 (November): 141-47.
Dehner, Dorothy. 1977-78. "Medals for Dishonor—The Fifteen Medallions of David
Smith." Art Journal 37 (Winter): 144-50.
Diamonstein, Barbaralee. 1979. Inside New York's Art World. New York: Rizzoli.
Fineberg, Jonathan. 1978. "Death and Maternal Love: Psychological Speculations
on Robert Motherwell's Art." Artforum 17 (September): 52-57.
Foster, Stephen C. 1975. "Clement Greenberg: Formalism in the '405 and ^os.^Art
Journal35 (Fall): 20-24.
. 1976. "Making a Movement Modern: The Role of the Avant-Garde Critic."
Art International (Lugano) 20 (October-November): 59-61.
Freke, David. 1972. "Jackson Pollock: A Symbolic Self-Portrait." Studio Inter-
national 184 (December): 217-21.

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Friedman, В. H. 1972. Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible. New York: McGraw-Hill.
. 1978. " The Irascibles': A Split Second in Art History." Arts Magazine 53
(September): 96-112.
Fuller, Peter. 1979. "American Painting Since the Last War." Parts i and 2. Art
Monthly (London) ю (May-June, July-August): 6-13,6-12.
Gagnon, François-Marc, Lise Lamarche, Nicole Dubreuil-Blondin, and René
Payane. 1979. Jackson Pollock: Questions. Montreal: Musée d'art contemporain.
Gaugh, Harry F. 1974. "Kline's Transitional Abstraction." Art in America 62 (July-
August): 43-47.
. 1975. "Franz Kline's Romantic Abstraction" Artforum 11 (Summer): 28-37.
Glazer, Penina M. 1972. "From the Old Left to the New: Radical Criticism in the
19405." American Quarterly 24 (December): 584-603.
Golding, John. 1976-77. Arshile Gorky Paintings and Drawings. Oxford, UK:
Museum of Modern Art.
Goldwater, Robert. 1971. "Rothko's Black Paintings Г Art in America 59 (March-
April): 58-63.
Goodman, Cynthia. 1979. "Hans Hofmann as a Teacher.'Mrts Magazine 53 (April):
120-25.
Greenberg, Clement. 1973. "Influences of Matisse.'Mrf International (Lugano)
17 (November): 28-30,39.
Hadler, Mona. 1977. "William Baziotes: A Contemporary Poet-Painter.'Mrfo
Magazine 51 (June): 102-10.
Haftmann, Werner. 1971. Mark Rothko. Dusseldorf: Stàdtische Kunsthalle.
Harrison, Charles. 1973. "Abstract Expressionism." Parts i and 2. Studio
International 185 (January-February): 9-18,53-60.
Hauptman, William. 1974. "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade."
Artforum 12 (June): 39-41.
Herrera, Hayden. 1976. "John Graham: Modernist Turned Magus." Arts Magazine
51 (October): 100-105.
Hess, Thomas B. 1971. Barnett Newman. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
. 1972. "Pinup and Icon." Art News Annual 38:223,228-33.
Higgins, Andrew. 1971. "Clement Greenberg and the Idea of the Avant-Garde."
Studio International 183 (October): 144-47.
Hobbs, Robert C. 1975. "Motherwell's Concern with Death in Painting: An
Investigation of His Elegies to the Spanish Republic, Including an Examination
of His Philosophical and Methodological Considerations." Ph.D. diss.,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
. 1976. "Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic? In Jiirgen
Harten, Robert Motherwell. Dusseldorf: Stàdtische Kunsthalle.
. 1979. "Re-review Possibilities? Art Criticism 1:96-103.
Hobbs, Robert C., and Gail Levin. 1978. Abstract Expressionism: The Formative
Years. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.

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 Imdahl, Max. 1971. Barnett Newman: Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue HI.
Stuttgart: Reclam.
Johnson, Ellen. 1973. "Jackson Pollock and Nature." Studio International 185 (June):
257-62.
Jordan, Jim. 1976. "Arshile Gorky at Crooked Run Farm." Arts Magazine 50 (March):
99-103.
Jordan, Jim, Harry Rand, Isobel Grossman, Karlen Mooradian, Arshile Gorky,
Hayden Herrera, and Alice Butler. 1975. Arshile Gorky: Drawings to Paintings.
Austin: University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin.
Judd, Donald. 1970. "Barnett Newman." Studio International 179 (February): 66-69.
Kagan, Andrew. 1975. "Paul Klee's Influence on American Painting: New York
School." Arts Magazine 49 (June): 54-59.
. 1979. "Improvisations: Notes on Jackson Pollock and the Black Contribution
to American High Culture" Arts Magazine 53 (March): 96-99.
Kambartel, Walter. 1970. Jackson Pollock: Number32,1950. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Karp, Diane. 1976. "Arshile Gorky's Iconography." Arts Magazine 50 (March):
82-85.
Kligman, Ruth. 1974. Love Affair: A Memoir of Jackson Pollock. New York: William
Morrow.
Kokkinen, Eila. 1976. "John Graham During the 19405." Arts Magazine 51
(November): 99-103.
Kozloff, Max. 1973. "American Painting During the Cold War." Artforum и (May):
43-54-
Krauss, Rosalind. I97ia. "Jackson Pollock's Drawings." Artforum 9 (January): 58-61.
. I97ib. Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
. 1974. "Issues and Commentary: Changing the Work of David Smith." Art in
America 62 (September-October): 30-34.
. 1977. The Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York:
Garland Publishing.
Kuspit, Donald. 1977. "Clyfford Still: The Ethics of Art." Artforum 15 (May): 32-40.
. I978a. "Symbolic Pregnance in Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still." Arts
Magazine 52 (March): 120-25.
. I978b. "Two Critics: Thomas B. Hess and Harold Rosenberg." Artforum
17 (September): 32-33.
. I979a. Clement Greenberg: Art Critic. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
. I979b. "To Interpret or Not to Interpret Jackson Pollock." Arts Magazine
53 (March): 125-27.
Lader, Melvin P. 1978. "Graham, Gorky, de Kooning and the 'Ingres Revival' in
America." Arts Magazine 52 (March): 94-99.
Landau, Ellen G. 1976. "The French Sources for Hans Hofmann's Ideas on the
Dynamics of Color-Created Space." Arts Magazine 51 (October): 76-81.

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Langhorne, Elizabeth. 1977. "A Jungian Interpretation of Jackson Pollock's Art
Through 1946." Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.
. 1979. "Jackson Pollock's ''The Moon Woman Cuts the Circle]" Arts Magazine
53 (March): 128-37.
Levine, Edward M. 1971. "Abstract Expressionism: The Mystical Experience."
Art Journal (Fall): 22-25.
Macmillan, Duncan. 1979. "The Outsider: Gorky and America." Art International
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MacNaughton^ Mary Davis. 1979. Adolph Gottlieb Pictographs, 1941-53. New York:
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McClintic, Miranda. 1979. David Smith: The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
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Moffett, Kenworth. 1972. Review of The Triumph of American Painting, by Irving
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(USA). (September-October): 52-74.
. 1978. Arshile Gorky Adoian. Chicago: Gilgamesh Press.
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Polcari, Stephen. 1979a. "The Intellectual Roots of Abstract Expressionism: Mark
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 Quick, David Marvin. 1978. "Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman and Three of
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Robert, Henry Flood, ed. 1979. Adolph Gottlieb: Paintings, 1921-1956. Omaha:
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Robert Motherwell: Choix de peintures et de collages: 1941-1977.1977. Paris: Musée
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. I978b. Willem de Kooning in East Hampton. New York: Solomon R.
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96-101.

The 1980s
Abadie, Daniel, Dominique Bozo, William Rubin, Barbara Rose, and Hubert
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 . igSsb. David Smith. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art.
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Mándeles, Chad. 1981. "Jackson Pollock and Jazz: Structural Par aliéis Г Arts
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Marcus, Stanley E. 1983. David Smith: The Sculptor and His Work. Ithaca: Cornell
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702 Selecte d Bibliograph y

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2000-2004
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Carmean, E. A., Jr. 2002. Coming to Light: Avery, Gottlieb, Rothko, Provincetown
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Demetrion, James T., éd. 2001. Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960. Washington,
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Dijkstra, Bram. 2003. American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920-1950.
New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Columbus Museum of Art.
Engberg, Siri. 2003. Robert Motherwell: The Complete Prints, 1940-1991; Catalogue
Raisonné. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center. Distributed by Hudson Hill Press.
Fineberg, Jonathan. 2000. Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being. 2d ed. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Frank, Elizabeth. 2002. Adolph Gottlieb: Vertical Moves. New York: PaceWildenstein.
Franks, Pamela. 2002. The Tiger's Eye: The Art of a Magazine. New York: Yale
University Press.
Frascina, Francis. 2000. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. 2d ed. London:
Routledge.
Galenson, David W. 2002. "Was Jackson Pollock the Greatest Modern American
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Harris, Jonathan. 2000. " 'Stuck in the Post?' Abstract Expressionism, T. J. Clark,
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Harrison, Helen. 2000. Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock. New York:
Thunder's Mouth Press.
Helfenstein, Josef. 2002. Louise Bourgeois: The Early Works. Champaign, IL:
Krannert Art Museum. Distributed by University of Washington Press.
Herrera, Hayden. 2003. Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work. New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux.
Herskovic, Marika. 2000. New York School: Abstract Expressionists: Artists Choice
by Artists; A Complete Documentation of the New York Painting and Sculpture
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Controversies ofthezoth Century, 140-75. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hilton, Tim. 2000. "Clement Greenberg."New Criterion 19 (September): 12-18.
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Gottlieb. New Britain, CT: New Britain Museum of Art.
Hoving, Kirsten A. 2002. "Jackson Pollock's Galaxy: Outer Space and Artist's Space
in Pollock's Cosmic Paintings Г American A rt 16 (Spring): 82-93.
Humblet, Claudine. 2003. La nouvelle abstraction américaine, 1950-1970. Milan:
Skira and Paris: Seuil.
Jachec, Nancy. 2000. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism,
1940-1960. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Karmel, Pepe. 2002. "Arshile Gorky: Anatomical Blackboard." Master Drawings
40 (Spring): 9-23.
Kertess, Klaus. 2000. Willem de Kooning: In Process. Fort Lauderdale, FL: Fort
Lauderdale Museum of Art.
Landau, Ellen G. 2OO2a. "Jackson Pollock: The Body and Nature." In Maroni and
Bigatti 2002,73-90.
. 20O2b. "Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner: The 'Erotics of Influence.' "
In Maroni and Bigatti 2002,173-88.
Lee, Janie C., and Melvin P. Lader. 2003. Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective of
Drawings: New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N.
Abrams.
Lieber, Edvard. 2000. Willem de Kooning: Reflections in the Studio. New York:
Harry N. Abrams.
MarkRothko. 2000. Barcelona: Fundaciójuan Miró.
Mark Rothko. 2001. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz in association with the
Fondation Beyeler.
Mark Rothko and the Lure of the Figure: Paintings, 1933-1946.2000. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Mark Rothko: The Realist Years, Selected Works. 2001. New York: PaceWildentstein.
Maroni, Monica, and Bigatti, Giorgio, eds. 2002. Jackson Pollock, the Irascibles, and
the New York School. Milan: Skira editore in association with Centro Italiano
per le Arti e la Cultura and Musei Civic i Venezia.
O'Connor, Francis V. 2001-2002. "The Scholarly Potential of Jackson Pollock's
Studio Floor." IFAR Journal 4, no. 4; 5, no. i: 41-43.
On the Sublime: Mark Rothko, Yves Klein, James Turrell. 2001. Berlin: Deutsche
Guggenheim; New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications.
Peggy and Kiesler: The Collector and the Visionary. 2004. Venice, Italy: Peggy
Guggenheim Collection.
Preble, Michael, ed. 2004. William Baziotes. Milan: Skira.
Richardson, Brenda. 2001. Willem de Kooning Vellums. New York: Mitchell-Innes 8c
Nash in collaboration with Matthew Marks Gallery.
Sims, Lowery Stokes. 2002. Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde,
1923-1982. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Shiff, Richard, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, and Heidi Colsman-Freyberger. 2004.

Selected Bibliography 705

 Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, edited by Ellyn Childs Allison. New
York: Barnett Newman Foundation and New Haven: Yale University Press.
Stevens, Mark, and Annalyn Swan. 2004. De Kooning: An American Master. New
York: A. A. Knopf.
Temkin, Ann, Richard Shiff, Suzanne Penn, and Melissa Ho, eds. 2002. Barnett
Newman. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Tenenbaum, Stacy. 2001. "The Triumph of'The New American Painting': MoMA
and Cold War Cultural Diplomacy." In Artists and Patrons in Post-war Britain:
Essays by Postgraduate Students at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate.
White, Anthony, ed. 2002. Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles. Canberra: National Gallery of
Australia. Distributed by Thames 8c Hudson.
Wilkin, Karen. 2000. David Smith: Two into Three Dimensions. Miami Beach:
Grassfield Press.
. 2003. Hans Hofmann: A Retrospective. Naples, FL: Naples Museum of Art
in association with George Braziller, New York.
William Baziotes: The Poetic Spirit. 2000. Youngstown, OH: Butler Institute of
American Art.
Williams, Reba White. 2001. "The Prints of Lee Krasner." Print Quarterly 18, no. 4:
396-413.
. 2002. "Abstract Expressionist Prints." Print Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June):
212-14.
Yohe, James, ed. 2002. Hans Hofmann. New York: Rizzoli.
Zucker, Steven. 2001. "Confrontations with Radical Evil: The Ambiguity of Myth
and the Inadequacy of Representation." Art History 24 (June): 379-400.
Zweit, Armin, and Volkmar Essers. 2003. Jackson Pollock: Works from the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, and European Collections. Dusseldorf: Kherer Verlag
Heidelberg, in association with Kunstsammlung Norderheim-Westfalen.

706 Selected Bibliography

 Index

Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Alloway, Lawrence, 7,24-25,28,47-48,

Critics (Ross), ix, 1-2 295,303,313,375
"Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Alston, Charles, 70
Developments" (Albright-Knox), xi, American Abstract Expressionism
3,50,52-53,59,83-84П9 (Thistlewood), 59,69,8зп4
Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record "American Abstract Expressionists and
(Shapiro and Shapiro), ix, 1-4 Imagists" (Guggenheim), 22,30,32,
"Abstract Expressionism: The Formative 97ni23,245,248
Years" (Whitney), 34-37 "American Art at Mid-Century: The
"Abstract Expressionism: Idea and Sym- Subjects of the Artist" (National
bol" (University of Virginia), 37 Gallery of Art), 33,39-43 passim
"Abstract Expressionism: Other Dimen- Anderson, Wayne, 40
sions" (Rutgers), 56,69 Anfam, David, 59-60, Ю9П233,580
Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics Arnason, H. H., 20,22,30,32,48,97Ш23,
(Gibson), 62,69-70,115-116, 245
Ш1286-88 Art of This Century Gallery, 2,17,62,
Abstract Expressionist dissertations, 5, ИОП245,416-17,584
12-13,34,59,98-99Ш35, 10111165, "Art of This Century: The Women"
112П258,120П328 (Pollock-Krasner House), 62, non245
Abstract Imagists, 20,33,50,52,245,248 Ashton, Dore, 9-10,34-35,47,244,517,
Abstract Painting—Background and 520,523
American Phase (Hess), 13,230-31 Asian influence on Abstract Expression-
"Abstract and Surrealist Art in America" ism, 207
(Mortimer Brandt Galleries), 7,86n28, Auping, Michael, xi, 3-4,50,53,59,
87пзо, 150 72-73,84ШО
Action Painting, 8,13,16-18,21,66, automatism, 36,131,183,219,265,283,
74-75,93n8o, 199,214,22i, 225, 334,564
246-47,565,654
Adorno, Theodor, 470-71 Baigell, Matthew, 50,72-73, Ю5~6п202,
African American artists, 69-70,510, 615
514-23 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 113^64,512
Alfieri, Bruno, 17-18,92-93nn69 and 75 Balakian, Peter, 73-74
Allentuck, Marcia Epstein, 35 Bannard, Walter Darby, 48

707
 Barber, Fiona, 65 Carmean, E. A., Jr., 33,40-42,55,645
Barr, Alfred H., Jr., 19,45-46,10311181, Cassirer, Ernst, 47,361,372,447
164,220,254,384,393,395,543,546, Cateforis, David, 65
550 Cavalière, Barbara, 33
Bataille, Georges, 68,78,11411278,650, Cedar Bar, 30,166,627
655 Centre Georges Pompidou, 53-54,68,
Battcock, Gregory, 31 645
Baziotes, William, xi, 6,33,36,81,152, Cernuschi, Claude, 48,51
155,161,251-255 passim, 264-65, Champa, Kermit, 61
269-70,273,281-82,285-88 passim, Charles Egan Gallery, 17,389,417,517
416-19 passim, 443,446,450,461,467, Chave, Anna C., 50-51,67, io6n2O5,
469,493,5^2-23,634; Works: Night 11Ш249
Mirror, fig. 2 Chipp, Herschel В., 2,567
Beats, 16,19,92067 С.LA. and Abstract Expressionism, 75
Belgrad, Daniel, 69 Clark, T. J., 44,57-58,65,77-79, io8n224,
Benedict, Ruth, 61,429-33 119ппз25-2б,535,б55
Benton, Thomas Hart, 35,113^67,132, Club, The, 30,90П54, H5n286,166,229,
286,306,446 232-33,236
Betty Parsons Gallery, 21-23,50,63, Coates, Robert M., 7,86n28,199
306-7,315,320,417-18,423,427,434, Cockroft, Eva, 45,75-76
455,468,544 Cold War politics and Abstract Expres-
biomorphism, 24,32,49,250-55,321,428, sionism, 45,62,78, ЮЗПШ77-78,
495,635 104Ш84,338-44,391-95 passim, 415,
Bloom, Harold, 584,649 511-12,516,535,537,561
Bois, Yve-Alain, 68,649 College Art Association 1986 Abstract
Bolton Landing, 11,29,63-64,165, 626, Expressionist panel, 3,50,56
629-40 passim Collins, Bradford, 46-47,77, H9n3i8
Bourgeois, Louise, 42-43,64, Ю2пш68- color in Abstract Expressionism, 47-49,
71,164,180-81,447,450,460-61,473; Ю4Ш88,322,362,465,649
Works: Quarantania, fig. 18 Color Field Painters, 20,32,47,49,321,
Breton, André, 35,270,385 573
Brooks, James, 164,403-4 Communism, n8n3O9,384-90,520-21,
Brown, Milton, 72 632
Brustein, Robert, 16-17 Cone, Jane Harrison, 29, дбппз,
Buber, Martin, 619-22 Conwill, Kinshasha Holman, 70
Budnick, Dan: photo of D. Smith, fig. 5 Corn, Wanda, 58
Buettner, Stewart, 56 Cox, Annette, 45-46,56,72
Bultman, Fritz, 402,428 Craven, David, 70,75-76,510
Burke, Edmund, 137,240-41,318-19,462 Crehan, Hubert, 71, n6n290
Burke, Kenneth, 443,462-66 passim Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, 19,
Busa, Peter, 24,36,280-83 26-28,35,40,65,201-14 passim, 248,
Butler, Judith, 65 257-63 passim, 367,583,634,646-47
Byzantine art: parallels with Abstract
Expressionism, 26-27,95nio6 Dabrowsky, Ivan. See John Graham
Dali, Salvador, 251,255,266-67,277,280
Campbell, Joseph, 61,447,493~94

708 Index
Damisch, Hubert, 470-71,474 Finkelstein, Louis, 11-12,14,89^7
Davis, Stuart, 12,154,166,213,264-65, Firestone, Evan, 48,399
416,418-19, 629 Flam, Jack, 47
De Kooning, Elaine. See Kooning, "Flying Tigers: Painting and Sculpture in
Elaine de New York, 1939-1946" (Brown Uni-
De Kooning, Willem. See Kooning, versity), 61, Ю9П236
Willem de Foster, Stephen, 56-57
De Man, Paul, 63, ИШ249,454,457,472 Foster, Susan Leigh, 499-500
De Saussure, Ferdinand. See Saussure, Foucault, Michel, 61,77,113^69,531-32
Ferdinand de Francis, Sam, 223-24,567-68
DeCarava, Roy, 70 Frankenstein, Alfred, 68
Dehner, Dorothy, 42,63-64,10211167, Frankenthaler, Helen, 23,67,107n2i6,
111-12, n25i, 166,625-41; Works: И4П273,562-73 passim
Abstraction, pi.8, Country Living Frascina, Francis, 1-2,56-57,75,8зп4
(Bird of Peace), 632, fig. 22 Frazer, James, 61,432,435,496, 501,
Delaney, Beauford, 70 584-85
Dewey, John, 8 Freke, David, 37-38
Dijkstra, Bram, 119-20, n327 Freud, Sigmund, 61,68, 9911151, 252,294,
Dinesen, Isak, 572-73 336,350,356,374,399,401,447-50,
Downtown Gallery, 417-18 460,467,494,650
Duncan, Carol, 64-65 Fried, Michael, 27-28,47~48, 57~5$, 67,
Z>yn,44,50 95Ш09,9бппз, ю8п224,256,316,
Dzubas, Friedel, 567-68 569,652-53
Friedman, В. H.,32,9in66,294,402,626
Echaurren, Roberto Matta. See Matta Fuller, Peter, 46
Ehrenzweig, Anton, 366-68,370,374-75
Elderfield, John, 562 Galerie Maeght, 9,14
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 314,374,618-19 Geldzahler, Henry, 30-31,115^85
European literature: influence on Ab- gender issues in Abstract Expressionism,
stract Expressionism, 47-48,173, 62-63,65-71 passim, 79, ii4nn27i-73,
326-33,336,399-410,446,466,493 115Ш1286-87, ii6n288,549-50,560-
European philosophy: influence on Ab- 75,625-26
stract Expressionism, 48-50,137,194, Gibson, Ann, 3-6,48-49,52-53,58,
334,422-36,520 62-63,69-71, ii5nn286-87,11611288,
Existentialism, 32,221,334,619,622 515
Exquisite Corpse, 284,467 Goldwater, Robert, 18,42,232,320,544
Goodnough, Robert, 10,12,14,42,66,159
Federation of Modern Painters and Goossen, E. C., 56,316,461,563-64,566
Sculptors, 44,146-47 Gorky, Arshile, 7,35,39,41,73-74,
Ferber, Herbert, 40, Ю2Ш70,313,444, iomi58, Ю7П216, и8пзо7,125,151,
447-48,454-55,459,461,464,470-71, 166,183,201-2,206,224,253,255,265,
618 269-73 passim, 286-87,346,352-58,
Fergusson, Harvey, 62 393,447-48,460,469,564-66,629;
film noir, 62,64, Ю9П240,531 Works: Artist and His Mother, 39,74,
Fineberg, Jonathan, 38 353, fig. 17; Plow and the Song, 39, pi. 6

Index 709
 Gottlieb, Adolph, 32,155,204-5,245~54 Grohmann, Will, 222
passim, 287,344,388,405,422,428, Gubar, Susan, 572-73
447,459-61,471,473,490-95 passim, Guggenheim Museum, 20,28,32,35,41,
502-5,523,527-30 passim, 540,543, 301
617,629; joint letter with Rothko to Guggenheim, Peggy, 2,7,17,62-63,66,
New York Times, 5,9,22-23,44,72, 77,1Ю-ПП245,138,201,265,272,
871132,94*196,11711301,146,450,452, 282-87 passim, 300,389,416,584,648
530; other statements on art, 5,7,9,33, Guilbaut, Serge, 44-45,59~6o, 75~76,
44,49,61,72,75,160; pictographs, I03ni8i
Ю5П207,151,208,315-16,405,450, Guston, Philip, xi, 233
453,492-93,501,504; Works: Alkahest
of Paracelsus, fig. 9; Thrust, 29, pi. 3 Haftmann, Werner, 72
Graham, John (Ivan Dabrowsky), 35-36, Halpert, Edith, 418
50,283,298,346-58,429,459; "Primi- Hare, David, 33
tive Art and Picasso," 298; relation- Harris, Jonathan, 59
ships with Abstract Expressionist Harrison, Charles, 2-3,46,95ШО5
artists, 35,166,299,626-31 passim; Harrison, Jane, 584-87
System and Dialectics of Art, 35,49, Hartigan, Grace, 220,223,249,562
142-46,346-49,355; Works: Apotheo- Hauptman, William, 45
sis, fig. 16; Two Sisters, 40,348-51, Hayter, Stanley William, 42
356 Hegel, Georg W. E, 28,129,137,194,370,
Graham, Martha, 61,489-505 374,425,462,465,535-36
Graves, Morris, 8,155,213,450 Henderson, Joseph L., 37,293,298,302,
Greenberg, Clement, ix, 6-8,19-21,24-30 304-5
passim, 32-36 passim, 42-48 passim, Hess, Thomas В., 27,256,406; Abstract
57-58, 61, 67,70-78 passim, 8зппз-4, Painting—Background and American
84nio, 95-96nio9, дбппз, 316,338, Phase, 13,230-31; on de Kooning, 14,
343,365-70 passim, 383-87,390-96, 40,65,90nn57-58,172-80,517,594,
404,442,469-71,513,546,564-65, 597,599,605; on Newman, 50,401,
569,600; Art and Culture, 20,93п8з, 615-17; panels at The Club, 229,233,
552,561; " 'American-Type' Painting," 235
20-21,24,94n88,198,263,341,514, Hobbs, Robert, 33,73, non243,324
550-52; "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," 20, Hofmann, Hans, xi, 7,10,85n26,86n28,
57,90П72,386-87; Je wishness of, 72, 93-94n84,155,159,184,200,203,205,
93п8з, Ii6-i7n295; on de Kooning, 17, 246,258,389,416-19 passim, 522,
65,202-3,213,549; on Newman, 21, 536-37,540,543,548,552-54; as
71,206,210-12,315; on Pollock, 10,20, teacher, 20,34,9911140,282,467,617
88n40,205-6,212,304,307,315,393, Hook, Sidney, 530
550,554,653,658; ; on Post-Painterly Hudson, Andrew, 32
Abstraction, 23,67 84nio; rivalry with Hunter, Sam, 56,408
Rosenberg, 9,16-21, допбб, 93n8o,
214,654; on Rothko, 365,370; on D. Iconograph, 5,460
Smith, 29-30,9бшш6-П7,97nii9, Impressionism: influence on Abstract Ex-
363,393 pressionism, 21,28,35,8gn47,208-9,
Grippe, Peter, 40,444,447,450,453 248-49,550

710 Index
Indian (Native American) art: influence Kline, Franz, xi, 9,59,67, допбб, 188,
on Abstract Expressionism, 49-50,54, 206-7,224,233,248,269,321-22,500,
136,299,302-4,314,422-36,458,460, 521,540,544,570; Works: New York,
493,520 New York, fig. 3
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 40,173, Kooning, Elaine de, 11, nonn243~44,
203,346-58 165-71,233,517,522-23,595,597,
"The Interpretive Link: Abstract Sur- 603-7 passim; fig. 23
realism into Abstract Expressionism" Kooning, Willem de, 12,22,35,41,54,
(Newport Harbor), 56, Ю7~8п223 67-71 passim, 84-5Ш9, допбб,
"Intrasubjectives" (Kootz), 8,88пз6, И9П324,155,159,163, i84,223,233,
154-55, i64 247-50,258,281,283,352-58 passim,
Irascibles, 2,32,34,97^26,99^39; %i 372,392,396,419,444,447,46i, 469,
It Is, 13,81,232 473-74,499,516-20,548,594-607,
629,637; fig. 23; "De Kooning Paints
Jachec, Nancy, 75-76 a Picture," 13-14,172-80; Greenberg
Jakobson, Roman, 52 on, 17,65,202-3,213; Rosenberg
Janis, Sidney, 7,77,86n29,87пзо, 150-52, on, 13,16; Works: Black Friday, 70,
420,545 П2П254, fig. 25; Woman 1,14,64-65,
Jewell, Edward Alden, 8-9,23,44, 9on58,i72-8o, 460,540; pi. i; Woman
870132-33,136,395,530 series, 14,39,53, iomi62,112,172-80,
Jewishness of Abstract Expressionism, 15, 257-58,448,472,539,596-6o6
29,50,71-72, ii6nn294-95,615-23 Kootz, Samuel, 8,77,87^3,88пз6,
Jones, Amelia, 66 154-55,287,393,521
Jones, Caroline, 10,76-77 Kozloff, Max, 18-19,44-45,344,368,
Jorn,Asger,548,553 372-73
Joseph, Ronald, 70 Kramer, Hilton, 20,34,46
Joyce, James, 48,58,61,399~4Ю, 492,494 Krasner, Lee (Lee Krasner Pollock), x, 28,
Julian Levy Gallery, 267,280 34-37 passim, 41,53,63-64,73,75,79,
Jung, Carl Gustav, 5-6,32,35,293-310, 9опб5,93п84,9бпш, 9901137-39,
350,399,423-46 passim, 435,447~48, иоп245, итп248-49,3б-39,282,
496; influence on Abstract Expres- 294,306-7,402,447,4бо, 465,467,
sionism, 5,32,35,37-38,49-50,52,54, 471-72,495,499-502,562,625-27,
60,85П25, ЮОШ51,293-312,426,428, 645-66; fig. 4; Works: Eye Is the First
435,449,467,493-94,606,645 Circle, fig. 27; "Little Images," 34,
55-56,73,473-74; Untitled (Little
Kagan, Andrew, 68-69 Image), fig. 14
Kamrowski, Gerome, 36,264-65,269-70, Krauss, Rosalind, 78,9бппз, 11401274
273,280-81,283 and 279, Ii5n28o, 405,627; on Pol-
Kandinsky, Wassily, 35,189,200-1,203, lock, 55,67-68,645-60; on D. Smith,
205,208,212,223,229,232,251,259, 4i,45i
287,324,362,418,465,564-65 Kuspit, Donald, 46-48,54,56,73,
Kant, Immanuel, 137,240-41,324,462 10401189-90, Ю5П195,361,623
Kaplan, Louis, 72
Kaprow, Allan, 10-11,13,181,649 Lader, Melvin, 40,346
Karmel, Pepe, i, 68,82ni, 646,657 Landau, Ellen G., 55, ШП245

Index 711
 Langer, Susanne, 445,447-49 Matthews, Jane de Hart, 45
Langhorne, Elizabeth, 37-38,54 Mattison, Robert, 46-47
Lassaw, Ibram, 40,447,630 Matulka, Jan, 627-29,634
Latin American art and Abstract Expres- Maxwell Galleries, 37
sionism, 75,510-14 McCarthy, Joseph, 45,339,343,538,547,
Leen, Nina, 2,32,9811127,99Ш39 554
Leja, Michael, 59,61,63,66,71,75, McCaughey, Patrick, 33,98ni3i
Ю9П238,1ЮПП239 and 243-44,527 Melville, Herman, 15,48,330,399
Levin, Gail, 34-35 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 30,32,40,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 52,58,61,403 99Ш39,340,419,527
Levy, Julian, 263,266 Mexican art and Abstract Expressionism,
Lewis, Norman, 69-70,75,104ni84, 35,205,285-86,296,298
115П286, n6n288,133,10Ч, 514-16, Michelson, Annette, 19
521-23; Works: Klu Klux, 69; Mumbo Minturn, Kent, 64,1ЮП24О, П2П257
Jumbo, 69,515, fig. 24 Miró, Joan, 35,37,39,131,133,150-53,
Life magazine, 2,10,32,77,88n40, 184,189,200-2,212,232,251-54 pas-
П2п253,549,5б2,5б5 sim, 273,284-85,289
Lippard, Lucy, 407,594 Modern Artists in America, 5,42,159,164
Lipton, Seymour, 40,444,447~48,453, Modern Man literature, 61-62,527-33
460,499,501 modernism, 26-28,57,59,72,8зпз,
Lorca, Federico Garcia, 38,326-33,336, 95Ш05,9бпю9,535~3б, 539,541,
399 556,561,587,652
Louis, Morris, 23,67,94n85,257,368, Moffett, Kenworth, 28,33,568
565-69 Molleda, Mercedes, 220
Lubar, Robert, 449 Mondrian, Piet, 21,138,162-63,177,197,
Luria, Rabbi Isaac, 50,615-16,621-23 200,208,211-14 passim, 232,244,347,
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 50 443,469
Monet, Claude, 21,35,208-9,365
Mainardi, Patricia, 80 Mooradian, Karlen, 74, ioini58
Manheim, Ralph and Mary, 307,402 Morris, Robert, 67,649-51,655-56
Marian Willard Gallery, П5П286,626, Mortimer Brandt Gallery, 7,86n28,
636,640 150-51,389
Marter, Joan M., 63-64, ШП250,625 Motherwell, Robert, 5-7,12,24,29,33,
Marxism, 15,20,35,43,46,57,75,78, 36-37,41,44,47-49,53,75-76,79,81,
Ii8n309,11911325,129,192,267, Ю4Ш88,151,155,160,163-64,184,
383-87 passim, 390 204,245-52 passim, 267-70,276-88,
Marxist interpretations of Abstract Ex- 300,324-37,385,400,404,410,417,
pressionism^, 61,75,78, io8n226, 446-47,465,471-73,521,529,563,
543-57,546 625-26; "Modern Painters'World,"
Masson, Andre, 131,200,205,208,251-52, 44, ЮЗШ74,129,514,530; Possibilities
268,274,282,285-87,648 editorial statement, 6,9,434-44,
Matisse, Henri, 11,47,161,177,200, Ю2-ЗШ73,153-54; Works: Elegies to
203-4,211,238,305,309,391,418,422, the Spanish Republic, 29,38,46-47,
469,543,550,553,587 Ю4Ш84,224,324,326,328-37,519,
Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren), 24,36, fig. 13; Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive,
201,252,263-85 passim, 467 38,47; pi. 5

712 Index
Murray, Gilbert, 584-85 Works: Broken Obelisk., 71, fig. 26; Gea,
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 12,27, 428,435,456; Onement 1-Й, 50,243,
45,49-50,64,80,10511199,135,257, 317,435,461-62,616; Stations of the
305,314,296,340-43,396,416,419, Cross, 28,50,319-21, fig. 12; Vir Hero-
493,601,638; "15 Americans," 6,171, icus Sublimis, 23-25,52,71,243,
308; International Council, 18-19,342; 462-63, pi. 2
"New American Painting," 18-19,45; "New York Painting and Sculpture:
Pollock retrospectives, i, 28,68,80, 1940-1970" (Metropolitan Museum of
ЮО-1Ш54,646,649; " Trimitivism' Art),30,ii5n285
in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the "New York School: The First Generation"
Tribal and the Modern," 49, Ю5Ш99 (LACMA),30
Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 35, Nietzsche, Friedrich, ю, 48,50, io6n205,
265,301 423-36
Myers, John Bernard, 24 Noguchi, Isamu, iomi63,490,493~95,
myth, 5,47,58,60-61,127-28,139, 503
l6
252-53,3 -i7,321,422-25 passim, Noland, Kenneth, 23,27-30 passim, 67,
428,435-36,493-94,501-2,504,529 94n85,95-96nio9,257,565,567,626
"Myth-Making: Abstract Expressionist
Painting from the United States" (Tate O'Connor, Francis V., 28,35,38,55,
Liverpool), 59-6o, 69,8зп4 851123
O'Hara, Frank, 14,550
Naifeh, Steven, 54,60 Oldenburg, Claes, 54,66,9in65
Namuth, Hans: photo of W. and E. de Olitski, Jules, 27-28,95Ш09,257,567
Kooning, 64, fig. 23; photo of B. New- Onslow-Ford, Gordon, 36,279
man and B. Parsons, fig. 7; photo of Ortega y Gasset, José, 8,154,460
J. Pollock and L. Krasner, fig. 4; pho- Orton, Fred, 45,74-75, n8n309
tos ofJ. Pollock, 10,16,53-54,68,76, Ossorio, Alfonso, 69,307-8,402-3,550,
Ю6-7П213,550,565,646,650,656 656
New Iconography 5
Newman, Arnold, ю Paalen, Wolfgang, 50,279
Newman, Barnett, 20-23,28,32-33,37, "Paints a Picture" series (ArtNews), 10-11,
41,44,48-49,53-54,61,84nnio and 13-14,76,9511108,172
19,99Ш39,244-48,251,273,288, Parsons, Betty, 77,136,389,391,402,434,
313-22,388-89,394,400-1,408, 52i; fig. 7
422-36,447,453,460-63,468-70, Partisan Review, 15,341,384-87,392,
495,527-30,545,55i; %• 7; Green- 550-52 passim
berg on, 21, 71,206, 210-12,315; Pavia, Philip, 13,229
"Ideographic Picture," 23-24,50,135, Peirce, C. S., 52-53,458-61,470
314-15,427,455-48 passim; Jewish- Perchuck, Andrew, 65-66
ness of, 29, 50, 71-72; 105-6П202, "Personal Statement: Painting Prophecy
n6n290, И7П299,615-23; "Northwest 1950" (Porter), 42
Coast Indian Painting," 50,423,427, Picasso, Pablo, 32,35,38~39,74,126-27,
432; other statements on art, 6-7,22, 131,133,138,150-53 passim, 175,179,184,
30-31,76,85-86п2б, 94П96, юзш75, 200-6,232,238,249-50,254,264,285-
12Ш332,159,54,530; "Sublime Is 86,295-300 passim, 347,357-58,392,
Now," 95Ш02, Ю5П200,137,545,618; 416,422,469,490,54,553,587,646;

Index 713
 Picasso, Pablo (continued) Shimmering Substance, 275,306,309,
influence on Abstract Expressionism, 466; Totem Lesson I-II, 270,307,309
32,35,74,133,232,254,264,285-86, Pollock, Lee Krasner. See Lee Krasner
295-97,582-83,600,630; Works: Pollock
Demoiselles d'Avignon, 40,64, Pop Art, 30-31,344,605
112П254,297-98; Guernica, 47,155 Porter, David, 42
Piper, Rose, 70 Possibilities, 5-6,9-10,14,43-44,81,
Polcari, Stephen, 3-4,49,58-6i,io8n226, 85П21,153,653-54
489 Post Painterly Abstraction, 23,27,67,
Pollock, Griselda, 45,65 84nio
Pollock, Jackson, x, 10,12,15-16,22, "Primitive Art and Picasso" (Graham),
26-27,35-37,4i, 55,60-63,66-71,75, 298
78,81,ii4nn272-73,152,155,181-87, primitivism, 35,43,49,62,70,127-28,
220-23 passim, 230,242-49 passim, 136,149,298-99,34,422-49 passim,
253-75 passim, 280-88,293-310,366, 457-58,528-32
372,383,389-96 passim, 400-8 pas- "Problem for Critics" (Putzel), 7-8,
sim, 416-19,422,444,447-53,460-61, 87П31,152
464-74 passim, 490,493,499~504 pas- Putzel, Howard, 7-8,77,87n3i, 152
sim, 519,521,529,536-54 passim,
563-65,569,617,625-26,645-60; race issues in Abstract Expressionism,
catalogue raisonné, 37-38,79; exhibi- 68-69, И5ПП286-87, n6n288,i34,543
tions, i, 17,28,55,68,80; Greenberg Rand, Harry, 39
on, 10,20,88n40,205-6,212,304,307, Rathbone, Eliza, 39-40
315,393,646-50,653-54; Jungian Rauschenberg, Robert, 12,250,275
influence on, 37-38,99Ш51, iooni5i, Read, Herbert, 302-3,446
443, 645-46; Namuth films and photos Reiff, Robert, 39,99Ш35
of, 10,16,53-54,76,550,646,650, Reinhardt, Ad, xi, 12,75,159,233~35,34,
656, fig. 4; "Pollock paints a picture," 388,400,406-10 passim, 447,455~56,
10,95nio8; retrospectives, i, 28,68, 461-65 passim, 471,473,514,516,
80, ЮО-1Ш54,646,649; Rosenberg 520-23 passim
on, 16, доппбз and 66,653-54; state- Rexroth, Kenneth, 19,92n67
ments on art, 5-7,10,33,51, io6n2O3, rhetoric and Abstract Expressionism,
1ЮП2Ч, 132-33,139-40,252,654; 51-54,442-44,462,474
Works: Autumn Rhythm: Number30, Ricard, René, 68
53,68,307,419,656, fig. n; Cut-Out, Riley, Maude, 150
27,260-62,560-61; Full Fathom Five, Riviere, Joan, 65
243,306,401-3,539,654; Gothic, Robertson, Bryan, 47,301,9in66
450-51,453,456; Guardians of the Robson, A. Deirdre, 77,415
Secret, 296,300-1,445,450,456; Rohn, Matthew, Ю7П217,657
Lavender Mist, 307,516,647; Moon Rose, Barbara, 2,30,54~55,9^66,9бппз
Woman Cuts the Circle, 37,303, pi. 4; Rose, Bernice, 304
NumberlA, 7 P4#, 27,257-59,261, Rosenberg, Harold, ix, 9,14-16,27,32,
654-55; Pasipháe, 270,296,301-2; 34,39,43,50,57-58,61,66,72-75 pas-
Portrait and a Dream, 53,55,472-73, sim, 81,9on6o, 9inn6i-66,199,233,
fig. 19; She-Wolf, 86n29,302,417; 256,315,326,341,394-95,459,

714 Index
 469-71,523,564-66,619-21; "Ameri- Schlessinger, Arthur, 393-95
can Action Painters", 8,13-16,31,43, Scholem, Gershon, 50, io6n202,615-16,
73,9onn65-66, Ii8n309,i89,34i, 529; 619-23 passim
on Gorky, 39, Ю1Ш58,564; "Intrasub- School of Paris, 189,416,418
jectives," 8,155-56; on Pollock, 16, Seiberling, Dorothy, 10
9Onn 63 and 66,653; on Tenth Street, Seitz, William C., 12-13,32,56,59,64,
9On6o, 91п6з; rivalry with Greenberg, 891151
9,16-21,90n66,93n8o, 214,654 Seligmann, Kurt, 277-79
Rosenblum, Robert, 25-26,51,239 semiotic interpretations of Abstract Ex-
Rosenzweig, Phyllis, 21,57 pressionism, 51,53,61,63,105n2o6,
Ross, Clifford, ix, 1-2,56,60 П4ПП274 and 278,331,460,538
Roszak, Theodore, 40, ioini63, Ю2пшб7 Serra, Richard, 67,656-59
and 170,444,447,449,454,461 Shapiro, Cécile, 1-4,45,56,58,60,338
Rothko, Mark, 22,33,35,47-53 passim, Shapiro, David, 1-4,45,56,58,60,338
59-61,71,75,81,47-48,151-52,184, Shiff, Richard, 53,594
211-12,222,224,241-48,252-54, Sidney Janis Gallery, 173,188
287-88,34-22,361-76,388,394,408, Simon, Sidney, 24,36-37,263,276
417,419,423,428,442,444-48 passim, Sims, Lowery Stokes, 70
450,452,455-56,459-60,463,468, Siquieros, David, 205,654
470,490-92,495,498,501-4,545, Siskind, Aaron, 59
554-55,634; joint letter with Gottlieb Smith, David, 11,28-29,35,40-42,59,63,
to New York Times, 5,9,22-23,44,72, 165-71,363,393,399,404-6,443-47
87П32,94П96,11711301146,450,452, passim, 449-56,460-61,466,469,471,
530; religious imagery, 50-51,72-73, 473,491,504; ng. 5; Greenberg on,
H7-i8n302,367,617; Rothko Chapel, 29-30,9611116-17,97Ш19, П4П274,
319-21; statements on art, 5,7,9,33, 363,393; Works: The Cathedral,
44,125-29,140-42,315,317,529-30, 167-71; Jurassic Bird, 63,449,456,
586; Works: Number 18,1948, fig. 6; 632; Medals for Dishonor, 63, H2n25i,
Syrian Bull, 23,147-48, fig. 8; Untitled 627,631-32; Royal Bird, 63,632, fig.
(1949), pi. 7 21; sculpture series, 29-30,470,472,
Rubin, William, 13,28,35~36,38, fig. 14
iooni54,316,646,658 Smith, Gregory White, 54,60
Rushing, W.Jackson, 49-50,422 Smith, Roberta, 34,37
Smith, Tony, 55,298,400,402,408-10,
Saltzman, Lisa, 67,560 656
Samuel Kootz Gallery, 8,417-18,420 Sontag, Susan, 471,594,607
Sandier, Irving, 31-35 passim, 41,44,46, stain painting, 27,5^3-75,650
48,56,72,9611114,98ni3i, I03ni8i; Stamos, Theodoros, 72,223,251-54 pas-
Triumph of American Painting, 31, sim, 315,389,427,455,504,617
33,98ni3i Stella, Frank, 27,77,95-96^1109 and 113,
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 51-52,114П274 257,318
Sawin, Martica, 9,188 Sterne, Hedda,32, И2П253,159
Schapiro, Meyer, 12,22,72,75,77,89^8, Still, Clyfford, 21-25 passim, 47-49,
172,215,277,384-85,388,396,5Ю, 54 59-61,72,78,208-12,272,287-88,315,
Schimmel, Paul, 56 317,361-76,389-92 passim, 453-55,

Index 715
 Still, Clyfford (continued) Tuchman, Maurice, 30-31,49,8зп5
460,465-73 passim, 473; statements Tucker, Marcia, 34,73
on art, 6-7,171-72,184,239-45,247, Twombly, Cy, 649-50,656
391,540,545-46,550-54 passim, Tyler, Parker, 544~45,550
580-88; Works: 1Q46-H (Indian Red
and Black), fig. 10; Unfitted (Self- unconscious, 36,49,52,55,62,131,133,
Portrait), fig. 20 142-48,252,298,355,434,448,472,
Stodelle, Ernestine, 491-92,497,500-1, 489,532,656
504-5
Streat, Thelma Johnson, 70, ii6n288 Varnedoe, Kirk, 49
Stuckey, Charles R, 402,517-18 Veneciano, Jorge Daniel, 70
Studio 35,7, И5П286,159,164,232,514 vulgarity and Abstract Expressionism,
"Subjects of the Artists" (Whitney Down- 78-79, И9ПП324-25,538-56 passim
town), 33,99Ш36
Sublime, 25-26,37,50,53,78-79,137-39, Wagner, Anne M., 63, ninn248-49
239-44,318-21 passim, 422,436, Warhol, Andy, 67-68,77,649-51,656
461-62 Wechsler, Jeffrey, 56,69
Surrealism: influence on Abstract Ex- Weiss, Jeffrey, 49
pressionism, 5,8,23,28,32,35-37, Whitman, Walt, 194,213,223,365,550-51,
40,42,74,85П25,86n29,87пзо, 107- 618-19
8n223,130-31,150-51,183-84,250-52, Whitney Museum of American Art,
265-72,277-78,280-83 passim, 287, 33-34,37,81,151,629
29б,358,4бо,490,493,634 Wilkin, Karen, 627,630,634
Sweeney, James Johnson, 151,301 Willard, Marian, П5П286,626,631,636,
Sylvester, David, 50 640
System and Dialectics of Art (Graham), 35, Wolfe, Judith, 37-38,293
49,42-46,346-49,355 Wollen, Peter, 66
"Women and Abstract Expressionism:
Ta hn
gg,J° ,45 Painting and Sculpture, 1945-1959"
Tenth Street, 14,20,23,30, допбо (Mishkin Gallery), 62-63, ПШ246
Thistle wood, David, 59,8зп4 Wood, Paul, 2-3
Tiger's Eye, 5,317,402,426-27,430,436, Woodruff, Hale, 70,522
46i,527 Worringer, Wilhelm, 50,423,425-28,
Time magazine, 17,40,88n40,92n6g, 435
93П93,549,5^2 W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration),
Tobey, Mark, 8,155,205,207,450,616 15,32,192,264,268,278,516
Tomlin, Bradley Walker, 8,155,164,400, Wye, Deborah, 42
501,539 Wysuph,C.L.,37
Triumph of American Painting (Sandier),
3i,33,98ni3i Yard, Sally, 40
Trotskyism, 15,43~44,72-73,11811309,
263,338,383-87,551 Zakian, Michael, 50

716 Index