Abstract Expressionism : The International Context 9780813539744, 0813539749, 9780813539751, 0813539757

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

Abstract Expressionism THE

INTERNATIONAL

Edited by Joan Marter

CONTEXT

‘The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Betty Parsons Foundation, and the Research Foundation, State University of New York, Stony Brook. This publication is based on the proceedings of two scholarly conferences, co-sponsored by the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and the State University of New York, Stony Brook, Department of Art, Art History, and Art Criticism, held at Stony Brook Manhattan: “Abstract Expressionism: An International Language,” 18-19 May 2004 “All-over: Abstract Expressionism’s Global Context,” 8-9 April 2005 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Abstract expressionism : the international context / edited by Joan Marter. pecm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13:978-0-8135-3974-4 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN- 13: 978-0-8135-3975-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Abstract expressionism—United States—Congresses. 2. Abstract expressionism—Influence—Congresses, 3. Art, Ameri-

can—20th century—Congresses. 4. Art, Modern—20th century—Congresses. I. Marte, Joan M. 'N6512.5.A25A27 2007 709'.7309045—de22

2006015182

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2007 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2007 in the names of their authors All rights reserved ‘No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joy Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, N] 088548099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use”as defined by U.S. copyright law. Manufactured in China

Contents

vii viii xt

Color Plates

Figures

‘Acknowledgments Introduction: Internationalism and Abstract Expressionism

by Joan Marter 13

POLITICAL 19

The Birth of Abstract Expressionism by Helen A. Harrison CONTEXTS

Implications of Nationalism for Abstract Expressionism

by Dore Ashton 29

51

67

Disdain for the Stain: Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme

by Serge Guilbaut

Transatlantic Anxieties, Especially Bill’s Folly by David Anfam A Legacy for the Latin American Left: Abstract Expressionism as AntiImperialist Art

by David Craven 82

Abstract Expressionism as a Model of “Contemporary Art” in the Soviet Union

by Jane A. Sharp

CONTENTS

Iv

ART-MAKING

99

108

125

CONTEXTS

A New Beginning: Abstraction and the Myth of the “Zero Hour”

by Gottfried Boehm

Ironic Gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism by Karen Kurczynski Greenberg Misreading Dubuffet by Kent Minturn

138

Abstract Expressionism’s Italian Reception: Questions of Influence

152

The View from the East: The Reception of Jackson Pollock among Japanese

by Adrian R. Duran

Gutai Artists

by Lewis Kachur

ORIGINS

AND 165

182

EFFLORESCENCE

Mexico and American Modernism: The Case of Jackson Pollock by Ellen G. Landau Pollock and America, Too by Stephen Polcari

196

The Ultimate Challenge for Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Transforming the Ecology of American Culture, 1924-1943

by Annie Cohen-Solal 215

vi | CONTENTS

African American Contributions to Abstract Expressionism by Ann Gibson

231

Notes

289

About the Contributors

293

Index

List of Illustrations

COLOR PLATES

een

aes

Yer

>

Color plates appear between pages 146 and 147.

Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955 Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (Second Version), 1912 Hans Hofmann, Afterglow, 1938

Willem de Kooning, Gotham News, 1955 Barnett Newman, Onement I, 1948 Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950-51 Guido Llinds, Untitled, 1958 Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950 Raul Martinez, Untitled, 1958

10. Lev Kropivnitsky, Outer Galactic Logic, 1960

11, Alexander Bandzeladze, Untitled, 1983 12. Mikhail Chernyshov, Untitled, 1962

13. Lydia Masterkova, Untitled, 1966

14, Viadimir Nemukhin, Still Life with Cards, 1965 15. Gia Edzgveradze, Wall of My Childhood, 1986 16. Asger Jorn, The Top of the World—or Gay Day, “Modification,” 1960 17. Asger Jorn,A Soul for Sale, 1958-59

18. Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure, 1942 19. Jean Dubuffet, Superveille, Large Banner Portrait, 1945 20. Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept: Expectations, 1958 21. Jackson Pollock, Number 7, 1950

22. Kazuo Shiraga painting with his feet at the 2nd Gutai Exhibition in Tokyo, 1956 23. Jose Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: Gods of the Modern World (Panel 12), 1932-34 24. Norman Lewis, Metropolitan Crowd, 1946

ILLUSTRATIONS

I vii

SN

aT

een

FIGURES

Lee Krasner, Igor, ca. 1943 Oswald Herzog, Der Sturm, May 1919 Oswald Herzog, “Der akstrakte Expressionismus,” Der Sturm, May 1919

Mark Tobey, Electric Night, 1944 Hans Hartung, T 1948-19, 1948

Jean Fautrier, Sarah (from the Hostages series), 1943

Wols (A. O. Wolfgang Schulze), Blue Phantom, 1951 Bram van Velde, Gouache, 1961 Clyfford Still, Untitled (Two Figures), ca. 1935-36

Hans Namuth, Barnett Newman doubled-exposed with Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1951 il.

Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950

12. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss Loie Fuller, ca. 1890

Willem de Kooning, Light in August, 1946 14, Willem de Kooning, Girl in Boat, 1964 13,

15, Chago, cover of El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba, 1965 16. 17.

Raul Martinez, Fragment I, 1957 Amelia Pelaez, Interior with Columns, 1951

18. Guido Llinas, Por R. Motherwell, 1992 19. 20.

Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34, 1953-54 Armando Morales, Dead Guerrilla I, 1958

21, Juan Rivas, Untitled (After Pollock), 1985 22. 23.

Fernando de Syzszlo, Inkarri, 1968

Viewers examining a sculpture by Ibram Lassaw at the National Exhibition ‘of American Art, Moscow, 1959

24, Fedor Pavlovich Reshetnikoy, Caricatures, 1963 25. Hans Namuth, Three frames from the film Jackson Pollock, released in 1951 26.

27.

84 86 106

Asger Jorn, A Hint of Weakness or Effortlessly Slow (Schwaicheanflug or Langsam miihelos), 1958

Asger Jorn, Untitled, 1956

. Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, Page from Fin de Copenhague, 1957 29. Asger Jorn, Allmen, “Luxury Picture,” 1961 30. Jean Dubuffet, Message: ¢a tapprendra, June 1944 3h. Jean Dubuffet, Front and back of the 1947 Lithographies catalogue, September 1947 viii | MLUSTRATIONS

109 5 119 123

129 130

32.

Adolph Gottlieb, Letter to a Friend, 1948

131

33.

Paul Klee, Abstract Script, 1931

132

34, Claes Oldenburg, I Think Your Work Looks a Lot Like Dubuffet, 1960 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

134

Cy Twombly, Criticism, 1955

135

Ray Johnson, Jean Dubuffet Fan Club, 1988

136

Armando Pizzinato, The Defenders of the Factories, 1948

144

Renato Birolli, Landscape—Breton Port, 1947

145

Emilio Vedova, Europe, 1950 Kazuo Shiraga, Challenging Mud, 1955

149 156

Saburo Murakami, Six Holes, 1955

157

42. Shozo Shimamoto creating a picture at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo, 1956

158

43.

160

44,

Akira Kanayama painting in his studio with his toy car, ca. 1957 David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock at a May Day rally, New York, 1936

166

45.

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Tropical America, 1932

168

46.

Jackson Pollock, Naked Man with Knife, ca. 1938-40

173

47. Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, ca. 1929-36

175

Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Woman), ca. 1930-33

176

48.

49, Jackson Pollock, Bird, ca. 1938-41

178

50.

Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Composition with Pouring II), 1943

179

51.

Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950

185

52. New York World’s Fair, General Motors Building, 1939-40

187

53. New York World’s Fair, Helicline exit ramp, 1939-40

187

54.

188

55.

Raymond Loewy, Evolution chart of automobiles, 1933

Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting One: Number 31, 1950

194

56. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1929

197

57.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Philip Johnson, Margaret Scolari Barr, 1932

204

58.

Philip Goodwin and Edward D. Stone, The Museum of Modern Art, facade, 1939

206

59. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Torpedo” Diagram of Ideal Permanent Collection, 1933 61.

207

LAszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Cover designs for the magazine i10, 1928

209

George Platt Lynes, Artists in Exile, 1942

213

62. Hale Woodruff, Ashanti Image, 1946 63.

Thelma Johnson Streat in performance, undated

221

223

64.

Beauford Delaney, Untitled (Still Life with Snake and Bird), 1946

227

65.

Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1947

228

ILLUSTRATIONS

| ix

Acknowledgments

Iam sincerely grateful to the distinguished group of scholars identified with the history of Abstract Expressionism whose work defines the scope and depth of this anthology. This volume includes revised versions of their presentations at two conferences organized to examine

Abstract Expressionism from a worldwide perspective: “Abstract Expressionism: An International Language” in 2004 and its 2005 sequel, “All-over: Abstract Expressionism’s Global Con-

text,” both held at the Manhattan campus of Stony Brook University. These events, co-sponsored by the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and the Department of Art, Art History and Art Criticism at Stony Brook University, highlighted the mutually enriching relationship between the historic site—the former home and studio of Jackson Pollock

and Lee Krasner—and the academic institution under whose aegis it operates. The encouragement and enthusiasm of Stony Brook University president Shirley Strum Kenny, Robert McGrath, provost, and James Staros, dean of arts and sciences, are very much appreciated.

The conferences were made possible by a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation,

which has also generously supported this publication. Additional support has been provided by the Betty Parsons Foundation and the Research Foundation of Stony Brook University. I also

wish to acknowledge the support of the Rutgers University Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, which contributed to my participation in this project. Several individuals deserve special mention: Charles C. Bergman, chair of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation board; Pollock-

Krasner House and Study Center director Helen A. Harrison and Ruby Jackson, assistant to the

director; Donald Kuspit, professor of art history and criticism, and James Rubin, former Art Department chair, at Stony Brook University; Scott Sullivan, manager of Stony Brook Manhattan; Christopher C. Schwabacher, director of the Betty Parsons Foundation; and Drs. Barry S. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

| xi

and Barbara Coller, who designated Research Foundation funds to support the publication of this book. Ellen G. Landau, Adin Lears, and Roberta K. Tarbell participated in research and edit-

ing. Christina Brianik, permissions manager at Rutgers University Press, and graduate assistants Tom Williams and Valerie Hellstein, doctoral candidates at Stony Brook University, provided essential help with photographs and other documentation. To Leslie Mitchner, editor-in-chief, Marlie Wasserman, director, and the editorial and pro-

duction staff of Rutgers University Press I offer my deepest gratitude for their expertise, guidance, and commitment.

Joan Marter

xii | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

Introduction: Internationalism

and Abstract Expressionism JOAN

MARTER

he chapters in this volume problematize Abstract Expressionism in relation to the emergence of postwar abstraction on four continents. Abstract Expressionism has assumed a magisterial position in the history of twentieth-century

modernism, but the broader context for the postwar ascendancy of abstraction needs to be examined fully. Global politics and the American search for a national cultural identity are com-

pelling reasons to explore links with the development of abstraction in European and Latin American nations, and in such countries with more volatile alliances with the West as Japan and

the Soviet Union. Fifty years have passed since Abstract Expressionism was in its heyday, and new assessments of its impact and importance continue to appear. As Ellen G. Landau notes in her comprehensive historiography of the movement, new interpretations are constantly being written, and the continuing cultural relevance of Abstract Expressionism is suggested by the

sheer number of these studies." After the Second World War, the United States assumed a dominant position in world pol-

itics. In addition to economic supremacy, America and her allies had triumphed over fascism, and assumed political leadership. Not too surprisingly, Americans desired cultural dominance, and Abstract Expressionism (or the New York School) soon was supported widely by leading art critics and important journals. In the 1940s Encounter, an English magazine, and Tiger's Eye in the United States, initiated the positive press for this new movement. Periodicals as diverse as

Life, which published a richly illustrated article on the new art as early as 1948, art journals of the period, and such politically engendered publications as Partisan Review soon followed.

Abstract Expressionism, hailed by Clement Greenberg as “American-Type Painting”? and

INTERNATIONALISM AND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

| 1

by Harold Rosenberg as “American Action Painting” in two seminal articles of the early 1950s,

was allied closely to postwar trends on both sides of the Atlantic. The most prominent painters

worked in abstraction, which they combined frequently with an expressionist approach. The Surrealists and other cultural émigrés had arrived in the States as exiles from fascist Europe dur-

ing the war years, and their presence was an important step in ending the aesthetic isolationism

represented by American Regionalist and Social Realist painters of the 1930s. Hans Hofmann,

the earliest to come from Germany via Paris, taught abstraction to young artists in New York

City and Provincetown throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, and Yves

‘Tanguy came as war exiles, and exhibited in New York during the 1940s. André Masson moved permanently to the United States, bringing with him a type of automatic writing and painterly

improvisation that attracted the interest of the Abstract Expressionist generation. Interested in

automatism and “psychic responses to life,” Matta (Roberto Echaurren) also gained the attention of young Americans. Piet Mondrian came to the United States in 1940, bringing with him firsthand exposure to his theories about geometric abstraction. The future Abstract Expressionists, therefore, had opportunities to meet seasoned artists involved in various European movements while these artists were in New York. The young Americans experimented with new theories and approaches to art-making.

Was Abstract Expressionism an American invention or primarily indebted to international

developments? In his 1952 article “American Action Painters” Harold Rosenberg observed: Some people deny that there is anything original in the recent American painting. What-

ever is being done here now, they claim was done thirty years ago in Paris. . . 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. . What counts i ts special motive for extinguishing the object, which is not the same as in other abstract or Expressionist phases of modern art... . 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 opti-

mism regarding himselfas an artist. The American vanguard painter took to the white

expanse of the canvas as Melville's Ishmael took to the sea.’

While subsequent chauvinist writers may have emphasized American roots, sources in native American art, and the exclusivity and originality of this movement, the connection to

2 | JOAN MARTER

European modernism is evident. Did the United States provide the breeding ground for much of postwar abstraction worldwide? Did the artists here perceive their work as international rather than specifically American? Robert Motherwell in 1951 wrote of the “supranationalism” of the movement. In a catalogue for an exhibition entitled The School of New York, Motherwell noted, “Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is

his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique.”*

This book contributes substantively to the discourse on Abstract Expressionism and its international context. Abstract Expressionism, with its acknowledged links to jazz and native American art, also includes the alienation and hermeticism that must be related to postwar

Existentialism and other European developments. Essayists included here address both Jackson Pollock’s contact with the Mexican muralists and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism for left-

ist artists in Latin America. Artists in France are represented here by art historians previously recognized for their research on the postwar era. Certain essays show that Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett may be more relevant to the estrangement expressed by the Abstract Expressionists than American sources and philosophical thought between the two world wars. The rel-

evance to Abstract Expressionism of postwar abstraction in the work of Cobra artist Asger Jorn and other painters of northern Europe is considered. Gutai artists working in Japan and revo-

lutionary art in postwar Italy are included, and Abstract Expressionism is viewed as a model for contemporary developments in the Soviet Union.

The international context for Abstract Expressionism is a somewhat unfamiliar, but illuminating, investigation of the range of postwar abstraction on four continents. How are we to view these artists as part of a global response to the events of the 1940s? To what extent did abstract

artists in other countries share in the primacy of inner experience over objective truth in the fashioning of an art? The example of Abstract Expressionism resulted in controversy and confrontation with indigenous aspects of modernism in many countries other than the United States, In some instances the gestural abstractions and broad fields of color characteristic of the

New York School became a rallying cry for leftist tendencies.

This anthology indicates that Abstract Expressionism needs to be studied from the margins

to the center. Both the origins and the development of the movement must be considered. The

goal of this publication is to view Abstract Expressionism by reaching beyond the canonical painters of previous literature on this art, and exploring broader, more global connections

among abstract artists of the postwar era. The movement needs to be redefined as extending beyond the previously identified roster of participants and ideas. The essays have been divided into three sections. The first group considers political

INYERNATIONALISM AND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

| 3

contexts, and explores the changing dimensions of leftist politics among American artists and their European counterparts during the postwar era. If all of these artists intended to invent a new art that responded to the present, their revolutionary politics contributed to their radical

break with the past. By the late 1930s committed leftist artists in the United States became disenchanted with Communism due to Stalin’s show trials and his negotiation of a non-aggression

pact with Nazi Germany. American leftists were decidedly anti-Stalin, and instead Trotskyite, and certain American critics, such as Clement Greenberg, supported their efforts by writing of the abstract artist “turning his attention away from subject-matter or common experience.”

The desire to separate from the Social Realism practiced by militant leftists led to a rejection of overtly political art for the more open-ended art theories of Leon Trotsky. By 1938 Trotsky and

the leader of the Surrealists, André Breton, had combined efforts to produce “Manifesto:

‘Toward a Free Revolutionary Art,” which was published in Partisan Review.’ This document

freed artists from the necessity of introducing overtly political or social messages in their art. In his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” printed in the same journal, Greenberg elaborated on the

necessity for artists to create an “art for art’s sake,” and avoid the overt depiction of political or social themes. He noted:

Where today a political regime establishes an official cultural policy, it is for the sake of

demagogy. If kitsch is the official tendency of culture in German, Italy and Russia, it is not

because their respective governments are controlled by philistines, but because kitsch is the culture of the masses in these countries, ... the main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of Fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical,

but that they are too “innocent,” that is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into them, that kitsch is more pliable to this end.”

But Greenberg and other critics supported the export of Abstract Expressionism for Amer-

ican propaganda purposes. Christopher Lasch, in his study of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization infiltrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, noted: “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.”* According to Lasch, Partisan Review was one of the journals that found sponsorship at the

CIA for a period of time. Both Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg were among those who promoted the acceptance of this movement by intellectuals of the 1950s, David and Cecile

41 JOAN MARTER

Shapiro have discussed this phenomenon. They point out: “It is also worth remarking in this

connection that the word “American” drums repeatedly in the titles of essays sympathetic to Abstract Expressionism: “The Present Prospects of American Paintings and Sculpture,” “Amer-

ican Action Painters,” “American-Type Painting,”“The New American Painting.”®

POLITICAL

CONTEXTS

Scholars included in the section devoted to political contexts contribute to the politics of Abstract Expressionism. Dore Ashton, for example, takes a somewhat jaundiced view of the cel-

ebratory language of the “triumph of American painting.” She explores how nationalism was

perceived by the Abstract Expressionists, and wonders about the notion of “people born in the

same place,” versus the humanism and authenticity of the struggles found among postwar artists internationally. Ashton accepts that art historian and artist William Seitz judged Abstract Expressionism as the end of provincialism for American art, but she notes the “dark side of our

American experience” considered by poets and writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In her emphasis on internationalism, Ashton notes Pollock's oft-cited statement from 1944:“I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France.

... 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 one country.” The reader will find that while Ashton declares the Abstract Expressionists to be unwilling

agents of nationalism, Serge Guilbaut considers French abstraction in the postwar periodas distinctly anti-American. Guilbaut, in his presentation of abstract art in Paris during the late for-

ties and fifties, judges Michel Tapié’s Pollock exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in 1952 Paris asa distinct provocation at a time when the French were eager for Americans to be ignored. Accord-

ing to Guilbaut, Pollock's art played like a wedge planted between humanistic Parisian realism and rational geometric abstraction, as the two postwar trends. While French journalists tried to

revitalize French culture, another type of art was being produced underground, but it was little

understood at the time. David Anfam posits that Abstract Expressionism is inconceivable without European thought, art, and culture—that is, both European modernism and old masters. He presents artists that he considers to be among the most chauvinistic of the Americans, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman, who developed their anti-European rhetoric by evoking the Transcendental

INTERNATIONALISM AND ANSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

| 5

poet Ralph Waldo Emerson and the poet of individualism and freedom, Walt Whitman. While Still and Newman resorted to prose, the “least wordy” of these artists was Pollock, who was best suited for the “ventriloquism” that placed him in the forefront of the westward migration of

artistic dominance. Anfam notes that political implications for American chauvinism were

found in certain critical writings. He proposes that Clement Greenberg's “American Type Painting” (1955) must have been in preparation in 1953, or during the Korean War, when the United

States narrowly escaped an ignominious defeat by the communists. While the phrase “Triumph

of American Painting” was attached by an editor to Irving Sandler's monograph on Abstract Expressionism, not coincidentally Sandler’s book was in press during the Vietnam War, another crisis point for American politics. Anfam notes with irony that some of the major tragedies of the 1960s, including the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the My Lai massacre, the Cambodian invasion, and Kent State, provided a backdrop for a

book that celebrates American artistic prowess. Anfam also presents Willem de Kooningas foil to Newman's Emersonian rhetoric and Still’s bravado, explaining that de Kooning was arguably the artist the most likely to partake of the European heritage of Existentialism and the philo-

sophical position of Kierkegaard. Within de Kooning’s art one can find expressed the anxiety of the age in America, and the mix of humanity and horror within the European tradition. Readers will note in David Craven’s essay that in Latin America the visual language of

Abstract Expressionism was often identified with insurgency. Although Cubans and Latin Amer-

icans were drawn to Marxism, these artists showed nothing but disdain for the socialist realism

championed by the Soviets. In fact Pollock’s drip paintings and Motherwell’s Spanish Elegies were treated by the Sandinistas as potent signifiers for opposition to mainstream culture. Jane Sharp examines dissident artists in the Soviet Union who considered Abstract Expres-

sionism a model of avant-garde rebellion against officially sanctioned artistic practices. In an essay intended to develop a richer understanding of the interaction of young dissidents in the Soviet Union, she writes of the “romanticization” there of American painting and Western culture. According to Sharp, young Soviets viewed Abstract Expressionism as a “universal embod-

iment of personal freedom and political autonomy.” Beginning with the International Youth

Festival in Moscow of 1957, and continuing to the notorious National Exhibition of American

Art in Moscow two years later, Sharp notes, Soviet artists had opportunities to see the works of Mark Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning and others. In 1961 an Art Informel exhibition in Moscow continued the exposure of Soviet citizens to the international avant-garde and established the groundwork for a generation of Russians to explore abstract modes.

© | JOAN MARTER

ART-MAKING

CONTEXTS

The next section of this book, designated “Art-Making Contexts,” includes European and

Asian responses to the gesturalism of the Abstract Expressionists and critical reactions to these

developments abroad. The individualized approach of the various Abstract Expressionists

included a shared intention to release subjective response, hail the importance of chance, and continue the exploration of the subconscious, which is echoed in Art Informel and other forms

of international abstraction. The idea that advanced art should be a radical departure from the past and that artists should explore innovative personal directions was shared in other locales. Exploring the internationalism of Abstract Expressionism as it takes a position in proximity to Art Informel, Cobra, and other abstractionists in Europe, might be viewed as a transnational response during the postwar era. Gottfried Boehm addresses the myth of the heroic art of Abstract Expressionism, and

explains its close affinity with Art Informel and other forms of abstraction found in postwar European art. He proposes a link between Pollock and Wols, two artists who did not know one another but who braved the “stigma of the same wound.” Boehm acknowledges that such Amer-

ican artists as Barnett Newman proposed an art that undermines everything that had previously

defined pictorial representation. With Newman’s large-scale Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950, the aesthetic of the nonrelational constituted a rejection of the European compositional aesthetic.

Inher essay Karen Kurczynski suggests that an American bias continues in viewing postwar

abstraction, when European artists also were innovative in these years. For example, Asger Jorn, an important theorist and artist organized Cobra and the international Situationists. While recognized in Europe, these groups were seldom exhibited in the United States. Although he was

dismissed by some critics as lacking originality, Jorn’s art manifests both singularity and an awareness of antecedents. Kurczynski notes that Jorn’s techniques of “parody, pastiche, and

materialism in forms” created gestures as critiques of the “increasingly apolitical rhetoric of transcendence in both Abstract Expressionism and tachism.”

Kent Minturn explains Greenberg’s fundamental misinterpretation of the art of Dubuffet. Ina 1947 review in The Nation, the critic related Dubuffet to the French Existentialists and dis-

missed him as having “literary leanings.” In actuality, as Minturn reports, Dubuffet mocked Existentialism, and Jean-Paul

Sartre was

not

favorably disposed

toward

Dubuffet’s art.

Although Greenberg may posit a seamless connection between such artists as Dubuffet and pre-

war literary movements, Dubutffet defaced journalistic writing, and instead should be associ-

ated with graffiti commemorating the broken messages delivered by the French resistance

MARIS AED ALG YS CLT EXERSS

CMs

17

during the war. Therefore, Minturn contends, Greenberg misinterpreted Dubuffet’s works when they were shown in New York, and his link with non-language approaches to abstraction by the Abstract Expressionists was not acknowledged. However, Dubuffet’s resistance to narrative was acknowledged by the next generation, and became an important precedent for Cy

Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, and others in the United States. In Italy the response to Pollock and other American artists was mixed, according to Adrian

Duran. In his essay Duran reminds the reader that although Abstract Expressionism may be viewed asa global language, it was hardly a native tongue for young Italian artists. Although they may have viewed this art with some curiosity, its reception was not in the context of a tabula

rasa. Whether Abstract Expressionism was an effective weapon of the Cold War has provoked impassioned responses among some writers, such as Max Kozloff and Eva Cockcroft.'° Duran posits a more nuanced response to this art among European leftists. Encounters with the New

York School began early in Italy, due to Peggy Guggenheim’s collection of Pollocks—which first became available in Venice in 1947. Similar works were shown in the Venice Biennale of 1948,

and debates raged in Italy over the languages of abstraction. Italy had one of the strongest manifestations of European Communism, and Abstract Expressionism was viewed as allied to

American Imperialism against which a global struggle was promoted. For artists of the group Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, Duran explains, leftist politics called for a rejection of any art related

to the United States, and fractured planes and energetic geometries connected with indigenous traditions of abstraction were preferable. Particularly notable in the category of “art-making” is Lewis Kachur’s presentation of the

Gutai artists, a group in Osaka, Japan, who carried the action painting of Jackson Pollock to the extreme, creating performance art that appeared simultaneously with the development of happenings and performance events in the United States. As Kachur explains, in 1954, in a country

devastated by atomic bombs less than a decade earlier, young Japanese artists acknowledged

Pollock’s painting methods. In a homage to the action painter from America, the Gutai artists

working in Osaka mixed hints of violence, Japanese martial arts, and improvisation to produce an original response to Pollock’s drip paintings. These artists were stimulated by Jiro Yoshihara,

who had seen Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock at work in the 1951 issue of Art News.

Soon his confreres were swinging by ropes over canvases spread on the ground. By shooting paint guns at canvases, and operating with motorized toy cars, these artists showed that the “act”

of painting could have many manifestations. For the Japanese, Pollock was praised for his per-

ceived universalism rather than being viewed as specifically American.

8 | JOAN MARTER

ORIGINS

AND

EFFLORESCENCE

The final section in this anthology addresses the Abstract Expressionist group and its origins in the visual culture of the 1930s, the inspiration of the Mexican muralists, and the impor-

tance of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and The Museum of Modern Art to the progress of abstract art in the United States. Topics in the efflorescence of Abstract Expressionism also include the devel-

opment of other responses to postwar abstraction beyond those artists previously identified with the canon of Abstract Expressionism. Ellen G. Landau writes about the Mexican muralists, detailing Jackson Pollock's fascination with their art. This essay includes murals in various locales in the United States, and describes

examples that were deeply admired by Pollock and his confreres Reuben Kadish and Philip Gus-

ton. Pollock’s presence in the Union Square workshop of David Alfaro Siqueiros may account

for his later use of commercial house paints and his signature working methods, including

painting on the floor. For, in this workshop, Siqueiros instructed his assistants in the use of Duco enamels, stencils, airbrushes, and the spontaneous dripping and pouring of paint to increase art’s politically subversive potential.” Landau presents a revised estimation of the considerable importance of Pollock’s knowledge of murals by Orozco, Siqueiros, and Diego Rivera to his release from the realism of Thomas Hart Benton for the expressive emotional potentialities of Picasso, and she views Pollock as the realization of Siqueiros’s dream of “an ideal art for

the future.”

Also focusing on Pollock, Stephen Polcari explores the relationship of American art of the

1930s, when the country was viewed as a cultural backwater, to the “progressive” developments in Abstract Expressionist art of the following decade. According to Polcari, Jackson Pollock is more indebted to this “fecund” period in American culture than is realized. The Streamline

Moderne of the 1930s transformed popular design, and signified “expressive change, process, and the evolution in space and time of modern civilization itself” The ideas of fluidity and flux

had much to offer to the abstractions of the 1940s. Pollock’s weavings of paint were thus pro-

jections of a transformative future necessary for himself and for his world. Polcari argues for a strong component of American culture in the work of the Abstract Expressionists in addition

to the presence of international elements.

Annie Cohen-Solal explains the importance of Alfred H. Barr to the development of mod-

ernism in the United States. As director of the Museum of Modern Art, Barr demonstrated a

“universalist conception of culture,” which was not necessarily shared by all of his contempo-

raries. Cohen-Solal argues that MoMA’s collection, which Barr helped to form, brought

INTEQNATIONSLISM AND ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

| 9

together French Surrealists, German Expressionists, Russian Futurists, and formed the most

encyclopedic compendium of European modernism to be found anywhere. Barr himself, with his enlightened, cosmopolitan spirit, opposed the nationalism that could have easily marginalized this important American institution.

Ann Gibson continues a discourse begun with her 1997 book Abstract Expressionism, Other

Politics,"' introducing additional discussion about four African American artists who were con-

temporaries of the canonical Abstract Expressionists. Her previous efforts to acknowledge these artists seem to have initiated a response at the Museum of Modern Art, where Norman Lewis’s painting was installed among the artists of the New York School in its 2004 reinstallation of the collection. Gibson describes the performances of Thelma Johnston Streat, who danced in front

of her paintings, joining the tradition of body movement popularized by Martha Graham and

Mary Wigman, to which Pollock has also been linked. Streat added dance to her painter's repertory in 1945 which, Gibson points out, is before the Black Mountain College experimentation

with happenings and performance art by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. Finally, Gibson attests that African Americans such as Lewis, Streat, Hale Woodruff, and Beauford

Delaney are “visual templates” for the universal values of Abstract Expressionism.

If Abstract Expressionism was a beacon of freedom, and a prime factor in the construction of a postwar identity for American art, there are, of course, additional topics requiring future study that are not considered in these essays. Artistic groups that fully contextualize the response to abstraction in the 1940s would include women artists and both male and female

sculptors who were associated with the New York School. Among

the artists neglected in the dis-

course on Abstract Expressionism in general are women artists associated with the first and second generation of Abstract Expressionism, such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell (plate 1), Grace

Hartigan, Perle Fine, and others. Although several of these artists were included in my exhibi-

tion organized in 1997, more research and writing on these women would require another anthology.!? Although this volume establishes a global context for the Abstract Expressionists, it cannot do justice to all of its ramifications. Admittedly, not all of the artists of the group are given equal attention. Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning are most prominent here.

Lee Krasner (figure 1), for example, found little recognition on the international scene. In a recently discovered letter written in 1944 to her friend the painter Mercedes Carles Matter, Kras-

ner noted: “I'm painting and nothing happens, it’s maddening—I showed Janis my last three

paintings—he said they were to [sic] much Pollock. It’s completely idiotic but I have a feeling.

from now on that's going to be the story.”'*

10 | JOAN MARTER

Pit 1. Lee Krasner, igor, ca. 1943, oll on canvas, 18 x 24 7/8 in. (45.7 x 63.2 cm). Private collection. © 2006 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

And Lee Krasner continued for decades to experience difficulty in establishing her artistic identity separate from her situation as the wife of Jackson Pollock. Women artists had difficulty in their identification with the artists considered Abstract Expressionists. In the 1950s only a few published articles acknowledged women as integral to the New York School. Irving Sandler's

perceptive “Joan Mitchell Paints a Picture” appeared in 1957 in Art News.'* Both artist and

author were willing to identify the painting being discussed with the New York School. In his respectful assessment of Mitchell’s art, Sandler claimed that she had assimilated some of the methods of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, and that she experienced a kin-

dred involvement with space. For a variety of reasons it seems that younger women such as Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Grace Hartigan, who were born in the 1920s and began

exhibiting in the 1950s, were championed more easily by the first generation of Abstract Expres-

sionists and their critics. Considering Abstract Expressionism’s international context, it is clear that American women artists were hardly known at all outside the United States. When The New

American Painting, organized by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art, was exhibited in eight European countries, beginning in 1958, Grace Hartigan was the only woman included in the show.'> This exhibition introduced the most avant-garde trends in American

abstraction to a European audience and had wide-ranging ramifications, but one woman artist and no African American artists participated.

Although many monographic studies and a number of anthologies have been devoted to

Abstract Expressionism, this book is unique. Previous publications have taken political, histor-

ical, sociological, and psychological approaches, but this book explores key aspects of the international zeitgeist of abstract art during the immediate

postwar years. The transnational

languages of abstraction certainly included the pioneering efforts of Pollock and others among

the New York School, but Art Informel also spread among artists in Italy, Latin America, and even the USSR. An active discourse among artists that was stimulated by the wide distribution

of Art News and other art journals, and supported by such exhibitionsas New American Painting, helped to assure that artists were aware of the predominant developments in other locales.

No other book on Abstract Expressionism has focused on the impact and interaction of its

artists with painters creating abstractions in northern Europe, France, Italy, Japan, Latin Amer-

ica, and the Soviet Union. Here some of the leading authoritieson Abstract Expressionism join younger scholars to provide a unique view of the expansion of this movement on the international scene. The contributors share my hope that additional revisionist approaches to the New York School and postwar abstraction will be stimulated by these essays.

12:1 JOAN maPTER

The Birth of

Abstract Expressionism HELEN

A.

HARSISGN

“4

\ a preamble to this publication on Abstract Expressionism, I'd like + ~ LA to offera brief history of the term and the concepts behind it. In the American edition of his Dictionary of Abstract Painting, published in 1957, the French art historian Michel Seuphor wrote of Abstract Expressionism: American critics tend to regard this as being an authentically American movement

and regard the continuation of Neoplasticism as being no more than a second-hand form of European art. I would suggest that those who assert this have forgotten about

Kandinsky: no more is needed than to visit the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and see a dozen canvases painted by Kandinsky between 1910 and 1918, to grasp the fact that Abstract Expressionism was and is just as European, since it was born in Munich.!

Is there any justification for this claim?

One American critic who agreed with Seuphor was Clement Greenberg. Writing in 1955,

he maintained that: “Of the utmost importance to those who were to overcome Picasso after

learning from him was the accessibility of a large number of early Kandinskys in what is now

the Solomon Guggenheim Museum” (plate 2). Greenberg, who had briefly studied art with the

German émigré painter Hans Hofmann, disliked the Abstract Expressionist label, but evidently

was aware of its European roots. “What real justification there is for the term ‘abstract expressionism,” he wrote, “lies in the fact that some of these painters began looking toward German, Russian or Jewish expressionism when they became restive with Cubism and with Frenchness

in general.” According to Greenberg, then, the decisive precedents for what seemed to most

THE BIRTH OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

| 13

people so characteristically American in post-World War II American abstract painting were to be found in the work of Hofmann, Kandinsky, and Chaim Soutine.

By and large, however, the European, and specifically German, genesis of Abstract Expres-

sionism has been unacknowledged by American commentators. Writing in the Magazine of Art in 1953, William Seitz maintained that the “‘expressionist’ ingredient” of Abstract Expression-

ism “has little if any connection with the German movement,’ and that “abstract expressionism has germinated on both coasts of the United States independently of Europe,” although he did allow that “the phenomenon transcends national boundaries.” Yet by 1955, when he completed.

his pioneering doctoral dissertation, “Abstract-Expressionist Painting in America: An Interpre-

tation Based on the Work and Thought of Six Key Figures,” Seitz had been made aware by the

art historian Peter Selz, himself a native of Munich, that the term originated in Germany just

after the First World War—twenty-seven years before Robert Coates’s use of it in a 1946 New Yorker art review signaled its first direct application to postwar American painting.‘ Ironically, Coates was writing about an artist who would have recognized the term from its original context: Hans Hofmann, whom Coates described as “one of the most uncompromis-

ing representatives of what some people call the spatter-and-daub school and I, more politely,

have christened abstract Expressionism.”> Hofmann was also one of the six “key figures” chosen

by Seitz to represent what he characterized as “the most universal and the most personal paint-

ing style in the history of the world” (plate 3). A

fellow student of Kandinsky’s at Anton Azbe’s progressive classes in Munich in the late

1890s, Hofmann opened his own art school there in 1915. His first prospectus outlined princi-

ples that echo certain aspects of Kandinsky’s earlier treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. “Creative expression,” Hofmann wrote, is “the spiritual translation of inner concepts into form,

resulting in the fusion of these intuitions with artistic means of expression in a unity of spirit

and form, brought about by intuition, which in turn results from the functioning of the entire

thought and feeling complex accompanied by vigorous control of the spiritual means.”

These ideas would be amplified in 1919 in the pages of Der Sturm (figure 2), where the term

“Abstract Expressionism” was used for the first time.

‘The avant-garde magazine was published in Berlin by Herwarth Walden, who also pub-

lished Kandinsky’s autobiography. In the year’s second issue of Der Sturm, Walden ran an article by the artist Oswald Herzog titled “Der abstrakte Expressionismus.” Paraphrasing both Kandinsky and Hofmann, Herzog defined expressionism as “expression of the spiritual through form.”“Abstract Expressionism,” he wrote, “is complete expressionism; it is the purity of formation, a physical creation of the spiritual, the formation of objects devoid of the concreteobject.”’ Both he and Hofmann repudiated the imitation of material reality, which Hofmann

14 | HELEN A, HARSISON

MONATSSCHRIFT | HERAUSOEBER: HERWARTH WALDEN ZEHNTER JAMROANO / ZWEITES HEFT

nt fh Een

Oswald Herzog: ernst saat oy

2. Oswald Herzog, Der Sturm, May 1919. Courtesy of Helen A. Harrison. 3. Oswald Herzog, “Der abstrakte Expressionismus,” Der Sturm, May 1919. Courtesy of Helen A. Harrison.

said was “not creation but dilettantism, or else a purely intellectual performance, scientific and

sterile” (figure 3).*

In her 1987 dissertation on Der Sturm, the British scholar Helen Boorman suggests that German Abstract Expressionism was a post-conflict reaction against the “crudely sensational

images of war-time Expressionism,” resulting in the shift from figurative to abstract imagery, and from material to spiritual content. Analytical formalism was rejected as too impersonal.’

‘One may draw an analogy here between aesthetic attitudes in post-World War I Germany and post-World War II America. In both locales, the avant-garde promoted subjectivity—a notion

that, once again, Hofmann had already articulated in 1915. “The artist must create his own view

of nature, i.e., his own experience, be it from nature or independent of it,” he advised in his school’s prospectus; and Herzog reiterated that notion when he wrote in Der Sturm that “Abstract Expressionism is the creation of life’s occurrence as such; it is creation in the present. The artist ... brings about forms that are and must be carriers of his experience.” If Hofmann

represents a direct ideological link between the European formulation of

THE BIRTH OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

| 15

Abstract Expressionism and its later reemergence in the United States, where he began teaching in 1930, Kandinsky provides a more tangible aesthetic precedent. Although he was an enormously influential teacher and theorist, Hofmann did not exhibit his own paintings in New

York City until 1944. Kandinsky’s art, by contrast, had been prominently displayed in New York City for some time. As both Seuphor and Greenberg pointed out, it was readily accessible at the

Guggenheim, which was founded in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. It could

also be seen at the Museum of Modern Art, whose director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., had character-

ized Kandinsky as an Abstract Expressionist as early as 1929, the year the museum opened. Ten years later, in his catalogue entry on the artist for the exhibition, Art in Our Time, Barr called Kandinsky “the first and most important of the abstract Expressionists.”!° Barr—who had traveled in Germany and

often discussed art with his close friend, the émi-

gré dealer J. B. Neumann, who was an expert on German Expressionism—may well have known

of the term’s origin in Der Sturm. (Years later, when credited with the coinage, Barr intimated as much when he demurred that he had merely revived it, not invented it.)!! In his 1934

Museum of Modern Art publication Modern Works of Art, Barr applied it in much the same way as Hofmann and Herzog had, describing Kandinsky’s improvisations as “a kind of abstract expressionism embodying perfectly the romantic ideal of vaguely lyrical spontaneity.””” In this

watered-down interpretation, however, Barr made a subtle but significant shift of emphasis by replacing the spiritual with the romantic, thus eliminating a key theoretical component of European abstract expressionist rhetoric. The term’s metaphysical dimension was apparent to the art historian Sheldon Cheney, who credited both Hofmann and Neumann for influence on his thinking. In his 1934 book, Expres-

sionism in Art, Cheney asserted that abstract expression “may be a revelation of something detected as a deeper value or hidden truth in the object, or it may be a manifestation direct from

the well of truth beyond all objects.” Unless it is a remarkable coincidence, that phrase suggests that Cheney was familiar with Herzog’s 1919 definition. Indeed he confirms it on page 76, where

he paraphrases Herzog’s Der Sturm article, although mistakenly ascribing it to Walden, the

magazine's publisher.

So in fact Michel Seuphor was right: Abstract Expressionism’s parentage was German. Although his role has seldom been acknowledged, it was Herzog in Berlin, inspired by the ideas of Kandinsky and Hofmann in Munich, who originated the label that came to define the Amer-

ican vanguard in the years after World War II. Whether or not the European influence is more profound than the invention of a convenient, if hotly disputed, name for their movement is one

of the many questions this anthology addresses.

16 | HELEN A. HAERISON

POLITICAL

CONTEXTS

Implications of Nationalism for Abstract Expressionism DCRE

J

ASHTON

\ How me to say that the following thoughts—if they are thoughts—

42 ~ od are in the nature of remarks, rather than historical addenda. Perhaps, as is so often the case in my country, this chapter is fundamentally a sermon masquerad-

ing as an essay. I begin with an anecdote. In 1789 or 1790, Nicolai Karamazin, a Russian traveler in France, was detained by peasants who forced him to shout: “Viva la Nation.” So he shouted,

and when he finished, they asked him: “What is this nation?”' A contemporary of Karamazin’s,

an abbé, pronounced himself skeptical in 1798 of this new idea of nation. He said that when men united in nations “they ceased to recognize themselves under a common name—Nation-

alism or National Love took the place of general love. Then it became a virtue to expand at the expense of those who were not under our dominion. Then to obtain this end it became permissible to distrust, deceive, and offend strangers.” While I am in the quoting mode, | will remind

you that that infinitely civilized man, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, had preceded the good abbé when he said: “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed, it seems we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.”*

The word nation comes from the Latin natio, usually defined as people belonging together

because of their birthplace. Needless to say, from the late eighteenth century on, the problem of definition became increasingly difficult, so that within a hundred years, students of the prob-

lem had to add another element. They began to talk of a hybrid they called the “nation-state,” an idea against which one of our most cited precursors in the debate, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, thundered. I will cite Nietzsche to remind you that the artists whom we are examining in this publication were like the young André Gide, who declared in 1898 “to speak well of Niet-

zsche one needs more passion than schooling. . every great creator, every great affirmer of life

IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONALISM

1 19

is necessarily a Nietzschean.” These artists of the New York School either had read Nietzsche or

knew someone who had. Thus Spake Zarathustra was a Modern Library bestseller when they were young, and it was used and abused constantly in various artistic publications. Here is Zarathustra on the state: “State is the name of the coldest of monsters. Coldly it tells lies, too;

and this lie crawls out of its mouth:‘I, the state, am the people.”* And late in his sane life, Niet-

zsche again attacked: “One pays heavily for coming to power; power makes stupid ... Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles—I fear that was the end of German philosophy.”* And, a few pages later, he praises Arthur Schopenhauer as “not merely a local event, or a ‘national one.”

Thave never regarded informalism or Abstract Expressionism as a “national event,” and yet

the word nationalism appears in many commentaries, and deserves scrutiny. I think the Amer-

icans inherited certain attitudes about America that leavened their loaf. Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address in 1801 talked of the American government as “the world’s best hope...

kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one-quarter of

the globe.”* William Seitz, in what is still, I think, the most penetrating book on the Abstract Expressionists, opens his discussion with the following: “One of the outcomes of this study has been the realization that during the postwar decade American painting joined the mainstream of Western art, not as in the past as one of its tributaries, but as one of its component sources as

well. The Atlantic no longer separates the cosmopolitan painter from the provincial.” And Seitz adds: “The American is now in a position to survey the world’s art on his own, free from nationalistic barriers.”"”

And yet, as everyone senses, the Atlantic is still there, even if there is no there there in Oak-

land. A high degree of ambivalence has accompanied all discussions of nationalism among artists and literati, Each of the artists | knew in the postwar period was ambivalent about

whether he wanted to be an American painter, or American painter. And there was good reason. The historical development of Modernism included the early nineteenth-century debates about the role of the artist—a red herring issueif there ever was one. The well-meaning utopian socialists in France such as Frangois Fourier and Henri de Saint-Simon had been kind enough to include artists prominently in their blueprints for the perfect society, but artists were increas-

ingly wary. These scholastic socialists drew up conditions, or, to use the social

scientist's jargon,

set up a social demand. One by one articulate artists withdrew from ministering to utopia, claiming, as did Edgar Allan Poe and his admirer, Charles Baudelaire, that art must be independ-

ent of all social demands. Art for Art. And this instinct to preserve their own preserve remained

in the bloodstream of all modernists. In the United States, during that brief experiment called the WPA, a few of our nascent Abstract Expressionists tried to celebrate Americanness, but they,

20 | DFE

ASHTON

4, Mark Tobey, Electric Night, 1944, tempera on board, 17 1/2 x 13 in. (44.5 x 33 cm). Seattle Art Museum, Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection. Photo Credit: Paul Macapia.

like their nineteenth-century forebears, soon abandoned ship in search of—dare I use the

debased term—freedom? Internationalism was a far more appealing “ism” to the generation who survived the enthusiasm in the 1930s for what was called “regionalism.” Or they entertained even a more exalted notion, expressed in the 1960s by the idealist Mark Tobey: “Now it

seems to me that we are in a universalizing period. ... If we are to have world peace, we should have an understanding of all the idioms of beauty because the members of humanity who have created these idioms of beauty are going to be part of us” (figure 4)."!

IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONALISM

| 21

During the 1940s, when the United States was cut off by the Atlantic from modernism’s motherland, Europe, poets and painters once again tried to sort out their feelings about being American. The literary critic Alfred Kazin published an important book, On Native Grounds, in

1942, in the wake of William Carlos Williams's rising prominence.'? During the Depression,

Williams had established the habit of seeking what is American in American history and letters, and Kazin searched in Williams’s book In The American Grain for clues into our artistic and lit-

erary history . His argument: “The greatest single fact about our American

writing [is] our writ-

ers’ absorption in every last detail of the American world together with their deep and subtle alienation from it”? Kazin, like many of the more intelligent commentators on American painting and sculpture, could not evade the evidence of ambivalence, and also the evidence of

the less cheerful among our literary notables, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Herman Melville. Here is Melville addressing Americans: When ocean-clouds over inland hills, ‘Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills,

And this spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country’s ills—

‘The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime. Nature’s dark side is heeded now..."

The dark side of our American experience was not neglected by the next century's poets,

but at the same time, they knew what Kazin called “the better patriotism of loving what one knows.” While I think that blatant nationalism was distasteful to all intellectuals in the twen-

tieth century, affection for what they knew had to be acknowledged. And what went for the

poets went for the painters as well. Countless painters have been quoted declaring their love for what I will call a sense of place. And that includes painters who were not born on native

grounds, but who quickly became aficionados of aspects they discerned in America, especially in New York. De Kooning, who told Seitz that he “just got the notion to go to the New World” really saw New York as the New World, and praised even its sidewalks littered with

garbage and chewing gum (plate 4).'* Of course, after World War II came yet another war (only it was called a police action), and also, Senator Joseph McCarthy. During the so-called McCarthy period, in what I. F. Stone called the “haunted fifties,” everyone, including artists,

22 1 DORE ASHTON

was forced to recognize that if there was something un-American about them, as more than

one congressman believed, there had to be something American that they could still be with-

out being subpoenaed, and perhaps it was what Wallace Stevens called “the coercing influence of time and place.”"® I will now depict three aspects of the issue of nationalism as it tinctures the story of mod-

ernart in America. First aspect—and don’t forget the word aspect comes from the Latin “to look

at,” an active and not a passive, term. In the purely immanent history in the arts (and I believe, unlike many of my colleagues, that there is an immanent history) we have a long line of painters and poets who sought what was true to their existence and knew the desire to celebrate place—

their place or places. They sought what the poet Marianne Moore insisted, what was characteristic of Americans, as the contemporary poet Grace Schulman has stressed: “For her [Moore], being an American was, as she wrote of her countrymen in Henry James as a Characteristic American, ‘intrinsically ample .. . reaching westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere, with a mind incapable of the shut door in any direction’ ”!7

Now, pride of place cannot exactly be called nationalism, but it sometimes expands uncomfortably. American poets and painters were eternally on guard against that spillover. They all knew that when a

sense of place becomes a sense of nation, beware! William Carlos Williams

was always on the defensive when he hobnobbed, by mail, with Ezra Pound, who accused him

of rejecting cosmopolitanism in favor of American sentimentality. He wrote testily to Pound in

1933: “I know as well as you do that there’s nothing sacred about any land. But I also know, (as.

you do also) that there’s no taboo effective about any land, and where I live is no more a “province” than I make it . . . I ain’t trying to be an international figure.”"* And Wallace Stevens, always alert to the “coercion of time and place,” carefully laid the groundwork for his aesthetic, or his esthétique du mal. At the end of his life, after having writ-

ten the pointedly plain-titled An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, he explained his intentions: “Here my interest is to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is

possible for a poet to get. It is not a question of grim reality but of plain reality. The object is of

course to purge oneselfof anything false.”””

Is not hard to see in the posturing of some of the Abstract Expressionists a rather perverse

desire to purge themselves of anything false, above all the tradition established in Europe, from

which they clearly derived. Anyone around in those days in New York, or rather, downtown New

York, could have seen the epigones of de Kooning wearing his workman's costume, especially his sailor’s knit cap, or sporting cowboy attributes in tribute to Jackson Pollock’s ostentatious

westerner’s machismo, or drinking hard liquor instead of wine, as almost all the Abstract

IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONALISM

| 23

Expressionists did, and in every way, trying to avoid refinement that all, including the first New

York School generation, identified as European.

This brings me to the second aspect. The agon. Unquestionably there was something of the racetrack mentality at work in New York in those days. There were those who regarded them-

selves as contestants in a struggle with Europe, but they were also chronically ambivalent. Picture them at the Cedar Tavern, although of course that myth needs to be deflated since some of the artists never went there, and lived peaceably uptown, away from the crowd. But imagine

those more sociable painters there at the bar. One night they might be shouting, “Hell! I’m not interested in French cuisine.” Or, they might argue, at least for a while, about the question of

“finish” in painting (which, by the way, they argued not so differently from Baudelaire, who declared a painting was finished when it was sufficiently so). The next night the same guys would put some younger hangers-on in their place by declaring with pride their descent from

the Parisian originators of modernism. Pollock went so far as to publish a statement in 1944: “I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. ... 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.” Still, those painters couldn’t help wishing for their apotheosis, which would soon. come in the form of critics and merchants who began to build a movement (something those

painters did not have on their minds) that went beyond sheer nativism. And into that campaign

to win an American place in the sun, shades of honest-to-god nationalism appeared. Ican attest to the fact that the painters I knew were quite uncomfortable with all that, while yet desiring a legitimate place in the Western world as real artists. When a book appeared with the title The Triumph of American Painting, they winced. And there would be other titles, or

characterizations, such as the awkward phrase coined by Greenberg, “American-type Painting,” Or even critics who were racking up the wins on the international front, goingso far sometimes as to make scorecards in which sacred figures such as Picasso and Miré and Matisse were demoted in favor of Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline.

This brings me to the third aspect—that is, the situation of these Abstract Expressionists from the social historian’s point of view. Nationalism had its place in the political and social arena in which actors other than artists played a role. I can remember my own distaste during the widely publicized events around the 1964 Biennale in Venice. While I cannot document the brouhaha, and scarcely remember the details, it was for the art world (that small reflection of the great world) a moment of high drama. There were rumors in New York and rumors in Paris that the master of American merchandising, Leo Castelli, had maneuvered among the Italians

24 | DORE ASHTON

skillfully enough to gain the first prize for his artist, his American artist, Robert Rauschenberg. Here, I interject my opinion that Rauschenberg, or any other artist for that matter, was not complicit. The fate of an artist’s work can never be controlled by the artist. Rothko, for instance,

tried, and several times refused to participate in public events such as group exhibitions, but he

failed, of course. The Biennale, as a public event, was seen as a platform for American imperial-

ism, or cultural imperialism, by suspicious Europeans. I don’t need to go into detail about all

this since Serge Guilbaut has thoroughly exposed the social and political aspects in his book

with that arresting and combative title, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Guilbaut’s

book impressively documents American political policies during the Cold War, and how these policies affected institutions denoted as “cultural.” But, as Dostoyevsky argued in Notes from the

Underground, “Human beings are still human beings and not piano keys.”®! What are called

“forces” that are said to shape society, in which artists also exist are not always so neatly encompassed. It is true that the artists who are wedged together with sobriquets, usually by art historians or journalists, are subject to the same pressures as any other citizen. But precisely because they are artists, they do not always conform to the schema set out by social historians and scientists. As de Kooning said, they did not want to conform.

To me it is apparent that these artists, who both wanted and didn’t want to be American

artists, never subscribed to Patriot Act nationalism. Their entire culture was based on the ideal-

istic internationalism associated with the modern movement. They had listened to the angry voices in 1936 at the Artists’ Congress and agreed. This was pretty well argued by the wood

engraver Lynd Ward who denounced chauvinism, political isolationism, and of course nation-

alism.“In Germany in 1927,” he said, “six years before Hitler came to power, there was already established a nationalist movement in art whose slogan was ‘Only German Art.”?? This, he

warned, offered a false solution to the problems of artists. “We have many appeals for an ‘Amer-

ican art’ in which the concept of America is very vague, usually defined as ‘genuine American

expression’ or ‘explicitly native art”? He concluded: “Just as the nationalist appeal in German.

art accompanied the rise of fascist reaction, a nationalist appeal in this country will inevitably contribute to a corresponding political movement.” Well, it almost did, and still could. The triumphalism associated with the postwar florescence of artistic activity here did not derive from artists. And here |will slip into the mode of witness. We all know the Rashomon effect

and have been consistently warned that witnesses are not always reliable, so I will choose my illustrations carefully. Those who recoiled from the late 1930s dogmas nevertheless maintained for

the rest of their lives a deep suspicion of nationalism. David Craven put forth many proofs of their consistency in his book Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique. He identifies dozens of

LY PLICATIONS OF NATIONALISM

1 25

artists associated with Abstract Expressionism, and cites their deep resistance to nationalism, or as he prefers, imperialism. It was undoubtedly because they continued to express anti-nationalist opinions that they were so well classified in FBI files. Sometimes the surveillance reports are hilarious, ridiculous, uncultured, and sometimes the reports derive from our many vigilant

watchers in Washington. I admit I was startled to learn that Mark Rothko’s file was partly gath-

ered by the head of the Counterintelligence Branch of the U.S. Marine Corps. Now, artists in their

civic capacity are not always in agreement politically. But that fact is,

these particular artists, in their role as citizens, held fast to the antinationalistic ideals of their youth. I could offer countless examples, but will mention only a few to which I was party. When. the legally elected socialist government of Chile decided to create a museum of modern art, El Museo de Solidaridad, in which international abstract idioms would be introduced to the work-

ing classes, especially the copper miners, whose towns became the first sites for exhibitions, I was the North American representative. I naturally approached artists I knew for donations. Many had been identified as Abstract Expressionists. Not one refused. When, in 1970, I curated

a huge exhibition in France called L’Art vivant aux Etats-Unis, | asked every artist to sign a declaration dissociating us from our government, which was busy exterminating Vietnamese at the time. Seventy-five artists—that is, every artist I had chosen, among them many of the younger generation—signed on. Louise Bourgeois and I gathered the press, especially television news,

and read our declaration publicly. These artists clearly wished to establish their solidarity with other artists in the world far more than they sensed their own national identity as artists. A lot

of them felt as did de Kooning, when he told an interviewer for the BBC, “It’s a certain burden, this American-ness.”*5 One thing that we Americans are short on is historical imagination. This

is something noticed by the great poet Octavio Paz, a political conservative and admirer of the United States. Despite his polemical advocacy of the North American political model, Paz did ruefully admit that we have no Vicos, Machiavellis, Montesquieus or Tocquevilles. I have to agree with him. If we had, we would have hearkened more assiduously to what Mallarmé called

the “words of the tribe,” and understood history as, in many ways, not only a telling, but a retelling. Lingering beneath the surface of much of our commentary are the origin myths no

nation can avoid, and the histories that inevitably reach far into the past, and keep welling up under vastly diverse circumstances. One history that the United States shares with the rest of the

Western hemisphere is its colonial origin. And from that origin springs an eternal question, now

usually posed under the rubric of identity. Our painters and sculptors of that World War II vintage could no more escape the deeply hidden problem of identity than could painters and sculptors of the southern hemisphere.

26 | DORE ASHTON

In both art and literary history in the United States, we find both negative and positive atti-

tudes, held in suspension, toward that vexing problem of identity. There is a long history of painters, from John Singleton Copley on, lamenting the excessive role of money in the shaping

of a national art. And in Allan Ginsburg’s “Howl,” there is that refrain: “Moloch, Moloch,

Moloch.” If we exercise an historical imagination, we would register the strong nationalist currents in our artistic heritage. Think of Walt Whitman, inspirer of the Abstract Expressionist

contemporaries, the Beats, and Ginsburg, above all. In the mid-1850s, Whitman was sympa-

thetic to a party with the remarkable name, the Know Nothing party. Their motto was America for Americans, and the urtext was the Star Spangled Banner. Whitman wrote: America isolated I sing; I say that these works made here made in the spirit

of other lands, are so much poison to These States.”

Whitman also wrote a review of his own work under a pseudonym which begins: An American bard at last!2” and another: No imitation—No Foreigner—but a growth and idiom of America.*

Whitman spoke of “the national identity power—the sovereign union,” but in later years, as David S. Reynolds points out, he wavered. Reynolds paints a portrait of the post—Civil War Whit-

man: “Many of his post war writings reveal a genuinely ambivalent mentality, divided between technology and radicalism; between centralized institutions and residual individualism.”

The genuinely ambivalent mentality prevails still today, and certainly was absolutely characteristic of the Abstract Expressionists. They were well aware of the contradictions on native grounds. They heard Paul Robeson sing “This country with its institutions belongs to the peo-

ple who inhabit it,” which incidentally, is from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address,” and

they witnessed how those institutions paid him back by driving him out of the country, along with Charlie Chaplin. They were not unaware of what are generally called “national” aspira-

tions. If you said “Spain” in 1937, they understood “nation.” If you said “Vietnam” in 1965, they

IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONALISM

| 27

also understood nation, and what is commonly called national aspiration. They recognized

what is called “self-determination” and liberty for peoples as we do today—some of us—and at the same time feared the consequences. In short, they were ambivalent as most thoughtful people are, and they understood that ambiguities—a property in many of their works of art—

haunt the world of spirit. Ina

recent review of a book about Basque nationalism and its dilemmas, Joseba Zulaika, a

professor of Basque studies at the University of Nevada, points to the “originating ambiguity” of the struggle. Echoing the old French saying, les extremes se touchent, Zulaika makes a stark comparison: “If we had to find a premise that would unite Bush and Bin Laden, the horror of both for essential ambiguities would be the key.”*"

Essential ambiguities were the very stuff of Abstract Expressionism. I conclude that impli-

cations of nationalism assigned by critics in Abstract Expressionism—that is to say, works by the artists of the New York School—are grievously off the mark.

23 | DORE ASHTON

Disdain for the Stain:

Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme SERGE

GUILBAUT

bod | he French art scene at the end of World War II was ina very peculiar and

a. complex situation, a situation of strength as well as of total helplessness, simultaneously locked up in a dream of symbolical power and in a nightmare of real everyday political turmoil and economic poverty. France was also a peculiarly special case, due to the multiplicity of competing intellectual, aesthetic, and political movements. After 1947, as France and Italy became—due to the strength of their communist parties—the two most crucial places

for Cold War activities, Paris turned into a specific center of attention for U.S. cultural policies.

However, until 1950, when Dwight Eisenhower launched his famous Campaign of Truth, the ignorance of each other's advance artistic practice was almost total.! What they knew of each other’s culture was a series of old clichés, which sadly were often reinforced during those days

of Cold War.

Things started to timidly change only in 1950, when the Louis Carré Gallery in New York presented the show Advancing French Art, highlighting such artists as Hans Hartung, Nicolas de

Staél, André Lanskoy, Maurice Estéve, Charles Lapicque, Jean Bazaine. In May of the same year, the Magazine of Art published an article wondering about, as the title stated: “Painting in Paris.” Six French critics were interviewed to map out the art scene for the American public. They asked

Frank Elgar, Michel Seuphor, Jean Marcenac, Pierre Descargues, Bernard Dorival, and André

Chastel omitting, interestingly enough, many of the most interesting writers who knew and

promoted painters working on the edge of Parisian culture and who were defining the new look of the School of Paris. They bypassed critics Michel Tapié, Charles Estienne, Edouard Jaguer, and Georges Duthuit. The weight of institutions was, again, distorting the field and would have long-lasting repercussions, in particular in the United States, for the international understanding (or not) of the French art scene. Let’s remember as well that in December 1951, with the help

DISD GIN FOR THE STAIN | 29

of Leo Castelli, Sidney Janis organized, after much difficulty, the exhibition American Vanguard for Paris for the Galerie de France. The show featured all the major exponents of the new Abstract Expressionist movement:

Baziotes, de Kooning, Gottlieb, Hofmann, Kline, Mother-

well, Pollock, Reinhardt, and Tomlin, and was understood by many U.S. critics as an important political statement, since many newspapers trumpeted the trip to France and Europe of several Avant-Garde art shows as being an important counter weight to active Soviet propaganda.” These exchanges were important as this was one of the most crucial moments for the rede-

finition of advanced Western culture, when the United States was just getting involved in the Korean War and when Picasso, allied with the French Left, was violently attacking these actions

through his Massacres in Korea of 1951 and his Dove Poster for Peace. These were days of high tension between the United States and France while America was trying to establish, in opposi-

tion to the USSR cultural propaganda machine, an alternative line of attack on the French cultural front?

What is important to understand about this period is that contemporary art in Paris in the late 1940s and 1950s was showing most of the same characteristics of Western production resulting from the horrors of the war: a strong interest in abstraction as well as a fascination for

the strength of the individual. As we know, the new French avant-garde art developed after the war was not seen or recognized in the United States, despite some great success in Europe. As

the art was often playing on a different key, not attuned to the formalist art criticism developed

in New York, U.S. eyes were unable to see what Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), Fautrier,

or Michel Tapié de Céléyrand were expressing in the early 1950s. Their philosophical silence and introspection were simply not registering in a world used to action and dripping, to the point that a decolonization of the eye still seems to be a needed venture today. The presentation

at the end of this chapter of work done by Wols and Bram van Velde during those years is not

an attempt to replace American art with a similar brand of French propositions, but to shed

some light on important and superb works produced in Paris but rarely discussed or compared with canonical Abstract Expressionist figures, as if the shining success of the later made other propositions invisible. Nevertheless, there was in Paris, simultaneously as in New York, the pro-

duction ofa new abstraction dealing with major postwar issues such as the importance of the

individual. But individuality in Paris, contraryto the image given in New York, was trapped in a serious existential pessimism, unable to believe in the so-called “Freedom of the Brush” popularized by MoMA in New York.*

Debates between realism, geometric abstraction, and forms of Abstract Expressionist

painting that were discussed in the United States until 1951 also raged in the French capital and

Jo | SERGE GuILeAUT

even—due to the peculiar political tradition and situation of postwar France—on a higher pitch. But what made Paris different was the extreme politicization of artistic expression in a culture still grappling with a violent and revolutionary tradition, in a moment of great tension during the divisive days of the Cold War. The art produced then in Paris was done in dialogue not only with the pressures of French reconstruction, defended differently by every sector of the

political body, but also with the history of modern painting, with old theoretical models and

with the new cultural and political situation at a time of intense scrutiny of self and national identity. In this battle, painting, due to its traditional historical importance in the construction of France's international image, was a site of extraordinary symbolic struggle. It became the prized item in the postwar ideological battles. But let’s go back a bit, as all this really started after

the Liberation in 1945, The entire world, so Paris wanted to believe, was waiting for its resurrection in order to guide civilization out of the ambient barbarism. The definition of what should or could be con-

sidered French, was then at the heart of postwar French reconstruction.

The liberation of France provided a horribly complex situation because the “young painters of French tradition,” who had managed to keep working during the occupation were back in town, producing similar images to those which, due to their mild modern vocabulary and nationalist colors, had had some success during the occupation.> The problem was that once the

occupation gave way to a free market of ideas, these pictures suddenly seemed literally from

another age. Topics of domestic interiors illuminated by rural light or rural maternities painted by Edouard Pignon, had a hard time to compete with modern urban soul-searching pictures of the type produced by Jean Fautrier, for example. What the established French art historians had been reconstructing after the war was

superb scaffoldings made of brilliant modernist reflections borrowed from Matisse, Picasso, and Bonnard but remixed in an academic exercise without any internal life capable of interacting with the devastated socio-psychology of postwar feelings. The art defended by the French

establishment was still at that time rooted in traditional Parisian values and so could not, in

their nostalgic dream, integrate what was actually being produced under their own eyes. Famous French art historians like Bernard Dorival or Pierre Francastel were defending outdated nationalistic aesthetics, not in tune with everyday modern life,* and certainly divorced

from those new dominating intellectual aspirations which talked more about anguish and pain

than about reasoned equilibrium and voluptuousness. In Paris, what the institutions were pro-

tecting, was an idealistic image of prewar France, as if the defeat, the occupation, and the new world of the atomic age divided into two blocs, did not have any bearing on the production of

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN | 31

art in Paris. These factors may have been present, they thought, but it was not the role of the

Parisian art world to talk about it. Paris’s role had always been to civilize the mad world around. it, not to describe it.

Edouard Pignon, showing at the new liberated Salon of 1944, was still representing a

utopian world steeped in rural life, ambiguously and curiously not so far from

Pétain’s

imposed view of the past. This type of production had some supporters in the world of Parisian critics, even if this mild modernism was already put into question by the heroization of Pablo Picasso, who triumphed at the Salon of 1944 onlya few days after his adherence to the Commu-

nist Party. This selection of Picasso was a strong and daring sign that the new government was not afraid to change course in order to bring the revolutionary ideas of the resistance into

French society. To give a central role in French culture toa Spanish communist painter was quite wild indeed. It flew in the face of many who wanted to go back again, like after the First World War to a kind of second retour a l’ordre. The valorization of Picasso’s modern work was one

important direction taken by progressist intellectuals, but the other, the one that ultimately became preeminent, was the one chosen by the more conservative side of French society.

Parisian institutions were keenly aware that they had to revamp the cultural image of

France, which had been badly shattered during years of occupation and collaboration. Several

directions were used, all not too convincing, to do this. The first one was the production of a

glossy magazine published in English, obviously geared toward the Anglo-Saxon world and called Paris Lives, published in 1945. The second was a

traveling show, Painting in France,

1939-1946, which went to New York in 1946 with devastating consequences.

In the Paris Lives magazine, Paris was trying to promote the old traditional image of France,

the one about the nostalgic love for the countryside, luxury, art, high fashion, etc . . . as if noth-

ing had happened during the war, as if it was possible to continue to believe that life was continuing unhampered by the new situation. Even when the war was acknowledged in the first pages of the magazine, it was—through a series of photos of devastated villages and cities—to

construct a hopeful framework. These scenes showing leveled landscapes were always repre-

sented under the watch of intact churches and cathedrals, as if a benevolent God was showing

the way fora shining future. If Christianity was the future guide for redemption of the soul, high consumerism was called upon in order to revamp the societal body. Indeed, what was exported abroad was the idea of luxury, the same old cliché of high-class French glamour, desire, and

excess, All this was at the time when people were discovering a crashed economy, ruined cities, and bruised souls. Traditional France was counting onits luxury industry to restart its economy.

This old idea was trying to convey to the rest of the world that despite the horrendous loss of

22 | SERGE GuILBAUT

real political and economical power, nothing had really changed in the symbolical world, in the world of culture, the only one France still wished to control. By the same token, for people who

could read between the lines, this layout was also saying: Well! Nothing has changed at all, and

this country is still stuck in her old eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imaginary dream of

power, even though the world all around was moving at a furious pace. The volume was geared

to reactivate a glorious past avoiding thinking about the distressful present. The past was the only thing really that France could sell to the world. Paris, or at least, this aristocratic magazine,’ was in fact trying to sell the past to a world enthralled by the future. The role of the magazine then was to convince the Anglo-Saxon world that French culture

was back and that Paris was ready for business as usual. But this display of luxury goods, includ-

ing architecture, books, art, and fashionable women’s hats, does not seem to have been a very

judicious move. Indeed, the image sold abroad was one of the haute bourgeoisie and aristocratic

lifestyles, ofa religious, classical academic, and, in particular, a colonial France—all things that

were going against the new image developed after the war by Western democracies, especially the United

States. But what was also clear, and in that the editors were right, was that reconstruc-

tion could not be one uniquely based on bricks and mortar, but needed to be also located in the

imaginary. Art and the image of France were crucial in this scheme, but what kind of image was

really needed or effective? This would be at the center of French reconstruction and at the core

ofa debate, which would be quite violent and complex.

The important concept, was again the idea that luxury was going to be the main card to

bring France out of her misery and into the new era. France was, after all, the sign of good times, of high culture, of the high taste of civilization. Paris was, or should be, still the center of Western quality.

This was the plan concocted by a quite confident establishment. Already by 1945 though,

‘one could have a fairly good sense that all this was to a large degree an illusion, wishful think-

ing, some poudre aux yeux thrown at a destabilized world easily dazzled by Parisian flair and luxury, or so went the discourse. By 1945 it was already visible that another new way of feeling was developing, and that another type of art was being produced underground, under the belly of

the realist beast, as the poet Francis Ponge adequately put it. Nevertheless, this side was not pro-

moted nor understood by the major established personalities. The 1946 show sent by the French government to several cities in the United States is the perfect example. Just like the magazine

Paris Lives, the exhibition presented a young generation of artists who found excellence in the integration of the discoveries of the two major French artists of the time: Picasso and Matisse.

Pignon, Estéve, Marchand, or Fougeron cleverly used Picasso's grid and Matisse’s colors to

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN | 33

arrive at a concoction that was thought to be a recipe for unmitigated success. The problem was

that the topics painted—interiors, still lives, models—did not seem to represent the anxieties of the day, rather they looked backward toward a nostalgic prewar world. Clement Greenberg, who hada shrewd understanding of the new developing art scene, used this display to lambaste postwar French art production: “André Marchand is presented as one of the best of the younger generation of Parisian painters. In him the pleasure principle according to the physical tradition is revealed nakedly and decadently. Marchand’s drawings owe almost everything to Picasso, while his color has absorbed all that has been rich and juicy in French painting since Renoir and boiled it down to slick, fatty tones through which shine brilliant and exquisite but meaningless intensities of hue. Not all Marchand’s tact, expertise, and taste can save his art from being confectionary.”* But what was being created outside of those controlled salons was a new type of discourse,

developed on the margins of the establishment, a new way to address contemporary anxieties.

And anybody a little attuned to the art scene would have known it, even Clement Greenberg. A formless type of abstraction was all the rage in underground Paris. This new individualistic expression, rapidly and clearly analyzed by the Surrealist art critic Edouard Jaguer in 1946,’ was the new way to position oneself between the old school of Paris now totally bankrupt and a particular French brand of Social Realism becoming rapidly dominant after 1947. Life indeed was hard for those stuck between tradition and revolution. But still one has to remember that fluid

abstraction had been produced in Paris since the late 1930s by such painters as Bram van Velde,

Hans Hartung, and started to have real visibility and critical appraisal as early as 1945, thanks

to the famous exhibition of Jean Fautrier’s celebrated and controversial Hostages paintings. This materialist type work, along with the work shown by Jean Dubuffet, Wols, and Jean-Paul Riopelle, came to be understood as another alternative to the Magnelli/Vasarely brand of geo-

metric abstraction, which, despite efforts by the Galerie Denise René, was losing ground follow-

ing the vogue for existential individualism. Utopian geometry was slowly being challenged by pessimistic deconstructive abstraction. While Michel Seuphor had finally published his famous book L’Art abstrait, ses origines, ses premiers maitres, which historicized geometric abstraction, Charles Estienne, a critic who until then was also mesmerized by this type of art, was publish-

ing in 1950 a disturbing pamphlet called L’Art abstrait est-il un académisme? In the book, Esti-

enne was poking fun at the academicization of geometric abstraction and, in particular,a new

established school, the Académie de l’Art Abstrait, where one could learn how to produce, precisely, abstract paintings. The two creators of this academy were Edgard Pillet and, especially,

Jean Dewasne, who—to show the complexity of the debate—wasa rare bird in Paris at the time,

341 STRGE GuUlLBaur

as he was, simultaneously, a geometric abstract artist and a Communist Party member. Estienne targeted this modern and uplifting academy as being the worst idea of the century due to the reactionary instrumentalization done there to abstraction. For Estienne and others, this academicization of abstraction was putting the accent on the mechanism of art rather than on its poetics. This was a terrible idea as the individual, this individual who had to be reshaped after

the anonymity produced by fascist and Stalinist ideologies, had to recover a sense of freedom and wonder. The artist, Estienne said—following the Surrealist tradition—should be in perma-

nent revolt against his/her own style in order to keep the self alive and on guard against sclerosis and codifications of all sorts. Basing his argument on writings by Kandinsky, Estienne was demanding a new freedom for the artist, a forgetting of all rules and a jump into the unknown as the Surrealists used to do. A similar position was also pursued and somewhat theorized by

another art critic, a fan of Dada this time: Michel Tapié. Tapié’s originality was that he rejected with passion the “neo-Parisianisme” he saw in Estienne."” His call was instead to re-establish

Paris at the center of the international art world and Tapié, being more flamboyant and media savvy than Charles Estienne, almost pulled it off. He rapidly did become in many ways the sym-

bol of the new international wheeler-dealer, the new corporate type of art critic, and a jet-set artistic entrepreneur avant la lettre.

Around 1950, while the power of Léon Degand was receding along with the geometric

abstraction movement he was defending, Estienne and Tapié became the enfants terribles of art criticism in Paris. They created many controversies connected with the galleries they were associated with, like the Studio Facchetti for Tapié and the Galerie l’Etoile Scéllée for Estienne.

Michel Tapié in particular had a grand vision for the development ofa new type of art, divorced

of all styles. What was important, he said in one of his famous books, Un Art Autre, in 1952, was the fact that artists of all types were actually now producing works which did not fit into any traditional category." Real artists were like sorcerer’s apprentices, conquistadors of virgin lands

asking for new Eldorados, searching for ecstasy—an ecstasy only found in expressivity, in the heat of creation. This heat (abstraction chaude) was of course, the opposite of cold geometrical pondering (abstraction froide). His goal was to assemble a team of international artists under the umbrella of what he called Art Autre, a space where all the artists he deemed “different”

could be hoarded into a powerful and wide-ranging group. He rapidly became a kind of Marcel Duchamp of art criticism as people he chose for whatever reason, were suddenly anointed as Art Autre, participating in a wide movement representing the new, the fresh breath of international art. As it was impossible to really rationalize this massive corralling of artists, Tapié’s

texts were elusive and strange, to say the least, as they seemed to come out of a very worked-out

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN

| 35

6 Hartung, T 1948-19, 1948, oll on canvas, 38 1/4 x 51.1/8 In. (97 x 130 cm). Private collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

mind, between automatic writing and paraphysical pronouncements. This new theory was

going to be put into practice in several shows and in particular in what Tapié called Véhémences

Confrontées at the Nina Dausset gallery in March 1951. There he assembled a disparate group of international painters (Bryen, Capogrossi, de Kooning, Hartung (figure 5), Georges Mathieu, Pollock, Riopelle, Russell, and Wols) in order to give a sense of new ways of expressing devised by a young generation of artists witnessing and reflecting upon the state of the new postwar

world. The catalogue for the show, emphasizing through the title the healthy confrontation of different enthusiasms for modernity,

a large page folded into four parts. Once unfolded, the

ay, was printed in red. The other side, with illustrations of the works exhibited, was done in black; red and black being of course the colors of anarchist and communist revolutions, which granted him a place in the new assertive avant-garde. One front page, with the title and Tapié’s

36 | SERGE GUILBAUT

portion of the page was presenting, no doubt in a tongue-in-cheek way, a Mondrianesque chart where all the Art Autre possibilities were neatly and strategically positioned. The world outside

the rejected abstract formalism was indeed full of possibilities, was bristling with life compared to the deep black hole of formalism, where all creativity seemed to have disappeared. Neverthe-

less it was difficult to explain or even to make sense of these encountered new directions. Tapié was in fact the Ariadneof fluid abstraction. He decided to use his unlimited vocabulary and language dexterity to paper over the huge differences one could see among enrolled artists. His text

was thick with lyricism where the word vehemence was popping up at every turn. His sentences,

which often make no sense at all, produce a whirlwind of connotations that was supposed to

produce in the reader an uplifting feeling of ascendancy toward ecstasy through words, mim-

icking in this way the art he was defending. In a text published the same year in a catalogue for his friend the painter Mathieu, Tapié used, as a subtitle, an aphorism from Francis Picabia, who

admonished the reader not to try to understand things. This new type of art criticism was coopting Dada in order to produce for the first time a tactic of branding for an art movement. Lis-

ten to Tapié, who surprisingly managed to have an English translation made of his text: “Only

the recourse to the hylemorphic principle of the individuation of a haecceity quanticly defined (qua substancia fit haec)—a universal formality may be applied univocally to all things—may still be possible as the last means of a volitive and actual achievement of the individual in defer-

ring the ineluctable rarefaction of the critico-organic ontities and the corollary engulfing of all possibility of transumption of the epistemological reality into maximum intelction.”"? Michel Seuphor, the famous specialist of abstract art, was livid. In his review of the show, he went as far

as to connect this desire of unintelligibility with Nazism, bypassing by the same token any possibility that all this could also be read as a new type of Salvador Dali artistic report. In November 1951, Tapié revised his artist list and presented at the Studio Facchetti, where

he was the artistic director, a new exhibition with an attractive title: Les Signifiants de l'informel, where Dubuffet, Fautrier, Mathieu, Henri Michaux, Riopelle, and Serpan were presented. The

popular impact was substantial, as this was seen as a powerful alternative to the revamped School of Paris. Informel became the master word for the new art produced in Paris, an art often teetering on the verge of nothingness, between detachment and engagement. But a movement

so unfocused that Fautrier, the painter whose work, after all, was responsible for defining the notion, rejected it completely after his friend the poet Jean Paulhan wrote his famous book L’'In-

formel (Eloge) in 1962. It simply did not make sense. It became, as Fautrier sneered, an empty spectacle for export.

But as Michel Tapié’s goal was to impose a new expressive individualism in Paris, to repre-

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN | 37

sent this new postwar sensibility developing rapidly all across the Western world, he looked for international allies. The vitality, individuality, and excessiveness of Jackson Pollock were the

perfect match. Tapié’s title of his essay for the Pollock show he organized at the Galerie Maeght

in 1952 was illuminating: it was called Pollock avec nous (Pollock with us). Tapié wanted to show

that, in opposition to political and humanistic realisms as well as rational geometric abstraction, a looser international abstract movement was developing and that Paris should pay attention to it. In his mind, Pollock, this provider of mythical total freedom, could be used to help

Paris wake up. Tapié, somewhat misreading Pollock’s latest project of the black-and-white paintings, was emphasizing in the catalogue the free individual side of the Pollock myth, rather

than the modernistic dialogue with tradition. The American, according to Tapié, was the perfect candidate because he was totally unaware of Parisian sectarianism, only confronted witha clean slate, with his own pure and virgin individuality. This was also what American criticism

was ina large degree proposing to Europe and which Tapié naively included in his introduction:

“An individual force, able to testify about the contemporary world through such a strong personal experience that he escapes collectivity to become the sign of total freedom.” The battles of words (collectivity versus freedom) in the midst of his diatribe were indeed nicely coded and tilted toward the West at this particularly hot moment of diatribe against the USSR. By being integrated in a new, radically different strand of abstract art, defined and led by Paris; to help

Paris regain, or re-establish the title of capital of the arts. For Tapié, Paris still had the power to universalize culture, the power of the center to mold the international scene. At this center Tapié

himself was presiding, sipping a drink at some Latin Quarter café, The problem was that the timing for reinscribing Paris as the fountain of modern universal art was pretty bad. While hoping to use Pollock for his own purposes, Tapié actually brought him at the worst possible

moment, since

Pollock's visit coincided with the first large-scale American cultural propaganda

of the Cold War. To shout in public “Pollock with Us” the way Tapié did in the introduction to

his catalogue, while many people were actually chanting and writing on walls“U.S. Go Home,”

was a form of provocation in the artistic scene which was still suspicious of Kitsch American

imperialism."4 Indeed, this title, and Pollock’s show was intended to participate in the avant-

garde struggle Tapié was involved in along with Georges Mathieu, unambiguously signaling

support for an American type of liberal freedom. For Tapié, Pollock was the perfect candidate in 1952, because his art played like a wedge planted between humanistic Parisian realisms and rational geometric abstraction.

The problem for the French was that, bombarded by a rapid succession of shows of Amer-

ican modern culture designed to transform the French understanding of the United States, the

38 | SERGE GUILBAUT

French were unable to respond or to articulate for political reasons, a united front, the way private America was able to do. The French, with their many different artists and intellectual/polit-

ical positions went to cultural war in dispersed order. No specific cultural logo could be identified, Nevertheless, they had in their ranks many powerful and complex artists, who were

buried under the cacophony of propagandistic and political discourses. In the United States, the power of the Museum of Modern Art, relayed by the art critic establishment, was such that by 1952, Abstract Expressionism was the voice of freedom, a freedom on the march all over Europe

with the mighty power of distribution. No other convincing voice was really available in New York at that time. Abstract Expressionism was the talk of the town, the only advanced voice of

depoliticized modernity. In Paris, on the other hand, due to a different postwar history and a more diversified as well as a more layered democracy (no McCarthyism), consensus was impossible. Debates, from extreme left to extreme right, were raging through many newspapers and exhibitions. There were too many deep-seated political debates that made it impossible to agree,

to come together under the banner of a unique new postwar modern French cultural identity, the way America was able to do at some ethical and political costs. Tapié and Estienne had several paroxysmal battles in newspapers on this account, often reflecting their political coloration, their positions regarding national identity. What was at

stake at the time, and Estienne understood this, was the need for the creation ofa new modern

French identity, an identity rooted, he thought, in a long national and glorious past but also armed with contemporary clout. What was needed, but not clearly assessed, was the construc-

tion of a present open to a universal future obviously developed from a French base. Yes the Americans were dripping, Estienne knew this, and Pollock was mildly interesting to him, but what fascinated him more was the fact that the French were “staining.”!° The French were doing “taches.” Le tachisme, which according to him, had been invented around 1952 by painters he

was supporting, "* was also, like the New York version, an art about freedom of expression. But in Paris, he explained, expression always starts from scratch, from the unarticulated, the dirty,

the stain; like the placenta, as he actually said. It was a birth with deep roots. This art, Estienne mentioned, using the fashionable phrase of Roland Barthes, who had just published his famous book Ecriture degrés zéro, is a total reenactment. “The ‘tache’ is the degree zero of plastic writ-

ing”; an art,as the critic kept emphasizing that stems from the individual rather than from style. Le Tachisme was—we always forget—a French parallel version of Abstract Expressionism, a type of painting created after the war and collected by Estienne in order to counteract the publicity that people like Michel Tapié was giving to the Americans by inviting Pollock to be with

them. The drip and the stain were two sides of the same coin; the head or tail of contemporary

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN | 39

art. A contemporary art scene clearly divided between those who looked toward America or

toward the neutralist for solace. Tapié and Mathieu, for example, were deeply immersed into the American-induced ideology of freedom and so deeply suspected of “collaboration” in Paris. ‘What was not helping the case was the fact that they were publishing simultaneously, while the

propaganda war was heating up, a magazine titled The United States Lines Paris Review for a luxury transatlantic liner where they were not worried to talk about “the vitality and grandeur of our Western civilization on both sides of the Atlantic.” In clear opposition, Estienne was dig-

ging, with the help of André Breton, deep into the French past in order to find a connection

between, as surprising as it may sound, the art of the Celts and Tachisme. The Celts, seen as the

antecedents of the French, did produce interestingly enough for our purpose, a deconstruction of Greek realism and anthropomorphism through the abstract style of their coins. This was described as being the roots of this new critical abstraction resurfacing in the 1950s in Paris after

centuries of dormant state. The sudden irruption and resurfacing of this long European tradition in Paris was seen as a powerful critical force similar to the one deployed by the Celts against the imperialist Greeks."” This was quite a journey for the “stain,” but essential for its propulsion to the front of the evolving formal and historical line. This was, they thought, a powerful and

fun argument even if a bit farfetched. This battle seems silly until one realizes that what was at stake was the way one saw the position of France in the larger political struggle between France and the United States at a time when several key problems were posed: the reactivation of the Cold War after the death of Stalin at a time when two major conflicts opposed the Atlanticists to the neutralists in France. There was the terrible conflict over the EDC (European Defense Counsel) and the intricate negotiations with the United States about the loosing of Indochina and the defeat of

the French Army at Dien Bien Phu, and all this was just at the time when the first bombs were

exploding in Algeria. These were indeed trying moments, disabling times. It seems that Estienne and André Breton were actually trying to carve out an independent space, far away from America, a French space where the critic from Brittany, Estienne, vaunted the tradition of the small sailor’s boat against the Transatlantic Liner supported by the aristocratic Tapié de

Celeyrand and Georges Mathieu, who seemed to have sold their souls to the most powerful interests of the moment, America. This was a losing battle of course and Estienne abandoned

what he felt was a corrupt art world for the coast of Brittany where, he, between trips in his

small sailboat, wrote popular songs for the anarchist singer Leo Ferré. André Breton and Estienne in their stubborn utopian independence looked a lot like those heroes Astérix and Obelix,

who refuse to buckle down under the powerful mechanization of the Empire, knowing full

40 | SERGE GuILBAUT

well that victory was out of the question but that self-preservation, cultural difference against all odds, had to be protected.

THE

INFORMEL

SOLUTION

Art Informel was a logo that was attached to the early work of Fautrier and Wols just after

the war. It rapidly became a formal sticker that could be applied to almost anything and so very rapidly lost its appeal, including for the one whose work was first described as such: Jean

Fautrier.'* In 1962 in response to his insertion in the Informel movement described by his friend

Jean Paulhan who had just written L’Art informel (éloge),'? Fautrier tried to pull himself out of what had become an abstract classification: “Reality is the starting point of art. ... Those pretentious entertainments, supported by a large useless and obscured literature, which call them-

selves “Informel” and which reject all forms of the real, end up in giving us only variations of matter, marbled papers, stuccos, in fact flat and empty of any imagination, and finally are only copying each other. Reality has to subsist in the oeuvre, it is the primary matter. ... The unreal-

ity of absolute “informel” does not bring anything. It’s a gratuitous game. No art form can give emotion if there is not a part of real.””° Still, despite the fashion of the term, the art produced by Fautrier, Bram van Velde, and Wols became only palatable for the French institutions in the 1960s. What was difficult to access was their rejection of clear and clean ways to represent the

world they tried to depict. Wols, in particular, was invisible. Informel seemed for many a dangerous and careful attack against the modernist tradition,

against painting. The conservative art critic Waldemar George, for example, in one of his discus-

sions of Fautrier’s show of his hostages in 1945, announced that we were assisting—live—at the

suicide of the great painter Fautrier: “It is painful to admit that Fautrier is skirting the abyss. His art, too elliptic, is the triumph of the inform. It is reduced to a puerile drawing grafted on a color,

which is totally alien to him. The case of Fautrier is the one of a great artist committing suicide” So there was a strong feeling out there, that his work was really about the destruction of the grand tradition—academic and modern—about the defilement of high culture. This was of course not

completely true, as the poet Francis Ponge, a friend of Fautrier’s, was constantly connecting Fautrier’s work with artists of the stature of Rembrandt, Giotto, or Picasso. Another friend, Jean Paulhan, in an interview of 1962 answering questions from André Parinaud, said that he liked

Fautrier (figure 6) “because among the informel painters he is the only one, atleast one of the few

who I feel has kept the feeling for the grande peinture, of generous and abundant painting, the

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN I 41

6. Jean Fautrler, Sarah (from the Hostages series), 1943, oll on canvas, 45 5/8 x 31.

7/8 in. (116 x 81 cm). Private collection. © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

only one who makes us think of Titian, Carpaccio, or Rubens.” While this statement seems to me

to bea bit over the top, what I like about it is the idea that among the Informel, Fautrier is one of

the rare artists who is continuing the task of modern and grand painting. The one who rather than trumpeting the end of art, still believes that it is worthwhile to continue the task of modern

42 | SERGE GUILBAUT

7. Wols (A. 0. Wolfgang Schulze), Blue Phantom, 1951, oll on canvas, 28 3/4 x 23 5/8 in. (73 x 60 cm). Private collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Pa

painting. The best way is to understand this view is to compare him with his friend, the German painter Wols (figure 7), who was also working in Paris during the 1940s, Wols was the one who continuously talked about his admiration for Fautrier, not only because he was excited by the similarities of inspiration, but because despite this closeness, Wols felt, unlike Fautrier, unable to

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN | 43

construct an oeuvre, to retool modern painting for these new times. What was needed in those

days mired in so many catastrophes, was to possess the “rage of expression” as Francis Ponge

described it, that rage which enabled you to struggle against the material and to win over matter.

If Fautrier literally builds up a monument to modernism, Wols cannot help but defile painting completely. When Fautrier rebuilds expressivity from the ground up through objects and mat-

ter, Wols produces images that tend to disappear from the canvas through a process of entropy. Wols’s abstract pictures, also done ona flat surface, but here not on the hard surface of a table but

on the soft one of his warm bed, are almost always produced at the center of the canvas, caught ina centrifugal force which gives the viewer a sense that the fluid material deposited on the can-

vas will not stay, will disappearas if being sucked into the canvas itself. And no amount of scratching will keep it on the surface. Wols pictures are about instability, about disappearance, about the inability to keep his self together. It is about the uselessness of the painting project. Usually, painters are like Fautrier, people who keep at their fingertips all the techniques of special organization and representation, but the individual, the one who struggles like Wols is rather the one who prefers to be a helpless witness, the one who wants to express the impossibility to commu-

nicate, the one who talks about the futility of painting, of knowledge and of artistic dexterity. Knowing the arrogance of the system, Wols, the bruised, defeated refugee, prefers to mark his ter-

ritory, just like a feline, at the four corners of his pictures, rather than to paint again. This was a derisive territory for many, but a really important one for Wols, since it delineated an independ-

ent space, separated, unique, all his. He created this space in a special way, with the traditional

effects of his trade (line and color) but in looking for life rather than its representation. To this

goal, he inverts the traditional language. That is why lines do not define anything in particular,

that the drawings unravel out as when one pulls a thread out of an old pullover, and that line

wilts, erases itself out, gets lost in the sandy surfaces of his granulated canvases. Wols, in fact, paints in order to demystify, to question the grand tradition. He scratches, takes out the matter,

the paint, rather than deposit it. He exhausts himself in trying to show how impossible it is to compete with the masters of the past, with the Matisses, the Picassos, the Mirds, etc. ... There is

no attempt to capture the past in his work, no attempt to deal with history. All is in the personal present, quite understandable after spending four years in French camps: “The first thing thatI chase out of my life,” he said once, “is memory.” The direct and authentic experience of the

moment surpasses the manipulated memory. His project was a radical rejection of historicism,

miles from the complex construction about private and public sphere at the heart of Fautrier. Fautrier’s phantasms and desires were located inside the mechanism of public representation historically located. Wols did not believe in all this,

44 | SERGE GuiLBAUT

Wols—and this defines the man and artist—in many of his aphorisms, prefers the termite to the butterfly. The butterfly is only beautiful for one day while the termites that create their

beautiful castle out of their own dejections are more pathetically profound. Similarly, his paintings are coming out of his dejected life. What he gives us to look at is not a well organized world as in Roger Bissiére’s paintings, nor chaos, not even a well-mastered chaos like Jackson Pollock's,

nor a pretty and savvy pile up of layers of plaster and paint as in Fautrier. Wols starts with the understanding that the studio language, the painter’s oeuvre, will never be able to express the

effect life has on the individual. Here is the end of the tunnel for Wols but also the definitive decadence of modernist utopia announced in a debauchery of colors and scratches, unfinished traces and lacerations. It is a real “mise 2 mort” of painting. Here lies in a thousand pieces, under the blinding light of the recent atomic explosions, the Enlightenment project. But this type of

painting could nevertheless call up through its textures and handling, the impossibility of a direct translation of human anxiety and horror confronted by the historical machinery, facing total alienation in front of history. For Wols, history had to be lived as experience and no longer as memory or even as knowledge. This is far from Fautrier’s design. Wols was, as he said in one of his aphorisms “a tunnel” and he will stay there, not even thinking that under proper circumstances he could erupt, break loose from it as Bataille theorized. Wols stops. Fautrier did not

stop; he actually felt so strongly about the importance of high culture that he thought he could transmit its grandeur to the masses, or at least to the middle class, thanks to his multiple original saga. Fautrier exalts painting while Wols humiliates it. Fautrier is the conductor, the chef d’orchestre of our emotions while at the same time being the chef, the pastry-cook of our dreams and desires. Both violate painting, but Fautrier struggles with the form, squashes it and wins while Wols exhausts himself and disappears. Fautrier won the 1960 Venice Biennale Prize. Wols

died of food poisoning and alcoholism in a small avant-garde garret in St. Germain-des-Prés. He was thirty-eight years old.

PARIS

VERSUS

NEW

YORK:

DIFFERENCE

AND

INDIFFERENCE

‘What was crucial and interesting about Bram van Velde’s work was that he produced a very sharp critique of the nostalgic look of the School of Paris while trying to continue questioning it,

the desperate task of modern painting (figure 8). Desperation is the key word here as van Velde, unlike Wols and Fautrier, finds delight, pleasure, and even a certain amount of strength in his dis-

membering of a great modern tradition.To be modern in postwar France, he felt, was to deal with

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN

| 45

despair transfigured by art in order to be

able to survive ... barely. Of course his pessimistic, tragic, and disillusioned outlook was, in his questioning of the possibility of painting, clearly connected with some artists’ preoccupations of the New York

School. But if American artists after 1943 had the desire to save international modern

art through an abstract kind of engagement, Bram, for specific, different historical reasons, refused to situate himself in the

debate engulfing intellectuals in the late 1940s. It was, nevertheless, from the city 8. Bram van Velde, Gouache, 1961, 50 x 48 In. (127 x 122¢m). _ and about the alienating city that he spoke.

Private collection. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New

But if American painters transformed ali-

York/ADAGP, Paris.

enation into a positive factor, reinforcing freedom in their struggle against tyranny, as

Rosenberg, Greenberg, Rothko, and Still were emphasizing, anguish was what Bram was after. No answers could be given by the artist—not even abstract ones—no certainties were left in his mind

or in his art. As he kept saying: “I do not believe in solution but I do believe in effort” and “I fum-

ble, but I fumble well.”?' Bram van Velde was insisting on his weakness, his withdrawal and the

emphasis on the derisory importance of his project. This was a far cry from the aggressive stand taken by the new generation of New York artists, who despite their pessimistic assessment of mod-

ern life were still able to discover in the sublime solitude (Barnett Newman), or in the strength of individual impetuosity (Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock) the force that Clement Greenberg was

looking for American art since 1947.

More so than Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman stands as the perfect antithesis to Bram van Velde. What Barnett Newman saw himself doing, in his libertarian kind of way, was as he said

to Harold Rosenberg, a political project: “If he [Rosenberg] and others could read it properly, it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.”» This, despite its overstate-

ment, was not merely a quip, because what Newman was doing in the late 1940s was the produc-

tion of plastic constructions and mechanisms geared toward the protection and exaltation of the individual. When

he moved in 1949 from his Surrealistic drawings concerned with mythi-

cal origins to his Onement, his purpose was certainly, like many painters of his generation, an

46 | SERGE GUILBAUT

attempt to salvage individuality from the ruthless treatment given to the integrity of the indi-

vidual by authoritarian regimes of all sorts—fascism as well as communism but also, as he said quite clearly, state capitalism and consumerism (plate 5). As we know now, he was not alone in

this position as many artists in Paris as well as in Montreal were pursuing the same purposeful

abstraction. But their ways of acting it out were different. Their similar assertion of individuality took different routes, gaining by the same token different types of public exposure. What

makes Barnett Newman's work antithetical to van Velde’s art, for example, is not his apparent emptiness, not even his brushing with the sublime and mysticism, but rather his worship and

fetishization of virility. His profoundly lived anarchism gave him this force and incentive, but in his search for the individual grail, he dragged with him the old inflated romantic ego which

in the end made him lose what he was presumably originally after. His pursuit and presentation of individualism was quite different from Pollock’s or Rothko’s—not so much from Still—but

very far indeed from the work of French artists of the same period like Wols, Bram van Velde,

or even Pierre Soulages. Painters, who were actually showing their broken spirits through a dismembering of modernist tradition, were putting into question all those certainties, which New-

man’s Zips establish and reinforce. There is no more anxiety in this type of work; everything is

tight, doubtless like pure power. This was very different indeed from Pollock’s materialist and

dialectical relationship to figuration and from Rothko’s neurotic search for introspection. If Pollock deals like Newman with the fear of chaos, Pollock, while also rejecting chaos, does not

impose harmony or “anything,” he chose instead to present the mechanism of his struggle in a way akin to van Velde’s preoccupation. Newman, in contrast, imposes calm and rhythms from above in a powerful streak of sublime light, which literally strikes the viewer. If it was force, confidence, virility that America was looking for, one can see how Barnett Newman’s Abraham

(1949) could answer those needs in a way that Bram van Velde and Wols could not. Nor could

the images then presented in the press and in catalogues of Wols working on his soft bed (in opposition to Pollock's hard surface of the floor) in a cramped hotel room, resting idle, or play-

ing the banjo while all Europe was crumbling—and this while Jackson Pollock across the

Atlantic was dazzlingly shown reconstructing modernism from the ground up in widely distributed photographs of the artist in action. Wols could not serve to conjure up any image of these artists as saviors of modern culture. Between the need to construct a strong type of painting in the United States during the Cold War and the need in Paris to reconstruct French traditional culture abandoned during the war, no room was left for the intelligent deconstructive art of Bram van Velde, or Wols. Between Barnett Newman’s sublime “Here” and Wols’s pathetic

“Nowhere,” Bram van Velde in his sophisticated assessment did not want to or could not choose.

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN

| 47

What made Van Velde’s work different and difficult to assimilate was his sense of the uselessness of participating in the world, his belief that history was over, and that struggle was inoperative while even pure individualism was impossible. But his dialogue with the history of

modern painting and in particular with Matisse (color, sensuousness) and Picasso (criticizing

his “primitivism”) differentiates him from Wols’s destructiveness. Not much room was left for

dreams, but only just enough space in the sphere of painting to be able to breathe. That was his way of totally giving in. In a sense his relationship with Samuel Beckett was complementary in

their despair. If Beckett, amazed by the beauty of van Velde’s paintings could marvel at his abil-

ity to create despite everything: (in a letter 1949) “you resist as artist to everything that distracts you from working. It’s admirable. In my case, I try to capitulate without being totally mute.”

Van Velde managed to be silent without capitulation. In endless works, a mirror was silently reflecting Bram’s quartered anguish. He represented an extreme form of the artist/hero (that he

had constructed out of his everyday life with the help of Georges Duthuit and Samuel Beck-

ett)—lucid, voiceless and tragic in his invisibility: a type of van Gogh who would have severed

his own tongue. Silent and invisible! “What a laugh,” Samuel Beckett would have said.

Van Velde’s formal disintegration by the loosening up of the Cubist grid and his introduc-

tion of watery and trembling lines into traditional Parisian design meant the corrosion of these

serene paintings, of those decided, cocky, combative ones, of those popular “good taste” paint-

ings whose role was to prolong with delight that long formal line which had seemed to stretch,

according to Samuel Beckett’s 1945 perverted formula, “from Les Eyzies cave to the Galerie de France.”“However,’ Beckett added sarcastically, “it is never certain if it is a pre-established line or if it is a trace which slowly unwinds like the slime of a slug. It is an invisible line. Could it be pos-

sible, rather, that the line was in fact a plane (plan)?”™ Samuel Beckett could see, already in 1945, the entire postwar problematic: the plane versus the line. Playing with the French word “plan?

what Beckett was referring to was not only the aesthetic formal device, but also the strength of

organizations, of directives, of ideologies, of utopias, and revolutionary plans against the line. Against the line which idles, which sticks to the individual, which does not go anywhere, which does not build anything, which contradicts, and which in the last analysis erases itself, doubling

back onto itself, in order to avoid defining anything which could, precisely, give rise to a plan. Outside of the communist party line, so to speak, for some like Beckett and Bram van Velde, the postwar era was not sympathetic to utopian plans of the sort concocted during the 1930s.

Painting no longer seemed capable of participating in the large utopian social experiments. Some painters thought that it was more crucial to be humble, see smaller, accept one’s impotence in order to save a spark of individuality; that individuality threatened by so much contem-

48 | SERGE GUILBAUT

porary ideological righteousness. Samuel Beckett again expressed this fear in a short but brilliant parable: ‘Tre cient: God made the world in 6 days, and you, you are not even capable of making me a pair of trousers in 6 months? Te TAILOR: But Sir, look at the world, and .. look at your trousers.?5 All was said, the important postwar art in France was going to be a succession of stories about trousers: those of Wols, Fautrier, Soulages, and, of course, van Velde.

Bram van Velde’s paintings are not totally unbridled, but the shivering disposition of sur-

faces, the arrangement of masses of colors faintly or falsely translucent, with transparent juices next to opaque areas, do not permit the eye to rest, do not allow the eye after a few seconds of intellectual excitement, to reconstitute the object of desire: man as center of descriptive power,

as enunciating force. The scaffoldings, which somehow support a series of vacillating imbricated forms, do not succeed in providing a sense of totality, or even a sense of progressive discovery. Bram van Velde’s work, which looks back at Matisse with roots in Cubism, exposes them,

produces a kind of labyrinth without Ariadne, a puzzle in which pieces desperately do not fit as they seem to belong to different games. Indeed, forms seem to pile up, to rise progressively in order to rapidly fall visually as if they were all too slick to buttress each other. In this chaotic sea of signs though, Kwakiut! masks, reworked through Picassoesque shapes, arise from our memory without nevertheless being able to firmly establish their presence as their cultural memory is constantly being treated as a passing ghost. This turning of Matisse’s oeuvre like a glove inside out delighted Georges Duthuit. He had finally discovered a soul capable of simultaneously

deflating and yet successfully continuing the oeuvre of his difficult father-in-law: van Velde had taken the light off Matisse’s hand in order to stick it upside down in the mud and toward a coun-

termeaning, He was thus dealing with the inheritance of the two famous pillars of French cul-

ture—Matisse and Picasso—but rather than blending them together, as others were desperately

trying to do, van Velde, through a suspended breathless vocabulary, radically weakened their

certitudes and powers of enunciation, hurling their tables and masks—unfit to bear the pressure of contemporary feelings—into a distant past. To paint in this depressed way, at the height of the Sartre years, seems in retrospect to have been a kind of provocation. It was. But it was not only a scandal in relation to “engagement” but also in relation to the context of reconstruction which was at the center of cultural as well as eco-

nomic agendas in France.

DISDAIN FOR THE STAIN | 49

Finally then, by 1953, Paris, after many difficult battles, was simultaneously discovering the happiness of the return and triumph of the avant-garde and the anguish brought along with the feeling that the cultural world of Paris, like the economic and political worlds—had definitely

toppled. The active and expressive art (Mathieu) was already too spectacularized and the more

thoughtful art (Wols, van Velde), in its deconstructive aspect was too weak to stand up against cold war enemies. They become

invisible. That did not mean that the art was not deep and pow-

erful in its own way, but it means that at the time, under such propagandistic brouhaha, the deep

soulful gestures of Wols or Bram van Velde were passed over as so many meaningless whispers by the critical establishment and the different museum institutions. Paris might have gained a few extra handsome pairs of “abstract” trousers, to use Samuel Beckett famous phrase, but had

irretrievably lost, despite some moving and wonderful productions, her shirt.

591 $8358

@VLraLr

Transatlantic Anxieties,

Especially Bill’s Folly DAVID

ANFAM

ot

! } begin with a comparison and an apology. In setting the deplorable U.S.

id Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld alongside two great Abstract Expressionists—Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman—my intention is in no way to link them as people. Instead, what seems striking is a certain resonance to Rumsfeld’s declaration in January

2003, when he notoriously decried a swathe of Europe—notably France and Germany—

because it would not kowtow to the United States’ rush to war against Iraq. The phrase he

invoked then was “Old Europe.” This “Old Europe” tag is apposite here because—while there is otherwise of course no common ground between Rumsfeld, Still, and Newman—it

revives

claims for a putatively outmoded European dispensation pitted against a “new” America. In

fact, such an opposition has been periodically trumpeted by politicians and artists in order (as Thope to outline with regard to the latter) to make maneuvers in a play of transatlantic rivalries. Typically, these tensions may, at any particular moment, involve claims to possession (whether of economic resources, creative ideas or selfhood) or precedence (as to who com-

mands the vanguard of, say, political democracy or pictorial originality). The artists who vividly rehearsed, albeit for their own aesthetic purposes, such an Old Europe versus new America

divide were preeminently Still and Newman. The former was perhaps the most boldly chauvin-

istic thinker of the entire New York School, while Newman, especially in his writings of the

wartime and postwar phase, maintained a game of geographical one-upmanship in which America became the torchbearer of fresh creative imperatives. My inference is that the topic of this past conference and publication—“Abstract Expressionism: The International Context”— centers upon transatlantic rivalries and, preeminently, anxieties arising from them. That is

who's ahead? who's won or lost, and what is the booty? This assumption should help to clarify one motive behind my title, “Transatlantic Anxieties.”

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES, ESPECIALLY BILL’S FOLLY

| 51

The old/new division is often foregrounded when artists, like politicians, have some especially

pressing ideological work to perform: as certainly did Rumsfeld in his belligerent way, but also,

undera quite different agenda, as did Still and Newman whenthey strove to engender the so-called

New American Painting, To distanced European eyes, this Americanism inevitably appears more conspicuous than it must from the other, originative side of the Atlantic. I myself was first drawn

to the art in question because | saw it, somewhat naively, as a challenge to British insularity,a new territory to colonize. At the start (some thirty years ago), my scholarly lenses were colored by the

terms of the “triumph” of American painting—the title of what was then the more or less canonical account of Abstract Expressionism published in 1970.' Yet when I duly began my own first book on the subject, doubts arose as to whether American art was quite the same phenomenon as the one I had hitherto understood it to be. This doubt spelled a gradual reeducation. Eventually,

when I assumed the Mark Rothko catalogue raisonné project in 1989, I felt Abstract Expression-

ism was no longer a narrative of various European modernist influences—German Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and so on—overcome so as to yield an autonomous new idiom. Rather,

there was much here that seemed at root decidedly un-American. Now I regard Abstract Expres-

sionism as inconceivable without the groundings of European thought, art and culture. Specifically, the quantum leap in interpretation at large has been to understand this chapter in art

history not just vis-a-vis European modernism—crucial as Picasso and countless others were to its genesis—but also with regard to the substantive significance of the old masters. To cite some

examples: for Pollock, these early mentors included Luca Signorelli, El Greco, Rubens, and so forth. In turn, Philip Guston engaged with Piero and other old masters while, in the early 1930s,

Rothko utilized reproductions of works by Rembrandt and his imitators for his own purposes. Still, apparently always the most self-sufficient, nevertheless was also schooled in pre-modern

Europeans. One of his first oil paintings (1920) was done after a J.M.W. Turner Venetian lagoon

scene.? So I would suggest we must recognize an overall paradigmatic and generational shift. In

my case, while I once regarded The Triumph of American Painting—indexed, as it is, to an established model of modernist teleological progress*—as the sole roadmap of Abstract Expression ism, I now view the latter less as a victory against European antecedents, than as a complicated dialogue, even an agon, with these venerable foundations.

Consider Newman's polemic against Europe. In response to Clement Greenberg, Newman in 1947 wrote:

Americans evoke their [artistic] world ... bya kind of personal writing without the props

of any known shape. This isa metaphysical act. With the European abstract painters we are

521 DAVID ANFOM

led into their spiritual world through already known images. . . To put it philosophically, the European is concerned with the transcendence of objects while the American is concerned with the reality of the transcendental experience.* Newman

here calibrates a differential between outmoded Europe and America’s more

enterprising attitude to transfiguration. Five years later, Still pronounced the death knell of a

whole artistic mainstream and explicitly its European branch: “Its substance is but dust and filing cabinets. The homage 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 pall bearer of my spirit in its name.” This is prime Still, a melodramatic showdown between the morbid old world and a vital reborn.

one. Similarly, Still’s Self-Portrait (1939, collection of the artist) at once buttresses and undercuts remarks he would make four decades later in 1979 during his retrospective at the Metropolitan

Museum of Art. For instance, here is Still’s retort to a journalist: “My work is not influenced by anyone.” The sentiment only extends a position already stated in 1959, when Still had averred that “the fog had been thickened, not lifted, by those who looked back to the Old World.”* The

latter—according to his American penchant for the list—encompasses, inter alia, Kierkegaard,

Cézanne, Freud, Picasso, Kandinsky, Plato, Marx, Aquinas, Spengler, Einstein, Croce, Monet, the Amory Show, and their ilk. Under Still’s diktat, all are relegated to history’s dustbin. In a stan-

dard Romantic riposte to the modern industrialized status quo, Still also concluded that the

present age “is of science—of mechanism—of power and death?”

Whence derives such anti-European rhetoric for originality? Beyond clear echoes of that

singular European, Friedrich Nietzsche, the influence is decidedly from the New England Tran-

scendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. In turn, Emerson's own thought had brimmed with input

from European thinkers from Plato onward. He too sought to remake the Old World’s philosophy anew. Witness Emerson’s essay “Nature” (1836), which prefigures Still. As Still had

remarked that “our age—it is of science—of mechanism—of power and death,”so did Emer-

son decide that “our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. ... Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?”® A broader paradox also lurks. Notwithstanding the primary genocide of its natives, North America is heavily populated by inhabitants from the Old World. In sum, it is

a dominion of others. This is an inescapable double-think at the crux of the national rite de pas-

sage. To be sure, Still was born in North Dakota.® But his formative experiences (just as he came from Scots-Irish stock) were elsewhere: on the prairies of Alberta, Canada.

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES, ESPECIALLY BILL'S FOLLY | 53

This heralds my central theme. It is a phenomenon that the literary critic Harold Bloom

famously called “the anxiety of influence.” Although a concept applied ad infinitum in literary theory, it has surprisingly gained less art historical coinage.'° Bloom argues that artists develop

in perennial rivalry with predecessors, akin to the Freudian model of the Oedipus complex, a struggle between sons and fathers. According to Bloom, “strong” creators deliberately misread their predecessors—as Blake took Milton, Stevens did the same to Wordsworth, and so forth. His term for the process is “misprision.”" Bloom’s pattern—a quixotic striving for originality in the face of the overweening past—is useful because it helps explain the virulence of the resistance that those such as Still voiced, as

well as the tenor of their general passing shots at Europe. Subsequently, Bloom also applied his theory (and usefully so for our purposes) to the “American sublime.” He proposed that a hyperbolic trope of self-begetting—that is, giving birth to oneself—is what differentiates figures such as Emerson and Walt Whitman

from the less radical European Romantic premise of renewal or

even rebirth.'? In contrast, the former conceive of themselves as giving existence to their own

essence. Lest these ideas and especially the Oedipal dimension sound far-fetched, Still specified the undertones of generational or familial struggle: “I had learned as a youth the price one pays for a father, a master, a Yahweh. . . . Bear in mind that the prodigal son has not returned to the father.” Still’s self-portrait closes this conflicted circle of emulation, self-assertion and renova-

tion. For, surely, it references Eugene Delacroix’s idiosyncratic self-portrait (1837, Musée du Louvre, Paris). The correspondences are remarkable: tight-lipped mouths, thin moustaches, the

high nineteenth-century collar, the crest of hair and the distinctive three-quarter profile. If so, then one explanation for the accord may be found in Delacroix’s influential Journals. Versed in art history, Still is unlikely to have overlooked Delacroix’s claim that the “only criterion for the

greatness of an artist is his singularity.” In other words, by “becoming” Delacroix, Still instituted a creation myth, begetting a new persona from his forebear.

Comparable trends mark Still’s pictorial evolution. Thus, the first canvas, dated 1934, in his

1976 gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art posits another alter ego. The naked protagonist is a variant of the American Adam, striding through a barren wilderness. Simultaneously, it also bears an uncanny resemblance to the resolute tripod-like pose of Rodin’s St. John the Baptist (1878-80), as if only a European mold would suffice for an American quester (and

to select a biblical prophet would also be typical of Still’s chosen genealogy). Moreover, Still

evoked this pioneer symbolism in a later statement wherein he cast his artistic odyssey as allegory (itselfa highly Puritan genre): “It was as a journey that one must make, walking straight

and alone. ... Until one has crossed the darkened and wasted valleys and come at last into clear

54 | DAVID ANFAM

9. Clyfford Still, Untitied (Two Figures), ca. 1935-36, oll on linen, Private collection. Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch.

air and could stand on a high and limitless plane. Imagination, no longer fettered by the laws of fear, became as one with Vision.”"* Again, the notion of the artist melded with “vision” and limitless space is a received set piece. Notably, it is Emerson's and, furthermore, a Gnostic one: “In

the highest moments, we area vision . . . Vast spaces of nature . . . vast intervals of time ... are annihilated to it.”"*

Masculine metaphors accompany Still’s promulgation of an originary “vision.” Thus, a key untitled composition from ca. 1935-36 presents naked male and female figures in a contending

allegory of despair (figure 9). Through the shocking effect of the man’s sightless head and the woman's lack of even a face, Still equates life without vision with impotence (significantly, a

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES, ESPECIALLY BILL’S FOLLY | 55

recurrent theme in his writings). In this respect, note how the female literally blocks the man’s lower body; she is where his potency should be. The corollary is that vision is masculine, steril-

ity feminine. This is vindicated insofar as Still’s subsequent art identified the mastery of space, the vertical conquest over the landscape—whether literally (as in the aforementioned untitled

painting from 1934) or in progressively abstract form—with (male) vision and particularly the upright axis, redolent with manifest sexual overtones. Consequently, Still’s imagistic universe became, simply put, phallocentric. It was at once a raw, sexist (at least by politically correct con-

temporary standards) and exceedingly powerful imagination. Overall, Still seemed to gauge his

distance from Europe, as his work matured in the 1940s, in direct ratio to its machismo. The more aggressive the thrust, the more suggestively original it was deemed. On the other hand, gendering broaches a leitmotif raised in various debates during this conference, Is there not manly European art or is America’s somehow cruder or more virile? No

simple answer obtains. Yet, to take two among countless possible examples, it is hard to envis-

age a more “masculine” or harsher painter than, say, Goya (whom Still indeed admired). By comparison, Henry James and, at random among painters, John Singer Sargent, immediately

spring to mind as among the most refined stylistic aesthetes. If so, consequent skepticism may

surround a longstanding tendency to define artistic identity in nationalistic terms'’—which

practice certainly courts easy generalizations and usually reflects ideological biases, However, this is not to confuse such interpretations, which may either knowingly or uncritically uphold these myths, with their artistic manipulation. Indeed, Still was a master of that layered craft.

Whatever the mysterious shapes of his late 1930s and early 1940s iconography—with their erectness, beady eyes and grasping hands—may symbolize, they remain emblems of selfhood and power.'* By 1946, the mutable motifs had modulated into mountainous upthrust presences. Thereafter, a formal reading would stress the integration, or more accurately, shredding together, of space and the figurative residues. On another level, the changes intimate psychosexual strife, as one pictorial area bites into, and penetrates, another.’

Newman invites kindred readings. For example, his seminal Onement I (1948, Museum of

Modern Art, New York) and Hans Namuth’s photograph of the artist at the Betty Parsons Gallery superimposed in a double exposure over his Vir Heroicus Sublimis (figure 10) possibly

verify Bloom's comments about the American capacity for self-begetting. Irregardless of when-

ever Newman executed Onement I, he assigned it to the date of his birthday, January 29, 1948.” Thereby, the canvas became a fons et origo, the progenitor or patriarch to his ensuing artistic repertoire. Onement I, that is, begat the new Barnett Newman

(plate 5). Its declarative “zip”

would go forth and multiply into Newman's extended pictorial family. Needless to add, it is a

56 | DAVID ANFAM

10. Hans Namuth, Barnett Newman double-exposed with Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1951, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. Photograph © Estate of Hans Namuth, courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner House and ‘Study Center, East Hampton, NY.

strongly gendered principle.’ Perhaps the outlook may reflect the prerogative of the male principle in Judaic tradition, a central Orthodox assumption. On a different plane, it reflects a

Weltanschauung that understands activity itself as masculine, exemplified in Newman's foun-

dational essay, “The First Man Was an Artist” (1947). Its title alone begs the question as to what

the first woman might have been. Comparably, the graphically designated Vir Heroicus Sublimis—“man, heroic and sublime”—conveys an equivalent import. Women evidently do not

make the grade (plate 6).

The tenet that masculinity gives birth to art runs through Newman's discourse

in the 1940s.

As mentioned, Newman tailored a template whereby America—the new, the unknown and the pragmatic—opposed Europe, portrayed as timeworn, fraught with tradition, decadence, and so forth. The dialectic generates a veritable theology. Listen to the hallmark 1948 essay, “The Sublime Is Now”:

I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer. . .. 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 obsolete props of

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES, ESPECIALLY BILL’S FOLLY

| 57

an outmoded and antiquated legend. . . We are freeing ourselves of . . memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. ... 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 history22 It is indeed a rousing sermon, and I admire it; but it is also open to manifold critiques. One

is that Newman voices aspirations found elsewhere throughout Abstract Expressionism: a bid for some manner of unmediated, direct cognizance of the artwork. Of course, this is a fallacy. We do not directly experience anything. What spurs this assumption? Perhapsa faith in adamant individualism, itself the basis of the European liberal mentality.A relatively obscure reference is

pertinent. The Canadian economist C. B. Macpherson has traced the origins of the highly individualized self, commanding the world by direct experience. Starting in seventeenth-century

England, this possessive liberal ideology assumes the self as the proprietor of his or her own per-

son or capacities, owing nothing to society.?» Newman’ faith in individualism, as we know, is tinged with Romantic anarchism. In 1968 he wrote the foreword to Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist and duly opposed anarchism to state capitalism. Yet the battle lines are not

clear-cut because when possessive liberalism is pushed to an extreme it precipitates a rampant individualism that is not far removed from anarchist principles. At another limit, it yielded a wellspring of capitalism itself. Driving a wedge between the two polarities (which evince a strange symmetry, as anarchist freedom balances capitalist anomie) is a Marxist standpoint. From this perspective (albeit one to which Newman was tellingly hostile), the self is seen as neither absolute nor original. Instead, it is engineered by economic and social interactions within

society, and our rapport with artworks is mediated by such factors as where we were born and

to whom, how much we earn, how long we can afford to spend in a museum looking at a Barnett Newman, and so forth. Above all, despite his sincere campaign for a parthenogenetic New

World—an autonomous American art of the sublime and its handmaidens—Newman was, of

course, ubiquitously prone to the misprision of European legacies. His adversaries or soul mates encompass Plato, Kant, Kropotkin, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Wilhelm Worringer, and Martin Hei-

degger. Selections from the writings of the last, including Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) were

translated into English, tellingly, in 1949, the year in which Newman meditated on space and

time a propos of the Hopewell culture Indian mounds in Ohio. Like Heidegger, Newman targets metaphysics, ontology and origins, whether of language or of being itself. In particular, what evidently came from Heidegger was Newman's equation

58 | DAVID ANFAM

that Being = Space = Time. The fundamental tenet of Sein und Zeit is that to endure is to be in time (and, it should be added, Dasein is defined as a “man”).’* Newman’s preoccupation with temporal experience—duration—proved almost more important than it was with space. Such a stance must stem from Heidegger and/or the French Existentialism that he in turn influenced. Also, Heidegger set store by a return to archaic precursors, pondering the ancient Greeks, as did

Newman. Lastly, Heidegger's sense of language as a primal drive finds echoes in Newman.*

True, they are ambivalent. This agrees with other Abstract Expressionists’ assertions to the effect that we cannot, or should not, verbalize art—just experience it directly as “revelation” (a sentiment recalling Gnostic and neo-Platonic doctrines). Yet, his titles nevertheless often refer to language and enunciation: The Command, The Word, The Name, Voice of Fire—alike reminders of the noumenal reality of the Word in both Heidegger and the Hebraic religion and midrash.”

Jackson Pollock was of course the least wordy Abstract Expressionist. Perhaps that is why

he was eminently suited for the veritable ventriloquism that placed him at the spearhead of the

much-debated westward migration of artistic dominance—alongside geopolitical power—to

the United States after 1945. In short, it was the theme of Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole

the Idea of Modern Art, which focused on the covert imperialist ideology evidently guiding Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting. However, that orientation furthermore had an earlier departure point, since Sandler in general followed the teleological plan of Greenberg's “‘American-type’ Painting” (1955), asserting a manifest destiny in an aesthetic armature. It is customary (and doubtless correct) to frame this latter text—which indeed becomes boastful and chauvinistic at its end—against a background of Cold War rivalries. However, a further nuance

infiltrates this historical matrix. Greenberg wrote “‘American-type’ Painting” in 1954, thereby dating its gestation to around 1953. The most memorable event of that time was the Korean War, in which the United States narrowly escaped an ignominious defeat by communism. Is it sheer coincidence that the argu-

mentative “‘American-type’ Painting” appeared in the immediate wake of that blow to America’s hegemony? In a curious repeat of this reactionary rhythm, The Triumph of American Painting came in 1970. It was therefore presumably written in the late 1960s. As with the period of the Korean debacle, the late 1960s were another crisis point when American identity faced

global skepticism and, in some cases, hit a nadir. The historical evidence is legior ; in 1965, the

first American troops entered Vietnam; in 1968, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.,

were both assassinated; simultaneously, Nixon’s machinations fuelled an international tide of anti-Americanism; 1969 saw the horrible revelation of the My Lai atrocity; and 1970 brought the Kent State killings, Nixon’s admission of sending troops into Cambodia, and a general

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES, ESPECIALLY BILL'S FOLLY | 59

atmosphere of Yankee culpability. This is the date of the Triumph of American Painting. Knowingly or otherwise, the book reinforces America’s artistic prowess on the cusp at which the

nation’s repute as an imperial power was gravely assailed.”* Thus it curiously repeats the timing of “American’-type Painting.” Without siding with, or against, Sandler’s many critics, unless we

countenance these dimensions, we cannot grasp Abstract Expressionism, and its influential

interpreters, in a fully historical light. But Pollock, for one, had seen matters from another angle. In 1944, he stated: “The idea of an isolated American painting seems absurd to me. An Ameri-

can is an American, and his painting would have to be qualified by the fact, whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary art are independent of any one country.”” In contrast to later writers, for Pollock it was not a matter of “American-type” painting, nor

its anticipated “triumph.” Provocatively—though Pollock was unlikely aware of the paral-

lelism—1944 was precisely when America had to surmount nationalist concerns, joining Stalin’s Soviet Union in order to beat Nazism’s evil. Pollock, unconsciously or otherwise, was in perfect step with a new sense of global values at that pre-Cold War juncture. Having cited a leading rendition of Abstract Expressionism, let us turn to another

renowned typology—Robert Rosenblum’s juxtaposition of Rothko and Caspar David Friedrich, Rosenblum initiated the analogy in anarticle, “The Abstract Sublime” (1961); it was then

elaborated in 1975 in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to

Rothko.” The comparison remains seductive; increasingly, | remain unconvinced." The geographical subterfuge, the northern Romantic tradition, is itself a European Romantic topos. In

the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire had already typecast Romanticism asa child of the north.» Still earlier, Madame de Staél associated it with the misty, melancholy north, declar-

ing the movement primarily an art of climate.*® So we have here, in effect, almost a nascent meteorological portrayal of Abstract Expressionism. In fact, because Rosenblum is so wonder-

fully steeped in Romantic art history, he may well have adopted models in which he is expert and laminated them, mutatis mutandi, upon a remote object—the progression of twentieth-

century painting—to breed strange hybrids: mysterious affinities linking Friedrich, Rothko, James Ward, Still, and so forth.

Be that as it may, I have sought an admittedly broad context for The Triumph of American

Painting. By extension, consider the historical background to “the sublime” approach. Rosenblum published his article in 1961. It was a period in which the United States reveled in awestruck new wonders: the space race had begun in earnest in 1957, three years later America

launched the first weather and telecommunications satellites, and in 1961 President Kennedy

declared the goal of landinga man on the moon. In short, Americans were in thrall during these

60 | DAVID ANFAM

years to the inspiring mysteries of the Great Beyond. Kennedy’s election on November 8, 1960 may also chime with the dates of the writing and then publication of “The Abstract Sublime” some three months later. In any event, compare a hallmark statement such as Kennedy's: “We

stand today on the edge of a new frontier. . .a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. ...

Tam asking each of you to be a pioneer on that New Frontier” (July 1960) with Rosenblum's equally distinctive claims: “In the abstract language of Rothko . . . we ourselves are the monk

before the sea, standing silently and contemplatively before these huge and soundless pictures,”

or“Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis puts us beforea void as terrifying, if exhilarating, as the arctic emptiness of the tundra” (both February 1961).* The article’s tenor is infectiously persua-

sive enough to divert from situating it within a rigorously historical context. Arguably,

therefore, Rosenblum’s stress upon standing on the brink of prospects, both breathtaking and scary, articulates the cultural climate of the Kennedy era, of the New Frontier, the looming won-

der of “boundless energies and limitless spaces,” and the revised rhetoric of manifest destiny in which these prospects were formulated. Interestingly, too, Samuel Monk's book on the sublime, first published in 1935, was reissued in 1960.°* Could the notion of the “abstract sublime,” entic-

ing as it has become, be site-specifically generated—a historical construct of Kennedy's Camelot era? With Pollock, additional interfaces between American stereotypes and European templates

spring to mind. The legend of Pollock as a tough cowboy type (which he fostered) meshes with Harold Rosenberg’s “action painting” thesis and its American pragmatism. Namuth’s influential photographs of Pollock painting seem to reflect this drift (figure 1 ). Yet, again, there exists a contrasting European connection. Think of the concordance between several Namuth shots

and Toulouse-Lautrec’s iconic lithograph depicting the dancer Loie Fuller (figure 12), a paral-

lel the more extraordinary for being coincidental. Why the equivalence? An explanation lies in how the “romantic image” of The Dancer encapsulates a complex of ideas which Pollock recapitulated, without so much as even being directly aware of such theories, in the half-baked

romanticism of his personality and practice (not to mention that of those who photographed. him and interpreted his art).As the literary critic Frank Kermode traces the tradition in Romantic Image (1957)—stretching from Keats, through Walter Pater and W. B. Yeats, to T. E. Hulme and after—it entails a set of beliefs about art and the artist. They hold that the artwork is “con-

crete” (Pollock: “abstract painting, . . confronts you”); has an autonomous vitality (Pollock: “the painting has a life of its own”); aspires to the union of body and thought epitomized in dance (Lee Krasner: “it [Pollock's dynamism] is all called dance in some form”); captures movement-in-stillness (Pollock: “energy and motion made visible—memories arrested in space”);

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES, ESPECIALLY BILL'S FOLLY

| 61

14. Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock painting Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950. Photo © Estate of Hans Namuth, courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY.

expresses inner forces (Pollock's selfsame

words in 1950); and arises organically, as with nature

Kermode

(Pollock: “I am

summarizes

the

nature”).**

“romantic

image” ethos with the words “the body

does the thinking’—to which, we might say, Pollock rejoined, “when I’m in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

. . . Otherwise there is pure harmony, an

easy give and take.” In sum, Pollock inherited assumptions with impeccable pedigrees in European Romanticism, Symbolism, and early Modernism. This bridge between

Pollock and a

European past leads to my conclusion with the case of Willem de Kooning. De Kooning is exemplary insofar as he represents the reverse of the undeclared anxiety of influence that, at the outset, I suggested moti-

~

vated, say, Still and Newman's aesthetic

12. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss Loie Fuller, ca. 1890, litho-

bravado. Instead of mapping a masculine path—grounded upona courageous rheto-

_graph with colors, 14 9/16 x 10 1/2 in. (37.0 x 26.6 cm). Brook_lyn Museum. Museum Collection Fund.

ric of unmediated sight—to transcendence, the sublime and the absolute, de Kooning always moved in the opposite direction. Thus, his pro-

nouncements highlight ambiguity, openly acknowledge anxiety and seek the everyday. To cite

three noteworthy instances, fear and trembling gave the very subject of de Kooning'’s 1949 talk, “A Desperate View.” Second, his germane remark, “Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.” Lastly, de Kooning’s confessional anecdote, “There are these two men talking in a barn, and off to one side in the doorway is stand-

ing that half-breed Joe Christmas. .. I'd like to paint Joe Christmas one of these days.” Joe Christmas was the antihero of William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August (1932) (figure 13). An archetype of the outsider, Christmas is ambiguity personified (ostensibly a white man, he has black blood)

and pure foolishness spurs him to murder his lover. In taking such themes—uncertainty, banal-

ity, human isolation—de Kooning confronted what Newman, Still and others sought to avoid or

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES,

ESPECIALLY BILL'S FOLLY | 63

13. Willem de Kooning, Light in August, 1946, oll and enamel on canvas, 55 x 41 1/2 in. (139.7 x 105.4 cm). Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. © 2005 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

annul with their shibboleths of preternatural exaltation and visionary certitude. As the latter apotheosized the present (“the sublime is now”) and denied the past, so de Kooning countered, “I

am different from them [my peers] because Ifeel myself more in tradition. .. . | change the past.”""

Likewise, he made no claims to utter originality. On the contrary, de Kooning remained receptive to all comers: “I can open any book of reproductions and find a painting I could be influenced

by.” Rather than wage open Oedipal strife with predecessors—the scenario of Bloom's anxiety of

64 | DAVID ANFAM

influence—de Kooning welcomed them. Acknowl-

edging the precarious human condition itself similarly amounted to a therapeutic act: “Because when

I’m falling, I'm doing alright, when I’m slipping I'm saying ‘hey, this is interesting. As a matter of fact, I'm.

really slipping most of the time, into that glimpse. I'm like a slipping glimpser.”®®

As opposed to Newman's Emersonian rhetoric

of an omniscient gaze, of Still’s masterly command

of his ambience by standing erect and so forth, de Kooning enjoys their antitheses: slipping and mere glimpses. In the spirit of the grotesque carnivalesque personages that populate his later imagery,

he lets it all hang out, falling around like a slapstick comedian. In short, comedy—light-years distant from

the dead seriousness of Still, Rothko and

Newman—proved an antidote to the world’s folly. On this score, de Kooning seems to partake of a_

14, Willem de Kooning, Gir! in Boat, 1964, pencil on tracIng paper. 66.1214. © Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. © Photographer Lee Stalsworth.

European heritage older than Sartrean Existential-

ism or even Kierkegaardian irony. Elsewhere I have suggested the influence of the imagery of

Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel on de Kooning’s art. In such droll conceptions as his Girl in Boat (figure 14), de Kooning may again prompt comparison with Bosch. It is not just the subject of the latter’s Ship of Fools (ca. 1488 or later, Musée du Louvre, Paris)—licentious rib-

aldry adrift in an arc-shaped boat—that matches de Kooning’s floozy. It is also the overall vision

de Kooning shares with his countryman: a topsy-turvy world, alternately horrific and hilarious,

in which humanity cannot help but slip and slide.** Along similar lines, Bosch’s Wayfarer (ca. 1488 or later, Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam) is the prototype of de Kooning’s vision of Joe Christmas: the eternal outsider bedeviled by anxiety and glancing warily askance,

as a dog snarls at his heels and two figures consort in a dark doorway. This Everyman foretells de Kooning’s existential sense of the human plight.

Perhaps it is happenstance that Bosch’s Wayfarer is in the Boijmans Van Beuningen

Museum in Rotterdam, de Kooning’s home town. The same may apply, a fortiori, to the otherwise eye-catching points of resemblance between certain late medieval pilgrim badges—

unearthed, again, in Rotterdam—and de Kooning’s more outrageous depictions of women

TRANSATLANTIC ANXIETIES, ESPECIALLY BILL'S FOLLY

| 65

(both alike displaying extreme sexual frankness).** Yet I doubt it is coincidence that another

native of Rotterdam should have explicitly anticipated de Kooning’s alertness to human fool-

ishness in a fallen world. This person is of course Erasmus. De Kooning’s awareness of Erasmus

need presume no esoteric learning, since the great humanist remains to everyday Dutch life

what Shakespeare is to English-speakers. School children hear his sayings, which belong to the

common culture.‘ Setting aside the controversy over whether such titles as Spike’s Folly were in

fact de Kooning’s,* it was the artist who most clearly recognized that the one sensible way of looking at reality was to recognize its absurdity. In this respect, he echoed perhaps the most

famous single book in the Dutch language, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly: “folly comprehends all men. ...A fool delights in his folly” That Erasmus’s Folly was also a bitch goddess may not have been lost on the painter of the Women series.” Certainly, Erasmus offered homegrown les-

sons about existence’s ironies long before de Kooning found them confirmed in Kierkegaard

and modern Existentialism proper. And, like Guston—but in marked distinction to other Abstract Expressionists—Bill de Kooning dealt with anxiety by making art from it. Art that pos-

itively revels in influences and which shifts between the abject and the grotesque, the grim and

the comical.

In sum, my thesis has been that Abstract Expressionism’s attitudes to the Old and the New World are indelibly dialectical. On the one hand, Still, Newman and others strove to make everything anew in the American grain—a strategy embracing an exhilarating yet potentially

suspect set of aspirations, including immaculate originality, the sublime and the absolute. On the other hand, figures such as de Kooning and Guston, who accepted the folly of the human

condition itself and thus fought shy of artistic efforts to transcend it. They recognized that

America is inconceivable without old Europe, that each indeed has thrived upon a lengthy transatlantic dialogue with the other. As de Kooning wryly concluded: “the idea that art can

come from nowhere is typically American.”!

66 | DAVID ANFAM

A Legacy for the Latin American Left: Abstract Expressionism as

Anti-Imperialist Art DAVID

CRAVEN

Abstract artists were strong when the Revolution took place, and they were supporting the Revolution; therefore there was no negative identification with abstractionism. It was decided that Cuban painting would have to be destroyed, in a manner of speak-

ing. ... We decided to use North American abstraction as our form, because in Cuba there

was no tradition. ... We also discovered that abstract art was the only weapon with which we could frighten people. ... Then it seemed to us that our painting served as a means to raise consciousness. —RAUL

MARTINEZ

What I shall point to here . .. are practices of negation in modernist art. ... The very way

that modernist art has insisted on its medium has been by . .. having matter be the synonym for resistance.’ —T. J. CLARK nthe third anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, in January 1963, the new revolutionary government sponsored an exhibition in

Havana with the title Abstracto Expresionismo. As the title of this show indicates, the visual language of Abstract Expressionism was identified both with the insurgent forces that had toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and with the art world movement that had

radically expanded the discursive field for cosmopolitan modernisms in Cuba. Moreover, this exhibition also made clear that the so-called socialist realism of the Soviet Union would find

A LEGACY FOR THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT | 67

Cmate. Ernesto Guevara

a

SOCIALISMO

‘HOMBRE

Y

gam

EN CUBA

little favor in revolutionary Cuba. Indeed, Che Guevara condemned the latter in 1965 as a species of nineteenth-century French art that would only constrain artistic practice in a

revolutionary setting where experimentalism was the order of the day.‘ The first Cuban edition of Che Guevara's most famous text on the culture of socialism explicitly contrasts

examples ofa newly validated Cuban modernism (in this case, semi-figurative paintings by René Portocarrero and Wifredo Lam, as well as the new art school at Cubanacan)

with the stultifying visual forms of contemporary Soviet art, which are entitled “Sobre los bases del siglo pasado.” As for the design of the book's cover, by an artist named Chago, it is clearly linked with the Russian Constructivism of the pre-

jis

Stalin era (figure 15).

15. Chago, cover of El socialismo y el hombre

Painter and printmaker Raul Martinez (1927-1995),

en Cuba, by Emesto Guevara. Havana: Edi- —_ easily one of the most significant artists to work in Cuba clones Revolucion, 1965. Photograph by David

Craven.

from the 1950s till his death there in the 1990s, observed

that the language of Abstract Expressionism was particularly important not only for opening up Cuban painting to a new international dialogue in the arts, but also for its power of cultural negation during this period. In this instance the artworks of Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Bradley Tomlin Walker, among others, were recruited as a force for political dissent and aesthetic contumacy by Martinez, Guido Llinas, and Tomds Oliva. These painters operated within a broader force-field that was called Los Once from 1953 to 1955 and

then Los Cinco from 1956 to 1963. Martinez has described the genesis of this modernist antimovement as follows:

In 1953, the movement called Los Once was born. It was called Los Once [The Eleven] by accident because in actuality it was a large heterogeneous group formed in the first years

of the Batista coup [1952]. There was a great fervor among the artists, ... It was a question of consciousness; of takinga position both ethical and aesthetic. It was decided that Cuban

painting would have to be destroyed, in a manner of speaking. . . We had to look at this

continent, not at Europe. We decided to use North American abstraction as our form, because in Cuba there was no tradition, there was nothing to explore. ... We also discov-

68 | DAVID CRAVEN

ered that abstract art was the only weapon with which we could frighten people. When we mounted an exhibition, people were left in a state of shock. They said we didn’t know how to paint, they attacked us. Then it seemed to us that our painting served as a means to raise consciousness. . .. The fight for liberty also took the form of the fight against the Biennial

of 1953. Francisco Franco [of Spain] and Batista organized the Hispanic Biennial in Cuba. We established an Anti-Biennial, explaining that artists shouldn’t exhibit because we were

fighting against dictatorship. . .. We [also] attacked the [Pan American Union] exhibition in Venezuela, arguing that if artists were boycotting the Franco Biennial because of the Spanish dictatorship, why should they participate in Venezuela, which also had a dictator [Pérez Jiménez]. We used the example of Spain because it was dangerous to speak of the dictatorship in Cuba, though it was obvious to whom we were referring. Los Once later dissolved [in 1955]. ... Rather than waiting until the group was destroyed from the outside,

we decided to break it up ourselves.>

The negativity of this movement enjoyed a potent afterlife up through the early 1960s, especially in the abstract expressionist paintings of Martinez and Llinds. This negation did not come from the content of their pictorial images. Rather it came from the attitudes conveyed by the

“negative” visual language in which they worked. In short, their artwork articulated an ideolog-

ical critique, a critique on the level of fundamental attitudes, but it did not contain any overt

political message. The concrete position of pictorial criticism for which they strove in this period was perhaps best summarized by Theodor Adorno, who in an essay from the early 1960s noted that some of the most effectively engagé art at present was that which was defamed as mere formalism. He then went on to contend that: “Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative gains or practical institutions. ... but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes.”* Moreover, in opposition to the doctrine of so-called “socialist realism,” Adorno observed, that “the idea of a ‘message’ in art, even when the art itself is politically radical, already contains an accommodation to the world’s established order.”” These observations definitely illuminate the “Abstract Expressionist” paintings from the

1950s by Martinez and Llinds, especially those that notably enlarged the discursive field of modernism in Cuban during this period of revolutionary upheaval. There are, for example, extant works that date from the moment of most intense fighting by the revolutionary insurgents, with

whom Martinez was in sympathy. Two of these paintings are Fragment I of 1957 (figure 16), an

oil on canvas (23 2 x 34 4 in.), and Untitled of 1958 (plate 7), another oil on canvas of more

FOR THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT | 69

16. Raul Martinez, Fragment I, 1957, oll on canvas, 23 1/2 x 34 1/2 in. (59.7 x 87 cm). Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Donation from the Cuban Museum of the Americ: Bequest of the Rafael Casalins Estate.

modest size (23 42 x 28 % in.), both of which are in the collection of the Cuban Museum of the Americas. To look at them is to recognize immediately the inter-image dialogue that was occur-

ring with Abstract Expressionism from the United States, which Martinez had discovered while

studying in Chicago during 1952-53.

The first painting from 1957 contains a dense, darkly orchestrated all-over space that

decenters every effort at any hierarchical focus. Similarly, this image cancels out the tactile sensations suggested by Pollock’s indexical skeins of surface-sitting lines, as in his magisterial

Autumn Rhythm (plate 8). In the Martinez painting there are rapid accents marked vertically by

ascending lines, as well as horizontally by sprawling ones, in a pictorial field where figureground relations meld almost imperceptibly, and then disassociate with equal subtlet

his

deftly contrasting feature helps to give the canvas a brooding tone that is nevertheless denied inertia by the quick-paced linear gestures.

70 | DAVID CRAVEN

Asacomposition it hovers tensely between states of formal resolution and dissolution, gen-

erating some components that expire and others that emerge with comparable force, so that the overall effect is one of grimness without rest, of grim restlessness. Analogies in tone and formal attributes do of course arise with the black paintings by de Kooning from the late 1940s or with the impressive gestural abstractions by Joan Mitchell from the late 1950s. Yet the air of negativ-

ity pervading the work by all three painters was nonetheless articulated by boldly different means in each case. Links to U.S. Abstract Expressionism notwithstanding, the painting by

Martinez stands as a distinctive contribution to the discursive field encompassing the three, rather than as a mere derivative reproduction of pictorial traits from “el Norte.”

Viewed in relation to the noteworthy semi-figurative paintings by older Cuban vanguard

artists like Victor Manuel (1897-1969) or Amelia Peldez (1896-1968), as for example, Interior with Columns of 1951 (figure 17), several instructive traits are in evidence. The 1957 painting by Martinez insists on declaring what it is not, even as it implies the advent of something else yet to emerge definitively. It is acommanding image that hinges for its formal effect on pinpoint accents without conventional resolve in formal terms. Expectant if hardly hopeful, the canvas entitled Fragments by Martinez inaugurated a new type of pictorial negativity, without signify-

ing resignation along the way. Even more quickly paced is Martine2’s 1958 painting, which is more turbulent in its all-over movement and less indeterminate in its back-and-forth interplay of figure-ground relationships. Here again, but even more restlessly, the gestural brushstrokes

alternate between a plethora of rapid fire black marks and a few passages of well-placed flourishes in low value white or somber blue.

The overriding ambience of negativity distinguishing both of Martinez’s images links

them to the New York School even as it distances them from the School of Paris’s more upbeat and celebratory Art Informel. Their precarious state of hovering tension momentarily uniting

the determined and the undetermined, along with their lack of any real sense of palette-knife

clotted surface impasto immediately marks off these dissident Cuban canvases from their period counterparts in Paris. The sullen, almost smoldering paintings by Martinez are rather at odds with the sumptuous and more high-keyed paintings of Nicolas de Stael. Similarly, the

all-over images of Martinez are less self-consciously elegant than the contemporary paintings

by Pierre Soulages, in addition to being more bleak, and less lighthearted in tone than works by Bram van Velde. Moreover, the incandescent accents harbored by Martinez’s works are dissimilar from the scintillating networks of lines that flicker across the pictorial expanses of Jean-

Paul Riopelle’s gorgeous paintings. As critic Luis Camnitzer has noted of Martinez’s palette, he often “painted in black and white as a reaction against the sweet colors of his predecessors {in

A LEGACY FOR THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT | 71

17. Amelia Peléez, Interior with Columns, 1951. Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas

Artes, Havana, Cuba. Photograph courtesy of David Craven.

Cuba].”* Concerning any dialogical links to the New York School, Camnitzer noted that the dis-

cursive interchange with Abstract

Expressionism and Beat Literature occurred because

Martinez and Los Once felt that “abstract expressionism was a visual language uncontaminated bya political reality they opposed.”

Another important artist from Cuba who was working in a vein of negative engagement was Guido Llinds (b. 1923). Perhaps the artist with the major claim to being the founder of Los

Once and Los Cinco, Llinas is the only member of the original group still living in 2005. Before

72 | DAVID CRAVEN

becoming a political dissident in 1953, Llinds, like Martinez, traveled in the United States, where he “discovered Newman, Rothko, Pollock, and, above all, Kline, de Kooning, and Gottlieb,” with whose work he become critically engaged onlya short while afterward.'° The brute calligraphic

faceting of pictorial elements in his paintings from 1957/58 certainly evokes links to Kline’s gestural “writing,” or perhaps that of Pierre Soulages on the one hand (plate 9). But, on the other

hand, these forceful paintings by Llinds aggressively and even inelegantly give a masonry look

to the pictorial building blocks comprising these compelling paintings. Less about the brooding in-between places one sees in works by Martinez, these intensely palpable paintings by Llinds have a matter-of-fact materiality that disperses the coy prettiness of the School of Havana and disbands the poetic indirection of the School of Paris. At once declarative and yet oblique,

these two paintings by Llinas embody the negative assertion of how painting can be evocative in its sensory claims on us without being suggestive in sentimental terms.

In subsequent—“post-dissident”—paintings, after he moved to Paris permanently in 1963, Llinds shifted his focus to the pictographic traditions of Torres-Garcia and Gottlieb, along with arelated attention given to the Afro-Cuban approach of Wifredo Lam. At other points, the cryptic sign language of pictographs converged in his paintings with the deployment of bald graffiti-like fragments as if his painting aspired

to the status of a hybrid visual text. Such was the case

only a decade or so ago when Llinds painted his moving elegy Por Motherwell of 1992, an oil on

canvas (47 x 47 in.), shortly after the artist’s death (figure 18). Llinds’s lifelong admiration for

Motherwell’s artworks was also probably linked, at least in part, to Motherwell’s conception of

Abstract Expressionism as a form of social protest painting. On this score and others, there was evidently an elective affinity between Motherwell and Llinds, as well as one with Ratil Martinez

and Los Once more generally. To quote Motherwell here is to approach in a fundamental way the ideological framework within which the dissident dialogical interchange occurred that allied alienated members of the New York School with their even more discontent counterparts

in Havana during the 1950s. While discussing the New York School, a term he evidently coined, Motherwell wrote as fol-

lows about the oppositional stance of himself and many of the other Abstract Expressionists:

Itis easier to say some of the things the School of New York is not. Its painting is not interested in giving information, propaganda, description, or anything that might be called (to use words loosely) of practical use. ...I think 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 heading of protest. . . The rejection by the School of New

A LEGACY FOR THE LATIN AMFRICAN LEFT | 73

18. Guido Llin4s, Por R. Motherwell, 1992, oil on canvas, 47 x 47 in. (119.4 x 119.4 cm). Private collection, Miami, Florida.

York of prevailing ideologies... . the rejection of the lies and falsifications of modern Christian, feudal aristocratic, and bourgeois society, of the property-loving world that the Renaissance expressed, has led us, like many other modern artists, to affinities with the art

of other cultures, ... Conventional painting [in the West] is a lie. . .. [and the] modern

emphasis on the language of art. . . . is not merely a matter of internal relations, of the so-

called inherent properties of a medium. It is instead a sustained, stubborn, sensitive, and sensible effort to find an exact formulation of attitude toward the world as concretely experienced." This concerted position of trism, was a hallmark of New stance also explains their early 1950s, along with their antiwar

74 | DAVID CRAVEN

internationalism, with its concomitant opposition to ethnocen York School artistic practice, particularly of Motherwell. This support of the civil rights movement at the beginning of the activism from the mid-1960s onward. (In fact, it was their oppo-

19. Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34, 1953-54, oll on canvas, 80 x 100 in. (203.2 x 254 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gal ry, Buffalo, NY. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1957. Art © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy of David Craven.

sition to the Vietnam War even more than their support of the Ci

vil Rights Movement that

caused Motherwell, Rothko, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, et al., to be considered

national security

threats by the F.B.I.)!? Such dissident positions, plus the conception of Abstract Expressionism

both asa form of social protest and as an expansion of painting's discursive field, help to explain the resonance of Motherwell’s artworks elsewhere in Latin America during the 1950s—where

dictators enjoyed hegemony based on imperialist military intervention by the United States. This was unquestionably the case with Motherwell’s almost epic series of paintings entitled

Elegy to the Spanish Republic, from 1948 to 1991 (figure 19). The overs zed Elegies served as a

A LEGACY FOR THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT | 75

tribute to the democratically elected socialist government of Spain that had been destroyed by

fascism in the Civil War from 1936 to 1939. In a subsequent essay along these lines, Motherwell coupled praise for Joan Miré’s artworks and socialist politics with a denunciation of “Franco's

gloomy, suppressed Spain.” Instructively enough, in discussing his Spanish Elegies, Motherwell spoke about his own transition from being a fellow traveler of Marxism to being an anarchist. He also illuminated

why this imposing series of paintings about the ascent of fascism would be of interest to key artists from contemporary Central America, such as, Nicaragua’s Armando Morales (b. 1936).

Motherwell remarked as follows:

I meant the word “elegy”in the title. was twenty-one in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War

began. ... The Spanish Civil War was even more to my generation than Viet Nam was to be thirty years later to its generation, and should not be forgotten, even though la guerre

est finie. For years after the series began, I was often mistaken for aStalinist, though I think the logical political extension . . . of extreme modernist individualism, as of native American radicalism, is a kind of anarchism.'*

Among the artists from Latin America for whom the ideological underpinnings of this series served as a period stimulus, Armando Morales definitely stands out. He is perhaps the most celebrated painter and printmaker ever to come from Nicaragua, if not from all of Cen-

tral America. In 1959, for example, the young Morales was awarded the Ernst Wolf Prize at the V Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil for outstanding artwork by a artist from Latin America. Two of

his most moving paintings from this period are Abstract Expressionist canvases from 1958, Guerrillero Muerto #1 (Dead Guerrilla) and The Electrocuted Prisoner (figure 20). Both works

were part of a series of over a dozen images that related to the themes of revolutionary insurgency and the martyrdom of revolutionaries.

Revealingly, the striking Dead Guerrilla—which is a large canvas, 48 by 80 inches—was

obviously linked through a deliberate inter-image dialogue with the elegiac series begun in 1948 and continued throughout the 1950s by Motherwell. An antifascist and anti-imperialist image of undeniable power like those of Motherwell, the painting by Morales features morose and brooding forms configured in megalithic passages of black on a muted, and atmospheric white ground. Uninflected by color accents, these boldly undifferentiated formal configurations are

marked both by organic contours and a type of mournful movement in pictorial terms. As is true of Motherwell’s related Spanish Elegies, the work by Morales depends for its impact visu-

76 | DAVID CRAVEN

20. Armando Morales, Dead Guerrilla |, 1958, oll on canvas, 48 x 80 In. (121.9 x 203.2 cm). The col-

lection of Ramon Osuna, Washington, DC.

ally ona compound modernist surface of maximum area with minimum diversity. As such, the

painting is at once formally obtrusive and yet thematically oblique. More a weighty sum of its few parts, than any dispersed union of opposites, the work gains in momentum emotionally

from this almost imperious pictorial logic. Dead Guerrilla also depends strongly on a field of fairly abrupt and almost harsh color contrasts, featuring an elegiac palette restricted primarily

toa deathly foregounded black, with a muffled white establishing the surrounding ground. The ideologically inflected visual language of the painting, not any politically illustrated message, is thus how the sensation of mourning martyrs is ultimately articulated as an emotional experi-

ence in this commanding protest painting by Morales.

There are at least two significant reasons that Armando Morales, who was an opponent of USS.-backed military dictator Anastasio Somoza, would have used the Spanish Elegies by Moth-

erwell as raw material for his dissenting artistic practice in the 1950s. First, there had been a cel-

ebrated case of revolutionary martyrdom in 1956 that rocked the

consciousness of the entire

country. It happened when the poet Rigoberto Lopez Pérez, fed up with the intense repression as well as corruption in Nicaragua under Somoza assassinated him at a public ceremony, knowing

A LEGACY

FOR THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT | 77

full well that his actions would then lead to his own immediate death. This sacrifice of his own life to help fight against the Somoza dictatorship—a dictatorship that would continue with full

USS. government backing up through the overthrow of Somoza’s second son in 1979—made

Lopez Pérez a national hero to the guerrillas fighting against a regime that was always among,

the most horrifyingly repressive in the history of the Americas. (After the revolutionary movement led by the Sandinistas, or the FSLN, succeeded in Nicaragua, portraits of Lopez Pérez as one of the nation’s three most well-known revolutionary martyrs—along with Augusto César

Sandino and Carlos Fonseca~appeared with relative frequency in a Pop Art-like visual language

used during the 1980s.)

A second reason that an antifascist like Armando Morales would use Motherwell’s elegiac

series as a dialogical point of departure for his own painting about martyrdom relates to how

Motherwell’s work was haunted by the national tragedy in Spain after the victory of Franco and the Falangists in 1939. In fact, one of Morales’s favorite professors in Managua at the National

School of Fine Arts during the 1940s was Augusto Fern4ndez,a Spanish refugee and former partisan of the socialist government that was destroyed by the victory of fascism. Like thousands of other leftwing partisans, Fernandez was forced to flee Spain in order to escape the mass executions that occurred in 1939/40 with the consolidation of Franco’s military dictatorship. Even

when Armando Morales would make the transition in the 1960s to a type of magical realism that constitutes one of the most outstanding achievements in painting from Latin America over

the last three decades, one thing would not change. Morales would return quite impressively to the theme of revolutionary martyrdom in his famous series of paintings and prints about Sandino.'5 Moreover, | think it is possible to see a notable thread of continuity between the abstract expressionist visual language used by Morales in his 1958 Dead Guerrilla and the superb 1990

monumental statue in memory of Sandino by Ernesto Cardenal that dominates the skyline of Managua like a specter today as a reminder of this tragic past and a warning against its repetition in Nicaragua. Not the statue of a fallen hero, but the stark, megalithic image of how his

shadow looms large even after Sandino’s demise, this sculpture involves the paradoxical

enshrinement of an indexical trace along iconic lines, Other than the identifiable contour of the

shadow, there are no other figurative referents illustrating the person to whom the artwork refers. And, like much Abstract Expressionism from both the United States and Latin America (think of the Guido Llinés Por Motherwell discussed above), this magisterial sculpture has a

strong dialogical link to the graffiti images of Sandino that appeared in the streets of Nicaragua during the final days before the revolutionary overthrow of Somoza Ill in 1979. Here as else-

78 | DAVID CRAVEN

21. Juan Rivas, Untitled (After Pollock), 1985, Oll on canvas. Photograph by David Craven. Private collection, Managua, Nicaragua.

where, the dialogue between fine art and popular culture has notably expanded the discursive field of painting in several directions. This latter point is equally clear if we recall the use of Jackson Pollock’s all-over gestural paintings as a point of departure for several paintings executed in the 1980s by members of the Sandinista Artists Union in revolutionary Nicaragua. In these instances, Pollock’s paintings

were wedded to popular culture in instructive ways. In the paintings of Sandinista cadres like

Boanerges Cerrato and Juan Rivas from the mid-1980s (figure 21), U.S. Abstract Expression-

ism’s potential for articulating dissident ideological values was used to telling effect as a manifestly anti-imperialist visual language during a period of U.S. military intervention under President Ronald Reagan. At once raw material for other artworks from Latin America and also a discursive field capable of expansion in various directions throughout the Americas, this lan-

guage so deeply associated with U.S. culture was definitely deployed to combat culturally the fact of unwanted imperialist military involvement by the U.S.-backed “contras.”

Such a tactic would not have been possible had the Abstract Expressionism of Motherwell,

A LEGACY FOR THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT | 79

22. Fernando de Szyszlo, Inkarri, 1968, acrylic on wood, 59 1/4 x 59 1/4 in. (150.5 x 150.5 cm). Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of John and Barbara Duncan, 1971. Photo credit: Rick Hall.

Pollock, et al. not been seen by the Sandinistas as a potent signifier for opposition to mainstream culture from the dissident margins of that very same culture. What made Abstract Expression-

ism so compelling in ideological as well as visual terms was how its language of negativity, its role

as abstract “social protest” against mainstream U.S. culture of the Cold War period were valued

deeply by many artists and intellectuals not only from Cuba and Nicaragua, but also from other countries like Argentina, Columbia, and Peru. One need only recall the outstanding painting Inkarrri by Fernando de Syzslo of Peru—with its clear dialogical interchange involving the paintings of Rothko, even as the title is about insurgent forces among indigenous peoples in that

80 | DAVID CRAVEN

region (figure 22)—to appreciate the broader anti-imperialist reception of Abstract Expressionism throughout “nuestra América.” Something similar can be observed about the color field

abstractions of César Paternosto from Argentina, with their interimage dialogue that extends back to pre-Columbian architecture and foreword to the zip paintings of Barnett Newman. This striking reception of Abstract Expressionism from the United States in Latin American hotspots during the Cold War was, of course, intertwined with the political intentions of the practicing artists in question. More generally, the reception of Abstract Expressionism in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean (the major exception was Mexico), was confirmed in the critical reception of these regions’ leading art critics. The most celebrated

example involves Latin America’s major art critic of this period, namely, Marta Traba from

Argentina (and Colombia). In her most acclaimed book, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes

plasticas latinoamericanos—which is seen as one of the first great books about modern art criticism from Latin America'*—she agreed with the reading noted above of Abstract Expressionism’s deeply negative impetus. For her, as for the artists cited above, Abstract Expressionism represented a refutation of the mainstream culture in the United States to which this art was

nevertheless connected (which is why U.S. Cold Warriors could attempt, as has been carefully documented by several scholars, to use it as an affirmation of the “U.S. Way”).

Conversely, for Traba, Abstract Expressionism embodied a negative visual language on

behalf of “una dimension interior” with dissident import and in opposition to “una interioridad” of fetishized subjectivity more characteristic of bourgeois values in the West. She wrote

eloquently of how the “resistencia critica” of “la generacién de De Kooning (Pollock, Mother-

well, Kline, Newman, Rothko)” was ideologically at odds with mainstream U.S. society.” Her argument presupposed a link to the critique of instrumental thought by Herbert Marcuse (whom she admired) and the Frankfurt School. Moreover, Traba contended in her classic study of 1973 what T. J. Clark would later note in 1982, in his critique of Greenberg's misreading of Abstract Expressionism: “The fact of Art, in modernism, is the fact of negation.”'*

A LEGACY FOR THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT | 81

Abstract Expressionism as a Model

of “Contemporary Art” in the Soviet Union JANE

{

res

Li

A. SHARP

'‘ecently the abstract painter lurii Zlotnikov (b. 1930) observed “the

UX orientation of young [Russian] artists toward Western art at that

time (in the 1950s~1960s) was tied to the romanticization of American painting, A group of artists formed who were interested in that culture.”! The list he appends clearly designates Moscow as the center, and a particular generation of artists as an avant-garde that had turned toward abstraction and the West. This essay will introduce a wider range of artists whose work

was transformed through encounters with Abstract Expressionism—some direct, others through hearsay, and as already assimilated in the art of native practitioners. I will also probe some of the anxieties that attended the exposure to and assimilation of art from the United States and Western Europe. In the 1950s, as in the 1910s in Russia, artists remained ambivalent about new work produced outside of their own cultural centers even as they appropriated specific painterly effects. American Abstract Expressionist painting may have been perceived as

both a national and a universal embodiment of personal and political integrity to the same degree that French modernist painting was in the decades immediately preceding the revolu-

tion; its dominance had to be resisted if Russians were to stand as equals within a global visual

culture. This dual appreciation of recent Western art also applies to contemporary artists as adaptation to international trends has led more often to their marginalization than to our recognition of the specific conditions and value of their practices, whether in Moscow or in

Thi

. Critics continue to speak of a cultural sphere that was neither properly Soviet nor mod-

ernist in the various contexts that determined art discourse during the post-World War II era. It is crucial that we understand responses to the importation of American art in other cul-

82 1 JANE A. SHARP

tural contexts whether Russian, Georgian, or Japanese in today’s political environment—where particular interests still have, or claim, global reach. More importantly for the Soviet 1950s—60s generation (a generation lost to Anglo-American art history) regional/local cultural politics make sense of their choices, and of their aim to create work that might be newly relevant to their

societies, both momentously historical and profoundly personal, or as one such artist phrased it, “contemporary” (sovremennyi). By addressing the aims and formal concerns of Abstract

Expressionism many came to perceive themselves not only as participants in the local and international art world, but as agents shaping their own era. It needs to be said here, however, that

the reception and notoriety of American abstract painting in Soviet Russia was supported rather than challenged by a simultaneous recovery of Russian modernist painting, as the work

of Robert Fal’k (1886-1958), Sergei Luchishkin (1902-1989), and others entered into the same institutional polemics of Artist Union and museum exhibitions.

In Russia the impact of Abstract Expressionism was likewise enhanced by the peculiar

prominence that abstract painting had attained by midcentury. Painting as both medium and tradition polarized art discourse, one style legitimated by the negative values attributed to the other. Realism, which, stemming from its official status as the style of Soviet art, mystified the

connection between painted representation and the object or idea being represented—was abstraction’s obverse. Equally, abstraction became the ever-present, but repressed Other in all visual art forms. The critical tradition that had made sense of it in the 1920s was understood as

formalist in terms no longer linked to definitive texts by Viktor Shklovskii, lurii Tynianov, Osip Brik, and others.? Soviet artists and critics compensated for this loss through a renewed commitment to ekphrasis, an urge to explain and justify: all themes and methods should be trans-

parent and singularly motivated. During the Soviet era, mimetic images both affirmed the reality they depicted and constituted the mythic narratives through which that reality was per-

ceived. Abstract painting allowed artists who doubted Socialist Realism’s premise (that image equals reality) to question, on that same discursive plane, both the realities of Soviet life, and, equally importantly, its myths. This also made abstraction seem uniquely subversive—it supplanted one narrative of cultural origin (classical antiquity) with another (the parallel author-

ity of medium across national boundaries and political ideologies). The suppression of histories of vanguard modernism in Russia from the 1930s through the 1960s made the course

taken by abstract painters in the West all the more compelling. Three major exhibitions held in Moscow are often cited as catalysts for the transformation of unofficial art in that city. Soviet citizens—artists included—were first exposed to new American art in the exhibition organized for the 6th International Youth Festival held in July-August

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1957. This was a revelatory experience for many artists, poets, and musicians—not so much because the art was extraordinary (it was

superceded by the following two that I will describe

in a moment)—but

because

the

events merged all forms of artistic expression, abstract painting, poetry, and jazz, for exam-

23. Viewers examining a sculpture by Ibram Lassaw at the National Exhibition of American Art, Moscow, 1959. V.Keme-

ple. And in this totalizing sensory field, accord-

ing to the poet Genrikh Sapgir, “we saw another art (drugoe iskusstvo), unlike any we

nov, Protiv Abstraktsionizma v sporakh o realizme (Leningrad:

had seen drummed into art schools—and we

Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1969).

saw each other.” Painter Mikhail Chernyshov

(b. 1945) madea similar observation regarding

the impact of the second and most important exhibition: the National Exhibition of American Art presented in Moscow in 1959 (it opened simultaneously with the Soviet exhibition in New

York City). Here, for the first time the Soviet public encountered a wide range of masterworks by Rothko, Pollock, Baziotes, de Kooning, Motherwell, Gorky, as well as by artists of the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries (figure 23).‘ The visual experience (often but not always negative) was coordinated with a more inclusive one, uniting fashion, commerce, technology, and ideology.

Enjoying free Pepsi, Soviet citizens watched on large television screens scenes of American daily life under Buckminster Fuller’s enormous geodesic dome. At the accompanying trade show they examined up close products of American technology, from the first IBM computer prototypes to the latest Chevrolet corvette. A new generation would recognize itself transformed on the streets

of Moscow, sporting crew cuts, white tee shirts, and jeans.>

If the American Congress had been stymied by the difficult concatenation of leftist politics

and recent trends in painting—associating, as so much recent scholarship has demonstrated, communism with European and eventually American abstraction—this was no less of a chal-

lenge for Soviet critics. The trumping of one interpretive formula (abstraction = communism) by another—abstraction as a demonstration of American principles of individualism, freedom of expression, and entrepreneurship—was echoed with admonitions to a gullible public and ridiculed by the Russian press. Representative Francis E. Walter, chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, would have taken heart had he been able to read articles by no less than Vladimir Kemenov (a member of the Soviet Academy of Arts) on the implications of Abstract Expressionism, Pollock's work in particular, for Soviet culture and society. The success

84 | JANE A. SHARP

of the visual arts component was clear enough to its organizers, Edith Gregor Halpert and Richard McLanathan, which Halpert and others detailed in a series of articles for the American

press and public.* The controversy surrounding the organization of the USIA exhibition (Walters had announced that among the artists chosen thirty-four “have records of affiliations with

Communist fronts and causes”) was also aired in the American press, often resulting in unex-

pected parallels between East and West. In summarizing the significance of the exhibition one critic noted ironically of the Socialist Realist painting admired by the president and gifted by the Soviet Union to the White House that it had been created by a “card-carrying Communist.”” Kemenov would seem to echo American congressmen George A. Dondero and Walters as he challenges Lloyd Goodrich’s, then director of the Whitney Museum of American Art and author of the exhibition’s catalogue, claim on freedom and authenticity of expression which

Abstract Expressionist art was said to represent. The contemporary abstractionist is a deluded

Gulliver, turning away from the beauty of this world “becoming blind” —or worse—he watches

helplessly as his world slips away, and finally his own life too. “These calls by ideologues of abstractionism are deeply reactionary and will inevitably lead to the death of the artist and of art.”* Pollock is the recognized master (Kemenov even cites Goodrich’s definition of action

painting to explain the artist’s method) for it is based “on more intuitive means, where fantastical elements coexist and the action, as well as the creative process itself plays a great role.” Given this primal scene Kemenov then muses: What is the artist to do but continually repeat himself?” For the Soviet critic, such a culture does not produce freedom of expression; it encourages narcissistic capriciousness and denies the artist his social relevance. Kemenov was not the only critic to respond to the show; numerous caricatures and critical

ripostes followed (figure 24).!° But he was largely responsible for describing the goals of abstract

painting to Soviet audiences and unmasking the ideological forces at work in the organization

of the exhibition. He returns frequently to Goodrich’s claim that “the strengths” of American formalism are a function of “our privileging of creative individual expression over classical formalism.” This Kemenov must overturn: the supposed variety of approaches to Abstract Expressionism is only transitory, lacking in gravity and substance. He even entitles a subsection of his long critical essay published in Sovetskaia kul’tura in 1959 (cited above), “The Myth of Individualistic Variety and Freedom.” His critical posturing revived the rhetoric and concerns of prerevolutionary critics, such as Viktor Vasnetsov, Konstantin, and Sergei Makovskii, who had

questioned the ability of avant-garde artists of the Silver Age to generate a new national school

of painting that would productively engage the wider public.

Following the American exhibition by just two years and in the same location (Sokolniki

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24. Fedor Paviovich Reshetnikov, Caricatures from Tainy abstraktsionizma. Risunki avtora (Moscow: Akademila khudozhestv SSSR, 1963).

Park), the French National Exhibition of 1961 confirmed the seemingly universal significance

of abstract painting (and its role in advancing national agendas of each country). A highlight of the exhibition was the gestural expressionism of Art Informel and Tachisme. Works by Hartung, Soulages, and Fautrier reinforced the association of nonfigurative uses of media with spiritual and emotional authenticity. They were not seen as politically neutral, no more than Pollock's skeins of paint were. Again, Kemenov provides a telling commentary: “Before us is a typical example of the kind of exhibitions promoted by foreign capitalist countries, which have been given over to half-abstract and abstract art, whereas works of a realist nature are almost com-

pletely absent.” If anything, the French are more provocative, claiming a new realism has emerged from these “formless images’—“the abstract and half-abstract works, it is claimed, better understand and express reality!”!' The impact of abstract painting on Soviet institutions could not have been better antici-

pated than by the USIA’s promotional strategy—linking American lifes

86 | JANE A. SHARP

yles with a new style of

painting—in the larger context of the national exhibition. An immediate consequence of the American exhibition was Eli

eliutin’s (b. 1925) dismissal from the Moscow Polygraphic Insti-

tute. He had formed his own studio in order to teach, or at least encourage, abstract painting among his students. The commission investigating his teaching, lead by the head of the paint-

ing department Andrei Goncharov (1903-1979), summed up the dangers facing Soviet culture that abstract painting now posed:

E. Beliutin is a bold representative of contemporary expressionism. His art and his method of teaching completely contradict Soviet art. There is no place for abstraction in Soviet institutions of higher learning! The members of the committee believe that any further activity by Beliutin in the dept. may lead to the complete liquidation of that valuable work which the head of the dept. A. D. Goncharov has conducted. The members of the committee believe

that abstractionism, of which Beliutin is a propagandist, uproots the foundations upon which Soviet art is built, and which they are obliged to protect, with all their force.!? Although the American and Soviet exhibitions presented in tandem were historical break-

throughs, signaling an early détente or thaw in relations between East and West, Cold War ide-

ological sparring led to rhetorical flourishes such as these, an art world parallel to Nixon’s and Khrushchev’s “kitchen debate,” which took place at the American pavilion in Moscow.

If Kemenov (and Khrushchev) succeeded in politicizing for Russians painterly techniques

that in the United States were celebrated for their personal content and formal autonomy, he left

much unstated. In the Soviet Union, Western abstraction was a dangerous reminder of the anar-

chic individualism that supposedly prevailed under Tsarism. Pollock's drips reinforced the threat Soviet critics perceived in early twentieth-century Russian avant-garde practices, when

left-liberal politics had found a highly effective language in the art of Goncharova, Larionov, Malevich, Rodchenko, and others—miscast as formalist by proponents of Socialist Realism. That contemporary artists discovered both turns to abstraction (the historical and contempo-

rary) simultaneously explains the total transformation of this generation of painters—and the vehemence of the official opposition.

Without doubt, to commit oneselfto abstract painting even during the thaw was both liberating and provocative. As Lydia Masterkova (b. 1929) has eloquently and passionately claimed, “abstraction was complete freedom,” a realization of creative integrity that sustained her and many others, all of whom worked in an environment that contrasted private and public interaction. A commitment to abstract painting even distinguished modes of public address

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within the artistic communities that operated outside of the Soviet system, such as the rural enclave of Lianozovo (in the Moscow region). Her understanding of her abstract art contrasts remarkably with that of her closest interlocutors. Another Lianozovo artist, Lev Kropivnitsky (1922-1994), recently returned to the Moscow

region from a

labor camp in Kazakhstan was, by 1959, marked as a political dissident.'* His

abstract paintings are directly connected to his experiences in the camp; as the artist recalled,

the particular ethical imperative of self-expression following incarceration could not be realized in any other form (plate 10).

1954 [the year of Kropivnitsky’s release] was the year of my resurrection, ... But I was dif-

ferent. And art could not be what it once was. The entire subjugating, murky world I had experienced attempted to stretch itself across the surface of my canvas. Yet, naturally, my

former naturalistic painting style could not bear such weight.I suddenly understood that only abstract painting, more emotionally accommodating, more personal, in essence more realistic, could do this.'5

Ulo Sooster (1924-1970), an Estonian artist who painted inscrutable works containing

symbolic, fragmented images—ovoids and labyrinthine circuits—also lived in Moscow. Like Kropivnitsky, his Gulag experiences charged his work thereafter and his medium, too, was abstract painting.'* Inasmuch as their roles and attitudes differed from those of Nemukhin and

Masterkova, Sooster’s and Kropivnitsky’s work point to a dilemma posed by abstract painting

of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years both in Russia and the West. In Russia, one person's com-

mitment toa public might result in constant harassment (rarely imprisonment)—while others would show work only to their closest friends. Those whose method seemed to draw the most

on accident and spontaneity of gesture, such as the Leningrad artists Evgenii MikhnovVoitenko (1932-1988) and Mikhail Kulakov (1933-2003) exhibited rarely if at all and only to

audiences within their own community. Given the very real consequences of an engaged dia-

logue with the public it is crucial that we distinguish among the choices artists made, beyond a common history of exposure to formal inventions of the Abstract Expressionists.

Though it was a major development in unofficial art of the late 1950s to the 1970s, abstract painting in the Soviet Union escapes most unifying criteria that have underwritten historical studies of Abstract Expressionism. Practices and motivations may not be defined by geographic-cultural locales to the extent that the New York School, as represented by Pollock, de

Kooning, and others, has been. Yet many painters worked in association with each other, some-

88 | JANE A. SHARP

times as couples (in the case of Masterkova/Vladimir Nemukhin), at other times as families. Lev

Kropivnitsky’s mother was the abstract painter Olga Potapova (1892-1971), his sister, Valentina Kropivnitskaia (b. 1924), was a very different kind of unofficial painter. In Tbilisi, the trend was

shaped by the relationship between mentor and student,as Alexander Bandzeladze (1927-1992)

(plate 11) was to Gia Edzgveradze (b. 1953). Other influential figures there included David Kak-

abadze (1889-1952), known to many painters asa result of his long Parisian career and contacts with the pre-revolutionary Russian and Georgian avant-gardes. Avtandil Varazi (1926-1977) was also widely appreciated within the dissident artistic community for his visceral object-based reliefs.”

‘We might make sense of this diversity by considering more theoretical models; no matter

when or where they encountered abstract art, artists in the Soviet Union speak similarly of their

position as outsiders to a history they gleaned in idiosyncratic, and often haphazard ways. Paintings by Masterkova, Kropivnitsky, Nemukhin, and Bandzeladze attest to their isolation from,and

self-conscious exploration of international postwar trends. The degree of familiarity with both

the methods and concerns of the American and French varied tremendously; Chernyshov may

have been the best informed (plate 12).'* Nevertheless, Soviet artists conveyed through gesture, media, and the faktura (facture) of materials an awareness of simultaneously working outside of and against a dominant culture (Soviet and Western) that reveals a shared sense of expressive

purpose." Perhaps as much for Russian and Georgian artists, as for African and Asian American artists, this distinctive experience of self-identity demanded that they continually question the

authenticity of (their) creative work. This may also explain the appearance of eclecticism within

individual oeuvres: if the self is not sustained by fixed terms of identity, an artist's means of expression might forever shift to test boundaries of culture, and of self and other.

In the former Soviet Union cultural identity was typically in flux—an artist of Russian

descent raised in Georgia, trained in Moscow would become a star of Moscow conceptualism (Igor Makarevich). An artist of Tatar descent raised in Uzbekistan, trained in Moscow and St.

Petersburg, would influence and encourage a new generation of avant-garde artists in Kaza-

khstan (Rustam Khalfin). These complex cultural experiences have been explained (by social scientists in eastern/central Europe) as “nesting identities,” an unfolding of or dialogue among cultures that is consciously cultivated—but so often, too, simply assumed by artist and viewer alike.° This was a quintessential feature of contemporary Soviet life inherited from a Russian

imperial past. Whatever might have been understood as American or Western, and the values

associated with these “national/cultural” terms, was immediately subsumed into a distinctive, interconnected web of associations and traditions.

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Literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “outsideness” (vnenakhodimost’) of cre-

ative practice helps us to understand how Chernyshov, Masterkova, and Nemukhin, differently encountered the art of the foreign, Western other at a time when they were also discovering the creative achievements of their historical Russian predecessors. Their exposure to both traditions required that they reexamine their view of their own place in history, as well as their interaction

with contemporaries undergoing the same self-questioning (Nemukhin’s mezhdusoboichiki).* Through his study of Dostoyevsky’s plurality of voices (his “heteroglossia” raznorechie), Bakhtin formulated a view of creative work that addressed the bifurcated nature of individual

self-awareness. Self-apprehension is always anticipatory and responsive, in dialogue with outside contexts and other subjectivities. In literature as in life, he wrote: “This consciousness of the other is not framed by authorial consciousness, it reveals itself from inside as standing outside

and beside, and the author enters into dialogical relations with it. Like Prometheus, the author

creates (more precisely, recreates) living beings independent of himself, with whom he appears to be on an equal footing.”

For artists of this generation, a similar condition of creative practice obtains: the artistic per-

sona is perceived in dialogical relation to numerous others, artist-colleague, critic, and viewer. But each artist expresses this attitude of difference in terms peculiar to his or her needs and

inter-

ests. For Chernyshov, speech is anticipatory and inevitably polemical; he understands the foreign

not asa shock to be internalized or overcome (during the American exhibition he found himself

disliking a number of artists’ work, de Kooning’ in particular) but rather as a position outside

his own experience with which he must engage. He gains insight into himselfas he projects a

counter-argument onto his imaginary and real interlocutors: “Even then [at the American exhibition] I began to study art through argument, by taking into account the level of my opponent.

Thad to think for him, to imagine and then know his arguments.” The work he produced shortly

after his encounters with both Abstract Expressionism and European abstraction draw the least

on his formal discoveries at that time. Rather his art demonstrates a concern with social and

political contexts, with the grandiloquence he perceived in Western and Soviet authorized art. His circular forms, inspired by Western jazz and by the omnipresence of organizing geometries from Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism to Ad Reinhardt’s monochromes, speak for his need to address and thereby to resist the messianic content of modernist visual arts traditions. But even

as his works may be formally correlated with Zlotnikov's geometric patterns (produced in the late 1950s), the latter is immersed in a more optimistic dialogue with other (nonart) representa-

tions of systemic occurrences. Zlotnikov's repetitions of primary colors and forms—line, circle, rectangle—speak of a creative integration of cultures, scientific and popular.

90 | JANE A, SHaKP

For Nemukhin, this sensitivity to environment, to gaps between contexts, is what makes Russian and Soviet art both ideological and national (grazhdanskoe), even when it is not explic-

itly political. Engaging one’s immediate or imagined space as if tomorrow never were to arrive, is also what makes creative work moral or ethical. In a 1996 interview with Andrei Erofeev, Nemukhin dated his appreciation of the bifurcated condition of creative practice in Russia to

the beginning of Khrushchev’s thaw and his initial experience of abstract painting at the 1957 Sixth World Festival of Youth. He explained: “It was at that time that I could perceive myself in

some other kind of space. In the larger space everything remained the same, but a kind of niche had been formed. One could speak differently with one another—such a joy it was to think and feel differently.”*

In listing the events that spawned his sense of both being embedded in and creating art out-

side of his immediate environment, Nemukhin linked the two: his self-awareness as a creative subject with the experience of contemporaneity. His apprehension of his immediate context connects the internal and intimate with another dimension of being. Identity is formed responsively, in conscious or unconscious dialogue with other events:

You see how much time has passed—within six years artists have become contemporary. They simply saw themselves as other { videli sebia sovershennno v drugom, literally, in something/somewhere else]. This does not mean that they copied someone. And on the

Moscow level, a schism developed, positions became distinctive: one person went in the

direction of abstraction and another remained figurative, but nevertheless other [dru-

oi)25

Nemukhin’s discussion of his “outsideness” and its implications for abstract art closely

approximates Bakhtin’s explanation of the participation of the other in the experience of self-

identity: We as individuals see others with an excess of vision (a surplus of “seeing”) and our-

selves with a deficiency of vision; that is, we see things about others that they cannot see about themselves, What we see of ourselves is limited to our “horizon”; what the other sees completes

us—we are perceived in our “environment.” Nemukhin’s speculations would seem to indicate what was impossible in life (perceiving oneself as historical agent) might have been realized through the process of making art. Becoming an abstract painter during the thaw enabled this sense of internal/external differentiation, when creative work revealed the self to be other, con-

temporary.

Nemukhin restated his understanding of these relationships in a more recent (April 2002)

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interview with this author. But he modulated his appreciation of the distinctive ways in which a conscious, rather than intuitive concern with history and ideology, motivates form and the

decision to invoke, whether through nostalgia or ironical distancing, the rhetoric of official

Soviet culture.” His revised emphasis is crucial for properly understanding and appreciating the art his generation produced in the wake of Abstract Expressionism—whether abstract or figurative. For he recognized that the responsive framing of historical and personal experience would produce art of different, even contrasting value, and substance from his models. His

argument also explains why a generation of painters who matured into abstraction catalyzed by art west of the “iron curtain,” now marginalized as Russian, Georgian, or Latvian may be represented only a posteriori as part of the modernist canon—at a conceptual and historical remove. They did not continue the early twentieth-century tradition or its modernist extension in Europe and the States, both assimilated fitfully through visits to museums, exhibitions, artists’ studios or accidental encounters with journals and books.”* Yet this is often assumed to be the

case, a myth at times encouraged by the artists themselves. The historical avant-garde first was understood much in the way the Abstract Expressionists were. Masterkova described Mikhail Matiushin (1861-1934) and his school (the Ender family) whose work she saw at Costakis’s

Moscow apartment, not so much as deliberative historical agents as individual subjects organically bound to their creations: “for them, painting is like breathing.”

Neither could the Russians be evaluated within the art world as equals because of the dominance of their American and European counterparts. As Ann Gibson reminds us, the central

principle upon which modernism and its canon is based, a canon against which all others have

been measured, is the authority and authenticity said to have emanated from the act of paint-

ing itself. She explains: “As Rosenberg saw it ‘the gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value—political, aesthetic, moral.”2? Statements by Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko are remarkable in the context discussed above for their insistence on the circum-

scribed experience of self as revealed in abstract painting. Reinhardt’s summary exclusion of environment stands in explicit opposition to Nemukhin’s experience of self as other: “We have cut out a great deal. We have eliminated the naturalistic, and among other things, the supernaturalistic and the immediately political. ... You're putting in everything about yourself, but not everything outside yourself.” Lydia Masterkova’s work exists in stark contrast with this historical view of Abstract Expressionist art—she compounds materials and metaphors in her gestural and monochromatic work, Raised in a family of urban, self-educated, skilled workers (her father was a pattern cutter [lekal’shchik] of musical instruments), Masterkova attached tremendous significance to the

92 | JANE A, SHARP

material complexity and allusiveness of abstract painting. According to Nemukhin, to whom

she was married at the time, she was the first to become transformed through her encounter with the art shown at the 1957 Youth Festival. Within two or three days of their visit to the Festival, Masterkova painted her first abstract gouaches, several of which are in the Dodge Collec-

tion. They resemble the organic, coloristic abstractions of Matiushin and his Leningrad circle

of the 1920s that she continues to admire today.’! But to Nemukhin, “everything about her had

changed—her eyes, her face—she had become a different person.” Masterkova’s collages of the mid-1960s reflect her grounding in a specific approach to faktura that subordinated gesture and hand to material, oil, plaster, and other mixed media—and eventually, collage. Paintings such as her untitled work of 1966 (plate 13) combine ecclesiasti-

cal materials and delicate tracings of women’s lace fabrics in arcing registers across the surface. Opaque light blues, grays, and ochers predominate, conveying a combined sense of density and transparency that defies categorization; color is apprehended as a function of texture, historical

and material. These completely abstract works yield associations with aspects of Russia’s complex and contradictory cultural heritage. Unlike another material collagist, Evgenii Rukhin (1943-1976), she did not typically draw on the form or imagery of the icon, but, rather, more

subtly explored indigenous traditions of handwork, communicating the accretion of time through materials, ornament, and traces of the artistic process. Masterkova’s works also appear

deeply personal—each densely built-up painting seemingly occupying a life span within the course of her career. Even later, in the 1970s, when the artist claimed to have truly found her own language as a painter—her palette knife blocking large shapes against the material tears and scatters of collaged rope, lace, or paper—she questioned the possibility of expressing a singular subjectivity through form. These grids, if we can call them that, point to variability as the measure of human vulnerability. The weight of experience inheres to each of Masterkova’s paintings

in inverse proportion to its ephemerality; whereas paintings of similar texture by Rukhin reaffirm the constant measures of individual style and iconography. His most abstract, monochromatic works are remarkable in focus but address the status of the material object as image in a far more literal way. Although Nemukhin’s early abstractions were also the result of his deliberate manipula-

tion of materials including pigment and collaged elements, he approached the processes of painting and creating abstract work differently—by grappling with form as sign, at one glance

self-sufficient, at another cohering as object. In his many paintings based on the subject of playing cards (plate 14), shapes read as traces of gestures while echoing and supporting the presence of the card at the center of the composition. The brushwork imparts a ghostly quality, through

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layers of impasto pigment that form shadows framing other shadows of gesture and color around the object/image. His repetition of the card, a precise graphic if ubiquitous form, embodies his dialogue with his culture, past and present. Playing cards carry for Nemukhin many historical and contemporary symbolic associations, from the avant-garde Jack of Dia-

monds group to emotional events in his own life, but lack the irony of Jasper Johns’s similar

appropriations of found images. Here painting expresses the self/subject as an immanent presence within the work and as contiguous but exterior to it.

Many artists of the late Soviet period, practicing from the late 1950s through the 1980s,

explored the effects of unmediated self-expression by using alternative media, often mixing oil, acrylic, or varnish with more precarious materials such as fabric, charcoal, sand, and plastics. They worked in the high art centers of Soviet Leningrad and Moscow, and in the multilingual,

multicultural border regions of Vilnius (Evgenius Cukermanas [b. 1935] and Tbilisi (Alexander Bandzeladze). Thus, however similar the gestures or drips, they each had distinctive local

cultural implications and repercussions in reception. In a manner analogous to other artists and book illustrators or designers, such as Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933), and Viktor Pivovarov (b. 1937), and unlike Masterkova and Nemukhin, Bandzeladze’s career spanned both poles—official and unofficial—alternately in symbiosis and

opposition. The Georgians, like the Lithuanians and Latvians, were afforded a greater measure of independence from official doctrine than the Muscovites, even as it was assumed that the latter would impose it, as heads of studios and other institutions. Bandzeladze, too, reinvented himself as an artist following his exposure to the work of Americans and Europeans at the

Sokolniki Park exhibitions. He developed his abstract painting style in private, though always at the risk of losing his studio.

It was through contact with Bandzeladze that Rukhin, during the early 1970s on a trip to Tbilisi, and later, the Moscow critic Leonid Bazhanoy, in the mid-1980s, came to realize with some shock the intensity of the unofficial art world of Tbilisi studios. Bandzeladze’s initial fla-

grantly color-saturated, gestural images turn line into plane, pigment into gesture, in a manner

resembling de Kooning’s work of the 1970s and 1980s. But by the mid-1980s, he, along with

other, younger artists, particularly Edzgveradze, began to explore the tension in representation between paint as matter and concept through more graphic means. He compartmentalized his images and reduced his palette to black, grays, and whites as primary statements of ground

interacting with expressive marks. Letters and numerical symbols occasionally appear in his work, making painting seem likea language of barely articulated ideas, a system whose code has either been half-discovered or half-abandoned.

94 | JANE A. SHARP

Edzgveradze’s images are often more personal statements exploring the ambiguity of emo-

tions and social roles. Painting and especially drawing become a means of interchange between

passion and intellect. Both Wall of My Childhood (plate 15) and Magic Joker (1989) contain recognizable fragments of words and symbols, the former relating to personal spaces, the latter to physical sensations of the body. Reflecting the artist’s fascination with the unique signs and

sounds of the Georgian language, graphic marks often double as image and sound or word fragment in Edzgveradze’s work; they leave unresolved questions of self-representation. Various epistomologies inform his art today (now comprising performance as well as drawing/paint-

ing). The artist himself has characterized the range of his philosophical interests in the 1970s~80s in terms of the interdependence of East and West (his simultaneous readings of Hei-

degger and Krishnamurti) stating in conclusion “you can’t throw everything out—flux is important in itself.” While teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tbilisi, Edzgveradze drew

on the tradition of café and street graffiti, incorporating materials such as cement, sand, and tar into his works to situate them in the urban present. Although the cultural and political institutional context for her work could not have been

more different, Masterkova's paintings also explored the local and personal associations of particular materials (religious fabrics) and traditions to bridge the gap in abstract painting between

claims for common human and intimately personal experiences. Like Edzgveradze’s large-scale pieces, Masterkova’s smaller paintings resist the strictures of genre and signs of professional skill inculcated within Soviet art academies—but to strikingly different ends. Both artists addressed questions of identity localized within the communities of Moscow and Lianozovo on the one hand, and Tbilisi on the other in response to their particular cultural and historical encounters.

For both artists, encounters with American and European abstract painting remain significant, but not exclusively so. As a result, and as Nemukhin has suggested, in becoming form these concerns also strayed from their overly determined contexts, Russian, Georgian, Soviet unofficial, semi-official, and they share a common interest in expressing something that is other—outside and beside the self.

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ART-MAKING

CONTEXTS

A New Beginning:

Abstraction and the Myth of the “Zero Hour” GOTTFRIED

BSENM

, merican Expressionism is inextricably linked with the topos of a 4~

wh

new beginning in art. Similar ideas are also associated with Art

Informel in Europe. Jackson Pollock and Wols, who can be considered representative of the two

movements, display a close affinity, despite the fundamental differences between them. Their affinity derives from the way in which, totally independently of each other, they accepted the risk of engaging in a lonely artistic act. That act seems to cut through historical links; it is a

heroic act that changed the world of art. Hans Namuth's photographs and films showed Pollock “in the arena” as an action painter, as Harold Rosenberg called him, while the photographic and graphic self-portraits of poor Wols, whose features were exaggerated by Jean-Paul Sartre in his

furious essay “Doigts et non-doigts,” were viewed—as from the 1950s—as being convincing evidence of this highly diverse European and American new beginning. Barnett Newman described Pollock’s intention in 1967 with the words “to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before.” Sartre in his suggestive prose did some-

thing else; he showed Wols in the light of a tragic hero: I got to know Wols in 1945”—so Sartre

wrote—"“bald with a bottle and a begging-bag. In his begging-bag he carried the world, his cares, while the bottle contained his death. . . . he was a man who ceaselessly started over again,

eternally in the moment. He always said everything at once and then said everything again—

and differently.”? And: “it is in the nature of things not to be that which they are.”* Not only “am.

Isomething else,” as Rimbaud put it, but now all things are characterized by “otherness.” Albeit

the two artists knew nothing of each other, they both seem to have been cut from the same cloth:

they were outsiders; men who, through fate or character, fell out with the world in a tragic way;

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men who bore the stigma of the same wound. Their addiction to alcohol seems to have opened

the floodgates for a productive unconscious, on the one hand, and self-destruction, on the other. The very thing that gave them their artistic inspiration caused their death. They were children of Surrealism who did not wish to accept that inheritance. Instead, they strove to say “everything at once,” to produce paintings of a yet-unseen totality. As befits true heroes, their

early deaths bear witness to their tragic heroism. This strong need for a new beginning assumes

mythological qualities when it places itself outside historical causality. A primal artistic act is

necessary for this return to the roots: a small gesture, an expansive painterly action, the placing

of elementary signs; in other words, a language of the body that would, or so the artists hoped,

withstand the disaster of culture and history, that would be able to mark a zero degré, to use Roland Barthes’s expression, on the scale of time. We repeatedly encounter the argument of the

merging of the present and prehistory. For example, Sartre described Giacometti as having

“antediluvian characteristics” and a determination that “sets itself back to the beginning of time.” And he also said: “So we have to start all over again . . . after three thousand years ... the

task... .is not to enrich galleries with new works but to prove that sculpture is something that is actually possible.”* Barnett Newman reconstructed the close relationship between prehistory and the present in the light of mythological and biblical stories. This is evidenced by many of his titles, which

include the places and the moments of a first beginning and the names of cultural heroes: for

example—Argos (1949), The Gate (1954), Cathedra (1951), Primordial Light (1954), Moment (1946), Day Before One (1951), Day One (1951-52), Gea (1945), Adam (1951-52), Eve (1950), Dionysus (1949), Ulysses (1952), or Prometheus Bound (1952). The close relationship is also evidenced by specific comments he made: “What is the raison d’étre, what is the explanation of the

seemingly insane drive of men to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man’s fall and an assertion that he returns to the Adam of the garden of Eden? For the artists are the first men.”’ The artist faces a “moral crisis” that occurs in the present but that has its roots far back in man’s fall, in the tragedy of Paradise. The artist has the task of redeeming that sin. Since the artist deals not only with the question of form (“how to paint?”), but also with the real

theme, that of the human life, what Sartre called “l’existence” (“what to paint?”), he nourishes contemporary art from the mythological source of a very first beginning.

Art history has dealt critically with this disturbing pathos. It has revealed its causes, analyzed the needs of the war years and the postwar period, investigated the divergence of American development from that in Europe, emphasized the differences in the beginnings and intentions. Furthermore, it has exposed the underlying influences, for example Surrealism and

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the Mexican muralists, that affected Pollock’s concept of painting. So is it a question of

demythologizing the talk ofa new beginning, of showing the historical derivation and context

of the artistic changes? The answer is both yes and no. For I am just as skeptical of the assertion of a historic caesura as I am of the complementary assertionof historical continuity. The notion of an opposition between supposed innovations that actually prove to be nothing else than

transformations of what went before, seems to us to fail to take full account of the nature of the historical process. This argument becomes clearer if we recall that the claim to a new beginning

has accompanied modern art since it first began to develop in the nineteenth century. On closer examination, one realizes that these different attempts to substantiate artistic work, such as

were undertaken by, for example, Cézanne, the Cubists, Mondrian, and Duchamp, were associ-

ated with a characteristic work of destruction. This can easily be demonstrated by specific

examples. During his progression toward an abstract picture, Kandinsky preoccupied himself with, for example, the iconography of decline and transition, with the Flood (Déluge) and the Day of Judgment (see plate 2). Both stories tell how the end, in a surprising way, can prove to be the beginning of something new. Yet Kandinsky translates this material into the structure of his

paintings: we now witness the decline of the figurative world, of narration and, therefore, ofa particular kind of painting. The image itself accomplishes this process. What inspires Kandinsky in this is in no way a depressive tendency. Quite the contrary: it is as if the slow ending of the calculated work of destruction, of the creation of chaos, has provided the soil for the growth of something completely new, for the abstract picture. It is on this notion of the reversal of begin-

ning and end, the inversion of them, that is accomplished through artistic work, that I shall orient myself in what I say next. This leads us directly back to Abstract Expressionism. For what Kandinsky did, Pollock also

did in his way when he merged the surreal and mythological material of his early paintings into the action of his allovers (plate 8). Wols and Newman went through comparable processes:“The

desire to destroy form” or “to destroy beauty” was described by Newman as an “impulse of mod-

ern art.”6 Yet what is the sense of this reversal? Of what does its historical necessity consist? Why

has it been so frequently repeated in the history of modernism?

To put it in a nutshell: it is essential because it creates the preconditions that enable artists

to work. For they do not yet know what their path can be and of what means they can avail themselves. Before they start to create and while they are creating, they find themselves con-

fronted with the question of what “representation” actually means. The reversal is accomplished

through practical work; even if individual artists have also thought about it and formulated it in theoretical terms, it is decided by the artistic result. One could further characterize this model

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by saying that modern art is not a succession of caesuras, not a story of progress as one innovation outdoes another but rather a historic space in which the conditions of representation have

been explored. Thisis particularly so because the reversal of which we are speaking also relates to scientific work, Ever since Kant used the term “Copernican turn” in the preface to his Critique of Pure Rea-

son, recurring inquiry about epistemological premises has been a productive strategy in many

fields, not just philosophy. Kant’s argument is easily demonstrated, for it states that one gains more knowledge and better knowledge if one takes account of the place, time, and condition of

one’s own standpoint. This also means that one must also recognize the respective conditions of a picture if one wants to understand what it represents. The famous “linguistic turn” to which

Rorty gave his name in 1967 hence proves to have been one in a whole series of attempts, all of which set out to create a solid foundation through critical destruction. It was in this way that the science of the last century also created those premises that we use as art historians or theo-

reticians, whether it be the model of historical criticism that concentrates on relating the aesthetic aspirations and suggestions of a work to historical processes, psycho-criticism, which

uses Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, or Pierce, who introduced the category of the sign for the process of cultural communication. Current attempts to extend the linguistic turn to nonpredicative, visual forms of representation, to have them result in an “iconic turn,” can also be

seen in this context.’ This ties up with attempts to establish how, in the history of art, meaning has been created using material means and without recourse to predicative models. The comments I shall now make are partially inspired by these attempts, which in Germany are currently

grouped together under the heading Bildwissenschaft, or “pictorial science.” They help to create a framework of specific characteristics and interrelationships that is useful for discussing the various concepts of modernism, particularly the historic transformation brought about by

Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel.

We can hardly discuss our theme without mentioning Newman's painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis (plate 6). In this work, the protagonist of the beginning, the hero, seems to be present in person. Of course, he conceals himself, for all attempts to identify him by means of a direct reference are doomed to failure. The five separate stripes (zips) that rhythmically structure the

bright red do not represent him, nor can they be symbolically concretized—for example with

Giacometti’s sculpture, which Newman had seen and admired in Pierre Matisse’s gallery. The

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zips demarcate a place in painting, just as Newman’s sculptures Here and Now can be seen as. demarcations of space and time. So who is this vir heroicus; can he be identified and what has he done? In order to obtain an answer, I shall embark ona brief analysis, which can obviously

greatly profit from countless interpretations of Newman. I shall especially look at the transformation of representation, thatis, at the underlying fundaments of a picture. In particular, I shall concentrate on two aspects of this: The first is the fundamental shift in the pictorial order, and the second is the fundamental shift in the role of the viewer.

The most important thing we find, which has so often been described, is as lapidary as it is far-reaching. Newman undermines everything that had previously defined pictorial representation, namely the interrelationship between its two constituent dimensions: height and width within the pictorial space. Instead, he established the power of the vertical, pushing the hori-

zontal so far back that it featured only as the edge of the canvas. In a few cases, he gave the hor-

izontal priority over the vertical. Newman went back to the roots of painting's logic, taking steps

to change it fundamentally. He and artists like Frank Stella und Donald Judd, who admired him, saw the aesthetic of the

nonrelational as being primarily a rejection of the European compositional aesthetic, as

brought to its ultimate conclusion by Mondrian, When Newman spoke of the necessit of destroying form and beauty, he may particularly have been thinking of Mondrian’s abstract pictorial concept. Yet he achieved a great deal more: the syntax of the picture is fundamentally suspended. His work of destruction entails none of Pollock’s emphasis and it is accomplished

without physical action. It negates with calm superiority, while ultimately resulting in a highly

charged effect. This lecture is not the place to discuss the individual implications of Newman's

work from the angle of pictorial theory, but it is nonetheless obvious that the generation of pic-

torial meaning is founded on contrasts, on the relationship between figure and ground the vertical and the horizontal, crossing themselves within the pictorial plane. It is an iconic difference that provides the premises for what Richard Wollheim, carrying on from Wittgenstein, has

called “seeing as” or “seeing in,” as basis of visual semantics.

The zips in Newman's painting can certainly be identified in front of this ground. To that

extent, we continue to be confronted by contrasts, that is, with painting. However, the fact that

Newman renounced the superimposition of the horizontal and the vertical dimension also means that he no longer saw the painted canvas as a substratum of meanings. The dismantlement of the pictorial syntax then also caused the painting on the wall itself to resemble a wall,

to become impenetrable. In his own way, Richard Serra drew direct, sculptural conclusions from this.

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The dominance of Newman's zips also affects our behavior as viewers. Our roaming eye repeatedly completes a vertical motion, gradually looking upward and then downward again. This motion is further reinforced by Newman's instruction that his works should be viewed. close up. Above all, however, this process results in the mobilization of the color’s forceful energy, which attacks the viewer. The renunciation of a simultaneous overview causes a crisis in our relationship to the painting. We no longer feel secure, invited to engage in participative

viewing or contemplation. The work of art is a hub of powerful forces and no longer a world that can be fathomed at a glance. Those forces are no longer bound to a visible order but confront the viewers who look at them. These strong emotions they generate reflect the title: “Who

is afraid of red, yellow, and blue”? Again: “a ‘first’ painting,” as the painter said in a comment?

Instead of coming to rest on an objective within the picture, the eye finds itself subjected to a

powerful force. With Newman, the totality of the picture never means an overview or visual object. Its significance is always “being stronger.” Many interpreters of Newman’s work have seen this shift of the pictorial center from the canvas to the space beyond it, to the viewer, as being connected with his interest in the totems

of the Kwakiutl Indians and, more generally, with an insight into the social and mythological

structure of rites. There is no time for me to explore this point in greater detail here. I would not wish to suggest that Newman's vertical pictorial order can be identified with a religious one. Yet the affective heightening associated with a totem was certainly a source of inspiration to him. This can be seen even from his early cosmic landscapes, in which we find a different “antediluvium” from that of which Sartre spoke. What is striking even here is the geometry of the verti-

cal stripes or plane and the fact that—in an unusual manner for landscapes—the horizon is weakened to the point of disappearing. In his own way, Newman's paint conjured up the

mythology of the cosmic beginning, alluding to biblical topoi such as the Book of Genesis, which speaks of the emptiness of the earth, the depths of darkness, and the power of light but

also of the divine power of creation—The Command, which he used as title of one of his early paintings. At that time, Newman was still working on the premise that he would represent the

power of the beginning (as the beginning) of creation on painting’s flat surface, even if he relied on vertical geometric stripes linking the top and bottom of the canvas. It was only with One-

ment (1948), that is, with the shift in his pictorial order, that he succeeded in endowing this eminent experience with a direct impact. He was helped in this by two traditional aesthetic models

based on confrontation: the aesthetic of the sublime and tragedy. He used both of these, and

both are characterized by a radical disproportion. The moment of the sublime can never be fathomed, that is, deprived of its power, and that of tragedy can never be mitigated. It is a testi-

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mony to Newman's exceptional artistic stature that he succeeded in combining these ancient

concepts into the form of the picture, which simultaneously displays and transcends itself. The painting we are discussing mentions the sublime in its title. By giving plausibility to the sublime

through the visual economy of the vertical dimension, the upright Newman makes us feel that

we are being uplifted, that our gaze is being directed upward. His work is an appeal to viewers; they are told to stand up, to hold themselves upright. So who is this vir heroicus? He isa solitary figure who can rely solely on his own determina-

tion and his lonely power of resistance. He can be anyone who lets him- or herself relate to these paintings. As we know, Newman was concerned by the question: “What to paint?” The context

of this “what?” is the experience of heightened individual vitality of strong emotion. The prototype of this solitary figure is undoubtedly the artist himself. “The artistic act” as Newman

explained, “is man’s personal birthright.”"° Seen in this way, vir heroicus sublimis can also be read

as an abstract studio painting, as a poetology of the new beginning at which the artist worked.

In conclusion, let us return briefly to Jackson Pollock. It would be very appealing to discuss his allover paintings in terms of pictorial theory, for example to compare them with Wols’s spiky lines, which cover an area no larger than the palm of a hand. There is not enough space to do so,

however. Instead, I shall limit myself to a few specific points. In my comments, I shall rely on a comparison that you might find rather surprising. There is naturally no connection between

the action painter Pollock and Laocoén. And yet this by no means completely coincidental encounter puts us on an interesting track. For centuries, since its rediscovery in 1506, the Hel-

lenistic sculpture of Laoco6n—the Trojan priest who, together with his two sons, was killed by

Athena's snakes without having been guilty ofa crime—has been considered an artistic proto-

type. Attention has, above all, focused on the role of motion in the medium of immobile sculpture. It makes the figures look alive and their story seem plausible. The body follows the logic of

the fruitful moment; what we see is the myth that the artist tells. Yet what makes it convincing,

and visible is the body's language.

In Namuth’s photograph, we see Pollock intent on his pouring and dripping (figure 55), with his body moving as forcefully as Laocoén’s. He is not being pursued by snakes, but there is a different power he is dominating. He is casting off the net of motion. It is separating itself from

his body, which remains outside the painting. This net gets caught up in itself; it will never be able to disentangle itself.

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25. Hans Namuth, Three frames from the film Jackson Pollock, released in 1951. Photo © Est of Hans Namuth, courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Hou: and Study

Center, East Hampton, NY.

This process of separation is particularly apparent in Namuth’s film (figure 25). We observe the artist through that pane of glass on which he has, in this case, painted his picture. His web of lines has no real location. It has been painted and is connected with the canvas

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BOEHM

but it cannot

actually be identified; it is a whole without parts; it is a totality. Pollock’s paintings suggest something that is called in French l’imaginaire. Even without a perceivable space and caught in a tem-

poral convulsion, that thing surpasses our understanding. One contributory factor is certainly

that these paintings merge the horizontal plane in which they are created with the vertical plane in which they are seen. This aspect has recently been particularly emphasized by Rosalind Krauss.!' The imaginary (Vimaginaire) that the viewer encounters is the substitution of the

myth that, before and afterward, Pollock sought to capture on the canvas using iconographic

means. That which surpasses our understanding now becomes an experience of our senses: another myth and another beginning.

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Ironic Gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel,

and Abstract Expressionism KAREN

KURCZYNSXI

re { 'n11958, Danish artist Asger Jorn painted A Hint of Weakness or Effortlessly lid Slow (Schweicheanflug ot Langsam Mithelos) (figure 26). In it, Jorn develops a series of semifigural forms through the use of fairly uniform, even monotonous black brushstrokes evoking awkward doodles. He replaces the quintessentially fast and, at least in artists like Georges Mathieu or Franz Kline, bold or graceful gestures of Informel and Abstract Expressionism with slow and seemingly dumb strokes. Arguably as self-defeating as a gestural stroke by Willem de Kooning, who typically painted, wiped away, and re-painted his images in a long and tedious process, Jorn’s application is nevertheless much more diminutive in width and length—more akin to drawing—and more apt to turn in on itself than the broad gestures

of de Kooning. Black doodles here and there resolve themselves into masklike faces, childlike birds, and other possible designs, such as trees, knots, molecules, or insects, Although the composition consists of carefully arranged colored areas distributed across a

lighter background, it is distinctly unbalanced through the heavy emphasis of blue, yellow, and dull green colors at upper and lower right. The colored forms seem to circulate aimlessly around the picture, an effect created by the broad brushstrokes and black outlines along the edges of the picture. The tonal values of the foreground and background elements reverse themselves on the left and right halves of the work, with white framing the shapes at left and receding to a small central area at right. This reversal disrupts any illusionism of figure over ground, such as the conceptual implications of space revived in Informel works that isolate a gestural brushstroke ona color field, for example in the work of Mathieu. Furthest from Jorn’s strategies of irony, artifice, and materialism was the painting of Mathieu, which abstracts the painterly sign to the

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26. Asger Jorn, A Hint of Weakness or Effortlessly Slow (Schwacheanflug or Langsam miihelos), 1958, oll on canvas, 31 7/8 x 39 3/8 in. (81 x 100 cm). Henle Onstad Art Centre Collection, Hévikodden, Norway. © 2005 fam. Jom/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/COPY-DAN, Copenhagen.

point that it refers to nothing but the artist’s performance and makes the event of art making itself into a transcendent category.! Whereas Jorn’s experimentation deliberately avoided a signature style, the total abstraction of Mathieu's painting deliberately masks its visual sources in,

for example, Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, and comes to refer exclusively to the artist's dra-

matic persona. Notorious for his theatrical painting performances, Mathieu executed these

works asa virtuoso, creating decorative and aggressive calligraphic shapes utterly removed from everyday life. In contrast to Mathieu's graceful and composed brushstrokes, Jorn emphasizes

the dull, anti-virtuosic slowness of the brushstrokes through awkward gestures that scribble

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over themselves or clumsily turn in at their ends. The title summarizes the distinct impression of methodical awkwardness created by these qualities. Instead of the heroic artistic gesture, Jorn provides a “hint of weakness,” a title that is both a joke on Informel and an affirmation of his

preference for a kind of average, everyday creativity. The humor is characteristic of Jorn. His cri-

tique of gestural painting, expressed in both writing and art making, directly targeted the assumptions of virtuosity, genius, and authenticity evident in what he viewed as the dominant paradigm of abstract painting in the 1950s.

The work of Asger Jorn, prolific artist, theorist, and organizer of key postwar movements

including Cobra and the Situationist International, has been infrequently shown and seldom

understood in the United States, where abstract expressionism dominates our understanding of postwar painting? Yet as a recent surge of interest for Jorn’s work in Europe demonstrates,’ the time is ripe for a reevaluation of his project in relation to the international tendencies of

Abstract Expressionism and European Informel, Tachism, and lyrical abstraction. Asger Jorn’s

painting has been consistently mischaracterized as “expressionist,”* annexed as a latecomer to

the early twentieth-century movement marked by its emphasis on inner emotions externalized

in the work of art, as Kandinsky summarized in his conception of “inner necessity.” Jorn and his colleagues, however, did not consider themselves expressionists and explicitly separated

themselves from the earlier movement.’ More significantly, Jorn’s work of the late 1950s demonstrates an explicit irony in relation to the painterly gesture. This irony separates his work not only from the early-twentieth-century conception that the gestural artwork represents an

outward manifestation of inner feelings, but also from the contemporary understanding of

expression in Abstract Expressionism and Informel. These broadly defined “movements”

tended to consider the gesture as a process of capturing on canvas the artist’s authentic struggle

with his (and very occasionally her) environment. Jorn’s work presents an alternative paradigm. Utilizing a vocabulary somewhere between doodling and graffiti, Jorn's paintings embody affirmative gestures of the everyday creative subject. They attempt to represent a singular voice from everyday culture rather than high culture, in both critique and homage to innovators of the new

painting such as Jackson Pollock. EXPRESSION

AND

COMMUNITY

Jorn's gestural painting revolves around the singular presence of the artist but conceives the artist as a social being. He understood the subject as developing collectively, linked toa particu-

110 | KAREN KURCZYNSKI

lar cultural context and constantly shaped by the social and natural environment.’ Jorn defined

art as an expression of intention, or as he put it, “intention and art are the same thing.”* Yet he also asserted that this intentionality always related to community and its expressions were inseparable from the community's interpretation of them. He wrote: “There is no distinction between impression and expression where there is a work of art. Nor is there between the conscious or

unconscious intentions of the artist and the realization of the expression in a material. Neither is there between the expression of the artist and the impression of the public. ... The artist is... the

actual agent of de-leveling, of movement and disequilibrium, in the community.”® Jorn’s painterly gestures, illuminated by his theoretical writings, embody this conception of

the subject as existing only in relation to community. | call these “singular” as opposed to “individual” gestures, borrowing Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical distinction between the “singular

voice” and the individual subject. Where individual implies a false distinction between inner

and outer and denies the mobility of subject positions permeated by the external world, the singular voice identifies subjectivity as something constantly creating itself in relation to others.'°

For Jorn, the self is no longer an internal subject opposed to external reality, but a singular inten-

tional entity in constant dialogue or, frequently, conflict with other singularities, which shape

its very being."' Jorn’s gesture expresses the singular, the voice of enunciation in a specific con-

text, rather than the individual or “whole” preexisting and private subject. He considered the psyche as inherently socially constructed, based on a constantly shifting desire or intention shaped through interaction with other subjects. Jorn never subscribed to the social alienation

internalized by many painters in both Europe and America.

Informel, and the limited examples of Abstract Expressionism available to Jorn, exempli-

fied a less critical approach, a gestural painting of the individual rather than the singular gesture. These gestures referred to a subject presented fully formed in its bodily traces, and the artist as essentially different from the everyday subject because the artistic gesture marked a spe-

cial talent. By the 1950s Jorn rejected the term “gesture” precisely because of what he described

as the term's link to an increasingly inflated “rhetoric.””” Avoiding a signature style, Jorn developed a uniquely critical approach that foregrounded the presentness of painting as an action without slipping into the rhetoric of heroic and/or mystical transcendence characteristic of writers like Michel Tapié or Barnett Newman.

For the first generation of Abstract Expressionism, artists who developed their mature styles

in the late 1940s, the gesture related to the originality of, as Irving Sandler described, a “unique artistic temperament.”

William Seitz similarly emphasized the “timelessness” of the “authentic”

expression.'* The American movement monumentalized what Robert Motherwell called “truth

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to experience” in large-scale visions of personal and alienated subjectivity. But Jorn was primarily exposed to these ideas through European writers. While he was working with the Cobra group in Paris, Jorn encountered the movement defined as “informe!” and “art autre” by Tapié, “tachism” by Charles Estienne, and “lyrical abstraction” by Mathieu.'* The new approaches to painting became the subject of heated polemics among French artists and critics, through exhibitions like the trans-national “Véhémences confrontées” organized by Mathieu and Tapié in 1951.” Tapié insisted on the importance of “authentic artists” of “exceptional individuality.”"* He wrote specifically of the “violence of the gesture” and the elaboration of “signs charged with a

maximum possible of expressivity.”"® He thus described the artwork as a trace of his explicitly Nietzschean “creator-destroyer” of art. Tapié utterly rejected all possibility of group action, claiming that only the individual had the power to act. He also actively revived German Expressionism’s outdated conception of the subject as embodying a superhuman will to expression.” Tapie’s rival, Charles Estienne, wrote likewise that art was about the “expression of the authentic.””' Estienne identified the most important characteristic of Cobra art to be its “impe-

rious and virile line, clear and strong likea sword.”? He described the gestures of Hans Hartung, alyric-abstract painter Estienne favored, as “the most naked and natural gesture through which

a man would escape the anguish of his condition.”® The writings of Tapié, Estienne, Mathieu, Jean Paulhan, Pierre Restany, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Malraux all participate in this rheto-

ric of heightened authenticity and heroic virility manifested in the gesture. For Malraux, one of the most popular critics, the primary function of modern art was the subjective expression of the artist’s psyche.?5 He presented a history of art driven entirely by a series of geniuses, whose educated eye separated them from ordinary individuals. Malraux described how these isolated men sought “transcendental” forms to express emotions.” For these French critics—as well as for Americans like Barnett Newman who wrote of the sublime unbeknownst to Jorn?”—indi-

vidual painterly expression led directly to transcendence.

Jorn, in fact, acknowledged the formal relationship of his work to Tachism and Informel,

with their investigations of the importance of process and the dissolution of pictorial compo-

sition and representational form.?8 His concerns with expressing a subject in the process of formation did, in fact, participate in a new understanding of painting in this period that differed

radically from classic expressionism. Rather than the expression of internal psychic forces or emotions, the most significant painting of the 1950s emphasized the gesture as a record of a pro-

visional and shifting subjectivity firmly grounded in a physical body. But when Informel came

to mean only purely abstract art and an academic and overtly mystical discourse, Jorn rejected the term “informel.”® In a 1954 text, Jorn accused Tapié of creating a new academicism of

VI2 0 RASTM

Informel abstraction.” Jorn would also attack the institution of art criticism as a co-founder of the explicitly leftist Situationist International. In April 1958, the SI staged an action in Belgium against the International Assembly of Art Critics. They distributed a venomous tract which

accused the critics of “striving to transform their activities into institutions” as well as soliciting “official recognition from the completely outmoded but still materially dominant society, for which most of them have been loyal watchdogs.”*' Jorn’s artistic critique of Informel would develop in this collective context of such disruptive actions.

Jorn criticized the mystification of the artist’s role as something that transcends everyday life in Informel criticism. In his writings, he rejected Malraux’s language of the “sacred” and the “divine” because they induced passivity by presenting idealized models of the artist.*? Jorn

claimed to develop an “anti-abstract” art and an “abstract art that does not believe in abstrac-

tion,” indicating his opposition both to abstraction as an art institution and to the mystical

descriptions of it as a new belief system.» The discourse of abstract art as a paradigmof libera-

tion had come to refer only to the artist’s freedom. Jorn critiqued Sartre’s conception of paint-

ing as an “Act” as well as Harold Rosenberg’s Sartrean designation “action painting” for their implication of the artist creatinga spectacle for a passive viewer." Jorn argued that action painting makes painting into show business, like a circus act.** His painting methods rejected the

Informel emphasis on the spectacularization of the artist's psyche by focusing on formal qualities of artifice, on the operations of the hand in its most crude and vulgar physicality, and to techniques of humor as an effective opposition to transcendence and sublimation.» Jorn developed gestures that were playful, personal, inauthentic, and socially critical. Like everyday gestures, they insisted on their continuity with the realm of social action. In what follows, I will survey three discernible visual strategies in Jorn’s painting, methods that overlapped in his prac-

tice and at times appeared in the same work. They include the overpowering of the gesture in materiality, the gesture as direct parody in the form of caricature or vandalism, and the ironic pastiche of the abstract expressionist gesture.

MATERIALITY

SUBSUMES

THE GESTURE

Works like the 1956 painting La grande victoire (The great victory) exemplify Jorn’s combination of extreme materiality, at times verging on abjection, with caricature.” It is tempting to

read the title as a direct parody of Mathieu's famous Battle images.” In such incomplete figura-

tions Jorn makes the mass-produced oil paint embody its own artificiality through its vulgar

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colors and its elaboration of a wide range of textural values, from liquidity to scumbliness,

opacity to transparency. These material paint qualities consistently overpower his gestures, which are themselves alternately hesitant, short, or scumbled.” The colors deteriorate into

brown and black muddiness by mixing on the surface of the canvas, overlapping and dripping

down over each other. Some of the mid-1950s works acquire a textural thickness comparable to Dubuffet’s earlier hautes pates.” In La grande victoire, comic faces seem caught in a metamor-

phic process, developing out of paint pressed and pushed around the surface as if fingerpainted. These semi-figurative masks are frequently described in mystical terms as “mythic beings” that differentiate Jorn’s post-Cobra painting from the total abstraction common in the New York School.‘! But these images are emphatically resistant to completion and therefore

symbolism, and yet they prevent Jorn’s gestures from referring only to the physical traces of his presence. His gestures also attempt to work out a subject matter and thus some form of social

meaning, but one depicted as always forming itself and never fully pictured.

In the mid-1950s Jorn produced a series of works that evoked a material reality more

directly somatic or “base” than the literality of paint itself. The large figure that seems to push

against the painting's edge in an untitled work of 1956 (figure 27) perhaps best exemplifies this abject materialism.” The personage is bounded only by the outward seepage of dirt-colored oil paint. The monster is deliberately ugly and formless, dripped and stained in earth-toned washes evoking internal fluids and decomposition. The wash texture also recalls Jorn’s experiments with glazed ceramics at the time. Splattered gobs of paint compound the figure’s visceral quality, in what amounts to an attack on painting's traditional function of mirroringa coherent sub-

ject. The spattering refers directly to Jackson Pollock: Jorn had experimented with Pollock’s drip method as early as 1953. The image exudes both comedy and a subtle horror at the dissolu-

tion of the figure before our eyes. Its vertical orientation, combined with the insistently horizontal seepage of the wash of paint that forms its body, is reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet’s Corps

des Dames series. Dubuffet’s matiériste paintings were surelya point of departure for this image, since it is so close in color, tone, and caricature to the French painter's series. Like the Corps des Dames, it inserts a vertical swath of raw matter in place of painting’s traditional window, blocking any recession into perspectival space with a vertical wall of relatively unstructured matter

that rejects the implications of control by our gaze.*® The seepage and splattering of the pigment insistently points to the horizontality of the literal ground (or table) on which it was created.

The seemingly decorative green and yellow drips that form the background contribute to this effect of matter flattened on the vertical surface of vision. Jorn’s foregrounding of matter and horizontality implies not an ideal observer but a material body interacting with literal space.

114 | KAREN KURCZYNSKI

Jorn, Untitled, 1956, oll on canvas, 39 1/4 x 27 3/8 in. (99.8 x 69.5 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, Mr. and Mrs. Rudolph B. Schulhof, 1986. 86.3474. Photograph by David Heald © SRGF, NY. © 2005 fam. Jom/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/COPY-DAN, Copenhagen.

Like Dubuffet’s strategies, it forms an alternative to Pollock’s drip method as an attack on the idealized, individual human subject. Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois have argued that Pol-

lock’s drip painting similarly embodies a critique of bourgeois individualism with its pretense

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| 115

to subjective unity," although as I will describe, Jorn considered Pollock’s process from the

point of view of its popularity as a media spectacle.As with Pollock and Dubuffet, though, Jorn’s monstrous figure re-embodies the observer and insists on our physical presence. Jorn’s strategy

of subsuming the gesture as well as the represented figure in materiality and the literalness of

paint replaces the modernist painting as icon of individualism with the work as a record of a singular artistic process that acts against the bounded conception of the individual subject.

PARODY

DIMINISHES

THE

GESTURE

Although in many ways abject, Jorn’s conflation of vertical and horizontal axes in the 1956 work never reaches the anomic extreme of the Bataillean informe because of its figurative outlines.“* The only actual brushstrokes in the painting take the form of indeterminate marks evok-

ing caricature: a large face, not clear enough to be apparent immediately nor to constitute an actual cartoon, but nevertheless both monstrous and funny. The face consists of heavy black

eyebrow stains, beady disjointed eyes, awkward green-black lines indicating nose and mouth,

and a lower section that could be considered a beard.” The outline of a large U-shaped tongue

sticking out of the mouth gives the figure a juvenile, rebellious quality. This facial gesture of rejection seems to be aimed at the observer's very assumptions about pictorial meaning, playfully asserting the relevance of the image on its own material terms, divorced from the viewer's preconceptions. These two extremes, of horror at the body’s dissolution and comedy at the

appearance of a grotesque face out of sheer matter, are juxtaposed in an image which deliber-

ately inspires directly conflicting interpretations, In such a work, Jorn’s brushstrokes directly parody the endowment of the gesture with transcendent meanings in the mainstream accounts of abstract painting in the 1950s. As we have seen in A Hint of Weakness, Jorn uses parody to diminish the gesture, maintaining its status as expression of singular intent but destroying its

association with a heroic subjectivity. In these parodic works, Jorn masquerades not asa genius, but asa charlatan, and sometimes even as a vandal. In the 1960 Modification called The Top of the World (plate 16), his gestural additions form a couple of battling monsters on top of the anonymously painted landscape.

Jorn’s abstract add-ons are gestures not of profound and meaningful expression but, rather, playful sabotage. In this series, the graffitilike scrawls on the kitschy flea~-market paintings reject their sentimentality by adding a level of humor, but at the same time preserve the legibility of the old scenes and thus subtly augment their status as earlier artistic creations. Jorn professed

116 | KAREN KURCZYNSKI

that he wanted to update these old paintings for the modern world.* He has also respectfully added his signature next to that of the original artist, in a pointed critique of both individual

creation and connoisseurship.*!

The goal of the Modifications was ultimately not parody, but rather a more complex state-

ment about the contemporaneity of both amateur and modern painting, even an argument for

their very equivalence. Parody is more accurately a method Jorn utilizes in these works, appear-

ing specifically in the gestures of Jorn’s additions. They transgress the “artistic” space of spatial representation established by the original painters with radically simplified painterly marks.

This kind of graffiti, however, was not merely an effacement. Jorn wrote that graffiti was a form

of expression that asserted a common human “need,” sometimes expressed as vandalism.» He

also described graffiti as an art form that by defacing institutional structures defies the institutionalization of art and its removal from common society.*’ Without negating the basic function of the gesture as self-expression, then, the “Modifications” in their rebellious literalness

parody the pretentiousness not of painting per se, but specifically of painting as an institution.

Jorn’s vandalism of artistic reproductions directly recalls Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 addition ofa moustache and goatee to the Mona Lisa, with the equally vulgar title, L.H.O.0.Q. Yet where

Duchamp’s Dada gesture was part of his overt rejection of painting, Jorn’s Modifications stand as records of a subjective encounter with a past work that through gesture parodies Painting with a capital P but remains sympathetic to the anonymous creativity of the amateur painter.

As early as 1941, Jorn praised such kitsch paintings as the “best art today.” He had also attempted such modifications earlier, in 1949, indicating that the project predated by ten years the Situationist rejection of art.5* But while in those works Jorn scribbled in ink on photorepro-

ductions of famous artworks, such as a print of Raphael's angels,* in the later Modifications he makes the Sunday painter an anonymous collaborator. Jorn’s graffiti reconfigured the artistic gesture into something untutored, critical, and popular. He transformed the gesture from a sign

of originality into an unauthorized response to a preexisting image. The 1959 Modifications were at the same time an example of Situationist détournement, the “introduction of existing «+» artistic productions into a superior construction of milieu.” The SI described détourne-

ment asa “parodic-serious” operation." This strategy, then, must in part be seen asa Situationist move and not unique to Jorn’s individual work—even though Jorn would emphasize the expressive potential of parody as opposed to Guy Debord’s view that the sole possibility of expression was through parody.

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PASTICHE:

IRONIC

GESTURES

Jorn’s critique of the gesture also took the more elusive form of pastiche. A deliberately imitative mode of art making, pastiche has been interpreted as more and less critical in different

periods, but in Jorn’s case was an explicitly ironic and critical form.® Jorn’s explicit emphasis on irony set his understanding of artistic expression apart from contemporaneous painters in both

Europe and America. Jorn wrote about the importance of irony, asserting that no form can express a specific content all the time, because in art just as in speech the same form can mean both the stated content and, by use of irony, the opposite.” He repeatedly stressed the basic link

between art and artificiality or artifice, including the possibility of inauthenticity or even delib-

erate lying on the artist's part.*' Jorn regarded lying as more important than any concept of

truth, because he considered truth irreducibly subjective, while lies were purposeful play or critique. For Jorn artistic expressions embodied a social critique through their inauthenticity. He

directly criticized American theorists of aesthetics for overemphasizing the importance of

depth and truth. He reproached the philosophers Suzanne Langer, C. K. Ogden, I. A. Richards, and John Hospers for their “fear of the superficial and the hollow,” and for “taking things too seriously” For Jorn, art was about the “superficial [overfladiske],” and an encounter with the unknown in which neither lie nor truth existed. Jorn systematically dispensed with the traditional notion that art had anything to do with truth. The prioritization of irony and inauthenticity set Jorn fundamentally apart from both

Abstract Expressionist and Informel discourse.“ Pastiche becomes evident in Jorn paintings where what initially seems like gestural brushwork proves to be a critique of the Abstract Expressionist or Informel paradigm, due in part to an ironic title or other framing device. Jorn specifically critiqued the institutionalization of Jackson Pollock's style through pastiche, although in many ways he admired Pollock’s formal innovations.** The American artist was by the late 1950s the most famous contemporary painter and a highly politicized figure in Europe, where after an initial period when critics attempted to portray the American artists as under-

cultured Europeans, Pollock's fame expanded to the point that he came to stand for the ruggedness of American culture and the force of American political power in the Marshall Plan/Cold

War era. For Jorn, he symbolized the institutionalization and Americanizing of the gestural

techniques Jorn helped develop in Cobra. From Jorn’s point of view, publicity turned an interestingly experimental painter back intoa superior actor exemplifying the very discourse of individuality that the forms of Pollock’s drip painting tended to negate.

Jorn probably saw his first large-scale Pollock painting in 1955, at the Museum of Modern

Wap

RAE

Art-sponsored exhibition 50 Ans d'art aux Etats-Unis in Paris. The show included Pollock’s Number

1A, 1948.’ In 1959 Jorn

may have seen examples of Pollock's aluminum and Duco drip paintingat the Pollock retrospective in Paris or the MoMA-

sponsored New American Painting exhibition. Jorn became aware of the drip method in the early 1950s, however, when

he acquired a copy of the catalog of Pollock’s 1951 exhibition of ink drawings at Betty Parsons Gallery. Jorn reproduced one of these images in his 1958 book Pour

la forme. This Pollock ink drawing relates directly to similar drawings Jorn did at the

time for Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires, book projects in which he experimented

with dripped gestures (figure 28). These books are relics of Situationist collabora-

,

3

4

28. Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, Page from Fin de Copenhague

tion, made by Jorn with Guy Debord and —_ (Copenhagen: Permild and Rosengreen, 1957). Silkeborg Kunst-

the printers Permild and Rosengreen in

museum, Denmark. © 2005 fam/ Jorn/Artists Rights Society

Copenhagen in 1957 and 1958. The drip

(ARS), NY/COPY-DAN, Copenhagen.

process Jorn used in the books was a specific pastiche of Pollock’s method. A pale green image at the end of Mémoires directly evokes the Pollock reproduction in Pour la forme, although its quiet tone and childlike, diminutive form

contrast with the dynamism of the Pollock image. Other Jorn drawings evoke more violent

drips, scrapings, scribblings, and attenuated tracings. The two Situationist books are marked by their deadpan critical deconstruction of both popular and high culture through a collage

approach that decontextualizes images and text appropriated from the mass media in floating

fragments. They usurp the power of the “spectacle”” to colonize our private desires by liberating its signifiers in the private and diminutive space of the page. For the drawings in Fin de Copenhague, the earlier book, Jorn dropped lithographic ink

from the top of a fourteen-step ladder, throwing the ink, in some cases cup and all, three meters

below onto folios laid on the floor.” He also turned the pages to let the wet ink flow in various

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directions, and the printers printed them in bright, pop colors. Jorn’s process removed the artist much further than Pollock’s method did from control over the final image, as well as from the

relative beauty and elegance apparent in Pollock’s large-format drip paintings with their grace-

ful and balanced compositions. Jorn’s pastiche of the drip method increased the distance between artist and canvas. He thus applied the drip as a mark of the artist’s physical experience and distance from the support rather than any trace or tache of the artist’s controlled move-

ment. In contrast to Pollock’s looping skeins of paint, Jorn’s drips embody disorder as they

splash and run in all directions.

Most scholarship on Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires reiterates the Situationist fiction that

the books were made entirely of preexisting elements.” In fact, Jorn added singular gestures in the ink drips that set spectacular culture in direct dialogue with the conventions of abstract

painting, implying the direct continuity between high and low. The colors emphasize their own pop vulgarity,”’ as opposed to the classic blacks, whites, and tans of Pollock's large-scale works.

In places, they represent fist-prints that parody the handprints, references to the primeval creator, in some of Pollock’s paintings. They take Pollock’s method to a new extreme, as both homage and critique. Jorn’s drip pastiche incorporated chance in such a profound way that it

revealed Pollock's process itself as a more personalized gesture, with its relative intimacy and primacyas a direct trace of the artist’s bodily movements. Indeed, Pollock famously denied the use of chance in his own work, asserting that even in drip painting, “with experience, it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and . . . I don’t use the accident.””* Jorn’s method created drip gestures minus Pollock’s dancelike control with all its implications

ofa new kind of virtuosity. Jorn’s drips were gestures as well, but ofa bodily movement that was more abandoned to chance and indeterminate in its outcome. The printed drips in both Fin de Copenhague and Mémoires depict the reminiscence of a gesture twice removed, through the

trace of the more violent brush throws which are then reproduced by printing. The books directly incorporate mechanical reproduction in their gestures, asserting that the gesture is still possible but that it is always mediated in the viewer’s reception of it.

Jorn’s critique of the Abstract Expressionist artist is apparent from the title of a key paint-

ing from 1958, Ausverkauf einer Seele (A soul for sale) (plate 17). With its large scale, sweeping gestures, and loops of paint drips a la Pollock, it invites comparison with the Abstract Expres-

sionist idiom, yet on closer viewing the erratic and interrupted appearance of Jorn’s gestures becomes apparent. Grotesque images also leer out of the work, disrupting its apparent lyricism. Jorn parodies the voice of the “ad man” in the title. He connects his own work explicitly with

commerce, and thus defies the conventional autonomy of art in bourgeois society that his con-

120 | KAREN KURCZYNSKI

tinued use of painting on canvas otherwise promotes. As Herbert Marcuse wrote in 1937, the idea of the “soul” is essential to the construction of art as the repository of the “unexpressed,

unfulfilled life of the individual” in modern society. By epitomizing society's ideals ofa “higher,

purer, nonprosaic world,” Marcuse argues, the concept of the soul effectively affirms and

strengthens the structural separation of culture from commerce in society.” Jorn ridicules this

implicit role of cultural production by asserting that art cannot be maintained as a pure site of rejection that renders itself powerless in its own autonomy. Jorn use of titles itself separates his

work from the bulk of Abstract Expressionism, with its artists’ general indifference to titles (as with Pollock) or outright hostility to them (as with Still). His titles mediate the relationship of his works to their audiences, emphasizing the framing element and thus the social and dialogical nature of the artwork.

This title may have also been a direct dig at the Abstract Expressionist artist. Jorn explicitly

critiqued the construction of the incommunicative, incorrigible, inevitably self-destructive

expressionist artist by the popular media in relation to Pollock and Wols.”* He also criticized the insular formalism of action painting. He wrote:

The success of so-called action painting is due to a pseudo-activity which claims to be based on ‘internal necessity, but is in fact nothing more than a

faithful recollection of

external necessity. In other words the social facts of life are accepted in a thoroughly harmless and orthodox way. This attitude is a denial of art because art ought to contest these social factors.”

Jorn critiqued not only the formulation of “action painting” that he felt made action paint-

ing nothing more than show-business, but also Greenberg's use of the publicity language of

media-friendly sports like boxing in his descriptions of the “strength” of various painters.”* Jorn thus criticized the American painters and critics for their political uncriticalness. His viewpoint

was, I would add, only possible because of his own unawareness of either the early development

of Abstract Expressionism or the ongoing politically engaged writing of artists such as Barnett

Newman. Only understanding the movement in the highly politicized context of postwar European reception and France in particular, Jorn viewed it reductively as apolitical.

IRONIC GESTURES: ASGER JORN

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THE

LUXURY

PAINTINGS

Jorn pushed Pollock's drip method in the direction of more overt pastiche in the Luxury Paintings of 1961, where Jorn splattered synthetic lacquer paint and produced lines using string

and marbles dipped in paint (figure 29).” Jorn’s use of lacquer rather than oil paint in these works may have been directly inspired by Pollock’s own unorthodox use of materials." Lacquer evokes both the luxury object of high-end decorative arts, referring to art’s economic status, and at the same time the baser connotation of industrial paint, such as the commercial paints and

enamels Pollock himself used."' For Jorn, it pointed to the sliding scale of value, oscillating between the two artificial poles of high and low, which he theorized as subjectively assigned to objects. While Pollock himself did not acknowledge the significance of mass culture and everyday life which his choice of materials could in retrospect be seen to reflect, Jorn was deliberately

inviting a comparison with the non-artistic, or kitsch. Through his framing acts of titling and theoretical writing, Jorn made apparent the social aspect of this material,as both acomment on the artwork as a luxury object and a way of emphasizing the object literalness rather than the representational quality of the works.

The title of the Luxury Paintings was itself a pastiche of the marketing of artworks, related

to Jorn’s conception of the social relevance of art as a luxury or surplus. The concept of surplus or luxury was central to Jorn’s definition ofart, as a source of “counter-value” that negates all conventional concepts of practical value. In terms reminiscent of Bataille, he wrote, “Art is the invi-

tation to an expenditure of energy, without a specific purpose aside from that brought to it by the spectator himself. It is prodigality.”** His Luxury title, then, was not just a fairly obvious pastiche of the economic role of the art market. It was also a statement on art as a site of innovation and

reshuffling of social values, conventionally useless and for that reason crucial to society.

In the “Luxury Paintings,” Jorn used string to create lines that were imprints of objects

rather than gestures of the brush or body. Unlike Pollock’s large-scale drips, Jorn’s string-lines are deliberately limpid, irregular, and awkward. A work like Allmen of 1961 juxtaposes looped string lines with allover splatters in intensely bright, cheerful colors. Jorn’s relatively evenly distributed drips create a rich texture across the surface. The “Luxury” works recall Impressionist

daylight scenes in their speckled luminosity; Jorn himself noted their debt to both Tachism and Impressionism." Allmen exemplifies the manner in which Jorn’s works communicate humor visually in the relationship of abstract forms themselves. The central orange form invites touch

with its vividly wrinkled, shiny surface. This thick blob of congealed lacquer exhibits a deliberate vulgarity in its unmistakable anatomical shape. Jorn compounds this base materialism by

122 | KAREN KURCZYNSKI

29. Asger Jorn, Allmen, “Luxury Picture,” 1961, synthetic lacquer on canvas, 31 3/4 x 25 1/4 In. (80.5 x 64.3 cm). Silkeborg Kunstmuseum. Photo: Lars Bay. © 2005 fam. Jor/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/COPY-DAN, Copenhagen.

adding a scatological brown-green splatter that appears to be expelled from the lower end of the orange form. These ridiculously somatic shapes halt vision on the surface of the picture—just

as Pollock did through his use of aluminum paint, but in a much more visceral way. The title Allmen evokes the Danish (and German) prefix “almen-,” meaning “common,” an evocation of

populism, deliberate vulgarity, and materialism in the sense of the common or ordinary object.

Dismissed as unoriginal by critics at the time,“ Jorn’s process in fact acknowledges the

falseness of the idea of the original gesture, the innocent or unprecedented mark, by directly encompassing the widely publicized style of another artist. It still manifests its own singularity

IRONIC GESTURES: ASGER JORN

| 123

asa trace of an action, however modest, but also acknowledges the inevitable existence of prece-

dents that define in advance the conception of that action itself. The Luxury Pictures are distin-

guished from Tachism and Abstract Expressionism by their lightness and humor as well as their open acknowledgement of their commodity status. The works combine Jorn’s techniques of parody, pastiche, and materialism in forms that were singular and process-oriented but at the

same time fully conscious of the impossibility of originality in an era dominated by mass media and its promotional techniques.

Jorn was never interested in simple critique, but always in a positive creation, which was the

orig

of his break with the Debordian Situationists, and something that I risk distorting in

emphasizing the critical aspects of his gestural techniques. Yet Jorn himself observed that nothing new could be created without a critical attitude to things as they exist.*° He applied the strategies of materialism, parody, and pastiche to create gestures directly critical of the increasingly apolitical rhetoric of transcendence in both Abstract Expressionism and Tachism. The art-

works I have singled out here manifest a gesture of singular rather than individual subjectivity. Abstract Expressionism and Informel manifest a more traditional individualist conception because although they replace the classic Expressionist internal subjectivity with one develop-

ing in constant dialogue with the environment, they remain emblematic of a heroic subjectivity isolated from the community. Jorn’s singular gestures, by contrast, employed artistic objects as a means to develop a subjectivity more fully aware of social reality. What makes Jorn’s view so relevant—and so contemporary—is his assumption that painting was no longer a sacred space that symbolized the free reign of the imagination, but rather an everyday object that facilitated both imagination and critical thought by means of a sensory address. What mattered to Jorn was art’s dynamic effect on the viewer, where the artist’s role is that of an initiator rather

than an expresser of inner feelings.

124 | KAREN KURCZYNSKI

Greenberg Misreading Dubuffet KENT

MINTURN

n

f { n his article“Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,”

i] published in the February 1, 1947, issue of The Nation, the American art critic Clement Greenberg discusses works from Dubuffet’s first solo show at the Pierre Matisse

Gallery, New York (January 7, 1947—February 1, 1947) and Pollock’s fourth one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of This Century Gallery (January 14, 1947-February 1, 1947).!

Throughout the review Greenberg's tone is dead serious; his pace, rapid. At certain points it sounds as if he is sitting ringside at a heavyweight title bout. Dubuffet and Pollock, the two contenders battling it out for the title of “the” postwar avant-garde artist, are for the most part evenly matched. Greenberg notes that Dubuffet and Pollock similarly handle the canvas in an

active, “over-all” manner. Both artists display their artistic prowess through their physical handling of the paint and ability to integrate the “surface” of the canvas. Specifically, he says, Dubuffet’s paintings display “intensity” and “concentration,” while Pollock’s have “power” and “astounding force.”?

In the end it is Pollock, of course, who comes out on top—but not for the reasons we might

immediately expect. Greenberg favors Pollock not only because he is the American, and because his paintings are ultimately “rougher and more brutal” (and therefore more “virile”*), but also

because, he asserts, Pollock has finally “gone beyond the stage where he needs to make his poetry

explicit in ideographs.”* Pollock, in other words, has at last renounced subject matter altogether

in favor of pure abstraction, he is no longer interested in including those kinds of graphic elements evinced in earlier paintings such as Stenographic Figure (1942, plate 18), The Moon Woman (1942), Male and Female (ca. 1942), and Guardians of the Secret (1943). Conversely,

Greenberg faults Dubuffet for being “insincere” —he “paints from the heights of culture”; his paintings represent “a state of mind,” not a “way of art.”> If Greenberg does not feel the need to qualify his nebulous statements about Dubuffet here, it is probably because he had done so already in an earlier article, “Review of an Exhibition of

GREENBERG MISREADING DUBUFFET

| 125

School of Paris Painters” (concerning a group show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, May 1-30, 1946)—the first article in which he discusses Dubuffet at length.° Although he admits Dubuffet

“seems to be the most original painter to have come out of the School of Paris since Miré,” Green-

bergis forthright about what he perceives to be “Frenchman's” fatal flaw; Dubuffet, he succinctly

states, “reveals literary leanings.” His paintings are at once too literary and too literal. They represent the transposition of one medium onto another, painting’s abdication to literature.

In hindsight, then, it becomes clear that Greenberg, a literary critic turned art critic, and the

self-proclaimed “newer” G. E. Lessing, chose to pit Dubuffet against Pollock in November of 1947 for the express purpose of reinforcing the barrier he had already erected between literature and

painting seven years before in his widely read essay, “Towards a Newer Laocotn” (1940). As. J. Clark has rightly observed, this essay, together with “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), is utterly

fundamental, it “stakes out the ground for Greenberg's later practice as a critic and sets down the main lines of a theory and history of culture since 1850.”* And while he was not the first major

twentieth-century critic to resuscitate Lessing’s argument in the name of media purity—for

example, there was Irving Babbit’s The New Laokoon: An Essay on Confusion in the Arts written in 1910 and later, Rudolf Arnheim's 1938 essay, “A New Laocoén: Artistic Composites and the Talk-

ing Film"*—Greenberg goes further than his predecessors in stressing the necessity ofa division between painting and literature, and making this the very basis for his own aesthetic judgments.

From Greenberg's perspective, artists who attempt to mix the two are inferior by definition. “Painting and sculpture in the hands of lesser talents . . . ” he maintains, “become nothing more than ghosts and “stooges” of literature. All emphasis is taken away from the medium and transferred to subject matter.”'° Further, Greenberg takes a potshot at Bretonian Surrealism and the idea of automatic writing when he reminds his readers that avant-garde painting should be a

“revolt against the dominance of literature,” not a “vessel of communication.”

So, according to Greenberg, just what kind of “literary leanings” was Dubuffet guilty of? The

answer to this question comes in an article the critic published in The Nation immediately following his aforementioned “Review of an Exhibition of School of Paris Painters;” namely, “Jean

Dubuffet and French Existentialism.”” In the article’s opening paragraphs Greenberg laments: “French painting . .. has become directly dependent as never before on literary and philosophi-

cal movements.” Dubuffet’s art, he contends, is a one-for-one illustration of “the world-hating attitudes revealed by French Existentialism” as revealed in Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea." At this point, the certitude and finality of Greenberg's statements could easily lead to a dis-

cussion of Sartre’s influence on postwar art in France and America or we might be tempted to prematurely conclude that Sartrean Existentialism was the “international language” shared by

126 | KENT MINTURN

the postwar French and American avant-gardes alike. There is certainly grounds for a discussion of this sort. Sartre’s ideas saturated the artistic milieu in postwar France, Likewise, Sartre’s influence quickly traversed the Atlantic. By the time Sartre first visited New York in December of 1945 he was already being hailed as an intellectual and Résistance hero, and Existentialism

quickly became a popular catchphrase in America. Sartre’s name not only appeared in main-

stream publications such as the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, it was featured in avant-garde

journals such as View."* Ata more biographical level, we might turn our attention to the fact that Greenberg was a personal acquaintance of Sartre's; the two had met in Paris before the war, and probably saw each other again during oneof Sartre’s postwar trips to America 1945~46.'S Starting in the summer of 1945,a series of Sartre’s recent essays were translated and published in Partisan Review, a journal for which Greenberg once served as an editor, and continued to be associated with throughout the 1940s. In reciprocal fashion, it was most likely Sartre himself who invited Greenberg to contribute the article “L-Art américain au XXe siécle,” to a special issue of Les Temps Modernes dedicated to the United States, published in August 1946.'¢

However, these are not the kind of connections I am interested in pursuing today, because,

first, in my opinion there has already been enough scholarly attention devoted to the relation-

ship between Existentialism and the postwar avant-gardes. Suffice it to mention Sarah Wilson’s work on Existentialism and art in postwar France, and Nancy Jachec and Ann Gibson’s articles on Existentialism and its relation to Abstract Expressionism in America.'’ Secondly, because I

am convinced that in many ways Dubuffet and Sartre were diametrically opposed figures.

Whenever Dubuffet spoke about Existentialism he did so mockingly. In an interview printed in Vogue, May 1952, he openly insists that his paintings have nothing to do with the philosophical movement."* Sartre, in fact, amounts to a conspicuous absence in Dubuffet’s art and copious

writings. For example, Sartre’s likeness was not included in the series of portraits of literary figures that Dubuffet famously exhibited at the Galerie René Drouin in October of 1947 (plate 19). In Dubuffet’s voluminous correspondence with key members of the postwar literary elite Sartre’s name is rarely mentioned. One outstanding exception occurred after Dubuffet caught wind of the public debate between Sartre and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a writer whom Dubuffet greatly admired. In his 1946 Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre had charged Céline with anti-Semi-

tism and suggested that the controversial writer once worked for the Nazis. Shortly thereafter

Céline responded with “Agité du bocal;” a venomous essay in which he called Sartre a parasitic tapeworm. Ina letter to Jean Paulhan dated July 7, 1948, Dubuffet wrote: “I have re-read Céline’s marvelous text on Sartre 36 times. What a pleasure! . , . Sartre is a good for nothing little turd . . .

compared to the great Céline!” Conversely, Sartre, as far as I can tell, had little if any interest in

GREENBERG

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Dubuffet. In fact, in his large body of writing on postwar art the philosopher mentions Dubuffet only once, and this is in passing, in “Doigts et Non-Doigts.”” For Sartre, Wols, Giacometti, Masson, and perhaps even Genet embodied Existentialism—Dubuffet did not. I would like instead to take things in a slightly different direction. My interest in Greenberg's

interpretation of Dubuffet stems from something that begins to stick out like a sore thumb after one rereads Greenberg's article on Dubuffet and Existentialism; namely, the fact that Greenberg chooses to relate Dubuffet’s art back to a prewar novel—that is, Sartre’s Nausea. In so doing,

Greenberg glosses over the great historical (and literary) rupture caused by World War II, the Occupation, the Holocaust and its aftermath, suggests a seamless continuation between the preand postwar literary and artistic avant-gardes, and connects Dubuffet’s paintings toa novel, and hence the idea of narrativity. Greenberg, in short, associates Dubuffet’s work with histoire in

both senses of the French term—“history” and “narrative”—precisely, those two things Dubuffet spent his entire artistic career rejecting.

Greenberg fails to admit that the war radically disrupted the conventions of the French novel. To a certain extent, with the dréle de Guerre and the Occupation of France also came the

defeat of narrativity. Storytelling lost its way, or became disoriented, like the narrator in Saint Exupéry’s Night Flight (1944). Further, stories ceased to have clear-cut beginnings and endings,

and temporality was often fragmented or arrested,as in Julien Gracq’s Un Balcon en forét (1940). Perhaps Sartre himself could serve as our case and point. At the onset of the war Sartre began to write a three-part novel called The Roads to Freedom. Although the first two parts of it, The

‘Age of Reason and The Reprieve, did appear in September 1945, he never finished the final volume, tentatively titled The Last Chance. The manuscript for this project, as Annie Cohen-Solal has noted in her biography of Sartre, is riddled with instances in which Sartre repeatedly wrote and erased the words “The End.”?!

In Greenberg's Manichean universe painting either has “explicit subject matter” or it is

abstract. It either attempts to tell a story over time through “poetry” and “ideographs,” or it

presents itself immediately to the viewer. There is no middle ground. Similarly, Greenberg cannot conceive of a category of literature explicitly about nothing, or a species of writing which resists narrative, stresses the opacity of the signifier and the importance of the physical gesture, the manual trace—in short, precisely the kind of literature that emerged in postwar France in opposition to Sartre’s littérature engagée, a literature which became known in poststructural discourse as “écriture” in its many guises. Greenberg is correct in asserting Dubuffet’s work is deeply attuned to the literature of his time, but he wrongly assumes it is

Sartre's literature. If Dubuffet does indeed have “literary leanings” then they are undeniably

128 1 KENT MINTURN

towards this alternative form of postwar French literature. Take, for example, one of Dubuffet’s six

Messages (1944) (figure 30), in which legi-

bility is pushed to its limits, and narrative is

fragmented beyond recuperation. Noteworthy also is the fact that these hasty

scrawls are done on scraps of newspaper. It is literally a defacement, and effacement, of

journalistic writing, which is precisely the kind of writing Sartre would promote as

_30. Jean Dubuffet, Message: ¢a t'apprendra, June 1944. © 2005

committed literature. Art historian Sarah _ Fondation Dubuffet/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ Wilson has related Dubuffet’s Messagesand —_ ADAGP, Paris. overarching interest in graffiti to the French

resistance, and the broken forms of communication that were used to avoid detection in occu-

pied France.*? However, in my opinion we should be wary of giving into associations of this sort—Dubuffet was not a resistance figure (his politics were questionable at best and he made a

living selling wine to the Germans during the occupation), and these Messages do not successfully communicate anything. One reads, “That will teach you,” while another one says,‘I will wait

for you until 8:00 Come back.” Dubuffet’s Messages, it seems to me, are ultimately about the very

impossibility of communication and narrativity.’

While Greenberg was doubtless unaware of these small, obscure works, he most likely saw

Dubuffet’s series of lithographs exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York

(from Octo-

ber 10 to November 1, 1947). With their roughly incised lettering, Dubuffet’s handmade covers

for the catalog set the stage for many of the works featured in the show (figure 31). Several lith-

ographs, including Dactylographe (1944) contained bizarre typographical elements or illegible

textual fragments.” Tellingly, Greenberg never mentions a word about this show. Simply put, it represents the side of Dubuffet’s oeuvre that escapes Greenbergian aesthetics. However, one of Greenberg's contemporaries, the American critic Henry McBride, did see Dubuffet’s Lithogra-

phies exhibit at the Pierre Matisse Gallery and wrote a review in which he perspicaciously notes: The new collection of lithographs is so full of gaiety and charm and distinction that one is now tempted to conclude that lithography may eventually turn out to be [Dubuffet’s] true medium. Just what this charm is that he exerts is difficult to say but it is much the same

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sort of thing you get in the captivating poems of Jacques Prévert—a

genius whose lone friend in America seems to be myself for I never meet

anyone who has heard of him yet. If André Gide, Paul Valery and Paul Eluard

31. Jean Dubutfet, Front and back of the 1947 Lithographies catalogue, September 1947. © 2005 Fondation Dubuffet/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Pai

were

rolled into one and

proffered me in exchange for him, 1 wouldn’t accept Prévert, a former “dissident” Surrealist,

was also a playwright and collagist. In 1945 he published Paroles, a hodgepodge collection of poems, cabaret songs, and improvisational writings scribbled on the backs of envelopes, nap-

kins, and scraps of paper. Dubuffet was a great admirer of Prévert’s work, and at one point was

invited by the author to make a cover for Paroles.° For reasons that are still unclear, Prévert

eventually chose instead to use one Brassai’s photographs of Parisian graffiti. However, Dubuf-

fet and Prévert remained friends and shared the honor of becoming official members of the

College de Pataphysique (a secret society of avant-garde literary figures devoted to the preservation and celebration of Alfred Jarry’s legacy) around the same time in the early 1960s.”

Compared to Greenberg, McBride better understands Dubuffet’s relationship to postwar French literature. Prévert, along with two of Dubuffet’s other acquaintances, Antonin Artaud

and Henri Michaux, created what Jean Paulhan described, in direct opposition to Sartre, “Uncommitted Literature”—that is, texts which have nothing to do with “the great social and national conflicts that people have lately tended to bore us with.” Like Dubuffet, Artaud was

interested in illegible texts and graphic marks that fail to signify; his drawings done while interned at an insane asylum in Rodez, France, attest to this much.” In his popular collection of

writings, Theater and Its Double, he treats the human body as a kind of unreadable hieroglyph.” And his own performances often involved nonsensical words or sounds. Dubuffet captures the essence of Artaud’s undecipherable body language in his 1947 portrait entitled Antonin Artaud

aux Houppes (1947). The French writer and artist Henri Michaux is most often remembered for his experiments with mescaline and other mind-altering drugs in the mid-1950s, but he also

invented alphabets and practiced pseudo-writing, as demonstrated in his series of Alphabets done in 1947, In his text on Réquichot, Roland Barthes speaks about the birth of “special kind

of semiography ... illegible writing” which he rightly claims was initiated by Michaux, among

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others after the war.’ Both Artaud and Michaux we should recall, were admired

by many of the Abstract Expressionists,

and not surprisingly, they figured promi-

nently in the Abstract Expressionist artist-

run periodical, Tiger’s Eye*—which leads me to my next point.

Greenberg's misreading of Dubuffet's

work prevented it from being associated with a side of Abstract Expressionism with which it ultimately has much in common, for there exists within postwar American

painting a similar anti-narrative impulse,

a fascination with opaque graphic elements, pseudo-writing, and signs that fail

to signify. And while I am skeptical of any attempt to promote Abstract Expressionism asan international language,Idothink

32. Adolph Gottlieb, Letter to a Friend, 1948, oll, tempera, and

that it is possible to talk about the Ameri-

gouache on canvas, 47 7/8 x 36 1/2 In. (121.6 x 92.7 cm). Art

can and French avant-garde’s shared inter-__

© Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New

est ina sort of international non-language

—_York, NY.

that reflected the impossibility of narra-

tive during and after the war. For me this shared concern is evinced not only in the ideographic

elements in the Pollock paintings cited before, but also in other Abstract Expressionist works, including Mark Toby’s Transit (1948), David Smith’s Letter (1950), and Adolph Gottlieb’s Letter to a Friend (1948) (figure 32). Gottlieb, who once said “I have no desire to communicate with

everyone” and gave a lecture on the importance of “Unintelligibility” at the Museum of Mod-

ern Art on May 5, 1948, certainly did not want his work to be read in any traditional sense, or to tell a story.

This side of Abstract Expressionism is usually exoticized or primitivized and related to North-

west Coast Native American Indian art, mythic symbols, ancient archetypes, “Oriental” calligra-

phy, orit is simply deridedas retrograde Surrealism. However, those works listed above resist facile categorizations. Therefore it might be more helpful to consider these works as extreme examples of what Ann Gibson has called Abstract Expressionism’s

“evasion of language”:™ their collective

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33. Paul Klee, Abstract Script, 1931, ink on paper mounted on cardboard, 31/4 x em). Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG

8 in. (8.4.x 21.9 Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

goal seems to be evoking language for the sole purpose of more forcefully denying it. David Anfam is the only scholar who has seriously investigated Abstract Expressionism’s inherent resistance to narrative.** In his 1993 article “Interrupted Stories: Reflections on Abstract Expressionism and Narrative,” he shows how, in spite of the fact that many of the artists spoke about the need for immediate communication between the work and the viewer, the movement as a whole

emphasized “negation, difficulty, self-reflexive-ness, barriers, breaks, thresholds . .. and aporia.” He justifiably concludes, “Abstract Expressionism tells no genuine stories. If there ever were sustaining plots, then they yield to enigma.”*

While Greenberg never addresses this side of Abstract Expressionism directly, he dances

around it from time to time when he speaks of “the School of Klee,” or more frequently, Klee’s “poetry.”” Greenberg maintains that Dubuffet is a disciple of Klee, as are the “lesser” American Abstract Expressionists Gottlieb, Tobey, and Morris Graves. To some extent he is right, Klee, as

evinced in his Abstract Script of 1931 (figure 33), was also interested in invented alphabets, illegible writing, and meaningless signs. For Greenberg, “poetry” takes on negative connotations because, again, it stands for narrative’s intrusion into painting. However, for Barthes, writing

132 | KENT MINTURN

simultaneously in France, the word represents something positive. In Ecriture Dégree Zero, a

collection of essays begun in 1947 in direct response to Sartre's Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Barthes explains that “poetry” is a liberating force because it posits a reality that is personal and

ultimately impenetrable to history. If Dubuffet’s work does indeed contain poetry, then it is surely Barthes’s, not Greenberg's. In “Jean Dubuffet and ‘Art Brut,” Greenberg’s third and final article devoted exclusively to Dubuffet, the critic unwittingly opens the door to a more original and ultimately more profitable approach to Dubuffet’s art when he notes the artist’s proximity to the changing conven-

tions of the postwar French novel—or what has become known as the nouveau roman. Greenberg writes: “Dubuffet discovered art brut at a time when many advanced writers in France were begin-

ning to question the premises of literature itself as a cultivated discipline and some among,

them were attempting—as they still are—to bring the novel and short story closer to actual contemporary experience by stripping the narrative of its acquired conventions.””

Here, Greenberg leads up to, but never fully considers the possibility that Dubuffet’s overall postwar project might overlap with or even participate in this sea change in French literature. It was not until 1962 that the important American literary critic Wylie Sypher dedicated a chapter of his book Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art to Dubuffet and the rise of the

New Novel. Sypher argued that Dubuffet’s impersonal style and death-of-the-author stance

paralleled the new forms of subjectivity and narrative ambiguity found in contemporary

French novels. Dubuffet admired Sypher’s chapter so much he paid someone to translate it so that it could be published in an issue of the important French literary journal Les Cahiers de L’Herne (1973), dedicated to himself. This is a connection that warrants additional scholarly

attention, especially given the fact that Dubuffet was a close friend and avid reader of the Nobel

Prize-winning New Novelist Claude Simon. Their correspondence, which sheds light on both

Dubuffet’s interest in the New Novel, and Simon's interest in modern painting, was published in 1994.4!

I would like to conclude then by suggesting that there are three second-generation postwar

American artists—Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, and Ray Johnson—who clearly recognized a

side of Dubuffet that Greenberg willfully neglected. As is often the case, artists see what critics miss. Collectively their works stand as a demurral to Greenberg's call for a division between art and literature, and as such go against his reading of Dubuffet as a simple illustrator of Existen-

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tialism. Instead they chose to highlight Dubuffet’s graphic side, his interest in illegible writing, and his rejection of nar-

rativity. One of the earliest examples of this is

Oldenburg's nearly illegible homage to Dubuffet “I Think Your Work Looks a Lot Like Dubuffet” (1960) (figure 34). Oldenburg, who was in the audience at Dubuffet’s

famous “Anti-Cultural Positions” lecture at 34, Claes Oldenburg, / Think Your Work Looks a Lot Like Dubuffet,

the Arts Club of Chicago, February 1951,

1960, pencil on paper, 11 3/4 x 9 In. (29.8 x 22.9cm). Collection

—_ was keenly aware of Dubuffet the writer

of the artist. Image courtesy of Kent Minturn.

and theorist. This work, enclosed within its

own meandering line, strikes the viewer as

a kind of closed-circuit conversation, or better yet, an inside joke between Oldenburg and the subject of his “anxiety of influence.” It suggests that Dubuffet’s true legacy is literary, not painterly—conceptual, not material. In reality it is likely that this sentence was frequently mut-

tered in Oldenburg’s presence. Oldenburg’s work then could be accurately described as a literal transcription of the spoken word. This is something that Dubuffet was extremely interested in as

well, to the point that he create a series of so-called textes en jargon, or books written in French

so orthographically incorrect they have to be read aloud—performed—to be understood. A year before this Oldenburg completed an ink-on-paper work, Dubuffet-Céline-Frenchmen (1959), which associated Dubuffet with a twentieth-century French writer whose use of slang, the first person, and tortured narrative challenged the French novel more than any other author. Dubuffet was with Céline’s widow when he first saw Oldenburg’s work in October of 1969, at the

Museum of Modern Art, New York. Immediately afterward Dubuffet wrote a letter to Oldenburg and professed how “touching” it was to discover his “own name associated with the great writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline”?

Cy Twombly, like several other second-generation postwar American artists, is extremely cognizant of the history of art, and his place within it. He purposefully positioned himselfat the end

of a line of important modernists, including Manet and Picasso, when he decided to resuscitate

the theme of Olympia in 1955. The last artist to do this before him was Dubuffet,in 1950. Twombly astutely recognized the inherent horizontality of Dubuffet’s Olympia, and its affinities to what Leo

Steinberg has famously described as the “flatbed picture plane,” which is to say, “a surface on which

134 1 KENT MINTURN

35. Cy Twombly, Criticism, 1955, oll, crayon and pencil on canvas, 50 x 57 7/8 In. (127 x 147 cm). © Cy Twombly. Image courtesy of Kent Minturn,

objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed,

impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.” What Twombly chose to borrow from Dubuf-

fet then was not his particular depiction of the female nude, but rather the work’s conceptual thrust, which plays itself out on the horizontal vector of writing. But, as Barthes reminds us,

Twombly’s marks never become writing per se, he simply uses them to create a field that alludes to writing.“ For art critic Robert Pincus-Witten these marks represent a rejection of the heroic

painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism, in the face of which Twombly had no other choice

GREENBERG MISREADING DUBUFFET | 135

but to start with “elemental beginnings” and

“learn to write again” For me, however,

Twombly’s marks are not as much an outright rejection of Abstract Expressionism as they are

a recognition and perpetuation of something always already present within in it. Less obvious

perhaps is a connection that I think can be

made between Dubuffet’s artistic legacy and

Twombly’s work Criticism (figure 35), which

above all seems to mock the critic’s inability to write about pseudo-writing, or writing that sig-

nifies nothing. Twombly’s inscriptions solicit deciphering, only to repeatedly frustrate it. As

the eminent art historian Hubert Damisch has suggested in his discussion of the unreadable

panels in an anonymous Renaissance Citta ide-

ale, examples of simulated writing in painting function as an absence of representation and

signal the impossibility of ekphrasis, narrative closure, and aesthetic judgment—which is to

say art historical writing itself. Dubuffet constantly challenged

the idea

that

painting

needed to be described or translated into lan-

36. Ray Johnson, Jean Dubuffet Fan Club, 1988. Estate of Ray Johnson, courtesy Richard L. Felgen & Co., New York.

guage before it could be understood. For exam-

ple, in a text entitled “Envoi” which appeared in the aforementioned issue of Les Cahiers

T'Herne, Dubuffet reminds us that a work of art should resist eluci

tion “so that every attempt to

precisely interpret it will not affect its power to intrigue and disorient.” In the end “it should

remain (even for the author himself) a question and not a response.” The desire to remain obscure and challenge critics and potential interpreters resides at the core of Abstract Expression-

ism as well. We need only to recall the title of the early Abstract Expressionist exhibit organized by

Howard Putzel in May of 1945—A Problem for Critics."

And finally, there is a bizarre little book by American artist Ray Johnson, Jean Dubuffet Fan

Club (1988) (figure 36), roughly the same size as Dubuffet’s first handmade book of phonetic

136 | KENT MINTURN

writing, Ler Dla Canpane (1947). Jean Dubuffet Fan Club contains an absurdist, nonsensical dialog between Johnson and Clive Phillpot, wherein Dubuffet’s name is mentioned along with

William Blake's and Mickey Mouse’s (tacitly, Johnson suggests the three are kindred spirits—

like Blake, Dubuffet effectively combined word and image in his art, and like Mickey, he was able to tap into an uniquely American cult of childhood). As such, the book stands as the record of a spontaneous oral exchange, “which took place in the formal garden at the Nassau County

Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn New York, on September 21, 1986, at 2:00 p.m.” Once again writing is subordinated to the spoken word. In 1973 Johnson established “The New York Correspondence School” and began to practice what has since become known as “Mail Art.” Johnson’s

artful correspondences were in many ways prefigured by Dubuffet’s own. Dubuffet, the artisteépistoliare extraordinaire, exchanged frivolously illustrated letters with Pierre Bettencourt, Florence Gould, Alain Pauzié, and Gaston Chaissac, among others.* In fact, letter writing was the only genre of literature that Dubuffet truly appreciated. In a letter to his friend Jacques Berne,

whom he once reprimanded for wanting to write novels, Dubuffet explained: “letters have an improvisational character (like a drawing) (like a footprint in the sand) that is why I like them, but never keep them.”>' In the end, these three American artists—Oldenburg, Twombly, and Johnson—celebrate a

side of Dubuffet that Clement Greenberg's interpretation closed off—a side which was in fact

very international, and one which had much in common with Abstraction Expressionism. They demonstrate, ironically, that Dubuffet’s postwar production was indeed “a revolt against the dominance of literature,” and accordingly, conforms to Greenberg's narrow definition of avantgarde art.

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Abstract Expressionism’s Italian Reception: Questions of Influence ATR,

OenAL

roy

i here is no question that New York School Abstract Expressionism has ied had a profound and global influence. Its impact was vast, with absorption and adaptation by artists as culturally and geographically diverse as Japan’s Gutai group, Cobra’s Asger Jorn, and Cuban painter Guido Llinds. This multifaceted and lasting stimulus is

certainly one of the greatest successes of American painting, and the hegemony of Abstract

Expressionism at midcentury has long been a central pillar of narratives of twentieth-century

art.

The means by which Abstract Expressionism came to dominate the discourse of midcentury

painting, however, were not uniformly benevolent or self-propelling, In the 1970s, the modernist

chronicle of Abstract Expressionism—most notably promoted by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried—gave way to a new body of scholarship that sought to reread midcentury American painting as part of the larger complex of forces that informed the whole of midcentury America. The most notable, and confrontational, element introduced into the discourse was that of politics. Scholars such as Max Kozloff, Eva Cockcroft, and David and Cecile Shapiro defied the

previous generation’s formalist and autonomous readings of Abstract Expressionism, placing the movement squarely within the context of the Cold War,! revealing channels of power and influence operated behind the global travels of the new American painting. Whether or not Abstract Expressionism was one of the most successful weapons of the Cold War or, for that matter, the extent to which the artists themselves participated in these maneuverings is still hotly contested. Serge Guilbaut’s 1983 How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art:

Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War continues to provoke impassioned responses

R. GeSs4 load ee SIAN

over two decades after its first publication, and Michael Kimmelman’s “Revisiting the Revision-

ists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War” pointedly reveals a number of inaccuracies

promulgated by Cockcroft and taken as fact by those who followed. This revising of the revisionists has made plain the dangers of assumption and generalization inherent in the writing of the history of Abstract Expressionism and has further emphasized the care with which these narratives must be constructed.

One of the most troubling aspects of these revisionist narratives is perspective. They are built, with Guilbaut as the noteworthy exception, from the American point of view. This is not

the least bit unnatural or unexpected, as their stated and unstated goals are to contextualize

midcentury American painting within the larger machinations of the Cold War. However, if we are to think of Abstract Expressionism as a global language, we must certainly attempt to understand it from the perspectives of others. Transmission involves two parties, and American nar-

ratives of Abstract Expressionism have rarely sought to view things from the audience’s position.

Instead, it is often assumed that international audiences welcomed it with open arms and

unrelenting acceptance, as indicated by the following statement by David and Cecile Shapiro:

Visits to these exhibitions [the Biennali of 1948 and 1950], furthermore, were among the first opportunities Europeans had after World War II to see the work of contemporary Americans. Artists from countries that had been living under Fascism, like Italy and Germany, had not even been permitted to see modern art, American or otherwise, in decades.

Their response to ... what was shown from a vivid and lusty America, was immense. Indeed, their needs tended to make them sympathetic with whatever the new art they saw and to do their utmost to identify with it

Certainly, Abstract Expressionism presented a new, and often exciting, visual language. But it is equally certain that its reception was not ofa single, universally affirmative nature. While the

Shapiros’ statements that modernism was a new phenomenon in countries like Italy and Ger-

many are correct, the implication that Abstract Expressionism was exported to a European cultural tabula rasa is not. Moreover, the assumption that all European artists were quick to identify with—and, thus, absorb and/or emulate—their American counterparts is similarly

incorrect. This understanding of the European reception of Abstract Expressionism is, at best, schematic and essentializing, suggesting as it does, that Europe presented a unified appetite for

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this new genre of abstraction. Left unchallenged, it leads to a discourse contoured by the dangerously imperialist structures of center and periphery. If we are to truly understand Abstract

Expressionism’s global context and reception, we must shift our line of questioning, Instead of sculpting the discourse in terms of how Abstract Expressionism was mobilized as part of Amer-

ican Cold War policy—how it served as a weapon of the Cold War or how New York stole the idea of modern art—we must now come to terms with those on the receiving endof this equation. Instead of asking how it was that Abstract Expressionism was constructed and presented to European audiences, we now need also to ask what sort of audiences were in place when Abstract Expressionism began to arrive in Europe in the late-1940s and how the socio-cultural

and political contexts of these audiences may or may not have encouraged the understanding intended by those who sent it there.

Methodologically, this approach to the reception of Abstract Expressionism by European

audiences has been heralded by alterity politics.* Whereas identity politics thematizes the other

in terms of similarities with the self, alterity politics considers identity as responsive first and foremost to the other. These first studies of Abstract Expressionism’s position within the Cold

War and its reception during this period—that is, the work of Kozloff, Cockcroft, and the Shapiros—have structured themselves as does identity politics, affording all powers of agency and determination to the American subject, leaving the European (and Japanese and Central

and South American counterparts) other stripped of any active position in these acts of transmission and generation of meaning. It is imperative to reorient these investigations along the

lines of alterity politics, returning to non-American audiences their agency and recognizing the

complex of issues specific to their own contexts that may have structured their understanding of the new American painting.

European nations, whether or not they had endured decades of Fascist isolation, brought

to the postwar period rich artistic traditions, ideals, and innovations. Many had nurtured

experimental and avant-garde artists that had sustained themselves during the arid years of Fascism, absorbing whatever news or information of modernism that could be smuggled in. With

the fall of these Fascist regimes, these progressive artists endeavored to revitalize the artistic

spirits of their respective nations. Their sources of inspiration and reaction were the same prewar avant-gardes that provoked the New York School to its own revolutions. The issues with which they would contend were often similar, if not identical, to those being negotiated by their American contemporaries. And, the art they would produce would manifest an experimental-

ism similar to that of American Abstract Expressionism.

Of these European nations, Italy offers one of the most illustrative examples for an under-

140 | ADRIAN R. CYEAN

standing of the Cold War context into which American Abstract Expressionism was received.

Not only had Italy been, as the Shapiros have duly noted, “living under fascism,” but it was both a recipient of Marshall Plan aid and one of the strongest footholds of Western European Communism.

Moreover, it was one of the first European nations to encounter the New York

School—as early as the 1947 arrival of Peggy Guggenheim to Venice and, subsequently, at the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennali and the 1950 Jackson Pollock exhibit at Venice's Museo Correr. A more pointed study of the Italian circumstance will thus serve to illuminate not only the

transmission of Abstract Expressionism during the years of the Cold War, but its reception and, perhaps as tellingly, its competition in the arena of postwar abstraction. Postwar Italy is not entirely absent from the current discourse of midcentury painting.

Marcia E. Vetrocq's 1989 study “National Style and the Agenda for Abstract Painting in PostWar Italy” offersa thorough introduction to the terms of Italy’s indigenous discourse in the late-

1940s and 1950s.5 Most importantly, Vetrocq asserts the autochthonous nature of Italian

abstraction during this period, pointedly critiquing the ways in which previous accounts of

Abstract Expressionism’s European travels “leave intact an erroneous image of Italy and much of Europe as a cultural colony of the United States, hapless and historically rootless . . Ameri-

can art did not fill an intellectual vacuum, but was absorbed into an older, much larger, and more complex debate about the nature of modern art in Italy.”*

More recently, Jeremy Lewison’s 1999 “Jackson Pollock and the Americanization of Europe,” attends more closely to the reception of this single artist by the individual and specific audiences of England, France, and Italy.’ Lewison is quick to note that “the European responses to exhibitions of American art differed from nation to nation,”* an acknowledgment that does

much to move the discourse away from the homogenizing impulses of the 1970s and 1980s.

Admirable as his intentions and results may be, Lewison is rather quick in his account of events prior to 1958, at which point the Museum of Modern Art's Jackson Pollock retrospective and

The New American Painting arrived in Rome and Milan, respectively.

This treatment undermines the importance of the immediate postwar period, especially

1948-50, during which Italy first encountered Abstract Expressionism and the moment at which the indigenous Italian debates about modernism and abstraction were at their most heated. These debates were often centered upon the Venice Biennale, at which the newest and

most widely representative sampling of art was brought together in a single location. Each Biennale would reflect the whole of the Italian art discourse, and the debates that would surround these individual exhibitions would reveal not only the ways in which the new art was being received by Italian audiences, but also the critical biases that informed these responses.

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The 1948 Venice Biennale was the first such event in six years, the first since the end of the war, and the first since the fall of Fascism. It was also Italy’s first opportunity to acquaint itself with European and American modernism, which had been substantially absent during Mussolini’s twenty-two-year reign. The exhibition’s organizers sought to include as many interna-

tional examples of modernism as possible, but also place Italy's own contributions to twentieth-century art at center stage. The assembled works represented artists as diverse as the Impressionists and Turner, Moore and Magritte, and the various faces of midcentury American

painting?

The United States’ pavilion, managed by the Museum of Modern Art, included seventy-

nine artists, including William

Baziotes, Arshile Gorky,

Jacob Lawrence,

Mark

Rothko,

Theodoros Stamos, and Mark Tobey.'° The presence of the young generation of Abstract Expressionism has been noted by a number of scholars, including Cockcroft, David and Cecile

Shapiro, and Lewison. But these scholars hardly discuss the way these works were received. Rather, there is the implication that the presence of the New York School had a formative impact upon the Italian art world and was an impetus, as the Shapiros would have us believe, to con-

version and imitation. What actually happened was much less decisive. The critical discourse was oriented in other directions. In fact, the American submission to that year’s Biennale seems

to have been largely overlooked by Italian critics.

The July 1948 issue of Ulisse included a number of thematic reviews of the Venice Biennale,

including texts by important critics Giulio Carlo Argan, Umbro Apollonio, and Giuseppe Mar-

chiori. Italo Faldi, who would later in 1975 succeed the great Palma Bucarelli as director of Rome's Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, attended to works by foreign artists in his submis-

sion “Le personali straniere.” Its focus was exclusively on French and German trends and it says nothing at all about the American pavilion or any of its artists.’ Faldi was not alone, and artist/critic Renato Guttuso’s two-part review of the Biennale for Rinascita was also silent about the American contribution.”? Like Faldi, Guttuso’s discussion of non-Italian artists focused

overwhelmingly on French painters.

Giorgio Castelfranco’s review of the Biennale in the October-December 1948 Bollettino d arte is the exception to this trend. Unlike most of his peers, Castelfranco dedicated some space

to the American pavilion, of which he wrote:

In the United States [pavilion], there is a group of painters, very simple and clear of material, with sonorous color, even if a bit Technicolor. They are spatially clear, even if a bit with-

out metaphysical profundity and interesting for the frank—and I do not mean this

142 | ADRIAN R. DURAN

disparagingly—posterlike quality of their images. I point them out: P. Blume, R. Gwath-

mey, Ch. Sheeler, N. Spencer, not well known in Italy, but already collected by American museums." His article even included a reproduction of Blume’s Parade, but no image or mention of any of

the young Abstract Expressionists included in the pavilion.

Lest it seem that these Italian reviewers were willfully ignorant of the American contribution to the Biennale, we must also note the presence of the collection of Peggy Guggenheim at

the exhibition, on display at the Greek Pavilion. Guggenheim had taken up residence in Venice the previous year and she brought with her one of the most important collections of modernist

art that the nation would ever see. Moreover, Guggenheim’s collection contained a significant

number of early works by Abstract Expressionist painters, including Baziotes, Gorky, Mother-

well, Pollock, Rothko, Sobel, and Still, and thus offered the newest of the new at that year’s Bien-

nale. Remarkably, beyond Guggenheim’s mention of “young American artists,” neither she nor Giulio Carlo Argan mentioned this young generation in either of their essays for the Biennale catalogue.'> They, like Guttuso, Faldi, and even Castelfranco, instead emphasized the vari-

ous movements of European modernism.

These earlier Modernist movements, particularly those that embraced more advanced forms of abstraction, dominated the critical discourse surrounding the Biennale. Italy, after all, had been substantially distanced from most of these innovations, and the 1948 Biennale was their first opportunity for a direct encounter. Not unexpectedly, much of the debate centered upon these languages of abstraction and the relative merits or pitfalls of continuing in such directions. Italy, like the United States, found itself transitioning from nationalism to internationalism, and the future of Italian painting was a primary concern.'*

The Biennale commission placed its hopes for the future in one of Italy’s new avant-garde groups, I] Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (The New Front of the Arts).!” Founded in Venice in October 1946 as the Nuova Secessione Artistica Italiana (The New Italian Artistic Secession), the

group settled on its final name in November and had begun a series of preparations for its pre-

mier exhibition at Milan’s Galleria della Spiga on June 12, 1947. The exhibition united twelve of Italy’s young, postwar generation: painters Renato Birolli, Antonio Corpora, Renato Guttuso, Ennio Morlotti, Armando sculptors

Pericle

Fazzini,

Pizzinato, Giuseppe Santomaso, Giulio Turcato, and Emilio Vedova, Nino

Franchina,

and

Alberto Viani, and ceramicist

Leoncillo

Leonardi.

‘The Fronte Nuovo was stylistically heterogeneous, drawing from the totality of prewar

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM’S ITALIAN RECEPTION

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37. Armando Pizzinato, The Defenders of the Factories, 1948, oll on faesite, 26 3/8 x 38 5/8 In. (67 x 98 cm). Gi Internazionale d’Arte Moderna, Ca’ Pesaro, Venice.

modernism, integrating and hybridizing the possibilities newly available to artists in postwar Italy. Some, like Emilio Vedova and Armando Pizzinato, engaged an energetic idiom characterized by vibrant colorism, curvilinear geometries, and a propensity for fracturing the picture plane into sharp, triangular and scythe shaped fragments. Works such as Vedova’s The Hurricane and Pizzinato’s The Defenders of the Factories (figure 37) both exhibited at the Biennale, reveal their debt to Futurist aesthetics. Others, such as Renato Birolli and Renato Guttuso, were

employing a more representational language, closely linked to the School of Paris, evident in Birolli’s Landscape-Breton Port of 1947 (figure 38) and Guttuso’s Washer Woman of 1947.

These affinities with earlier moments in European modernism are worth consideration,

particularly in counterpoint to an American discourse that sought to assert its own innovation

and independence. The Fronte Nuovo took Picasso's Guernica as its beacon."* This was demon-

strated in their dual initiatives of engaged politicism and formal innovation. Many of the artists

of the Fronte Nuovo had fought in the Italian resistance, and they al nurtured strongly anti-

144 | ADRIAN R. DURAN

38. Renato Birolli, Landscape—Breton Port, 1947, oll on paper, 25 3/8 x 18 1/4 In. (64.5 x 46.5 cm). Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, Venice. permission of the Ministero per| Beni e le Attivita Cutturall.

Fascist and Leftist politics.” They thus found the ideals of Guernica profoundly sympathetic to their efforts for a new art in a post-Fascist Italy newly exposed to the breakthroughs of modernist painting. These allegiances imbued the Fronte Nuovo with a distinctly political character. In fact, the

entirety of the Italian art world was, and would continue to be, profoundly politicized. Whereas, according to Guilbaut, Cockcroft et al., art and politics were being separated in the American

art world (if only to see the art produced swiftly embroidered into the fabric of American Cold

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM’S ITALIAN RECEPTION

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War rhetoric),2" in the Italian art world art of every stylistic persuasion was becoming overtly political.

The impact of such politicization would become abundantly clear in November of 1948, on

the occasion of the Prima Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Contemporanea (First National Exhibition of

Contemporary Art) sponsored by Bologna’s Alleanza della Cultura. In the November issue of Rinascita, the head of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Palmiro Togliatti, published a one-

paragraph review of the Bologna exhibition:

It is a collection of monstrous things.

How does one describe as “art,” and even “new

art” this stuff, and how can one find . . .so many good people willing to confirm ... this exposition of horrors and stupidities as an artistic event? Let us speak the truth ... none of

them believe or feel any among these scribblings . .. to be works of art. ... Have courage!

. - Say that the Emperor wears no clothes; and that scribbling is scribbling.2!

By “scribblings,” Togliatti most certainly means abstraction, which was thus deemed unacceptable, at least from the standpoint of the Italian Communist Party, of which many of these artists were members.” This engendered an immediate and irreconcilable conflict of interest. The Fronte Nuovo, and with it an entire generation of artists, found itself caught in the middle.

Togliatti’s jeremiad instantly polarized Italy’s art world, a rupture that would condition the discourse for at least a decade. This call to order was but a single manifestation of the larger machi-

nations taking place in Italy during the late 1940s, as the chill of the Cold War descended upon

the peninsula.

The previous year, Alcide De Gasperi, the head of the Christian Democratic party (DC),

had secured $100 million as part of the Marshall Plan and, in the 1948 elections, the DC heartily

defeated and subsequently marginalized both the Socialist and Communist parties. The PCI, which had played a

vital role in the Resistance against Fascism and Nazi invasion, felt itself

threatened and responded with a number of declarations and actions, the most representative of which was the March 1, 1948 “For the Salvation of Italian Culture,” which situated the party as the victim of a “reactionary offensive,” the objectives of which were “to suffocate every tendency of progressive culture in an effort toward the true and literal colonization of Italian cul-

ture on the part of groups dominated by American imperialism.” It was within this increasingly contentious political landscape that Togliatti issued his attack on abstraction, and it was this polemical extremism that provided the backdrop for the arrival of American Abstract

Expressionism.

146 | DORIAN R, DURAN

1. Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955, oil on canvas, 80 x 80 in. (201.9 x 201.9 cm). Gift of the Society for Contemporary Art. The Art Institute of Chicago. Photograph © The Art institute of Chicago.

2. Vasily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (Second Version), 1912, oil on canvas, 43 7/8 x 63 7/8 in, (114.4 x 162.1 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Gift, Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1937. 37.239. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

3. Hans Hot 1ann, Afterglow, 1938, oil on fiberboard, 30 x 36 in. (76.2 x 91.5 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Patricia and Phillip Frost. 1986.92.58.

4. Willem de Kooning, Gotham News, 1955, oll on canvas, 69 x 79 in. (175.3 x 200.7 cm). Collection Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1955. © 2005 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

‘5. Barnett Newman, Onement|, 1948, oll ‘on canvas, 27 1/4 x 16 1/4 in. (69.2 x 41.3 cm). Gift of Annalee Newman. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2005

Barnett

Newman

Foundataion/

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

6. Bamett Newman, Vir Heroicus Submis, 1950-51, oll on canvas, 7ft. 11.3/8 In, x47 ft. 9 4/4 in, (2.92 x 5.4 m). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. Digital image © The Museum of Modem Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2005 Barnett Newman Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

7. Guido Llinds, Untitled, 1958, oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 21 in. (72.4 x 53.3 cm). Col lection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Donation from the Cuban Museum of the Americas, Bequest of the Rafael Casalins Estate. 8. Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950, enamel on canvas, 105 x 207 in, (266.7 x 525.8 cm). The Metropolltan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1957 (57.92). Photograph © 1998 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. © 2005 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

9, Raul Martinez, Untitled, 1958, oll on canvas, 23 1/2 x 28 3/4 in. (59.7 x73 cm). Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami. Donation from the Cuban Museum of the Americas, Bequest of the Rafael Casalins Estat

10. Lev Kropivnitsky, Outer Galactic Galaxy, 1960, oll on linen, 27 1/4 x 17.4/2 In. (69 x 44.5 cm). Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photograph by Jack Abraham. 05209. 11. Alexander Bandzeladze, Untitled, 1983, oll on canvas, 55 1/8 x 46 7/8 in. (140 x 119 cm). Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photograph by Jack Abraham. 06048.

12, Mikhail Chernyshov, Untitled, 1962, gouache and collage on paper. Collection of the artist. Courtesy of the Gallery Sandmann.

13. Lydia Masterkova, Untitled, 1966, oil and fabric collage on canvas, 27 3/4 x 35 3/4 in. (70.5 x 91 em). Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photograph by Jack Abraham. 06386.

14, Vladimir Nemukhin, Still Life with Cards, 1965, oil, playing cards and mixed media collage on canvas, 28 1/8x 37 3/4 In. (71.4 x 96 cm). Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photograph by Jack Abraham. 06499.

15. Gia Edzgveradze, Wall of My Childhood, 1986, oil, paper collage, sawdust and cement on canvas, 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in. (200 x 200 cm). Collection of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum. Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photograph by Jack m. 05914. Abr

16. Asger Jorn, The Top of the World— or Gay Day, “Modification,” 1960, oi on canvas, 12 3/4 x 16 in. (32.5 x 40.5 cm). Collection of Jacqueline de Jong (modification made by Asger Jorn on a painting which Jacqueline de Jong found in Belgium and gave to Asger Jorn). Amsterdam. © 2005 fam. Jom/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/COPY-DAN, Copenhagen.

17. Asger Jorn, A Soul for Sale, 1958-589, oll on canvas, 79 x 98 3/4 in. (200 x 250 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Purchased with funds contributed by the Evelyn Sharp Foundation, 1983. 83.3040. © 2005 fam. Jon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/COPY-DAN, Copenhagen.

18. Jackson Pollock, Stenographic Figure, 1942, oll on linen, 40 x 56 in. (101.5 x 142.2 cm). Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bareiss Fund. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2005 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

19. Jean Dubutfet, Superveille, Large Banner Portrait, 1945, oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 38 1/4 in. (130.2 x 97.2 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Maurice E. Culberg. The Art Institute of Chicago. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago. © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

20. Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept: Expectations, 1958, oll on canvas,

incisions, 49 1/4 x 39 5/8 In. (125.1 x 100.6 cm). Photo: Jacques Faujour. CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource,

NY. Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. Fondazione Lucio Fontana-Milano.

21, Jackson Pollock, Number 7, 1950, enamel paint on canvas, 23 in. x 9 ft. 13/8 in. (70.58 x 2.77 m). Gift of Sylvia Slifka in honor of William Rubin. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © 2006 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

22. Kazuo Shiraga painting with his feet at the 2nd Gutai Exhibition in Tokyo, October 1956. Copyright Kazuo Shiraga and the former members of the Gutal Art Association. Courtesy Ashiya City Museum of Art and History.

23. Jose Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization: Gods of the Modern World (Panel 12), 1932-34, fresco. Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

24. Norman W. Lewis, Metropolitan Crowd, 1946, oil on canvas, 18 x 40 in. (45.7 x 101.6 cm). Delaware Art Museum, Louisa du Pont Copeland Memorial Fund and partial gift of Ouida B. Lewis in memory of Harvey W. Singleton, 1994 DAM# 1994-48, courtesy of landor Fine Arts, Newark, DE.

It would be two years later, in 1950, that Abstract Expressionism would make another,

stronger foray into the Italian exhibition schedule. That summer's Venice Biennale saw an effort to include those aspects of prewar modernism that its predecessor had not. This not only brought works by Rousseau, Seurat, Matisse, the Blaue Reiter, the Mexican muralists, Consta-

ble, and Hepworth, but it included a more pointed glimpse of Abstract Expressionist canvases

by Gorky, Pollock, and de Kooning, Not unexpectedly, the presence of these three painters has been a constant point of reference in accounts of American painting's travels to Europe, noted by Cockcroft, Lewison, and Guilbaut, the last of whom described it as one of “the early signs of triumph.”* David and Cecile Shapiro make of these twelve paintings—which, it must be noted,

were outnumbered nearly six to one by paintings by Marin, Bloom, Gatch, and Lebrun—the

first victory in the campaign to conquer Europe: “Large numbers of artists swung over to Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s, thus contributing to the force of the movement they

were joining because they could not beat it.”* Though Abstract Expressionism would certainly have its influence, the reverberations may not have been quite as seismic as insinuated by these accounts.

Catherine Viviano, who had previously served as Pierre Matisse’s assistant and was then

running her own galleries in Rome and New York, was quoted as stating “They [the Italian artists] loved his [Pollock’s] work ... They recognized immediately what a great artist he was.”

Giorgio Morandi was similarly excited, exclaiming, “Now this is new. Such vitality, such energy!” Clearly, the works made an impression. However, this should be tempered by a few other statements by Morandi, who described de Kooning’s Excavation as “a little forced,” and not only called Gorky “a little French,” but also “Un po’ sordo. He's a little tone deaf.”*

To this should be appended the report of Time magazine's Alexander Eliot, who claimed

that “U.S. Painting did not seem to be making much ofa hit abroad .. . At Venice’s ‘Biennale, the

U.S. pavilion (Featuring the wild and wooly abstractions of Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock)

was getting the silent treatment from the critics.””? Eliot was not entirely correct in this generalization, and Giorgio Castelfranco again provides the exception. However, Castelfranco’s attention to the U.S. pavilion was not comprehensive. He claims that “we would have preferred amore varied collection, and perhaps in part retrospective, since nineteenth-century American. painting interests us, as does the rest of American society of the past century, while at the same

time it does not seem to me that Marin, notwithstanding the fifty-eight pieces exhibited,

emerges as an artistic phenomenon of importance.” Again, it was not an overwhelmingly positive review, and, again, there was no mention of the New York School. Given recent events within Italy's own art world, that neither the U.S. pavilion nor the

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM’S ITALIAN RECEPTION

| 147

works by Pollock, de Kooning, and Gorky it contained were headline news ought not be surprising. Perhaps the most important reason as to why the American presence at the 1950 Biennale was overlooked was that the Italian art world was in the midst of a civil war. Togliatti’s interventions of two years prior had caused a violent rupture in Italy's postwar avant-garde. The Fronte Nuovo was one of the most visible casualties, disintegrating in March 1950 as its artists were forced to proclaim their allegiances to either abstraction or realism.*! That summer’s Biennale

was entirely preoccupied with the recent emergence of Neo-Realism, particularly as it evidenced a return to figuration by many ex-abstract painters, Armando Pizzinato most conspicuous among them.”?

Pizzinato, whose abstractions at the previous Biennale were met with great approval,’ had

undergone a remarkable change and submitted three works that heralded his return to a Com-

munist-themed Neo-Realism: Land, Not War, A Specter Is Haunting Europe, and The Defenders of the Factories, all of 1949-50. The last of these, which shared a title and subject with one of his

submissions to the 1948 Biennale, maintains his proclivity towards fractured planes and energetic geometries, but the pair of workers in blue jumpsuits and the none-too-subtle hammer and sickle clearly mark this as a different mode of painting. Pizzinato was joined in his response to Togliatti’s call by Renato Guttuso, Giuseppe Zigaina, Mario Mafai, and others. Their unified

front and direct engagement with the subjects and problems of postwar Italy garnered a great deal of support and critical attention. More often than not, they were set in opposition to the equally vibrant developments in Italian abstraction.

Pizzinato’s work stands in contrast to Vedova’s Europe 1950 (figure 39) the chaotic geome-

tries of which embody the damaged, postwar Europe in which it was created. Vedova has com-

pletely eliminated color and focused upon the harshly complex skeleton of forms and lines, intensifying his abstraction at the very same moment his fellow Venetian and former compatriot in the Fronte Nuovo was sublimating his own. Others, including Corpora, Santomaso, and Birolli, mediated their abstraction with visual referents and residual subject matter. Ultimately,

these battles between abstraction and realism, in the art and its surrounding discourse, dominated the 1950 Biennale and would continue to be one of the central topics of the Italian art discourse for the rest of the decade.

This, however, does not mean that Italian and American painting existed in total isola-

tion. In fact, it was during that same summer of 1950 that Abstract Expressionism made its first noteworthy headway into the Italian consciousness. The event was the Jackson Pollock

retrospective held at Venice's Museo Correr, which has played a central part in the artist’s reception in Europe.” It was, after all, the motivation for Bruno Alfieri’s now famous review,

148 | ADRIAN R. DURAN

reprinted in Time magazine, which led to Pollock’s even more famous response: “No chaos damn it.”

More recently, this exhibition was the motivation for two 2002 exhibitions, also at the Museo Correr: Jackson Pollock a Venezia and Gli “Irascibili” e la Scuola di New York. These two exhibitions motivated a return to their predecessor, and the accompanying catalogue is cer-

tainly aware of the place of the 1950 exhibition in Pollock history and hagiography. In his essay,

Giandomenico Romanelli resurrects a September 8, 1950, review by P. A. Quarantotti Gambini

published in Milan’s I! Tempo di Milano, mobilizing it as proof of Pollock's excited and welcoming reception. That Quarantotto Gambini was intrigued is certain, and he went so far as to call it “not a negligible conquest,” but Pollock’s conquest was graduated and certainly not total.

Romanelli is quick to gloss over Gambini’s list of the annoyed reactions of many members of the visiting public, and he does not mention at all what negative criticism did exist. Venice’s city

newspaper I! Gazzettino seems to have totally ignored the exhibition, and the journal Minosse

called Pollock “the typical product of the degeneration of capitalist culture, who expresses the materiality of his idleness.”>”

This sort of a response was not unusual in Italy’s newly polemicized art discourse. More

often than not, one can anticipate that the response of a critic will be in accordance with their political affiliation, with Communists and Rightist conservatives generally opposed to nonfigurative art and non-Communist Leftists and other liberals if not explicitly in favor, at least

willing to consider. One byproduct was a correlation of cultural origin with reception, which

often caused American art to be viewed, as evidenced in the Minosse review, as imperialist and

emblematic of capitalist society. By the following Biennale, the American pavilion seems to have lost its proclivities towards

Abstract Expressionism. Instead, Davis, Hopper, Kuniyoshi, and Calder represented the United States.** Calder, in fact, won the grand prize for sculpture. By this point, however, the artists who

had once formed the Fronte Nuovo were mature painters and were accordingly awarded the focused exhibitions that the Biennale afforded as recognition of establishment. Guttuso and Birolli were both given “anthological exhibitions,” and Vedova, Corpora, Morlotti, Santomaso, Turcato, and Pizzinato all had smaller, multi-work showings. Most importantly, the comparatively abstract works of Birolli, Afro, Vedova, Santomaso, Morlotti, Moreni, Turcato, and Cor-

pora, were brought together as “II Gruppo degli Otto” (The Group of the Eight) under the banner of Lionello Venturi. They were promoted by the critic as the most advanced proponents

of Italian painting and an exhibition toured Germany, situating the eight painters as central

players in European Informel.”*

150 | ADRIAN R. DURAN

As the decade developed, Abstract Expressionism continued to appear and

reappear in Ital-

ian exhibitions. Perhaps the most notable moments were the twenty-seven work de Kooning exhibition at the 1954 Venice Biennale and Tobey’s thirty-six work submission to the 1958 Biennale, which won him one of the exhibition’s largest prizes, 1,500,000 lire. Rothko exhibited ten works that same year. The most important visits to Europe paid by the New York School were those in 1958, when the Museum of Modern Art sent a Jackson Pollock retrospective to Rome and its New American

Painting exhibition to Milan. Though it would be neglectful to overlook

the importance of these latter exhibitions—Lewison’s account is excellent—these final years of

the decade witnessed the birth of a new paradigm for Italian painting.” Italian critics were dis-

cussing the stasis of abstract painting, calling it “The Dogma of Boredom.”*' The production of artists as diverse as Ettore Colla, Lucio Fontana (plate 20) and Piero Manzoni were evidence of

the abandonment of gestural, canvas-based abstract painting for alternative modes more

closely attuned to science, performance, and installation. If we are to understand the confrontation and interaction of American Abstract Expres-

sionism and Italian painting during the 1950s, we must recognize the totality of the circumstance, which ultimately means divesting ourselves of the assumption that Italy was completely

entranced by the power of the new American painting and immediately followed its lead like the children of Hamelin. This will undoubtedly disappoint those who would like to perpetuate the mythology of American dominance at midcentury. Nonetheless, the critical discourse on art in Italy at midcentury reveals that Italy was an already developed and continually developing contemporary of America, not its colony.

Truly, many of the battles being waged in the American art world were simultaneously

being fought in Italy. The constant antagonism of conservatism against liberalism, both politically and artistically, contoured the decade in both nations. Moreover, both Italy and America

were witnessing a new generation of artists coming to terms with the intimidating legacy of European modernism, and both sought new ways to intensify and invigorate their native artis-

tic traditions and assert the profound newness of their respective schools of postwar painting. Instead of simple recourse to the Marshall Plan mentality of American victory and European

recovery, center and periphery, source and recipient, we should, in the spirit of the Cold War,

begin to consider America and Italy as fellow travelers.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM’S ITALIAN RECEPTION

| 151

The View from the Eas The Reception of Jackson Pollock

among Japanese Gutai Artists iS K&CHCR

* ny consideration of the interchange between Abstract Expression-

4: ~ sa ism and Japanese artists takes place before the backdrop of the recent war and its aftermath. The formal American occupation continued until 1951 and even

after, up to one hundred thousand U.S. troops were stationed there through the 1950s. To take one example of this persistent history, wounded and horribly scarred survivors of the atomic

attacks were photographed in 1962 by Shomei Tomatsu, and later published in his portfolio 11:02 Nagasaki (1966). It must have been a psychically troubling realignment, to say the least, to validate the cultural production of their recent enemy.

Only nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in mid-1954, a large group of seventeen

artists living in the Osaka area founded the Gutai artists association. More than others in Japan, the Gutai artists considered and engaged with recent Abstract Expressionism, especially the work of Jackson Pollock. A combination of partial understanding, mixed with resistance and

rivalry, and melded with native traditions and a quest for originality led to some fascinating offshoots from Abstract Expressionism.In part they thus broke with the one tradition, that of gen-

erations of Japanese artists who, like many others around the world, traveled to or looked to Paris for the latest in art. Paris was not so much neglected, as New York became an additional

focus. This was not a capitulation in the cultural sphere, rather a complex reaction with elements of resistance or one-upsmanship in an emergent rivalry with New York. The immediate impulse in postwar Japan was to reestablish links to Paris. Thus it was only in early 1951 at the Third Yomiuri Independent exhibition in Tokyo that a group of works by

the new Abstract Expressionists premiered in Japan, Recent works by Brooks, Pollock, Pousette-

yep dee

HRS

>

Dart, Rothko, Stamos, Sterne, Still, Tobey, and Tomlin were included. Jiro Yoshihara, the organizer and leader of the Gutai group, was quick to write in specific praise of the Pollock paintings:

“An undefined beauty, something attractive is expressed powerfully in them: this something has an impact not so much on the purely visual perception, but rather directly on ourselves. As Jack-

son Pollock proves, drops of paint are more beautiful than that which they present... . You

would say that painting has purified itself: the elements of painting, shapes, lines, colors, had come apart to reunite and undergo rebirth in abstract painting.”! Yoshihara thus emphasizes the kinesthetic over the purely optical. He also foreshadows the emphasis on material itself, as well as the “rebirth” theme, which later characterize the Gutai reading of Pollock.

Coincidentally, his review was published the very same month, May 1951, as the first group of Hans Namuth’s now well-known photos of Pollock painting (see figure 11). Given his interests, and the many international periodicals that he subscribed to, it is no surprise that Yoshi-

hara saw a copy of this Art News early on, as well as probably other published Namuth photos

of Pollock painting.? Yoshihara owned a copy of L’Art d’Aujourd’hui of June 1951, which

included a dramatic full-page photo of a crouching Pollock dipping his brush into a can of paint.? Indeed, Namuth was quite successful in disseminating both his photos and the related

film; the latter was screened in Tokyo as early as 1952.‘ The internationalism of a growing art

media, and its hunger for novelty, assured that Pollock’s technique and practice would become as widely known—f not better known than the works themselves.>

In general, Yoshihara projected an attitude of universalism that nicely side-stepped issues

of nationalism and local pride. The new art was not embraced for its Americanness per se, but

something close to it, in that it was praised for its “liberty” and “vivacity of spirit.” Yet it is contextualized as part of a global avant-garde in the trans-national language of abstraction.* Yoshihara’s own painting was significantly impacted, and clearly became more abstract in 1951, yet not in a way directly related to Pollock’s vocabulary. Indeed, his most accomplished works like

Night Bird tend to bring other figures to mind, such as Motherwell or Pousette-Dart.

The most recent of the two Pollock paintings exhibited at the 3rd Yomiuri Independent was Number 7, 1950 (plate 21), which was of an unusual format: about 9 feet by 23 inches. In other words, it was not mural sized in height, but rather more than four times wider than high, so that

its format resembled a traditional Chinese or Japanese landscape scroll painting. Executed ona tan ground, the initial layer of broad, gray strokes seems to be applied with a wide brush, and form what can only be called calligraphic shapes. These are overlaid with poured spatters of yellow, black, and white, single gestures that mostly remain within the framing edge. The spatters read processionally across the surface, rather than as one dense web (as is the case with the

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square format Number 11, 1949, exhibited at the same time).’ Thus as a choice among Pollock’s

work, the echoes of calligraphic and even ink drawing traditions seems calculated to appeal to. the Japanese audience. Jiro Yoshihara’s enthusiasm for these two Pollock paintings assure that they were consid-

ered and discussed among his protégees. Indeed, as mentor to the younger artists, Yoshihara played an influential role that is unfamiliar in the New York art world context; the closest par-

allel might be the few studio sessions organized around Matta in the winter of 1942-43, but with

a much more formalized and sustained group formation, persisting through the 1950s. Thus it is not surprising to find echoes of Pollock’s practice among what would become the Gutai group from this point on. Yet there are no poured paintings, but rather deliberate reflections on, and extensions of, Pollock's attitudes towards materials and technique. These extensions sometimes

rival or critique Pollock as much as pay homage to his example. This is often accomplished by

the incorporation of seemingly unique, native traditions in their work.

So, too, Yoshihara balanced his response to the New York School with ongoing interest in Parisian art, particularly Informel abstraction. Praise of Pollock in his Gutai manifesto (1956)

is matched by his lauding of Georges Mathieu. The strategy of triangulating between Europe and the United States persists among Japanese designers today, as the best jumping off point for unique creation. And invention and originality were Yoshihara’ touchstone. Thus his exhortation, well-known throughout the group, to “create what has never existed before.” Four of the Gutai artists who were among the most creative in extending Pollock to what “has never existed before” are Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, Shozo Shimamoto, and Akira

Kanayama. Men born in the mid-1920s, they were too young for military service in World War II, but during their adolescence experienced the traumas of war. In some cases, this is one of the factors behind a note of violence in their works. Shiraga, born in 1924, studied both Japanese and Western art in the late 1940s. He and

Murakami were members of the Zero group before being recruited to Gutai in 1955. Already in late 1953 he began painting with his palms, followed in December by the soles of his feet (plate 22). This was a short step from photos showing Pollock treading on his canvases.

Sometimes Shiraga balanced himself within a large ground, performing Harold Rosenberg’s “canvas as an arena in which to act.” Other times he grabbed a suspended rope to swing to and fro over the canvas. On one level Shiraga tries to outdo Pollock with greater physical effort and athleticism, and bolder use of the canvas as a platform to create. His practice falls somewhere between Pollock’s emphasis on dialogue with the canvas and

Asian martial arts. The

visual result has parallels to certain radical Japanese calligraphers, which Shiraga became aware

154 | LEWIS KACHOR

of only after he began this body of work. A hint of violence is suggested in his recollection of

bloodied festival celebrants brought into his parents’ shop after accidents. Shiraga himself drew the connection between this experience and his foot paintings.*

One of Shiraga’s actions has taken on a near legendary aspect in Gutai historiography: performing Challenging Mud on the occasion of the first Gutai art exhibition in the capital Tokyo in

October 1955 (figure 40). He ordered a large pile of mud delivered to the yard outside the exhibition hall, where he kneaded, tossed and threw himself into

it on three occasions. One was pho-

tographed, and another filmed.’ There seem to have been at least two photographers, one of

whom also made some dramatic overhead shots, which may have been at least partly posed. The

results were marked as a “work” with a small label. This full body performance made literal the

implied kinesthetic response to a Pollock pouring that Yoshihara alluded to. It also prefigures the “living brush” technique that Yves Klein directed around 1960. The modes of horizontality, base-

ness, and “over-all” are fully engaged. Struggle and eventual rebirth are metaphorically implied.

Shiraga here goes beyond painting or the object into a temporal, theatricalized event that

anticipates not only Klein, but also the Happenings and Fluxus actions of the late 1950s and

early 1960s; yet his loincloth and the general scale of the ground area also recall Sumo wrestling.

‘An analogy has also been recently drawn to the Doronko matsuri, a type of festival in which groups of “young men strip down to loincloths, mud-wrestle, and cover one another in mud for purification and to guard against evil.”"°

This first Tokyo exhibition clearly elicited an ambitious effort by the rival artists up from the south. Shiraga’s colleague Saburo Murakami also performed a full body action with a dose of aggression. This one did leave behind an object or, more accurately,a ruin of one. Murakami stretched three large 6-by-12-foot screens, and then hurled himself through them, breaking the

paper layers in sequence. Despite its title, At One Moment Opening Six Holes (figure 41) must

have taken several moments to complete. The artist also posed for dramatic documentary photos, as with his fists flung through a torn hole. For contemporary Japanese viewers, the wood-

framed paper related most to shoji screens, interior space dividers in typical homes. Yet from a Western postmodern perspective, it also seems to herald the destruction of the canvas surface, the tradition of the stretched and framed picture. The subsequent display of the torn screens suggests a relic of Western pictorialism, spatial yet exploded. Like Shiraga, the artist performs

athletically, evoking Asian traditions of body control in martial arts. In both these performative works, there is an aspect of battle, even violence, yet coming

through on the other side, which obviously can be related to Japan's recent war experience. Murakami returned to the broken screen mode several times, notably with the increase to twenty-

THE VIEW FROM THE EAST | 155

40. Kazuo Shiraga, Challenging Mud, the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition In Tokyo, October 1955. Copyright: Kazuo Shiraga and the former members of the Gutai Art Association. Courtesy: Ashiya City Museum of Art and History.

41. Saburo Murakami, Six Holes, the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo, October 1955. Copyright:

Makiko Murakami and the former members of the Gutal Art Association. Courtesy: Ashiya City Museum of Art and History.

‘one square screens smashed through at Gutai’s subsequent Tokyo exhibition (October 1956). ‘These overshadow a turn from the more subtle and meditative works of 1954, where Murakami had throwna ball dipped in ink onto a large sized piece of paper. The one dark mark of the ball’s contact and its nearby spatters isolate the unique gesture as the work itself. Reducing Pollock, there is a“minimal” or “one hand throwing” aspect here. The rest of the surface remains untouched.

The theme of the Western pictorial surface as wounded also appears in some of the earliest works of Shozo Shimamoto. Shimamoto was one of the first and youngest pupils of Jiro Yoshihara. In 1950 he drew on stretched paper painted with oil. Once the pencil broke through the paper, the artist followed on this accident with more deliberate punctures of the surface. They

are wounds, unlike the more elegant punctures and slices of the often-compared Lucio Fontana.

Yoshihara gave a favorable response to this approach, and Shimamoto followed on witha series. After the publication of “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Shimamoto initiated a new “action”

method of hurling paint onto the canvas (figure 42). In liquid form pigment was contained in small glass vessels. He spread out large swaths of paper, upon which he arranged a number of rocks. There is a clear association to Japanese rock gardens, the carefully arranged surface a

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42. Shozo Shimamoto creating a picture at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo, October 1956. Copyright Shozo Shimamoto and the former members of the Gutai Art Association. Courtesy Ashiya City

‘Museum of Art and History.

microcosm of a landscape, and ultimately the world. Shimamoto forcefully flings the containersat these rocks, shattering the glass and spraying color over the terrain. These were recognized at the time in the periodical Gutai as “a work of terrible power and violence.”"' Their process of destruction strongly conveys aerial bombardment. Shimamoto later improvised a hood and goggles for himself, for protection from the shards, yet he took on the appearance of a Japanese zero pilot. Even more literally bombastic was his thirty-foot-square vinyl made for the second Gutai outdoor exhibition in Ashiya Park (summer 1956). It is not as well documented, and only one such work survives, It is mostly known for its method: Shimamoto fired a kind of pressurized paint gun, described as “a handmade cannon filled with various colored enamels [that]

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explode against the vinyl cloth.” The relation to the bombardments of World War II is obvious.

Shimamoto has escalated the firepower of the nine shots fired by Duchamp with a toy cannon

at his Large Glass. He seems the angriest of the young men, or the most willing to identify with

and absorb the aggressor.

These three artists, Murakami, Shimamoto and Shiraga, were implicitly linked with adjoining illustrations to the Gutai Art Manifesto of 1956. They are shown in their characteristic actions, which take off from the example of Pollock’s technique. Jiro Yoshihara’s text is careful

to praise both Pollock and the Frenchman Georges Mathieu equally, thus balancing the group's allegiance between New York and Paris. In an animizing metaphor, both their works are said to “emit the loud outcry of the material, of the very oil or enamel paints themselves.” In terms of

reputation, of course, today it is the echo of Pollock that resounds louder.

If in dueling and exceeding Pollock the Japanese artists had enacted his symbolic erasure or

explosion, his unexpected early demise may have deflated their competitive compulsion. Pol-

lock’s death was reported in the pages of Gutai magazine, followed by an appreciation written by his biographer B. H. Friedman. In this report, the group learned that Pollock had received

two issues of Gutai magazine and, on this basis, had “recognized a vision and a reality close to his own.”!?

The next issue of Gutai magazine (July 1957) praised Akira Kanayama for taking a step “on the way opened by Pollock.” Kanayama’s step seems in retrospect a premonition of Japanese technologizing and refining of American invention, perhaps with a layer of parody here. The hint of a post-Pollock stance is conveyed in Kanayama’s distinction between his and Shiraga’s practice, his own self-described as more conceptual.'*

Kanayama purchased a number of children’s toy cars that ran in circles (figure 43). He affixed

a paint dispenser, and wired them to controls. The car thus made lines of colored ink or paint

traces on the surface it drove over. Kanayama used various surfaces—vinyl, board, canvas— aligned horizontally, on the floor. Linear webs were produced, the crux being, as it had been for Pollock, when to halt. Their “hands off” method clearly levels a critique of the action painter's expressive brushstroke as an excavation of the subconscious mind. Similar critiques would

become widespread in the late 1950s. Kanayama precedes by two years Jean Tinguely’s Meta Machines, which used a different delivery device to produce abstract linear scribblings on paper. But they are quite similar in parodying Pollock's expressive linear mark by mechanizing it. Kanayama fashioned The Work for the Third Gutai exhibition in April 1957. It dwarfed

the image of himself, standing on a ladder as he tacked up the enormous mural. Larger than the largest Pollocks, its colossal size precluded stretching. Kanayama’s studio photograph

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43. Akira Kanayama painting in his studio with his toy car, ca. 1957. Copyright Akira Kanayama. Courtesy Ashiya City Museum of Art and History.

documenting his process includes other completed works hanging around the room. One wonders if this is a conscious echo of the Namuth’s photos that show paintings hung in Pollock’s barn.

In 1957 and 1958 the group organized two “Gutai Art on the Stage” performances, occasions for their most theatrical, experimental proto-Happenings. For the first, Kanayama aimed

to theatricalize his recent techniques by painting a red and black linear web on a giant balloon.

The performance consisted of the gradual inflation of the flattened balloon so it bubbled up as

a sculptural abstraction, Under changing colored lights,it rotated on the stage, then was cut and

deflated. Shimamoto composed monotonous Gutai music to accompany the inflating. Such performances have been cited as forerunners to the Happenings movement, and the general trend toward the performative; Yves Klein’s Living Brushes events were likewise accompanied

bya “monotone symphony.”

160 | LEV

Yet one should also consider potential origins in both the modernist avant-garde, and

native sources and popular traditions. Futurist evenings and Dada soirees at the Cabaret Voltaire both anticipate Gutai Art on the Stage. An obscure event of Cologne Dada saw Max

Ernst and Baargeld create a stage set with paint-dipped footprints. Nearly a half century later, Kanayama made walking footprints along a 300-foot-long roll of white vinyl for the Outdoor

Gutai Art Exhibition (July 1956). It paralleled a viewer's walking path throughout the grounds of Ashiya Park, where the exhibition was held— foreshadowing Andy Warhol's dance diagram pictures. And as we have seen, Shiraga began making numerous paintings with the soles of his feet. Yet the modernist avant-garde had been repressed in Japan in the nationalist period, and it is not clear how much if any of the Western precedents would have been known to Japanese artists in the immediate postwar period. On the other hand, scholars in recent years have elaborated a number of native sources and

popular traditions that relate to Gutai attitudes. Notably Shiraga’s performance Sanbaso Super Modern signals in its title a relation to the figure who appears first on the traditional stage to per-

form a blessing in the context of festivals.'® Sanbaso figures vary widely, but generally wear a hat and mask, as Shiraga did. His performance was also introductory, the first in the Gutai Art on

the Stage of 1957. The vivid red of the costume was striking, as were his very elongated sleeves,

manipulated by holding poles inside. Simple waving and turning motions became a dramatic dance.

More recently it has been convincingly proposed that the matsuri or festivals are fundamental to understanding Gutai performances and outdoor exhibitions. They provide “a con-

ceptual understanding of the relationship between man and nature,a framework for theorizing the almost animistic view of materials espoused by the Gutai, and a model for the role of art in

life.”"* That these issues equally apply to Pollock's poured paintings underlines the complexity of any discussion of context or influences.

It is precisely when the Gutai performances and outdoor exhibitions cease, after 1958, that the relevance of Pollock seems to wane. The Gutai artists turn to easel painting, and to a closer alliance with Michel Tapié and the Parisian Informel artists. The Pollock effect thus had its own

mediated trajectory in Japan, and passed into performative territory that Pollock himself had barely explored. His reception involved various contingencies, including a postwar mood that viewed the United States ambivalently, as well as the structures of creative misapprehension and misunderstanding. There is also pointed one-upsmanship, in terms of virulence of paint appli-

cation, large scale, and the elaboration of art as action. There is also pastiche, bordering on par-

ody. And aspects metaphorically reflecting the recent war, from crawling through the mud to

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aerial bombardment, which can be seen as a part of a broader abstractionist trend of the postwar period, well-termed a “dialectic of creation and destruction.”” Ironically, given the centrality of photography to the exchange, Pollock’s ambivalence about

being photographed was not perceived in Japan. Rather the opposite, photographing became

intrinsic to Gutai events. On one occasion, performances were staged solely for photographers

from Life (April 1956). There seem to have been multiple cameras documenting both Shiraga and Shimamoto, and film shot as well. Documentation continues to appear in new publica-

tions,!* suggesting more cameras present at Gutai events than at, for instance, most early Hap-

penings, implying a self-consciousness about the value of their innovations.

The 1950 Namuth photos of Pollock appeared at a moment where art magazines were

beginning to reflect a more internationalized art world. Reproduced mostly in black and white,

Pollock paintings did not show well in this format, even as they were distributed more widely than the original canvases. On the other hand, the drama of Namuth’s “action” photos was

novel, and made them a breath of fresh air in these pages. Pollock’s process thus came to have a

wider impact than the paintings, not least half way around the world, in the environs of Osaka.

162 | LEWIS KACHUR

ORIGINS

AND

EFFLORESCEHCE

Mexico and American Modernism: The Case of Jackson Pollock ELLEN

x cd

£2

G. LANSAU

om rodded to reminisce about the start of her relationship with Jackson

Pollock, Lee Krasner invariably mentioned the continuing impact of

Mexican Muralism on her future husband and artistic partner. Indeed, it amused Krasner to recall that it was Pollock’s unusually deep admiration for David Alfaro Siqueiros that precipitated the young couple’s first argument. Still a dedicated Trotskyite in the early 1940s, she just

could not believe that Pollock revered a man accused of plotting to assassinate her hero. But, she

remembered, Jackson stood his ground. Los Tres Grandes—as Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco have been worshipfully labeled—were both idolized and idealized by Pollock. He had first encountered their works as a teenager in Southern California and he remained fascinated with key aspects of what they represented, both aesthetically and in terms of leftist com-

mitment, a decade after moving to New York to study with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League (figure 44). “Benton taught Pollock about ideals of beauty; [those] Mexicans taught him that art could

be ‘ugly”: this candid remark by Peter Busa, a League friend, has been widely quoted since its appearance in Pollock's first biography.! Always mentioned, but rarely analyzed beyond demonstrating that he was introduced to freer technical methods at Siqueiros’s 1936 Union Square

workshop, Pollock’s attraction and debt to Mexican art requires further definition. That Mexi-

can experts have begun to produce more nuanced interpretations of Siqueiros’s revolutionary accomplishments is helpful in assessing his impact on Pollock. In particular, understanding Siqueiros’s innovations as rooted in his desire to project and promote a truer, more specific cultural identity opens avenues for increased comparability.”

Jackson Pollock's frequently quoted 1956 definition of painting as “a state of being” (“Every good artist paints what he is”) demonstrates that his own creativity was likewise motivated by

MEXICO AND AMERICAN MODERNISM

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an identity quest.’ Whereas Pollock’s therapeutic

impetus

to express

himself

in

paint was deeply personal, it certainly coincided with larger notions of individ-

ual freedom promoted in postwar Amer-

ica. While Siqueiros, a dedicated Stalinist for most of his life, was driven (as Irene

Herner has shown) by a very different desire, to delineate Mexico's mestizo cul-

ture as the paradigm for a socialist utopia,

44, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock at a May Day rally,

Pollock was nevertheless drawn to him asa

New York, 1936. Jackson Pollock Papers, ca. 1914-75, in the

—_ role model for action painting. That Pol-

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Image Is cour- _ lock found significant ways to re-read (or tesy of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hamp-

—_—misread)) Siqueiros’s achievements in paths

ton, NY.

more congruent with his own inner themes testifies to the powerful dialecticism of the

latter's aesthetic and ideological goals.‘ But Siqueiros is, of course, not the only protagonist in the story of Pollock and Mexican art; the more violent mythic vision of José Clemente Orozco

likewise contributed in highly important ways.

“Orozco’s violence,” observed Lawrence Alloway (one of the earliest writers to investigate

seriously Pollock’s Mexican obsession), “often seem[ed] to escalate from a specifically political revolutionary cause to a ‘cosmic’ vision of world-wide anguish”; this brand of “apocalyptic romanticism’ Alloway judged as “obviously congenial” to Pollock.' The importance of Pollock's emulation of the stylized elementalism of Orozco’s 1932 Prometheus mural at Pomona College,

as well as his emotional investment in Orozco’s singularly dramatic Dartmouth University

Baker Library mural cycle (plate 23), is evident in the young artist’s drawings of the mid to late 1930s.* This influence has been identified by scholars and critics beginning with Alloway, although Orozco’s impact in relation to the competing, yet complementary example of Siqueiros still requires amplification.’ Actually a more overtly “violent” man than Orozco (he did not deny his part in the 1940 assault on Trotsky’s residence-in-exile in the Coyoacén suburb of Mexico City and was jailed numerous times for his renegade political escapades), Siqueiros's ongoing commitment to radical ideals, culminating in his willingness to fight in the Spanish Civil War, held up the model ofa different kind of “action” to Pollock and others of his genera-

tion. Yet, as Herner has shown, the artistic expression of Siqueiros’s “post-Baroque” rhetorical

166 | ELLEN G. LANDAU

aims, achieved primarily by inventing new media and re-inventing visual space, were ultimately

more paradisiacal than apocalyptic. The same can probably be said of Pollock (who, of course, was a violent man only when drunk, for him a non-creative state).*

In regard to the generally undervalued impact of Siqueiros on artistic developments in the

United States,’ I have always been fascinated by the recollection of another member of Pollock’s

early New York cohort, fellow transplanted Angeleno Reuben Kadish. Kadish, along with Pollock’s brother Sande, had joined the 1932 Los Angeles Block of Painters set up to help the Mexican master (soon to be dubbed I! Duco) paint the politically confrontational outdoor mural

Tropical America on L.A’s downtown Olvera Street (figure 45). Recalling the heady days when he and other budding modernists (including Pollock’s high school co-conspirator, Philip Guston)"® were young idealistic west coast leftist sympathizers,"! Kadish remarked that “Siqueiros coming to L.A. meant as much then as the Surrealists coming to New York in the forties.”!? Indeed, mate-

rial as well as iconographic echoes in signature works by all of these artists firmly establish how, in the inception of their mature styles, Siqueiros had an important initializing role to play. Their acute awareness of what Siqueiros stood for, that a resolution of the fundamental problems of advanced art is not merely thematic, but is rooted in contemporary hybridized procedures and techniques, is amply attested by his formative impact on a distinct cadre of American aesthetic innovators, not restricted to denizens of the somewhat provincial art world of

Depression-era L.A. The Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi"? and northern California-bred painter Robert Motherwell,'* both of whom

(like Guston and Kadish) actually worked

in Mexico in the mid 1930s and early 1940s, are additional prominent examples. In fact, fully recognizing the centrality of a Mexican-associated experience for a small but significant sampling of the mid-twentieth-century American avant-garde firmly repositions the impact of Los

Tres Grandes (and Siqueiros in particular) as a challenge to widely held assumptions about Abstract Expressionism’s predominantly Eurocentric origins. Recognition of the creative pos-

sibilities inherent in neutralizing the oppositions of French Surrealism and Cubism is typically ascribed as jump-starting this movement; the real story is a bit more complicated.'* Just three months after Pollock's tragic death in an automobile crash in August 1956, with-

out referencing the Mexicans either by inference or name, British critic John Berger perceptively targeted the core contrast between his achievements and theirs. “I believe that Pollock imagina-

tively, subjectively, isolated himself,” Berger wrote. “His paintings are like pictures painted on the

inside walls of his mind?" Berger surely based this appraisal on Pollock’s own stated goals, which were already well known. Applying in 1947 for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim

Foundation, he had articulated these with utmost clarity. “I believe the easel picture to be a dying

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45. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Tropical America, 1932. Acervo Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros/INBA/ CONACULTA. © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

form? Pollock explained, “and the tendency of modern feeling is towards the wall picture or mural. | believe the time is not yet ripe for a full transition from easel to mural. The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a half-way state, and an attempt to point out the direc-

tion of the future without arriving there completely.”"”

Although he likely had help from art critic Clement Greenberg in preparing this articulate

statement, the basic ideas voiced in it had been simmering for almost two decades in Pollock’s own mind. Seventeen years prior, Paul Jackson Pollock had left the West Coast and moved to

New York, making both a geographic shift and a name change at the suggestion of an elder sibling. Charles Pollock, also an aspiring artist, encouraged his troubled, ne’er-do-well baby brother to join him in studying with Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. Impor-

tantly for Jackson's future development, Benton (like the Mexicans) had, by that time, also begun garnering fame for major mural commissions. While claiming subscription to an isolationist refusal of foreign influence, Benton (a reformed Marxist) continued to reference the European Old Masters he still greatly admired; in large part, Benton conceptualized his own highly mannered, rhythmic mural compositions as. “an extension of muscular action patterns.”"* Recognizing this as a major precept to which he

had early concentrated exposure is crucial to understanding the later enthusiasms, innovations and accomplishments of Jackson Pollock. But, whereas Alloway believed Pollock’s stint with Benton had prepared him to accept Mexican influence, the actual chronology was reversed.

Benton’s was not the first wall art Pollock admired, nor perhaps even the most important. And certainly, by the time Pollock submitted his proposal for a Guggenheim (which he did not get), the heyday of his teacher's folksy-Baroque illustrative style had faded into history. Pollock’s rather heretical intention so cogently expressed in 1947—to crossbreed progress

in art by painting pictures that would “function between the easel and mural”—had likely become further clarified through conversations with Greenberg, already a leading supporter. During the early forties, Greenberg, who loathed Benton and everything he stood for, staked his reputation on championing the advances in art represented by Pollock’s repudiation of his teacher's anti-modern prejudices. Greater receptivity to a wider variety of outside stimuli was now allowing the young artist to experiment in novel ways. However, and perhaps a bit ironically, the direction of Greenberg's advocacy also contributed to keeping Pollock's focus on reconfiguring an establishment art form of the past. As his Guggenheim statement evidences, akin to the aims of the Mexicans (albeit very differently framed), a wholesale re-invention of the

meaning of the art-historically sanctioned “big” picture was an important goal for Pollock.'*

Greenberg’s unsympathetic view of both Regionalist and Mexican artistic achievements

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| 169

notwithstanding, he provided one of the sharpest assessments of Pollock’s reliance on cues

gleaned from the latter enthusiasms in “‘American-Type’ Painting,” his summary of the attainments of Abstract Expressionism published in Partisan Review in the spring of 1955. There, Greenberg noted that Pollock had

compounded hints from Picasso's calligraphy in the early thirties with suggestions from

Hofmann, Masson, and Mexican painting, especially Siqueiros, and began 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.”

In the same vein as Peter Busa, but without specifically referencing the Mexicans, Green-

berg had already commented, “What is thought to be Pollock’s bad taste is in reality simply his willingness to be ugly in terms of contemporary taste.” But, willfully ignoring any possible artis-

tic prototypes, the critic established an American literary pedigree for Pollock's “ugliness”: “Faulkner and Melville can be called in as witnesses to the nativeness of such

violence, exasper-

ation and stridency.” With an unacknowledged nod to Gertrude Stein, Greenberg further justified this direction, reminding readers that “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.”2! At the point when Pollock was applying to the Guggenheim Foundation, Greenberg had become one of a very few, other than Krasner, invited to visit the artist’s Long Island studio to observe what he was doing. The novel creative methods Pollock devised a year or so after moving from New York City to The Springs in 1945, would not become better known until Hans Namuth’s distinctive photos showing him at work began to appear in print around the time

“‘American-Type’ Painting” was published.22 Wider access to Namuth’s images allowed for a better understanding of the disruptive ramifications of Pollock’s highly unusual enterprise. In particular, Namuth’s visual documentation of the making of Autumn Rhythm and other

so-called “classic” allover poured pictures of 1950 (figure 11) revealed the astounding aesthetic potential of what might be considered Pollock’s rather extremist extension of Benton’s valorization of muscular process. In more than 500 black-and-white photos, Namuth shows Pollock

engaged in such unorthodox means (that is, except to anyone who had worked with Siqueiros)” as flicking, pouring, dripping, and spattering, as well as actually walking into and moving

around his pictorial space. Further delineating the impact of Pollock’s attraction to muralism,

Namuth not only provided visible proof of Pollock’s unusually physical method of generating form (based on earlier models, but significantly exceeding them), he also showed how it was

only surrounded by his own over-sized paintings that Pollock could become transfixed through

170 | ELLEN G. LANDAU

aesthetic and psychic transformation. Prompted by a 1952 description in Art News by existentialist critic Harold Rosenberg (Greenberg's rival) that gestural Abstract Expressionists were

converting the canvas from a place where objects are depicted into “an arena in which to act,”

art historical attention to Namuth’s photographs has concentrated on their revelation of Pol-

lock’s “performance” of his unconscious as he paints. However, through well-chosen angles of vision and framing, Namuth’s images also demonstrate incontrovertibly that his young friend’s ambition to blend easel and mural conventions was capable of spectacular achievement.

At work in the relatively small space of the barn on his property in The Springs, Pollock immersed himself in a new visual field, one encompassing perpendicular directions. Interconnected traces of the oversight of bodily activities being played out on the “inside walls of his mind” were

displayed on the real walls around him, and

on the floor where his current painting

rested.** “Little Man in Big Sea,” the witty caption appended to one of Namuth’s famous Pollock photographs by Happenings innovator Allan Kaprow, deftly captures the impression of envel-

opment so viscerally engendered.” This sensation obviously derived from, yet also substantially subverted, the muralistic. With the possible exception of Picasso’s more narratively based Guer-

nica, no European modernist examples come close to anticipating this breakthrough. How did Jackson Pollock arrive at this extreme and exciting point, and of particular interest, what role in

his trajectory was played by rethinking the Mexicans?

As already noted, although Benton certainly admired Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros—he

praised all three for their initiation of “a profound and much-needed redirection of art toward its ancient humanistic functions”**—Pollock’s attraction to Mexican art had begun well before

attending Benton’s classes in New York. Pollock’s formative roots were closely tied to the particular profile of Southern California between the two world wars—its distinctive political, social, and cultural mix. In Los Angeles, more than anywhere else in the United States during that era,

Marxist sympathies translated directly to an engagement with precepts of the Mexican revolution. Reuben Kadish’s joining Siqueiros’s “Syndicate of Painters” to help paint leftist murals and

the blatant Communist propaganda he, Philip Guston (then called Goldstein), and Pollock’s

brother Sande prepared for the L.A. Workers’ Cultural Center in 1933,” led to Siqueiros’s help in obtaining a commission the following year to paint a wall in Morelia, Mexico, the terms of which Guston was sent to negotiate.” Since young Jack had mused to Charles about “going to Mexico City if there is any means of making a livelihood there,”® it is possible that, had he stayed out west a bit longer, he too would have joined the Syndicate and might even have gone with his

two friends on their year-long Mexican journey. In any event, debilitating psychological problems with alcohol developing in his late teens

MEXICO AND AMERICAN MODERNISM

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and increasing in his early twenties would perhaps have precluded artistic success for Jackson Pollock south of the border. But geographical distance did not curb the continuing impact of Mexican innovations. In fact, by 1938-39, although “riddled with doubts”*2 about his personality and aesthetic uniqueness and under psychiatric care, as Pollock strove “to mine the unconscious as a source of visual images,” he initially conjured, in the words of critic Hilton Kramer, “a Surrealist battleground on which [it seemed] Picasso and the Mexican muralists were fighting it out.”> Drawings Pollock brought to his analysts during this period demonstrate that the ‘ongoing appeal of the Mexicans, and his earnest attempts to rethink their ideas, played a cardinal role in helping him initiate a search for his own artistic direction.

‘As Kramer recognized, running parallel to Pollock’s fixation with Los Tres Grandes was his

growing fascination with the more abstract innovations of European avant-garde art. Of course, Diego Rivera's early career also included a Cubist phase,™ but unlike Rivera, Pollock

never went to Paris nor met Pablo Picasso, Cubism’s most important innovator and practitioner. Both Rivera and Pollock struggled to assimilate, then to renounce Picasso, although they

chose very different routes to resolve this Oedipal conflict. Although, as early as ca. 1928-29,

Pollock had professed admiration for Rivera's work (he wrote to Charles of his attraction to Dia

de Flores, which had just won a prize at the Los Angeles art museum)®* and a few years later he watched its author paint at the New Workers School on West Fourteenth Street, neither Rivera’s Cubism nor his brand of Mexicdnidad had any discernible repercussions on Pollock’s evolving

imagery. By contrast, as noted by Robert Motherwell, Pollock’s deep-seated need to “splash [Picasso] out” was a major stimulus to his troubled creativity. Playing into his attraction to Picasso was Pollock’s prior admiration for Orozco. Although

Greenberg had singled out Siqueiros as the Mexican example most consequential for Pollock’s early work, beginning with Alloway writing in 1961, most historians re-assign this influential developmental role to the third member of Los Tres Grandes. Indeed, Jackson and his brothers Sande and Charles were wont to describe Orozco as “the real man”; for an astonishingly long

period of time Pollock continued to cite the latter’s Prometheus as “the greatest painting done in modern times.””

Pollock’s development of a close and deeply emotional rapport with Prometheus was no

doubt based in large measure on Orozco’s forceful resurrection of the archetypal heroics of Michelangelo, but in a context more synchronous

with modernity.** About

1938-39 he filled an

entire sketchbook with furiously rendered, semiabstract compositions drawn in ink, colored

pencil, and graphite which pay strong homage not only to Prometheus, but also to Orozco’s

Dartmouth mural cycle which Jackson and Sande made a special trip with Guston to New

172 | ELLEN G. LANDAU

46. Jackson Pollock, Naked Man with Knife, ca. 1938-40, oll on canvas, 50 x 36 In. (127 x 91.4 cm). Tate Gallery, London. P1 inted by Frank Lloyd, 1981. © 2006 The Pollock-Kras: Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Hampshire to see. In these laboriously worked-over sketches,” and in related contemporaneous paintings such as Naked Man

with Knife (ca. 1938-41) (figure 46), Pollock attempted

mightily to redefine in personal terms his profound admiration for Orozco’s stylized, dramati-

cally brutal, elemental expressiveness."”

It is often helpful in making art historical judgments to find models that share compelling

MEXICO AND AMERICAN MODERNISM

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characteristics but ultimately differ in more significant ways; as such, contrasting Pollock in the nascent stages of his career to contemporaries who regarded the search for aesthetic identity as an assimilative process can be instructive. Philip Guston would seem an obvious comparative choice. His and Kadish’s mural work in Mexico reflects a similar adulation of Italian Renaissance masters

(Uccello, Piero, and Michelangelo) as well as the impact of Siqueiros’s new method of polyangularity synthesized with the film-noirish classical pastiche promoted by Lorser Feitelson and other members of the Southern California “Post-Surrealist” group." Additionally, their own first-hand experience with politically-motivated censorship in Los ‘Angeles played a crucial part in engendering the stylized mural composition Guston and Kadish devised in Morelia for The Struggle against War and Fascism, alternatively known as The Inqui-

sition, Although its imagery shows they shared Pollock's interest in violence and cruelty, these

themes are very differently focused than in Naked Man with Knife." More artfully painted, Guston and Kadish’s monumentally foreshortened muscular figures go about their sinister and xenophobic activities silently and ritualistically. Themes of autobiographical resonance are

present in their work as well as in Pollock’s, but Guston and Kadish layered personally mean-

ingful iconography within a historical and contemporary political commentary with global significance.

A different, but equally indicative contrast might be made between Pollock and Arshile Gorky, also a great admirer of Picasso and a transplanted New Yorker. As Norman Bryson has observed, sometimes an image’s identity can best be defined as residing in the “gap between ‘itself’ and the repertoire of images in play.“ Keeping this essentially Derridean equation in mind, Gorky’s early preoccupations can serve as a foil that helps to explain more specifically what Pollock gleaned from Orozco as a prototype.

Over a ten-year period from 1926 to 1936, Gorky created two paintings and numerous

drawings based on a photograph taken in 1912 in Van City, Turkish Armenia, where he originally came from (figure 47). Gorky (then known as Vosdanig Adoian) stands stiffly next to his seated mother in this sad and moving childhood image taken shortly before her tragic death from starvation on a death march dictated by the Turks. A distant look in her eyes and the set of

her lips signify fear, fatigue, and introspection. The steps Gorky took to modify this treasured

memento for his own expressive purposes—eliminating detail and flattening space—indicate a reworking of icons of the Blessed Virgin in the context of modernist innovation.

Although the visual connection is perhaps not as clear-cut, Pollock seems also to have “based” an early composition, known as Woman, on a family photo depicting mother, father

and five sons, taken in Chico, California in 1917. However, this picture (figure 48), also rigidly

174 1 BELLING. LANCAU

posed, underwent a stranger metamorphosis when filtered through Pollock's differently

troubled

imagination.

In

the

original photograph, Stella Mae McClure Pollock stands in the back row composed

and robust in her sober Sunday finery. By contrast, in the painted version, the female

protagonist looms front and center with

legs splayed open, naked except for pendu-

lous earrings and high-heeled shoes. The other six figures now surround her—the

youngest (i.e., Jackson) attempts in vain to

suckle at her breast. Whereas the source

image presents LeRoy Pollock and his sons as solemn and freshly scrubbed, on canvas,

_47. Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, ca. 1929-36, oil on

hollow-eyed and (in at least one case) fem- _ canvas, 23 5/8 x 19 3/4 in. (60 x 50 cm). Allsa Mellon Bruce

ry of Art,

inized cadavers huddle around a fiercely

Fund, Image © 2006 Board of Trustees, National Gi

imposing phallic matriarch.

Washington. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Gorky’s portraits of himself and his doomed mother are ephemeral and enigmatic; Pollock’s Woman also demonstrates unreality, but ina rather more nightmarish way. It is doubtful, moreover, that any viewer who accepts the

notion that, in it, Pollock represented his mother, would detect a similar psychodynamic to Gorky’s at work in its creation. Pollock’s attitude toward Stella could not have been more

opposed to Gorky’s religious veneration of Lady Shushanik’s memory.” Indeed, his therapists, siblings, wife, and friends were all well aware that Jackson's conflicted feelings toward women derived from Stella’s alternately remote and smothering attentiveness and his strong aversion reaction to her belittlement of his father."* Sexually disturbing rather than nostalgic, Woman discloses not love and devotion, but lack of nurturance and the anxiety of castration.

There is little question that, at the time he created Woman (ca. 1930-33), the Mexicans, par-

ticularly Orozco, would have been the only models familiar to Pollock for such compellingly

suggestive deformation. (Benton had certainly never made this kind of psychologically agitat-

ing work.) It was not necessary to the elaboration of Pollock's private subtext for him to have actually seen Orozco’s social critiques including naked prostitutes; we know from his sketch books that Pollock was quite familiar with the latter’s take-offs on José Guadalupe Posada’s

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48. Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Woman), ca. 1930-33, oll on fiberboard, 14 1/8 x 10 1/2 In. (35.9 x 26.7 cm). Nagoshima Museum, Kagoshima City, Japan. © 2006 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

grotesque political caricatures, and he had encountered visually similar references related to the Day of the Dead that Orozco incorporated at Dartmouth.” What literary theorist Harold Bloom might characterize as Pollock’s Freudian “misreading”

of Orozco’s style and iconography aided him in producing the therapeutic statement he made in Woman.” It was certainly through Orozco’s example that Pollock was prepared to under-

stand and mine the more abstractly expressive emotional potentialities of Picasso. What Orozco

176 | ELLEN G. LANDAU

had to offer in the late 1930s in the way of style and iconography seems to have been remarkably coterminous with Pollock’s aesthetic and personal needs at this crucial juncture. Should the impact of Siqueiros be characterized in an analogous way? Jackson became aware of David Alfaro Siqueiros at least as early as 1932, when Sande, still

in Los Angeles, began attending the Mexican’s fresco class at the Chouinard School prior to joining the “Syndicate of Painters” that assisted in production of the politically contentious outdoor

mural Siquieros devised for Olvera Street.*' Material evidence in the next stage of Pollock's

artistic growth—technical as well as thematic echoes of Tropical America are clearly visible in such early 1940s transitional works as Bird—indicate that, in the genesis of his mature style,

compared to Orozco, Siqueiros had an opposing role to play.” It seems likely that Pollock’s widely chronicled observation of Navajo sand painters working in the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, the year he created Bird (figure 49), revived or reinforced his attraction to the strong, gritty surfaces of Siqueiros’s Los Angeles

mural compositions.* (Portions of these, which Pollock traveled all the way across country one summer to see, were created by spraying Duco enamel onto a base of sand and Portland cement; other sections were done in encaustic, then textured with drills or a blowtorch.) Pollock's

admixture of sand into the pigment in order to create a roughened texture in Bird, its compositional affinities with the menacing eagle in Tropical America, and the physiognomic similarities of his trampled-upon faces with the mural’s crucified peasant, suggest a vigorous, although somewhat clumsy attempt to reformulate the Mexican’s social vocabulary in accordance with his own private archetypes.*

If Orozco helped direct Pollock toward a more complex psychological and artistic identification with Picasso, Siqueiros’s experimentation with materials now suggested, as Bloom might phrase it, the potential of “a subversive alternative arrangement” that could provide a way out of the anxiety inevitably caused by Picasso’s all-powerful influence. Close reading of a work in Pollock's 1943 first solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century, now known as Composition with Pouring II (figure 50), can help to advance a clearer assessment of the deter-

minant consequences of his ongoing Mexican interests, but some background is required first. Asked to leave the United States in the wake of the Tropical America scandal, Siqueiros

returned in 1936 asa delegate to the American Artists Congress. That April he opened a work-

shop near Union Square with the express intent of creating art for the people. Rejecting traditional media as “archaic” and “anachronistic,” while still in Los Angeles Siqueiros had begun

to formulate his theory of “the poetic role of materials in shaping a work of art”; the implications of this direction would finally come to fruition in his New York-based activities. Their

MEXICO AND AMERICAN MODERNISM

| 177

49. Jackson Pollock, Bird, ca. 1938-41, oll and sand on canvas, 27 3/4 x 24 1/4 in. (70.5 x 61.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lee Krasner in memory of Jackson Pollock. © 2006 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

elder brother Charles described the investigations Siqueiros instigated at Union Square in

which Jackson and Sande were now both participants. Workshop assistants were instructed in the use of industrial nitrocellulose pigments (especially pyroxilin and Duco enamel), stencils, airbrushes, spray guns, methods of superimposition, spontaneous and chance genera-

tion of form (including pouring, dripping, and spattering), and the embedding of foreign

178 | ELLEN G. LANDAU

50. Jackson Pollock, Untitled (Composition with Pouring I!), 1943, oll and enamel on canvas, 25 1/8 x 22 1/8 in. (63.8 x 56.2 cm). 66.4082. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966. Photo by Lee Stalsworth. © 2005 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

objects (wood, metal, sand, fibers, sawdust) as a way to increase art’s politically subversive potential. Never considered ends in themselves, and primarily adapted by Syndicate members to manufacture

floats, banners and posters, such techniques were also being employed

by

MEXICO AND AMERICAN MODERNISM

| 179

Siqueiros on more intimate easel paintings.” While equally polemical in intent, the effects he created on a smaller scale often bordered on abstraction. It is not clear whether Jackson actually

observed Siqueiros making the best-known work of this series, Collective Suicide, primarily fabricated by pouring pyroxilin from a can onto a wood panel laid flat on the workshop floor. However, he definitely saw this work and similar examples after their completion in 1936. To produce Collective Suicide, a commentary on the Spanish conquest of the Incas, Siqueiros used sticks to flick the pigment, worked through friskets, employed an airbrush with different nozzles, and dripped lacquer thinner, encouraging but controlling accidents to generate what he called dissolving “absorptions” of superimposed color.** A Regionalist-themed lithograph done in 1936 or 1937, to which Pollock added lurid air-

brushed color, and a more non-objective composition of pigment squeezed onto cardboard a few years later (that he once characterized as his “breakthrough picture”), are two extant indications of Pollock’s continuing fascination with the spontaneous, non-traditional facture com-

binations introduced at the Siqueiros workshop.” Shortly after creating the latter, Pollock briefly took part in another experimental group project, joint painting sessions held in the winter of 1942-43 at the New York studio of Chilean emigré Roberto Matta. Knowledge of Matta’s

painterly approach to Surrealist automatism—he would sometimes spread color with sopping rags causing it to smear and clot, or scrape it thinly to encourage unexpected “convulsive”

imagery—was undoubtedly an important variable in Pollock's ability, by the time of his first exhibition,to re-channel his training with Siqueiros. The ideas on risk and method propounded by the eccentric author/painter/entrepreneur John Graham, became another seminal source for the intuitively engendered stream-of-consciousness approach of works like Composition with Pouring II. In it, recalling Siqueiros, Pollock used improvisation with materials to promulgate content, but what he produced projected a distinctively different meaning.”

Featuring his initials seen at upper left interwoven with two phalluses ejaculating pigment,

Composition with Pouring II seems to constitute Pollock’s admission (or at least deepening

realization) of the inextricable extent to which his psychic, sexual, and painterly identities were completely intertwined. In this work and others like it of the period, he continued to ponder

virility questions earlier addressed more imagistically in paintings such as Woman and in certain provocative drawings.*' Now, more vividly metaphorizing masculinity both with and in

his process of painting, Pollock, as Greenberg put it, had become able to advance “beyond the stage where he needs to make his poetry explicit in ideographs. . .. What he invents, instead,

has perhaps, in its very abstractness and absence of assignable definition, a more reverberating meaning.”

180 | ELLEN G. LANDAU

By 1949, when his most recent exhibition opened at Betty Parsons, Pollock’s advanced retrenchment from methods and imagery associated with the easel tradition—a move incipi-

ent six years earlier in Composition with Pouring If—had become more patently evident. As we've seen, in the close to mural-sized allover poured canvases initiated the previous year, his ability to release and register physical and psychological experience through pure painterly means had exponentially increased. Using methods which obviously recalled Siqueiros—work-

ing on the floor, pouring pigment from a can, dripping it off sticks, and sometimes imprinting his hand or foot—Pollock achieved in signature works such as Lavender Mist and Autumn

Rhythm free-standing indexical effects that Siqueiros would never have dreamed of generating

without polemical intent. By converting technique and its calligraphic evidence into a primary and very visceral “means of arriving at a statement,” Pollock refocused his own and the viewer's attention, highlighting causality (how a work has been created), as opposed to message or figuration. Responding, as Motherwell remarked, with “his body-and-mind as a whole to the events of reality.” Pollock literalized his “energy and motion,” documenting his thoughts and actions in pictorial space.“ Although visual documentation exists to prove that Siqueiros also used his own body movements to mediate between concept and material fact, Namuth’s brilliant photographic images track the more aesthetically transformative powers of Pollock's auto-

plastic “cursive sweep.” Differentiating himself from Benton, Pollock shared with (and perhaps derived from) Siqueiros the notion that modern painters should not express their own place and time with forms and methods conceived in the past. Both he and Siqueiros seem to have desired, as Pollock once phrased it, to “experience [our] age in terms of painting—not an illustration of—(but the equivalent).”* But, akin to his radical conversion of the muscular action principles of Ben-

ton, Pollock’s conclusions ultimately differed from Siqueiros in ways that are highly significant.

As John Berger realized early on, although he was as interested as the Mexicans in conquer-

ing large areas of visual space, Pollock’s basic instincts convinced him that a painter's best and truest surfaces were those positioned internally. Demonstrating that social meaning can also be

embedded in the autographic, Pollock threw an ingenious bridge between the aims and accom-

plishments of the easel and mural traditions.*’ As attested by Harold Lehman, who knew them well, despite their age and national differences Jackson Pollock and David Alfaro Siqueiros were indeed “simpatico.”* Transcending utterly such conventional aesthetic categories as beauty and

ugliness, Siqueiros’s dream of “an ideal art for the future” defined dynamically and interactively was to be realized, but in a way he could never have envisioned.”

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Pollock and America, Too STEPHEN

POLCARI

rt in the late 1940s had an international flavor. The work of Francis Bacon in Britain, Jean Dubuffet in France, and the Abstract Expres-

sionists in New York can be superficially characterized as painterly, rough, and hard—

Dubufett’s art was called Art Brut. Looseness or freedom seemed to transcend cultural differences. Why? Although it is impossible to generalize, certainly a central contributing factor to

this ethos was World War II. In the wake of fifty million dead, a good part of the world damaged

if not destroyed, the worst war and the worst regime in recorded history, the idea of clarity, pre-

cision, and grace seemed inappropriate, if not outright offensive. Although a cliché and a mar-

velous piece of German pessimism, Theodor Adorno’s famous comment that it was “obscene to

make poetry after Auschwitz” seemed quite apt in the visual as well as the literary arts. Only an art of toughness and brutality seemed authentic to human experience at that time.

Although powerful forces seemed right as a subject for international Western art, that is where the similarities end, or at least fade; for Bacon, Dubuffet, and the Abstract Expressionists

are very different both culturally and stylistically. In America, Abstract Expressionism has tra-

ditionally been seen as America’s first art of international significance. This, supposedly, is because the Abstract Expressionists allegedly learned at the feet of Picasso, Miré, and the Sur-

realists, the best European pedigrees, that allowed them to overcome the provincial roots of American art and culture and to emerge as distinctive contributors to European modernism. For Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock was the heir to Picasso. For Harold Rosenberg, it was

Willem de Kooning.

The Abstract Expressionists were supposed to have particularly stepped beyond the retardaire America of the 1930s. According to virtually every history written of these artists, American artistic culture was mostly in a backward state at that time. It had rejected European modernism and reverted to old-fashioned representationalism, as in the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and the WPA. Nothing in American culture seemed viable for the more

182 | STEPHEN POLCARI

forward-looking Abstract Expressionists, with a few exceptions, such as Stuart Davis and the

early Arshile Gorky. According to the standard argument, they bucked the “realist” trend with Cubist and Surrealist work, although Davis still felt the need to render the American scene with

his advanced European idiom. Otherwise, American culture of the 1930s was irrelevant, if not barren, for the so-called advanced artists of the 1940s. Moreover, the greatest example of the barrenness is the WPA, with its big murals of the conventional evolution of American life.

Wish that it were that simple. In reality, Abstract Expressionism, and especially the work of

Jackson Pollock, owes much more to the thirties than has been recognized. Those years were a

far more creative period, indeed, they were much more alive and complex than what conventional thinking portrays as a period of nothing but left-right politics. Too much attention has

been given this reductive view, particularly in the last twenty years, the years of politics this, politics that. The 1930s was a fecund period in American culture. Modernist art historians and others

have paid little attention, so determined were they to ascribe everything interesting and new in Abstract Expressionism to Europe. In a way, this disregard for American origins has been a traditional rite in American culture. There has always been a divide between those who saw the relationship to the Continent as most important and most validating and those who empha-

sized American issues and expression.

While the idea of a European connection has dominated the criticism by Americans and

Europeans since the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism, in the 1950s there was a brief attempt to explain the art in terms of American culture. This was the latest example of the continuing search for an American artistic identity and personality. For Abstract Expressionism, one of the

best arguments was put forth by John McCoubrey in his book The American Tradition in Paint-

ing.' McCoubrey argued that Abstract Expressionist art reflected traditional American concerns

with emotional honesty; rough, unrefined even violent surfaces and forms; and naive feelings. He also characterized the artist as a noble savage infused with existential angst by society’s alleged

corruption. Such an interpretation posited a virtual American stereotype—the American as seemingly innocent but well-meaning—as the Abstract Expressionist cultural identity.

This 1950s response to Abstract Expressionism did not last. The idea that Abstract Expres-

sionism was mostly American in character and meaning went out of fashion. Critics of the

1960s and later stressed its European derivation, as Greenbergian European modernism triumphed. Thereafter, much effort was spent on searching for modern European sources and

subjects for Abstract Expressionism. Whether its dynamism was sourced as Surrealist automa-

tism, its all-over unity perhaps ultimately Cubist, or its immediacy and directness a product of

POLLOCK AND AMERICA, TOO

| 183

rendering the unconscious, for most observers, Abstract Expressionism became a mode of European modernism adapted and reinvented on American soil. Yet, perhaps Pollock’s comment helped to clarify the issue most clearly. In 1944 he said that the idea of an isolated American art, as in the 1930s, was not viable, but his art could not help being American by virtue of

his being American? To a certain extent the first part of Pollock’s comment is true, but I would like to propose

that the second partis also true, if not truer: Abstract Expressionism is more American than pre-

viously recognized; and it was the American culture, particularly of the supposedly retardaire 1930s, that was significantly responsible for creating it. Let us look at the work of Jackson Pol-

lock in regard to his use of automatism, all-over unity, and directness and immediacy, keystones of his art, to investigate whether there is anything American in his Abstract Expressionist art.

THE

HIEROGLYPH

OR

PICTOGRAPH

OF

MOTION

Pollock’s art, and that of Abstract Expressionism as a whole, was shaped by an interaction

with the crisis atmosphere created by the epochal change in Western civilization from a rural to industrial and urban society that took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

(figure 51). It was a change that transformed American culture, values, behaviors and ideals. Pollock’s art was also brought forth by the culmination of that era in two world wars in twenty

years, separated by a great economic collapse. Such an era of public turmoil finished off much of the largely peaceful integrated, rural, religious American culture and psychology of the nineteenth century, and laid the groundwork for the liminal changes in living, thinking and feeling of the twentieth century. Itis from this new and creative culture that Jackson Pollock’s art and modern American culture of the thirties and forties arose. To be sure, his art is also one of subjective crisis, that is, his alcoholism, but it is also one that intertwines the personal and the collective. It is my belief that Pollock addressed his own difficulties through and along with those of his era. To him, they were

one and the same. The public was private and the private public. To resolve one was to resolve

the other. Pollock probed the thoughts and actions of his suffering selfby probing the thoughts

and action of suffering mankind. And he fought the forces in himself by fighting the destructive forces in the psyche that, in the theory of the day, were shared by other human beings. The dynamism of Pollock's abstractions illustrates the issue (plate 8). For many years these works were thought of mostly as the spontaneous, chaotic outpourings of the artist’s tortured

184 | STEPHEN POLCARI

51. Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950, oll and enamel on canvi , 8 ft. 10 In, x 47 ft. 5 5/8 In. (2.70 x 5.34 m). The Museum of Modem Art, New York. Sidney and Harriet Jar Collection Fund (by exchange). © 2006 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

unconscious, a popular understanding of an allegedly popularly determined art. Yet Pollock's weavings are much more, if they are that at all. They epitomize, in my opinion, something that, while recognized, has not been sufficiently appreciated in his art, or that of Abstract Expression-

ism as a whole: the abstractions embody a style of movement and flow in and of themselves. In other words, Pollock’s work consists of deliberately structured symbolic and metaphoric dynamics, a defining idea and form of Abstract Expressionism, and not just undisciplined gestures, outbursts or releases, or as Stuart Davis so colorfully put it in the typically fifties’ distorted way—“a belch from the unconscious.” To an extent, Pollock’s characteristic movement and flux is well known. Abstract Expressionist art is considered largely processive, that is, revealing of its own making, and the mean-

ing and sources of its process have been explicated in the literature. It has been traditionally

argued that Abstract Expressionism arose from either one of two things—as noted, European, that is, Surrealist, automatism, or “action” as defined by Harold Rosenberg's essay “American

Action Painters” of December 1952. These conceptions are limited, however, and at the very least incomplete, if not flawed. Pollock's work is neither, yet the sheer force of its elements mov-

ing through and with space is the most recognizable feature of his work. I would argue that Pol-

lock’s weavings are an invention out of the grounding of the ideas of movement prevalent in American culture and thought between and after the world wars. That is, Pollock’s work, as

indeed most Abstract Expressionist work, is characterized bya dynamism that originated in the

cultural debates and ideals of his formative years, the thirties, before those ideals were reborn

and adapted to later conceptions such as European modernism. These American sources were unrecognized by most modern critics, but now we need to move beyond the limited, first under-

standings previously offered.

Pollock’s youth was spent in a deeply troubled time in American and Western history. Partly because of the Great Depression, images, forms, and ideas of progressive movement dominated his early years. The economic catastrophe created a deep devotion to initiating something new in American life, to revitalizing and to recommencing, in other words, to “starting all over

again” and getting America moving?

In the 1930s, however, starting all over was easier said than done in the face of stagnation. We are familiar with the indelible images of the new photojournalism of that time: images of

idleness, inertia and despair. As Life noted, “depressions are hard to see ... they consist of things not happening, of business not being done.”*“Starting over” and getting America moving again were apt words, for they suggested the idea and image of motion as a felicitous symbol in the

thirties for overcoming the disaster and stagnancyof American life. Thus, motion itself became

5 1 STEPKEN POLCAED

a fertile metaphor for change, for the re-

ignition of progress and for a bustling

future. It also became the hieroglyph for human striving and purposeful activity.

In answering the challenge of the

rebirth of the American economy, if not life itself in the thirties, America clothed

itself in the needed imagery of progressive

movement. American visionary intellec-

tuals such as Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes, Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin ‘Teague, and others created a machine aes-

thetic of stripped-down, organic forms

suggesting the uncluttered

optimism

of

progress and promise. Those most closely

associated with machine production were

thus among the first to create the manifestation of this hope, originating the stream-

lined form that replaced the more rigid cubist Art Deco style of the 1920s. Indeed, _ 52, top. General Motors Building, Records of the New York World's

the Streamline Moderne, as it was called, _ Fair, 1939-40. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York transformed

American

popular

design,

Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Image cour-

consumer goods, and such visions of the _ tesy of Helen A. Harrison. future as the World’s Fair of 1939.Itwasan

_53, bottom. Helicline exit ramp, Records of the New York World's

idea and image so widespread that the

Fair,

thirties are sometimes called the “stream- _

Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

lined decade.” From the Ford Motor Com-

_tesy of Helen A. Harrison.

1939-40. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York image cour-

pany’s “Road of Tomorrow” to General Motor’s “Highway and Horizons” exhibition building (figure 52) to the sweeping pathways of the Helicline (figure 53) and Dreyfuss’“Democracity” in the Perisphere, curvilinear movement was the order of the day. In planes, trains, and automobiles, as well as other products, too, the need for new life and

efficient activity combined principles from biology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy to

give a form to the hope for change. For example, the shapes of aircraft gradually metamor-

POLLOCK AND AMERICA,

TOO

| 187

phosed from square to organic forms. By

1933 the most popular aircraft of the

decade,

the

DC-3,

had

become

fully

streamlined. Airplanes now had smooth, continuous profiles with bird heads and

tapered bodies. They were sleeker and

faster, the logic of aerodynamics clearly stated in a form that revealed its function

while summing up and symbolizing the ideas of swift flight, lift and low resistance

to moving forward. By seemingly rejecting constraints, planes enacted what they represented:

moving

from

one

place

to

another, from the past to the future in one

54, Raymond Loewy, Evolution chart of automobiles, 1933. Cour-

continuous motion, easily overcoming

tesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

resistance.

The same was also true of trains,

including the Zephyr, the 20th-Century Limited, the Blue Comet, the Flying Yankee, and many

others; and it was also true of automobiles, with their open, curvilinear forms. Detroit refash-

ioned its cars to suggest dynamic movement with structures composed of compound curves

replacing the right-angled or box shapes of the 1920s (figure 54). Particularly striking was the “torpedo” design, which featured a thrusting flow of low, integrated curves. (Alfred Barr used the design to diagram the history and future of modern art.)

‘There were many more fields for the realization of open, unbounded movement in the thir-

ties, but suffice it to say that at that time, an image of the fluid movement of the new, or the “liv-

ing,” in the terms of the day, could signify symbolical and expressive change, process, and the evolution in space and time of modern civilization itself.

The idea of “getting America moving again” thus had found its expressive symbol in fluid,

organic, and often compound curvilinear form and flux. As the designer Egmond Arens declared “streamlining is a world of great liberation. ... It expresses the wishes and hope of all people in all walks of life, whose will and energy have been closed down by the circumstances

of the Depression.” Fluid, organic form was thus a hieroglyph or pictograph, part design and part reenactment, fusing matter and manner, idea and form, embodying a holistic myth and

visionary life symbol for its time.

188 | STEPHEN POLCARI

And what underlies the art and thought of the 1930s ultimately was reconceived in the 1940s and 1950s under the impact of surrealism and modern art. Thirties streamlined movement, that is, “something fluid and fluxional, not fixed and final,” as it was often described, forms the ground line of the most significant art of the next decade, too, Abstract Expressionism and art of the New York School. The decisive form, image, and idea of the arts and society

of these two decades, then, was movement. Do I need to point out the fundamental relatedness to this underlying idea of Pollock's abstractions? While they are not the streamline design or stylized industrial objects, they, too,

suggest moving as an expressive symbol. They, too, consist of fluid, organic, compound, curvilinear forms. They, too, suggest perpetual organic movement and flow. They, too, express change, process, and evolution in space and time. And while they may not be unilinear as with the streamlined decade, their all-overness still articulates the expressive concept of movement

and flux. Pollock himself said that his weavings are “energy and motion made visible” and thus were “concentrated—fluid.”’ He also described his work as “human needs and motives.” His work is nothing if not “something fluid and fluxional, not fixed and final.” Even with the new

recognition of the presence of figures and symbols in Pollock’s abstractions this remains the case, as they are adapted to participate in the flux and flow.

Pollock’s weavings are thus a modernist version of the hieroglyph or pictograph of motion,

part design and part reenactment, fusing matter and manner. And for him, as with the previous

decade in America, they were projections of the “hopes and wishes” of a streaming, interrelating, moving and transformative future, necessary for himself and for his world, especially after the second world war in twenty years. Pollock’s turmoil was thus matched by that of his world,

and his need to address and overcome that turmoil became one with the same need of America and world at large, that is, of universal “humanity.” To be sure, there were many steps to the change from thirties concepts of motion to those

of the forties, among them Pollock’s engagement with the dynamism of his teacher Thomas

Hart Benton. There was besides automatism, the renew fashion for Bergsonism generated by

Surrealism, and the new interest in the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said that one can never step into the same river twice because it is constantly changing. There was also the belief in the dynamics of the unconscious promulgated by Carl Jung, the pop “modern man” writers and by others. And there was also the “stream of consciousness” writing of James Joyce,

whose work became widely known among artists. Nevertheless, these new ingredients rest on

the ground line of thirties dynamism, without which they would not have had as much impact

or proven so significant. Hieroglyphs or pictographs of motion, of the open fluid and fluxional,

POLLOCK AND AMERICA, TOO

| 189

not fixed or final, however different in externals, ultimately characterize these decades more than any other time before or since in American art of the twentieth century.

TOTALITY A second aspect of Pollock’s weavings rooted in the cultural turmoil of the thirties rather

than in his alcoholism or European modernism is their integrated unity. Pollock’s weavings

resolve themselves into a greater and more direct vitalist unity or holism than any works seen before in modern art. This resolution was recognized immediately by the modernist critic Clement Greenberg, who helped establish Pollock’s reputation in the 1940s.* Pollock’s inte-

grated unity has become known as his “all-over design,” and it is that “all-over design” that, along with his dynamism and his public myth as America’s tortured artist, has made Pollock famous.

“All-over design” is the formal designation for the even distribution and integration of the separate elements in his work. While not finishing at the edge (the painted field largely does not extend to the edge), the evenness of line, color and form is so consistent in his large canvases

that Pollock seems to dispense with the centuries-old mode of composition emphasizinga centralized subject/ground configuration. Pollock’s “all-over-design,’ then, created a new quality of wholeness that won him stylistic recognition. Modernist criticism has seldom offered a reason for Pollock’s holism. Greenberg tried to do so when he wrote that Pollock's abstractions, con-

sisting of the accumulation and dissolution of similar units into sheer texture and sensation, correspond to the contemporary feeling that all hierarchical distinctions have been exhausted, that no area or order of experience is either intrinsically or relatively superior to another, that is, the all-over design is more democratic than previous designs.’ However, this attempt at explanation is the exception, not the rule. Style alone has been sufficient justification for most critics through the years. “All-over design” is not just a stylistic innovation, however, but a realization of another profound wish of Pollock’s social culture that has seldom been recognized in the years in which for-

malist analysis and personal struggle have been the principal modes of interpreting his work. “all-over design” realized a new form of integration from the fragments of modern culture that had to be reconfigured after the turmoil and cataclysms of the early twentieth century. All-over design is reintegrated wholeness, or totality, that was a, if not the, central ideal of the 1930s, a

desire for which we can see in a variety of places.

190 | STEPHEN POLCARI

In the 1920s and 1930s, the interest in cultural wholes was everywhere. Just to cite a few

examples, it underlay the development of several new disciplines, for example, cultural As Jacques Barzun, a founder of this way of thinking at Columbia University, noted, history broke down disciplinary boundaries, among them, the arts, social customs, ment, and religion, to form a holistic understanding, a web of interrelationships, of

history. cultural governsociety.

What made it distinctive at that time was that it refused to be bound by such single categories

as politics or economics. Interest in cultural wholes underlay another form of thinking, anthropology, which arose and made social, integrated thought popular between the wars. Anthropology dominated the study of the new idea of the thinking, “culture.” Previously conceived to refer to the enlightenment and refinement of a civilization, particularly European civilization, in the thirties under

the impact of anthropology, the term culture was newly thought to be something separate and distinctive. The new definition of culture was put forth by Sir Edward Tylor: culture was “that

complex whole [my italics] which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”"® Tylor’s concept emphasized that culture was learned, not inherited, and that it united a people. Thus a geographical

area, a given people, a set of behaviors, and a given time would make a totalizing, integrated entity, pattern or configuration. In the thirties, it was thought that culture formed the total

structure of the life of a society.

Further, in art besides that of the WPA, Pollock's teacher and father figure—the key region-

alist Thomas Hart Benton, painted what he thought to be a totalizing pattern of American life,

history and experience in epics of continuous energy and of “doings and undergoings” or experience. The result was an all-over history in his painting, representative of the dynamism of American life and personality, in other words, a “big picture” of the American experience and the American mind in the city and in the country. Other ideas of organic wholeness were influential in the period. Too numerous to mention.

separately, it should suffice to include the views of Holger Cahill, the director of the Works

Progress Administration Federal Art Projects and a good friend of Pollock’s, who argued that

the American artist was seeking to represent the American “native epic” or myth (today called “jdentity’) that expressed the “qualitative unities” making up the pattern of American culture.'' Ultimately, Pollock’s all-over design transforms the thirties’ desire for holistic configura-

tion into forties terms of myth, memory, and inward tensions and forces, that is, into something more psychological than it was. And these terms form his kind of future. Perhaps the Abstract Expressionist Arshile Gorky best expressed the forties’ version of the holistic web or “all-over

POLLOCK AND AMERICA,

TOO

| 191

design” in words when he wrote that he painted the mind or memory’s sense so that the “life pattern that exists in the universe, its tensions, oppositions, action, and counteractions .

form

the complete living unit.”

Pollock’s extraordinary compositions of interlocking, compound, yet stabilized curvilinear movements, then, parallel Gorky’s idea of a “complete living unit” or whole. His “all-over designs” form a vivid living entity in integrated balance and expression. As in the thirties, but without its socio-economic determinism, his webs fuse all separate activities or elements into a

new holistic inwardness of tensions, oppositions, actions and counteractions that for him dynamically moved from a past to a future."

DIRECT AND

EXPERIENCE,

PARTICIPATION

THE

DOCUMENTARY

OBSERVATION

In 1943, the filmmaker Preston Sturges narrated in his famous Sullivan's Travels the experience of a movie director who wants to make a socially relevant film. At first, the filmmaker

seeks out local material to portray, but through a series of mishaps, he himself becomes down and out, a hobo on the road—true, with Veronica Lake—but still on the road. He thus moved

from the theoretical to the “real,” from the representation of the artist’s depiction to the actual

experience of the participant, living his narrative rather than describing or symbolizing it. He thus fulfilled the third ideal of the 1930s—the ideal of direct experience, that is, the documen-

tary and the participant-observer.'*

In this era, the golden age of radio reporting is perhaps the best example of this idea. We all

know FDR's marvelously effective “fireside chats” that helped

to sell the New Deal. Another such

figure similarly, and brilliantly, using the radio was Edward R. Murrow. Murrow dealt with public fact in concrete and human terms, making an intimate story of the big picture. For example, to make early World War II vivid to his listeners, to bring them “the real thing,” he ad-libbed

from rooftops as the Germans blitzed London, bringing alive the day’s terrifying events. Murrow’s grim introductions became the language of the late 1930s and throughout the war: “This is... London,” he said. His introductions exemplified the direct method: London is talking to

you. At the same time, they took his audience directly on the road for further investigation. “We

take you to Paris,” he declared (or Vienna or Nuremberg), indicating that the listener was being physically hustled from site to site so that he could be an on the spot witness, too.” Far from

being dispassionate and neutral, on the rooftops in London, Murrow spoke in a trembling voice

192 | STEPHEN POLCARI

that broke into sobs. Although

the listener did not have the experience himself, he had

another’s—Murrow’s.'* "Murrow and his colleagues offered something akin to drama: vicari-

‘ous experience of what they were living and observing. It put the listener in another man’s shoes. No better way to influence opinion has ever been found.”"*

A further exercise of this idea very close to Pollock is, again, the method and work of Pol-

lock’s teacher, Thomas Hart Benton. Benton, too, sought the documentary, that is, when at first with his father and then on his own, he tried to encounter the direct reality of America in trips to southern Missouri, the Ozarks, the Arkansas rivers and byways, and other hinterland localities. There he would encounter the living past in the form of Civil War veterans, farmers and others. He would sketch these figures and places and they would become basis of his art. Much like Sturges, Benton felt the need to check his ideas and knowledge in the field. For him, real

experience tests and defines. The artist turns to the “world of experience,” and “things as they were and are” and he rendered them in art.

‘What counted with all of these men, then, were not abstractions, not theories that intellec-

tuals conjure but “living experience” as they saw it, a profoundly important goal and subject of the time. Usually the provenance of only participants, direct experience suggests that live, immediate and authentic emotion speaks for itself.

Pollock absorbed this concept (figure 55). From the very inception of his career, he praised

it as a worthy goal, for he had written about Benton ina letter to his father in 1933, “After a lifetime struggle with the elements of everyday experience, he [Benton] is beginning to be recog-

nized as the foremost American painter today. He has lifted art from the stuffy studio into the

world and happenings about him {my italics] which has common meaning to the masses.” Pol-

lock thus described Benton’s as an art attuned to real experience in real places, that is, as a liv-

ing art generated by direct experience. Pollock valorized this by direct means himself—by traveling across the country to capture local color for his own youthful art. Later, in 1950, when

he employed modernist devices, in a radio interview, he declared “I approach painting in the

same sense as one approaches drawing: that is, it’s direct. I don’t work from drawings ... paint-

ing is, I think, today,—the more immediate, the more direct—the greater the possibilities of making a direct—of making a statement.”"* Pollock’s living abstractions, particularly seen

through Hans Namuth’s photographs and films, are full of direct and vivid authenticity, if not psychological experience. His paintings immediately document the expression of the psyche as he conceived it. An idea of the thirties has come alive once again in the new terms of the forties. Tam reminded of a statement by the film director John Huston: “In [moving] pictures, if you do it right, the thing happens right there.”"”

POLLOCK AND AMERICA, TOO

| 193

55. Jackson Pollock painting One: Number 31, 1950. Photo © Estate of Hans Namuth, courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, NY.

Thus one can conclude there is a strong American component in Pollock's art. This is also true of other Abstract Expressionist work. The European element provided a finish to what had already been laid down in America. Yes, Pollock’s work represents a development of some international ideas, but it is as much a development of the ideas of thirties America and its cultural

and social wishes. Like a cathedral built over time, with its last portal in the latest style, Pollock’s exemplary work contains many concepts from disparate motivations. It should not be judged, just as a cathedral should not be, only by the last additions. Work needs to be done to restore

some balance and perspective to our understanding of the complex relationship in this new art. It is not simply a question of American subordination to European thought, but the use of

European thought yet again for American, as well as personal, hopes.

POLLOCK AND AMERICA, TOO

| 195

The Ultimate Challenge for Alfred H. Barr, Jr.:

Transforming the Ecology of American Culture, 1924-1943 ANNIE

COKREN-SOCLAL

| |n 1954, Thomas B. Hess, the executive director of Art News, criticized u Alfred Barr for being “late on Abstract Expressionism” and the Museum of

Modern Art for showing a “baffling lack of recognition of postwar American abstract paint-

ing and sculpture.”' Years later, in a private letter to Alfred Frankfurter and Hess, Barr explained that he had found these remarks “inaccurate and unfair as well as damaging,” and

that he was “deeply concerned over the Museum's responsibility, past and present, toward the American avant-garde.”? In the following I will investigate the validity of Hess's criticism and explore the question of

the role played by Alfred H. Barr and by the Museum of Modern Art in the emergence of

Abstract Expressionism and, more widely, in the cultural life of New York during the 1930s. I

will address this question from both a sociological and a historical perspective,’ in considering Barr as one of those “dynamic actors”—such as collectors, patrons, trustees, art dealers, museum

directors and curators, professors and critics—who were responsible for creatinga new cultural environment in which American artists could produce their work. I will also analyze Barr's

achievements in the context of a change of locus during a very specific historical moment, namely, when political events that took place in Europe forced many cultural actors of the Continent to seek refuge in the United States.

In my most recent research, I have tried to understand the process that helped transform the

working conditions of painters in the United States and produced the autonomization of the

196 | ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL

American artistic field from its European model.' Icriticized the doxa

that tended to

present the emergence of Abstract Expres-

sionism asa heroic moment that seemed to appear almost magically on the art scene

and suggested a new periodization (which

differs, for instance, from that of Serge Guilbaut).’ | argued that most meaningful changes started taking place already around

1860 (i.e., much earlier than usually agreed upon), when the French academic system began to collapse and when, in the United States, the great wave of industrialization created a new social class that asserted itself through art collections, assembled in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

I then showed that the first wave of build-

86. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1929. Margaret Scolari Barr Papers, photo

ing of American

albums,

museums

(1890-1900)

allowed a wider public to benefit from

box

35.

Digital

Image

© The

Museum

of Modern

Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

those collections, and it is in this perspec-

tive that I will analyze Barr’s role as a transforming agent within the different changes that took

place between 1900 and 1948 as well as the “complex network of participants”* that enabled American painters to reach a period of emancipation, and eventually to be recognized internationally.

Neil Harris has described the role that religion, minorities, and institutions played in the American art world during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.’ It might be interesting

to refer Harris's approach to the analysis of Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich who, when

describing the Protestant Reformation, evoked the respective cultural importance of the cities of Antwerp, London, and Brussels, before formulating the following conclusion: “In biology the word ‘ecology’ refers to a species of animal or vegetable that survives only in a certain climate and ina certain environment. Naturally lam employing this word metaphorically. Many interrelated factors bring about the flowering of a particular style. And when they are gone, art can die.”* Borrowing this metaphor from Gombrich, | would like to concentrate here on Barr’s cul-

tural achievements, by exploring the way he transformed the ecology of American culture at

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. 1197

different moments of his career, from its early beginnings as a young academic throughout his other commitments as the director of MoMA, during a period spanning from 1924 to 1943.

AN EARLY MILITANT

OF MODERNISM:

1924-27

As an undergraduate at Princeton, Barr had taken Charles Rufus Morey’s classes in early Christian and medieval art as well Frank Jewett Mathers courses in modern art, both a major influence on his intellectual formation. Morey, in particular, stressed the “interrelation of all

manifestations of culture from painting, sculpture, architecture, manuscripts, and ivories to folklore and theology.”!° His book The Sources of Medieval Art, in the tradition of German art

historians Heinrich Wolfflin and Alois Riegl, displayed the idea that only the full consideration of the complex historical context could explain the emergence of early Christian and medieval

art. This statement was also presented through a genealogical chart in which Hellenistic, Latin,

and Celtic sources were interwoven: such use of spatial visualization will always accompany Barr through his career."' Interestingly, in his book about art history teaching in the United

States, art historian Erwin Panofsky comments on Morey’s approach: it was effective because “where the European art historians were conditioned to think in terms of national and regional boundaries,” distance enabled the Americans to overcome those restrictions.'* Mather, though, who also wrote art criticism for the New York Evening Post, taught the class in modern art, but his conservative taste provoked numerous conflicts with Barr, who shortly afterward became an early militant of modernism." Between 1924 and 1927, he taught seminars at Harvard, Princeton, and Wellesley, organized exhibitions, and wrote articles, all with the explicit intention of “infus{ing] modernist interpretations of art through the college and stim-

ulat[ing] an interest among the students in the vital and revolutionary creative work which is an integral part of the twentieth century civilization.”"* The three exhibitions of modern art that he presented from 1924 to 1927, helped him reach out to a circle of academic audiences at the

Taylor Art Gallery at Vassar College, the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, and the Farnsworth

Museum at Wellesley College.'*

In the spring of 1927 Barr carried out his project by teaching a pioneer course at Wellesley

College. It was, as he called it, “almost the first course in any college devoted entirely to painting.

of the last hundred years.” By committing himself into a “study of all the arts” (including

painting, industrial architecture, the industrial and decorative arts, as well as the theater arts, music, the history of the movie, criticism and aesthetics), by extending his object to the new

198 | ANNIE CONEN-SOLEL

accomplishments “not only in art circles but in all currents of life,” by integrating “reports on

events of timely interest” in the beginning of each class, by making “each individual student responsible” for the division of the subject, Barr certainly innovated by the way he taught art history in the United States. But his course, obviously modeled after Morey’s interdisciplinary approach to medieval culture, went way beyond. For Barr suggested that his students be also aware of contemporary art issues, be organized as a “faculty.” and be in charge of their own “departments,”in an experimental form of pedagogical approach. In those times ofearly art history teaching in the United States, Barr navigated between the

two schools offering the best possible training at the time. After integrating Princeton's tradi-

tion of historical context, his move to Harvard put him in touch with the other dominant tra-

dition, that of connoisseurship based on a much more formalist approach. It was certainly Paul

Sachs’s museum course at Harvard during academic year 1926-27 that put the final touches on

Barr's training. Paul Sachs’s own project echoed the vision of his professor, Charles Eliot Norton, a specialist in American art, who had often expressed his pessimism about art and culture in the United States. “It is our misfortune,” Norton wrote in 1865, “to have no body of educated

men competent to pass correct judgment, and forming a court of final appeal in matters of

learning; not an academy, not an organized body, but a scattered band of men of learning and cultivated critics who would leaven the whole mass of popular ignorance.” After diagnosing the American situation and after numerous travels to England where he befriended John

Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill, Norton managed to call on his students and to

discuss the immediate steps to take in order to improve the situation in the United States. Following Norton’s analysis, Sachs’s museum course was based on the assumption that the

United States urgently needed an elite to guide its people toward a new culture. Profoundly disappointed by the American system, in which museum directors went about their work empirically, Sachs started to imagine the training of new “arts administrators” who would know how

to talk to art patrons.'* He believed that it was urgent “to implant scholarly standards in future museum workers and to educate their eyes so that they might be helped to see.” Therefore, Sachs envisioned the future museum director as a “connoisseur-scholar,” a “guide who would be first and foremost a broad, well-trained scholar and a linguist, and then in due course, a specialist.” Thus, under such leadership, the new American museum would become “not only be a treasure

house, but also an educational system. In every prosperous municipality in the land,” he further

wrote, “in the next ten years the call is likely to come for thoroughly equipped curators and directors. Harvard must maintain its leadership in this new profession, the dignity of which

is

as yet imperfectly understood.”

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. 1199

After a year of training with Paul Sachs and a first summer trip to Europe, the young Barr

stepped fiercely onto the public stage, and boldly criticized the backwardness of the American

art scene. He published some strong articles, among which a violent denunciation of the confined atmosphere of certain American cities, such as Boston. “It is surprising, even shocking to the stranger,” Barr noted, “to find so little interest in Modern pictures in Boston and Cambridge. .«.One may search in vain for the works of the foremost living painters. .. . It is actually impossible for an amateur to study a single painting by Cézanne. . . . Sculpture after Rodin is almost

equally neglected.” Bart's frustration about the provincialism of his country was certainly reinforced by the difficulties in finding reproductions, books, and any other information coming from Europe. “You suggested that you could import books and prints for me at dealers’ prices,” he wrote to J. B. Neumann, the Berlin gallerist established shortly before in New York. “I have an absurdly small amount—a little over $200. Can you tell me what Austrian, German, French firms other than those I have mentioned make fine reproductions of modern art?”*! Thanks to Paul Sachs’ introductions, Alfred Barr became part of a small and informal network of initiés, that ofa handful American actors of modernism in the United States: spanning the worlds of academics, collectors, critics and dealers. Among them, he met J. B. Neumann. (director of the New Art Circle galleries), Julian Lévy, Valentine Dudensing, César B. de Hauke (of the Wildenstein

Gallery), and Alice Van Vechten

Brown, the radical director of the

Farnsworth Museum at Wellesley. He was also in contact with critics such as Marianne Moore (chief editor of the magazine The Dial) and Sheldon Cheney (author of A Primer of Modern Art); with collectors such as Albert Barnes, Walter Pach, and Katherine Dreier. Those years of training culminated in 1927 when Barr decided that it was “essential [for him] to go to Europe—London, Paris, [and] most important at the moment Germany.”“I wish to study con-

temporary European culture and gather material for a thesis on “The Machine in Modern Art,

he added, Contemporary art is puzzling and chaotic but it is, to many of us, living and important in itself and a manifestation of our amazing though not too lucid civilization.

FIELDWORK

ON

THE

CULTURAL

AMSTERDAM-BERLIN-MOSCOW,

AXIS:

1927-28

On the cultural axis Amsterdam-Berlin-Moscow, Barr was able to discover the realizations

produced in context by European avant-gardes at a crucial moment, ten years after the end of World War I and ten years before the beginning of World War II, during the interim of peace that

260 | AR WE COHN SOLAL

the British writer Robert Graves called “the long week-end of Europe.” In October 1927 Barr

arrived in Rotterdam, setting out on his grand tour of Europe that would last twelve months. On

the suggestion of his friend Henry-Russell Hitchcock and of J. B. Neumann, he insisted on trav-

eling to see the revolutionary housing created for workers by Dutch architect J.P.P. Oud in Hoek

van Holland, near Rotterdam, before visiting most museums in the country. Before his departure, Barr had an arrangement to write a series of articles for The Arts, based on his trip. After reporting from London, he wrote his “Dutch Letter,” which can be read as a manifesto. Nowhere more than in Holland are the old and the new so abruptly, so piquantly con-

trasted. In the same landscape, one can see an eighteenth century mill slowly towing its

great fans in defiance of a traveling steam gib-crane which is toiling in the distance a load

of lumber from Norway. In the same placid canals snorting motor-boats churn paint black

and beetle-yellow barges pushed along by a lone man with a pole while another nods against the tiller. In the same street opposite Gothic and Baroque facades are shop-fronts

of the most aggressive and complete modernity. There is no compromise with dead styles, no revamping of Beaux-Arts academicians. Dutch burgers put up a severely modern post-

office with cubistic sculpture to the obvious disadvantage of a seventeenth century townhall, just as ruthlessly as their ancestors added a Gothic nave to a Romanesque choir. Dutch merchants realize the value of definitely modern surroundings for their wares. Dutch cafés and theaters are in the fashion. Even the Dutch householder, to judge from the furniture shown in shop-windows, wants his living-room to be as modern as his bathroom. And this seems true of Haarlem and Utrecht as well as of Amsterdam and The Hague. To describe

this modern style in the abstract, is impossible. Posters, book-jackets, objets d’art, textiles,

typography, as well as furniture and architecture, reflect or express it. Moreover, it is not

one style, but several. The American, or at least the American of the Eastern coast, takes it

for granted that his public museums should be indifferent to modern art-except to give occasional memorial exhibitions to painters who have just died. In Holland the opposite

is true. The Museum of Rotterdam, for instance, has special rooms devoted to a perma-

nent collection of modern works of art. Here are Severini’s fine neoclassic guitar player; a Sheeler-like still-life by Herbin; cubist and expressionist paintings by such Dutchmen as Toorop and Thorn-Prikker; sculpture by Maillol, de Fiori, and Archipenko. At The Hague, where department-stores are as modern as grain-elevators, an official loan exhibition of Austrian art was in progress at the Museum Voor Moderne Kunst. The place of honor was

given a dozen paintings of Kokoschka, who is certainly one of the most important among

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. 1201

‘Teutonic expressionists. Will any of it come into the American museums? To Americans, the success with which this policy of showing contemporary advanced work has been carried out is a sad reminder but also, perhaps, a challenge.” The Netherlands, a country that had remained neutral during World War I, played a key role in the cultural reconfiguration of Europe, and was displaying the most visible implementations of this cultural fermentation. In fact, it was eleven years before Barr’s travel to the Netherlands, in November 1917, that the first issue of De Stijl had been published in Leyden by

Theo van Doesburg. This “monthly magazine for modern plastic disciplines,” aimed at “con-

tributing to the development of a new aesthetic consciousness,” and remained active even if irregularly until 1931. De Stijl played the role of a catalyst for visual artists, designers, architects, poets, from northern countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium, but also from Italy, Hun-

gary, and Austria. If De Stijl has started as a reaction against Parisian trends, it also aimed at an international recognition. United by a common ideal, that of the artwork conceived as a synthe-

sis of the most diverse artistic experiences and, more radically, as a metaphor of the universe, artists and intellectuals actively contributed to the experimentations stemming from contem-

porary European avant-gardes (Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism).

Theo van Doesburg further developed those ideas by traveling and opening his magazine to other avant-garde publications, while another member of De Stijl, Piet Mondrian, settled in Paris, where he implemented his ideas on the relations between painting, sculpture and archi-

tecture and developed his hope that “the new spirit,”“the New Plasticism” could help “create the reunion of all arts.” Cafés, department store windows, furniture, theaters, and even book jackets and posters, all the “realizations of the most aggressive and the most complete modernity” that had enchanted

Alfred Barr during his travel through the Netherlands in October 1927, represented precisely the concrete signs of De Stijl's belief that art was able to challenge everyday life. After the Netherlands, Alfred Barr traveled to Dessau, where he met with Laszlé6 Moholy-Nagy and Vasily Kandinsky, whom he referred to as the “masters of the Bauhaus.” In Berlin he discovered the German museums basking

in the creative effervescence of the Weimar Republic; he was “enthu-

siastic” about Ludwig Justi’s concept of a “gallery dedicated exclusively to modern art” when he

visited the Neue Abteilung of the Nationalgalerie in the Kronzprinzenpalast; and he regarded the Mannheim Kunsthalle as “the most active modern art collection in Europe.”

Finally, the sev-

eral months he spent in Moscow at the time when Anatoly Lunacharsky (the first Soviet’s Peo-

ple’s Commissar) was at work on his project of bringing modern art to the masses, and his

202 | ANNIE CObrY-SOLAL

two-month journey throughout the Soviet Union, from Stalingrad to Leningrad, and up to Novgorod, where he met with Soviet filmmakers and listened to the debates between Constructivist and Suprematist painters on propaganda and art, helped him develop his first impressions expressed in the “Dutch Letter” and anchored his convictions that the European avant-gardes

were carrying the most promising seeds for the culture of the present.’ ALFRED

H. BARR

AS A MUSEUM

DIRECTOR:

1929-43

‘Asan academic, Barr had launched a fierce struggle to fight the ignorance and lethargy of the American art scene; shortly after his return to the United States, he would be considering,

that same agenda, but this time from the perspective ofa museum director, after meeting with Abby Rockefeller, one of the three founding members of the museum, in July 1929. The person responsible for allowing Barr to turn his projects into action was Paul Sachs, who introduced him to her.

It was the financial support of Republican women, the expertise ofa German Jew with aca-

demic credentials, and the energy of a Harvard cadet (a true American combination) that made

modern art possible in the United States. Barr’s ultimate project became the museum, consid-

ered in a revolutionary approach. His ultimate challenge became the one that he alluded to in his “Dutch Letter”: to change the state of modern art in the United States. His actions as a museum director should be seen as a continuum with both his past com-

mitments as a radical academic and with his year of “field work” in Europe (figure 57).“All over the world,” Barr wrote, a month before the museum opened,

the rising tide of interest in modern movements in art has found expression not only in private collections but also in public galleries. ... Nowhere has this tide of interest been more

manifest than in New York. But New York alone, among the great capitals of the world, lacks a public gallery where the founders and the masters of the modern schools can today be seen. That the American metropolis has no such gallery is an extraordinary anomaly. New York, if fully awakened, would be able in a few years to create a public collection of modern art which would place her at least on a par with Paris, Berlin and London.”*

In order to convince the trustees of the emergency of his radical project and to play on their nationalistic tendencies, Barr certainly stressed his commitment to his country’s excellence.

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. 1 203

Similarly, when he had to convince them

that “a new art museum would be multi-

departmental, including architecture, design, photography, and film)” although he was clearly borrowing the model of interconnection of the arts from De Stijl

and the Bauhaus, with a clever strategy in mind, he pleaded the following: “It is the tendency on the part of the public to iden57. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Philip Johnson, Margaret Scolari Barr. Cor- _ tify art with painting and sculpture—two Italy. 1932. The Museum of Modem Art Archives, New York.

_fields in which America is not yet, | am

‘The Margaret S. Barr Papers. Digital Image © The Museum of Mod-

afraid, quite the equal of France. But in

em Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

other fields, architecture and photography, for instance, the United States would

seem to be the equal or superior of any other country. If, then, we can in this Bulletin assemble our record in American art in all fields, I am convinced that we will have a very strong case, for no other museum in the country has done as much to further the interest of American photog-

raphy, American films, American architecture and American industrial design.” Was indeed Barr's reference to film and photography (as the most American art forms) the best possible way

to convince the trustees, who certainly did not consider film and photography as legitimate department for a museum? Between his conviction that modernism in the United States could only be implemented from the European model, and

the trustees’ requirements that

national considerations be main-

tained, Barr often had to maneuver subtly. His actions inevitably produced conflicts and misunderstandings with different groups in New York: the journalists, the artists, the trustees, who

regularly stressed a nationalistic interest. When the museum opened, Lloyd Goodrich condemned Barr's choice: “Seldom has there been such a crying need in the world of art for standards to correct certain popular tendencies. The modern French school, after years of bitter

controversy, has conquered this country as it has every other . .. we have carried our admiration

for it to an absurd length, accepting almost without question anything which bears the cachet

of Paris, exalting certain distinctly second-rate artists far beyond their desserts and in the

process neglecting the art of every other country and to a certain extent our own.”®As an heir

of elite institutions of the country, Barr had been influenced by the standards of his own mentors (Morey and Sachs certainly, and to a lesser extent, Mather) that he further implemented. Is

204 | ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL

it not ironic, therefore, that he was criticized precisely on the grounds of standards that he himself wanted

to uphold and disseminate?

Similarly, in 1936, after the show Cubism and Abstract Art, members from the American Abstract Artists Association picketed MoMA. “How can the Museum of Modern Art be Modern?” asked one of its leaflets that was distributed in front of the museum. “Let’s look at the facts.

The museum is supposed to exhibit the art of our era. Art of whose era? Sargent, Homer, Lafarge

and Harnett? Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Mondrian? What era? If it’s that of the descendants of Sargent and Homer, then where are the descendants of Picasso and Mondrian? Where is American Abstract Art? Shouldn’t the concept of modernity include the Avant-Garde?”° Thomas Craven, for his part, summarized these various criticisms, declaring that MoMA was “a Rocke-

feller plant riddled by cultural sickness. Its top intellectual, Alfred Barr, a master of a style that is one part mock-erudition and nine parts pure drivel, writes books on Picasso, the Red idol deified by the Parisian Bohemia which he rules, and on other such deadly phenomena. His museum isa glittering depot of exotic importations and the claptrap of a few culled Americans who have nothing American about them.””' In 1936 Barr came into conflict with the chairman of the board of trustees, Conger

Goodyear, while selecting an architect for the newbuilding: that episode signaled a culmination

of the clash between two radically opposed agendas. While Barr was discussing the possibility

of having it commissioned to one of the greatest European architects of the time, such as J.J.P. Oud, Mies van der Rohe, or Le Corbusier, Goodyear had made the decision to hire an architect

who might be of lesser stature than these Europeans, as long as he was American. In a kind of secretive coup, Goodyear hired Philip Goodwin, while Barr had already commissioned the building to Mies (figure 58). Stressing his commitment to excellence, therefore to cultural diver-

sity, Barr wrote:

The Museum was founded to show people the finest in modern art from all over the world. We have tried to do this, but whenever we have consciously and deliberately fallen below this standard (as has happened) we have betrayed the purpose of the Museum, The Museum, | believe, has done more than any other institution to initiate the reform in American architecture by bringing before the public the finest European work which was, in 1930, from five to twenty-five years ahead of America. ... For these reasons I think we are under obligation to consider one of the obviously superior Europeans ... know that some of our Trustees are strongly nationalistic in feeling but I think they do not hesitate to. buy their English clothes or French hats (if not French pictures)—nor do they seriously

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. 1205

object

to the

Museum's

owning

foreign

paintings. Why then should we be prejudiced

against a foreign architect? The Modern, as patron of modern architecture cannot afford the risk of mediocrity. It must

superlatively best.”

have the

In the end, Barr had to submit to the

trustees and accept their choice of Philip Goodwin. It represented one of his greatest defeats.

The art historian Meyer Schapiro offers us an interesting parallel when analyzing

the scandals provoked by the Armory Show

in the New York scene in the year 1913: it

“mark|ed] amoment of acceleration in the spread of Modernism in the United States,

and it offered to the public a lesson in internationalism, inculcating in the viewer lip Goodwin and Edward D. Stone, The Museum of Modern

—_an awareness of modernity, of the histori-

Art, New York, facade, 1939. Digital Image © The Museum of Mod-

cal present, of the unfolding present. More-

em Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

over, this new notion of time was universal, based on that of the entire world, of a

Europe and America united by a common cultural destiny; transcending local tradition, modern art was being experienced simultaneously at home and abroad.” But while the Armory

Show did point the way toward the future, introducing America to the new international aes-

thetic, local artists would for years deplore its effects.

Could we describe Barr's continual conflicts with the journalists, the artists, and the

trustees as symptomatic of the gap between the cultural soil of the United States and the seeds

that he aimed to sow into it? Could we compare all these conflicts to the scandals provoked by

the Armory Show two decades earlier? Was the American public at large prepared for the new “moment of acceleration” that Barr was engaging in? With a “cosmopolitan spirit of intercul-

tural explorations)" Barr w:

further developing the reconfiguration of his country’s cultural

ecology, which had been in process since the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Barr's

206 | ANNIE

COHEN-SOLAL

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59. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Torpedo” Diagram of Id manent Collection, 1933. Alfred H. rr, Jt. Papers, 9a.7A. The Museum of Modem Art Archives, New York, NY. Digital mage © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

project of anchoring the museum in an “unfolding present” contributed to further accelerating his country’s cultural awareness, and to installing a symbiosis with the past, the present, and the

future of its times. Such concept of a “dynamic museum” appears again when, in order to describe the permanent collection, Barr invented the metaphor of a torpedo. “The Permanent Collection,” he explained, “may be thought of graphically as a torpedo moving through time [figure 59], the blunt end pushes into the advanced field of art by means of the changing exhibitions. The bulk is made of accepted modern art. The tail tapers off into art which has become

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. 1207

classical and is ready for the general museum. The torpedo moves forwards by acquiring, and retails its length of seventy years by giving to other museums.” In the updated drawing of 1941, Barr’s conception of the torpedo has evolved to include

American and Mexican artists at the “blunt end.” Was this move a concession to the trustees’ expectations? Was it a response to the criticisms that the American Abstract Artists Association

had expressed? Furthermore, when he decided that an institution should fulfill a dual role—at once a Kunstmuseum, with a permanent collection of modern art (establishing “a fine collection of the immediate ancestors both American and European of the modern movement”) and a

Kunsthalle, a place to present contemporary artists (displaying “carefully chosen collections of the most important living masters”)—Barr was attempting to follow up these challenges by

bringing the past, present, and future into dialogue within a single institution. Such a challeng-

ing program represented the weaving together of two usually distinct activities: that of the

scholar-anthropologist and that of the policy-maker. Thanks to his nomination at the head of the museum, Barr found himself in a position of cultural action. But in a country unprepared for so much innovation, the complexity of the cultural heritage that he had amassed over the

years was inevitably bound to provoke resistance.

In 1943 further conflicts with the trustees led Conger Goodyear—the trustee who had clashed with Barr over the new building—to send the New York World Telegram a letter complaining about the last exhibition that Barr had organized: “I think the exhibition is very silly,

perhaps the silliest we've ever had. Really, I think we must put a stop to it. It would be far better to have no exhibitions at all than that kind of things. | think that together we can stop the present tendency.” The accumulation of conflicts (the last critic being Barr’s lack of publishing)

led Stephen Clarke—both president and chairman of the Board—to fire Barr from his position in 1943,

IN LIGHT OF EUROPEAN

INTELLECTUALS

CF HIS TIME

By crossing traditional boundaries among disciplines, genres and hierarchy, and by reconfiguring new cultural spaces for his country, Barr also stepped into the tradition of European

intellectuals from the 1930s and 1940s who, like Barr, imposed major cultural reorganizations: Arthur Lehning, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Claude Lévi-Strauss each responded to the situation in

his own way. While Barr was traveling throughout Europe, Dutch, French and German book-

stores were carrying copies of the journal i10 (figure 60) an international magazine directed by

208 | ANNIE CONEN-STLAL

60. Lészlé Moholy-Nagy. Cover designs for the magazine /10, Amsterdam, 1928.

Arthur Lehning, a twenty-nine-year-old anarchist—almost exactly Barr’s age. Born in Utrecht to German parents, Lehning had already constructed, by a series of well-planned European trips, a considerable network of intellectual contacts. A year before Alfred Barr’s “grand tour” of Europe, Lehning had visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he had discussed his project of creating a new magazine with Moholy-Nagy, in charge of the metallurgical workshop, and with Kandinsky, in charge of the pictorial one. “The fundamental ideal of the review in question seems to me exceptional and I am completely convinced,” wrote a euphoric Kandinsky, three days after his meeting with Lehning.“‘I am excited by this synthetic idea of joining together the arts of different fields. Fora long time I’ve dreamed of such a journal and 1 am very happy about the idea that such a project is at last on the brink of becoming a reality.”””

Familiar with the German cultural tradition—particularly enthusiastic about the‘“dynamic

atmosphere of [Berlin, its] capital,” also at ease in Vienna, Paris and Amsterdam—Lehning

quickly managed to gather around him, through an impressive strategy of networking, some of the most interesting artists and intellectuals of his time. He described his own vision as that of

a“socialist-utopian with an anarchist bent” and aimed at creating a journal that would be “an

organ of all the manifestations of the modern mind, a documentation of all the new trends in

art, science, philosophy, and sociology.” The signatures of artists Hans Arp, Naum Gabo, Kandinsky, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Mondrian, and Moholy-Nagy (who designed the layout of the magazine) appeared with those of philosophers Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch; architects Oud and Mark Stam; designers and graphic artists Gerrit Rietveld and Paul Schuitema;

musician Willem Pijper; filmmaker Joris Ivens; photographer; poets Hendrik Marsman and

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. | 209

J. J. Slauerhoff; literary critic Menno ter Braak; and politicians Max Nettlau, Alexander

Schapiro, Alexander Berkman, and Roger N. Baldwin.

This interdisciplinary magazine gathered contributors from all over Europe—from the

Soviet Union, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Belgium—as well as from the United States, and it contained articles written in Dutch, English, French, and German,

Finally, the obvious goal of the magazine remained a political one, as Arthur Lehning later

stated: “the concept fundamental to i10 was that the so-called integration of art in daily life...

would have to be accompanied by changes in other sectors of cultural life and in society as a whole.” As shown by Yve-Alain Bois, if since the 1910sa few other avant-garde magazines such as De Stijl and L'Esprit Nouveau,” by their attempts to decompartmentalize the conventional borders between disciplines and to build bridges between art and life (as it was then formu-

lated), had already paved the way for i10, certainly i10 .. . remains in fact absolutely unique." The careers of two French philosophers of Barr’s generation, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss, can contribute to our understanding of Barr’s behavior through the daunting challenges of this period. Sartre and

Lévi-Strauss, both students at the Ecole Normale

Supérieure, therefore representing the intellectual elite of their country, soon became subver-

sive heirs to their milieu. At a time when French philosophy was drowning in a formof institutionalization that excluded all reference to foreign sources, students perceived that within the

French academic order, all questioning about forms of elaboration or of transmission, all openings to foreign philosophical traditions, were regarded as highly suspicious. The young Sartre understood that one could only help restore the dignity of philosophy by considering the culture of the present and by transgressing this tradition and decisively attack-

ing this order. He explored other disciplines (less legitimized by the institution) such as cinema, jazz, songs, and literary criticism; he explored other cultures such as those of North America

and Germany. He traveled to Berlin in order to study phenomenology from the texts of Husserl and Heidegger, traveled to the United States in order to learn “lessons in the art of writing” from novelists Dos Passos and Faulkner, watched and analyzed Russian and American movies from S. M. Eisenstein and John Ford. He produced an aesthetic conceptualization of the cinema asa

new genre, infused an ethnography of everyday life into his philosophical essays, wrote a highly experimental novel, Nausea, and attempted to think modernity at large. A decade later, with the

creation of his magazine Les Temps Modernes, Sartre decided to “write for his town time” by “tracking down the truth wherever it might be”; by encompassing all genres with a synthetic mind and anchoring his quest into the challenges of the unfolding present, he managed to launch the age of “committed literature.”

210 | ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL

As for Claude Lévi-Strauss, although conscious that France was then a country where philosophy reigned supreme, he promptly admitted that “if philosophical training at the Sorbonne aimed at exercising the intelligence, it in fact reduced itself to an aesthetic auto-contemplation

of the conscience, and inevitably ended up by drying up your spirit.” Confronted with a “disgust for this kind of training” he chose to study anthropology, an emerging discipline, and started field work in Brazil, which he later complemented in the United States during World War II by

an exploration of the boundaries among ethnography and linguistics, psychology, geology, and

biology, as well as to build a new scientific culture for himself. Being able to experience the

“porosity of borders” gave him an “exhilarating feeling.” For him, the 1940s became a place where all doors were “giving ways to other worlds he could thrive on the many bridges yet unconnected in France, engage sible anywhere else, and enjoy American museums such as the Museum

city of New York in the and to all times,” where in the dialogues imposof Natural History that

had been able to “make of a necessity virtue.”” Back in Paris after the war, Lévi-Strauss accepted the support of the Rockefeller Foundation

and created the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the Vith section of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, implementing what he called “cross fertilization” between American and French social sciences. Recalling the invaluable research of Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Daniel Lin-

denberg evokes the 1930s as a period that saw the emergence of numerous “religious, philosophical or political groupuscules, whose members . . . rejected dominant ideas, whether from the right or from the left,” navigated in order to foster utopian visions. Although Barr's agenda

does not appear immediately as strictly political, it in fact touched deep chords within the

American cultural tradition and went beyond a strictly artistic project. THE NEW

CULTURAL

CONTEXT

Since 1929, the New York art scene had changed considerably. New actors had entered the

stage, new institutions had been created, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program, had deeply transformed the relationship between American artists and citizens. It marked, according to Dore Ashton, the beginning of the “artistic milieu,” an intermediary between artists

and American society. Only five years after Barr’s return from his grand tour of Europe, Fascist

political decisions had taken hold on European cultural life: the Bauhaus was closed; in 1937, the Entartete Kunst show in Munich brought to an end the careers of some of the most ambitious

artists of the historical avant-gardes. World War I had already forced a number of European

THE ULTIMATE CHALLENGE FOR ALFRED H. BARR, JR. tai

artists to flee to New York. Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933, the signing of the German-

Soviet pact in September 1939, and the invasion of France by German troops in May 1940 created a second wave of cultural immigration to the United States. Within three decades, a new demographic order, perhaps the most extraordinary in the entire history of art, changed the artistic demography of the United States.

At the museum, Barr had also created a safe haven for European émigrés and a place where

European and American artists could meet, turning the museum intoa sort of salvation pro-

gram (figure 61). To a certain extent, these various external circumstances underscored Barr's role as a transforming agent and helped him plant the seeds of modernism in the United States. Among the new arrivals were Roberto Matta from Chile, Nicolas Calas from Greece, Max Ernst from Switzerland, the Dutch Mondrian, who had just spent ten years in Paris, Victor Brauner from Romania, and Salvador Dali from Spain. Finally, in 1941, came André Breton and André Masson, with the idea of joining Marcel Duchamp.” “It was in America that things came into

focus for me,” Masson later wrote. “That is where I went the farthest, where I matured.”"’ They all went to MoMA to discover or rediscover Picasso’s Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,

Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Cup, and the drooping clocks in Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Mem-

ory. They visited it again and again, stunned by both the museum’s art and its architecture. “What was extraordinary was the modern side, the accessible side,” recalled the actress Dolorés Vanetti, a friend of Duchamp and Breton. “There was this museum, this garden in the heart of the city and this modern architecture. It was like no other museum we knew. Modern art, contemporary art, was recognized here; that was the difference.”* Going back to Tom Hess's criticism mentioned at the beginningof this text (whether Alfred Barr had indeed been “late on Abstract Expressionism” and whether the Museum of Modern Art had indeed showed a “baffling lack of recognition of postwar American abstract painting

and sculpture”),we can now analyze its validity. Take the example of Jackson Pollock, who spent his early years supported by the WPA program, learning from regionalist painter Thomas Hart

Benton. The city in which Pollock arrived in September 1930 had been deeply transformed by the “Barr decade,” and benefited from the educational institution that he had created with his

shows, his catalogues, and his programs at MoMA. Eventually, Pollock was dragged into the fully formed Picasso engine, when in September 1939, he visited the exhibition Picasso: 40 Years

of His Art at MoMA. In fact, Pollock belonged to the first generation of American artists who

did not need to make the usual pilgrimage to Paris because the patrimony from Europe had already been brought to New York by the permanent collection that Alfred Barr had assembled. Like Lehning, Sartre, and Lévi-Straus, Barr understood that modernism was about recon-

212 | ANNIE COHEN-SCLAL

61. George Platt Lynes, Artists in Exile, photograph taken on the occasion of an exhibition at Pi Matisse Gallery, March 1942. From left to right, first row: Matta Echaurren, Ossip Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, Max Emst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger; second row, André Breton, Plet Mondrian, André Mas‘son, Amédee Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, Pavel Tchelitchew, Kurt Seligman, Eugene Berman. Digital Image © The Museum of Modem Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. © Estate of Georges Platt Lyn

figuring a new space. By implementing his radical projects as museum director, by committing to “excellence,” by panting the seeds of modernism in the soil of his own country, Barr indeed did not favor American painters. Nor did he favor any artist from any nation in particular. But his vision and his policy about the permanent collection contributed to transforming the ecology of American culture, and to speed up the insertion of American artists in the broader web

of art history. For those Abstract Expressionist painters, indeed, Barr had organized an institution which represented “a transnational order of cultural forms,” according to the description

given by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.”

If Paul Sachs’s mission was to create generations of museum directors who would become “guides for the American people,” Barr certainly contributed to it. But there is a further dimen-

sion to the role that Barr played.“ The museum was encyclopedic in scope,” gallerist Leo Castelli recalls.It opened my eyes. I discovered that painting wasn’t limited to Picasso, Braque, Soutine, and Modigliani and that, apart from the Surrealists, there were also the German Expressionists, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Klee—all essential artists that were barely known in Paris.” Born in Trieste, Castelli had studied in Vienna, Milan, and Budapest, had lived in Bucharest, Paris, and

London, and knewall of Europe's museums before to fleeing to New York in 1941. His judgment certainly stated that the permanent collection assembled by Alfred Barr represented an achieve-

ment that no museum in Europe was able to offer at the time. Was not he asserting that, with

the Museum of Modern Art, New York had become the true capital of European art? And, moreover, that Alfred Barr had become not only“a guide for his people,” but a guide for the European

people as well?

214 | ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL

African American Contributions

to Abstract Expressionism ANN

ou

ir

GIZSON

‘sa not-yet-named Abstract Expressionism was emerging after

ww World War II, a number of Aftican American artists were produc-

ing works that look now as if they belong with those of Pollock, de Kooning, and the rest. Why were they not included from the first? Inclusion of their works not only presents new subjectmatter and procedures that enrich, complicate, and sometimes even contradict elements of Abstract Expressionism as we know it; these artists also provide precedents for some of the most

important American art of the next decades.

In 1946 Norman Lewis painted Metropolitan Crowd. That same year, Hale Woodruff produced Ashanti Image. Thelma Johnson Streat presented the program of dance interpretations at the San Francisco Museum of Art that launched what we would now call her career as a performance artist, and Beauford Delaney painted Untitled (Still Life with Snake and Bird).' Metropolitan Crowd treated one of Lewis's most frequent themes: the actions of people in groups.

Woodruff’s Ashanti Image, based on his study of African art forms, is part of a lifelong project of reclaiming an African Heritage. Thelma Johnson Streat based her performances on Negro

life and experience and on her studies of Native American dance and song, seeing in them “a basic human relationship.” Beauford Delaney meshed recognizable images with abstract ones

with a disregard for the avant-garde distaste for mixing them. Nevertheless, the works of these four Abstract Expressionist painters demonstrate more of the elements of Abstract Expressionism than they flout: flatness, a relatively spontaneous appearance, and the absence of story-

telling and illusionistic rendering.

Until quite recently, though, these four African American artists have not been included in

exhibitions or studies of Abstract Expressionism.‘ The unspoken assumption in mainstream studies of Abstract Expressionism was that African Americans made no significant contributions. The

AFRICAN AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS

| 215

reasoning behind this was a) that if there were any “good” Abstract Expressionists who happened to be black, we would have known about them and they would have been considered

from the beginning, and b) as one scholar remarked when asked about Norman Lewis's apparent absence in the roster of Abstract Expressionists, that Norman Lewis didn’t fit in. Jacob Lawrence's work fit better the idea of what a black artist should do, he said, because it was partly abstract and partly primitive. Lewis was so completely abstract! If you needed an abstract artist,

you could find a better one.‘ In other words, black artists were “good” to the extent that they

conveyed a black identity that matched white expectations, and at the same time, failed to the extent that they did not approximate the achievements of their white peers.° The impression

was that African American painters were late arrivers on the scene and had made no contributions to Abstract Expressionism. This was the case with Romare Bearden, but it characterizes a whole generation of American artists sometimes referred to as “second generation” Abstract Expressionists, sometimes as Abstract Impressionists, and other times as Post-painterly Abstrac-

tionists. While Bearden was not among the early developers of Abstract Expressionism as were

Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, Thelma Johnson Streat or Beauford Delaney, there is an argument to be made for his presence among American abstractionists who came into prominence in the later fifties and early sixties. For brevity, I have left some of their other African American

colleagues out of this discussion.”

Veiling the power of these preconceptions after World War II was the myth of a new, supposedly apolitical, post-Popular Front hero. In the winter of 1947—48, Robert Motherwell and critic Harold Rosenberg published Possibilities, showcasing “artists and writers whose ‘practice’ in their work is based on their own experience without seeking to transcend it in academic,

group, or political formulas.” “Political commitment in our times,” they claimed, “means logically—no art, no literature.” To continue to make art in such a required “the extremest

situation, they concluded,

faith in sheer possibilities.”* In the wake

of the Moscow

Trials

(1936-38), the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and the Soviet invasions of Finland (both 1939), many left-

leaning avant-garde artists cut their ties with the Communist Party.’ By the early forties it was clear that socialist theory and practice had not produced freedom in the USSR any more than fascism had in Germany. Individual ambition, exhibited in the totalitarianism of those regimes, had devastated Europe.’ In the United States, anti-Stalinists who remained on the left encour-

aged a new version of individualism to replace especially that of the Soviets, whose alliance with fascist practices had tainted its collectivist ideals.

The postdialectical (demystified) paradigm of individual agency, the new hero, described

in such books as Sidney Hook's The Hero and Otto Rank’s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, was

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often an artist! This was particularly evident in the pages of the Partisan Review, Politics, and

Commentary, where, as Nancy Jachec has argued, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the major critical champions of Abstract Expressionism, were as much driven by their alliances

with an independent leftist press bent on rescuing Marxism from 1939 through the fifties, as they were by their appreciation of the art they supported.

With this understanding, one can read Motherwell and Rosenberg’s statement of purpose

for Possibilities not as apolitical, but as a sign of an as yet unrecognized new politics of this postdialectical individual, a hero, whose “sheer faith” in possibilities would free humanity from the unacceptable choice between communism and fascism. This direction was taken by Greenberg,

too, whose apparently democratic, New Critical visual analysis was rooted in positivistic science, although it paradoxically supported a brand of connoisseurship ultimately most serviceable to well-connected curators and collectors. Rosenberg, a committed leftist less allied with

these magazines by 1950 than was Greenberg, identified Abstract Expressionism with French

Existentialism’s leftist individualism in his independent projects, such as the Intrasubjectives show in 1949, his article “The American Action Painters” in 1952, and his co-editorship with

Robert Motherwell of Possibilities."' This approach found its moral high ground in an artist’s intention, not in the playing out of his intention in the real world, over which he had no control, emphasizing the importance of individual motivation rather than group action. The alienated hero, embodied in an artist such as Jackson Pollock via elements of Abstract Expressionist

politics and practice, has been described by Ellen Landau as an art-world prototype of Hollywood’s Marlon Brando and James Dean, and by Michael Leja asa vacillating, and conflicted ver-

sion of Modern Man." The split subjectivity of this position is now conceded to be a normal response to modernist life, as perhaps it was to thoughtful approaches to imperatives in any culture. But in the years just before World War II, although some heroes (like the ones Humphrey

Bogart portrayed) were allowed to suggest such divisions, more familiar were the types John Wayne embodied. Somewhere between was the attitude presented by such acclaimed artists as Pollock and de Kooning, who became the paradigms of American creativity. In the wake of the totalitarianism

of right and left in Europe and the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, they appeared both

resistant to group thinking and community-based values, and also as independent of the benefits of capitalism (at first, anyway), in their modest poverty—then seen as the necessary con-

dition of artists. For artists of color, however, this hero of the new left, who often scorned collective ideals, only further obscured other politics: the politics of identity, which included the

politics of race. Compare, for instance, the position ascribed by Barnett Newman to the voids

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in Herbert Ferber’s sculpture in 1947 with the alienation experienced by postwar artists in

Ralph Ellison’s essay “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” written in 1946 but not published until 1953. Even one of the most consistently leftist of the Abstract

Expressionists, Barnett Newman, posited a rather individualistic version of the artist, writing in 1947 of Ferber but undoubtedly thinking out his own move to his signature format with Zips:

“By insisting on the heroic gesture, and on the gesture only, the artist has 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.”"? On the other hand, Ralph Ellison saw this emphasis on the unitary self as a justification of the United States’ failure to

include the Negro in its democratic processes, weakening for blacks and whites our national

symbols, hollowing out the rituals that dramatize the American dream, and “robb[ing] the artist of a body of unassailable public beliefs on which he could base his art; ... The result was that he responded with an attitude of rejection, which he expressed as artistic individualism. But often his [the artist’s] rejection and his individualism,” Ellison observed critically, “were

narrow; seldom was he able to transcend the limitations of pragmatic reality, and the quality of moral imagination—the fountainhead of great art—was atrophied within him.’ Ellen Landau, Michael Leja, as well as David Craven (see above) offer critical insights into the work of the artists now considered crucial to the understanding of abstraction at midcentury (which, thanks to work like Craven’s, is now beginning to include Lewis). Ellison offers an analysis ofa

conflict that distinguishes the limits of modernity as it was understood by canonical artists, their critics and curators, from what Craven sees as the contemporaneity—the more broadly social and less individualistic insights shared by Woodruff, Lewis, Streat, and Delaney." If we imagine an Abstract Expressionism informed by the work of artists such as Norman Lewis, Hale

Woodruff, Thelma Johnson Streat, and Beauford Delaney, would its definition be different from the one we have?

NORMAN

LEWIS

In 1949, the year Pollock was pictured in Life magazine in front of the eighteen-foot-long, Number Nine, Lewis was producing easel-sized work. Unlike Pollock, Lewis had no patron in the forties, though he joined the Marion Willard gallery in 1946. Both artists had been using antil

ierarchical compositions with flattened, abstract imagery for at least four years. But

Lewis's application of paint, while it appeared swift, was also eloquently controlled; it did not

218 | ANN GIBSON

encourage the audience to imagine him “possessed” by an outflow of unconscious forms in the act of painting to the extent that Pollock's did. Lewis's painting, unlike Pollock’s, did not call attention to his body as its author, although it sometimes invoked his blackness; rather, it often focused on the civic body of “the people,” as

he had in 1946 in Metropolitan Crowd." We effortlessly identify the lines in it as a large group of people in the city because the title tells us to. In their close proximity and diagonal variations on

a basically upright relation to our horizon, they are also metaphoric ciphers for a large group of people rushing about. If Lewis had called it Straws in a Wind or Pick-up Sticks, we would associate it with one of those things. Its fundamental visual structure of meaning, then, is keyed not to the index—it is not a sign that registers the action that created it, which Pollock’s paintings

would become—nor even entirely by metaphor, but also by metonymy. Metonymy results when

one thing (here, a title) is brought to bear on another, producing a meaning that the object in question (the painting) might not otherwise have had. Metonymy is the functional connector

of image to meaning in allegory, where the interpretation of an image depends on an explana-

tion outside the art itself; an artifice of meaning that most Abstract Expressionists rejected by numbering their works ortitling them Untitled, or some other generic designation that avoided the verbal suggestion of meaning."” Once metonymy makes the connection between the title and the image in Metropolitan

Crowd (plate 24), though, another figure, metaphor, which is one of the favored figures in Abstract Expressionism, comes into play, inducing one to see the actions of the upright lines

that jostle one another in this painting as those of people in a crowd doing the same thing." But even though Lewis used metaphor and incorporated the flatness, radical abstraction, and

allover composition to place himself stylistically within the boundaries of Abstract Expression-

ism, his reference to “the people,” linked him to the older politics of the masses, Marxism, from

which Advancing American Art was trying to extricate itself.’ This was particularly ironic, because, unlike many socialist-inclined artists in the thirties, Lewis did not idealize ordinary

people; especially not when they were in crowds.” Lewis was therefore doubly unsuitable for promotion as the “James Dean” type of rebel that Pollock projected. Whereas Pollock’s skeins referred to the actions of the body of a hero, the “modern man” who turned inward to paint his

psychic struggle, Lewis's marks stood, more inclusively, for the masses of urban humanity around the world. Although much of his work in the next years, such as Harlem Turns White, in 1955, contin-

ued in the Abstract Expressionist mode, he also maintained its references to locations and subject-matters that were African American, as a valid metaphors for universal subject-matter, as

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opposed to the more ethnocentric, Western-based universalism of “modern man.” Concern

about one’s community became, after the war, more typical of beleaguered groups, including African Americans, women, and gays, than of the middle and upper class whites who bought

and promoted Abstract Expressionism. In presenting a visual surface that looked like Abstract Expressionism—fast becoming also “American” painting—but whose core was consistent with

the old leftist concerns abandoned by many on the American left, Lewis proposed that collectively, black American subjectivity was as good a carrier of American ideals as the more individualistic vision of Pollock. Imagine, if you can, an African American in Pollock's stance in Life magazine. For most whites, the impression of alienation, of the “beat,” elicited by a white in that

position, is different from the resentment, controlled anger and therefore danger, of an imagined black man standing in the same way. White alienation could be tragic, romantic. But at midcentury, in a society where blacks still couldn't use the same drinking fountains or rest-

rooms as whites, black alienation—magnified by white guilt and projected as anger—was not attractive to whites. It was frightening.

HALE

WOODRUFF

Hale Woodruff had painted totally abstract work as early as 1931, as illustrated in Alain Locke's The Negro in Art. Acutely aware of the politics of race, Woodruff had urged the discontinuation of IBM’s Contemporary Art of the African Negro exhibitions, arguing that all-Negro exhibitions tended to “isolate and segregate” black artists.?* Woodruff, who founded the Art

Department at Atlanta University, was invited by New York University in 1946 to join their art education department that included William Baziotes, among others. In both places, despite his

integrative goals, he encountered the politics of race, including the fragment of the art world that would become Abstract Expressionism. In the fall of 1949, Woodruff with two N.Y.U colleagues led the Friday lecture series which had been part of the failed “Subjects of the Artist” school run by Baziotes, Motherwell, Rothko,

Newman, and David Hare. It became known as “Studio 35,” hosting the important three-day “Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35” in 1950. Woodruff invited Alfred Barr, director of collections at the Museum of Modern Art, to moderate the three-day conference to define the development that would become Abstract Expressionism.’> Woodruff, however, even though he was one of

the organizers of the enterprise that had preceded it, and was—or would become—a member

of the Abstract Expressionists’ Artists’ Club, was not asked to participate in it, Norman Lewis,

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Woodruff, Ashanti Image, 1946. © Estate of Hale Woodruff /Einor: ourtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY. John D. Axelrod, Boston, MA. Courtesy of Kenkeleba Gallery. Image courtesy of Ann Gibson.

whose dealer, Marian Willard, was requested to send one of her artists, did attend, as the tran-

script of the “Artists’ Sessions” in Modern Artists in America and Max Yavno's photograph

attest: 2° Later, Woodruff would fall out with members of the Club over their having a minstrel

show. His colleagues couldn't see why Woodruff objected to their clowning in blackface or, for that matter, to the idea that jazz was “folk” or “primitive” music.”

Woodruff had acquired his first book on African art as a young artist in Indianapolis.2*

Later, in Paris from 1927 to 1931, his interest was confirmed as he accompanied collector Albert

Barnes and philosopher-critic Alain Locke to look at—and buy—African sculptures. Later, the young artist based apparently abstract paintings such as Ashanti Image (figure 62), Carnival, 1950, and Afro Emblems, also 1950, on variations of his own collection of inventivelyshaped Akan gold weights, and on African, Mexican, and Oceanic forms.” Both this series and the Children at Play series discussed below, were also realistic and abstract at the same time, but

in another way: as relatively realistic representations of abstract (African) forms. Woodruff later remarked that although some black artists responded by working figuratively with black sub-

ject matter, others (like himself) felt the need to respond more directly by working abstractly within the “competitive totality” of New York's artistic scene."'

Refusing the generalizing reference of most Abstract Expressionists, Woodruff maintained many of his sources’ references not only to specific cultures but also to specific aspirations: the

balanced development of African American children, for instance, or in the case of the gold

weights, recuperation of his African heritage. Such gold weights were not gold themselves, but a bronze alloy. Made for economic rather than religious purposes, they were precisely weighted and used to determine how much gold dust was on the other side of a balance scale. Above all,

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their function had little to do witha desire to escape from reason in sexuality, nature, or the abject fear that some Abstract Expressionists found in African art. Woodruff did not glean his refer-

ences to other, older cultures to obtain release from the rationalism of modern times. He did not

see the supposed freedom of “irrationality” in African sculpture, but rather, “the dignity of man” and “the significance of the self” His goal was, rather, to mesh his abstract practice with a retrieved ancestry that through informed criticism became part of America’s values. “The critics for a long time didn’t understand African art,” Woodruff said, not “until the artist who under-

stood the universality as well as the impact of its localization pointed it out. [Woodruff had explained what he meant by ‘localism’ in an earlier sentence as ‘it’s Negro, black] You see, any black artist who claims that he is creating black art must begin with some black image.”? Amer-

icans in general are only now beginning to see that black culture has always been a part of everyone’s culture in the United States. But for those to whom what was African signified an exotically

uncontrolled libido, Woodruff’s work would have appeared as insufficiently spontaneous and, in its recognizably African and other non-Western sources, merely derivative and to that extent, less

universal than the more highly abstracted symbols Abstract Expressionism offered.

THELMA

JOHNSON

STREAT

Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, the painter Thelma Johnson Streat (figure 63), purposefully made performance part of her métier. The photograph of Streat illustrated here is indicative of the range that she bridged. Dressed in a costume of her own design reminiscent of biblical, Mexican, and African antecedents, she performs next to the base of a column that evokes a Western tradition anchored in ancient Greece.» But her very presence, before she moved, spoke, or painted, evoked the diaspora that brought her ancestors to these shores, and the increasingly apparent hypocrisy of a nation that still segregated schools, blood, and housing during the Second World War, when black Americans were fighting in Europe to preserve American freedom, As with any African American in the forties, her identity would have been considered an inappropriate basis for American individualism. Ina milieu that included Katherine Dunham (whom Streat knew) and Lester Horton, both of whom choreographed with multicultural sources and companies, Streat was dancing with her paintings before Jackson Pollock's bodily movements were publicly associated with his process of pouring. Public awareness of the latter’s process as a kind of performance was sparked by Hans Namuth's photographs published in Artnews in May 1951. While Pollock's art

222 | ANN GIBSON

63. Thelma Johnson Streat in performance, undated. Private collection. Courtesy of The Johnson Collection.

has become celebrated as performance, he was ambivalent, to say the least, about going public in this way. Films taken on four occasions of Streat dancing have yet to be rediscovered.* Indeed, Streat, in contrast to Pollock, often danced for the public in front of her paintings.** Like her costumes, her art and her dance presented viewers with images whose sources were multiple but local; that is, drawn from the specifics of various cultures. As many of the Abstract

Expressionists did under the influence of the writings of Carl Jung, Streat intended her borrowings to demonstrate that apparently disparate cultures had much in common, and, like Lewis, she was interested in the culture and politics of the people, or the folk, of other countries as well

as her own, as well as in high culture.” Her Red Dots, Flying Baby, and Barking Dog, with an allover composition, a combination of purely graphic and abstracted but recognizable elements, and a stylistic flavor somewhere between the graphic designs she did for fabric and cartoon art, contains references to the flattened surrealism of Joan Miré, to African art such as that of the Kota, and to the rhythmic planarity of Squamish art of America’s Northwest Coast, which she visited with a photographer to document Squamish art and dance.** Streat added dance to her repertoire in June 1945, before the Black Mountain College experiments in performance by students and teachers now associated with Abstract Expressionists, such as Elaine de Kooning in 1949, and post-Abstract Expressionists such as Robert

Rauschenberg in John Cage’s “first happening” in the summer of 1952.” She used some of the same gestures in her performances as those assumed by the figures in her paintings, with whose movements she often engaged in a dialogue on stage. “She brought those movements to life,” one of her sisters, Lois Johnson Ross remembered; “it was all very connected.” Streat designed

her own choreography and sang, too; sometimes a capella and sometimes accompanied by a pianist. According to a review in 1945, she performed her “Dance of Freedom,” at the Museum of Modern Art (which had bought one of her drawings), in front of one of her own large paintings, “using the painting as a part of the forms expressed in her dance.”*! There was no music and a commentator’s voice was heard.” Critics saw Streat’s interpretations, as they would later see those of Jackson Pollock, in the

tradition of body movement popularized by Mary Wigman and Martha Graham as “direct outpourings of feeling transmitted by body movements.” Although Pollock's paintings were held up by Greenberg as exemplary for their means, not their meaning (that is, as statements whose

social or personal agenda was of no importance in assessing their importance), they were also

influentially described by critic Harold Rosenberg in an opposing way that was much closer to

Wigman and Graham. Rosenberg suggested that the process of “action painting” (his term for

Abstract Expressionism in 1952) was an ongoing struggle in which, with each stroke on the

224 1 ANN

GiRSi+

canvas, the artist visually discovered himself anew. The struggle sprung “from the saving moment in his‘story’ when the painter first felt himself released from... [the] myth of past selfrecognition.” The release that this produced, enabled the aesthetic decisions that made the

painting similar to the “outpouring” of emotion was transcribed in the dancing of Wigman and

Graham (and more importantly for Streat, the more “locally sourced” dances of Dunham and Horton) into movement." So Pollock’s paintings, especially, but also those of painters such as de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others, and like Graham’s, Dunham’s and Streat’s dance, no matter how distinct their sources, were largely as the externalization of their own psyches as they

explored the dramas of their inner conflicts. The performed products of Pollock, de Kooning,

Kline, and Graham became modernist icons. Dunham’s are on the way. But both the painting

and performances of Thelma Johnson Streat have nearly dropped out of sight.

This was in part because of Streat’s color, in part because of her sex, and because those two

factors combined made theater and education more acceptable venues for approval by the United States’ white majority than was abstract or even decorative and relatively abstract art like

hers. The combination was particularly difficult in relation to her relatively abstract paintings. The public accepted performance by blacks, at least when they performed as blacks. But abstract

painting was still in the purview of whites. With her husband Edgar Kline, Streat founded

schools in Honolulu, Hawaii; in Punaluu, Oahu; and on Salt Spring Island off the coast of

British Columbia to encourage cross-cultural understanding through art and dance.** Purpose-

fully, she described the instrumentality of her total agenda—that is, of the multiculturality of

her own dancing, singing and painting as well as her teaching, as “a form of Visual Education

for children in the development of worthwhile social concepts.” These ideas, she said, will “contribute towards a more widespread understanding among

children of different races of the cul-

tural contributions made by these races.” Her art challenges midcentury assumptions that are still at issue, such as “Who determines what is kitsch and what is art?” “Why did Abstract Expressionists so disdain the decorative?” and “What were the factors that compelled Streat to knit the recognizably local into the global while artists such as Pollock and de Kooning felt it necessary to veil the local to invoke the universal?”

BEAUFORD

DELANEY

By 1945, Beauford Delaney was painting abstracted still lifes, such as Abstraction (1945). The iconography combines vague references to African sculptural form—a figure indicated in

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black and red behind of a bowl of fruit and vegetables extended towards the viewer may be taken

from a frontal photograph ofa Benin head in Alain Locke's The Negro in Art. But brushwork referring to European Expressionists such as Emil Nolde and Chaim Soutine, and a tipped-up table top display and hot color are reminiscent of the Fauves, especially Matisse.”

Delaney’s enthusiasm for African art was surely encouraged by the writing of Locke, one of

the colleagues with whom Woodruff hunted out African treasures in Paris. In the late forties, as Abstract Expressionism was being defined, Delaney wrote enthusiastically about “wonderful new ideas for painting Negro subject matter.”** “Find a true way into the center of things, true and real that deals with all Negro culture. This is important,” he wrote in his notes on another occasion.” Delaney was gay but not really “out.” He was troubled about his sexuality as it emerged into

his consciousness as a religious young man, and discouraged later about the loneliness that seemed to him the inescapable result of the combination of his ancestry, his poverty as an artist,

and the social and religious disapproval of his sexuality. But by his later thirties, in a romantic musing addressed to an unnamed person “about these nuances which flow between you and me,” Delaney wrote that despite some remaining ambiguity on his part about the nature of such

exchanges (or the situation in which they placed him), I take what I can understand of / It for what it is—I do not! / The rest I ponder.””

Perhaps in an attempt to establish an iconography through which he could treat the personal—and dangerous, in the McCarthy years—issues that arose in America for men who were gay and those who were black, but to deliver nevertheless the universal appeal that the Abstract

Expressionists pursued, Delaney experimented with iconography for a theme almost never identified with Abstract Expressionism: homosexual love. He suggested this with a mixture of

abstract but expressionistically brushed forms with recognizable images, whose combination necessarily conveyed not only “the cosmic'l’ that turns up to paint pictures,” as Harold Rosenberg described the action painter, but also introduced himself not only as a gay subject via

iconography, but as an Abstract Expressionist via technique, as “a painter [who] exists as a

Somebody?!

In the late forties, along with cityscapes and portraits, Delaney’s already-abstracted still

lives became similarly heavily impastoed hybrid compositions that incorporated emphatically abstract fields of flat, textured color with non-objective and recognizably representational

forms. His Untitled (Still Life with Snake and Bird) of 1946 (figure 64), for instance, has a resolutely material flat violet ground and a diamond-shaped mandorla-like center that looks like

an eye with a highlight, but also suggests parts of overlapping brown and pink bodies, perhaps

226 | ANN GIBSON

64. Beauford Delaney, Untitled (Still Life with Snake and Bird), 1946, oll on canvas, 17 x 21 In. (43.2

x 53.3 cm). Image courtesy of Ann Gibson.

heads. It contains as well the recognizable images of a white bird, a profile head, and a coiled

snake. In another Untitled, of 1947 (figure 65), rivers of thick paint threaten to engulf another eye-like mandorla in the center, with another white bird, a heart and dark stars completing the ensemble.

Appearing at the end of a letter in one of his sketchbooks is a white bird labeled “a strange dove

of Peace,” which looks very much like the white bird that dives downward in Untitled, 1947.

Doves were common symbols in Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as in Early Christian imagery,

where, with olive branches in their beaks, they stood for peace in the afterlife; in later centuries the

dove became a widely accepted symbol of love and concord. Picasso gave a lithograph ofa white dove to the Communist party to use as an image on posters for its World Peace congresses from

1949 to 1951, and did numerous drawings of stylized doves in different positions, which became

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65. Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1947, oll on Masonite, 24 x 30 In. (61 x 76.2 cm). Image courtesy of ‘Ann Gibson.

known as Picasso's Doves of Peace, for various Communist party initiatives.” But in Delaney’s

description of it as “strange,” and its placement above his signature, this one also acts as a stand-

in for Delaney himself, whose pacific effect on others had already become legendary." Delaney’s references, in his conversations, his letters, and his diaries, to love and “inner light,” as well as to. Eastern thought, and his ownership of books by the well-known J. Krishnamurti—one dated

1940—make it possible to speculate that he may have investigated “Oriental philosophy,” and

therefore to see the two rounded, central foci of these works as love and vision respectively, as mandorlas of a sort, and as talisman for Delaney’s interaction with the world.°>

The snake, resembling the phallus, was an object of ancient fertility rites. Delaney, an inveterate reader, may or may not have known this; but in Christian theology, the snake is a symbol

228 | ANN GIBSON

of temptation, taken from the biblical story in which the devil takes the form ofa snake and

urges Eve to offer to Adam the apple which caused humanity to fall from paradise. As a reference to temptation, which in Delaney’s case would have encompassed a still very illicit form of sex, a serpent would have been overdetermined as an appropriate emblem. Since Delaney’s father was a minister, it is extremely likely that the painter knew the biblical story. But the coiled snake, like the emblems in Untitled, 1946, was also one of the forms in which Akan gold weights

were cast. The gold weights that inspired some of the images in Woodruff’s Ashanti Images and his Carnival were likely to have been those with more flattened and abstracted forms. But many

gold weights were small, three-dimensional cast metal images of men and animals, including snakes, which represented cautionary tales and old wisdom that Akan, Ashanti and people rec-

ognized.” Delaney probably could not afford to buy even these comparatively inexpensive

small sculptures, as Woodruff did. But he may have been made aware, from his own reading, through conversations with Locke and Woodruff, and through seeing exhibitions in Manhattan containing gold weights such as American Negro Art at the Wehye Gallery in 1940 (whose catalogue began with a quotation from Locke on the significance of African Art) that they had narrative as well as economic functions.* Even if Delaney did not know the East African tales

the snake suggested, he may have recognized its allegorical potential. A coiled snake's presence beneath a male portrait head, a dove of peace, and an emblem of embracing pink and brown forms inside a nearly heart-shaped red outline, makes an ensemble representing an embattled sexuality, desire for peace, exchange of goods, and skin colors in close proximity. These are elements of Delaney’s necessarily secret desire and factors that prevented him from achieving it. Themes in the work of these artists, then, disturb traditional interpretations of Abstract

Expressionism as solely the product of white, heterosexual, and male subjects who met the demand for a depoliticized but heroic and universalizing model of American individuality.

These themes also support and supply a basis for more recent suggestions that despite the heroic rhetoric with which the themes of more recognized standard bearers Abstract Expressionists were credited and for which they were applauded—“order out of chaos,’ “death (and life)”—

they were nevertheless beset with anxiety regarding their status.” The hypocrisy of being cast

as the makers of examples of an American “freedom” that begrudged full participation to African Americans, to say nothing about women and other ethnic groups, could not have been entirely lost on these alert observers, especially with artists like Lewis and Woodruff, Streat and Delaney in their midst. Considering the inflammatory mix of issues and strategies affecting artists who were

attempting to establish their (black) identity as a valid basis for a universal art, one expects to

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find subjects more consciously and even more violently riven than are their more familiar Abstract Expressionist counterparts. I now think it maybe not so much a matter of more or less than one of quality, or character. Perhaps because they pursued intellectual and artistic excellence in an era whose terms seemed stacked against them, the artists treated above appear as

particularly heroic. As subjects who historically resisted being split between being “American” and what was then called “Negro,” along America’s heavily-policed color line, the artists I have

discussed consciously treated it as imposed and negotiable. Their art reveals a refusal to accept

the alienation it produced, or to glorify as essentially superior the subjectivities on either side.

Thus, they proffer less familiar themes and structures, but demonstrate self-conscious subjec-

tivities split in ways not otherwise recognized in Abstract Expressionism. Lewis retained a faith in “the people” but refused to idealize them or see in them a monolithic unity of thought or grant them immunity from criticism; Woodruff, as did also Streat and Delaney, reclaimed a

primitivized African heritage, retaining its markers of place and time. Streat substituted for

Abstract Expressionism’s unacknowledged appropriation African and other native cultures not only a cross-cultural dialogue, but the public performance of a diasporic African subject; and

in contrast to Abstract Expressionism’s “normal” subject—heroically unified, unquestioningly

heterosexual and unthinkingly white—Delaney projects the benevolent existence of a split subject who is black and gay.” These artists, in fact, have mobilized their identities within the

unlikely terms of Abstract Expressionism in ways that opposed its usual maintenance of the elements of high culture, a hierarchy of rhetorical devices, individualism, anonymity, and unified subjectivity. Read this way, these painters are heroes, resistantly politicized against their invisi-

bility, whose art deserves consideration as visual templates for the universal values that, up to now, Abstract Expressionism has not projected as truly as it might have.

230 | ANN GIBSON

Notes

Introduction: internationalism and Abstract Expressionism

aye

ey

1. Ellen G. Landau, Reading Abstract Expressionism, Context and Critique (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 4. Clement Greenberg, “American Type Painting,” Partisan Review 22 (Spring 1955): 179-96. Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” Art News 51 (December 1952): 22-23; 48-49. Robert Motherwell, The School of New York (Beverly Hills, CA: Frank Perls Gallery, 1951). Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review6 (Fall 1939): 35. Leon Trotsky and Andre Breton, “Manifesto: Toward a Free Revolutionary Art,” Partisan Review (Fall 1938), 49-53. 7. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Pollock and After, The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 30. 8. Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 323, 336. 9. David and Cecile Shapiro, “Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting,” in Pollock and After, 146. 10. Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War.” Artforum 11 (May 1973): 43-54; Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12 (June 1974): 39-41; Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); David Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (New York: Cambridge University Press, 199). 11. Ann Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 12. Joan Marter, Women and Abstract Expressionism, Painting and Sculpture, 1945-1959 (New York: Baruch College, City University of New York, 1997). 13, Letter from Lee Krasner to Mercedes Carles Matter, 1944, Mercedes Matter Archives, New York. 14, Irving Sandler, “Joan Mitchell Paints a Picture,” Art News 56 (October 1957): 44-45. 15. Alfred H. Barr, The New American Painting (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1959). Also see: Kenneth Rexroth, “U.S. Art across Time and Space: Americans Seen Abroad,” Art News 58 (Summer 1959): 30-31; 52-54.

NOTES TO PAGES

1-12

| 231

The Birth of Abstract Expressionism

Michel Seuphor, Dictionary of Abstract Painting with a History of Abstract Painting (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1957), 77. Clement Greenberg, “American-Type’ Painting,” Partisan Review 22, no. 2 (Spring 1955), revised

1958 and reprinted in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 210-1 1. In an extensive footnote, Greenberg lists his credits for the flawed terminology he discusses: Robert Coates for “abstract expressionism” as applied to American painting; Harold Rosenberg for “action painting”; Charles Estienne for “tachisme”; and Michel Seuphor for “art informel.” He credits the British painter Patrick Heron with the coinage of “American-type painting,” which Greenberg prefers because, in his view, it is “without misleading connotations.” William Seitz, “Spirit, Time and ‘Abstract Expressionism,” Magazine of Art 46, no. 2 (February 1953), 80. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., concurred, writing in his introduction to the catalogue, The New ‘American Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959) that the artists included in the exhibition—among them Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still—“rightly reject any significant association with German Expressionism.” Whether Barr personally polled the surviving artists is not known; both Gorky and Pollock were dead by the time of his writing, and none of their extant statements refer to such a rejection. William C. Seitz, “Abstract-Expressionist Painting in America: An Interpretation based on the Work and Thought of Six Key Figures” (Ph.D.

issertation, Princeton University, 1955). Pub-

lished posthumously as Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983). In both versions, Seitz’s initial note to chapter one credits Barr with the first use of the term in the United States, applied to Kandinsky, but notes that “An earlier European use of the phrase, called to my attention by Peter Selz, dates back to 1919. During that year an article with the title ‘Der abstrakte Expressionismus, by Oswald Herzog, appeared in Der Sturm, 10

(Berlin, 1919), 29.” . Robert Coates, “The Art Galleries: Abroad and at Home,” The New Yorker 12, no. 7 (30 March 1946), 83.

The prospectus is reprinted and translated in William Seitz, Hans Hofmann (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963), 56. The first complete English translation of Kandinsky’s Uber das Geistige in der Kunst appeared as The Art ofSpiritual Harmony (trans. Michael T. H. Sadler), published by Houghton Mifflin in 1914. Another translation, by Hilla von Rebay, was published by the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1946.

Oswald Herzog, “Der abstrakte Expressionismu: .” Der Sturm 10, no. 2 (1919), 29. Lam grateful to Barbara Lipman-Wulf for translating this article from the German. An abstract image by Her20g was illustrated on the magazine’ Seite, Hans Hofmann, 56. Helen Boorman, “Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm 1910-1930: German Culture Idealism and

242 1 NOTES TO PAGES

13-15

the Commercialization of Art” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of East Anglia, 1987), 289-90. 10. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Art in Our Time (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), n.p. (caption for cat. no, 181). Barr’s first recorded use of the term (applied to Kandinsky’s paintings) was ina flier advertising his 1929 lectures on modern art at Wellesley College. See Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989), 44. 11. For details of Barr's relationship with Neumann, see Marquis, Barr, 38 passim. In his memoir, A Sweeper-Up after Artists (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), Irving Sandler relates a 1958 exchange at The Club between Barr and Thomas Hess, who disliked the idea of “bunching

together” painters under a single rubric. Sandler quotes Hess as saying, “There is no collective, no name: Barr interjected: “There are several names...’ Hess continued: ‘The names are always hedged. You came up with the name abstract expressionism? Barr looked dejected: ‘I just revived it,and I’m not particularly proud of that” (230).

12. Alfred H. Barr, Jr, Modern Works of Art: Fifth Anniversary Exhibition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934), 14, 13, Sheldon Cheney, Expressionism in Art (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1934, revised 1948), 343. Implications of Nationalism for Abstract Expressionism

1. Nicolai Karamazin, “Letters of a Russian Traveller.” trans. Andrew Kahn, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 4, (2003), 264.

eu

ay

2. Ibid. 3. “On Cannibalism,” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 152. 4. Justin O'Brien, The Journals of André Gide, vol. 1 (New York: Knopf, 1949), 301. Jean Delay, The Youth of André Gide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 468-69. Walter Kaufmann, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 160. Ibid., 506. Ibid., 509. Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address was delivered March 4, 1801. See Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Viking Penguin, 1975), 292; and Public and Private Papers by Thomas Jefferson (New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990), 167-68. 9. William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1.

10.

Ibid., 1-2.

11.

Tbid., 110.

13,

Ibid, ix.

12. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1942).

NOTES TO PAGES

15-22

| 233

14, “Misgivings,” in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Packard,

1947), 3-4,

15, Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, 6. 16. Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 17. 18, 19. 20. ai. 22.

1951). Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 13. William Carlos Williams, Letter to Ezra Pound, March 23, 1933 in Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York: McDowell Obolensky, 1957), 139-40. Letter to Bernard Heringman, 1949 in Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 636. “Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire,”in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 16. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 30. Lynd Ward, “Race, Nationality, and Art,” in Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, ed. Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 119.

23. Ibid. 24, Ibid. 25. “De Kooning’s Women: Interview with Willem de Kooning,” in Abstract Expressionism: A Criti-

cal Record, ed. David and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 225. 26. This excerpt from “By Blue Ontario's Shore,” was published in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. See Michael Moon, ed., Leaves of Grass and Other Writings (New York: W, W. Norton, 2002), 287. 27. Ina self-review using a pseudonym in The United States Review, Whitman coined this phrase to describe his own poetry. See David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995), 345.

28. This phrase is taken from a self-review by Whitman, which appeared unsigned in “Leaves of

Grass: A Volume of Poems Just Published,” The Brooklyn Times, September 29, 1855. See Moon, ed., Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 793. 29, Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America:A Cultural Biography, 452. 30. Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. See Joseph R. Fornieri, ed., The Lan‘guage of Liberty: The Political Speeches and Writing of Abraham Lincoln (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2003), 573. 31. Joseba Zulaika, “El Territorio de la Ambiguedad,” Revista de Libros, no. 84, December 2003. Disdain for the Stain: Abstract Expressionism and Tachisme

1

In September 1950 the U.S. Congress appropriated more than $111 million to be spent during

2E4 | NGTES TO PAGES

72-29

the year ending June 30, 1951, ina program aimed at combating and exposing Soviet propaganda about the United States, as well as explaining American aims and policies. Approximately 13,500 persons were in charge of all the different programs. This project was much more complex than this and attracted, particularly in France and Italy, the wrath of many journalists and intellectuals who saw all this as an imposition of a cultural propagandistic network geared toward the imposition of U.S. values on other cultures. Eloise A. Spaeth, “America’s Cultural Responsibilities Abroad,” College Art Journal 11 (Winter 1951-52): 115-20. During the whole year, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was in the process of organizing a megafestival of the arts in Paris for 1952 called Masterpieces of the 20th Century, including symphony, opera, ballet, painting, the cinema, literature, and philosophy plus a forum on the freedom of the press, in order, so said the public relations firm in charge of the publicity (James Jones and Company), “to show the artistic achievements of free man in the last fifty years. ... but also to bring over the “neutralists” of Western Europe who may doubt the validity of Western culture today.” (State Department archives, 59, public affairs, box 70). What the “neutralists” were in fact worried about was the hijacking of Western culture by the U.S. See the year-long diatribe in Le Monde and L’Observateur. |. See Serge Guilbaut, “The Frightening Freedom of the Brush: The Boston Institute of Contempotary Art and Modern Art,” in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston, exh. cat. (Boston: The

Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986), 52-94.

On this bizarre episode see Laurence Bertrand Dorleac, L’Art de la Défaite (Paris: Seuil, 1993),

244-61.

See Pierre Francastel, Nouveau dessin, nouvelle peinture (Paris: Librairie de Medicis 1945 (written 1943 to 1944) and Bernard Dorival, La Peinture Frangaise (Paris: Larousse, 1942).

Let’s remember that at the time, while the magazine was produced with glossy paper, color photographs, and many ads for luxury items, the famous newspaper Le Monde was published on only one page due to paper shortage. Clement Greenberg, The Nation, June 29, 1946, cited in John O'Brian, Clement Greenberg: The

Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988-93), 90.

Edouard Jaguer, in a long article published in a new socialist newspaper called Juin (October 1, 1946, p. 2), describes in detail this new trend that lies between geometric abstraction and realism. Charles Estienne organized two exhibitions in January and February 1952 called Peintres de la

MW

nouvelle école de Paris at the Galerie de Babylone, which was the opposite of what Tapié was trying to achieve.

Michel Tapié, Un Art autre; oit il s'agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris: Gabriel-Giraud, 1952).

12, Ibid. 13. In Michel Tapié, Jackson Pollock avec nous, exh. cat. Studio Paul Facchetti (February 1952), n.p.

NOTES TO PAGES 29-38

| 235

14, Indeed, Pollock's exhibition arrived in the middle of a strong American cultural and propaganda

push in Paris. To put it mildly, not everybody felt happy about this sudden invasion of the cultural sphere by American shows: February 25~March 15 1952: Regards sur la peinture Americaine, Galerie de France (Albers, Baziotes, Brooks, de Kooning, etc. . ..) May-June 1952: Large exhibi-

tion L;Oeuvre du vingtieme siecle, organized by James JohnsonSweeney, a show that was extended

by the Paris Festival, financed by the well-known propaganda arm of the U.S. government, the

American Committee for Cultural Freedom, November 12, 1952: Book translation program from the State Department financed the publication of Olivier Larkin, L’Art et la vie aux Etats-Unis.

15. Here we need to remember that the staining of painting was, in New York, a very negative concept. Barnett Newman was quite adamant about the fact that he was not “staining” his canvases, as Greenberg mentioned in one of his articles. For Newman, staii ing is too soft, to uniform to be

of any force. The paint quality, of his canvases was as he stated in his letter to Greenberg “heavy,

solid, direct, the opposite of a stain”; in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 202-4. For an extensive discussion of this issue, see Serge Guilbaut, “Voicing the Fire of the Fierce Father,” in Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power, and the State, ed. Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbaut, and John O'Brian (Toronto: Univer-

sity of Toronto Press, 1996), 139-53. 16. He was defending Marcelle Loubchansky, Hantai, Gillet, Degottex, Duvillier, Messagier, Fahr-elNissa and even the American Ossorio, It was not very difficult to understand the analogy between Greece and the United States.

17. 18. For a good formalist discussion of the concept, see Hubert Damish, Fenétre jaune cadmium; ou les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 131-40.

19, Jean Paulhan, L’Art informel (éloge) (Paris, 1962). 20. See discussion about his relation to Informel in Jean Lescure: En écoutant Fautrier (Paris: VEchoppe, 1999), 7-15-31. Jean Fautrier, Letter to Jean Paulhan, Sur la Virtuosité (Paris: LEchoppe, 1987). There is also an interesting interview of Jean Paulhan relating to issues of the Informel in

Arts, “Jean Paulhan répond a Francois Mauriac: L’informel est une voie mystique de l'art,” October 10-16, 1962, 9. 21. See Charles Juliet, Rencontres avec Bram Van Velde (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1978), 89. 22. Barnett Newman, interviewed by Dorothy Gees Seckler, Art in America 50 (Summer 1962): 87. 23. Letter of Samuel Beckett to Bram van Velde, Paris, January 14, Archives J. Putman, cited in Bram

24.

Van Velde, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989), 165.

Samuel Becket, “La peinture des Van Velde ou le Monde et le pantalon,” Cahiers d'art (1945-46):

349.

25. Cited in Samuel Beckett, Le Monde et le pantalon (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1989). The text was written for Bram van Velde’s show at the Galerie de Mai in 1945 and was republished in Cahiers

d'Art 20/21 (1945-46): 9.

236 | NOTES TO PAGES 38-49

Transatlantic Anxleties, Espectally Bill's Folly 1. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970).

2. Painted in Bow Island, Alberta; Clyfford Still photographic archive no. PH-662. 3. Hence its tell-tale sequence of: an early indebtedness to modernist sources; the emergence of an avant-garde “underground”; the success of full-fledged independence; and finally the “dissolution” of the movement. 4. “Response to Clement Greenberg,” in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O'Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 164. 5. “Froma letter dated 5 February 1952,” in 15 Americans, ed. Dorothy Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), 20. 6. “Letter to Gordon Smith,” in Paintings by Clyfford Still, exh. cat. (Buffalo: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and Albright Art Gallery, 1959), n.p. 7. Clyfford Still, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1963), n.p. 8, “Nature,”in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1981), 7. 9. Ina typical twist, Still sought an autochthonous art for himself while delving the art of native Amerindians. 10. Notable exceptions include the work of Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. 11. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence:A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 14 ff.

12. Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 244.

13. “A Statement by the Artist,” in Clyfford Still (Buffalo: The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 1966), 17. 14. H.G, Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 21. 15. Still, in Paintings by Clyfford Still. 16 “Journal” (1838), quoted in Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 175. 17. There isa large literature on this subject but, for example, see John McCoubrey, American Tradition in Painting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963, 2000), 2-5.

18. In one of many suggestive details, the monstrous presence of 1936-7-No.2 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo) grasps its truncated phallus. 19. David Smith's iconography and formal development conform to an analogous pattern. Early phallic motifs segue to a later interpenetration of line and space. 20. ‘Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 51. 21. Cfibid., 56, probably paraphrasing Newman, on Onement I:"“the zip,as an independent shape— man—the only animal who walks upright, Adam, virile, erect.” See also Jeremy Lewison, Looking at Barnett Newman (London: August, 2002), 10-20, for a Derridean reading of this process.

NOTES TO PAGES 52-57

| 237

22. Newman, in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings, 173. 23. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1962). For this connection Iam indebted to Adrian Lewis, “Barnett Newman, Abstract Expressionism and American Cultural Conventions,” in Representing and Imagining America, ed. P. Davies (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 160-69.

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings, 174-75. 25. Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1949), 45: “the’self” exists together with its fellow-beings and indeed in many respects not as an ‘Ich’ (I), but as a ‘Many i.e. as‘one like many.” The connection between Heidegger's stress on “man” and the title Vir Heroicus Sublimis is suggestive. 26. I first raised the connections with Heidegger as a respondent at the symposium “Reconsidering Barnett Newman” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (April $7, 2002). Newman definitely referred to Heidegger in the 1960s: see Richard Shiff et al. Barnett Newman: A Catalogue 24,

Raisonné (New York: Barnett Newman Foundation, 2004), 112, n. 16. Significantly, the 1949 pub-

27. 28. 29, 30. 31.

lication also adverts to Kierkegaard, whose writings Newman surely knew. The Heidegger link will be the subject of a forthcoming article by Claude Cernuschi. CE. Heidegger, Existence and Being, 391: “Obedient to the voice of Being, thought seeks the Word through which the truth of Being may be expressed.” In recent years, it has been defensively asserted that the “Triumph” title was not the author's but, rather, his publisher's. If so, publishers are famously attuned to the popular mood of the moment. Pollock, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 16. Robert Rosenblum, “The Abstract Sublime,” Art News 59 (February 1961): 38-41; Rosenblum, ‘Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972). CE. Peter Schjeldahl, “Inspired Lunacy: A Closer View of Caspar David Friedrich,” The New Yorker 77 (October 1, 2001): 116: “the concept of the sublime—a hopelessly jumbled philosophical

notion that has had more than two centuries to start meaning something cogent and hasn't succeeded yet.” 32. Charles Baudelaire, “What is Romanticism?” (1846) in Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750-1850: Sources and Documents, ed. Lorenz Eitner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 2:157.

33. See Lilian R. Furst, The Contours of European Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 56-73 on de Staél’s De Ia littérature (1800) and De I’Allemagne (1810-13).

34, See http://www.jfklibrary.org/index. In fact, Newman specifically eschewed the “void” and

instead sought its opposite, “fullness,” in his paintings. 35. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1935, 1961). 36. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1957, 1986), 49-91 and passim. Pollock, respectively in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, 19, 18, 45, 24, and 28.

228 | NOTES TO PAGES 58-63

'. Kermode, Romantic Image, 53; Pollock, in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, 18.

38. 39, 40. Al. 42, 43.

44,

Furthermore, the similarities between “romantic image” precepts and Newman's are acute. For example, Kermode begins with James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and concludes with T. E, Hulme (Newman owned a copy of the first and of Hulme’s Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art [1924]; Newman continued the idea of the image as nondiscursive and revelatory; and he also paralleled the belief, held by adherents of the “romantic image,” in pregnant historical crisis. De Kooning, in The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning (Madras and New York: Hanuman Books, 1988), 9-14. “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951), in ibi

David L. Shirey, “Don Quixote in Springs,” Newsweek, November 20, 1967, 80. Irving Sandler, “Conversations with de Kooning,” Art Journal 48 (Fall 1989): 216. Harold Rosenberg, “Interview with Willem de Kooning,” Art News 71 (September 1972): 54. De Kooning (1960), in Collected Writings, 176-77. David Anfam, “De Kooning, Bruegel and Bosch: Some Fundamental Themes,” Burlington Magazine 145 (October 2003): 705-15.

Hence de Kooning’s obsessive concern with flux and fluidity. See Richard Shiff, “Water and Lipstick: de Kooning in Transition,” in Willem de Kooning: Paintings, ed. Marla Prather (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1994). The pornographic (to modern eyes) pilgrim badges were doubtless unearthed too late for de 46. Kooning to have known them. Yet he could have encountered vernacular everyday descendents of their folkloric imagination while still in the Netherlands. To judge the parallels, compare the badge reproduced in Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert, Carnivalesque (London: National Touring Exhibitions, 2000), 100 and de Kooning’s Woman (1951, Collection Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr.). Nothing else resembles this drawing so much as the equally diamond-shaped symmetrical configuration of the badge that turns the figure into a vagina. 47. My thanks to Bart Cornelis, deputy editor of The Burlington Magazine, for these observations. 48. The titles of the two versions of Spike's Folly (1959, 1960) were supposedly invented by the paintings’ owners: see The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection: 1945-1995 (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 37. Yet “folly” is hardly the most American of words, whereas it instantly rings a bell to any Dutch ear, especially to one such as de Kooning who had inscribed the word Zot (Dutch for “foolishness”) within a 1947 painting. 49. Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. Hoyt Hopewell Hudson (Ware: Wordsworth Edi45.

tions, 1513, 1998), 78.

50.

‘The same may be said of how Erasmus's relating Folly to the medieval tradition of Christ

51

De Kooning (1958), in Collected Writings, 104.

’s“pure”

foolishness ties with the diverse Christological themes throughout de Kooning’s work: for example, the Christlike figure of Joe Christmas and his longstanding fixation with the Crucifixion. See ibid., 83: “We are fools for Christ's sake.”

NOTES TO PAGES 63-66

| 239

A Legacy for the Latin American Left: Abstract Expressionism as Anti-Imperialist Art

This article would not have been possible without the personal interviews that I conducted with several of the artists discussed in the article: Raul Martinez in Cuba in 1991, Armando Morales in New York in 1987, Ernesto Cardenal in Managua in 2003, Boanerges Cerrato in Managua in 1986, Juan Rivas in Managua in1990. Moreover, | would also like to thank Susanne Baackmann, Jennifer Ahlfeldt,

Dore Ashton, Brenna Drury, and Rebecca Fitle for discussing issues with me recently concerning Latin

American art that relate to this article,

. Raul Martinez, Interview with Sandra Levinson, Havana, 1984. Videotape at the Center for

Cuban Studies in New York City. “Painters into Poster Makers: Two Views (Raiil Martinez & Alfredo Rostgaard] Concerning the History, Aesthetics and Ideology of the Cuban Poster Movement,” in Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 146. This interview was conducted in Havana on December 29, 1982.

T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 78, 81. For plates, see Cmdte. Ernesto Guevara, El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (Havana: Ediciones Revolucién, 1965), n.p. See also: Eva Cockcroft, Cuban Poster Art: A Retrospective 1961-1982

(New York: Center for Cuban Studies & Westbeth Gallery, 1983), 4 on Fidel Castro’s defense of abstract art.

5. “Painters into Poster Makers,” 145-48. Theodor Adorno, “Engagement” (1962), in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp

Verlag, 1974), 412, 429-30.

Ibid., 429: “Im Begriff des “message,” der Botschaft von Kunst selbst, auch der politisch radikalen, steckt schon das weltfreundliche Moment.” 8. Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 108. Ibid. )._ Guido Llinds and Los Once After Cuba (Miami: The Art Museum at Florida International Univer-

1. 12,

sity, 197), 11. This catalogue contains valuable essays by Juan Martinez and Christoph Singler. See also Guido Llinds: Printmaking, 1964-2002 (Lehigh University Art Galleries, 2003), It contains an essay about the artist by Alejandro Anreus and an interview with the artist by Juan Martinez. Robert Motherwell, “The New York School” (1950), in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed, S, Terenzio (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 77-80. See: David Craven, “The FBI Files on the New York School,” in Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79-104.

240 | NOTES TO PAGES 67-75

13, Robert Motherwell, “The Significance of Miré,” Art News 58, no. 4 (May 1959): 32-33. For a recent study that carefully traces the U.S. support for Franco and Spanish Fascism, see Angel Vitias, El las garras del Aguila (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2003). The author rightly notes that, while Hitler helped to put Franco in power in the 1930s, it was the United States, beginning in the 1950s, that kept him in power. 14, Barbaralee Diamonstein, “An Interview with Robert Motherwell,” Inside New York's Artworld (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), 244-45.

15, See: David Craven, “Armando Morales and Magical Realism,” Latin American Art Magazine 1, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 52-56. This essay was also published in Nicaragua as: David Craven, “Armando Morales: clasico del realismo magico,” Nuevo Amanecer Cultural (Managua) 1 , no. 535 (November 24, 190): 1-2. The translation into Spanish was done by art critic and artist Rail Quintanilla. 16. Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes pldsticas latinoamericanos (Mexico City: Sigloveintiuno, 1973), 3-6.

17,

Ibid.

18. Clark, “Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art,” 82.

Abstract Expressionism as a Model of “Contemporary Art” In the Soviet Union Works by many of the artists mentioned here but not illustrated may be found reproduced in Drugoe iskusstvo, ed. Leonid Talochkin and Irina Alpatova (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Galereia “Moskovskaia kollektsiia,” 1991), vol. 2, and in publications by the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, including its Zimmerli Journal 1, 2 and 3, part 1 (Autumn 2003, 2004, 2005). 1. Zlotnikov, as quoted in Drugoe iskusstvo: Moskva 1956-76, 1:66.

2. The classic survey of literary formalist criticism remains Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). Recently much has been written on these theories in connection with the visual arts by Leah Dickerman (on photography), Christina Kaier (on Rodchenko); for a recent study of the polemics among critics see Natasha Kurchanova, “Against Utopia: Osip Brik and the Russian Avant-Garde” (Ph.D, thesis, City University of New York, 2005). 3. Sapgir, as quoted in Drugoe iskusstvo, |

4. Among the works on view described by Kemenov and others were: by Pollock, Lavender Mist (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), Cathedral (Dallas Museum of Art), Blue Poles (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra); by Baziotes, Moon Animal (University of Illinois, Urbana~Champaign); by de Kooning, Asheville (The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.); by Gorky, Water of the Flowery Mill (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); by Rothko, Old Gold on White; Roszak, Hound of Heaven (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); by Ferber, Once Again (Knoedler and Co., Inc., New York); Portrait ofJackson Pollock (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Among the sculptors Calder, Lassaw, Lipton, and Lachaise also were rep-

NOTES TO PAGES 76-84

| 241

resented. The exhi jon was a survey of American art beginning with the Ashcan School and represented most trends (including regionalist and surrealist work). To appease critics, the curators added some thirty works ranging from Gilbert Stuart to Cassatt and Sargent.

5. Mikhail Chernyshov: Moskva 1961-67 (New York: self-published, 1988), 10-14.

6. Edith Gregor Halpert, “Moscow Sees American Art,” Art in America 47 (Autumn 1959): 94-95.

See also Arlene Hannes, “Open Door in Moscow,” Arts and Architecture 76 (Summer 1959): 10-13.

A. Frankfurter, “Russian and Other Summertime Roulette,” Art News International 58 (Septem-

ber 1959): 17. The painting admired and acquired by Eisenhower was by lurii Podliaskii, Spring

is Approaching (1952).

Vladimir Kemenoy, “Abstraktnoe iskusstvo v svete leninskoi krikite makhizma” (first published

in Voprosy filosofii, no. 5 1959) was a response to Winthrop Sargeant’s article “Why Artists Are Going Abstract,” Life Magazine, February 17, 1947 and Andrew Carnduff Ritchie’s catalogue Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1951); republished in V. Kemenov, Protiv abstraktsionizma v sporakh o realizme (Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 1969), 5-36. V. Kemenov, “Sovremennoe iskusstvo SSHA (USA) na vystavke v Moskve,” (first published in Sovetskaia kul’tura, August 11, 1959) is republished in V. Kemenov, Protiv Abstraktionizma,

59-76, for citations see 69-71. An abbreviated version of his article was translated into English and published by Halpert as “International Look at the USA: Plus and Minus at the Moscow

Show,” Art in America 48, no. 2 (Summer 1960): 34-39. 10. An equally harsh if more philosophical critique is by N. Dmitrieva, “Abstraktsionizm i esteticheskie zakonomernosti,” Iskusstvo 7 (1960): 45-53; see also A. Guber, “Abstraktsionizm vrag

pravdy i krasoty,” Iskusstvo 6 (1959): 20-27. F. P, Reshetnikov published some of the most mem-

orable caricatures in Tainy abstraktsionizma (Moscow: Akademiia khudozhestv SSSR, 1963),

illustrated in this chapter, but a wider range appeared in the press.

Kemenov, “Krasota i urodsto: Zametki o vystavke frantsuzskogo iskusstvo” (first published in Sovetskaia kul’tura, September 5, 1961); for this citation see Kemenov, Protiv abstraktsionizme, p. 78. Mikhail Chernyshov has also described the hanging of this exhibition which he viewed prior

to its opening, Mikhail Chernyshov, 23-27. 12. A.D. Goncharov, as quoted in Drugoe iskusstvo, 1:67.

13. Author’s interview with the artist, May 30, 2002. 14. The extent and nature of artists’ internal exile in the Soviet period has been reexamined in pub-

lications such as the one sponsored by the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Almaty, Kazakhstan and coordinated by Alim Sabitov: L. N. Pletnikova and G. M. Safarova, Kogda iskusstvo

ukhodilo iz pamiati (Karaganda: Soros-Kazakhstan Foundation, 2001). Among the nonconformist artists represented in this small anthology are Lev Kropivnitsky, who spent the years 1949-54 in one of the several Steppe camps located near Karaganda, Kazakhstan; Eva LevinaRozengol'ts; loikoiamo Misao; and Ulo Sooster.

242 | NOTES TO PAGES 84-88

15. From the memoirs of Lev Kropivnitsky, Kogda iskusstvo ukhodilo iz pamiati, 29. 16. Sooster’s turn to abstract painting is also linked to his camp experience. See Eda Sepp’s description of his artistic evolution in “Estonian Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Occupation in 1944

to Perestroika,” in Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression Under the Soviets, 1945-1991, ed. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (New Brunswick, NJ: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum and Rutgers University Press, 2002), 47.

17. Kakabadze is long overdue historical recognition in the West. His career was opened for discus-

sion and historical study in the USSR, including Georgia, during the Gorbachev era. An early reappraisal was by lurii Moseshvili in his “Palitra: ‘Ia znaiu chto delaiu- K 100-letiiu so dnia rozh-

deniia Davida Kakabadze,” Ogonek 39 (September 1989): 8. Varazi and Bandzeladze were among the few artists who sought to link their work retrospectively with his. Varazi spent a good deal of time in Moscow in the 1960s, according to Nemukhin, who often socialized with him (interview

with the author, April 4, 2002).

18, Chernyshov has described in some detail his exposure to foreign art magazines, which he read avidly on a regular basis from 1960 in the Gorkii Institute of World Literature in Moscow:

Mikhail Chernyshoy, 21-23.

19, Faktura is the Russian term designating the material character of the work of art; it assumed a central role in Russian art theory and criticism in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and particularly in the reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin. The subject of a book by the Latvian artist

Waldemar Matvejs (Vladimir Markov), Tvorcheskie printsipy v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh. Faktura (St. Petersburg, 1914), the subsequent meanings signified by the term have been elucidated recently by Maria Gough in “Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde,” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn 1999): 32-59. 20. My argument adapts Ann Eden Gibson's thesis for Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), particularly as outlined in her introduction. Her source is W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications [1903], 1962), 16-17. Scholars of Russian literature have also taken recourse to Du Bois in order to explain the

particular structuring of subjectivity evinced by Russian writers and their fictional characters:

Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

21. Andrei Erofeev, “Interv'iu s Vladimirom Nemukhinym,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 9 (February

1996): 572. This neologism (mezhdusoboichik) refers to the relationships that obtained among

artists who were not so much a group as occasional interlocutors for each other, Nemukhin uses the term to describe the shared interests of the Moscow abstractionists.

22. Mikhail Bakhtin “K pererabotke knigi o Dostoevskom” (1961), as quoted by Tsvetan Todorov,

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 105; for publication data, see 123 (item 31). 23. Mikhail Chernyshov (1991), 12. 24, Nemukhin, in Erofeev, “Interv'iu s Viadimirom Nemukhinym,” 571.

NOTES TO PAGES 88-91

| 243

25. Ibid. 26. Bakhtin’s discussion of this quality of self-perception is extensive and cannot be elaborated in further detail here. For another art historian’s presentation of outsideness in connection with the visual arts that informs this one, see Deborah Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1995), 74-77.

27. Nemukhin, for example, highly regards the work of Eric Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov but does not regard them as contemporary artists because they mystify this double sense of self, of acting both

within and outside of one’s environment (Interview with the author, April 4, 2002). In Erofeev’s interview, Nemukhin also underscores the conscious allusions to Western art in work by his generation of abstract painters as a feature of contemporaneity. Nemukhin, in Erofeey, “Interv'iu s

Vladimirom Nemukhinym,” 571-72.

28. Artists encountered the avant-garde in different ways and at different moments. Masterkova, for

example, cites the photographer Evgeni Nutovich, who had access to the reserves of the

‘Tretyakov Gallery. Nemukhin refers to his visits to the home of Petr Sokolov, a student of Male-

vich; Francisco Infante-Arana and others frequently mention the collection of George Costakis, which contained a huge number of works by virtually every figure within the avant-garde. Nemukhin's list of critical encounters with contemporary American and European art includes the 1959 and 1963 exhibitions of American art and the 1961 exhibition of French art. All three

were held in Moscow, the 1959 and 1963 at Sokolniki Park. 29. Gibson, citing Rosenberg, in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, xxvii. 30.

Ibid., xxiv. In this extract, she cites Still over Pollock for explicitly identifying himself with his art:

“When I expose a painting [Still wrote in 1951], I would have it say, ‘Here I am: this is my pres-

ence, my feeling, myself. Here I stand implacable, proud, alive, naked, unafraid,” ibid., 5-6. As Gibson states in her introduction, the point of revisiting these claims is to examine them as rhet-

oric—and thereby reengage the very real issues, ideological, political, and racial, that shaped their creative environments. In the end, she argues, within certain limits “these artists did see their works in a broad cultural and social context rather than a narrowly stylistic one,” ibid., xxiii, 31. Masterkova described the work by Matiushin and his school (the Ender family) which she saw at

Costakis’s Moscow apartment as the most powerful expression of the Russian avant-garde. She

professes very little interest in or attraction to Malevich's Suprematism, although she admires the non-objective art that followed, particularly the work of Liubov Popova. Interview with the

author, May 30, 2002.

32. Boris Groys has also explored the significance of interweaving graphic marks in Edgzverardze’s

work, seeing it as an anomaly precisely because the artist avoids overt references to his cultural heritage, Kommentarii k iskusstvu (Moscow: Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, 2003), 325-33.

33. Ina series of conversations held by this author with Edgzveradze in March 2002.

244 | NOTES TO PAGES 91-95

15. From the memoirs of Lev Kropivnitsky, Kogda iskusstvo ukhodilo iz pamiati, 29. 16. Sooster’s turn to abstract painting is also linked to his camp experience. See Eda Sepp’s description of his artistic evolution in “Estonian Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Occupation in 1944

to Perestroika,” in Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression Under the Soviets, 1945-1991, ed. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (New Brunswick, NJ: Jane Voorhees

17.

Zimmerli Art Museum and Rutgers University Press, 2002), 47.

Kakabadze is long overdue historical recognition in the West. His career was opened for discus-

sion and historical study in the USSR, including Georgia, during the Gorbachev era. An early reappraisal was by lurii Moseshvili in his “Palitra: ‘la znaiu chto delaiu, K 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Davida Kakabadze,” Ogonek 39 (September 1989): 8. Varazi and Bandzeladze were among

the few artists who sought to link their work retrospectively with his. Varazi spent a good deal of time in Moscow in the 1960s, according to Nemukhin, who with the author, April 4, 2002).

often socialized with him (interview

. Chernyshov has described in some detail his exposure to foreign art magazines, which he read avidly on a regular basis from 1960 in the Gorkii Institute of World Literature in Moscow:

Mikhail Chernyshoy, 21-23.

19. Faktura is the Russian term designating the material character of the work of art; it assumed a central role in Russian art theory and criticism in the first two decades of the twentieth century,

and particularly in the reliefs of Vladimir Tatlin. The subject of a book by the Latvian artist Waldemar Matvejs (Vladimir Markov), Tvorcheskie printsipy v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh. Faktura (St. Petersburg, 1914), the subsequent meanings signified by the term have been elucidated

recently by Maria Gough in “Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde.” RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn 1999): 32-59.

20. My argument adapts Ann Eden Gibson's thesis for Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), particularly as outlined in her introduction. Her source is W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications [1903], 1962), 16-17. Scholars of Russian literature have also taken recourse to Du Bois in order to explain the

particular structuring of subjectivity evinced by Russian writers and their fictional characters: Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul 21.

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Andrei Erofeev, “Interv’iu s Vladimirom Nemukhinym,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia 9 (February 1996): 572. This neologism (mezhdusoboichik) refers to the relationships that obtained among

artists who were not so much a group as occasional interlocutors for each other. Nemukhin uses

the term to describe the shared interests of the Moscow abstractionists.

22. Mikhail Bakhtin “K pererabotke knigi o Dostoevskom” (1961), as quoted by Tsvetan Todorov,

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 105; for publication data, see 123 (item 31).

23. Mikhail Chernyshov (1991), 12. 24, Nemukhin, in Erofeev, “Interv'iu s Vladimirom Nemukhinym,” 571.

NOTES TO PAGES 88-91

| 243

25. Ibid. 26. Bakhtin’s discussion of this quality of self-perception is extensive and cannot be elaborated in further detail here. For another art historian’s presentation of outsideness in connection with the visual arts that informs this one, see Deborah Haynes, Bakhtin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge 27.

and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 74-77. Nemukhin, for example, highly regards the work of Eric Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov but does not

regard them as contemporary artists because they mystify this double sense of self, of acting both

within and outside of one’s environment (Interview with the author, April 4, 2002). In Erofeev's interview, Nemukhin also underscores the conscious allusions to Western art in work by his gen-

eration of abstract painters as a feature of contemporaneity. Nemukhin, in Erofeey, “Interv'iu s Viadimirom Nemukhinym,” 571-72. 28. Artists encountered the avant-garde in different ways and at different moments. Masterkova, for

example, cites the photographer Evgenii Nutovich, who had access to the reserves of the ‘Tretyakov Gallery. Nemukhin refers to his visits to the home of Petr Sokolov, a student of Male-

vich; Francisco Infante-Arana and others frequently mention the collection of George Costakis,

which contained a huge number of works by virtually every figure within the avant-garde.

Nemukhin’s list of critical encounters with contemporary American and European art includes the 1959 and 1963 exhibitions of American art and the 1961 exhibition of French art. All three were held in Moscow, the 1959 and 1963 at Sokolniki Park.

29. Gibson, citing Rosenberg, in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, xxvii. 30.

Ibid., xxiv. In this extract, she cites Still over Pollock for explicitly identifying himself with his art:

“When I expose a painting [Still wrote in 1951], I would have it say, ‘Here I am: this is my presence, my feeling, myself. Here I stand implacable, proud, alive, naked, unafraid,” ibid., 56. As Gibson states in her introduction, the point of revisiting these claims is to examine them as rhet-

oric—and thereby reengage the very real issues, ideological, political, and racial, that shaped their creative environments. In the end, she argues, within certain limits “these artists did see their works in a broad cultural and social context rather than a narrowly stylistic one,” ibid., xxiii. 31. Masterkova described the work by Matiushin and his school (the Ender family) which she saw at

Costakis's Moscow apartment as the most powerful expression of the Russian avant-garde. She

professes very little interest in or attraction to Malevich's Suprematism, although she admires the non-objective art that followed, particularly the work of Liubov Popova. Interview with the author, May 30, 2002. 32. Boris Groys has also explored the significance of interweaving graphic marks in Edgzverardze’s work, seeing it as an anomaly precisely because the artist avoids overt references to his cultural 33.

heritage, Kormmentarii k iskusstvu (Moscow: Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, 2003), 325-33. Ina series of conversations held by this author with Edgzveradze in March 2002.

244 | NOTES TO PAGES 91-95

A New Beginning: Abstraction and the Myth of “Zero Hour”

NOY

ew

1, Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O'Neill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 192. 2. Translation of the German version of the French text: Jean Paul Sartre, “Finger und Nicht-Finger” (“Doigts et non-doigts”), in Portritts und Perspektiven (Reinbek: Rowholt, 1975), 325. Tbid., 330.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Die Suche nach dem Absoluten in Situationen (Reinbek: Rowholt, 1965), 90. Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, 160. Ibid., 170-72.

Gottfried Boehm, “Die Wiederkehr der Bilder,” in Was ist ein Bild? (Munich: W. Fink, 1994), 11; “Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder,” in Iconic Turn: Die neue Macht der Bilder, ed. Christa Maar and Hubert Burda (Cologne: DuMont, 2004), 28-43. 8. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 9. Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, 192.

10.

Ibid., 159,

11,

Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York, 1997), 93f.

Jronic Gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism

1. Mathieu refers frequently to the idea that “signs precede their signification” in lyrical abstraction. Georges Mathieu, De la Révolte a la renaissance: Au-dela du Tachisme (1963) (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 360. His performances made unavoidable, however, the conclusion that the primary

meaning of these signs for Mathieu was their indexical relation to the artist himself. 2. Almost all Jorn's artwork is found in European collections, and the artist had few dealers in the United States, in part because Jorn, a socialist activist since his early days in Silkeborg, refused to enter a country where he would have to sign a paper certifying that he was not a Communist. 3. Nuria Enguita Mayo, ed., Asger Jorn (Barcelona: Fundacié Antoni Tapies, 2002); Laurent Gervereau, Critique de l'image quotidienne: Asger Jorn (Paris: Cercle d’Art, 2001); Laurent

Gervereau and Paul-Hervé Parsy, La planéte Jorn (Strasbourg: Musée d'Art Moderneet Contemporain de Strasbourg, 2001); Christian Gether et al., eds., Asger Jorn (Ishoj: Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, 2002).

4. Stokvis, for example, characterizes Cobra art as the “second great wave of Primitive Expressionism” in twentieth-century art, applying this somewhat anachronistic distinction as a term of praise. Willemijn Stokvis, Cobra: An International Movement in Art after the Second World War (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), 7. Carter Ratcliff refers to the “pain and violence” and “genuinely painful screams” of Jorn’s “expressionist” work, failing to see its humor and deliberate artifice. Ratcliff,"New York,” (Jorn review) Art International 14 (1970).

NOTES TO PAGES 99-110

| 245

Kandinsky summarized his views on expression in “The Cologne Lecture”(1914), translated in Art in Theory 1900-1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,

1992), 94-98, The Helhesten group in Denmark characterized themselves as a “new realism” in 1945, and the Cobra group described its new artistic interventions as a “social realism” from 1948 to 1950.

Asger Jorn, Magi og skanne kunster (Magic and the fine arts) (1948) (Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1971), 111, Asger Jorn et al., “Den ny realise,” in Hostudstillingen (The Hest exhibition) (Copenhagen: Den Frie Udstilling, 1945).

Jorn's critique of advertisements as an assault on the subject, for example, demonstrates his recognition that the psyche is shaped for better and worse by outside determinants. See Jorn,

‘Magi og skonne kunster, 20-21. Jorn also stated in Pour la forme, “Les désirs purement individu-

els n’existent pas” (Purely individual desires do not exist). Jorn, “Pour la forme: ébauche d'une

méthodologie des arts,” (1958) in Documents relatifs a la fondation de l'Internationale Situationniste, ed. Gerard Berreby (Paris: Allia, 1985), 427.

“Intention og kunst er det samme.” Asger Jorn, “Tegn og Underlige Gerninger eller Magi og de

skonne kunster” (Signs and strange actions or magic and the fine arts), (Silkeborg Kunstmuseum

Archives, 1954), n.p. “II n'y a pas d’identité entre impression et expression la oi il y a oeuvre d’art. Non plus entre les intentions conscientes out inconscientes de l’artiste et la réalisation de l’expression dans une matiére. Pas davantage entre l’expression de I’artiste et l'impression du publi - Lartiste est... dans la communauté le véritable agent de dénivellation,de mouvement et de déséquilibre.” Jorn, “Pour la forme,” 530.

10. For Nancy, singularity is an ontological condition. He defines the self as the singularity which co-

appears or“compears” (com-parait) simultaneously to the idea of community, and is thus inseparable from it. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community(1986), ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1-42. i. Nancy terms this condition the “singular plural.” Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (1996), trans. Robert D, Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

12. Jorn, quoted in Kenneth Coutts-Smith, “More

than a Gesture,” Art and Artists (1966): 30.

13. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 97. San-

dler also cites statements by Motherwell and de Kooning on the truth and integrity of gesture painting (92-96). 14, William C. Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 230, 33. 15, Robert Motherwell, “Foreword,” Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, xiii. 16. Tapié coined the term informel in “Ainsi voit-on le celte Camille Bryen transcender l’informel,”

News Post Paris, June 1951, cited in Jean Paulhan, L’Art informel: éloge ( Paris: Gallimard, 1962),

20, Estienne appropriated the term “tachisme,” initially an insult, for the movement in “Une

Révolution: le tachisme,” Combat-Art, March 1, 1954. Mathieu also claims to have invented

246 | NOTES TO PAGES

110-112

Informel a few months before Tapié, but he is actually known for his conception of “abstraction lyrique.” Mathieu, De la Révolte a la renaissance: Au-dela du Tachisme, 357-60. Jorn's work was briefly connected to Informel when Tapié included Jorn’s Raft of the Medusa in an exhibition in Rome in 1953. Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn: en biografi (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1994), 2:15. 17. Other key exhibitions include Tapié’s “H.W.PS.M.T.B. (Hartung, Wols, Picabia, Stahly, Mathieu, Tapié, Bryen]” in 1948, Tapié’s “Art autre” of 1952, and Estienne’s Salons d’Octobre, inaugurated the same year. 18, Michel Tapié, Véhémences confrontées (Paris: Galerie Nina Dausset, 1951). See also Tapié, Un Art autre, oi ils'agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris: Gabriel-Giraud et fils, 1952).

19, “Des signes chargés d’un possible maximum d’expressivité,” Tapié, Un Art autre, n.p. 20. Tapié, Un Art autre, n.p. 2. Estienne, “Le mur, la fente et les graffitis,” Combat-Art 87, March 5, 1962, quoted in Jean-Clarence

Lambert, ed., Charles Estienne et l'art a Paris (Paris: Centre National des Arts Plastiques, 1984),

89. See also Estienne, “Une révolution: le tachisme.” 22. “La ligne, impérieuse et virile, claire et forte comme une épée.” Charles Estienne, Prélude aux Noces (Lidge: Société Royale des Beaux-Arts de Liege; Supplement to Cobra 10, 1951): n.p.

23.

“Le geste le plus nu et le plus naturel par lequel un homme veut échapper a l’angoisse de sa condition” Estienne, “Hans Hartung,” Art d’aujourd'hui 4 (March 1951), quoted in Lambert, ed., Charles Estienne et l'art a Paris, 44.

24. In addition to the above-cited sources, see Mathieu, De la Révolte a la renaissance: Au-dela du

Tachisme, Paulhan, L’Art informel: éloge, Pierre Restany, “Moralité du geste,” I Gesto 2 (1957). 25. He writes of Fautrier’s art as an “instinctive expression,” ascribing its force exclusively to the artist's “eye, a tragic vision.” Malraux, “Les arts: Exposition Fautrier,” La Nouvelle revue francaise 233 (February 1, 1933): 345~46, translated in Curtis L. Carter and Karen K. Butler, Jean Fautrier, 1898-1964 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 188,

26.

André Malraux, The Psychology of Art, trans, Stuart Gilbert, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon, 1949); Malraux, The Voices of Silence (1953), trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

27.

Motherwell, “A Tour of the Sublime” (1948), in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 53. Rothko, “The Romantics were prompted . ..” Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947/48), reprinted in Mark Rothko, 1903-1970 (Lon-

don: Tate Gallery, 1987),84. Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now” (1948),in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O'Neill, 170-73. | have found no evidence that Jorn, who generally wrote about every text that crossed his path, had direct knowledge of these artists’ writings. Such a connection might explain his reference to American painting as a “religious” art in Asger Jorn, “Salonvikingen og Jean de France,” Information, January 23, 1964, 4.

28. He discusses Tachisme in the key 1955 manuscripts “Om kunsti Europa og Danmark efter krigen

(uden titel)” and“Forundring—beundring—begejstring,” Silkeborg Kunst museum Archives, and

NOTES TO PAGE

112

| 247

Informel in Asger Jorn, “Jeg er totalt feerdig med dansk kunstliv,” Kunst [Copenhagen] 7, no. 5

(1960). 29. Jorn, “Pour la forme,” 531. 30.

Jorn, “The Meaning of the Nuclear Plastic Experience,” 1954, quoted in Tristan Sauvage [Arturo

Schwartz], Arte nucleare (Milan: Galleria Schwartz, 1962), 36. Jorn’s critique of Informel as anew academicism refers to the earlier “querelle de l’'académisme abstrait” in Paris, 1950. Estienne criticized geometric abstraction as an academic style in L’Art abstrait est-il un académisme? (Paris:

Editions de Beaune, 1950). In an example of the increasing polemics in France, Tapié would accuse Estienne of developing a new school of academic abstraction in 1952, two years before 31.

Jorn accuses Tapié of the same. See Lambert, ed., Charles Estienne et l’arta Paris, 92, 104. The text was signed by Khatib, Korun, Debord, Platschek, Pinot-Gallizio, and Jorn. Translated in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 48-49. Jorn may not have been at the action in Belgium (he seems to have been en route

between Munich and Albisola at the time). He most likely supported the playful disruption of the action, with its wake-up call to critics like Sweeney who supported the work ofa number of Jorn’s

ex-Cobra colleagues, even if its polemical wording belongs to the French milieu of Debord’s circle, in self-conscious imitation of the prewar avant-gardes.

32. Jorn, “Pour la forme,” 545. Jorn may have reacted specifically to Malraux, The Voices of Silence,

283, where Malraux claims that prehistoric art began with “the sacred, the divine, before turning

towards man.”

33. “Un art abstrait qui ne croit pas a l’abstraction,” Jorn, “Pour la forme,” 545. 34, Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” (1952), in The Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). Sartre contributed to this discourse with his writings on Wols and Giacometti,

the former as the tragic Daoist-inspired artist paralyzed by his inability to act, the latter as the artist

who reveals the “only truly human unity: the unity of the Act.” Jean-Paul Sartre, “Fingers and Non-

Fingers” (1963), in Wols: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings, ed. Werner Haftmann (New York:

Abrams, 1965); Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute” (1948), in Art in Theory 1900-1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 604, 35.

Asger Jorn, “Handlingens Kunst—Eksperimentelle kunst eller de frie kunster. Forelaesning pa det svenske kunstakademi” (Silkeborg Kunstmuseum Archive : 1964), 3-4, Jorn, “Har det kongelige

Akademi for de skonne Kunster i Danmark nogen eksistens-berettigelse?” Kunst [Copenhagen] 2, no. 8 (1964): 202.

36. Jorn’s occasional hyperbole in referring to his friends as “geniuses” indicates that he was at times infected by the mainstream discourse of Informel, but in his more sober writing, as in his paint-

ing itself, he develops an ironic critique of the gesture asa record of genius. Asger Jorn, “L’Etat des passions au milieu du XXe sigcle et Gallizio-le-tatoué,” in Pinot Gallizio (Paris: Bibliotheque d’Alexandrie, 1960).

37. For a reproduction, see Asger Jorn: Malerier, keramik, skulpturer (Silkeborg: Silkeborg Kunstmu-

seum, 1995), 65.

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38. For a description of Mathieu's “Battle” paintings, see Michel Tapié, “Mathieu Paints a Picture,”

Art News 53, no. 10 (1955): 50-53, 74.

39. Incidentally, this process of making materiality dominant over the individualist gesture also has

parallels in Abstract Expressionism. Jack Tworkov, for example, praises Soutine for displaying qualities sought by contemporary painters such as “that quality of surface which appears as if it

had happened rather than as [being] ‘made.” It was largely the critics and the popular press who

made ubiquitous the understanding of Abstract Expressionism as an art of the gestures of tormented genius. Tworkov, “The Wandering Soutine,” Art News 49, no. 7 (November 1950): 32,

quoted in Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, 100.

40. Jorn identifies Dubuffet as one of the key new French painters in a manuscript of 1951, the year Dubuffet exhibited the “Corps des dames” at René Drouin’s Galerie Rive Gauche. Asger Jorn, “Paris og moderne kunst,” (Silkeborg Kunstmuseum Archives: 1951). According to Andersen,

Drouin introduced Jorn to his work in fall 1946. Andersen, Asger Jorn: en biografi, 1:146. On the

two artists’ relationship, see Valérie Da Costa, “Asger Jorn et Jean Dubuffet en dialogue,” in La

planéte Jorn, ed. Laurent Gervereau and Paul-Hervé Parsy (Strasbourg: Musée d'Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg, 2001), 114-31. 41. See, for example, Werner Haftmann, “Asger Jorn,” in 25 Years Lefebre Gallery (New York: Lefebre Gallery, 1985); Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century (1954), trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Praeger, 1965), 1: 355; Hans Kjzerholm, Asger Jorn Malerier, trans. Ann Draycon (Silkeborg: Silkeborg Kunstmuseum, 1964), 69-72.

42. I mean “base” in the sense of Georges Bataille, who made base materialism central to his philos-

ophy. For Bataille, “base matter . . . alone, by its incongruity and by an overwhelming lack of respect, permits the intellect to escape from the constraints of idealism.” His famous designation of the “formless,” a parallel concept, defines it as something “squashed everywhere, like a spider

or an earthworm.” Despite Jorn’s differences with Bataille which I describe in my dissertation, an

equivalent viscerality seems apparent in this particular phase of Jorn’s work. Georges Bataille,

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans, Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1985), 51, 31.

43. Kristeva’s description of abjection as an iconography of expression applies perhaps better than

Bataille, for whom in theory materiality excluded metaphor (although metaphor actually persists in his writings). See Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans, Leon §. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

44, Jorn’s Italian colleagues saw Pollock in 1950 at the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and Ser-

gio Dangelo viewed watercolors by the artist in Milan. Dangelo avows that in 1950, all he and his colleagues Dova and Peverelli cared about was Pollock and Wols. At the time, they all tried paint-

ing in enamels on the floor. Sauvage, Arte nucleare, 20, 130. Drips were used in Baj’s painting in

the early 1950s, when they also appeared in Jorn’s.

45. On the traditional Cartesian construction of the gaze and its disembodiment of the subject, see

Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press,

NOTES TO PAGES

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1983); Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988). 46. By the mid-1950s Jorn’s standard process was to paint on a canvas laid out on a table or directly

on the ground.

47. Yve-Alain Bois, “Whose Formalism?” Art Bulletin 78, no. 1 (1996): 11. Rosalind Krauss describes the function of Pollock’s method to attack the “gestalt” conception of the subject as whole and

ideal in “Early Images Coming Thru: Pollock's Black Paintings,” in Abstraction, Gesture, Ecriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection (New York: Alesco; Scalo, 1999), 23-33; see also Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

48. The figuration of Jorn and Dubuffet, however deconstructive and transgressive in its day, auto-

matically disqualified such works from the canon of the informe. See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind

49.

E. Krauss, Formiess:A User’s Guide (New York: Zone, 1997), 141-43. The bearded face, symbolic of folk- and, later, counter-culture, was one of Jorn’s favorite images

of popular and medieval art. Jorn certainly would have appreciated Dubuffet’s series of “Beards,”

begun in 1959 and exemplifying the same mixture of celebration and anti-cultural associations, although Jorn’s interest in the beard stems from the Cobra period if not earlier. The beard also

identifies the god Freyr, discussed in Asger Jorn, “Le Frey (Fré): De la féte populaire au mythe universel,” Cobra 7 (1950): 14-15.

50. Asger Jorn, “Peinture détournée” (Paris: Galerie Rive Gauche, 1959; reprinted in On the Passage

of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957-1972, ed. Elizabeth Sussmann, 140-42). 51. Duchamp made a similar move in Pharmacie of 1914, where across from the artist’s printed sig-

nature he added “PHARMACIE, MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1914.” Writing his name in all caps, he attempted to depersonalize the gesture. For a reproduction, see Arturo Schwartz, ed., The Com-

52.

plete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000), 597. Jorn, “Sauvagerie, barbarie et civilisation,” in Asger Jorn et al,, Signes gravés sur les églises de I'Eure et du Calvados, ed. Institut Scandinave de Vandalisme Comparé sous la direction d’Asger Jorn,

53.

vol. 2, Bibliotheque d’Alexandrie (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1964), 127. He wrote that Norman church graffiti expressed a popular opposition to the isolation of artistic objects in Medieval churches, which held valuable objects (such as reliquaries) outside of social

circulation. Jorn, “Sauvagerie, barbarie et civilisation,” in Jorn et al., Signes gravés, 247. 54, Asger Jorn, “Intime Banaliteter,” Helhesten 1, no. 2 (1941): 33.

55. In 1949, Jorn had written to Constant of his idea to create “La section d’amélioration des anci-

ennes toiles” (The Department for the Improvement of Old Canvases). He specified that the

function of these works would be not negative like a Surrealist satire, but positive, in order to preserve the “actuality [actualité]” of old pictures and save them from oblivion. Jorn, letter to Constant, 1949-50, Constant Archives, Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD),

The Hague, Netherlands.

56. See Gether et al., eds., Asger Jorn, 48.

250 | NOTES TO PAGES

114-117

57. “Intégration de productions actuelles ou passées des arts dans une construction supérieure du milieu.” “Définitions,” Internationale situationniste| (June 1958): 13. 58. “Le Détournement comme négation et prélude,” Internationale situationniste 3 (1959): 79. The article discusses Jorn’s Modifications as well as Mémoires as examples of détournement.

59, In using the term pastiche, I am not revisiting Hal Foster’s interpretation of postmodern pastiche as allied with a neoconservative politics of the status quo. See Foster, “(Post) Modern Polemics,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (New York: New Press, 1985), 121-36. | believe such characterizations conflate aesthetic forms with the sometimes conservative politics of their makers and ignore the basic irony inherent in the practice of pastiche, which indicates a disjuncture

between an existing form and its original content versus its present theoretical implications. Jorn’s use of parody and pastiche is closer to that described by Benjamin Buchloh in “Parody and Appropriation in Francis Picabia, Pop, and Sigmar Polke [1982],” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 343-64. But unlike Buchloh, |interpret Jorn’s use

of pastiche as extending to institutional critique, by refusing the very conception of authenticity

‘on which the conception of art as autonomous from the market and from politics depends.

60. Jorn, Magi og skonne kunster, 118-20. He similarly writes in Cobra that forms may express notions directly opposed to their content. Asger Jorn, “Les formes concues comme langage,” Cobra 2 (1949): 6-7.

61. Jorn, “Pour la forme,” 466. 62. According to Paul de Man, irony makes authenticity impossible because it reflects the self as complex, split into opposing aspects which the ironic work reveals to be coexisting, De Man's discussion of the operation of irony as a double structure of language that allows for no totality, but

rather situates consciousness in a momentary realization of its inauthenticity, relates closely to Jorn’s approach, Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 214-26. 63. “angsten for det fladbundede, for det hule og overfladiske. . . De tager alle sammen for tungt paa

tingene.” Jorn, “Tegn og underlige gerninger.” n.p. Jorn refers in the text to Suzanne Langer, Phi-

losophy in a New Key (New York: Mentor, 1951); Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Routledge, 1953); C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1923); and John Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947).

64. Fora discussion of the artist's own “truth” as basic to art, see Malraux, The Psychology of Art, vol. 2, 153-54, Tapié was particularly concerned with “authenticity,” as demonstrated in Un Art autre. Motherwell summarizes Abstract Expressionism as a kind of truth to experience, as opposed to entrenched dogmas, in Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, xiii. William Seitz fore-

grounds “truth” as a key concept for the movement as one of its “spirit characteristics.” Seitz writes that, “Art is a quest for reality and truth as subjectively apprehended and created... . Differing (but related) realities are those of the picture’s physical existence, the truth of immediate

perceptual and emotional responses, and the transcendental reality which begins to approach a

NOTES TO PAGES

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mystical dissolution of the ego.” Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, 152. Many painters consistently referred to “authenticity,”“integrity,” and “truth” in the American school, as

noted by Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting, 230-33. Even when Rothko argued for the importance of “irony” in his work in his famous 1958 artistic statement, the tone of his overall

approach continued to frame painting as a sincere investigation of the artist’s understanding of

the world. He redefined irony in his own terms as a concept that enabled him to more appropri-

ately express his interpretation of the world, or as he put it, the human drama as much as I can

possibly experiencei

Dore Ashton, “Art: Lecture by Rothko,” New York Times, October 31, 1958,

26. Greenberg's positivist rhetoric, while separating itself from concerns of personal expression, relies equally firmly on a conception of the increasing literalness of abstract art as a truth or integrity to its own materials. Rosenberg, finally, refers directly to the authenticity of the artist’s

effort as an indicator of artistic quality. He writes, “The test of any of the new painting is its seri‘ousness, and 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.” Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 33.

65. Jorn, “Pour la forme,” 533. 66. Serge Guilbaut, “1955: The Year the Gaulois Fought the Cowboy.” The French Fifties; Yale French Studies 98 (2000):

175-76; Jeremy Lewison, “Jackson Pollock and the Americanization of

Europe,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Abrams, 1999), 218-21.

67. 50 Ans d’art aux Etats-Unis, (Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1955), cat. 87. It is titled Number | in the catalog, but I am following the current title used by the Museum of Modern Art,

which purchased the painting in 1950.

68.

69.

Jorn, “Pour la forme,” 408. Both books are in the collection of the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum, Denmark, Mémoires also in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Both are also available in facsimile: Guy Debord, Mémoires: Structures portantes d’Asger Jorn [1959] (Paris: J . Pauvert aux Belles Lettres, 1993); Asger Jorn,

Fin de Copenhague: Conseilleur technique pourle détournement, G.-E. Debord [1957] (Paris: Allia, 2001).

70. The term made famous in Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Zone, 1995).

71. Troels Andersen and Aksel Evin Olesen, eds., Erindringer om Asger Jorn (Silkeborg: Galerie Mod-

erne, 1982), 180. 72. Greil Marcus, “Mémoires: A Situationist Primer,” in On the Passage ofa Few People Through a

Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957~1972, ed. Elizabeth Sussmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 126. What Debord actually asserts in the “Attestations” to the 1993 facsimile of Mémoires is only that he did not write any of the texts: “J'ai publié des Mémoires qui n'étaient franchement composts que de citations trés variées, sans compter une seule phrase, méme brave, qui soit de moi.” 73. For Mémoires, Jorn instructed the printers to print the drip drawings—overlaid with the snip-

252 | NOTES TO PAGES

118-120

pets of ads and other texts—in deliberately glaring colors, “as screaming and clashing as possible [saa skrigende og usammen hengende som muligt].” Jorn, letter to Permild and Rosengren, Feb. 74.

13, 1958, in Debord-Jorn letters, Silkeborg Kunstmuseum archives. Jackson Pollock, “Interview with William Wright” (1950), in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles,

and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Abrams, 1999), 22.

75. Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture [1937],” in Negations (Boston: Beacon,

1968), 114-15.

76. He lamented the self-destruction of artists like Pollock and Wols, who pushed their art to such

an extremist emotional pitch that, seemingly as a result of this excessive intensity, it became suicide, Asger Jorn and Georg Andrésen, “Asger Jorn hjemme: Jeg er totalt faerdig med dansk kunstliv? Kunst [Copenhagen] 7, no. 5 (1960): 127. 77. Asger Jorn, “Farfa and Sam Francis: Italian Futurism and American Action Painting,” (Silkeborg Kunstmuseum Archives: 1956). Written in English, this text is published in French in Jorn, Dis-

cours aux pingouins et autres écrits, ed. Marie-Anne Sichere, trans. Anne-Catherine Abecassis (Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2001), 185-87.

78. Jorn, “Handlingens Kunst—Eksperimentelle kunst eller de frie kunster. Forelesning pa det svenske kunstakademi,” 3-4.

79. Lawrence Alloway underlines the direct connection with Pollock by reproducing a Jorn “Luxury

Picture,” Yggdrassel Man, next to a Kaprow installation in his article on Pollock. Lawrence Alloway,

“Some American Painters,” Stand 5 (1961): 34. For a description of the series, see Lawrence

Alloway, Asger Jorn—Luxury Paintings (London: Arthur Tooth & Sons, 1961); Guy Atkins and

Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn, The Crucial Years, 1954-1964 (London: Lund Humphries, 1977), 71;

80.

Asger Jorn, “Den experimentellen Charakter meiner Luxusmalerei,” (Silkeborg Kunstmuseum Archives: 1972), n.p. Lacquer, of course, is a general term indicating a variety of different paints used today in industrial uses, such as furniture and appliance painting. I have not been able to determine specifically what kind of lacquer Jorn used, but it must have been a synthetic paint bought in a can to have

created such splatter and pour effects. This was verified by Troels Andersen, e-mail correspon-

dence, July 16, 2004. 81. Pollock himself never explained why he turned to industrial paints, although Lee Krasner and

later critics specified that it was most likely the material liquidity of the paints themselves, which

lent them to dripping in a way impossible with oils, at a time before the advent of acrylics. Barbara Rose, “Jackson Pollock at Work: Interview with Lee Krasner [1980],” in Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: Abrams, 1999), 43. Bois insistently differentiates Pollock’s use of industrial materials from any association with the culture industry,

asserting that they are rather part of the internal critical dialogue of high modernism. He writes

that these materials adulterate the modernist dogma of pure visuality by “referencing” kitsch, but are nevertheless firmly separated from mass or low culture itself. Yve-Alain Bois, “Kitsch,” in Bois and Krauss, Formless:A User's Guide, 123~24. Yet, as T. J. Clark acknowledges, Pollock’s colors are

NOTES TO PAGES

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insistently material: aluminum, not silver. “Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction,” in T. J. Clark, Farewell

to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 331.

I would argue that Pollock’s use of these materials cannot be separated from kitsch since the use

of such low-cost industrial materials by the Abstract Expressionists in general emphasizes in a material sense the continuum of painting with everyday material culture. In other words, although Abstract Expressionism today has been incorporated into the canon of high mod-

ernism, its insistent material literalness actually heightens our experience of it as an ordinary object. 82. “Lartest linvitation a une dépense d’énergie, sans but précis en dehors de celui que le spectateur lui-méme peut y apporter. C’est la prodigalité.” Asger Jorn, Critique de la politique économique suivie de La Lutte Finale, vol. 2, Rapports présentés a I’Internationale Situationniste (Paris: Inter-

nationale Situationniste, 1960), 21. Jorn had earlier described art as a luxury in both Magi og

skonne kunster (93) and Held og Hasard. In the latter, he writes that “conception, superfluity,

prodigality, munificence, surplus, the voluptuous, luxury, the generous—[are] identical with the aesthetic principle.” Asger Jorn, Held og hasard. Dolk og guitar (Luck and Chance. Dagger and Guitar) (Silkeborg: Published privately, 1952), translated in Asger Jorn, The Natural Order and

Other Texts, trans, Peter Shield (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 264.

83. Jorn, “Den

experimentellen Charakter meiner Luxusmalerei,” n.p.

84, R. Melville, “Exhibitions,” Architectural Review 130 (1961): 130. 85. Asger Jorn, “Art and Orders: On Treason, the Mass Action of Reproduction, and the Great Artistic Mass Effect,” Situationist Times 5 (1961): 11.

Greenberg Misreading Dubuffet

This paper, delivered on May 19, 2004, at the first annual Pollock-Krasner Study Center confer-

ence, was originally titled “Greenberg's Dubuffet.” Shortly after the conference, I received, via Colum-

bia University’s Office of Interlibrary Loan, a microfiche version of Sophie Berrebi’s unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Outsider as Insider: Jean Dubuffet and the United States 1945-1973 (Courtauld Institute of Art, 2002), which includes a subsection of a chapter devoted to “Greenberg's Dubuffet” (97-109). In deference to Dr. Berrebi, I have retitled my paper here. 1. Clement Greenberg, “A Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” The Nation (February 1, 1947): 136-37, 139; reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 122-25 2.

Ibid., 124-25,

3. See Aruna D’Souza’s discussion of this point in her article, I Think Your Work Looks a Lot Like Dubuffet: Dubuffet and America, 1946-1962,” The Oxford Art Journal 20:2 (1997): 61-73.

4. Greenberg, “A Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” 122.

254 | NOTES TO PAGES

122-125

5. Ibid., 123.

Clement Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of School of Paris Painters,” The Nation (June 29, 1946), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2:87-90.

7. Ibid., 90.

T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 47-64. See also Peter Wollen’s comments on “Greenberg's Laocoén,” in Raiding the Icebox (London: Verso), 91-95. Irving Babbit, The New Laokoon: An Essay on Confusion in the Arts (Boston: Houghton, 1910),

and Rudolf Arnheim, “The New Laocoén: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film” (1938), in

Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 199-230.

10. Greenberg, “Newer Laocoén,” reprinted in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Me

12.

13. 14. 15, 16. 17.

18.

Frascina (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 36-37. Ibid, 39. Greenberg is of course referring to André Breton's Les Vases Communicants (1932), trans. by Mary Ann Caws and Geoffrey T. Harris as Communicating Vessels (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). Clement Greenberg, “Jean Dubuffet and French Existentialism,” The Nation (July 13, 1946), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2:91-92. Ibid. George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Sartre’s “The Nationalization of Literature,” was translated by Stuart Gilbert and published in View 2-3 (March-April 1946). Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 52. Greenberg first met Sartre sometime between April 20 and June 6, 1939. Clement Greenberg,“L’Art américain au XXe sidcle,” in Les Temps Modernes 11-12 (August-September 1946). The original English version of this essay has been lost, and its publication history remains somewhat obscure. Sarah Wilson, “Paris Post War: In Search of the Absolute,” in Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-1955, ed. Francis Morris (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 25-52; Nancy Jachec, “The Space Between Art and Political Action’: Abstract Expressionism and Ethical Choice in Postwar America, 1945-1950,” Oxford Art Journal 14:2 (1991): 18-29; and Ann Gibson, “Abstract Expressionism’s Evasion of Language,” Art Journal 47, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 208-14. Allene Talmey, “Controversial Painter: Dubuffet,” Vogue (May 1, 1952). Also see Dubuffet’s earlier letter to Jean Paulhan, dated September 2, 1946, wherein he admits that he has read La Nausée, but is “confused with what it [Existentialism] is all about.” In Jean Dubuffet—Jean Paul-

han Correspondence, 1944-1968, ed. Julien Dieudonné and Marianne Jakobi (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 325. 19. Jean Dubuffet—Jean Paulhan Correspondence, 535.

NOTES TO PAGES

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20. Jean Paul Sartre, “Doigts et Non-Doigts,” (1961), translated as “Fingers and Non-Fingers,” in Wols, ed. Werner Haftmann (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1965), 30-41. Sartre’s passage on Dubuffet reads: “There are two ways of illustrating the otherness of being. The first is to reveal in a finger the cancerous presence of All Things. Dubuffet excels at this. He paints his women in purulent pinks, glands and viscera in full bloom, cheerful undernourished bugs with meatus, two breasts, and a thinly grooved sex; they are non-women stripped of all myth, trembling on the surface of the inorganic. At first Wols set out on this path, but he did not have Dubuffet’s strong, pungent materialism to sustain him” (37).

21, Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life (1985), trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 253, See also, Denis Hollier, The Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre (1982), trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 27-42.

22, Sarah Wilson, “Paris Post War: In Search of the Absolute,” in Francis Morris, ed., Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-1955 (London: Tate Gallery, 1993): 25-52.

23. Some of Dubuffet’s Messages contain dirty words or phrases. For further commentaryon this, see

“Dirty Words,” and “Les Messages: Sense and Nonsense,” the introduction and first chapter of Rachel Perry's unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Retour a l’Ordure: Defilement in the Postwar

Work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier” (Ph.D. diss. Harvard University, 2000), 1-45, 46-80.

24. The catalogue contained an exhaustive list of Dubuffet’s lithographic works to date. The series of

lithographs Dubuffet created to illustrate Eugene Guivellic’s book of poetry, Les Murs, were sup-

posed to be included in the show but were lost en route to the gallery. For more on this see Dubuf-

fet’s letter to Matisse, dated October 28, 1947, reprinted in Pierre Matisse and His Artists, ed. William M. Griswold and Jennifer Tonkovich (New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library, 2002), 210. 25. Henry McBride, “The Dubuffet Lithographs,” New York Sun, October 17, 1947, 29. 26. See Dubuffet’s letter to Jean Paulhan, written in December 1944, in Dubuffet-Paulhan Correspon-

dance 1944-1968, ed. Julien Dieudonné and Marianne Jakobi (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 158-59. 27. See Christian Bok, Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science and Les Trés Riches Heures du College de Pataphysique (Par ‘ayard, 2000). 28. Jean Paulhan, “Three Cheers for Uncommitted Literature,” in Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts, ed. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: The New Press, 1999), 49-51. 29. Artaud’s drawings are reproduced in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). In early 1945, Dubuffet and his wife, Lili, visited Artaud in Rodez.

30. Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double. Dubuffet was extremely fond of this book and in a let-

ter to Artaud dated January 15, 1945, that he explained that he held similar ideas about painting. See Prospectus et tous écrits suivants 4, ed. Hubert Damisch (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 98.

31. Roland Barthes, “Réquichot and His Body” (1973), in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of C: jifornia Press, 1985

32. For example, passages from Artaud’s “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,” appeared in

256 | NOTES TO PAGES

128-131

Tiger’s Eye 7 (1949), and Michaux’s “The Great Shapeless Hand,” Tiger’s Eye 1 (October 1947), cited in Ann Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor: UML Research Press, 1990). For more on this periodical see the exhibition catalogue, Pamela Franks, ed., Tiger’s Eye: The Art ofA Magazine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 33.

See James Elkin’s discussion of Gottlieb’s painting in the chapter on “Pseudowriting.” in The

Domain of Images (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 147-52.

34. Ann Gibson, “Abstract Expressionism’s Evasion of Language,” Art Journal 47, no. 3 (Fall 1988):

208-14. 35. See David Anfam, “Interrupted Stories: Reflections on Abstract Expressionism and Narrative,” in American Abstract Expressionism, ed. David Thistlewood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 21-39 (the quote comes from 31), and his related essay, “Beginning at the End: The Extremes of Abstract Expressionism,” in American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1913-1993, ed. Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal (Munich: Prestel, 1993), 85-91. 36. Anfam, “Interrupted Stories,” 31. 37. For example, at one point Greenberg claims that Dubuffet “followed Klee in order to find an escape from the physical into ‘poetry:” For a sustained analysis of Greenberg's take on Dubuffet and Klee, see Sophie Berribi, “Recognition Paul Klee as an Alternative Modernist Narrative,” in her unpublished doctoral dissertation, “The Outsider as Insider: Jean Dubuffet and the United

38.

39. 40. 4.

42. 43.

States, 1945-1973” (Ph.D. diss. London: Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2002), 64-80. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 158-59, Clement Greenberg, “Jean Dubuffet and ‘Art Brut,” Partisan Review 16:3 (March 1949): 295-297. Wylie Sypher, “The Zero Degree of Painting,” chapter 6 of Loss of the Selfin Modern Literature and Art (New York: Random House 1962), 110-38; translated as “Le degré zéro de la peinture,” in Jacques Berne, ed., Les Cahiers de I'Herne 22 (1973): 51-60. Jean Dubuffet & Claude Simon: Correspondance 1970-1984 (Paris: 'Echoppe, 1994). Cecile Britton, Claude Simon: Writing the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Alexander Didier, “Claude Simon et Jean Dubuffet: terroirs d'origine,” Dalhousie French Studies 31 (1995): 39-64; Jean H. Duffy, Reading between the Lines: Claude Simon and the Visual Arts (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998); Brigitte Ferrato-Combe, Ecrire en peintre: Claude Simon et la peinture (Grenoble: Université Stendhal, 1998). For more on this see Sophie Berrebi, “Dubuffet pilote: Claes Oldenburg regarde Jean Dubuffet,” in Les Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne 77 (Autumn 2001): 80-91; a facsimile of Dubuffet's letter to Oldenburg is reproduced on p. 90. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 84. Cf., Rosalind Krauss's discussion of Twombly in Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1993), 256-66.

44. Roland Barthes, “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper” (1979) reprinted in The Responsibility of Forms,

NOTES TO PAGES

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45.

trans, Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 157-76. The passage in question reads: “TW’s work—others have said as much—is a kind of writing; it has some relation with calligraphy. Yet this relation is one neither of imitation nor of inspiration; a canvas by ‘TWis only what we might call the allusive field of writing (allusion, a rhetorical figure consists in saying one thing with the intention of making another understood)” (158). Robert Pincus-Witten, “Cy Twombly: Learning to Write” (1974), reprinted in Eye to Eye: Twenty Years of Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 87-91.

46.

Hubert Damisch, “Reading at an Impasse,” chapter 6 of Origin of Perspective (Cambridge MA:

47. 48.

Jean Dubuffet, “Envoi,” in Jacques Berne, ed., Les Cahiers de I'Herne 22 (1973): 433.

MIT Press, 1993), 236-77.

‘The show was organized by Howard Putzel, May-June 1945. For more on this exhibition see Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Painting and Subjectivity in the 1940s (London and New Haven: Yale University Press), 24~31; and Melvin P. Lader, “Howard Putzel: proponent of Surrealism and Early Abstract Expressionism in Americé ” Arts Magazine 56 (March 1982):

85-96, 49. Ray Johnson and Clive Phillpot, Jean Dubuffet Fan Club (Roslyn, NY: Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, 1988). I would like to sincerely thank William S, Wilson for enthusiastically answering my many questions about Ray Johnson and for magnanimously making a copy of Johnson’s

small book on Dubuffet available to me for my research. For more on Johnson's Jean Dubuffet Fan Club, see Joy Hakanson Colby, “This Art Is RSVP.” Detroit News, December 31, 1986, 1A, 1-2C; and “At the ‘Club,” New York Times, September 21, 1986.

50. See Poirer le papillon: Lettres de Jean Dubuffeta Pierre Bettencourt 1949-1985 (Paris: Editions Let-

tres Vives, 1987); Nicole Prévot and Jacqueline Zacchi, eds., Par le don de Florence Gould (Paris: Bibliotheque littéraire Jacques Doucet, 1988), 34-41; La Ponte de La Langouste: Lettres a Alain Pauzie (Paris, Le Castor Astral, 1995); Gaston Chaissac: Correspondances, ed. Dominique Brunet, Benoit Decron, Lydie Joubert, and Nadia Raison (Les Sables D'Olonne: Musée de L’Abbaye Sainte-Croix Les Sables D’Olonne, 2004), 26-55. 51. Jean Dubuffet, letter to Jacques Berne dated February 5, 1948, in Lettres d J. B. 1946-1985 (Paris: Hermann, 1991), 35. Abstract Expressionism’s Italian Reception: Questions of Influence

1 Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War,” Artforum 11, no. 9 (May 1973): 43-54;

Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974): 39-42; David and Cecile Shapiro, “Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting,” Prospects 3, ed. Jack Salzman (1977): 175-214. These can all be found reprinted in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

258 | NOTES TO PAGES

135-138

2. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Michael Kimmelman, “Revisiting the Revisionists: The Modern, Its Critics, and the Cold War,” in Frascina, Pollock and After, 294-306. 3. Shapiro, reprinted in Frascina, Pollock and After, 188. 4. Anexcellent source for the terms of alterity politics is JeffreyT. Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). 5. Marcia E. Vetrocq, “National Style and the Agenda for Abstract Painting in Post-War Italy,” Art History 12, no. 4 (December 1989): 448-71. 6. Ibid., 449. 7. Jeremy Lewison, “Jackson Pollock and the Americanization of Europe,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: MoMA, 1999), 201-31. This also comes up in the work of Serge Guilbaut. See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, and “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964, ed, Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990), 30-84. 8. Lewison, “Jackson Pollock and the Americanization of Europe,” 201. 9. XXIV Biennale di Venezia (Venice, 1948). 10. Works by the younger generation of abstract painters included William Baziotes’s Seascape (1945); Stuart Davis's Ursine Park; Arshile Gorky’s Argula (1938); Jacob Lawrence’s Going Home (1946); Irene Rice Pereira’s Green Depth (1944); Mark Rothko's Baptismal Scene; Theodoros Stamos’s Ancestral Worship (1947); Mark Tobey’s Broadway; Bradley Walker Tomlin’s Still Life (Inward Preoccupation). The most useful history of American participation at the various Venice Biennali is Philip Rylands and Enzo di Martino, Flying the Flag for Art: The United States and The Venice Biennale 1895-1991 (Richmond, Va.: Wyldbore and Wolferstan, 1993). 11. Italo Faldi, “Le Personali Straniere,” Ulisse 4, no. 2 (June 1950): 742-53, 12, Renato Guttuso, “Osservazioni generali a proposito della XXIV Biennale,” Rinascita 5, no.6 (June 194 27-28 and “Alcuni artisti italiani e stranieri,” Rinascita 5, no. 7 (July 1948): 273-75. 13. Giorgio Castelfranco, “La XXIV Biennale Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia,” Bollettino d’Arte 33, no 4 (October-December 1948): 283. 14. Guggenheim’s collection of New York School abstraction and other midcentury American painters included: William Baziotes's Three Doors (1944) (now in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art), The Room (1945), and an untitled gouache (1945); Richard Pousette-Dart’s Spirit (1946) (now in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art); a Gorky untitled oil (1944); Matta’s Deep Stones (1938) (now in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art) and an untitled oil (1942); Robert Motherwell’s (Autoportrait) Surprise and Inspiration (1943); Jackson Pollock's Eyes in the Heat (1946), Moon Woman (1942), Two (1943), Circumcision (1945), an untitled drawing (1942), and Don Quixote; Rothko’s Sacrifice (1943); Janet Sobel’s The Frightened Bride (now in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art); Clifford Still’s Jamais (1945).

15. XXIV Biennale di Venezia, 330-32

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16. This formulation of nationalism to internationalism, and then into universalism is discussed in Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 174. 17. The literature on the Fronte Nuovo is primarily in Italian. The best sources are Giuseppe Marchiori, Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (Vercelli: Giorgio Tacchini Editore, s.r.1., 1978), Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti: Nascita di una avanguardia (Vicenza: Basilica Palladiana, September 13-November 16, 1997), and Tristan Sauvage [Arturo Schwartz], Pittura italiana del dopoguerra (Milan, Schwartz Editore, 1957). An excellent essay in English, contemporary with the Fronte Nuovo itself, is Ingebord Eichmann, “Letter from Italy: the Fronte Nuovo,” The Magazine of Art 42, no. 1 (January 1949): 68-71. My dissertation, “II Fronte Nuovo delle Arti: Abstraction and Realism in Italian Painting at the Dawn of the Cold War, 1944-50” (University of Delaware, 2006), hopes to remedy this absence from the English-language discourse. 18. Pablo Picasso was certainly the most influential artist for Italy's young artists during the postwar period. The most obvious examples of this are the writings of the artists, See first the February 1946 Manifesto del Realismo, otherwise known as the Beyond Guernica manifesto, reprinted in Sauvage, Pittura italiana del dopoguerra, 232-33. Ennio Morlotti was also widely published on Picasso and Guernica, including his 1946 “Teachings of Guernica” and “Letter to Picasso,” both reprinted in Ennio Morlotti, Questa mia dolcissima terra: Scritti 1945-1992 (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1997), 21-28. Guttuso was equally vocal, particularly in a 1943 letter to Morlotti, published in Sauvage, Pittura italiana del dopoguerra, 219~20 and his article “Pablo Picasso ¢ le guardie bianche,” L’Avanti (Milan), November 13, 1947. See also Bruno Mantura, Anna Mattirolo, Anna Villar, ed., Picasso 1937~1953: Gli anni dell apogeo in Italia (Rome: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, December

12, 1998—March

15, 1999),

19. Guttuso, with painter Aligi Sassu and sculptor Giacomo Manzi, was involved in arms stealing and smuggling in Milan in the late 1930s. Sassu, Birolli, Nino Franchina, and painter Giuseppe Migneco were all arrested in Milan for partisan activities in 1937. See Costanzo Costantini, Ritratto di Renato Guttuso (Brescia: Camunia editrice srl, 1985), 57-59. Vedova and Turcato would, in 1943, join Guttuso and sculptor Mirko Basaldella in partisan activities in Rome. See Emilio Vedova, “Diario del pittore Emilio Vedova dall’E 42 alle bande dei partigiani.” Avanti! (Rome), February 8, 1961. And Pizzinato was involvedin clandestine printing of the Communist newspaper I'Unita at Venice. 20. Guilbaut outlines this in chapter 4,"Success: How New York Stole the Notion of Modernism from the Parisians, 1948,” of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. 21, Roderigo di Castiglia [Palmiro Togliatti), “Segnalazioni,” Rinascita: Rassegna di politica e cultura italiana 5, no. 11 (November 1948), 424. 22. ‘This caused a pointed conflict in Bologna, when Vedova and Guttuso got in a public argument concerning the Alleanza della Cultura exhibition. The event was recounted by Vedova in Emilio Vedova, Pagine di diario (Milan: Galleria Blu Editrice, 1960), 30. Pizzinato was also a member of

the PCI. Morlotti and Turcato, though perhaps not card-carrying members, were also greatly sympathetic to the Party prior to Togliatti’s review, at which point the former strayed.

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143-146

23. Excellent sources for Italy during the Cold War are S. J. Woolf, ed., The Rebirth of Italy 1943-50

(London: Longman Group Limited, 1972), Simon Serfaty and Lawrence Gray, eds., The Italian Communist Party: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), Gior-

dano Bruno Guerri, Antistoria degli Italiani: Da Romolo a Giovanni Paolo II (Rome: Mondadori,

1999), and Stephen Gundle, Between Hollywood and Moscow: The Italian Communists and the

Challenge of Mass Culture, 1943-1991 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000).

24. The document was originally published as“Per la salvezza della cultura italiana” in VII Congreso

del Partito Comunista Italiano-Documenti politici del Comitato Centrale, della direzione, della segreteria (Rome, 1951) and is reprinted in Nicoletta Misler, La via italiana al realismo: La politica culturale artistica del P.C.I. dal 1944 al 1956 (Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1973), 133-136.

25. Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 180 and XXV Biennale di Venezia (Venice, 1950). Gorky submitted Garden in Sochi (1941); Landscape (1945); Charred Beloved II (1946);

The Calendars (1946-47); The Orators (1947). Pollock's inclusions were No. 1 (1948); No. 12 (1949); No. 23 (1949). De Kooning exhibited The Mail Box (1948); Light in August (1948); The

26.

Mirror (1950); Excavation (1950). Shapiro and Shapiro, Abstract Expressionism, 189.

27. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson

N, Potter, 1989), 605.

28.

29.

Ibid. Ibid.

30. Giorgio Castelfranco, “La XXV Biennale di Venezia,” Bollettino d’Arte 35, no. 3 (July-September

1950): 285.

31. Francesco Semi, “Lettera da Venezia: Crisi nel “Fronte delle Arte,” La Fiera Letteraria (Rome), March 26, 1950. 32.

Rodolfo Pallucchini explicitly declares Neo-Realism as one of the top priorities of that year’s Biennale in his “Introduzione” in XXV Biennale di Venezia (Venice, 1950), xv.

33. Pizzinato's First of May was, in fact, the only work by a member of the Fronte Nuovo that sold at

the 1948 Biennale. It was bought by Peggy Guggenheim and is now in MoMA‘s collection.

34, The organization of this exhibition has differing histories. Alfieri claims it to have been the product of “The Three Hands” of himself, Giuseppe Marchiori, and Oreste Ferrari, working in con-

junction with Peggy Guggenheim and Vittorio Carrain. Guggenheim’s version would have one believe that the effort was all hers and Carrain’s. For these accounts, see Bruno Alfieri, “La mostra di Pollock,” in Jackson Pollock a Venezia and Gli “Irascibili” e la Scuola di New York (Museo Correr,

Venice, 23 March-30 June 2002), 9-18 and Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books, 1979), 336. Guggenheim's description of the organi-

zation process is, not unexpectedly, slightly dramati She is often quoted in regards to the exhibi-

tion’s reception: “Thousands of people saw this exhibition, as it was in a room through which one

had to passin order to get into the Correr Museum... It seemed to place Pollock historically where he belonged as one of the greatest painters of our time, who had every right to be exhibited in this

NOTES TO PAGES

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wonderful setting. All the young painters were very much influenced by this show.” This, like so many of her claims, is lively and enthusiastic but somewhat unsatisfying in substance. While the show certainly encouraged a number of responses from the visiting public, as chronicled by P. A. Quarantotti Gambini, I have not found any substantive evidence, written or artistic, as to the

response of any of the presumably Italian artists of whom Guggenheim may have been speaking.

35. Alfieri’s review was reprinted as part of the Time article “Chaos, Damn It!” in the November 20, 1950 issue. The overwhelming focus on the “Chaos”/*No Chaos” call and response engendered by this review, to my mind, has made Alfieri’s review more confrontational than it may actually have been intended to be. Like other Italian critics, especially P. A. Quarantotti Gambini, Alfieri

seems perplexed by Pollock’s works and thus defaults to close formal reading and material

description. Though it is not at all surprising that his statements about “Chaos,” “Complete lack

of structural organization,” and “Total absence of technique, however rudimentary” would have

rankled Pollock, he does admit that “these are superficial impressions, first impressions.” It does also seem important to remember that Alfieri was not only young—he was only twenty-three—

but also new to art criticism and facing works of a monumentally revolutionary character. The

now infamous exchange, though exciting for the myth of Pollock, ultimately seems like an unfor-

tunate case of signals being crossed. 36. Giandomenico Romanelli, “Jackson Pollock al Museo Correr,” in Jackson Pollock a Venezia and Gli “Irascibili” e la Scuola di New York, 5-6. 37. Franca Bizzotto, “La pubbli tica degli anni Cinquanta: frammenti di cronaca e di critica,” in Venezia 1950-59 II rinnovamento della pittura in Italia, ed. Maria Grazia Messina (Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, September 26, 1999-January 9, 2000), 56 and note 14. 38. XXVI Biennale di Venezia (Venice, 1952), 362-72. 39. The debut of the Otto was accompanied by the publication of Lionello Venturi, Otto Pittori Italiani: Afro Birolli Corpora Moreni Morlotti Santomaso Turcato Vedova (Rome: De Luca Editore,

1952). The exhibition toured Germany first at the Kestner-Gesellschaft E.V. in Hanover from April 19 to May 17. It then traveled to the Berlin Der Bildhauer Karl Hartung from May 24 to June 28, the Henry Moore und englische Farblithographien from July 5 to August 2, and the BerlinZahlendorf Haus am Waldsee from September 2 to October 4. See 8 Italienischer Maler: Afro Birolli Corpora Moreni Morlotti Santomaso Turcato Vedova (Kestner Gesellschaft E.V., Hanover April 19-May 17, 1953). The most recent study of the group is Luisa Somaini, “Otto Pittori Italiani” 1952-1954: Afro, Birolli, Corpora, Moreni, Morlotti, Santomaso, Turcato, Vedova (Milan:

40.

Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, 1986). Responses to the exhibition were, as one would expect, varied.A number of these reviews are collected in Alfred H. Barr, Jr,“The New American Painting,” in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, ed. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 95-108. The quotation from Leonardo Borghese’s review in the June 8, 1958, Corriere della sera is almost nonsensical in its contention and reveals, if anything, only the vehemence with which its author opposed abstraction. Borghese had established himself as a firm critic of abstraction

262 | NOTES TO PAGES 148-151

with his tirades against the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti during the 1948 Biennale. Marco Valsecchi’s

review in Milan’s I Giorno of June 10, 1958, is much more positive and thoughtful. He goes so far as to describe the achievements of the Americans as further detached from traditions of Euro-

pean painting and “more pleasant, vibrant, and cheerful” than those of their European contem-

poraries. In truth, it is the response to these responses that are more engaging, if not entertaining.

A noteworthy example is Kenneth Roxroth,“2 Americans Seen Abroad” Art News 58, no. 4 (Sum-

mer 1959), which decries the European reviews for their “parade of busted clichés and demoralized preconceptions” only to carry on with an account of the French response that fulfils the great

stereotypes of American anti-French sentiment. 41.

Antonello Trombadori, “Il dogma della noia,” I! Contemporaneo (Rome), January 7, 1956.

The View from the East: The Reception of Jackson Pollock among Japanese Gutal Artists 1. Jiro Yoshihara, Kansai Bijutsu 13 (May 1951), trans. in Barbara Bertozzi, “On the Origin of the New Avant-Gardes: The Japanese Association of Artists Gutai,” in Gutai Japanese Avant-Garde 1954-1965 (Mathildenhéhe Darmstadt, 1991), 51.

2. Ming Tiampo discovered that Yoshihara copied passages of Robert Goodnough’s Art News article in “his rather short-lived English-language diary.” See her insightful discussion in “Gutai & Informel: Post-War Art in Japan and France, 1945-1965” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2003), 115-16; fig. 47.

3. L’Art @aujourd’hui, ser. 2, no. 6 (June 1951): 15. 1 am grateful to Mizuho Kato of the Ashiya Museum for this information, as well as for indicating that Yoshihara’s library does not contain a copy of Art News issue of May 1951.

4. Osaki Shinichiro, “Une stratégie de l'action: Gutai, Pollock, Kaprow,” in Gutai (Paris: Jeu de Paume, 1999), 52. Atelier and Mizue devote special issues to the Yomiuri exhibition, the latter reproducing Number 11 (1949) on the cover.

5, Barbara Rose, “Hans Namuth’s Photographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth: Part One: Media Impact and the Failure of Criticism,” Arts Magazine53 (March 1979): 112-16.

6. Jiro Yoshihara, “L’art de la peinture abstrait,” Asahi, April 17, 1951, quoted in Osaki, “Une

stratégie de action: Gutai, Pollock, Kaprow,” 51-52. 7. Francis V. O'Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock:A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings,

Drawings and Other Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 2: 68, no. 246, No. 7, 1950, is on 2: 96, no. 272.

8. Shiraga interview of 1998, quoted in Ming Tiampo, “Gutai and Japanese Matsuri Festivals,” in Gutai Moments of Destruction, Moments of Beauty (Paris: Blusson, 2002), 56-58. 9. Yamamoto Atsuo, “Space, Time, Stage, Painting,”in Gutai Moments of Destruction, Moments of Beauty, 12.

NOTES TO PAGES

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10. ll. 12. 13, 14,

Gutai Moments of Destruction, Moments of Beauty, 63, pl. 69. Gutai 6 (April 1957) trans. in Gutai Japanese Avant-Garde 1954-1965, 49. Gutai5 (October 1956), trans. in ibid., 51. Gutai 7 (July 1957), trans. in ibid., 52.

Interview with Kanayama by Alexandra Munroe, quoted in her Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky (New York: Abrams, 1994), 89. 15, Ibid.,97. 16. Ming Tiampo, “Gutai and Japanese Matsuri Festivals,”in Gutai Moments of Destruction, Moments of Beauty (Paris: Blusson, 2002), 38. . Paul Schimmel, “Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object,” Out of Actions: Between Per-

formance and the Object, 1949-1979 exh. cat. (Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998),

17. This important essay and exhibition begins with Namuth's photos of Pollock. 18, For instance, I have also benefited from Hirai Shoichi, What's Gutai? (Bijutusu Shuppan-Sha,

2004); Ashiya City Cultural Foundation, Document Gutai 1954-1972 (1993), and the DVD doc-

umenting period films of Gutai performances, produced by the Ashiya City Museum. I am grateful to Mizuho Kato and Midori Yoshimoto for assistance in preparing this essay. Mexico and American Modernism: The Case of Jackson Pollock

1.

Quoted in B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972), 29.

See Irene Herner, Siqueiros: Del Paraiso a la Utopia (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2004). All direct quotations from this book are taken from the English manuscript draft generously provided to me by the author. For Siqueiros's influence on Pollock's search for identity, see also Peter Wollen, “Mannerkunst: Siqueiros und Pollock,” in Jurgen Harten, ed., Siqueiros/Pollock; Pollock/Siqueiros (Diisseldorf: Stadtische Kunsthalle and DuMont Buchverlag, 1995), 2:55-66. Quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957; Capricorn Books, 1961), 82.

One way to situate the impact of Mexican and other artists on Pollock's creativity is to keep in mind that, like many young American artists in the interwar period, he began what Ann Gibson has termed “a progression away from ways of referring in which the sensory properties of the art look like the referent.” Instead, Gibson notes, canvases and sculptures being created in New York during the early 1940s increasingly possessed qualities that functioned like (rather than imitating the appearance of) a model outside the work. Siqueiros, it seems, provided particularly strategic clues for Pollock as to how to go about achieving this. For her assessment quoted above, see Gibson’s “The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,” in Michael Auping, ed., Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, exh. cat, (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery in association with Harry

N. Abrams, New York), 71.

264 | NOTES TO PAGES

155-166

5. Lawrence Alloway, Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours from the Collection of Lee Krasner Pollock exh. cat. (London: Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., 1961), no. 17. 6. Inaletter to this author dated March 22, 1987, Pollock's friend Reuben Kadish wrote: As you know Jackson worked with Benton on the New School murals. Orozco was also on a mural job at the school—by this time there was a very decided interest in the Mexican mural movement in the U.S.—While Rivera was on the fringe and Siqueiros was known

but mostly via Anita Brenner-Orozco was the most admired and heralded figure among the artists—Jackson was often enthusiastic but reserved—but did go way overboard on the

“Prometheus” at Pomona College—and it sure does show in his painting as he began to

make the bridge from Benton into his own idiom. There was more than one painting and

many drawings that show that stamp—No question. Orozco was a major influence (1-2). In subsequent references, this primary source will be designated “Kadish letter.” 7. For comparative discussion, see, for instance, Stephen Polcari, “Orozco and Pollock: Epic Transfigurations,” American Art (Summer 1992): 37-57, and Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York; Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 47-56. Francis V. O’Connor’s October 13, 1984 Dartmouth College lecture, “The Influence of Jose Clemente Orozco on Jackson Pollock,” has unfortunately never been published. For details on Orozco’s North American murals, see Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989),

13-87. 8. Pollock's biographers, beginning with Friedman, have discussed at length his Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde

personality, meek when sober and violent when drunk. See also Jeffrey Potter, To a Violent Grave:

‘An Oral Biography of Jackson Pollock (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1985) and Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989). A recent analysis of Pollock’s tendency toward violent behavior when inebriated is found in Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and PostPainterly Abstraction (Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 2004), 82-83. In his direct com-

parison between the personalities and biographies of Pollock and Siqueiros, Wollen (as in n. 2) recounts that Pollock listened to Siqueiros tell anecdotes about the Mexican muralists defending

their early murals wearing gun-belts.

9, Siqueiros’s U.S. mural projects are detailed and analyzed in Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists,

195-252.

10. For more on the shared high school experience of Pollock and Guston (then known as Phillip {sic] Goldstein), see Landau, Pollock, 24-25; Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 37-43; and Dore Ashton, Yes, but... A Critical Study of Philip Guston (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 13-14. Details of

the event which caused their expulsion after publishinga broadside entitled Journal of Liberty are given in Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, 134-36.

11. The extent of Pollock's political commitment has been questioned by scholars. A postcard he wrote to Herbert and Mercedes Matter in Los Angeles (datable to the summer of 1944 when he

NOTES TO PAGES

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and Krasner were living in Provincetown, MA) confirms Pollock's leftist sympathies. He tells the

Matters, “I have a brother at 901 E Hyde Park, Inglewood. If you're able to get around look him

up, and I'll tell him to do the same—he’s a swell guy and politically left—I feel he supports me

in that direction.” Postcard in the collection of Alex Matter, provided courtesy of Mark Borghi, Inc. 12, See comments by Reuben Kadish in Potter, To a Violent Grave, 49 and in Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, 219.

13. The most detailed study of Noguchi’s unusual cement sculptural relief created for Mexico City’s Mercado Abelardo Rodriguez, Historyas Seen from Mexico in 1936, is James Oles’s “Noguchi in Mexico: International Themes for a Working-Class Market,” American Art 15 (Summer 2001):

10-33. This mural, typically marginalized in accounts of the artist’s career, strongly reflects, in my opinion, Noguchi’s interest in radicalized Depression-era dance in New York City, Art historians (particularly Stephen Polcari) have recognized numerous parallels in motivation, theme and style between Abstract Expressionism

and Martha

Graham's

innovations. Oles discusses

Noguchi’s repetition in Mexico City of Communist symbols and worker imagery from wall designs by other artists (such as Pablo O'Higgins and Marian Greenwood) who decorated the same building. Noguchi’s Mercado Abelardo Rodriguez mural is, however, also crucial early evidence of the premises underlying his lifelong attraction to theater. I plan to detail these connections in a forthcoming book, Mexico and American Modernism.

14. Motherwell spent about half of 1941 in Taxco and in Coyoacén, returning for another sojourn in 1943, Able to converse in French, he could interact at a more sophisticated level with prominent Surrealist exiles such as Kurt Seligmann in New York and Wolfgang Paalen living in Mexico. Prior interpretations of Motherwell’s art seen in light of his biography have underrated his Mexican expe-

rience. For example, castration imagery detectable in central early works such as Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943) has been linked to the painter's charged relationship with a father, who did not want his son to pursue an artistic career, but other factors also at work are, as this painting's theme implies, traceable to his infatuation with Mexico's cultural and political history.

15, Ata symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art to complement its 1998-99 Pollock retro-

spective, Robert Storr pointed to the inarguable fact that “the context in which Pollock is portrayed, and the company he is thought to keep, [has] become a litmus test of scholarship, critical

scruples, and changes in ideological and historical perspective.” Storr also observed that “No

issue cuts closer to the root of ‘the Pollock problem’ in this regard than that of the place accorded

the Mexican muralists.” Details matter, he stipulated, in order to make this case. I fully agree; my closer reading of Pollock's thought processes and work habits highlights the extent to which Mexican artistic methods and goals contributed to the establishment of his signature style. See Storr, “A Piece of the Action,”in Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock: New Approaches (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 33-70, for the published form of his lecture. 16. John Berger, The New Statesman (London), November 22, 1956, Quoted in Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967), 77.

266 | NOTES TO PAGE

167

17. See Francis V.O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paint-

ings, Drawings and Other Works (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 4:238, doc. 67. Hereafter JPCR. Reprinted in Pepe Karmel, ed., Jackson Pollock Interviews, Articles, and Reviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 17.

18.

Thomas Hart Benton, “The Mechanics of Form Organization in Painting, Part IV,” The Arts 10 (February 1927): 95-96.

19. See, in particular, Greenberg's “Art: Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,”

The Nation, February 1, 1947, 137-39, in which the critic states, “Pollock points a way beyond the

easel, beyond the mobile, framed picture, to the mural, perhaps—or perhaps not. I cannot tell.”

Reprinted in O'Connor, Pollock, 41and 20. Clement Greenberg, “American-Type’ 21. Clement Greenberg, “Art: Review of Nation, April 7, 1945, 396. Reprinted

Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews, 56-57. Painting,” Partisan Review 22 (Spring 1955): 179-96. Exhibitions of Mondrian, Kandinsky and Pollock,” The in Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews, 52-53. For Stein's quote, see Gertrude Stein, What Are Masterpieces? (Los Angeles: conference Press, 1940), 29.

22. For Namuth’s observations of Pollock at work, see his memoir,

“Photographing Pollock,”in Bar-

bara Rose, ed., Pollock Painting (New York: Agrinde Publications Ltd., 1980). A representative sampling of Namuth’s photographs of Pollock first appeared in Robert Goodnough, “Pollock Paints a Picture,” Art News 50 (May 1951): 32-38 and in Hans Namuth, “Jackson Pollock,” Portfolio: The Annual of the Graphic Arts (Cincinnati, 1951). 23. “We were going to put to pasture the stick with hairs on its end,” Axel Horn commented about Pollock and his other friends who comprised Siqueiros’s New York “syndicate.” Quote from Horn’s “Hollow and Bump,” 85. See n. 57 below.

24. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51 (December 1952): 22-23, 48-50. 25. Asked his opinion in 1943 of the numerous French and German Surrealist émigrés in residence in Manhattan, Pollock answered, “I am particularly impressed with their concept of the source

of art being the unconscious.” This response, however, must have surprised his old comrades from Siqueiros’s 1936 Union Square experimental workshop since “to talk about Surrealism and the unconscious was absolutely diametrically opposed” to the more political motivations of Mexican art. Yet, this seemingly unbreachable opposition was easily neutralized by Pollock. For Pollock's quote, see “Jackson Pollock:A Questionnaire,” Arts and Architecture61 (February 1944): 15. Reprinted in Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews, 15-16.

26. Another theory, advanced by Rosalind Krauss, holds that Pollock’s true originality was based on

an urge toward desublimation. In The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993): 244, Krauss states: [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 [Greenberg]’s mission was to lift him above those pictures, just 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

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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.” According to Krauss, whereas the strokes made by other Action Painters like de Kooning and

Kline register the pull of gravity, because he used gravity as a tool like a paintbrush or turkey-

baster, Pollock's index instead “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,” a concept borrowed from Surrealist Georges Bataille (Optical Unconscious, 276, 284). Krauss demon-

strates her conclusion largely by studying the works of later artists (particularly Robert Morris 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. For further discussion of the conclusions Krauss has drawn from Pollock’s having worked his canvases flat on the

floor, see Jeanne Siegel, Painting after Pollock: Structures of Influence (New York: G&B Arts International, 1999), 163-67.

27. Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 10. 28. Thomas Hart Benton, An American in Art:A Professional and Technical Autobiography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 68-74. Benton continued, “The Mexican concern with publicly

significant meanings and with the pageant of Mexican national life corresponded perfectly with

what I had in mind for art in the United States.” 29. Guston and Kadish’s collaboration with Jackson’s brother Sanford (Sande), in the painting of a

mural for the proscenium arch of the stage of the Workers Alliance Center at 242 S. Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles, is not well known. Installation photographs of this project, created in early 1934 and signed merely “Syndicate of Painters,” were sent to Siqueiros in Mexico. He responded with a promise to help those who wanted to come south of the border to secure a Mex-

ican wall on which to display their talents. Photographs of this project, buried in the papers of Reuben Kadish (now in the collection of the Archives of American Art), have never been pub-

lished. Strongly influenced by Siqueiros's 1932 Chouinard School fresco, The Workers’ Meeting, but also reflecting themes by Rivera and Orozco, the Workers Alliance Center mural likely consti-

tuted the most radically left-wing composition painted during the Depression) by American

artists in the United States, When Rivera included the face of Lenin at Rockefeller Center in 1933, his mural was destroyed. The right-hand side of Guston/Kadish/Sande Pollock's design features

both Marx and Lenin, one of whom gestures toward two huge fists gripping Communist symbols,

while the other points to a scroll displaying the initial phrase of the Communist manifesto. A worker who has broken his shackles provides the foil to a kerchiefed female, a black miner and two additional white members of the proletariat depicted at far left. One, a muscular youth, harangues

the others to recognize the power of the Party. Anti-war scenes and symbols glimpsed through two

vertical openings pre-figure more imaginative anti-Fascist iconography Guston and Kadish included in The Inquisition.

268 | NOTES TO PAGE

171

30. For more on Guston and Kadish’s Morelia commission, see “On a Mexican Wall,” Time, April 1, 1935, 46-47; James Douglas Oles, “Walls to Paint On: American Muralists in Mexico, 1933-1936” (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1995; Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1998); and Eugenio Mercado Lépez, “La inquisicfon: un mural del Museo Regional Michoacano de Morelia, Michoacan, México,” Acento: La Voz de Michoacan 11, no. 584 (May 12, 2004), 2-5. Jackson's brother Sande

did not accompany Guston and Kadish to Morelia. Another friend, the aspiring poet Jules Langsner, went with them on their1934-35 Mexico trip.

31. Letter from Jackson Pollock to his brothers Charles and Frank, October 22, 1929, JPCR, 4:207-8, 32. 33.

doc. 6, See Dr. Joseph L. Henderson, “How a Disturbed Genius Talked to His Analyst with Art,” Medical

World News, February 5, 1971, 18-28 and Landau, Pollock, chapter 3. For this assessment, see “The Jackson Pollock Myth I,” in Hilton Kramer, The Age of the AvantGarde: An Art Chronicle of 1956-1972 (New York: Farrar, Straus& Giroux, 1973), 335-38. Kramer

did not mean it as a positive comment.

34. On Rivera's debt to Cubism, see William H. Robinson, “Cubist Heresies: Diego Rivera and the

Parisian Avant-Garde, 1913-1917,” in Diego Rivera Art and Revolution (Mexico City: Consejo

35.

Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes and The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999), 105-28. Jackson wrote to his brothers Charles and Frank from Los Angeles on October 22, 1929: “I became acquainted with Rivera's work through a number of Communist meetings I attended

after being ousted from school last year. He hasa painting in the Museum now. Perhaps you have seen it, Dia de Flores. I found the Creative Art January 1929 on Rivera. I certainly admire his

work” (JPCR, 4: 207-8, doc. 6). By contrast, letters from Philip Guston to another Los Angeles friend, Harold Lehman, indicate that he and Kadish, after seeing Rivera’s murals in Mexican City, were less than impressed. On July 14, 1934, Guston told Lehman that “the much heralded Mexican renaissance is very much a bag of hot air.

| can’t explain to you my disappointment in most

of the frescoes.” He expressed strongest criticism for Rivera's opportunism. After “grabbing all the available walls,” Rivera, Guston said, painted murals which were “a horrible mess”; itis clear that Guston believed Rivera was too “busy receiving gushing tourists” to fulfill the Mexican revolution's vaunted ideological imperatives (Dore Ashton Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).

36.

37.

Motherwell, speaking in “Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium, Part I,” Art News 66 (April 1967): 66.

Friedman, 29 and Potter, To a Violent Grave, 49. Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, 298, relate Busa's recollection that Jackson kept a large reproduction of Prometheus prominently displayed in his studio in New York. Itis known that Pollock traveled to Pomona College in Claremont, California in June 1930 with his brother Charles to view this mural. The following fall, in New York, he most likely met Orozco while doing “action posing” for Benton’s New School for Social Research murals, or at dinner parties at Benton's apartment where Orozco was sometimes one of the guests. See below, n. 53, for Kadish’s confirmation.

NOTES TO PAGES

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38. Marjorie L. Harth, ed., José Clemente Orozco Prometheus (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum of Art, 2001) includes detailed discussion of this mural by a variety of art historians. 39. For more on these drawings, see Lisa Mintz Messenger, “Pollock Studies the Mexican Muralists and the Surrealists: Sketchbook III,” The Sketchbooks of Jackson Pollock (New York: Metropolitan

Museum of Art, 1998), 61-84. 40. Herner, Paraiso, 295, argues for Pollock's reliance on Siqueiros for iconographic cues in a painting that is probably roughly contemporaneous with Naked Man with Knife (JPCR, cat. 60). She

postulates that the geometric overlay in Head with Polygons, ca. 1938-41 (JPCR, cat. 66), may be Pollock's attempt to recreate the effects of Siqueiros’s diagrammatic mural Plastic Exercise created in Argentina after he was deported from the United States in the wake of the political scan-

dal created by Tropical America. Correspondence from Guston to Lehman indicates that he and

Kadish were shown pictures of this mural by Siqueiros while they were in Mexico during 1934-35, Perhaps, Herner reasons, Guston or Kadish may have shown these images to Pollock a few years later in New York. Guston's letter is found in Dore Ashton’s Papers in the Archives of American Art. The section that describes Plastic Exercise is quoted in Yes, but. .., 31-32. 41. Similar to Pollock’s New York experience with Benton, under the tutelage of Lorser Feitelson in

Los Angeles, Guston and Kadish studied the design principles of Michelangelo, Piero della

Francesca, Giotto, Masaccio, and Uccello. In conceiving their Morelia mural, they synthesized these Renaissance prototypes with echoes of Feitelson’s “Post-Surrealism,” a pastiche of classicism and the Pittura Metafisica style of de Chirico, another admired influence. See Ashton, Yes,

but..., 19-23. 42, Every account of Guston’s career features the sadistic and unconstitutional suppression in February 1933 (by the notorious Los Angeles Police Department Red Squad under Captain William R. Hynes) of portable murals he, Kadish, Lehman, Luis Arénal, and others painted for a protest exhibition, Negro America, to be held at the Hollywood branch of the Communist-affiliated John

Reed Clubs. Guston later recalled watching in horroras their sympathetic depictions were bashed

with lead pipes and rifle butts, the eyes and genitals of their subjects pierced by bullets. Dubbed “misguided individuals” in the local newspapers, when he and his friends protested in court; a reactionary judge dismissed their case. Herner, Paraiso; Oles, “Walls to Paint On”; and Ashton, Yes, but. provide further details, in the Archives of American Art.

Photographs of these lost panels are found in Kadish’s papers

43. There are numerous indications in Pollock's private fantasies, bolstered by the subsequent disposition of Naked Man with Knife (he gave it to his mother; see below in text for discussion of their troubled relationship), to suggest that this work may have been meant as a wish-fulfillment self-portrait. The provenance of this painting is given in JPCR, 1:46.

44. Christological imagery included in The Inquisition encodes references to the suicide by hanging of Guston’s father Lieb Goldstein. Other sections, which detail the torture of non-believers, including Jews, (Michoac4n, where Morelia is located, was the site of a Mexican Inquisition trial), and those which picture the xenophobic activities of the Ku Klux Klan, correlate to Gus-

270 | NOTES TO PAGES

172-174

45. 46.

ton and Kadish’s parents’ experience escaping pograms in Russia and to their own right-wing persecution in Los Angeles because of leftist ideals (see n. 42). Specific imagery in a lower section of their Morelia mural indicates that Guston and Kadish were now analogizing the suffering of their own people with the lynching of innocent Negroes they had protested previously. Detailed analysis of this aspect of the Morelia mural will be presented in my forthcoming monographic study of Guston. Norman Bryson (referencing the ideas of Jacques Derrida), Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 24. Polcari, in “Orozco and Pollock,” 48-49, notes that the central character in Woman, “old and wizened, with pendulous breasts and bright earrings, may have been inspired by Orozco’s prints of prostitutes” and that, in it, Pollock approaches the Mexican’s “caricaturish qualities.” “In composition,” he observes, Woman resembles Orozco’s Prometheus and other works featuring a large figure surrounded by the masses of humanity.” Polcari reads the central woman as “surrounded by several bald figures, mostly women, who seem to be of all ages.” His analysis continues:

Woman has inspired many interpretations. If the woman is perceived as Pollock's image of a mordant Orozco prostitute, the work is a social critique. Or the woman may represent

the life cycle, from nurturing woman to “old hag.” The painting may also reflect the nur-

turing but fatal quality of a giant female force, in which case it may be a more troubled

restatement of the mother nursing her child in Two Landscapes with Figures (1934-38, private collection),as well as an anticipation of the mythic theme explored in She- Wolf (1943, The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

47.

48.

49,

For instance, Gorky wrote about Lady Shushanik to his sister Vartoosh on November 2, 1946: “Mother's thoughts were so correct. So valid for so many things in life and especially nature ... She was the most aesthetically appreciative, the most poetically incisive master I have encountered in all my life. ... Mother was a poetess of aesthetics. Mother was queen of the aesthetic domain.” Quoted in Karlen Mooradian, The Many Worlds of Arshile Gorky (Chicago: The Gilgamesh Press, 1980), 309-10.

By contrast, Jackson's brother Sande wrote Charles in 1941, at a point when their youngest brother had been hospitalized for alcoholic depression, that “part of [Jackson's] trouble (perhaps a large part) lies in his childhood relationships with his Mother in particular and family in general,” adding that “it would be extremely trying and might be disastrous for him to see her at this time” (JPCR, 4:226, doc. 40). Orozco exhibited regularly in New York at Alma Reed’s Delphic Studios (where Benton showed) and also at Weyhe Gallery in the 1930s. There was a permanent revolving installation of Orozco’s work on display at Delphic Studios, but 1 do not have access to records which might indicate whether any of the Mexican’s prostitute pictures were on view around the time Pollock painted

NOTES TO PAGES

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Woman, Reed wrote an important article, “Orozco and Mexican Painting,” in Creative Art 9 (September 1931): 199-207, which Pollock must have known.

50. The core of Bloom's widely discussed study, The Anxiety of Influence:A Theory of Poetry (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), is his contention that misprision—the reading or understanding of the work of another which retains its terms, but means them in another

sense—provided a critical basis for modernist creativity. Jonathan Weinberg adopted Bloom's

conceptual framework to assess Pollock’s reworking of Picasso in “Pollock and Picasso: The

Rivalry and the Escape,” Arts Magazine 61 (Summer 1987): 42-48.

51. Sande is, however, not mentioned as among the members of this class listed in “California Group

Studies Fresco Technique with Siqueiros,” The Art Digest 7 (August 1932): 13. This article includes an illustration of the mural Siqueiros created for Chouinard, The Workers’ Meeting, which was destroyed soon after completion. It quotes at length from the observations of Arthur Millier, art critic for the Los Angeles Times:

Siqueiros creates the most powerful forms that have yet come to us from Mexican revolt. The effect of them is overwhelming. The paintings are dark and unframed. The massive forms and heads look out of an aura of black. The first impression isof brutality and dank-

ness, of a complete absence of any “charm”—that pleasant manipulation of pigment which means so much to the English and Americans. There is present, however, something else—that brooding sense of tragedy which exists where, century after century, the people ofa race have repeated the same movements and gestures until the individual counts for little amid the long procession of types and gestures. In Potter, To a Violent Grave, 49, Kadish recalls of the early 1930s in L.A., “I had a car out there

and carted Siqueiros around. Sande got acquainted with him that way and became the contact for Jack when Siqueiros became established in New York.”

52. In Herner’s opinion, Pollock condensed elements by both Orozco and Siqueiros in Bird (JPCR, 72), She writes: “At the top center, Pollock recreated the eye of the eagle that appears in Siqueiros’ mural; below it, the most dynamic area in América Tropical and Orozco’s Prometeo. {Where the

waist of the crucified man in Siqueiros’ painting seems to be surrounded by a concentric move-

ment, Pollock painted two concentric circles. In addition, he also included the bird’s wings and

abstracted concentric forms inspired by the realist images of pre-Columbian sculptures that Siqueiros had painted on either side of the cross” (Paraiso, 290).

53. Pollock probably never actually viewed Siqueiros’s Los Angeles murals, including Tropical America, in situ. In 1987, Kadish stated regarding this work, “There is also no questions about his knowing the work—he knew the wall . .. But Jackson did not work on it or any other L.A. mural.”

(Kadish letter, 2-3) Photographs of Tropical America were however exhibited in New York at Delphic Studios in 1934; as Kadish further observed, Pollock “attended many museum shows—and no doubt with his interest saw most of what went on in N.Y. re the Mexicans.” Shifra Goldman,

272 | NOTES TO PAGES

176-177

54. 55. 56.

in “Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles,” Art Journal 33 (Summer 1974): 327,n. 26, relates that, in several conversations, Siqueiros mentioned Pollock's being around in Los Angeles during the summer of 1932. However, a March 25, 1933, letter to Sande, in which Jackson writes “the experience with Siqueiros must have been great—am anxious to see the job,” suggests no contact with Tropical America the previous year (JPCR, 4:216, doc. 19). For other anecdotes about the personal relationship between Pollock and Siqueiros, see Potter, Toa Violent Grave, 52,as well as Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, 284-90. See Landau, Pollock, 66-69, for additional discussion of Bird's affinities with Tropical America. See Harold Lehman, “For an Artists Union Workshop,” Art Front (October 1937) and David Alfaro Siqueiros, “How to Paint a Mural” (Ediciones Mexicanas, 1951), quoted in Jean Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 117. Charles Pollock assessed the impact of the Siqueiros workshop on his younger brother in a letter to Francis V. O'Connor dated November10, 1966: “I have always thought it to have been a key experience in Jackson's development. Amongst other things, the whole ambience was an antidote to regionalism; but it was so far-fetched and outlandish in the circumstance that in the endit only served to make social contact, whether provincial or revolutionary, a meaningless term for him. Nevertheless, the violation of accepted craft procedures, certain felicities of accidental effect, scale, must have stuck in his mind to be recalled.” Quoted in 0’Connor’s “The Genesis of Jackson Pollock: 1912 to 1943,” Artforum 5 (May 1967): 16-23.

'. For analysis of the Union Square Workshop, consult Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists, 220-31.

Axel Horn, another participant, later recalled of the Americans’ experience and what Pollock did with it, “Of course, we used all of these devices to enhance paintings with literary content. Noone thought of them as ends in themselves. The genesis of Pollock's mature art began to be discernible only when he began to exploit these techniques as final statement.” See Horn’s “Jackson Pollock: The Hollow and the Bump,” Carleton Miscellany 7 (Summer 196: 36; reprinted in Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews, 104-109. Lehman's recollections of his workshop experience

58.

59, 60.

are presented in Herner, Paraiso, 208-9.

Siqueiros described how he generated The Birth of Fascism, a related work to Collective Suicide, ina letter to Maria Asunsolo of April 6, 1936. In a 1960 lecture at the Central University of Caraas, Siqueiros recalled of the workshop period, “In our search for techniques we made prime use in our paintings of the artistic accident, which . . . we transformed into figurative art with an intensive realist purpose.” (Quoted in Art and Revolution (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975], 219.) The political meaning of this work is analyzed in Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists, 224-25 and Herner, Paraiso, 217-18. Herner writes that in such 1936 paintings as Collective Suicide, The Birth of Fascism, and The End of the World, “Siqueiros did not just portray war, he also managed to formally produce war-like explosions.” Landscape with Steer, ca. 1936~37, JPCR, cat. 1065 (P9) and Untitled, ca. 1942, ibid.,952; see ibid., 4:139, 35. Pollock’s comment is included in the remarks to 952. See Marcia Epstein Allenstuck, John Graham's System and Dialetics of Art (Baltimore and London:

NOTES TO PAGES

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| 273

The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971) for Graham's ideas. Perhaps Pollock picked up more readily than others on Graham's espousal of risk, accident, and automatic écriture because of his

experiences at the Siqueiros workshop. For more on Pollock's participation in Matta’s sessions, see David S. Rubin, “A Case for Content: Jackson Pollock’s Subject Was the Automatic Gesture,” Arts Magazine 53 (March 1979): 103-9.

61. See for example JPCR, cat. 635, a drawing of 1941-42 in which the male partner of a rather inelegant embracing couple watches with apparent consternation as (his?) phallus fly away. 62. In my 1989 monograph on Pollock (Landau, Jackson Pollock, 149), I described this painting as completely non-objective. I am indebted to the late Ray Johnson who suggested to me in 1990 the deeper meaning of its phallic imagery. Greenberg's quote appeared in The Nation, 1 February 1947, 137-79; reprinted in Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews, 56-57.

63. Forexample, one of the projects created by Siqueiros’s New York workshop when Pollock worked there was a float produced at the behest of the American League Against War and Fascism for the “Anti-Hearst Day” demonstration of July 4, 1936. According to Hurlburt “the sides of the boat

were covered with ‘bloody’ (red paint) handprints, symbolizing the suffering of the people at the hands of fascism.” (Mexican Muralists, 226) Of course, there are other possible sources for Pol-

lock’s pressing his paint-stained hand against Number 1A: 1948 and Lavender Mist, 1950, most

notably illustrations of the handprints in prehistoric caves at Castillo and Péche Merle found in one of Pollock's favorite books, G. Baldwin Brown’s The Art of the Cave Dweller (New York: Coleman, 1931). 64.

One of Pollock’s most important statements is the highly poetic, undated notation found in his

papers:

Technic is the result ofa need — new needs demand new technics ———_——total control—denial of

the accident: States of order-

organic intensityenergy and motion made visible memories arrested in space, human needs and motives

‘acceptance

JACKSON POLLOCK

This is reproduced in JPCR, 4:253, doc. 90, and reprinted in Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews,

24. For Motherwell’s assessment, see his “The Modern Painters World,” Dyn 6 (1944): 9-14. 65. Recently discovered photographs of Siqueiros striking poses, which he used during the 1950s to

274 | NOTES TO PAGES

180-181

model his Mexico City National Autonomous University mosaic reliefs, indicate how closely he telied on his own bodily actions to generate significant form. See Irene Herner, “Ciudad Universita Segunda Etapa del Muralismo,” in Siqueiros: el lugar de la utopia (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, 1994), figs. 168-175. In their 1934-35 Morelia mural, Guston and Kadish attempted to emulate Siqueiros’s invention of polyangular kinesthetic body effects. As noted, one of Guston’s letters from Morelia to Lehman includes a

worshipful description of huge photos he and Kadish had just seen of nudes that Siqueiros painted in Argentina, “very distorted so that they would appear not distorted because of the

peculiar shape of the wall,” explaining that “as the spectator moves, the figures move and rotate with him” (Dore Ashton Papers, Archives of American Art).

66. JPCR, 4:253, doc. 89; reprinted in Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews, 24. 67. In “On the Exhibition Siqueiros/Pollock Pollock/Siqueiros at the Kunsthalle Diisseldorf,” Burlington Magazine 108 (April 1966): 272-75, Stephen Polcari wrote, “Because he was a fantastic realist, Siqueiros was more influential and more parallel to Pollock than has hitherto been acknowledged. Siqueiros and Pollock are both chimerical artists of epic struggle and transformation. The former by using public spaces to paint transforming propaganda; the latter by creating

private psychologized ritual art for public and personal benefit.” Polcari summarized as follows his understanding of their stylistic and iconographic connections:

Siqueiros and Pollock are linked by an emphasis on fantastic images of struggle, power and strife, on imaginary forms and new worlds. Both artists articulate the related but different

ways in which their generations went about recording, explaining and transforming their worlds. Siqueiros presents the struggle of the masses for change through exaggerated

anatomies, bulging muscles, gigantic proportions, compressed shapes, and thundering,

multiple perspectives. Pollock represents his understanding of the determining forces of the inner and outer cosmos through symbolic, tribal references and symbols, powerful hybrid figure combinations, allusions to contemporary concepts of the mythic, fertile unconscious and abstract pictorial forces. Both drew on the tribal and cultural past—

Siqueiros to centre his idealism, Pollock to suggest a wished-for, primal, non-industrial

alternative to the modern world. Siqueiros wanted to transfigure the world through social

and political change. In keeping with his generation, Pollock wanted to transfigure the

squalor of modern society and its apocalyptic history through cultural and psychological

introspection and change personified in powerful spiritual beings and their abstract forces

rising from the unconscious. (274)

68. Quoted in Herner, Paraiso, 228, from an interview with Lehman conducted by Herner and Jack Seligson in New Jersey in 1994. In 1987 Kadish also noted that Pollock and Siqueiros “were very fond of each other.” relating that “at one time when Siqueiros came back from Spain to raise money and a group of us gave him a dinner in N.Y. | specifically recall his asking that Jackson be

NOTES TO PAGE

181

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there” (Kadish letter, 2). This may be the dinner where the two men got into a wrestling match on the floor and tried to strangle each other that is recounted by Axel Horn (see Karmel, Jackson Pollock Interviews, 108-9). Horn recalls that “Each had his hands around the other’s throat and was silently attempting to choke the other into unconsciousness, Jack in a wild exhilarated effort and Siqueiros in a desperate attempt to save himself.” This incident may simply illustrate in a rather

extreme way Kadish’s comment to Naifeh and Smith that Pollock and Siqueiros “had a great rapport ... They seemed to reflect each other in a strange way. Each felt the other's intensity. When

you put them in the same room, they really bounced off each other” (Jackson Pollock, 285).

69, Some of the ideas presented here were given earlier expression in my essays, “Jackson Pollock und die Mexikaner,” in Harten, vol. 2, 38-54; and “Jackson Pollock Number 13, 1950,” in Kyriakos Koutsomallis, ed., Classics of Modern Art (Andros, Greece: Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation

Museum of Contemporary Art and Umberto Allemandi & C., 1999), 140-47 as well as my prologue to Herner, Paraiso, 15~20. Pollock and America, Too

1. John McCoubrey, The American Tradition in Painting (New York: George Braziller, 1963).

2. Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Arts & Architecture 61, no. 2 (February 1944): 14.

3. Donald J. Bush, The Streantlined Decade (New York: George Braziller, 1975). Perhaps politician, Mario Cuomo, “Mario’s Deep ‘Depression;” New York Post, February 16, 1998, 9, best described the experience of the 1930s when he noted: “In a way, the Great Depression made us all poor immigrants again—starting all over again in a strange land, with little more than our dreams of a better life.” 4. Cited in Morris Dickstein, “Depression Culture: The Dream of Mobility,” Partisan Review, Winter 1996, 68. 5. See Bush, The Streamlined Decade, 114. 6. Quoted in Thomas Ott, Streamliners: America’s Lost Trains, Pegasi Pictures, Inc. for “The American Experience,” WGBH Educational Foundation, distributed by PBS, 2001. 7. Pollock, cited in Francis O’ Connor and EugeneV. Thaw, Jackson Pollock:A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 4:253, docs.

89, 90. 8. Clement Greenberg, wrote that what was most impressive about Pollock’s new abstractions were the sense that the picture was polyphonically “knit together ofa multiplicity of identical or similar elements,” from one end of the canvas to the other. This allover design seemed to have no beginning or middle or end. Comparing Pollock to Jean Dubuffet, Mark Toby, Janet Sobel, and others, Greenberg wrote that they “weave the work of art into a tight mesh whose principle of formal unity is contained and recapitulated in each thread, so that we find the essence of the whole in every one of its parts.” See “The Crisis of the Easel Picture” Partisan Review, April 1948;

276 | NOTES TO PAGES

181-190

reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism! Arrogant Purpose, 1945-49, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 2: 222-24. 9. Ibid., 224.

1 12. 13.

Sir Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1871), reprinted in two volumes, The Origins of Culture and Religion in Primitive Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 1:1. Holger Cahill, in “American Resources in the Arts,” in Art for the Millions, ed. Francis V. O’Connor (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 44. Gorky, letter, February 14, 1944, cited in Michael Auping, Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years (Forth Worth: Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, with Rizzoli, New York, 1995), 84. In the conference, Donald Kuspit raised objections to the idea that Pollock's weavings are dynamic integrations. He asserted, or rather, reasserted the chaos theory of the 1950s as the nature of Pollock's work. According to Kuspit, Pollock’s work has no unity and his art is “disintegrative,” the product of a collapsed psyche. For Kuspit, they, and especially the drip paintings, directly index Pollock’s infamous behavior in the form or, nonform, of fading and dissolving lines and shapes. Alcohol may or may not enter as a cause but whatever the reason, the work of 1947 to 1950s isa set case of anxiety, frustration, and instability. To Kuspit, then, Pollock is exhibit “A” of a Freudian pathology. Regrettably, this conception simply repeats the paradigm of the fifties, which it merely embellishes by a more professional explication of Freudian psychoanalysis, which Kuspit practices. As a conception, however, it has no recognition or understanding of Pollock's concept of the “unconscious” as contextualized themes of inwardness shared with his period. It cannot explain the use of she-wolfs or crowd imagery in his abstractions or the long history of the images of fertility and growth, both personal and cultural, that pervade Pollock's work and that were epitomized by his painting Birth of 1938-41. The psychoanalytic understanding cannot cope with the period belief in movement and flow as a positive, transformative force, not simply a negative one. In the end, it is a Freudian colonization of a Jungian artist and era, turning Jungian and other's ideologies of “creativity” so central to Abstract Expressionism as evident in Barnett Newman’s Day One and Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Adolph Gottlieb’s Omens of Spring and Phyloprogenative Center, Clyfford Stil’s generative figures and fields and so on. And ironically, while the psychoanalytic view relies on Pollock's abstractions as biography, it fails to note the real events of Pollock's life in the period—the stoppage of his drinking, his new and happy marriage, the explosion of his career, and the move to Long Island and nature where he was most at home. He was a Californian, after all. If his art was merely biography, his abstractions should index happiness at that time, not disintegration. Ultimately, if we are reiterating what was said in the 1950s as evidence, Pollock himself vigorously repudiated the idea when he wrote “NO CHAOS

14,

DAMN

IT” in a telegram to Time magazine in 1950 (D[ocument] 91), in

ibid., 253) and declared he was searching in his work for more integration, not less. See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986) for the richest explication of the documentary.

NOTES TO PAGES 190-192

| 277

15,

16. 17. 18. 19,

Ibid., 88-89. Eric Barnouw, cited in ibid., 89. Pollock, letter to his father, Leroy Pollock, February 3, 1933, cited in D(ocument) 16, O'Connor and Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné, 4: 214. Pollock, in D(ocuments) 89-90, ibid., 253. Cited in Stott, Documentary Expression, 29.

The Ultimate Challenge for Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Transforming the Ecology of American Culture, 1924-1943

I would like to thank Valerie Helistein, Stony Brook University, for assistance in preparing these

notes.

1. ‘Thomas B. Hess, “Eros and Agape Midtown,” Art News, November 1954, 17; cited by Irving San-

dler, Defining Modern Art, Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr, ed. Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 38. Art News, July 29, 1957, quoted in ibid., 252. See Raymonde Moulin, Le Marché de la peinture en France (Paris: Minuit, 1967) and Vera Zollberg, Constructing a Sociology of the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Annie Cohen-Solal, Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 1am borrowing the term from Fred R. Myers’s beautiful book Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). About the network of actors involved in the production of art work, see also Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). . Neil Harris: The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years 1970-1870 (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1982) and Cultural Excursions, Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

Ernst Gombrich and Didier Eribon, Ce que l’image nous dit (Paris: Editions Adam Biro, Paris,

10,

1991), 69-70. See Alice Gordfarb, Alfred H. Barr, jr, Missionary for the Modern (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989) and Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr, and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Marquis’ idea about Barr's religious “missio1 based on his being the son of a Presbyterian minister, should be reduced to Bart's family involvement with education, Kantor helps us understand many details essential to Barr's early training by publishing precious new documents on this period. See Sandler, Defining Modern Art, 49-50.

278 | NOTES TO PAGES

193-198

ML. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

This was very aptly showed by Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr, 21-22. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 27. “Wellesley and Modern Art,” Boston Evening Transcript, April 27, 1927, in Sandler, Defining Modern Art, 54-55. Modern European Art (with French works by the Fauves, by the Cubists of la Section d’Or, by Hungarian and Russian geometric abstract artists, and Italian Futurists) was presented at the Taylor Hall Art Gallery in April 1924; Modern Art at the Fogg Art Museum, in November 1926; and Exhibition of Progressive Modern Painting from Corot to Daumier to Post-Cubism, at Farnsworth Museum, Wellesley, in April 1927. “Wellesley and Modern Art,” 54-55. “It is on behalfof all classes of the community, except that vicious and degradated one by which the late ‘American Museum’ was largely monopolized, that we ask the community for a building and for collections that shall be worthy of the name so sadly misapplied—museum, musée—the word seems full of honorable meaning in every language but our own, and with reason.” Charles Eliot Norton, The Nation, July 13, 1865, 113. Richard A. Peterson, “The Role of Formal Accountability in the Shift from Impresario to Arts Administration,” in Sociologie de l’Art, ed. Raymonde Moulin (Paris: La Documentation Frangaise, 1986).

19. Paul Sachs, Tales of an Epoch, unpublished memoir, 1956, Fogg Museum Archives, Harvard Uni20. 21,

versity, 43, 150-73, 424. Alfred Barr, “Boston Is Modern Art Pauper,” The Harvard Crimson, October 30, 1926, reprinted

in Sandler, Defining Modern Art, 52. Letter to J. B. Neumann, October 1926, cited in The New Criterion, special edition “Our Cam-

paigns” (Summer 1987): 10-11.

22. Application for a fellowship at Harvard, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Dwight Macdonald

Papers.

23. Alfred Barr,“Dutch Letter,” The Arts, January 1928. 24, See Piet Mondrian, Le Néo-Plasticisme (Paris: Editions de l'effort moderne, Léonce Rosenberg, 1920), 6-7.

25. In Sandler, Defining Modern Art, 98-100, 103-11. 26. Ibid., 69-76, 27. Ibid., 69-72. 28. Alfred H. Barr, Jr, “Re: Bulletin on What the Museum Has Done in the Field of American Art,”

Memorandum to Miss /Dorothy C/ Miller, October 10, 1940 in Alfred Barr Papers, 96, MoMA Archives. 29. Lloyd Goodrich, “A Museum of Modern Art,” The Nation, December 4, 1929, 665. 30. American Abstract Artists, “How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art 2” (New York: privately 31

printed, April 15, 1940); see Sandler, Defining Modern Art, 250.

See Thomas Craven, “The Degradation of Art in America,” 1948, typescript in a file labeled NOTES TO PAGES

198-205

| 279

“Art—20th Century-Reactionary Criticisms,” Library of the Museum of Modern Art, 2, 11-12, 13. Cited in Sandler, Defining Modern Art, 246. 32. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to Philip Goodwin, July 6, 1936, the Museum of Modern Art Archives. 33. Meyer Schapiro, “The Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show (1913),” in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries; Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 137, 139-40, 34. See Bruce Althsuler, “Collecting the New: A Historical Introducation,” in Collecting the New, ed. Bruce Althsuler (Princeton, NJ: Princton University Press, 2004), 26. 35. Alfred H. Barr, quoted by Christoph Grunenberg, “The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 197.

36. Letter from Clark, published in the New York World Telegram.

49.

Letter from Kandinsky to Oud, October 26, 1926, quoted by H. Gassner, K. Kopanski, and K. Stengel, eds., Die Konstruction der Utopie (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1992), 134. “Introduction,” by Arthur Lehning, Internationale Revue i10 1927-1929 (Nendeln/Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1979). Ibid. By Ozenfant and Jeanneret (alias Le Corbusier). Yve-Alain Bois: “La lecon de i10,” in i10 et son époque (Paris: Institut Néerlandais, 1989), 7-13. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Présentation,” Les Temps Modernes 1 (October 1, 1945). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Regard éloigné (Paris: Plon, 1983); see also Brigitte Mazon, Aux Origines de EHESS. Le réle du mécénat américain (Paris: Cerf, 1988); and Annie Cohen-Solal, “Claude L. Strauss in America,” in Critique, “numéro spécial Claude Lévi-Strauss” (January-February 1999): 620-21. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-Conformistes des années 30 (Paris: Seuil, 1969). “Sartre et le nouveau ‘mal du siécle’ *” in La Naissance du phénomene Sartre: Raisons d’un succes, 1938-1945, ed, Ingrid Galster (Paris, Seuil, 2001), 101. See Mary Jane Gold, Crossroads Marseille 1940 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980). Interview with André Masson by Martica Sawin, André Masson in America, 1941-1945 (New York: Zabriskie Gallery, 1996), 4. Interview with author, January 27, 1996. Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Beckenridge: “Museums Are Good to Think: Heritage on View in

50.

India,’ in Museums and Communities: the Politics of Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp, Stern D. Levine, and Christine Mullen Kraemer (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). Ann Hindry, Claude Berri rencontre/meets Leo Castelli (Paris: Renn, 82).

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44,

45. 46.

47. 48.

280 | NOTES TO PAGES 205-214

African American Contributions to Abstract Expressionism

1, Lewis's Metropolitan Crowd is reproduced in Norman Lewis, Black Paintings, 1946-1977, ed. Ann Gibson and Daniel Veneciano (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1998), as Plate 1; Hale

Woodruff’s Ashanti Image and Beauford Delaney’s Still Life with Snake and Bird are reproduced in The Search for Freedom, African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975, ed. Corinne Jennings (New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1991), 71 and 28 respectively. Thelma Johnson's performance at the San Francisco Museum of Art was announced by Helen Clement in “Thelma Johnson Streat at S.F. Museum of Art” in the Oakland California Tribune, March 17, 1946. 2. Judith Wilson, “Go Back and Retrieve It: Hale Woodruff, Afro-American Modernist,” in Collected

Essays: Art and Artists from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1980s (Atlanta Georgia: National Black Arts Festival), 41-49.

3. Clement, “Thelma

Johnson Streat at S.F. Museum of Art” and Bill Rose, “Brilliant Negro Artist Is

Here to Study Indian Lore,” The Vancouver Sun, August 16, 1946. 4. One exception is American Abstract Expressionism, ed. David Thistlewood (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1993). 5. Milton Brown, interview with the author, New York City, December 10, 1987.

6. Abstract Expressionists were considered “better” than Lewis; the arguments include a preference

for rawness over elegance, the appearance of intuition over intellect, large over small size, high chroma over subtle hues, and eventually, field over line and subject matter that did not specifi-

cally refer to any group or its politics.

7. These include Charles Alston; Ed Clark; Ronald Joseph; Harlan Jackson; Haywood Bill Rivers,

among others.

8. Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, editors; statement, Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947-48):

1.Fora testimony to this development across the disciplines, see Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed, foreword by David. C. Engerman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). My thanks to the late Kenneth Koford for bringing this book to my attention.

9. For influential and moving accounts of the intellectual and emotional devastation of the left following these events, see The God That Failed.

10, Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 18. 11. Ibid., 19-20. See David Craven, “The Varied and Diverse Lineages of Abstract Expressionism” in Abstract Expressionism as Social Critique, Dissent During the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33-50. 12. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 272-73, 318; Ellen Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 15. 13,

For this quotation, see Newman, “Ferber” in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O'Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 111; for Newman as politically left, see

Craven, Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 7-8.

NOTES TO PAGES 215-218

| 281

14. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act

[1953] (New York, Random House, 1966), 60, 52.

15. See David Craven, “Contemporary Man’ Discourse versus‘Modern Man’ Discourse,” in Abstract

Expressionism as Cultural Critique, 123-30. While I applaud Craven's articulation of the difference between “contemporary” and “modern” man, I disagree that African American and Euro-

pean Abstract Artists were equally “contemporary” (i.e., internationalist) when it came to color

prejudice. Although some were sympathetic, as Craven shows, they seldom if ever (with the possible exception of Ad Reinhardt and Dorothy Dehner) put their reputations on the line to get African Americans’ work shown, sold, or reviewed, as, say, Lillian Smith and Carl Van Vechten. did. Closer to home, gallerists Marian Willard, Betty Parsons, Samuel Kootz, Michael Freilich

(who showed Lewis, William H. Johnston, Bearden, and Delaney respectively), as well as writers Henry Miller and a few journalists (one was Elaine de Kooning—for Delaney) did. 16. See, for instance, the paintings with titles such as Ring Around the Rosie, Congregation, Klu Klux, Processional, Exodus, as well as many more whose crowd imagery is similar but whose titles are less explicit, in Gibson and Veneciano, Norman Lewis, The Black Paintings.

17. For further discussion of allegory and metaphor in Abstract Expressionism, see the overviews “Allegory” and “Metaphor,” 85-88 and 69-75, respectively, in Ann Gibson, “The Rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,” Abstract Expressionism, the Critical Developments, ed. Michael Auping (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), and Michael Leja’s sustained and persuasive analysis of “Pollock and Metaphor” in Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 275~331. 18. Similarly participating in a forbidden structure of meaning, narrative, Greenberg's very explanations of the movement's non-narrative dimension is what Jean-Frangois Lyotard has called a “narrative of the legitimation of knowledge,” which make every work considered in the ambit of

“abstract Expressionism” a part of the story of that mode’s development (or failure), and thus, paradoxically, an oxymoronically narrative participant in the denial of its own non-narrativity. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), esp. 23-37.

19. Advancing American Art was the title of an exhibition of what was considered in 1947 to be

cutting-edge American painting. It was sent on a worldwide tour at the end of World War II to strengthen U.S. claims to cultural supremacy in Europe and the Middle East. See the telling account in Tayor D. Littleton and Maltby Sykes, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989. 20. Harry Henderson, Second Interview with Norman Lewis, Oct. 17, 1973, 64 Grand St., New York City, unpublished manuscript. 21. Itis worth noting that Lewis, in comparison to Pollock, was well traveled in terms of his commu-

nications with people of different nationalities, cultures, and geographies. He spent two years on South American Freighters as a seaman, visiting Bolivia, St. Thomas, and Jamaica. See Romare

Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African-American Artists from 1972 to the Present (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 317; Susan Innis, “Norman Lewis, “Identity, Expression, and

282 | NOTES TO PAGES 218-219

Cultural Difference in American Painting,” in Norman W. Lewis 1901-1979: Linear Abstractions (New York: Bill Hodges Gallery, 2002), 6. In 1957, Lewis traveled in Europe, spending time in Barcelona, Madrid, Algeciras, Tangiers, Granada, and Ibiza. Letters from Lewis to Jean and Marvin Lagunoff from these cities on April (n.d,), March 28, June 2, June 4, June 6, June 13, respectively. Letters collection of Jean Lagunoff, Sarasota, Florida.

22, Fora reproduction of Harlem Turns White, see African American Art: 20th Century Masterworks,

III (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 1996), 12. For Lewis's “universality,” see David Craven, “abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial approach to ‘American’ Art,” Oxford Art Journal 14:1 (1990): 57, as well as Craven’s “Modern Man Discourse vs. the Hybrid Art

23.

24, 25.

of Norman Lewis and the New York School,” in “Norman Lewis as Political Activist,” Norman Lewis Black Paintings, ed. Gibson and Veneciano, 56-59.

For Abstract Compositon see Alain Locke, The Negro in Art [1940] (New York: Hacker Books,

1969), 54, For the 1943-44 paintings, see Corinne Jennings, “Hale Woodruff: African-American Metaphor, Myth, and Allegory,” in A Shared Heritage, ed. William E. Taylor and Harriet G. Warkel (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1996), 80 and p. 98, note 14. For an abstract painting by Woodruffof ca. 1944-45, see Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, 68. Woodruff to Hughie-Lee Smith, February 20, 1947. Hughie-Lee Smith, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll N/69-111: 0228. An edited transcription of this important meeting as well as a photograph by Max Yavno of the artists included, plus Barr, was included as “Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 (1950)” in Modern Artists in America, ed, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt (New York: Wittenborn Shultz, Inc., 1951), 9. The transcript and the photograph are reprinted in Ann Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1990), 314-44 and fig. 54.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

Woodruff does appear later on an undated list of “New Members (Already Voted In)” in the papers of Philip Pavia, along with Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, and Gandy Brodie, among others. My thanks to Jim Richard Wilson, director of the Opalka Gallery, The Sage Colleges, for this information. Philip Pavia, telephone interview with the author, April, 10, 1991. ‘Woodruff in “Albert Murray: An Interview with Hale Woodruff,”in Hale Woodruff: 50 Years of His Art (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1979), 77. Judith Wilson, “Go Back and Retrieve It,” 42. See reproductions of Carnival and Afro Emblems in A Shared Heritage, ed. Corinne Jennings, 82-83.

Ashanti (or Asante, in current usage) goldweights, used by a confederation of peoples who ‘occupied much of what is now Ghana, could be abstracted forms or comparatively realistic, multifigured scenes. To judge from his paintings, Woodruff was interested in the more abstracted forms. As most other Abstract Expressionists did, he further simplified or altered these forms. If

NOTES TO PAGES 219-221

| 283

one divides the horizontally oriented painting Ashante Image vertically into six major groups of forms, for instance, the second from the left, a roughly circular form, has a form inside it shaped like the Adinkra form for a “talking drum” supported by two thick lines that connect the “drum” to the sides of the circular form. That larger circular form can be seen as an asymmetrical version of Mmara Krad, the padlock or “The Seal of Law and Order,” with a drum, a symbol of communication and praise, at its center. See W. Bruce Willis, The Adinkra Dictionary (Washington, D.

The Pyramid Complex, 1998), 132-33, and 90-91, respectively. See also Gibson, “Two Worlds: African American Abstraction in New York at Mid-Century,” in Jennings, ed., The Search for Freedom, 44, n.87.

31. Hale Woodruff in “Albert Murray: An Interview with Hale Woodruff,” 82-83. 32.

33.

Ibid., 87, 85. According to her sisters, Juanita Johnson (who wrote some of Thelma Streat’s material), and Lois

Johnson Ross, Streat made her costumes herself. Author’s telephone communication with the Johnson family, June, 13, 1998. 34, Judy Bullington, “Thelma Johnson Streat and Cultural Synthesis on the West Coast,” American Art 19 (Summer 2005): 100. 35. The interest in connections between performance and identity has continued to grow via interests such as Judith Butler’s in gender as performance (see, for instance, her “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Practice, ed. Sue Ellen Case (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 278-79; and curator Pepe Karmel’s essay “Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth” in Kirk Varnedoe, ed., Jackson Pollock, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 87-137. One of the four motion pictures of Streat's singing and dancing was made by Franchot Tone and Burgess Meredith (Information drawn from “About Thelma Johnson Streat,” a press release undated but from internal evidence some-

time in 1949 or after, in the Thelma Johnson Streat Papers, collection of the Archives of American Art at the Huntington Museum, San Marino, Calif.). 36. Pictures of Streat and reproductions of her paintings may be seen in the author’s “Two Worlds” in The Search for Freedom, ed. Jennings, 76,77, and her Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, 158, 159. 37. The Oakland Tribune [Calif.], for instance, reported on March 17, 1946, that Streat had been

making murals of the place of the Negro in the meatpacking industry, the railroad industry, as well as the place of Negro women in industry. Clipping (n.p.) in Archives of American Art, Thelma Johnson Streat papers, at the Huntington Museum, Los Angeles, Calif.

38. Bill Rose, “Brilliant Negro Artist is Here to Study Indian Lore,” Vancouver Sun (August 16, 1946),

clipping (n.p.) in Johnson Family files. For illustrations of Red Dots, Flying Baby, and Barking Dog, see Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, 159. 39. For Streat's beginning dance in June 1945, see Helen Clement, “Thelma Johnson Streat at S.F. Museum of Art” Oakland Tribune (March 17, 1946), clipping from Johnson family files. For date

284 | NOTES TO PAGES 221-224

of Elaine de Kooning in performance at Black Mountain, see Helen Harrison, “Elaine de Kooning: The Early Years,” 29; for Rauschenberg’s performance in Cage’s Theater Piece # 1, in which his White Paintings were hung overhead, see Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert

Rauschenberg: A Retrospective (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 552, 614.

40. Lois Johnson Ross (sister of Thelma Johnson Streat) in telephone interview with author, June 13,

1998.

41. Catherine Jones, “Thelma Johnson Streat Comes Home, Artist Tells Plans in Child Education,” June 17 1945 Oregonian, section 3, p. 5.

42, Lois Johnson Ross in telephone interview, June 13, 1998. 43. Helen Clement reports this observation by “one dance authority” in “Thelma Johnson Streat at

San Francisco Museum of Art,” Oakland Tribune, March 17, 1946. For the popularity in the early forties of dramatic dance and pantomime as “a desirable aesthetic tendency” see Katharine Everitt Gilbert, “Mind and Medium in the Modern Dance” in What is Dance, Readings in Theory and Criticism, ed. Roger Copeland and Marchall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press,

1983), 302. For Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism, See Stephen Polcari, “Martha Gra-

ham and Abstract Expressionism,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 4 (Winter 1990): 2-28.

For Jackson Pollock’s poured painting technique in Namuth’s film as dance see Roger Copeland,

“Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception,” in Copeland and Cohen, What is Dance?, 307-9.

44. Greenberg made no secret of the fact that exploration of “too-obvious emotion” and “new

‘ideas,” of the “apparent importance of the subject” would only prevent artists from exploring “the means” of their art, thus preventing them from achieving “the concentration and high impassiveness of true modern style.” (Review of A Problem for Critics, 1945, rpt. in Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O'Brian [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 29-30). His reviews of Pollock would concentrate accordingly,

despite that painter’s emotionality, on his painterly “means,” rather than his “subject|-matter].”

Harold Rosenberg,in “American Action Painters,” 1952, rpt. Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 31. For more on Graham's influence on Abstract Expressionism, see Stephen Polcari, “Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism,” Smithsonian

Studies in American Art 4 (Winter 1990): see esp. n. 26, 26-27.

45, “Visiting Hawaii Child Welfare Leaders See Folklore as Link for All Children,” unidentified news-

paper clipping, Thursday, Sept. 18, 1958, and “From Children’s City, Thelma Johnson Streat’s ‘New School of Creative Expression,” undated flyer. For planned Canadian site, see “’Children’s

City’ on Salt Spring Planned by Folk Lore Scholars)” Victoria Daily Times, June 13, 1956, 17. Clippings in collection of the Johnson family. 46. “Colorful Hawaiian Couple Seeking Canadian Folklore,” undated and unidentified clipping in Johnson family archive. . Abstraction, 1945, is fig. 9 in Ann Gibson, “Gay and Black in Greenwich Village: Beauford

Delaney’s Idylls of Integration,” in Sue Canterbury, Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris

NOTES TO PAGES 224-226

| 285

(Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2004), 15. Alain Locke, The Negro in Art, Ife: 48. 49,

5. 52. 53.

Head, 216.

Delaney, quoted from his notebooks by Michael Leeming, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 42. Delaney, “Beverly” spiral sketchbook, 4 x 6 in.,“6014” written upside down in large numerals at the bottom of the cover. Delaney family Archives, Knoxville, Tennessee. Delaney, in The Spiral Sketch Book No. 96 R, 30 sheets, dated on the first page “Mar. 6.40” n.p.s collection Delaney Family Archive. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters [1952],” 1982, 34-35.

Unpublished, worn, aqua notebook, 4 x 6 in. with “Wabash SPIRAL SKETCH BOOK CHICAGO" printed on the cover; undated (but from internal evidence from later in the New York years) in the Delaney Family Archive. Francoise Gilot, “Aragon and the Dove,” and Ilya Ehrenburg, “Picasso and Peace,” both in A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, ed. Marilyn McCully (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 240-42. Roland Penrose, Picasso, His Life and Work (New York:

54,

Harper & Row, 1971), 377.

The best-known paean to Delaney’s pacific and Buddha-like demeanor is Henry Miller's essay

“The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney” It is reprinted in the Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective, curated by Richard A. Long (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1978), n.p. David Leeming’s Amazing Grace is replete with instances of Delaney’s calmness and generosity in adversity. 55. For Delaney on “inner light,” and his discovery of Zen sometime in the early fifties, see Leeming, Amazing Grace, 139, 169; 134; for his regard for Oriental philosophy, see Delaney, letter to Larry Walrich, Paris, April 23, 1954, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library. An inventory of Delaney’s library after his death includes the notation “Krishamurti, Ojai and Sarobia), 1940, and Talks by Krishnamurti in Europe (1961). Sue Canterbury, Assistant Curator, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “Library of Beauford Delaney, Complete

Inventory of Books in Delaney Family Archive, Knoxville, Tennessee,” as of 2003.1 am grateful to

Sue Canterbury for sharing this and other items relating to Beauford Delaney.

». See, for instance, the coiled snake in Ife, Akan und Benin: westafrikanische Kunst aus 2000 Jahren:

Gold, Bronzen, Terrakotten (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2000), pl. 106. See Karin Guggers, “Goldweights as a Mirror of the World of the Akan, 1400-1900,"in Jfe, Akan and Benin, 145. Goldweights themselves were certainly familiar in New York by 1940, as suggested by Alain Locke's reference to “the well-known Ashanti gold-weights” in his The Negro in Art, published that year. See Hacker Art Books’ facsimile, The Negro in Art, published in New York in 1979, 208,

The text in the Wehye catalogue (n.p.) for American Negro Art by an unnamed author asserted under the heading “Ivory Coast” of the goldweights (21 were pictured in ill. 10) notes: “Profes-

sional story tellers used them to illustrate the legends they recounted.

246 | NOTES TO PAGES 226-229

59,

E. A. Carmean, Jr., et al., “Introduction,” The Subjects of the Artist (Washington, DC: National

Gallery of Art, 1978), 37. 60. Tuse the term “anonymous” thinking of the convention of the periodical The Tiger’s Eye, which published the Abstract Expressionists’ work, of putting an author's name only in a separately colored section in the middle of the magazine, so that the art could be judged on its own merits, not the author's reputation. Similarly, when Abstract Expressionists borrowed from other cultures, they often muted the forms in such a way that it is difficult to identify specific sources.

NOTES TO PAGES 229-230

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About the Contributors

David Anfam is commissioning editor for fine art, Phaidon Press. His books and exhibition catalogues include Franz Kline (2004), Willem de Kooning Landscape (2004), Mark Rothko, The

Works on Canvas—A Catalogue Raisonné (1998), Mark Rothko: The Chapel Commission (1996),

Abstract Expressionism (1990), American Abstract Expressionism (Tate Gallery Liverpool Critical Forum Series, 1993), and No Limits, Just Edges: Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper (2005). He has curated dozens of exhibitions on post-1945 art, and served as visiting scholar at Brandeis Uni-

versity and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Dore Ashton is among the most prolific writers on Abstract Expressionist topics. She is the author of several books on Abstract Expressionism, including The New York School, A Cultural Reckoning (1972), About Rothko (1983), A Critical Study of Philip Guston (1990), Robert Motherwell (1989), Richard Lindner, A Reading of Modern Art, Modern American Sculpture (1960), and Isamu Noguchi, East and West (1992). She is professor and head of the art division of at

Cooper Union in New York.

Gottfried Boehm is a professor of modern art history at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous essays on aesthetics and individual artists, including Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, Alberto Giacometti, Giorgio Morandi, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jacob Burckhardt. Among his books are Paul Cézanne, Montagne-Sainte- Victoire (1988), Willi Baumeister (1995), Cézanne und die Moderne (1999), Museum der klassischen Moderne (2001), and Der Mahler Max

Weiler: Das Geistige in der Natur (2001). Annie Cohen-Solal received her Ph.D. in French literature from the Sorbonne. She taught at

New York University and the universities of Berlin, Jerusalem, and Paris. Having served as the

Cultural Counselor at the French embassy in the United States from 1989 to 1993, she is cur-

rently professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where she teaches a seminar in American art. The French edition of her book Painting America: The Rise of American Artists (2001) was awarded the Prix Bernier by the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

| 289

David Craven isa scholar of American and Latin American art. His books include Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990 (2002), Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (1999), and Diego Rivera: an Epic Modernist (1997). Craven is professor of art history at the University of Mexico, and has been a visiting professor in a university in Mexico City, at Trinity College, and at the universities of Dublin and Bremen. Adrian R. Duran completed his dissertation in 2006 at the University of Delaware on abstract

painting in Venice and Milan from 1945 to 1952. He has participated in several scholarly conferences. He is currently an assistant professor of art history at Memphis College of Art.

Ann Gibson isa leading authority on Abstract Expressionism, and has published several studies on African American artists related to this movement. She is the author of Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997) and Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals

(1990). Dr. Gibson has also published “Abstract Expressionism’s Evasion of Language,” which has been reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, edited by David and Cecila Shapiro (1990) and in other anthologies. Gibson's essays and articles on African American artists include those on Norman Lewis, Nannette Carter, Beauford Delaney, and Alma Thomas.

Gibson is a professor of art history at the University of Delaware.

Serge Gullbaut has written extensively on post-1945 art. His books include How New York

Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983, translated into four languages) and Voir, Ne pas Voir, Faut Voir (1993). He has edited several books, including Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York,

Paris, and Montreal, 1945-64 (1990). Currently he is finishing a book about the art debates in postwar Paris and their relation with New York. Guilbaut is professor of art history at the University of British Columbia. Helen A. Harrison is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York. She is the co-author with Constance Ayers Denne of Hamptons Bohemia:

Tivo Centuries of Artists and Writers on the Beach (2002) and editor of Such Desperate Joy: Imaging Jackson Pollock (2000).

Lewls Kachur has held a Fulbright grant for teaching in Japan, and has lectured widely on the Gutai group. His publications include Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali and Surrealist Exhibition Installation (2001), The Drawings of Stuart Davis (1992), and

200 | ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Word-Image in Contemporary Art (Howe Gallery of Kean University, 1992). Kachur is a professor of art history at Kean University.

Karen Kurcyznski completed her dissertation, “Beyond Expressionism: Asger Jorn and the European Avant-Garde, 1941-1961,” at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2005.

She presented a paper on Cobra (abstract artists working in Copenhagen, Brussels and Amster-

dam) at the College Art Association annual meeting in New York, 2003. She is currently teaching at Pratt Institute and works in academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Her essay on Asger Jorn and the avant-garde appeared in the Rutgers Art Review in 2006.

Ellen G. Landau isa scholar devoted to artists of the Abstract Expressionist period. Her books include Jackson Pollock (1989), Lee Krasner:A Catalogue Raisonné (1995), and Lee Krasner, Jack-

son Pollock: Kunstlerrpaare, Kunstlerfreunde (Kunstmuseum Bern, 1989). She was co-curator for a Krasner/Pollock retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 1989-90. Landau has written

numerous articles and essays for American and European art journals, and exhibition catalogues. Her current research is on Mexican and American modernism. In 2005 her method-

ological study of Abstract Expressionist criticism, Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique, was published. Landau is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Case

Western Reserve University. Joan Marter is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Her books include Alexander Calder (1991), Jose de Rivera Constructions (1980), and a publication on Theodore

Roszak’s drawings. Shes also the editor and principal author of Off Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957-1963 (1999). Dr. Marter has organized or co-organized fourteen exhibi-

tions, including Women and Abstract Expressionism, Painting and Sculpture, 1945-1959 (New York, 1997), which was awarded “Best Exhibition in a Gallery” by the International Association of Art Critics. She has written numerous articles and essays for museum publications.

Kent Minturn recently completed his doctoral dissertation on the art and writings of Jean Dubuffet at Columbia University. His reviews and articles on twentieth-century painting, film,

and photography have appeared in Art Journal, Res, and the Archives of American Art Journal.

He is currently teaching modern and contemporary art at Sarah Lawrence College.

Stephen Polcarl is the author of Abstract Expressionism: The Modern Experience, and many

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

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articles and essays on Abstract Expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. He is currently chair of the department of art at Chapman University. Jane A. Sharp, an associate professor of art history at Rutgers University, specializes in Soviet art and the Russian avant-garde. She contributed to The Great Utopia, an exhibition of Russian

modernism at the Guggenheim Museum, and has published Russian Modernism between East

and West: Natalia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde

(2005). Dr. Sharp is also the author

of numerous catalogue essays for the Zimmerli Art Museum on Soviet dissident art.

292 | ABOUT THE CONTRIRUTCRS

Index

Italicized page numbers refer to figures; color plates are designated as pl. 1, pl. 2, etc. abjection, 114, 116, 249n43

Abstract Expressionists’ Artists’ Club, 220

Abstracto Expresionismo exhibition (1963),67 Académie de l’Art Abstrait, 34-35

Academy of Fine Arts (Tbilisi), 95 action painting: and African American artists, 224-226; and

Japanese Gutai artists, 157-160, 158, 160; and Asger Jorn, 113,

Alston, Charles, 2817 alterity politics, 140, 259n4 American Abstract Artists Association, 205, 208 American Artists Congress, 177 American Committee for Cultural Freedom, 236n14 ‘American League Against War and Fascism, 274n63, American Negro Art exhibition (1940), 229

American-type painting, 1, 6, 24, 186; and Jackson Pollock, 8, 61, 59-60, 170, 232n2 ‘American Vanguard for Paris exhi62, 85,99, 105, 162, 16; and Pollock/Mexican muralists, 166, bition (1951), 30 170-171, 267-268n26; and anarchists, 36, 40, 46, 58, 76,87, Harold Rosenberg, 99, 113, 209 224-225, 232n2 Andersen, Troels, 253n80 Adorno, Theodor, 69, 182 Anfam, David, 5-6, 51-66, 132 ‘Advancing American Art exhibiAnreus, Alejandro, 240n10 tion (1947), 219, 282n19 Anti-Biennial (Cuba), 69 Advancing French Art exhibition antifascism, 144-145, 260019, (1950), 29 268n29, 27463 African American artists, 10, 12, “anti-Hearst Day” demonstration 89, 215-230, 281nn6, 7, (1936), 27463 282n15 antinationalism, 5-6, 10, 19-28; Afro-Cuban art, 73 and Italian abstraction, 143, Akan gold weights, 229, 286n58 260n16 alcoholism, 99-100, 167, 171-172, antiwar activism, 74-75, 184, 190, 265n8, 27148, anxiety of influence, 54, 63-66, 277n13 134, 177, 237110, 272050 Alfieri, Bruno, 148, 150, apocalyptic romanticism, 166 261-262n34, 262n35 Apollonio, Umbro, 142 Alleanza della Cultura (Bologna), Appadurai, Arjun, 214 146, 260n22 Aquinas, 53, all-over design: and Rauil Archives of American Art, 268129 Martinez, 70-71; and Jackson Arénal, Luis, 270n42 Pollock, 79, 101, 105, 183-184, Arens, Egmond, 188, 189-192; and Thelma Johnson ‘Argan, Giulio Carlo, 142-143 Streat, 224 Armory Show (1913), 53, 206 Alloway, Lawrence, 166, 169, 172 Arnheim, Rudolf, 126 121; origins of in American art,

Arp, Hans, 209 Artaud, Antonin, 130-131, 256nn29, 30 Art Autre, 35-37, 112 ‘Art Brut, 133, 182 LaArt d’Aujourd'hi i, 153, 263n3 Art Deco style, 187 “art for art's sake,” 4, 20,73 art history teaching, 198-199 Art Informel, 37, 40-45, 42, 232n2, 236n20; and heroic art, 7; and Italian abstraction, 12,

150; and Japanese Gutai artists, 154, 161; and Asger Jorn, 108-113, 118, 124, 246-247116, 248n36; and Latin American artists, 12, 71; and new beginnings, 99, 102; in Soviet Union, 6, 12,86 Artin Our Time exhibition (1939), 16 Artists’ Congress (1936), 25 “Artists Sessions at Studio 35.” 220-221, 28325 Artist Union, 83 Art News, 8, 12, 153, 171, 196, 222, 263nn2, 3 ‘The Art of This Century Gallery, 125,177 The Arts, 201 Arts Club of Chicago, 134 Art Students League, 165, 169 LArt vivant aux Etats-Unis exhibin (1970), 26 Ashcan School, 241-242n4 Ashiya Park, 157-158, 161 Ashton, Dore, 5, 19-28, 211 Asunsolo, Maria, 273n58 Atelier, 263n4 Automatism,2, 126, 180, 183-184, 186, 189, 255n1, 273-274n60

INDEX

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Beats, 27, 72, 220, 267-268n26 Brando, Marlon, 217 Beckett, Samuel, 3, 48-50 Braque, Georges, 214 Brauner, Victor, 212 Bel Geddes, Norman, 187 Beliutin, Eli, 87 Brenner, Anita, 26516 Babbitt, Irving, 126 Benjamin, Walter, 209 Breton, André, 4, 40, 126,212,213, Bacon, Francis, 182 Benton, Thomas Hart: and Pol255n1 Baker Library (Dartmouth Unilock/Mexican muralists, 9, 165, Brezhnev, Leonid, 88 169-171, 175, 181, 265n6, Brik, Osip, 83 versity) mural cycle, 166, 172-173, 176 268n28, 26937, 270n41, Brooks, James, 152, 236n14 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 90-91, 24426 271-272n49; and Pollock's ori- Brown, Alice Van Vechten, 200 Baldwin, Roger N.,210 gins in American art, 182, 189, Brown, G. Baldwin, 274n63 Bandzeladze, Alexander, 89, 94, 191, 193, 212 Bruegel, Pieter, 65 243n17; Untitled, pl. 11 Berger, John, 167, 181 Bryson, Norman, 174 Barnes, Albert, 200, 221 Bergson, Henri, 189 Bucarelli, Palma, 142 Barr, Alfred H.,.9-10, 196-214, Berkman, Alexander, 210 Buchloh, Benjamin, 251n59 197, 278n9; and African Amer- Berman, Eugene, 213 Bulatov, Eric, 244n27 ican artists, 220, 283n25; early Berne, Jacques, 137 Busa, Peter, 165, 170, 26937 training, 198-200; and EuroBerrebi, Sophie, 254n Butler, Judith, 284n35, pean intellectuals, 208-2115 Bettencourt, Pierre, 137 European travels, 200-203; as Betty Parsons Gallery, 56, 57, 119, Cabaret Voltaire, 161 museum director, 203-208, 181 Cage, John, 10, 224 204, 207; and new cultural con- Beyond Guernica manifesto, Les Cahiers de L’Herne, 133,136 text, 211-214; on origins of 260018 Cahill, Holger, 191 Abstract Expressionism, 16, Calas, Nicolas, 212 Biennale. See Venice Biennale 232nn3, 4, 233nn10, 11; and Bin Ladin, Osama, 28 Calder, Alexander, 150, 241-242n4 Pollock's origins in American Birolli, Renato, 143-144, 148, 150, calligraphic shapes: and Greenart, 188 260n19; Landscape—Breton berg's misreading of Dubuffet, Barr, Margaret Scolari, 204 Port, 144, 145 131; and Japanese Gutai artists, Barthes, Roland, 39, 100, 130, Black Mountain College, 10, 224 153-154; and Latin American Blake, William, 54, 137 132-133, 135, 257-258n44 artists, 73; and Georges MathBarzun, Jacques, 191 Blaue Reiter, 147 ieu, 109; and Jackson Pollock, base materialism, 114, 24942 Bloch, Ernst, 209 153-154; and Pollock/Mexican Bassiere, Roger, 45 Block of Painters (Los Angeles), muralists, 170, 181 Bataille, Georges, 45, 116, 122, 167 Cambodian invasion, 6, 59 249nn42, 43, 267-268n26 Bloom, Harold, 54, 56, 63-65, Camnnitzer, Luis, 71-72 Batista, Fulgencio, 67-69 176-177, 237110, 272n50 Campaign of Truth, 29, Baudelaire, Charles, 20, 24, 60 Blume, P., 143; Parade, 143 234-235n1 Bauhaus, 202, 204, 209, 211 body movement tradition, 10, 120, capitalism, 46, 58, 150, 217 Bazaine, Jean, 29 154-155, 181, 222, 224-225, Capogrossi, Giuseppe, 36 Bazhanov, Leonid, 94 28543 Cardenal, Ernesto, 78-79 Baziotes, William: and African Bochm, Gottfried, 7, 99-107 caricature, 85, 86, 113 American artists, 220; and Bogart, Humphrey, 217 Carlyle, Thomas, 199 French art scene, 30, 236n14; Bois, Yve-Alain, 115, 210, 237010, Carrain, Vittorio, 261-262n34 and Italian abstraction, 253-254n81 Cassatt, Mary, 241-2424 142-143, 25910, 259014: Bollettino d'arte, 142 Castelfranco, Giorgio, 142-143, 147 Moon Animal, 241-242n4; The Bonnard, Pierre, 31 Castelli, Leo, 24-25, 30, 214 Room, 259n14; Seascape, Boorman, Helen, 15 Cedar Tavern (New York), 24 259010; in Soviet Union, 84, Borghese, Leonardo, 262-263n40 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 134; 241-242n4; Three Doors, Bosch, Hieronymus, 65; Ship of “Agité du bocal,” 127 259n14 Fools, 65; Wayfarer, 65 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), BBC, 26 Bourgeois, Louise, 26 4 Bearden, Romare, 216, 282n15 Braak, Menno ter, 210 Cernuschi, Claude, 238n26 automobiles, evolution of, 187, 188 ‘Azbe, Anton, 14

294 | INDEX

Cerrato, Boanerges, 79

Congress for Cultural Freedom, 4,

Chagall, Mare, 213 Chago, 68; cover of El sacialismo y el hombre en Cuba, 68

Constable, John, 147

Chaplin, Charlie, 27

Contemporary Art of the African ‘Negro exhibitions, 220

Cézanne, Paul, 53, 101, 200

‘Chaissac, Gaston, 137 ‘Chastel, André, 29

Cheney, Sheldon, 16, 200

235n3

Constructivism, 68, 68

“contemporary” art in Soviet Union, 82-95,

272n51 Los Cinco, 68, 72

“contras,” 79 Corpora, Antonio, 143, 148, 150 Costakis, George, 92, 244nn28, 31 Craven, David, 6, 25-26, 67-81, 218, 282n15, Craven, Thomas, 205

Clark, Ed, 281n7

Cuban artists, 67-71

Chernyshov, Mikhail, 84, 89-90, 243n18; Untitled, pl. 12

Chouinard Schoo! fresco, 268129, civil rights movement, 74-75

Clark,T. J. 81, 126, 253-254n81 Clarke, Stephen, 208

Coates, Robert, 14, 232n2 Cobra art, 3,7, 110, 112, 118, 245n4, 246n6, 24830, 250n49

Cockcroft, Eva, 8, 138-140, 142, 145, 147

Cohen-Solal, Annie, 9, 128, 196-214

Cold War politics, 4-5, 8; and antiEuropean rhetoric, 59 and

French art scene, 25, 29-31, 38-40, 47, 50, 234-235nn1, 3, 236n14; and Italian abstraction, 8, 138-141, 145-146, 151, 261n23; and Latin American

creation myth, 54-55

Cuban Museum of the Americas, 70

Cuban Revolution, 67, 69

Cubism, 13, 48-49, 52, 101; and

Pollock/Mexican muralists,

167, 172; and Pollock’s origins

in American art, 183

Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition (1936), 205

Cukermanas, Evgenius, 94

cultural negation, 68-72, 80-81

Dada, 35, 37, 117, 161 Dali, Salvador, 2, 37, 212; The Persistence of Memory, 212 Damisch, Hubert, 136 artists, 80-81; and Jackson Pol- Dangelo, Sergio, 249n44 lock, 118, See also imperialism, Dartmouth mural cycle, 166, American 172-173, 176 Colla, Ettore, 151 Davis, Stuart, 150, 183, 186, College de Pataphysique, 130 259n10; Ursine Park, 259010 colonial origin, 26 Day of the Dead, 176 Commentary, 217 Dean, James, 217, 219 communism, 6; and African Debord, Guy, 117, 119, 124, American artists, 216-217; and 248n30, 252nn70, 72 French art scene, 29, 32, 35-36, Degand, Léon, 35, 47-48; and Italian abstraction, De Gasperi, Alcide, 146 8, 12, 141, 146, 148, 150; and de Hauke, César B., 200 Asger Jorn, 2452; and Korean de Kooning, Elaine, 224, 282n15 ‘War, 6, 22, 30, 59; and National de Kooning, Willem: and African Exhibition of American Art, ‘American artists, 217, 225; and 84-85; and Pollock/Mexican anti-European rhetoric, 63-65, muralists, 171, 266n13, 64, 65, 66, 239nn45, 46, 50; and 268n29, 269n35, 270n42 antinationalism, 22-26, pl. 4; Asheville, 241-242n4;“A Des“complex network of participants,” 197, 278n6 perate View.” 63; Excavation,

147; and French art scene, 30, 36, 232n3, 23614; Girl in Boat, 65, 65; Gotham News, 22, pl. 4; and Italian abstraction, 147-148, 151; and Asger Jorn, 108, 24613; and Latin American artists, 68, 71, 73, 81; Light in August, 64, 65, 23950; and Pollock/Mexican muralists,

267-268n26; and Pollock's ori-

gins in American art, 182; Spike's Folly, 66; in Soviet Union, 6, 84,90, 94, 241-242n4; and women artists, 10, 12; Women series, 66 Delaney, Beauford, 10, 215-216, 218, 225-230, 276nn54, 55, 282n15; Abstraction, 225-226; Untitled, 227, 228; Untitled (Still Life with Snake and Bird), 215, 226-227, 227, 229 Delphic Studios, 271-272n49, 272-273n53 De Man, Paul, 251n62 Depression era, 22, 167, 186-188, 26n13, 26829, 276n3 Derrida, Jacques, 174, 237n21 Descargues, Pierre, 29 détournement, 117, 251n58 Dewasne, Jean, 34-35 The Dial, 200 Dien Bien Phu, battle of, 40 di Martino, Enzo, 259n10 direct experience, 192-195 lissident artists,6, 88-89, 242n14, 243nn5, 16 documentary, 192-195 Doesburg, Theo van, 202 Dondero, George A.,85 Dorival, Bernard, 29, 31 Doronko matsuri, 155 Dos Passos, John, 210 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 25, 90 Doves of Peace (Picasso), 30, 227-228 Dreier, Katherine, 200 Dreyfuss, Henry, 187 drip paintings: and Asger Jorn, 114-116, 118-120, 122, 250n47; and Mexican muralists, 9; and Jackson Pollock, 6, 8, 39, 87, 253-254n81

INDEX

| 295

Drouin, René, 24940 Encounter, 1 scene, 30-31, 34, 37, 41-45, 49, drug use, 130 Ender family, 92, 244n31 236120; Hostages paintings, Du Bois, WE.B., 24320 engagé art, 69 34, 41, 42; Malraux on, 247n25; Dubuffet, Jean: Antonin Artaud aux Entartete Kunst exhibition Sarah (from the Hostages series),42; in Soviet Union, 86 Houppes, 130; Beard series, (Munich), 211 250n49; Corps des Dames Erasmus, 66, 239n50 Fauves, 226 Erlich, Victor, 241n2 series, 114, 249n40; DactyloFazzini, Pericle, 143 graphe, 129;“Envoi,” 136; and Ernst, Max, 2, 161,212,213 FBI (Federal Bureau of InvestigaFrench art scene, 34, 37; Green- Ernst Wolf Prize, 76 tion), 26,75 Erofeev, Andrei, 91, 244n27 Federal Art Projects, 191. See also berg’s misreading of, 7-8, 125-137, 129, 130, 255n18, LEsprit Nouveau, 210 WPA (Works Progress Admin256nn20, 23, 30, 257037, Estéve, Maurice, 29, 33 istration) Estienne, Charles: and French art Feitelson, Lorser, 174, 270n41 258n49; and Asger Jorn, 114-116, 249n40, 25048; Ler scene, 29, 34-35, 39-40, Ferber, Herbert, 218, 241-2424; Dla Canpane, 137; Message: ¢a 235n10; and Asger Jorn, 112; ‘Once Again, 241-242n4 Fapprendra, 129; Messages, 129, and Tachism, 39, 112, 232n2, Fernandez, Augusto, 78 129, 256n23; Olympia, 134; and 236n16, 246-247n16 Ferrari, Oreste, 261-262n34 Pollock's origins in American Eurocentrism, 74, 167 Ferré, Leo, 40 art, 182, 276-277n8; Superveille, European art: and anti-European 50 Ans d'art sux Etats-Unis exhibiLarge Banner Portrait, pl. 19 rhetoric, 5, 51-66; and Alfred H. tion (Paris, 1955), 118-119 Duchamp, Marcel, 35, 101, 117, Barr, 10, 200-203, 208-211, Fine, Perle, 10 233nn10, 11; and Pollock's oriFluxus, 155 159, 212, 250n51; Large Glass, 159; Pharmacie, 250051 gins in American art, 182-184. Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge), Hl Duco. See Siqueiros, David See also French art scene; Ger198, 279015 Alfaro man Expressionism; Italian Fonseca, Carlos, 78 Duco enamels, 9, 119, 177-178 Fontana, Lucio, 151, 157; Spatial abstraction Dudensing, Valentine, 200 European Old Masters, 5, 52, 169 Concept: Expectations, pl. 20 Dunham, Katherine, 222, 225 “evasion of language,” 131-132 Ford, John, 210 Duran, Adrian, 8, 138-151 Existentialism, 3; and African Ford Motor Company, 187 Duthuit, Georges, 29, 48-49 American artists, 217; and formalism: and French art scene, anti-European thetoric, 6,59, 30, 375 and German ExpresEchaurren, Roberto. See Matta, 65-66; and Greenberg's missionism, 15; and Asger Jorn, Roberto reading of Dubuffet, 7, 121; and Latin American Ecole des Hautes Etudes (Paris), 21 126-128, 134, 255n18 artists, 69; in Soviet Union, 83, 85, 87, 241n2 Ecole Normale Supérieure, 210 ecology of American culture, Fahr-el-Nissa, 236016 formlessness, 116, 24942, 197-198 faktura, 89, 93, 24319 250n48, 267-268n26 EDC (European Defense Council), Falangists, 78 Foster, Hal, 251n59 40 Faldi, Italo, 142-143, Fourier, Francois, 20 Edzgveradze, Gia, 89, 94-95, Fal’k, Robert, 83 Francastel, Pierre, 31 Farnsworth Museum (Wellesley Franchina, Nino, 143, 260n19 244nn32, 33; Magic Joker, 95; Wall of My Childhood, 95, pl. 15 College), 198, 200, 279015, Franco, Francisco, 69, 76, 78, Einstein, Albert, 53 fascism: and African American 241ni3 Eisenhower, Dwight, 29, 242n7 artists, 216-217; and antinaFrankenthaler, Helen, 12 Eisenstein, S.M., 210 tionalism, 25; and Alfred H. Frankfurter, Alfred, 196 ekphrasis, 83, 136 Barr, 211; and French art scene, Frankfurt School, 81 Elgar, Frank, 29 35,47; and Italian abstraction, “Freedom of the Brush,” 30 Eliot, Alexander, 147 139-142, 146; and Latin Amer- Freilich, Michael, 282n15 Ellison, Ralph, 218 ican artists, 76, 78, 241n13 French art scene, 29-50; and Art Eluard, Paul, 130 Informel, 37, 40-45, 42, Faulkner, William, 63, 65, 170, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 6, 22, 210, 23950 232n2, 236n20; and Western 53-55, 65 Fautrier, Jean: and French art culture, 5, 29-33, 38-41, 45,

296 | INDEX

47, 49-50, 235n3. See also Giacometti, 100, 102, 128, 248n34 Gibson, Ann: and African AmeriSchool of Paris French National Exhibition can artists, 10, 215-230; and (Moscow, 1961), 86, 94, 244n28 Greenberg's misreading of French resistance, 7-8, 32, 129 Dubuffet, 127, 131-132; and Freud, Sigmund, 53-54, 102, 176 Pollock/Mexican muralists, Freudian psychoanalysis, 277113 264n4; and Soviet artists, 92, Fried, Michael, 138 243n20, 244n30 Gide, André, 19-20, 130 Friedman, B. H., 159, 265n8 Friedrich, Caspar David, 60, Ginsburg, Allan, 27, 267-268n26 Giorno (Milan), 262-263n40 238n31 Giotto, 41, 270n41 I Fronte Nuovo delle Arti,8, 143-146, 148, 150, 260017, Gli “Irascibili”e la Suola di New York exhibition (2002), 150 26133, 262-263n40 FSLN, See Sandinistas Goldman, Shifra, 272-273n53 Goldstein, Lieb, 270-271n44 Fuller, Buckminster, 84 Fuller, Loie, 61, 63 Goldstein, Phillip. See Guston, Futurism, 10, 144, 161 Philip Gombrich, Ernst, 197 Gabo, Naum, 209 Goncharov, Andrei, 87 Galerie de Babylone, 235n10 Goodnough, Robert, 263n2 Galerie de France, 30, 236n14 Goodrich, Lloyd, 85, 204 Goodwin, Philip, 205-206, 206 Galerie Denise Rene, 34 Galerie Etoile Scéllée, 35 Goodyear, Conger, 205, 208 Gorbachev era, 243n17 Galerie Maeght exhibition, 5, 38, 236n14 Gorkii Institute of World LiteraGalerie René Drouin, 127 ture (Moscow), 243n18 Galerie Rive Gauche, 249n40 Gorky, Arshile: The Artist and His Galleria Della Spiga (Milan), 143 ‘Mother, 174-175, 175; Argula, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Mod259n10; and French art scene, erna (Rome), 142 232n3; and Italian abstraction, gay artists, 226, 229-230 142-143, 147-148, 259nn10,14; gaze, the, 114,249-250n45 and Pollock/Mexican muralists, I Gazzettino (Venice), 150 174-175, 175, 271n47; and PolGeneral Motors Building (World's lock’s origins in American art, Fair, 1939), 187, 187 183, 191-192; in Soviet Union, 84, 241-242n4; Water of the George, Waldemar, 41 German Expressionism, 10, 14-16, Flowery Mill, 241-242n4; and 15,52, 112,214, 232nn3, 4, women artists, 12 233nn10, 11 Gottlieb, Adolph, 30, 73,75, German-Soviet pact, 4, 212, 216 131-132, 277113; Letter to a gestalt conception, 250n47 Friend, 131, 131; Omens of gestural painting, 7, 109-121, Spring, 277013; Phyloprogenative Center, 277013 24613, 248N36; ironic pastiche of, 118-121, 119, Gough, Maria, 243n19 252nn59, 62, 252-253n64, Gould, Florence, 137 253nn70, 72, 253-254n73; and Gracq, Julien, 128 Luxury Paintings, 123; materi- graffiti: and Brassai, 130; and Jean ality subsumes, 113-116, 115, Dubuffet, 7, 129; and Asger 249nn39, 42-44, 25046; parJorn, 110, 116-117, 250053; ody diminishes, 116-117, and Latin American artists, 73, 250nn49, 51, 251n58 78; in Soviet Union, 95

Graham, John, 180, 273-274n60 Graham, Martha, 10, 224-225, 266n13 Graves, Morris, 132 Graves, Robert, 201 Greeks, 40, 59, 236n17

Greenberg, Clement: and African

American artists, 217, 224, 282n18, 285n44; and American-

type painting, 1,6, 24, 232n2 and anti-European rhetoric, 52, 59; and Cold War politics, 4; and French art scene, 34, 46, 236n15; and Italian abstraction, 138; and Asger Jorn, 121, 251-252n64; misreading of

Jean Dubuffet, 7-8, 81,

125-137, 255n1, 257n37; on

origins of Abstract Expressionism, 13-14, 16; and Pollock’ Mexican muralists, 169-172, 267n19, 267-268n26; and Pol-

lock’s origins in American art,

182-183, 190, 276-277n8 Greenwood, Marian, 266n13

Groys, Boris, 244n32

“Il Gruppo degli Otto,” 150, 262n39

Guervara, Ernesto (Che), 68, 68

Guggenheim, Peggy,8, 125, 141,

143, 177, 259014, 261133,

261-262n34

Guggenheim Foundation, 167, 169-170 Guggenheim Museum, 13, 16

Guilbaut, Serge, 5, 29-50; and

anti-European rhetoric, 59;

and antinationalism, 25; and

Alfred H. Barr, 197; and Italian

abstraction, 138, 145, 147, 259n7, 260n16

Guivellic, Eugene, 256n24; Les

Murs, 256124

Guston, Philip, 9, 52, 66, 167, 171-172, 174, 265n10, 268n29, 269nn30, 35, 270nn40-42, 270-271n44, 275n65; The

Inquisition (with Kadish), 171, 174, 268n30, 270n41,

270-271n44, 275n65

Gutai art exhibitions, 155, 156, 157-161, 157, 158

INDEX

| 297

Gutai artists. See Japanese Gutai artists

Gutai Art Manifesto (1956), 154, 159

“Gutai Art on the Stage” performances, 160-161

Gutai magazine, 158, 159 Gutai music, 160

Guttuso, Renato, 142-144, 148, 150, 260nn18, 19, 22; Washer Woman, 145

Halpert, Edith Gregor, 85

Happenings,8, 10, 155, 160, 171, 224

Hare, David, 220

Harper's Bazaar, 127

Harris, Neil, 197

Harrison, Helen A., 13-16

Hartigan, Grace, 10, 12

Hartung, Hans: and French art scene, 29, 34, 36; and Asger

Jorn, 112; in Soviet Union, 86; T 1948-19, 36

hqutes pates (Dubuffet), 114 Hegel, G.W.F, 58

Heidegger, Martin, 58-59, 95, 210, 238nn25-27

Helicline exit ramp (World's Fair, 1939), 187, 187 Heracleitus, 189

Herner, Irene, 166, 270n40, 272n52

heroic art, myth of: and African American artists, 216-219,

229-230; and Alfred H. Barr,

197; and Greenberg's misreading of Dubuffet, 135; and Asger Jorn, 110-112, 116, 124; and

new beginnings, 7, 99-107

Heron, Patrick, 232n2 Herzog, Oswald, 14-16, 15, 232nn4, 7; “Der abstrakte

Expressionismus,” 14, 15,

232n4 Hess, Thomas B., 196, 212, 233n11

hieroglyph of motion, 184-190, 185, 187, 188

Hiroshima atomic attack, 152 Hispanic Biennial (Cuba, 1953), 69

historical imagination, 26-27

208 | INDEX

historicism, 44-45, 58-61

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 201

Hitler, Adolf, 25, 212, 241n13 Hitler-Stalin Pact, 4, 212,216 Hofmann, Hans, 2, 13-16, 30, 170;

Afterglow, pl. 3 holism, 190-192

homosexual love, 226, 229

Hook, Sidney, 216 Hopewell culture Indian mounds, 58

Hopper, Edward, 150

Horn, Axel, 267n23, 273n57,

275-276n68

Horton, Lester, 222, 225

Hospers, John, 118

House Un-American Activities Committee, 22-23, 84 Hulme, T. E., 61, 239n37 Husserl, Edmund, 210

Huston, John, 193

Hynes, William R., 270n42 IBM, 220

illegible writing, 130-132, 134-135, 257-258n44

imperialism, American: and antiEuropean rhetoric, 59-60; and antinationalism, 25-26; and French art scene, 38, 40, 236nn14, 17; and Italian abstraction, 8, 140, 146, 150-151; and Latin American artists, 75-81, 241n13; and

Spanish Civil War, 76, 241n13 impressionism, 122, 142

individualism, 6; and African

American artists, 216-218, 220,

222; and European art, 58,

238n23; and French art scene, 30, 34-38, 44-48; and Asger Jorn, 111-112, 116-117; and Mexican muralists, 166; and

National Exhibition of Ame

can Art, 84; in Soviet Union, 87 Infante-Arana, Francisco, 244n28

informe, 116, 249n42, 250n48 Informel. See Art Informel

International Assembly of Art Critics, 113, 248n30

International Program (MoMA), 12

International Youth Festival

(Moscow, 1957), 6, 83-84, 91,93

Intrasubjectives show (1949), 217 irony, 108, 110, 118-121, 119, 245n4, 251nn59, 62, 251-252n64 Italian abstraction,8, 12, 138-151 Italian Communist Party (PCD), 146, 260022 Italian resistance, 144-146, 260n19 i10 magazine, 208-210, 209 Ivens, Joris, 209 Jachec, Nancy, 127, 217 Jack of Diamonds group, 94 Jackson, Harlan, 281n7

Jackson Pollock (film), 106, 106, 153

Jackson Pollock a Venezia exhibition (Venice, 2002), 150 Jackson Pollock exhibition (Venice, 1950), 141, 148, 261-262n34, 262135 Jaguer, Edouard, 29, 34, 235n9 James, Henry, 56 Janis, Sidney, 30 Japanese Gutai artists, 3, 8, 152-162 Jarry, Alfred, 130 jazz, 3, 84,90, 221 Jefferson, Thomas, 20 Jiménez, Pérez, 69

John Reed Clubs, 270n42 Johns, Jasper, 94 Johnson, Juanita, 284n33 Johnson, Phillip, 204 Johnson, Ray, 133, 136-137, 258n49, 274n62; Jean Dubuffet Fan Club, 136-137, 136, 258n49 Johnston, William H., 262n15 Jorn, Asger, 3, 108-124, 245nn2,4, 246n7, 246-247n16, 247027, 248130, 31; Allmen, 122-123, 123; Ausverkauf einer Seele, 120; Fin de Copenhague, 119-120; Fin de Copenhague, page from (with Debord), 119; and gestural painting, 7, 109-121, 115, 119, 248136, 249nn39, 42-44, 250nn46, 48, 49,51, 53,55, 251nn58, 59, 62,

251-252n64, 252nn70, 72, Kant, Immanuel, 58, 102 Kulakov, Mikhail, 88 252-253n73; La grande victoire, Kantor, Sybil Gordon, 278n9 Kunstmuseurn/Kunsthalle, 208 Kurczynski, Karen, 7, 108-124 113-114; Held og Hasard, Kaprow, Allan, 171 254n82; A Hint of Weakness or Karamazin, Nicolai, 19 Kuspit, Donald, 27713 Effortlessly Slow, 108, 109, 11 Kato, Mizuho, 263n3, 264n18 Kwakiutl Indians, 104 and Luxury Paintings, Kazin, Alfred, 22 Laboratory of Social Anthropol122-124, 123, 253nn79, 80, Keats, John, 61 Kemenoy, Vladimir, 84-87, ogy, 211 253-254n81, 254n82; Magi og skonne kunster, 254n82; 241-242n4, 242n8 Lam, Wifredo, 68, 73 Kennedy, John F,, 6, 60-61 Landau, Ellen G., 1,9, 165-181, ‘Mémoires, 119-120, 251n58, 252n72, 252-253n73; ModifiKennedy, Robert, 6,59 217-218 Langer, Suzanne, 118 cations, 116-117, 251158, pl. Kent State killings, 6,59 16; Pourla forme, 119; Raft of Kermode, Frank, 61, 239n37 Langsner, Jules, 269n30 the Medusa, 246-247n16; Kerouac, Jack, 267-268n26 Lanskoy, André, 29 Schwitcheanflug or Langsam Khalfin, Rustam, 89 Laocoon, 105 Miihelos, 108, 109, 116;A Soul Khrushchev, Nikita, 87-88, 91 Lapicque, Charles, 29 Kierkegaard, Soren, 6, 53, 65-66, Larkin, Olivier, 23614 {for Sale, pl. 17; The Top of the World—or Gay Day, “Modifi238n26 Lasch, Christopher, 4 Lassaw, Ibram, 84, 241-242n4 cation,” 116, pl. 16; Untitled, Kimmelman, Michael, 139 114-116, 115, 250049 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 6, 59 Latin American art, 3, 6, 67-81 Joseph, Ronald, 281n7 kitsch, 4, 38, 116-117, 122, 225 Lawrence, Jacob, 142, 216, 259010; Klee, Paul, 132, 214, 257037; Going Home, 25910 Joyce, James, 189, 23937 Abstract Script, 132, 132 Le Corbusier, 205 Judd, Donald, 103, Klein, Yves, 155, 160 Léger, Fernand, 213 Juin, 23509 Kline, Edgar, 225 Lehman, Harold, 181, 26935, Jung, Carl Gustav, 189, 224 Kline, Franz: and African Ameri270nn40, 42, 275n65 Jungian psychology, 277n13 can artists, 225; and antinaLehning, Arthur, 208-210, 212 Justi, Ludwig, 202 Leja, Michael, 217-218 tionalism, 24; and French art Kabakoy, Ilya, 94, 244n27 scene, 30, 232n3; and Asger Lenin, Vladimir, 26829 Kachur, Lewis, 8, 152-162 Jorn, 108; and Latin American Leonardi, Leoncillo, 143 Kadish, Reuben,9, 167, 171, 174, artists, 73, 81;and Leonardo da Vinci, 117; Mona 265n6, 26829, 269nn30, 35, Pollock/Mexican muralists, Lisa, 117 267-268n26; and women Lessing, G.E., 126 270nn40-42, 270-271n44, 272n51, 272-273n53, 275n65, artists, 12 Levina-Rozengol'ts, Eva, 242n14 275-276n68; The Inquisition Know-Nothing party, 27 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 208, (with Guston), 171, 174, Kootz, Samuel, 282n15 210-212 268n30, 270n41, 270-271n44, Korean War, 6, 22, 30,59 Lévy, Julian, 200 Kota, 224 Lewis, Adrian, 23823, 275n65 Kakabadze, David, 89, 243n17 Kozloff, Max,8, 138, 140 Lewis, Norman, 10, 215-216, Kramer, Hilton, 172, 269n33 218-221, 224, 229-230, 281n6, Kanayama, Akira, 154, 159-161; The Work, 160 Krasner, Lee, 10, 12,61, 165, 170, 282nn15, 16, 18, 19, 282-283n21, pl. 24; CongregaKandinsky, Vasily: and anti253-254n81, 265-266n1 1; Igor, European rhetoric, 53; and 7 tion, 282n16; Exodus, 282n16; Alfred H. Barr, 202, 209, 214; Krauss, Rosalind, 107, 115, Harlem Turns White, 219; Klu Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 237010, 250n47, 267-268n26 Klux, 282n16; Metropolitan 14; Day of Judgment, 101; Krishnamurti, J., 95, 228 Crowd, 215,219, 282nn16, 18, Déluge, 101; and French art Kristeva, Julia, 249043 pl. 24; Processional, 282n16; scene, 35; Improvisation, pl. 2; Kropivnitskaia, Valentina, 89 Ring Around the Rosie, 282116 and Asger Jorn, 110; and new Kropivnitsky, Lev, 88-89, 242n14; Lewison, Jeremy, 141-142, 147, begin gs, 101; and originsof Outer Galactic Logic, pl. 10 151,237n21 Abstract Expressionism, 13-14, Kropotkin, Peter, 58 Life, 1, 162, 186, 218, 220 16, 232n4, 233n10 Ku Klux Klan, 270-271n44 Lincoln, Abraham, 27

INDEX

| 299

Lindenberg, Daniel, 211 Lipchitz, Jacques, 213 Lipman-Wulf, Barbara, 232n7 Lissitzky, El, 209 literature, French, 126, 128-130, 133-134, 137 Lithographies exhibit (Dubuffet), 129, 130, 256n24 1g Brushes, 155, 160 Llinds, Guido, 68-69, 72-73, 78, 240n10; Por R. Motherwell, 73, 74, 78; Untitled, pl. 7 Locke, Alain, 220-221, 226, 229, 286n58 Loewy, Raymond, 187, 188 Lopez Pérez, Rigoberto, 77-78 Los Angeles Block of Painters, 167 Los Angeles Police Department, 270n42 Los Angeles Times, 27251 Los Angeles Workers’ Cultural Center, 171 Loubchansky, Marcelle, 236016 Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis, 211 Louis Carré Gallery, 29 Luchishkin, Sergei, 83 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 202 luxury industry, 32-33, 40, 235n7 lying, 118, 251-252n64 Lynes, George Platt, 213 Lyotard Jean-Francois, 28218 lyrical abstraction, 110, 112, 246-247016 McBride, Henry, 129-130 McCarthy, Joseph, 22

McCarthyism, 22-23, 39, 217,226

McCoubrey, John, 183 McLanathan, Richard, 84-85 Macpherson,C. B., 58, 238n23

Mafai, Mario, 148

‘Magazine of Art, 14,29 magical realism, 78 “Mail Art,” 137

Makarevich, Igor, 89

Makovskii, Sergei, 85

Malevich, Kasimir, 87, 90, 244n31

Mallarmé, Stéphan, 26

Malraux, André, 112-113, 247n25

Manet, Edouard, 134

Manifesto del Realismo, 260018

Mannheim Kunsthalle, 202

300 | INDEX

Matter, Mercedes Carles, 10, 265-2611 Manzi, Giacomo, 260n19 Matvejs, Waldemar, 243n19 Marcenac, Jean, 29 May Day rally, 166 Marchand, André, 33-34 Melville, Herman, 22, 170 Marchiori, Giuseppe, 142, Mercado Abelardo Rodriguez 261-262n34 mural, 266n13 Marcuse, Herbert, 81, 121 Meredith, Burgess, 284n35 Marion Willard Gallery, 218 mestizo culture, 166 Meta Machines (Tinguely), 159 Marshall Plan, 141, 146, 151 Marsman, Hendrik, 209-210 metonymy, 219 Marter, Joan, 1-12 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 53 martial arts, 8, 154-155 Mexican muralists, 3, 9, 101, Martinez, Juan, 240010 165-181, 264n4, 265nn6, 8, Martinez, Ratil, 68-73; Fragment I, 266n15; and Italian abstrac69-71, 70; Untitled, 69-71, pl. 9 tion, 147 Marx, Karl, 53, 268n29 Mexican revolution, 171, 269n35, 272n51 Marxism, 6, 58, 76, 169, 171,217, 219 Mexico City National masculinity, 56-57, 125, 180, Autonomous University 237nn18, 19 mosaic reliefs, 275n65 Masson, André, 2, 128, 170, 212, mezhdusoboichiki, 90, 24321 213 Michaux, Henri, 37, 130-131; Alphabets, 130 Masterkova, Lydia Alekseevna, 87-90, 92-95, 244nn28, 31; Michelangelo, 172, 174, 270n41 Untitled, 93, pl. 13 Mickey Mouse, 137 Masterpieces of the 20th Century Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 205 (Paris, 1952), 235n3 Migneco, Giuseppe, 260n19 materiality: and Japanese Gutai Mikhnov-Voitenko, Evgenii, 88 artists, 153, 159, 161; and Asger Mill, John Stuart, 199 Jorn,7, 113-116, 124, Miller, Henry, 276n54, 282n15 249nn39, 42-44, 250n46; and Millier, Arthur, 272n51 Latin American artists, 73; and Milton, John, 54 Pollock/Mexican muralists, Minosse, 150 267-268n26; and Soviet artists, Minturn, Kent, 7-8, 125-137 92-95, Miré, Joan, 24, 44, 76, 126, 182, Mather, Frank Jewett, 198, 204 224 Mathieu, Georges: Battle images, Misao, loikoiamo, 242n14 113; and French art scene, misprision, 54, 58, 176, 272n50 36-38, 40, 50; and Japanese Mitchell, Joan, 10, 12,68, 71; City Gutai artists, 154, 159; and Landscape, pl. 1 Asger Jorn, 108-109, 112-113, Mizue, 26304 245n1, 246-247n16 Modigliani, Amadeo, 214 Matisse, Henri, 24, 31, 33, 44, Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 202, 209, 48-49, 147,226 209 Matisse, Pierre, 102, 147 MoMA. See Museum of Modern Matiushin, Mikhail, 92-93, Art (MoMA) 244n31 Le Monde, 235nn3,7 Matta, Roberto, 2, 154, 180, 212, Mondrian, Piet, 2,37, 101, 103, 213, 259014, 273-274n60; 202, 209, 212, 213, 214 Deep Stones, 259n14 Monet, Claude, 53 Matter, Herbert, 265-266n11 Monk, Samuel, 61 Manuel, Victor, 71 Manzoni, Piero, 151

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 19 Moore, Henry, 142 Moore, Marianne, 23, 200 Morales, Armando, 76-78, Dead Guerrilla (Guerrillero Muerto #1), 76-78, 77; The Electrocuted Prisoner, 76 Morandi, Giorgio, 147 Morelia mural (Mexico), 171,174, 269n30, 270n41, 270-271n44, 275n65 Morey, Charles Rufus, 198-199, 204 Morlotti, Ennio, 143, 150, 260018, 260n22 Morris, Robert, 267-268n26 Moscow Polygraphic Institute,87 Moscow Trials (1936-1938),4, 216 Moseshvili, lurii, 243017 Motherwell, Robert, 3, 30, 2175 and African American artists, 216-217, 220; (Autoportrait) Surprise and Inspiration, 259114; Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 75-78, 75; and Italian abstraction, 143, 259n14; and Japanese Gutai artists, 153; and Asger Jorn, 111, 246n13, 251-252n64; and Latin American artists, 6, 68, 73-79, 74, 75, 81; Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 26614; and Pollock/Mexican muralists, 167, 172, 266n14; in Soviet Union, 84; Spanish Elegies, 6 motion, hieroglyph of, 184-190, 185, 187, 188 Murakami, Saburo, 154-155, 157, 1595 Six Holes, 155, 157 Murrow, Edward R., 192-193 Museo Correr (Venice), 141, 148, 150, 261-262n34, 262n35 E] Museo de Solidaridad (Chile), 26 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and African American artists, 10, 224; Art in Our Time,” 16; and Alfred H. Barr, 9, 196, 198, 203-208, 206, 207, 211-214, 213, 220; Cubism and Abstract 204; 50 Ans d'art sux EtatsUnis exhibition (Paris),

118-119, 252n675 “Freedom of the Brush,” 30; and Adolph Gottlieb, 131; and Italian abstraction, 12, 141-142, 151, 26133, 262-263n40; and Asger Jorn, 118-119, 252n67; The New American Painting exhibition, 12, 119, 141, 151, 232n3, 262-263n40; and Claes Oldenburg, 134; Picasso: 40 Years of His Art, 212; and Pollock/Mexican muralists, 177, 266n15 ‘Museum of Natural History (New York), 211 ‘Museum of Non-Objective Painting. See Guggenheim Museum Mussolini, Benito, 142 Myers, Fred R., 278n6 My Lai atrocity, 6, 59

Nemukhin, Vladimir, 88-95,

Nagasaki atomic attack, 152 Namuth, Hans, 181, 193, 194; and Bernard Newman, 56, 57; and Jackson Pollock, 8, 61, 62, 99, 105-106, 106, 153, 160, 162, 170-171, 222, 264n17, 267122, 267-268n26 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 111, 246nn10, 11 narrativity, 8, 128-134, 136, 282n18 The Nation, 7, 125-126, 274n62 National Autonomous University mosaic reliefs (Mexico City), 275065 National Exhibition of American Art (Moscow, 1959), 6, 84-87, 84, 86, 90, 94, 241-242n4, 244028 nationalism, opposition to. See antinationalism National School of Fine Arts

African American artists,

(Managua), 78

nation-state, 19-20 Native American art, 3, 53,131, 17, 215, 224, 23709 Navajo sand painters, 177 Nazism, 4, 37, 60, 127, 146 negative engagement, 68-72, 80-81 Negro America exhibition (1933), 270n42

243nn17, 21, 244nn27, 28; Still

Life with Cards, pl. 14 Neoplasticism, 13

Neo-Realism, 148, 261n32

nesting identities, 89 Nettlau, Max, 210

Neue Abteilung (Nationalgalerie, Berlin), 202 Neumann, J. B., 16, 200-201,

233n11

New American Painting, 5, 12,52

The New American Painting exhibition (1959), 12, 119, 141, 151, 232n3, 262-263n40

New Art Circle galleries, 200 new beginnings, 99-107

New Critical visual analysis, 217 New Deal, 192

Newman, Barnett, 7, 10; Abraham

(Newman), 47; Adam, 100; and

217-218, 220; anti-European

thetoric of, 5-6, 51-53, 56-59, (57, 61,63, 65-66, 23721, 238nn25—27, 239n37; Argos,

100; Cathedra, 100; compared

to Bram van Velde, 46-47,

236n15; Day Before One, 100;

Day sus, 100; Asger

One, 100, 277n13; Diony100; Eve, 100; The Gate, Gea, 100; Here, 103; and Jorn, 111, 121; and Latin

American artists, 73, 81; Moment, 100; and new beginnings, 99-102, 104-105; Now, 103; Onement, 46, 56, 104,

237n21, pl. 5; and Pollock’s origins in American art, 277n

Primordial Light, 100; Prometheus Bound, 100; Ulysses, 100; Vir Heroicus Sub-

limis, 7, 56-57, 57, 61, 102-105, 238n25, 27713, pl. 6;

zip paintings of, 47, 56, 81, 102-104, 218, 237n21

New School for Social Research murals, 265n6, 269n37

New Workers School (New York), 172

“The New York Correspondence School,” 137

INDEX

| 301

‘New Yorker, 14, 127 ‘New York Evening Post, 198 New York School, 1-3; and African American artists, 10,221; and anti-European rhetoric, 51; and antinationalism, 20, 23-28; compared to Soviet art, 88; and French art scene,

38-39, 46-47, 236nn14,15; and Nalian abstraction,8, 12, 138, 140-142, 147, 151, 259n14; and Japanese Gutai artists, 154, 159; and Asger Jorn, 114; and Latin American artists, 71-74; origins of in American art, 185 and women artists, 12 New York World Telegram, 208 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 19-20, 53, 112 Nina Dausset gallery, 36 Nixon, Richard, 59, 87 Noguchi, Isamu, 167, 266n13 Nolde, Emil, 226 non-language approaches, 8, 129-134, 257-258n44 nonrelational aesthetic, 7, 103 Northwest Coast Native American Indian art, 131 Norton, Charles Eliot, 199, 27917 nouveau roman, 133 Nuova Secessione Artistica Italjana, 143, Nutovich, Evgeni, 24428 Oakland Tribune (Calif.), 284n37 L’Observateur, 235n3 O'Connor, Francis V., 273n56

Oedipal conflict, 54, 64, 172 LOeuvre du vingtidme sidcle exhibition (Paris, 1952), 236n14 Ogden, C.K, 118

O'Higgins, Pablo, 266n13 Oldenburg, Claes, 8, 133, 1375 Dubuffet-Céline Frenchmen, 134; I Think Your Work Looks a Lot Like Dubuffet, 134, 134

“Old Europe,” 51, 66

Old Masters, European, 5, 52, 169

Los Once, 68-69, 72-73

Oppenheim, Meret, 212; Fur Cup, 212

originary vision, 54-55, 66

origin myths, 26 Orozco, Jose Clemente, 9,

165-166, 171-177, 265n6, 268n29, 269n37, 270n38, 27146, 271-272n49, 272n52;

The Epic of American Civilization: Gods of the Modern World, pl. 23; Prometeo,

272n52; Prometheus, 166, 172, 265n6, 269n37, 270n38,

271n46

Ossorio, Alfonso, 23616 Oud, J.P.P., 201, 205, 209 outsideness, 90-92, 244nn26, 27 ‘Ozenfant, Amédee, 213

Paalen, Wolfgang, 266n14 Pach, Walter, 200

Painting in France, 1939-1946 exhibition (1946), 32-34 Pallucchini, Rodolfo, 261n32

Pan American Union exhibition (Venezuela, 1953), 69

Panofsky, Erwin, 198

Parinaud, André, 41 Paris Lives, 32-33, 235n7

parody: and Japanese Gutai artists, 159, 161; and Asger Jorn, 113,

116-117, 124, 250nn49, 51, 251n58 Parsons, Betty, 282n15. See also

Betty Parsons Gallery

participant-observer, 192-195

Partisan Review, 1,4, 127,170,217

pastiche: and Japanese Gutai

artists, 161; and Asger Jorn,

118-121, 179, 122, 124, 251nn59, 62, 251-252n64 Pater, Walter, 61 Paternosto, César, 81 Paulhan, Jean, 37, 41, 112,127, 130, 23620, 255n18 Pauzie, Alain, 137 Paz, Octavio, 26

Old World, 53, 66

Peintres de la nouvelle école de Paris

Olvera Street mural (Los Angeles),

Peldez, Amelia, 71; Interior with

Oles, James, 266n13 Oliva, Toms, 68 167, 168, 177

302 | INDEX

exhibitions (1952), 23510 Peirce, Charles S., 102 Columms, 71,72

Pereira, Irene Rice, 259n10; Green Depth, 25910 performance art: and African ‘American artists, 10; and Japanese Gutai artists, 8, 154-155, 160-162, 264n18; and Georges Mathieu, 109; and Thelma Johnson Streat, 10, 215, 222-225, 223, 284n35, 285n43 Perisphere (World's Fair, 1939), 187 phallocentrism, 56, 175, 180, 228-229, 237nn18, 19, 274nn61, 62 Phillpot, Clive, 137 Picabia, Francis, 37 Picasso, Pablo: and African American artists, 227-228; and antiEuropean rhetoric, 52-53; and antinationalism, 24; and Alfred H. Barr, 205, 212, 214; Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 212; and French art scene, 30-34, 41, 44, 48-49; and Greenberg's misreading of Dubuffet, 134; Guernica, 144-145, 171, 212, 260018; and Italian abstraction, 144-145, 260n18; Massacres in Korea, 30; and origins of Abstract Expressionism, 13; and Pollock/Mexican muralists, 9, 170, 171-172, 174, 176-177, 272n50; and Pollock's origins in American art, 182, 212 Picasso: 40 Years of His Art exhibition (1939), 212 pictograph of motion, 184-190, 185, 187, 188 Piero della Francesca, 174, 270n41 Pierte Matisse Gallery, 125-126, 129, 213, 256n24 Pignon, Edouard, 31-33 Pijper, Willem, 209 pilgrim badges, 65-66, 239046 Pillet, Edgard, 34 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 135 Pinot-Gallizio, 248n31 Pittura Metafisica, 270041 Pivovarov, Viktor, 94 Pizzinato, Armando, 143-144, 148, 150, 260n22, 261n33; The Defenders of the Factories, 144,

144, 148; First of May, 261033;

Land, Not War, 148; A Specter Is Haunting Europe, 148

Plato, 53, 58

Podliaskii, luri, 2427 Poe, Edgar Allan, 20, 22 Polcari, Stephen, 9, 182-195, 266n13, 271n46, 275n67

political dissidents, 6, 88-89, 242n14, 243nn15, 16 Politics, 217

Pollock, Charles, 169, 172, 178,

269nn35, 37, 271n48, 273n56

Pollock, Frank, 269135 Pollock, Jackson: and action paint-

ing, 8, 61, 62, 85, 99, 105; and African American artists, 217-220, 222, 224-225, 282-283n21, 28544; and alcoholism, 99-100, 167, 171-172,

184, 190, 265n8, 271n48,

277013; and anti-European

thetoric, 52, 59-63, 62; and antinationalism, 5, 23-24; ‘Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 62, 70, 170, 181, pl. 8; and

Alfred H. Barr, 212; death of, 100, 159, 167; Bird, 177, 178, 272n52; Birth, 277013; Blue

Poles, 241-242n4; Cathedral, 241-242n4;

259014;

Circumcision,

Composition with Pour-

ing Il, 177, 179, 180-181; Don

Quixote, 259114; Eyes in the

Heat, 259n14; and French art scene, 5-6, 30, 36, 38, 45-47, 232n3, 236n14; and Greenberg's

misreading of Dubuffet, 125, 131, pl. 18; Guardians of the

Secret, 125; Head with Polygons,

270n40; and Italian abstraction, 8, 141, 143, 147-148, 150-151, 259n14, 261-262n34, 262n35;

and Japanese Gutai artists, 8,

152-154, 157, 159-162, 264n17;

and Asger Jorn, 110, 114-116, 118-123, 249n44, 250n47,

253nn76, 79, 253-254n81; and

Lee Krasner, 10, 12,61, 165, 170, 253-254n81, 265-266n11; and Latin American artists, 6, 68, 70, 73, 79-80, 79, 81; Lavender Mist, 181, 241-2424; Male and

Female, 125;and Mexican muralists, 3,9, 101, 165-167, 166, 169-181, 173, 176, 178, 179, 264n4, 265nn6, 8, 265-266n11, 266n15, 267nn19, 23,25, 269nn33, 35, 37,270nn40, 43, 271nn46, 48, 271-272n49, 272nn51,52,272-273n53, 273nn56, 57, 273-274n60, 274nn61-64, 27567, 275-276n68; The Moon Woman, 125, 25914; Naked Man with Knife, 173-174, 173, 270nn40, 43; Namuth’s photos of, 8, 61, 62, 99, 105-106, 106, 153, 160, 162, 170-171, 181, 193, 194, 222, 264n17, 267-268n22, 268126; and new beginnings, 7, 99-101, 103, 105-107, 106; Number 1A, 119, 252n67; Number 7,153, pl. 21; Number Nine, 218; Number 11, 154, 263n4; One: Number 7, 194; One: Number 31, 185; ri gins of in American art, 182, 185, 189-191, 194, 276-277n8, 277013; She-Wolf, 271n46; in Soviet Union, 84-87, 241-242n4, 244n30; Stenographic Figure, 125, pl. 18; Two, 259n14; Two Landscapes with Figures, 271n46; Woman, 174-176, 176, 180, 271n46, 271-272n49 Pollock, LeRoy, 175 Pollock, Sanford (Sande), 167, 171-172, 177-178, 268129, 269n30, 271n48, 27251, 272-273n53 Pollock, Stella Mae McClure, 175, 271048 Pollock avec nous exhibition (Paris, 1952), 5, 38, 236n14 Pomona College mural, 166, 265n6, 26937, 270038 Ponge, Francis, 33, 41, 44 Popova, Liubov, 244n31 Portocarrero, René, 68 Posada, José Guadalupe, 175-176 Possibilities, 216-217 “Post-Surrealist” group, 174, 270n41 Potapova, Olga, 89

Pound, Ezra, 23 Pousette-Dart, Richard, 152-153, 259n14; Spirit, 259014 Prévert, Jacques, 130 pride of place, 22-23 Prima Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Contemporanea exhibition (Bologna, 1948), 146

primitive, the, 48, 131,216, 21-222, 230 A Problem for Critics exhibition (1945), 136, 258048 propaganda. See Cold Wer politics Putzel, Howard, 136, 258048 Quarantotti Gambini, P.A., 150, 261-262n34, 262n35, Quintanilla, Raul, 241015

Rank, Otto, 216-217 Raphael, 117 Rashomon effect, 25 Ratcliff, Carter, 245n4 Rauschenberg, Robert, 10, 25, 224 Reagan, Ronald, 79 rebirth theme, 153, 155 Red Squad (LAPD), 270n42 Reed, Alma, 271-272n49 Regards sur la peinture Americaine exhibition (Paris, 1952), 236n14 regionalism, 2, 21, 169, 180, 212, 241-2424, 273156 Reinhardt, Ad, 30, 75, 90, 92, 282n15 Rembrandt, 41 Reshetnikov, Fedor Pavlovich, 86 Restany, Pierre, 112 Reynolds, David S.,27 Richards, 1.A., 118 Riegl, Alois, 198 Rietveld, Gerrit, 209 Rimbaud, Arthur, 99 Rinascita, 142, 146 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 34, 36-37, 71 Rivas, Juan, 79; Untitled (After Pollock), 79 Rivera, Diego,9, 165, 171-172, 265n6, 26829, 269035; Dia de Flores, 172, 269n35 Rivers, Haywood Bill, 281n7 Robeson, Paul, 27 Rockefeller, Abby, 203

INDEX

| 303

Rockefeller Center mural, 268n29

Rockefeller Foundation, 211 Rodin, Auguste, 54, 200; St. John the Baptist, 54 Romanelli, Giandomenico, 150 Romanticism: and anti-European rhetoric, 54, 58, 60-61, 63, 238n31, 239n37; and Mexican muralists, 166; in Soviet Union, 82

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 192 Rosenberg, Harold: and action

painting, 2,61, 99, 113, 154,

224-226, 232n2; and African American artists, 216-217,

224-226; and Cold War poliics, 45 and French art scene, 46; and Japanese Gutai artists, 154; and Asger Jorn,

251-252n64; and Pollock/Mex‘ican muralists, 171; and Pol-

lock’s origins in American art, 182, 186; and Soviet artists, 92

Rosenblum, Robert, 60

Ross, Lois Johnson, 224, 284n33 Roszak, Theodore, Hound of Heaven, 241-2424

Rothko, Mark:

and African Ameri-

can artists, 220; and anti-

European rhetoric, 52, 60-61, 65; and antinationalism, 25, 26; Baptismal Scene, 25910; and French art scene, 46-47, 232n3;

and Italian abstraction,

142-143, 151, 259nn 10, 14;

and Japanese Gutai artists, 153; and Asger Jorn, 251-252n64; and Latin American artists, 73, 75, 80-81; Old Gold on White, 241-242n4; Sacrifice, 259n14;

in Soviet Union, 6, 84, 92, 241-242n4

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 147

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 128

Saint-Simon, Henri de, 20 Salon of 1944, 32

Sandinistas, 6, 78-79

Sandler, Irving: and anti-European

Shakespeare, William, 66

Sandino, Augusto César, 78-79

thetoric, 6, 52, 59-60, 2373,

238n28; and Alfred H. Bart,

233n11; and Asger Jorn, 111, 246n13, 251-252n64; and

women artists, 12

‘San Francisco Museum of Art, 215

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 54

304 | INDEX

Shapiro, David, 4-5, 138-142, 147 Sharp, Jane, 6, 82-95

Shimamoto, Shozo, 154, 157-159, 158, 160, 162 Shiraga, Kazuo, 154-155, 159,

161-162, pl. 22; Challenging

Mud, 155, 156; Sanbaso Super

Sargent, John Singer, 56,

Les Signifiants de 'informel exhibi-

Sargeant, Winthrop, 242n8 241-242n4

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3; and antiEuropean rhetoric, 65; AntiSemite and Jew, 127; and Alfted H. Barr, 208, 210, 212; and French art scene, 49; and Greenberg's misreading of Dubuffet, 7, 126-130, 133,

‘Modern, 161

Shoichi, Hirai, 264n18

Shushanik, Lady, 175, 271n47 tion (1951), 37

Signorelli, Luca, 52 Simon, Claude, 133 Singler, Christoph, 240n10

singularity, 111, 246nn10,11

Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 9,

255nn15,18, 256n20; and Asger

165-167, 166, 170-172, 174, 177-181, 264n4, 265nn6, 8, 267nn23, 25, 268n29, 270n40,

new beginnings, 99-100, 104

273nn56, 58, 273-274n60,

Jorn, 112-113, 248n34; and Sassu, Aligi, 260019 Schapiro, Alexander, 210 Schapiro, Meyer, 206

‘School of Havana, 73 The School of New York exhibition (1951), 3 School of Paris, 29, 37,45; and

Greenberg's misreading of Dubuffet, 126; and Italian

abstraction, 144; and Japanese

Gutai artists, 152, 154, 159; and Latin American artists, 71,73

Schulze, Alfred Otto Wolfgang. See

Sabitov, Alim, 242n14 Sachs, Paul, 199-200, 203-204, 214

Shapiro, Cecile, 4-5, 138-142, 147

Shklovskii, Viktor, 83

Russian Constructivism, 68, 68

Rylands, Philip, 259n10

Seurat, Georges, 147

Santomaso, Giuseppe, 143, 148, 150 Sao Paulo Biennial (1959), 76 Sapgir, Genrikh, 84

Rubens, Peter Paul, 42, 52 Rukhin, Evgenii, 93-94

sense of place, 22-23

Serra, Richard, 103 Seuphor, Michel, 13, 16, 29, 34, 37, 232n2

Sandinista Artists Union, 79

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 20 Schuitema, Paul, 209

Roxroth, Kenneth, 262-263n40

Selz, Peter, 14, 232n4

Schulman, Grace, 23

Wols Schwitters, Kurt, 209

Seitz, William, 5, 14, 20,22, 111, 232n4, 251-252n64

Seligman, Kurt, 213, 266n14

272nn51, 52, 272-273n53,

274n63, 274-275n65, 275n67, 275-276n68;

The Birth of Fas

cism, 273nS8; Collective Suicide, 180, 273n58; Plastic Exercise, 270n40; Tropical America, 167,

168, 177,270n40, 272052, 272-273n53; The Workers’ Meeting, 268n29, 272151

Situationist International (SI), 110 Situationists, 7, 113, 117, 119-120, 124

Slauerhoff,J.J.,210

Smith, David, 131, 23719; Letter, 131 Smith, Lillian, 282n15 Sobel, Janet, 143, 259n14,

276-2778; The Frightened Bride, 259n14

socialism: and African American artists, 216, 219; and antina-

tionalism, 26; and Asger Jorn,

245n2; and Latin American artists, 67-68, 76, 78; and Mexican muralists, 166 social protest, 73-75, 80 Social Realism, 2, 4; and French art scene, 34; and Asger Jorn, 246n6; in Latin America, 6,67-69; in Soviet Union, 83,85, 87 Sokolov, Petr, 244n28 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 13, 16 Somoza, Anastasio, 77-78 Sooster, Ulo, 88, 24214, 243n16 Soulages, Pierre, 47,49, 71, 73, 86 Soutine, Chaim, 14,214, 226, 249039 Soviet Academy of Arts, 84 Soviet artists, 6, 82-95 Spanish Civil War, 76, 78, 166, 241n13 spectacle, 119-120, 252n70 The Springs (Long Island, N.Y.), 170-171, 267-268n26, 277013 ‘Squamish art, 224 Staél, Nicolas de, 29,71 staining, 39-40, 236nn15, 16. See also Tachism Stalin, Joseph, 4, 40, 60 Stalinism, 4, 35, 166 Stam, Mark, 209 Stamos, Theodoros, 142, 153; Ancestral Worship, 259110 Stein, Gertrude, 170 Steinbert, Leo, 134 Stella, Frank, 103 Stevens, Wallace, 23, 54 De Stijl, 202, 204, 210 Still, Clyfford: anti-European rhetoric of, 5-6, 51, 55, 60, 63, 65-66, 237nn9, 18; and French art scene, 46—47; and Italian abstraction, 143, 259114; Jamaid, 259n14; and Japanese Gutai artists, 153; and Asger Jorn, 121; in The New American Painting exhibition, 232n3; and Pollock's origins in American att, 277013; Self-Portrait, $3; in Soviet Union, 92, 244n30; Untitled (Two Figures), 55-56, 55 Stokvis, Willemijn, 2454 Stone, Edward D., 206

Stone, 1. F, 22

Storr, Robert, 266n15 Streamline Moderne, 9, 187-189

stream of consciousness, 180, 189 Streat, Thelma Johnson, 10, 215-216, 218, 222-225, 223, 229-230, 284nn33, 35, 37,

285n43; “Dance of Freedom,”

224; Red Dots, Flying Baby, and

Barking Dog, 224

“Studio 35,” 220-221, 283n25

Studio Facchetti, 35, 37

Sturges, Preston, 192-193 Der Sturm, 14-16, 15, 23204

subjectivity: and African Ameri-

can artists, 217, 220, 230; and

Jean Dubuffet, 133; and German Expressionism, 15; and

Asger Jorn, 110-112, 114-116, 118, 122, 124, 246n7; and Latin

‘American artists, 81; and Soviet artists, 93, 243n20

sublime, the, 54, 57-58, 60-61, 64, 66, 104-105, 238n31

Sullivan's Travels (film), 192 Sumo wrestling, 155 Suprematism, 90, 244n31

Surrealism, 2, 4, 241-242n4; and

anti-European thetoric, 52; and Alfred H. Barr, 10; and French art scene, 34-35; and Greenberg’s misreading of Dubuffet, 126, 130-131, 255n1; and Asger

Jorn, 250n55; and new begin-

rings, 100; and Barnett Newman, 46; and Pollock/Mexican muralists, 167, 172, 180,

266114, 267125, 267-268n26; and Pollock's origins in American art, 182-183, 186, 189; and

‘Thelma Johnson Streat, 224 surveillance reports, 26

‘Sweeney, James Johnson, 236n14, 248n30

Symbolism, 63

“Syndicate of Painters,” 171,177,

268n29

Sypher, Wylie, 133

Szyszlo, Fernando de, 80-81; Inkarri, 80, 80

tabula rasa, 8,139

‘Tachism: and French art scene,

39-40, 236nn15, 16; Clement

Greenberg on, 232n2; and Asger

Jorn, 110, 112, 122, 124,

246-247n16; in Soviet Union, 86

Tanguy, Yves, 2,213 Tapié de Céléyrand, Michel: and French art scene, 5, 29-30,

35-40, 235n10; and Japanese Gutai artists, 161; and Asger Jorn, 111-113, 246-247n16, 24830, 251-252n64; and

Véhémences Confrontées exhi-

bition, 36-37, 112

Tatlin, Vladimir, 243n19 Taylor Art Gallery (Vassar College), 198, 279015,

Tchelitchew, Pavel, 213

Teague, Walter Dorwin, 187 Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 25914 1 Tempo di Milano, 150 Les Temps Modernes, 127,177 Third Yomiuri Independent exhibition (1951), 152-153, 263n4

Thistlewood, David, 281n4 Tiampo, Ming, 263n2

Tiger’s Eye, 1, 131,287n60

Time magazine, 147, 150, 262n35,

27713 Tinguely, Jean, 159 Titian, 42 Tobey, Mark: and antinationalism, 21; Broadway, 259n10; Electric

Night, 21; and Greenberg's misreading of Dubuffet, 131-132; and Italian abstraction, 142, 151, 259n10; and

Japanese Gutai artists, 153; and Pollock's origins in American art, 276-277n8; Transit, 131

Togliatti, Palmiro, 146, 148, 26022 Tomatsu, Shomei, 152;

Nagasaki, 152

11:02

Tomlin, Bradley Walker, 30, 153,

259110; Still Life (Inward Preoccupation), 259010

Tone, Franchot, 284n35

“torpedo” concept for permanent

collection (Barr), 207-208, 207

totality, 190-192, 276-2778, 277013 totems, 104

INDEX

| 305

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 61; Miss Loie Fuller, 63 toy cars, 8, 159, 160

‘Traba, Marta, 81 transcendence, rhetoric of, 7, 109, 111-113, 248nn34, 36 Transcendentalism, 56, 53-55 Los Tres Grandes, 165, 167, 172.

See also Orozco, Jose Clemente; Rivera, Diego; Siqueiros, David Alfaro ‘Tretyakov Gallery, 244n28 Trotsky, Leon, 4, 165-166

Trotskyism, 4, 165

Turcato, Giulio, 143, 150, 260n22

‘Turner, J.M.W., 52, 142 ‘Twombly, Cy, 8, 133-136, 137,

257-258n44; Criticism, 135,

136; Olympia, 134

‘Tworkov, Jack, 249n39

Tylor, Edward, Sir, 191 ‘Tynianov, lurii, 83

Uccello, Paolo, 174, 270n41 Ulisse, 142 “Uncommitted Literature,” 130 unconscious, the, 100, 102, 171-172, 184, 186, 219, 277013 Union Square workshop, 9, 165, 177-180, 267n25, 273nn56-58, 274n63 United States Lines Paris Review, 40 U.S. Marine Corps, 26 Untitled as title of Abstract Expresionist works, 219 USIA exhibition (Soviet Union, 1959), 85-87, 242n7 Valery, Paul, 130

Valsecchi, Marco, 262-263n40 vandalism, 116-117

Vanetti, Dolores, 212

van Gogh, Vincent, 48

Van Vechten, Carl, 282n15

van Velde, Bram, 30, 34, 41, 45-50, 71; Gouache, 46 Varazi, Avtandil, 89, 24317 Vasnetsov, Viktor, 85 Vedova, Emilio, 143-144, 148, 150, 260n22; Europe 1950, 148, 149; The Hurricane, 144

306 | INDEX

Véhémences Confrontées exhibition (1951), 36-37, 12

Venice Biennale: and antin: nal ism, 24-25; and French art scene, 45; and Italian abstraction, 8, 139, 141-144, 147-148, 150-151, 259n10, 261nn32, 33, 262-263n40; and Asger Jorn, 2a9nd4 Venturi, Lionello, 150, 262039 Vetrocq, Marcia E., 141 i, Alberto, 143

Vietnam War, 6, 26, 59, 74-76 View, 127 Viviano, Catherine, 147 Vogue, 127 Walden, Herwarth, 14, 16 Walker, Bradley Tomlin, 68 ‘Walter, Francis E., 84-85. Ward, James, 60

Ward, Lynd, 25 ‘Warhol, Andy, 161, 267-268n26 Wayne, John, 217

Weimar Republic, 202 Weinberg, Jonathan, 272n50

‘Western culture, 5, 29-33, 38-41,

45,47, 49-50, 235n3

Weyhe Gallery, 229, 271-272n49

Whitman, Walt, 6,27, 54, 234nn26-28

Whitney Museum of American Art, 85 Wigman, Mary, 10, 224-225

Wildenstein Gallery, 200

Willard, Marian, 221, 282n15. See

also Marion Willard Gallery

Williams, William Carlos, 22-23 Wilson, Sarah, 127,129 Wilson, William S., 258n49

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 103

Wolfflin, Heinrich, 198 Wollen, Peter, 265n8

Wollheim, Richard, 103 ‘Wols:

and alcoholism, 99-100;

Blue Phantom, 43; and

French art scene, 30, 34, 36, 41, 43-45, 43, 47-50; and

Greenberg's

misreading of

Dubuffet, 128, 256n20; and Asger Jorn, 121, 248n34,

249n44, 253n76; and new beginnings, 7,99-101 ‘women artists, 10, 12, 225, 229 Wood, Grant, 182 Woodruff, Hale, 10, 215-216, 218, 220-222, 229-230, 283nn25, 26, 283-284n30; Afro Emblems, 221, 283-284n30; Ashanti Image, 215, 221, 221, 229, 283-284n30; Carnival, 221, 229, 283-284n30; Children at Play series, 221-222 Wordsworth, William, 54 Workers Alliance Center mural (Los Angeles), 268129 Workers’ Cultural Center (Los Angeles), 171 World’s Fair (1939), 187, 187 World War Il, 1-25 and antinationalism, 22, 26; and Alfred H. Barr, 200, 211-212; and French art scene, 29-33, 47; and German Expressionism, 15-16; and Greenberg's misreading of Dubuffet, 7-8, 128-130; and Italian abstraction, 139, 142, 144-146, 260n19; and Japanese Gutai artists, 152, 154-155, 158-159, 161-162; and new beginnings, 100; and Pollock's origins in American art, 182, 189, 192 Worringer, Wilhelm, 58 WPA (Works Progress Administration), 20, 182-183, 191, 211-212 Yavno, Max, 221, 283n25 Yeats, W. B., 61 Yoshihara, Jiro, 8, 153-154, 157, 159, 263nn2, 3; Night Bird, 153 Yoshimoto, Midori, 264n18

Zadkine, Ossip, 213 Zen Buddhism, 276nn54, 55 Zero group, 154 Zigaina, Giuseppe, 148 zip paintings, 47, 56,81, 102-104, 218, 237n21 Zlotnikov, lurii, 82, 90 Zulaika, Joseba, 28