Abstract expressionism as cultural critique : dissent during the McCarthy period 9780521434157, 0521434157

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

Dissent during the McCarthy Period Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique examines the artistic aims of the New York School of painters within the context of left-wing political discussions during the 1940s and 1950s. By drawing on new primary material from government archives and contemporary art critics,

including Meyer Schapiro and Marta Traba, David Craven addresses

Abstract Expressionism as a response to the politics of the cold war. Outlining the artistic intentions of New York School painters and the reception of their work in Latin America, Craven shows how Abstract Expressionism emerged as an implicit criticism of important main-

_Stream ideas in the United States during the McCarthy era. David Craven is Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico. A scholar of American and Latin American Art, he has been a

Visit-

ing Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a

Visiting Lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and a

Visiting Professor at

Bremen University in Germany. Most recently, he has been elected a Fellow of the Collegium Budapest in Hungary.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE SERIES EDITOR

Patricia Hills, Boston University

ADVISORY BOARD Albert Boime, University of California, Los Angeles Garnett McCoy, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Lowery Stokes Sims, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Terry Smith, University of Sydney

Roger Stein, University of Virginia Alan Wallach, College of William and Mary

Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture provides a forum for works on aspects of American art that implement methods drawn from related disciplines

in the humanities,

including

literature, postmodern

cultural studies,

gender studies, and “new history.” The series includes studies that focus on a specific set of creative circumstances and critical responses to works of art, and that situate the art and artists within a historical context of changing systems of taste, strategies for self-promotion, and ideological, social, and political ten-

sions.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE Dissent during the McCarthy Period

DAVID

CRAVEN

5 CAMBRIDGE

i

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP, United Kingdom MBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk _http://www.cup.org

© David Craven 1999

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written perrnission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1999 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Stone Serif 9.25/13 pt. System QuarkXPress® [MG] A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Craven, David, 1951-

Abstract expressionism as cultural critique : dissent during the McCarthy period /

David Craven.

p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in American visual culture) Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-521-43415-7 (hb) 1, Abstract expressionism - United States.

3. Artists - United States - Political activity. 1945-1953. I. Title. II. Series. N6512.5.A25C73 1999 759.13°09'045 ~ de21 ISBN

0521 434157

hardback

_ 2. Dissident art — United States.

4. United States - Politics and government, 98-35100 cIP

This book is dedicated to my parents, Dr. and Mrs. Albert Craven,

whose lifelong commitments to racial equality, social justice,

and progressive values have always been inspirational.

Contents

List of Illustrations

page xi

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

A Discourse on Method and Sources The Reception of Abstract Expressionism CHAPTER THE

-

xiii

_

-

oo

ONE

VARIOUS

LEGACIES

EXPRESSIONISM

AND

DIVERSE LINEAGES OF ABSTRACT

88

Schapiro’s Discussion of Abstract Expressionism in Relation to the Prospects of Socialism and Democracy during the 1950s Abstract Expressionism and the Social History of Art CHAPTER ABSTRACT

3 9

35 39

TWO EXPRESSIONISM

AND LEFT-WING

DISCOURSE

_

SL

Left-Wing Discourse in the 1950s

54

Methodological Considerations: Schapiro’s Approach to Art Affirmations of Community and the Negativity of Modernism

64 69

CHAPTER

THREE

THE FBI FILES ON THE NEW YORK SCHOOL

9

U.S. Government Surveillance of Reinhardt and the Abstract Expressionists

80

McCarthyism versus the Negativity of Alternative Modernism Critical Challenges Posed by Mythmaking CHAPTER

102

FOUR

MYTHMAKING IN THE McCARTHY PERIOD _

-

Myths That Menace America’s Future The Cult of Masculinity

105

105 115

“Contemporary Man” Discourse versus “Modern Man” Discourse CHAPTER

96

123

FIVE

AUTOMATISM

AND THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

Abstract Expressionism as Romantic Anticapitalism The Age of Automation and “Scientific Management”

_

_

_

133

136 141 ix

x

CONTENTS CHAPTER SIX

THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM

IS

The Response to Technologism and Scientism

152

Dilemmas of Anarchism

162

The Decentered Subject of the New York School

APPENDIX A MEYER SCHAPIRO, “A CRITIQUE: PEVSNER ON MODERNITY”

(1938)

_

169

nz!

APPENDIX B MEYER SCHAPIRO,”AN ANTIWAR SPEECH AT COLUMBIA”

(AY 18, 1972)

173

APPENDIX C INTERVIEWS WITH MEYER SCHAPIRO AND LILLIAN MILGRAM SCHAPIRO QULY 15, 1992-JANUARY 22, 1995)

175

Notes

Bibliography of Primary Sources

Index

183

219

223

Illustrations

. “The DISSENT Art Show,” Dissent: A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion,

PRNAME YH

vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer

1961), p. 232

“The Second DISSENT Art Show [in 1963],” Dissent, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1964), p. 244 Meyer Schapiro, Portrait of Irving Howe, 1970s Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34, 1953/4 Ratil Martinez, Sin titulo (Untitled), 1958

12 13 14

Ratl Martinez, Sin titulo (Untitled),

14

Armando

Morales, Guerrillo muerto I (Dead Guerrilla I), 1958

1961

Guido Llinas, Sin titulo (Unititled), 1953 Antonio Vidal, Sin titulo (Untitled), 1953 Raul Martinez, Siempre Che (Che Always), 1970 Pierre Soulages, Painting, 1952/3

10. 11, 12. Bill Russell’s “Action Painting” with a Basketball, The Budweiser 1984 Olympic Games Art Collection 13. Rasheed Araeen, Oh Dear, Oh Dear, What a Mess You Have Made!, 1994 14. Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950 15. Ad Reinhardt, Number 88, 1950 (Blue), 1950 16. Boanerges Cerrato, Triptych, 1986 17. Juan Rivas, Untitled (After Pollock), ca. 1985 18. César Paternosto, From the Archetypal Geometry Series #1 (6), 1982 19. Adolph Gottlieb, The Alchemist, 1945 20. Norman Lewis, Mumbo Jumbo, 1950 21, Norman Lewis, Klu Klux, 1963 22. Norman Lewis, Processional, 1965 23. Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1949 |. Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958 25. Meyer Schapiro, Marcuse and Horkheimer at a Meeting of the Institute for Social Research in New York City, September 1938 26. Meyer Schapiro, Portrait of Leo Lowenthal at the Institute for Social

27. 28. 29.

14

14 15 19 21 22

23 23 25 25 28 29 30 31 31 32 55 58

Research in New York City, September 1938

59

Meyer Schapiro, Portrait of Erich Fromm and Unidentified Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in New York City, September 1938 Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, vol. 7 (1938)

59

Adolph Gottlieb, Romanesque Facade,

66

1949

61

xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

30. 31.

Meyer Schapiro, Notre Dame de la Couture, 1927

32.

Louise Bourgeois, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1949

Rudolf Baranik, Napalm Elegy, 1972

33. Ad Reinhardt, No War, 1967, from The Artists and Writers Portfolio 34. Elaine de Kooning, Untitled (Black Mountain #14), 1948 35. Meyer Schapiro, Abstract Painting, 1950s 36. Elaine de Kooning, Bill at St. Marks, 1956 37. Joan Mitchell, Hemlock, 1956 38. Willem de Kooning, Ashville, 1949 39. Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950/1 40. Barnett Newman, The Broken Obelisk, 1967 Book advertisements in Dissent, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1964)

67

92 93 95 97 99 119 121

137 156

157 182

Acknowledgments

An

NEW BOOK IS WEIGHTED WITH OLD INTELLECTUAL DEBTS, AND THIS ONE is hardly an exception to that rule. Among the numerous individuals

and groups to whom I am indebted, there are several who stand out. Generally speaking, this study began with a public lecture I gave in 1985 at Trinity College, Dublin. T owe the faculty there thanks (particularly James Thompson) for the opportunity to address this topic publicly for the first time.

Three subsequent events also helped to provide the major impetus for this book. The first was a review essay I wrote for Art History in 1985, which was edited by Fred Orton, from whom

I have learned a number

of things about the New

York School.

The second was a 1986 meeting in Managua with several members of the Sandinista Artists Union (particularly Ral Quintanilla, Donaldo Altamirano, and Leonel Cerra-

to) who provided me with a far more sophisticated analysis of the reception of Abstract Expressionism in Central America than did anything in the art-historical literature from the West at that point. The third was the challenge of giving a series of lectures about Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art at the University of Bremen in 1988 when I was a Visiting Professor at this German tion by Michael

Miiller and

institution, thanks to an invita-

Peter Biirger, two eminent

scholars with

whom

I dis-

cussed some of the ideas in this study. Similarly, in writing this book, I have been influenced and aided by several key scholars in the field: Donald Kuspit, who (when I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill) introduced me to many of the more perplexing interpretative issues surrounding Abstract Expressionism; Dore Ashton, who has

always generously allowed herself to be interviewed about her unequaled knowledge of the New York School; and the late Meyer Schapiro, as well as Dr. Lillian Milgram,

who graciously provided me with access to many unpublished documents of great importance to an analysis of this period. In addition,

I learned much

from

Ouida

Lewis,

who

kindly agreed to be inter-

viewed about her former husband, the late Norman Lewis, whom I had the good fortune to meet in the fall of 1978; from Annalee Newman

and Rita Reinhardt Bedford,

who spoke not only of their deceased spouses - Barnet Newman and Ad Reinhardt but also of broader issues central to the New

York School; and from Rudolf Baranik,

who was a longtime friend of Ad Reinhardt, along with May Stevens, who was an important part of the New York art world during the 1950s. Beyond the art world my debts are also extensive. Just as this book makes an unprecedented effort to situate the New York School in relation to various left-wing disxiii

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

courses and movements, so I gained a great deal of knowledge about these issues

during my fifteen years (1978-93) as a professor at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a member of a group of scholars and activists called the Theoretical Community, which comprised faculty members from various departments (African-American Studies, Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, and Sociology). This remarkable group represented almost ev-

ery conceivable theoretical tendency on the left - from the positions of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas), Antonio Gramsci, and those of Althusser’s circle through the vantage points of the Monthly Review School (Braverman, Magdoff, and Sweezy), American Pragmatism, Third World dependency theory (Samir Amin), Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory, and French poststructuralism (Foucault and Derrida) through major schools of Marxian cultural history in Great Britain (E.J. Hobsbawm,

E. P. Thompson,

and Raymond Williams) and France (Marc

Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie). As one might imagine, our discussions were as animated as they were instructive,

our disagreements often as profound as they were enlightening. Many passages in this book are testaments to the signal lessons about critical theory and political economy that I acquired from the Theoretical Community in Cortland. Among the many exceptionally accomplished scholars in the dynamic group were Frank Hearn, Gerald Surrette, Henry Steck, John Ryder, Pete Banner-Haley, John Marciano, Jamie Dangler, Deveraux Kennedy, Michael Mertens, and Colleen Kattau. Although not members of this group, Catherine Lewis, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, and Howard Botwinick were

also professors at SUNY-Cortland from whom J learned much. The considerable debt

that I owe all of these former colleagues will endure at least as long as my work

does.

As a result of the political critiques and social activism spawned by Cortland’s

Theoretical Community in the 1980s, we established a network of stimulating interchanges with some outstanding scholars in the area, such as James Petras, Perry An-

derson, and Giovanni Arrighi at SUNY-Binghamton; Eugene Genovese, Betsy FoxGenovese, and Christopher Lasch at the University of Rochester; and the collective

of scholars at Cornell University who worked with CUSLAR, the Committee on U.S.Latin American Relations, which included Bud Kenworthy, Tommie

Sue Montgom-

ery, Leonardo and Cecilia Vargas, Lavinia Belli, and Félix and Maria Masud-Piloto. Parts of this book have been published in four different places: Art History, the Oxford Art Journal, a catalog for the Tate Gallery in England, and another catalog for the Studio Museum in Harlem. Because of the sterling editorial help that they gave me

on these earlier versions of my book, I must express deep gratitude to several scholars: Neil McWilliam, Andrew Hemingway, Alex Potts, Richard Wrigley, Penelope Curtis, Ann Gibson, Jorge Daniel Veneciano,

and Kinshasha Conwill.

Since coming to the University of New Mexico, I have incurred some important intellectual debts while working on this book. I would therefore like to thank Joyce Szabo, Linda Hall, Flora Clancy, Joe Rothrock, Christopher Mead, Tom Barrow, Kathleen Howe, and Holly Barnet-Sanchez, among others. Particularly helpful have been.

the debates and discussions that I have had with a group of outstanding graduate students here at UNM: Jasmine Alinder,

Diane Zuliani, Brian Winkenweder,

Catherine

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS DiCesare, Lindsay Jones, Stephanie Iverson, Danny Hobson, Gina Tarver, Alejandra Jiménez, Teresa Rivera, James Crump, Greta Murphy, Sara Marion, Suzanne Newman,

Diane Reed, Feliza Additionally, I lach, Patricia Hills, Eisenman — as well

Medrano, and Ananda Chakrabarty. need to convey special thanks to some close friends - Alan WalShaw Smith, James Thompson, Patricia Mathews, and Stephen as to my editors at Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Reh] and

Michael Gnat. Finally, I must thank Catherine DiCesare for her excellent help in preparing the manuscript and my dear partner Margery Amdur for her warm support throughout the past few years.

xv

Introduction

It is conceivable that an art which avows a socialist doctrine may support attitudes dangerous to the working class. . .. The ease with which

slogans of socialism are appropriated by the fascists indicates how

great is the gulf between slogans and action, between general asser-

tions and effective tactics. . . .

On the other hand, works without political intention have by their

honesty and vigor excited people to a serious questioning of themselves and their loyalties; they have destroyed the faith in feudal or bourgeois values and helped to create the moral courage necessary for revolutionary action and will. . . . The fact that a work of art has a politically radical content therefore does not assure its revolutionary value. Nor does a non-political content necessarily imply its irrelevance to revolutionary action.

~ Meyer Schapiro, “The Patrons of Revolutionary Art,” Marxist Quarterly (1937)!

+ Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions . . . but to

work at the level of fundamental attitudes. . .. The notion of a “message” in art, even

when

politically radical,

already contains

an ac-

commodation to the world as it is. . . This is not a time for political art, but politics have migrated into autonomous art, and never more so than when they seem to be politically dead. — T. W. Adorno, “Commitment”

(1962)2

+ When the socialist imagination is at its most serious, it proposes a dialectical relationship to “classical” liberalism: a refusal, on the one hand, of a quasi-Benthamite rationale for laissez-faire economics and

{on the other hand] a pact in behalf of preserving and enlarging the boundaries of freedom. . . . Socialists and liberals have some areas of

common interest in balancing these two stresses, the communal and the individual, the shared and the alone. . . .

If we confine ourselves to the “advanced” countries, one criticism

socialists have come increasingly to make of liberalism is that it fails to

2

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

extend sufficiently its democratic concerns from the political to the

economic realm.

- Irving Howe, “Socialism and Liberalism,” Dissent (1977)3

NY JUSTIFICATION FOR YET ANOTHER STUDY OF AN ALREADY WELL-KNOWN

and widely discussed group of artists should generally entail the disclosure of new material along with a novel approach to it. Among the things to be expected from such a study would be the acquisition of new primary documents, the inclusion of previously neglected secondary sources, and the formulation of a shift in critical perspective that complements, as well as consolidates, much of the existing art-historical literature while also charting a distinctly different course beyond it. This present study of Abstract Expressionism was written with all three of these requirements firmly in mind. A theory of history, the method used here is also intended to yield a self-critical history of this theory. Accordingly, the interpretative framework used in this book

has emerged at least in part from an attempt to consider new material in a stringent and innovative manner. As a result of this new documentation and the analysis it has elicited, there has been a resulting methodological shift in my approach to Abstract Expressionism. This shift has in turn led, | hope, both to the further elucidation of older documents once assumed to be conclusively analyzed and to the concomitant amendment of the established interpretations of this previously cited material. At once historically engaged and critically detached, the approach employed here was intended to be informed by critical theory without being overwhelmed by it. If this has been achieved, it is because my method has not stopped simply with criticism in the Enlightenment tradition, whereby judgments are sometimes made from a purely “neutral” or supposedly Archimidean vantage point. Accordingly, the method I have attempted to use frequently involves an immanent critique, which is a form of discursive, as well as empirically grounded, analysis that begins with an as-

sessment of the subject from a pivotal place in concrete proximity to it (rather than from any Olympian heights above or outside it). This approach commences with an analysis of the art object’s own manifest structural logic, along with a critique of the artist’s avowedly “negative” aims. A critical reconsideration of these intended artistic

aims along with a look at the unintended consequences of Abstract Expressionism, and in light of the resulting pictorial logic of the artworks produced, will conclude

this study. As such, this analysis should bring maximum interpretative cohesion to the historical study of Abstract Expressionism without minimizing the movement's undeniable diversity or daunting complexity. All of this has been done so as to locate the subject’s symptomatic paradoxes from

within, both in order to elicit recognition of those progressive attributes that internally contradict the subjects’ own otherwise regressive aspects and also to point beyond the historical impasse of this contradictory site of contestation. Along these lines, then, determining the meaning of Abstract Expressionism lies not so much either in

disclosing its weaknesses or in celebrating its strengths, but in understanding the contradictory nature of their union and how their unlikely convergence holds a qualified

INTRODUCTION

promise for the future. As such, I have attempted to address through this critique the

originally dissident and still paradoxical power of Abstract Expressionism - in relation to an overarching system that the best of its artists never could escape nor ever ceased. to contest. At issue here is the paradoxical relationship of progressive tendencies within modernism,

which constitute a type of “alternative modernism,”

to the ever ex-

tended reach of the modern corporate state. As will become clear, the signification of Abstract Expressionism involves an uneasy nexus of competing ideological values as well as aesthetic concerns, none of which enjoys absolute sway or unchecked sovereignty.

A DISCOURSE

ON

METHOD

AND

SOURCES

The new primary documents that I shall use consist of two different collections

of unpublished material. Access to these sets of materials has in turn necessitated the reexamination of period literature from the 1940s through the 1960s, including much that appeared in journals that had generally been assumed to lie outside the domain of Abstract Expressionist studies. First, there are the recently obtained and until then unpublished FBI files on several North American artists of almost two hundred pages from the McCarthy period through the 1960s. These secret files divulge what powerful members of the U.S. government deemed the subversive activities and artworks

by six artists from the first generation of Abstract Expressionism: Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner. (The files on Norman

Lewis are still being declassified for clearance by the U.S. Department of Justice.)5 These governmental documents are revealing concerning the dissident positions of the artists, especially when seen in light of other materials in the Archives of American Art and in relation to the left-wing publications of the 1950s and 1960s with

which many of the Abstract Expressionists became associated.

Two of the journals with which members of the New York School became linked

were crucial to left-wing discourse in the United States during the fifties and sixties. The first was Dissent: A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion, which was founded in 1954 by Irving Howe, with Meyer Schapiro being a charter member of the editorial board and Harold Rosenberg being a noteworthy contributor throughout the 1950s and 1960s. (Schapiro remained on the editorial board until his death in March 1996.) The second

was the short-lived New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought, which was founded in 1961 with Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg among its sponsors.® Association with and support for both of these left-wing but anti-Stalinist journals attested to a notable political shift on the part of most artists in the New York School. This is par-

ticularly clear if we contrast these publications with the various other leftist, generally popular-front publications with which the young artists later called Abstract Expressionists had been involved

in the 1930s and

1940s: Art Front, The New Masses,

Partisan Review, P.M., and Soviet Russia Today. By the 1950s all of the latter had either

ceased publishing, remained pro-Soviet, or become anti-Socialist.” As Irving Howe and the other editors of Dissent made clear, their publication was

inspired by The Masses (1911-17), with its emphasis on nonaligned socialism and ex-

/

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

perimentalism in the arts, rather than by The New Masses, which was started in 1926

and linked from the beginning to the Communist Party.8 When Howe, Schapiro, and

others on the left defined themselves throughout the period as “anti-Stalinist,” if not “anti-Soviet,” they did so in order to disallow the rigid cold-war framework for defining politically what constituted being on the left or right. Hence, the left-wing category of “anti-Stalinist” was in this case more a “negative” assertion of political nonconformity than it was a means of positioning oneself in a positive way. Conversely, the orthodox framework, which was invoked on both sides of the cold-war ideological divide, decreed that socialists and others on the left support the Soviet Union, while liberals and conservatives were to identify wholeheartedly with the United

States. As we shall see in Chapter 1, this reductive mode for naming “heretics” and “turncoats” in fact did considerable violence to the period political options on the left throughout this era. Put succinctly, the open-ended term “anti-Stalinist” meant

“none of the above” when one was asked to name the system with which a person on the left could identify consistently. As such, the designation “anti-Stalinist” was em-

ployed by Dissent and the New York School less as a synonym for “anti-Soviet” than as a way of refusing period orthodoxies along with the crude political taxonomy promoted by cold-war ideologues from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Unpublished correspondence about Dissent in the Archives of American Art (such as a letter from Meyer Schapiro to Ad Reinhardt on October 15, 1963)? and several public notices in the early 1960s about Dissent Art Shows (Figs. 1, 2) make clear that many of the Abstract Expressionists helped to sustain this democratic socialist jour-

nal financially during difficult moments.!° In 1961, for example, an Art Committee that included Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell organized the exhibition and sale of artworks to rescue

the financially strapped Dissent. Among the forty-one artists who contributed works to the sale were Adolph Gottlieb, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman. About Schapiro’s own crucial support for Dissent, especially in the 1950s and

1960s, Irving Howe (Fig. 3) has written: From the start Meyer Schapiro, the art historian, served as an editor, and while he wrote almost nothing for our pages, we were happy that so eminent a mind was ready to stand by us at a time when we were being attacked on all sides. It mat-

tered that Meyer Schapiro attended some board meetings, speaking in his passionately lucid way about socialism as the fulfillment of Western tradition. . .. [O]ne winter afternoon after a Dissent meeting, five or six of us got stuck in an

elevator and, forced to wait for rescue, did not know what to do- until Norman

Mailer slyly asked Schapiro a question (something, as |recall, about the relationship between Picasso and Matisse), whereupon we were treated to a splendid

twenty-minute talk. When the repairman arrived we left, if not with the troubles of socialism under control, then at least with more knowledge about modern

art.11

Established in the mid-1950s, Dissent was meant to be an anti-Stalinist and pro-

socialist counter to the political odyssey of many New York intellectuals, particularly

The

DISSENT

Art

Show

Esthetically and financially a success, an ART EXHIBITION AND SALE for the benefit of DISSENT was held in on attractive hall in New York City on May 6 & 7 under the direction of William Fitelson. The editors of DISSENT wish to take this occasion to give their sincerest thanks to the ART COMMITTEE 196! which organ-

ized the show Fitelson,

(by all accounts one of the best in the City this season}: William

Thomas

B.

Hess,

Willem

de

Kooning,

Robert

Motherwell,

Larry

Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro; and the forty-one contributing artists:

Wolf Kahn Aristodemos Kaldis Franz Kline Elaine de Kooning Willem de Kooning Irving Kriesberg Fay Lansner Alfred Leslie Isaac Lichtenstein Palko Lucas Robert Mallary Nicholas Marsicano Mercedes Matter

Gert Berliner Norman Bluhm

Gandy Brodie Paul Burlin Dorothy

Dehner

Dorothy Eisner

Herbert Ferber

John

Ferren

Perle Fine

Jone Freilicher

Robert Goodnough Adolph Gottlieb Grace Hartigan Peter Kahn

Figure 1.

Rivers,

Robert Motherwell Barnett Newman

Constantino Nivola Robert Orlove

Felix Pasilis Patricia

Passlof

Jeanne Reynal Larry Rivers

Jason Seley

Thomas Sills Leon Smith Hyde Solomon Richard Stankiewicz

Adje Yunkers

“The DISSENT Art Show,” Dissent: A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion, vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer

1961), p. 232. The cover of this issue of Dissent was designed by Elaine de Kooning.

Figure 2. “The Second DISSENT Art Show [in 1963],” Dissent, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1964), p. 244.

The

Second

DISSENT

Art

Show

DISSENT is pleased to inform its readers that @ second Art Exhibition and Sale was held in New York City under the direction of William Fitelson. This show took place In

December,

to once

with

forty-six

painters

contributing

paintings.

The

editors

of

DISSENT

wish

again offer their sincere thanks to the committee in charge of the show (Meyer

Schapiro, Thomas Hess, Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg) and to the following list of contributing artists. From the standpoint of financial help to DISSENT the 1963

Art Show was even more successful than the first:

Milton Avery Gandy Brodie Nell Blaine Fritz Bultman Emilio Cruz Elaine de Kooning Dorothy Dehner

Derothy Eisner Herbert Ferber Perle Fine Jane Freilicher Robert Goodnough Adolph Gottlieb Red Grooms Philip Guston

David Here Grace Hartigan L. Jocelyn A. Kaldis Peter Kahn Franz Kline Irving Kreisberg Metsumu Kenemitsu Fey Lansner lseac Lichtenstein Conrad Marce-Reilli Arline Meyer Nicholes Marsicano Robert Motherwell Alice Neal

Barnett Newman Constantino Nivole Felix Pasilis Jeanne Reynal

Clara Seley Jason Seley Thomas Sills David Sawin Devid Slivka Leon Smith Richard Tumsuden Jane Wilson

“Adja Yunkor

ABSTRACT those who

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

were associated with Partisan Review, since (to quote

Howe),

“they were

abandoning their socialist convictions.”!2 Despite its resolutely anti-Stalinist opposition to any concept of socialism that was either illiberal or antidemocratic, Dissent

has always featured pieces by many different tendencies on the left, from the Frankfurt School and Worker's Council socialism to social democracy and anarchism. In keeping with the classical liberal commitment to civil liberties and democratic institutions (as noted in the epigraph above by Irving Howe on the points of intersection between liberalism and socialism), the editors of Dissent published essays by writers who disagreed with their main line.

One such figure was the anarchist Paul Goodman, who had earlier contributed to Tiger's Eye, the journal associated with the Abstract Expressionists, when in 1947 Barnett Newman, also an anarchist, was an editorial associate.!3 Through his writings for Possibilities (1947-8), which was edited by Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, Goodman also inspired a painting by Motherwell, namely, The Emperor of China (1947) - a work that was executed

not long before the Chinese

Empire became

the

People’s Republic of China with the victory of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary forces in 1949. Among the lines in this poem by Goodman were the following two: “. . . all China realizes with horror that it is imprisoned” and “Therefore let us set free the people of China.”14 Subsequently, Goodman would collaborate with Barnett Newman on the publication in 1968 of Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, for which Newman wrote the Foreword and Goodman the Preface. About Paul Goodman’s contributions to Dissent, Howe has stated: “though a declared anarchist at odds with us politically, {Goodman] remained a steady contributor to the end . . . he thought me ‘dried out’

by Marxism, I found his pose as sage rather tiresome.”15 Both the FBI files (to which we shall return at length in Chapter 3) and these fil-

iations with the various left-wing tendencies of Dissent and New Politics demonstrate that the “anti-movement” known as Abstract Expressionism should be defined more

in terms of what it opposed than in light of any one position that it proposed. Revealingly, these documents underscore quite clearly how the “modern man” discourse, currently being overused to “explain” the New York School, in fact applies only ina marginal way to the Abstract Expressionists, since, as Michael Leja himself has admitted, this discourse “implicitly absolved from responsibility and guilt conscious human. agency and the political order.”16 Indeed, the aforementioned

new material (and more to be introduced later) is

quite enlightening, especially when assessed in conjunction with a closer reading of the Abstract Expressionists’ own statements and related to our own more extensive

knowledge at present of their consistently principled stands both against U.S. military intervention abroad and in favor of the civil rights movement at home. All this exemplifies well the New York School's antagonism toward existing discourses (such as the cold-war view that you had to be either procapitalist or pro-Soviet), even when.

in some cases they also paradoxically shared some common assumptions with these same discourses. Equally revealing along these lines was their opposition to any programmatic identity - it would be “disastrous to name ourselves,” Willem de Kooning declared in 1950 at a time when “naming names” was a right-wing obsession.!7 This

INTRODUCTION

Figure 3. Meyer Schapiro, Portrait of Irving Howe, pen and ink on paper, 1970s, Private Collection. This drawing of Schapiro’s longtime friend was used on the bookcover for Irving Howe's memoits, A Margin of Hope (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). This is the book in which Howe's written “portrait” of Schapiro as editor for Dissent appears.

negative or evasive viewpoint of the Abstract Expressionists in fact signaled a shared. resistance to certain “unifying” or centering beliefs in postwar U.S. society, among

which one would have to include the “modern man” discourse. These purportedly unifying ideological beliefs of the status quo, many of which were grounded in workplace practices, entailed an embrace of the following: instrumental thinking, scientism, U.S. imperialism, corporate capitalism, and Eurocentrism, all of which were generally championed (albeit to very different degrees) both by right-wing McCarthyists (such as George Dondero) and by cold-war liberals (such as

Arthur Schlesinger Jr). Conversely, all of these positions were generally opposed -

how effectively is another issue - by the major first-generation Abstract Expressionists, whether on behalf of anarchism, socialism, or social democracy. (Reinhardt, Pollock, and, perhaps, Norman Lewis were closer to being “non-Stalinist” sympathizers with

the Soviet Union up through the mid-1950s.) Significantly, all of the views held by the Abstract Expressionists were for the most part in alliance with classical liberal civil liberties and democratic concerns in the economic sphere, as well as in the political domain. Robert Motherwell,

in discussing the Abstract Expressionists (or the “School of

New York,” as he first christened them in a lecture in 1949 and an article of 1951), emphasized that their artwork was as much about negation as it was about affirmation, as much about rejections as it was about consent.18 (Reinhardt’s first definition

of art as “pure negation” would be published only in 1952.)!9 Of course, the emphatic nature of this undertaking was not defined either as “escapism,” “disengagement,” “resignation,” or “evasion,” but rather as an ethically unrepentant and even

desublimated contestation of the existing order. Such was also the case in the statements by other Abstract Expressionists — as, for example, when

Barnett Newman

8

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

claimed in 1948 that “the only moral act is the useless one, and the only useless act

is the aesthetic one.”20

The highly important antidefinition of Abstract Expressionism provided by Rob-

ert Motherwell in 1949 went as follows: The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind

rejects of the contemporary social order.2! . . . It is 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. . . . But I think that the art of the School of New York, like a great deal of modern art that is called “art for art’s sake,” has social implications. These

might be summarized under the general notion of protest. . . .22

The rejection by the School of New York of prevailing ideologies - or its refusal

to accept conventional positions as representative of man’s real needs, basic

wants, and desires . . . [along with] the rejection of the lies and falsifications of

modern Christian, feudal aristocratic, and bourgeois society, of the property-

loving world that the Renaissance tradition expressed, has led us, like many other moder artists, to affinities with the art of other cultures: Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean, Africa, the South Seas, and above all the Orient. . .. Conventional painting [in the West] is a lie - not an imposture, but the product of a man who

is a living lie. ... One can only guess, if there were something more deeply and

humanly inspiring, at what might be, what all mankind might be capable of.23

Most major Abstract Expressionists, along with Meyer Schapiro, made common

cause with Dissent through their anti-Stalinism, anticapitalism, antidogmatism, and anti-imperialism. Similarly, Irving Howe, who had met Mark Rothko and deeply ad-

mired the artist’s work,?4 also spoke for the members of the New York School when he observed of the agreements and disagreements between classical liberalism and democratic socialism: “If we confine ourselves to ‘advanced’ countries, one criticism

socialists [and anarchists] have come increasingly to make of liberalism is that it fails to extend sufficiently its democratic concerns from the political to the economic realm.”25 a

The second group of unpublished primary documents on which I shall draw in this study strikingly extends a number of the points already made, while introducing several new considerations as well. These other documents consist of information gleaned from an extended series of interviews (1992-5) with Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram

Schapiro that have been conducted

by Andrew

Hemingway, James

Thompson, and myself.26 Included among these documents are also various unpublished lectures and essays by Meyer Schapiro himself from the 1930s through the 1970s. It is Schapiro’s largely underappreciated, as well as little understood, interpreta-

tion of Abstract Expressionism (along with his concomitant lifelong commitment to “unorthodox Marxism”) that will form the cornerstone of my own approach to that

movement. Among the many significant documents to be found in Meyer Schapiro’s

INTRODUCTION

Personal Papers in New York City are, for example, his “Memorial Address on Barnett Newman” (July 6, 1970), which included commentary on Newman’s longtime commitment to anarchism. In addition, there are some highly informative personal reflections on Marxism and socialism, such as Schapiro’s handwritten 1957/8 “Commentary on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program,” which relates quite profoundly to his

key essay on Abstract Expressionism from 1957.27 Schapiro, who in 1959 went from being an acquaintance of Barnett Newman to being his close friend at a time when Newman was finally gaining some critical praise and modest financial success, gave him this funerary tribute in Campbell Memorial,

New York City.?8 Schapiro’s unpublished address included the following observations:

Until he was forty, Barnett Newman was hardly known as a painter outside a very

small circle in New York. He had no driving ambition or eagerness for success and

showed little if at all before the late 1950s. His art matured slowly, without the pressure of publicity, competition and the market. Unsupported by institutions, he pursued an independent way of life. ... Very early he reached conclusions about society and politics that can be described as anarchist, closest perhaps to those of Kropotkin who was a generous mind, both a scientist and a revolution-

ary...

Yet a current of fervent idealism behind certain of these interests ultimately

flowed into his art. . . . It was upon this attitude, I believe, and on his experience

of the art of the museums and the great art which had emerged in the early decades of this century, that he built the art we know and admire. Its breadth and

challenging simplicity, its sparseness and complete freedom from gesture and virtuosity, issue from this aspiration to the noble.29

THE

RECEPTION

OF

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

A fundamental reexamination of the avowed intentions of the Abstract Expressionists is warranted because highly important new information about the broader reception of this artwork in Latin America and elsewhere reveals the current inadequacy of much that the social history of art has had to say about this issue. When we seriously interrogate previously ignored and undeniably significant sources about the historical reception of Abstract Expressionism throughout the Americas and the Third

World during the 1950s and 1960s, we come away with quite a different picture of the signification of Abstract Expressionism, both here and abroad, than the cold-war studies by Serge Guilbaut and Eva Cockcroft would sometimes prepare us to encounter.3° The point here is not so much that they are wrong, but that their positions are now too reductive (and dated) to permit further insights into the ongoing struggle

over the art’s signification and thus also into the unstable nature of Abstract Expressionism. Because Guilbaut’s book of 1983 and Cockcroft’s article of 1974 were published long ago and in a different historical epoch, this is not necessarily a damning

observation to make about their work. My disagreements with them aside, it will be clear throughout the following critique that Guilbaut and Cockcroft have served as forceful stimuli, as well as significant foils for my own analysis. All of this is tanta-

10

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EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

mount to conceding the considerable contribution they have each made to “critical” art history. Moreover, the overall aim of my study constitutes an acknowledgment of the power with which they raised the pressing problem of “cultural imperialism” in our hemisphere and beyond. In this regard, Eva Cockcroft and Serge Guilbaut gave convincing descriptions of the ideological intentions of the “business liberals” from the United States (whether art

dealers, government propagandists, or formalist critics) who sent Abstract Expressionism abroad. Nonetheless, their accounts largely failed to chart how the artists, intellectuals, and popular movements of Latin America often assigned a very different, even “insurrectionary,” meaning to Abstract Expressionism that caused the art to be recruited as an “anti-imperialist” force in the 1950s and 1960s. In retrospect, we can see that there is something historically constraining about the assumption that if U.S. cold warriors intended their traveling art exhibitions in Latin America to be suc-

cessful examples of “cultural imperialism,” then the people of Latin America had no choice but to comply unthinkingly and at their own expense with this hegemonic reading of Abstract Expressionism as a celebratory signifier of mainstream U.S. values. Not surprisingly, this tendency by some Western scholars to overlook how Latin American people received Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, as if its signification resulted only from the intentional designs of those in the United States who circulated the art shows, has understandably encountered stiff criticism at the hands of several important Latin American experts in the arts. One such art critic was Juan Acha of Peru, a left-wing intellectual and person of letters who, until he died in 1995, was one of the most widely recognized scholars from all of Latin America. In his signal book Las culturas estéticas de América Latina (1993), Acha specifically refuted part of

the Cockcroft and Guilbaut thesis concerning how cultural imperialism has operated: The 1960s ... were a time of the North-americanization [of Latin American Art]. . .. But several young scholars were mistaken when, in their zeal to criticize

their own government, they credited the CIA with the authorship of this North-

americanization of our art, as if we were easily manipulated by such coercion

and persuasion. In their paternalistic outbursts, these young scholars have also

underestimated us.3!

While some scholars would have us see Abstract Expressionism primarily as a monolithic and stable signifier around the world for “petty bourgeois values” and “United States imperialism,”32 a contrary interpretation of the New York School was written in the early 1970s by Latin American art critic Marta Traba. Her receptionist-

based and probably countries, exception tavio Paz,

historically anchored reading of Abstract Expressionism’s dissident aims is the most well-known and influential analysis throughout Latin American at least among members of the intelligentsia and the art world. A possible would be Mexico, where somewhat competing interpretations by poet Ocon the one hand, and by art critics such as Teresa del Conde or Raquel Ti-

bol, on the other, seem to be more widely embraced.33 (The latter two critics are clos-

er to Guilbaut and Cockcroft in their assignment of meaning to the artistic role of the New York School.)

INTRODUCTION It is of note, however, that Traba’s interpretation of the New York School was

grounded in her firsthand knowledge of the “counterhegemonic” reception of Abstract Expressionism from the United States in much important Latin American art

during the fifties and sixties. An avowedly leftist and clearly dissident, if not directly

anti-imperialist, usage of Abstract Expressionism was registered in some notable paintings from the 1950s by Armando Morales of Nicaragua and Raul Martinez of

Cuba, as well as in works by other artists from such vanguard Cuban groups as Los

Once (1953-5) and Los Cinco (1955-63). We shall return shortly to this left-wing re-

cruitment of U.S. Abstract Expressionism by some of the major Latin American artists to emerge in the 1950s.

Traba was born in Argentina but did much of her critical writing on contemporary art while she was living in Colombia. It was there that she made her name in the 1960s and 1970s as perhaps the most original voice of the day in modern Latin American criticism. (Along with her spouse, Angel Rama, she was deported from the United States in 1983, because the Reagan Administration found their left-wing political views to be subversive.)+4 It was in her now classic 1973 study entitled Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plasticas latinoamericanos (Two Vulnerable Decades in the Visual

Arts of Latin America) that Traba analyzed Abstract Expressionism from the United States in an innovative manner. In doing so, she utilized her commanding grasp of

then-current Latin American artistic practice and expressly drew on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. She developed a reading of Abstract Expressionism and its pertinence to Latin America that was in many respects analogous to the socialist interpretation used by Meyer Schapiro in his 1957 essay entitled “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art” — an essay that figures prominently in my study.

Along these lines, Traba wrote of how “la resistencia critica” of “la generacién de De Kooning (Pollock, Motherwell, Kline, Newman,

Rothko)” was “against converting

art into a component of the technological project that dominates in a consumerist society.”35 Consequently, she saw the art of the Abstract Expressionists as oppositional, owing to how it drew upon “una dimensi6n interior” in artistic production that was at odds with the salient ideological attributes in the West of the corporate capitalist

mode of production (specifically its pervasive instrumentalist thinking as manifested

in scientism, technophilia, and positivism). Her critique was pervaded by a note of urgency because these instrumentalist values were then starting to be implanted in Latin America through the hegemonic economic logic ofa multinational capitalism

and Western imperialism that were centered in the United States.36 But what was the original reception in the 1950s accorded Abstract Expressionism when it first became well-known in Latin America? More specifically, what was the artistic, as well as political, reaction to paintings of the New York School by practicing Latin American artists, especially those associated with opposition both to local dictators and Western imperialism? By answering this generally unasked question about the history of hemispheric reception, so as to construct more expansively the meaning(s) of Abstract Expressionism in insurrectionary parts of contemporary Latin Amer-

ica, we shall be able to gauge the truth-value of the above-noted thesis advanced by

Marta Traba and Juan Acha.

11

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AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

The first case study here would have to involve Nicaraguan painter Armando Morales, who is easily one of the greatest artists ever to emerge from Central America. It was in 1959, for example, that the young Morales won the Ernst Wolf Prize as Best

Latin American Artist at the V Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil, and he did so with a high-

ly distinctive visual language that was indebted to the work of Robert Motherwell,

Antoni Tapies, and Serge Poliakoff. Among the more noteworthy works from this period in his career was an award-winning abstract painting entitled Guerrillo muerto I (Dead Guerrilla I) from 1958 (Fig. 4) that led to a series of over a dozen works related to the theme of revolutionary martyrdom.37 Not surprisingly, this striking painting was clearly indebted to the most famous (and largest) series of elegiac paintings done by an Abstract Expressionist, namely, the

“Spanish Elegy” series begun by Robert Motherwell in 1948 (Fig. 5). An antifascist

image of considerable obliqueness like that of Motherwell, this painting by Morales features morose and brooding megalithic forms in broad patches of black that are largely uninflected by any color accents and are marked throughout by organic con-

tours and meandering movement. There are at least two important reasons that Armando Morales would have used the “Spanish Elegy” series of Motherwell as raw material for his own art at this moment in history.

First, there had indeed been a revolutionary martyred in Nicaragua in 1956 when

the poet Rigoberto Lopez Pérez, in an effort to spark popular upheaval, had assassinat-

ed the dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia and then been killed himself. Second, the link to Motherwell’s epic memorial to the Spanish Republic, defeated in 1939 by the fascist leader Franco, would have been of interest to Morales because one of his best professors in Managua at the National School of Fine Arts during the 1940s, Augusto Figure 4. Armando Morales, Guerrillo muerto I (Dead Guerrilla 1), 1958, oil on canvas (48” x 80”). Collection of Ram6n Osuna, Miami Beach, Florida.

INTRODUCTION

Figure 5. Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34, 1953/4, oil on canvas (80° x 100%), Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1957.

Fernandez, was a Spanish refugee and former partisan who had fled Spain after Fran-

co's victory over the Spanish Republic.38 (Armando Morales would live to see both the death of Franco and the 1979 overthrow of Somoza’s son by revolutionary guerrillas from the Sandinista National Liberation Front. During the Sandinista years in

Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, Morales would serve as the Sandinista delegate to

UNESCO. He also painted some impressive elegies to Gen. Augusto César Sandino, the eponymous guerrilla leader whose death in 1934 had been ordered by Somoza Garcia, who

was then commander

of Nicaragua’s U.S.-trained National Guard.)39

An even earlier and no less important absorption of Abstract Expressionism from the United States into a process of national liberation in Latin America occurred in Cuba during the period leading up to and through the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Among the major figures to be associated with the Cuban version of Abstract Expressionism that dates from 1953 was Raul Martinez (Figs. 6, 7), one of Cuba’s foremost modern artists and perhaps the most significant painter to emerge into prominence during the first three decades of the Cuban Revolution.40 Along with a group of very accomplished painters that would include at various points Guido Llinas, Tomas Oliva, Antonia

Eirez, Antonio Vidal, and Hugo Consue-

gro, Rail Martinez would help establish the vanguard group named Los Once (19535) (Figs. 8, 9) and then participate in the movement

called Los Cinco, which would

13

14

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

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CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

Figure 6 (above). Raul Martinez, Sin titulo (Untitled), 1958, oil on canvas (3° x S’). Collection of Dr. Jay D. Hyman.

Figure 7 (right). Raul Martinez, Sin titulo (Untitled), 1961,

oil on canvas (397 x 31%"). Collection of Dr. Jay D. Hyman.

Figure 8. Guido Llinds, Sin titulo (Untitled), 1953, oil on canvas (26¥3” x 36%”). Collection of Dr. Jay D. Hyman. Figure 9. Antonio Vidal, Sin titulo (Untitled), 1953, oil on canvas (2° x 4’). Collection of Dr. Jay D. Hyman.

INTRODUCTION

Figure 10. Ratl Martinez, Siempre Che (Che Always), 1970, oil on canvas (45/4 x 50%”), Museo, Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.

have its culminating exhibition in 1963 in revolutionary Havana under the title “Expresionismo Abstracto.” (During the mid-1960s Ratil Martinez would switch his artistic allegiances from Abstract Expressionism - or Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock - to Rauschenberg and Warhol [Fig. 10]. The innovative introduction into Cuban culture of a variant of Pop Art made Ratil Martinez famous and caused him to be influential not only in Cuba but throughout Latin America.)41 About the modernist group Los Once, which arose in 1953 both to oppose the Batista dictatorship and to make Cuban art more internationalist, the Uruguayan art critic Luis Camnitzer has noted that the paintings of Martinez, Llinds, and others “referred to U.S. abstract expressionism and beat literature. They reasoned that abstract expressionism was a visual language uncontaminated by the political reality they opposed [the Batista dictatorship and Western imperialism]. . . . International art language was integrated with local political resistance.”42 Aside from having a profound impact on concrete artistic practice in the region, this group of artists aligned itself with the revolutionary movement then sweeping Cuba in the 1950s. Accordingly, they organized an Anti-Biennial in Homage to José Marti, held in Havana in 1954, in order to protest the II Hispanic-American Biennial

15

16

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE of the same year. The Cuban Abstract Expressionists, along with other artists, boycotted this official art exhibition because it was organized by a fascist government, that

of Franco in Spain, and was hosted by the Batista dictatorship in Cuba. Although Los Once disbanded in 1955 out of a fear of reprisals, the key individuals associated with the group (such as Ratil Martinez, Antonio Vidal, and Guido

Llin4s) refused to take

part in the III Hispanic-American Biennial of 1956 and boycotted the VIII National Salon of 1957.43

As a consequence of the alliance of Cuban Abstract Expressionists with the revolutionary 26th of July Movement led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, abstract art was viewed differently in Cuba than it was in the Soviet Union or most Eastern bloc

countries during the post-1945 period. Indeed, just as Che Guevara denounced Socialist Realism as nineteenth-century French art being recycled, so Fidel Castro would declare to the dismay of Soviet allies in the 1960s: “Our enemies are capitalists and

imperialists, not abstract art.”44

This situation did not change even though some of the artists formerly associat-

ed with Los Once became disenchanted with the Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s

and emigrated to Europe, where they continued to produce a distinguished Cuban variant of “counterrevolutionary” Abstract Expressionism for many more years in ex-

ile. Foremost among these Cuban exiles was Guido Llinas, who moved to France and as late as 1992 produced a moving tribute to a founding figure of Abstract Expression-

ism, entitled Por R. Motherwell.45 Ironically, then, in the 1960s Abstract Expressionism

from the United States was used as a point of departure by Cuban artists on both sides of the cold-war ideological divide.

stra ap: reve uray tive ide ROVE ical thei tow ind dent

quit the tos

Cait

the

wer toa

Revolution from

cep

Abstract Expressionists, always enjoyed respect in revolutionary Cuba (although the ascendency in Cuba of the mechanically reproduced poster as the major means of

and

Raul Martinez, who remained a strong partisan of the Cuban

1959 till his death in 1995, explained why vanguard painting, like that of the U.S.

generating images after the mid-1960s meant that Pop Art quickly overshadowed Abstract Expressionism for younger Cuban artists):

Abstract artists were strong when the [Cuban] Revolution took place, and they were supporting the Revolution; therefore, there was no negative identification with abstractionism.46

This remarkable and perhaps unlikely history of the Latin American reception of

Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s obviously raises new questions concerning the various things that the art of the New York School has come to signify around the world. The marked inadequacy of much art-historical literature for ex-

plaining the various dimensions of Abstract Expressionism is clear when we consider

Latin America. On the one hand, there are the Western scholars responsible for these

current assessments of Abstract Expressionism who deem it to be a signifier of U.S.

imperial interests within cold-war ideology, whether intentional or otherwise.47 For these authors, then, Abstract Expressionism was either conceived to be or has since

become little more than a beachhead of the cultural imperialism that helps sustain

U.S. dominance in the Americas. On the other hand, however, there are major Latin American artists from revolutionary movements (in such countries as Cuba and Nica-

ove con

well

thar

ing ical

one

edcl

Expy

cong es 9 Tumi Semy emis Sie w

this i944 arouy

INTRODUCTION

ragua from the 1950s to the 1980s) — as well as important art critics from South Amer-

ica like Marta Traba, Juan Acha, César Paternosto, and Luis Camnitzer - who view Abstract Expressionist warks as decentered vocabularies of visual conventions that are capable of development ina variety of directions, whether progressive or reactionary,

revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, and socialist or classical liberal.48

In the case of Cuba and Nicaragua, the aforementioned artists have actually drawn on postwar U.S. art from the 1950s through the 1980s to advance their respective nations’ cultural self-determination in the face of the foreign intervention and

ideological underdevelopment promoted by Western capital in concert with the U.S.

government (especially in the Reagan and Bush years). It was precisely this paradoxical potential of U.S. art, particularly as a raw material for Latin American artists in their own project of decolonization, that led the Cuban-American critic Coco Fusco to warn North American leftists against assuming rather paternalistically that the Latin American use of art from the United States was “necessarily a symptom of depen-

dency.”49

As indicated by all of these points (and many others that we shall explore), it is quite untenable to view Abstract Expressionism as a cohesive and centered signifier of the dominant ideology of the ruling class in the United States. Nor is it very plausible to see Abstract Expressionism as a simple “reflection” of the dominant ideological claims of a cold-war “business liberalism” that has been dogmatically supportive of the predominance of U.S. multinational capitalism throughout the Americas. Instead, we must adopt a more subtle and sophisticated conceptual framework that allows us to analyze the “dialogical” nature of art, with special emphasis being given to the re-

ception of this art quite aside from how it was intended to be shown abroad.5° Moreover, according and open-ended combined. An well, when he

to this model, an artwork is not a unified whole but rather a decentered site of contestation wherein various cultural practices are temporarily arresting insight along these lines was in fact made by Robert Motherstated that “works of art are by nature pluralistic: they contain more

than one class of values.”51 Any visual language in the arts should thus be understood as a locus for competing cultural traditions along with diverse aesthetic concerns and divergent ideological values. Hence, any artwork, regardless of how much it is publicly identified with one class or society, also signifies not only for dominant sectors but also for dominated classes and different class fractions. Consequently, artwork such as that by Abstract Expressionists should be approached as an uneasy locus - more or less stable but not

conclusively resolved — of competing values, some of which are hegemonic and others subaltern, out of which broader signification is constructed. In an unpublished

rumination of 1939, Meyer Schapiro encapsulated how this problem was one of the symptomatic paradoxes confronting the progressive tendencies within much modernist art, noting that “modern artistic individualism is a product of [the] bourgeoisie which enters into conflict with [the] bourgeoisie.”52 Again,

it was Robert Motherwell,

a former student of Schapiro, who conveyed

this position in a comparable way from within the New York School. In a prefatory

1944 assessment of the Abstract Expressionists on the eve of its definitive emergence

around 1946 (the term Abstract Expressionism was, of course, prefigured in a 1944 re-

17

18

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

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CRITIQUE

view by Robert Coates and then coined by him in 1946),53 Motherwell wrote as follows about the conditions confronting this group of artists: The preponderance of modern artists come from the middle-class. To this class modern art is always hostile by implication, and sometimes directly so. Even before the socialists, the artists recognized the enemy in the middle-class. But being

themselves of middle-class origin . . . the artist in a certain sense attacks himself. ... The artist's hostility for the middle class is reciprocated.54

In keeping with this dialogical conceptual framework, every visual language is, by its very nature, not merely a formative tool for political struggle but also a location of ongoing political conflict. As such, all visual languages are inherently shaped by cultural, ethnic, and class tensions, so that they are necessarily decentered.55 According-

ly, art does not simply reflect, embody, or parallel any one ideology, whether that of its patrons, makers, or spectators; rather, it signifies various ideological values and possibilities at once, all of which are in alliance with each other, none to the complete

exclusion of all the others. In this way art, like language, is addressed as a material force that unevenly shapes the social sphere, as do economic or political developments, and sometimes in contradistinction to them. As such, a dialogical analysis re-

calls what Marx termed the “law of uneven development” among various spheres of society.56 A result of just such a process of uneven development - and the conflictual as well as contested dialogical meaning emerging from it — is the present paradoxical predicament of Abstract Expressionism: This artwork is a “national” signifier abroad for a nation that has not generally embraced it and the “international” signifier else-

where for a principled opposition to the nation that originally produced it. However, this is only the latest in a long line of contradictions that have plagued this movement since its inception in the mid-1940s. Indeed, it was the paradoxical and quite unsettled context of the 1950s that, in addition to cold-war hysteria, allowed people allied with the U.S. government and corporate capital to attempt to use - often rather unsuccessfully - both modernist art and social realism as signifiers of an existing state of “total freedom” in the United States.57 This occurred when people formerly of the CIA, in collusion with certain cold-war liberals of corporate capital, mounted clandestine support for circulating exhibitions of artworks by dissident figurative artists, such as Ben Shahn, on the one hand, and the Abstract Expressionists, on the other.58 Revealingly, covert involvement by people associated with the CIA in funding these exhibitions was necessary because of the overt government censorship of the arts then rampant in the United States during the McCarthy years. In her well-known 1974 study cited earlier, Eva Cockcroft outlined in ground-

breaking fashion the nexus of relationships involving former CIA operatives and some MOMA Officials whereby Abstract Expressionism, along with other U.S. artworks in many different styles, was exhibited abroad as “representative” of U.S. culture. Hence, it is in this qualified sense that Serge Guilbaut was justified in his claim that North American “Avant-garde radicalism did not really ‘sell out,’ it was borrowed

for the anti-Communist cause.”5?

Figure 11. Pierre Soulages, Painting, 1952/3, oil on canvas (7754” x $14"), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photograph: David Heald, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (FN 53.1381).

20

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Nor was this contradictory situation peculiar to the onstrated by the case of French painter Pierre Soulages gon, a French critic identified with the New Left, wrote pean strain of Abstract Expressionism that has a strong Kline, which also emerged in the 1940s and 1950s:

New York School, as is dem(Fig. 11). Indeed, Michel Rarevealingly about this Euroaffinity to the work of Franz

[O)ne of the best lyric abstractionists, Pierre Soulages, has been adopted in spite of himself by the American

consumer

society, Gaullism, and

the Communist

Party. We learned from the press that in one and the same week Waldek Rochet placed a Soulages tapestry in the room where a Communist Party congress was

being held, while M. Georges Pompidou hung a picture in his office, and Ameri-

can collectors, though both anti-Gaullist and anti-communist, continue to collect

Soulages; this was the same Soulages who had the courage to make a poster attacking the American war in Vietnam and to sign all the revolutionary manifestoes of the May [1968] uprising.©°

Clearly, there has been considerable exaggeration by art historians on both the Right and the Left about the degree of success enjoyed by the CIA and cold-war liberals in remaking Abstract Expressionism into a mere celebratory signifier of late capitalism along with U.S. hegemony. These are not really the values that this art has most often come to signify, either in Latin America or the United States. This situation remains the case in spite of the way many mainstream art historians, along with their adversaries among the social historians of art, unhesitatingly speak for entire countries and even continents when they write of the New York School's global “triumph.” Indeed, public opinion polls of U.S. citizens have also clearly indicated that even in the United States Abstract Expressionism does not generally signify the artistic le-

gitimacy of the existing political order in conjunction with its semiofficial high culture. Even less does it signify the Eurocentric as well as Anglo-American values of the

so-called American Way. The most common view that has been empirically docu-

mented in the United States, both within the working class and among the petit bourgeoisie, is that Abstract Expressionism often signifies the illegitimacy, even incompre-

hensibility, of art experts and the culture they are claimed to represent, all of which

supposedly involves a largely unsuccessful effort at the “duping” of “ordinary” people, who claim to “know” that “anybody,” whether skilled or not, can make Abstract

Expressionist paintings.6! This very pervasive, most probably ascendant, populist view in the United States is simultaneously egalitarian in claim and anti-intellectual in character - and thus a

confused mixture of reactionary and progressive sentiments (which probably gained

greater currency during the intensely anti-intellectual climate of the Reagan-Bush years). A symptomatic product of this populist view was circulated in 1984 by the culture industry through mass publications like Sports Illustrated and on behalf of the Olympics (Fig. 12). In this image, the basketball skills of former Boston Celtic star Bill Russell supposedly produced an easy “action painting” in the manner of Pollock, as

Russell dribbled a paint-covered ball on a canvas - thereby evidently signifying the

whimsical affinity between sports fans.

insincere basketball and art lacking seriousness for real

INTRODUCTION

BILL RUSSELL PUTS ONE UP FOR OUR OLYMPIC TEAM. AGAIN. Own the Budweiser 1984 Olympic Games Art Collection.

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Bill Rusel

won his Olymp

gold through sheer athletic artist tn the basketball court. He re lutionized the game. His art was defense. But he never inagined he'd tase that familiar ball to create art of different form,

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Figure 12. Bill Russell’s “Action Painting” with a Basketball, The Budweiser 1984 Olympic Games Art Collection, Sports Illustrated (1984). Such an interpretation is actually in keeping with one of the first presentations of this artwork through the mass-culture industry in an article on Jackson Pollock for

Life magazine in August 1949. In what remains one of the best overviews of the orig-

inal reception of Abstract Expressionism, Phyllis Rosenzweig wrote in 1980 of how the article in Life, “typifies the popular attitude toward ‘the new American painting’

as something esoteric and incomprehensible and, by implication, not to be taken se-

riously.”62

In an interview shortly before his death, British art critic Lawrence Alloway also raised questions about the assumed signification of Abstract Expressionism in Great

21

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

Figure 13. Rasheed Araeen, Oh Dear, Oh Dear, What a Mess You Have Made!, 1994, vinyl emulsion on cardboard and acrylic on four plywood panels (73” x 109”). Collection of the Artist. Britain, where it was first circulated extensively by the CIA and cold-war liberals in the late 1950s. As a good friend of Barnett Newman (with whose anarchist views and classical liberal values he was familiar), Alloway noted that Newman would have been quite upset by such an interpretation of his work and would have “deplored anything

that suggested he was a defender of imperialism or a lackey of the Rockefellers.”

Al-

loway further observed: “if one looks over the reception of Abstract Expressionism in the early days [in the United Kingdom], it was rejected both by the art-world and

by the general public. . . . In fact, the presence of New American Painting [exhibition of 1958-9] at the Tate Gallery received grudging and ignorant reviews.”64

Not surprisingly, Alloway's timely intervention on behalf of a minority viewpoint in the United Kingdom was subsequently singled out by Newman himself, who observed how “Alloway . . . was the first literary voice defending American painting in

Europe” in 1959 “when it Yet the complexity of how paradoxical readings each other in the work of

was being attacked there.”65 this reception is probably summed up most strikingly in of Abstract Expressionism have been played off against a key Third World artist, namely, Rasheed Araeen of Paki-

stan. In Oh Dear, Oh Dear, What a Mess You Have Made! from 1994 (Fig. 13), Araeen has

produced a nine-part grid painting, five parts of which feature panels after Pollock's

classic drip paintings (Fig. 14) and the other four of which are green panels that refer symbolically to Islam. Similarly, this general cruciform, which he has used at least

since his first Green Painting of 1985/6, intentionally recalls the work of Ad Reinhardt

INTRODUCTION

Figure 14.

Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm,

1950, oil on canvas (8° 9” x 17° 3”), The Metropol-

itan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, New York City.

Figure 15. Ad Reinhardt, Number 88, 1950 (Blue), 1950, oil on canvas (75” x 144”), Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

(Fig. 15), who was an admirer of Islamic art. In a recent interview, Araeen has said of

this formal synthesis and the cross-cultural dialogue on which it was based that “It is

not a simple juxtaposition of Western art and Oriental icons.”6

At issue here is how a crude variant of Pollock’s all-overs was promoted as a “uni-

versal” style in Pakistan during the 1950s by a U.S. artist named Elaine Hamilton. This

“positive” cold-war usage of Abstract Expressionism by the U.S. Embassy in Karachi,

23

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

Pakistan, occurred when Araeen was first studying to become an artist. As such, this cold-war deployment of the New York School is intimated in Araeen’s painting by the way in which the Pollock-like lines become transformed into figurative references to barbed wire when they cross over onto the green Islamic ground.§” Nonetheless, Araeen did not simply intend to show Pollock’s work as essentially reactionary, as merely a signifier of cold-war imperialism. He strongly emphasized this point in a recent interview with me when we discussed the problem of the New York School in relation to the cold war. Rather, Araeen has acted through his own artistic

dialogue with Pollock and Reinhardt, as both a “defender and critic of Western modernity” at once.®8 For Araeen, the polyvalence of Abstract Expressionism was simultaneously a strength and a weakness during the cold-war period. In summing up the critical ambivalence of Araeen about the New York School, as well as toward traditional Islamic culture in Pakistan, art critic John

Roberts (who

once worked with Robert Motherwell on an anti-imperialist project) made the follow-

ing observation:

The last point at which such knowledges were circulated as [modernist] critique - the discourses of Abstract Expressionism ~ was in fact the point where the global nature of capitalism under [North] American hegemony was becoming largely

visible. The New York School’s emphasis upon the radicality of “non-representation” owed a great deal to the anti-perspectival traditions of the East. By focusing modernism towards these traditions, Abstract Expressionism looked to the “nonrepresentational”

as an act of resistance to the visual conformities of [North]

American mass culture. ... Modernism’s assimilation of the “primitive” from

Gauguin to Abstract Expressionism certainly acknowledged the reality of cultur-

al difference. . . .[But] the appropriated cultural materials were subordinated to

the universally defining powers of Western progress. In short, irrespective of how

artists actually saw themselves utilising non-European sources, imperialism determined how such cultural relations would be used.69

As it stands, the claim of John Roberts is at once insightful and misguided. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (and touched upon earlier in this section), in the case

of Nicaragua during the revolutionary years of the 1980s, it was not just the forces of Western imperialism, but also the revolutionary forces opposed to it, that contributed substantially to the progressive reception and ongoing vitality of Abstract Expressionism. In the paintings of Sandinista cadres like Boanerges Cerrato and Juan Rivas from the mid-1980s, Abstract Expressionism was once again recruited as a raw material both to aid national self-determination and to counter U.S. cultural imperial-

ism (Figs. 16, 17).70

The process of artistic hybridity that emerged in Managua and in New York City has not simply entailed the mechanical “influence” of Abstract Expressionism on mere dependent cultural traditions. Instead, this process has involved the critical reclamation by Third World artists of artistic practices that the Abstract Expressionists had earlier borrowed from a variety of non-Western cultures. Nor is it unimportant politically or ideologically (as we shall discuss below) that the Abstract Expressionists drew extensively on “foreign” experiences and “un-American” cultures at the very time in history when the U.S. House Un-American

Activities Committee (HUAC) was

INTRODUCTION

Figure 16. Boanerges Cerrato, Triptych, 1986, oil on canvas (3° x 6’). First Prize at the 1986 Certamen Nacional (National Exhibition) of the Sandinista Union of Visual Artists (ASTC), Managua. Photograph: David Craven.

Figure 17. Juan Rivas, Untitled (After Pollock), ca. 1985, oil on canvas (342’x 5¥2)), Collection of Ratil

Quintanilla, Managua, Nicaragua. Photograph: David Cra

25

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

terrorizing the citizenry of the United States with tales of foreign subversion and antiAmerican conspiracies. Moreover, it was then that the Truman Doctrine of 1947 initiated an unprecedented military assault by the U.S. government on Third World liberation movements - an assault that most Abstract Expressionists deeply opposed. + In order to address the above issues in a sustained and stringent way, my book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 focuses, with recourse to new primary documents, on how in the 1950s Meyer Schapiro used a method grounded in classical Marxism (along with a practical application of it known as democratic socialism) to construct a reading of Abstract Expressionism that was generally consistent with the artists’ own commitments to anarchism and/or various other forms of socialism. (It is important to mention here that Clyfford Still’s multilateral radicalism and consequent Sorelian-like conflation of ultraleft and ultraright politics constitutes an instructive exception to this general tendency among the first generation of Abstract Expressionists.)”! This reading of the New York School by Schapiro significantly contravened one of the more pervasive myths of the entire cold-war period: the rude reduction of all one’s options to an endorsement of either the American Way or Stalinist communism, so that any third path for social development was precluded out of hand. In evaluating Schapiro’s

approach, it is necessary for me to mount a rigorous critique of the deficiencies ring the otherwise important interpretation of Abstract Expressionism by major ponents of the social history of art (Eva Cockcroft, Serge Guilbaut, T. J. Clark, Michael Leja). My aim is to restore a sense of the period asymmetry between the

marproand New

York School and mainstream U.S. values of the 1950s, while also registering a renewed

sense of the polyvalent, dissident, and paradoxical side of Abstract Expressionism. Chapter 2 addresses the complicated relationship of the artistic practice of the New York School to various left-wing political discourses of the time. It also focuses on the affirmations of community, along with the type of modernist negativity, that pervaded the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists and Ad Reinhardt. Chapters 3 and 4, like the second chapter, delineate carefully the various period political options - however overlooked then or implausible now some of them might seem - that existed during the Age of McCarthyism. (Moreover, as I. F. Stone has noted, McCarthyism both predated and outlasted Senator McCarthy.)’2 This reconsideration entails more than an examination of the climate of intimidation and U.S. governmental repression that pervaded this era from the 1940s through the early 1960s

- as aptly demonstrated by the FBI monitoring of the dissident or “subversive” activities of various Abstract Expressionists. Such a study also involves a summary of inter-

related economic as well as political developments of the postwar period, interlaced with the period discourses about culture. Charting critically the overarching trajectory of this historical moment allows me to highlight several of the major myths of the ruling order in the United States:

from those of Eurocentrism and the cult of masculinity to those of “free enterprise” and the “modern man” discourse. These mainstream myths must be recognized and dissected in order to distinguish the different dynamic of the generally dissenting

INTRODUCTION countermyths advanced by the Abstract Expressionists. (Their general embrace of the cult of masculinity is obviously not an example of any such dissent.) My aim is to restore a sense of the historical unevenness of economic and ideological developments in this period, in relation to which the Abstract Expressionists produced their own tensely paradoxical artworks. These artworks, which were simultaneously about affirmation and negation, both served and subverted the society within which they were produced. In following Meyer Schapiro’s 1957 writings on both Abstract Expressionism and democratic socialism, Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the way in which much of this artwork from the 1940s and 1950s concretely embodies identifiable aesthetic traces of

a labor process, or process of artistic production, that was often at odds with the “or-

dinary experience of working” within the capitalist mode of production during the postwar era. Thus, the function of Abstract Expressionism as an ideological critique of labor practices within monopoly capitalism will be seen to emerge from the internal pictorial logic of the artworks themselves, in conjunction with certain evocative thematic allusions, rather than from any explicit or declarative political content. Here it is crucial to highlight the distinction in the arts (so incisively made by Adorno)’3 between a necessarily polyvalent, as well as indirect, ideological critique and a far mote easily recognizable as well as topically oriented political message. Although Abstract Expressionism is seldom about explicit political engagement, at its most profound it almost always involves an implicit criticism of existing ideological values, whether associated with established pictorial modes or with the social rela-

tions of production. In this sense, Abstract Expressionism contains an implied ideological critique, without declaring any explicit political agenda. Along these lines, Robert Motherwell aptly distinguished this movement from conventional “political art” when he stated that for modernist artists an “assault upon society is by indirec-

tion.”74

The ideological critique implicit to Abstract Expressionism is one of the features that links the progressive legacy of the New York School to postcolonial theory. César Paternosto (Fig. 18), the contemporary Argentinian artist and scholar whose own works carry on a dialogue with the works of Adolph Gottlieb (Fig. 19) and Barnett Newman, encapsulated well the nature of this postcolonial lineage. He did so in 1996 when discussing how Abstract Expressionism sought to forge an internationalist “art

of the Americas”:

Torres-Garcia and Newman [along with Gottlieb and Rothko] can be seen as having effectively laid the groundwork for an abstract art of the Americas that today is still only haltingly being assimilated by succeeding generations. It remains, as a whole, a potentiality, a task yet to be completed. . . . That “forgotten Newman”

of the 1940s . . . is, in my view, of far more importance in the development of an

abstract art with roots outside neocolonial culture than is the mainstream historical figure who fostered Minimalism.75

When it is broken down from being a definitively “unified” and “harmonious” style into a dynamically multiethnic and transcultural (or multicultural) language that is never entirely stable, Abstract Expressionism reemerges as what it often was

27

28

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

originally: a visual language fundamentally at odds with the homogenized AngloAmerican culture of the McCarthyists and in opposition to the largely Eurocentric pedigree whereby cold-war liberals valorized “major” art, both in and out of the art world. Furthermore, the Abstract Expressionists’ informed choice of art forms from outside the West, as a means of revitalizing an “alternative” modernism, disclosed a

marked antipathy on their part to the ascendant concepts of nature and culture that were intrinsic to Western mainstream capitalist modernization. Significantly, an incorporation of the vantage point of multiculturalism and postcolonialism in the deepest sense leads us to reconfigure and augment the makeup of the most important members of the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, or the “essential eight” as they are sometimes designated. For a start, we can, indeed should, promote Norman Lewis (the primary African-American among the first generation of

painters) and Lee Krasner (the most accomplished woman artist in this group) to prominent places within the original New York School. This is incumbent upon us precisely because of how their respective and undeniably distinctive combinations of European art with non-Western art — African, Asian, and African-American traditions in the case of Lewis (Figs. 20-22); Middle Eastern, North African, and Celtic in the case of Krasner (Fig. 23) - were paradigmatic of the

Figure 18. César Paternosto, From the Archetypal Geometry Series #1 (6), 1982, acrylic emulsion and marble powder on canvas (66” x 66”), Collec-

tion of the Artist.

INTRODUCTION

Figure 19. Adolph Gottlieb, The Alchemist, 1945, oil on canvas (23° 4” x 29° 92”), Tate Gallery, London. © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation / licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.

most progressive formal tendencies within Abstract Expressionism proper. Both of these artists produced compelling “internationalist” idioms because of their unique-

ly transcultural concerns and owing to their very early uses in 1946/7 of “all-over”

field painting as a means of melding these diverse artistic traditions. A critique along these lines will help us explain how and why the painters of the New York School, with their biomorphic shapes, geological-looking formations, and muted human traces sought, often unsuccessfully, to achieve several related things: They attempted to reintegrate humanity with nature, to reground art in more “spontaneous” human terms, and to recommence the construction of society along more equitable, disalienated lines, as part of their drive to create an “art of the Americas.” Significantly, much of this work addresses such themes as elemental natural forces, social genesis, precapitalist artisanal traditions, and precepts of liberation theology, thus conveying the classic avant-garde desire for a clean cultural slate from which to start social development anew and in a different direction than that which produced the present. Although often haunted by the “expressive fallacy,” sometimes attenuated by a recourse to antirhetorical rhetoric, generally marked by an implausible concept of human nature, and frequently checkmated by a voluntarist view of historical change, the most magisterial paintings by the Abstract Expressionists neverthe-

29

30

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

Figure 20. Norman Lewis, Mumbo Jumbo, 1950, oil on canvas ($1” x 27”). Estate of Norman Lewis, New York.

INTRODUCTION

Figure 21.

Norman Lewis, Klu Klux, 1963, oil on canvas (10” x 40”). Estate of Norman Lewis.

Figure 22. Lewis.

Norman Lewis, Processional,

less continue

to command

our respect,

round of constructive criticism.

There keen sense rain of the why many

1965, oil on canvas (S7%2” x 38%"). Estate of Norman

even as these artworks

also call for a new

can be little doubt but that among the Abstract Expressionists there was a of the failings of U.S. society, which was related to the bleak political terMcCarthy years. This alienation of New York School artists would explain of them chose to support the civil rights movement, the antiwar move-

ment, and the call for dramatic structural change in the 1960s. By examining Abstract

Expressionism along all of these lines, we shall better understand how this movement was often a remarkable instance of the cultural tendency otherwise known as Romantic anticapitalism.76

31

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

The original impetus for much of the first generation of the New York School was articulated by painter Norman Lewis, who had been a union activist from Harlem. In the 1950 Artist Sessions at Studio 35, Lewis declared: People no longer have this intimacy [of the New Deal Period] with artists, so that

the public does not know actually what is going on, what is being done by the painter. I remember organizing for a union on the waterfront. People then didn’t know the function of a union, or what was good about it, but gradually they were made aware of it. The same is true of our relationship with the people; in making

them aware of what we are doing [in art].77

Figure 23. Lee Krasner, Untitled, 1949, oil on composition board (48% x 30°), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Alfonso A. Ossorio.

CHAPTER

ONE

The Various Legacies and Diverse Lineages of Abstract Expressionism

[In] countries with a long experience of democracy, a higher level and

standard of living, socialist forms would not be undemocratic and the important personal freedoms would be preserved and extended. This seems to have been in Marx’s mind when he supposed that the transi-

tion to socialism in England would not require a violent revolution.

. .. [At present] the establishment of a distinct social stratification . . .

tends to limit the development of equality and democracy as envi-

sioned by Marx and Lenin.

- Meyer Schapiro, “Commentary on Marx's Critique of the

Gotha Program,” unpublished essay, Personal Papers

(1957/8)

+

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

opposed to the general trend of life. Yet, in such opposition, these arts declare their humanity and importance. . . . This art is deeply rooted, I believe, in the self and its relation to the surrounding world... . If

the painter cannot celebrate many current values, it may be that these

values are not worth celebrating. . . . Painting by its impressive exam-

ple of inner freedom and inventiveness and by its fidelity to artistic goals .. . helps to maintain the critical spirit. - Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde

Art,” Art News (1957)2

+ The conditions under which an artist exists in America are nearly un-

bearable; but so they are everywhere in modern times . . . artists were

more wanted in the past when they spoke for the whole community. ... [Yet] we modern

artists constitute a community of sorts. . . . Until

the structure of modern society is radically altered, these will continue to be the conditions under which modern artists create.

— Robert Motherwell, “Reflections on Painting Now,” lecture in Provincetown, Mass., August

11, 19493

33

34

ABSTRACT

VW

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

HEN IN THE 1950S SCHAPIRO ROSE TO THE DEFENSE OF THE

New York School, he enjoyed extended personal interchange with virtually all of the major artists among the first-generation

Abstract Expressionists. This was also when many of the most important artists of the second generation, including Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler, were his students or friends.4 Schapiro’s now well-known 1952 discussion about “finish” with Willem de Kooning in the latter's studio, which convinced the painter

to exhibit Woman One, readily attests to this art critic’s well-known intimacy with the artistic practice of the Abstract Expressionists.5 Earlier, in the 1930s, Ad Reinhardt had been Schapiro’s student at Columbia, and

in 1940 Motherwell moved to New York City in order to study with Schapiro. He did so after being impressed by Schapiro’s essay entitled “The Nature of Abstract Art,”

which had appeared in the Marxist Quarterly. As art critic Thomas B. Hess observed, these relationships were important for all concerned:

The artists who lived downtown frequently attended Meyer Schapiro’s lectures,

especially at the New School and N.Y.U. in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I recall going to them with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Philip Guston, Franz Kline.

. .. [Barnett] Newman attended as many of Schapiro’s lectures as he could. . . .

In 1959, Schapiro invited Newman to a graduate seminar at Columbia.”

At once a student of their art and a forceful influence on the formulation of their views toward art, Schapiro wrote his most significant analysis of Abstract Expressionism in 1957 - and I would argue that it was probably the single most incisive assessment written about the New York School by anyone in this period. Around the same

time, Schapiro also authored some probing personal reflections in 1957/8 on the prospects for socialism and democracy

in the United States, as well as elsewhere. These

thoughts are recorded in his handwritten

meditation (which remains unpublished)

entitled a “Commentary on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.”8 Revealingly enough, this personal rumination on postwar political economy

helps to explain the subtle yet signal methodological accent of his Art News article on Abstract Expressionism. The somewhat different tenor of Schapiro’s Marxian approach to contemporary abstraction in the visual arts entailed an analysis of it as a form of disalienated labor with both precapitalist and postcapitalist features. According to Schapiro, it was these latter traits that allowed this new artwork by the New York School to serve as an immanent critique from within of the overall logic and at-

tendant ideological values of the corporate capitalist mode of production. This thesis of Schapiro’s recalls Marx’s own view of art as disalienated labor even

within capitalism, and it is the primary theme of Chapter 5.9 Moreover, among the noteworthy

methodological

tenets connecting Schapiro’s 1957/8 query about the

contemporary political situation with his 1957 inquiry into the critical significance of modernist art by Abstract Expressionists is how this work deeply affects the current question, in art-historical studies and beyond, of the relative role of ideology within postwar U.S. society.

Since Schapiro’s defense of the New York School presupposes an understanding

of many of the same ideological concerns voiced in his survey of the period prospects

THE LEGACIES AND LINEAGES OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

of socialism, I first summarize this new material about the historical predicament of

the Abstract Expressionists (and indeed of all other progressive people in the postwar era as well). I then examine at length the instructive divergence between Schapiro’s theoretical approach to the New York School and that of several scholars who practice the social history of art. This examination not only entails a stringent outline of the artistic intentions of the Abstract Expressionists in relation to various left-wing discourses of the 1950s; it also leads to an adumbration of the alternative vision of community advanced by these artists of the first generation, and includes a consideration of the specific place of modernist negation within their artistic practice.

SCHAPIRO’S IN

RELATION

DEMOCRACY

DISCUSSION TO

THE

DURING

In his reflections from

OF ABSTRACT

PROSPECTS THE

EXPRESSIONISM

OF SOCIALISM

AND

1950S

1957/8 on Marxism and democratic socialism, entitled

“Commentary on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program,” Schapiro advanced several ideas that related in a fundamental way to his essay of 1957 on Abstract Expressionism.!° While meditating on Marx’s essay, Schapiro privately pondered the lack of civil liberties and the dearth of democratic institutions during this period in both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Nonetheless, he concluded that the contrary situation could still be possible in another part of the world, because:

in other countries with a long experience of democracy, a higher level and stan-

dard of living, socialist forms would

not be undemocratic

and the important

personal freedoms would be preserved and extended. This seems to have been in

Marx’s mind when he supposed that the transition to socialism in England would not require a violent revolution.!1

From here, Schapiro went on to do a critique of the situation in the West, as well

as in the Eastern Bloc countries. What he noted was a certain symmetry between them concerning the lack of greater democratization and the stalled movements toward the socialization of power in each area: [At present] the establishment of a distinct social stratification . . . tends to limit the development of equality and democracy as envisioned by Marx and Lenin.

Lenin thought that every cook should govern, and that the wages of a member

of the government should not exceed those of a worker; but this ideal appears more and more remote in Russia, as it does indeed in the most democratic cap-

italist countries. The great advance in the living standards of American skilled workers has not brought workers into Congress or the state and municipal law-

making bodies, nor has it reduced appreciably the span in income between the

richest and poorest.!2

The historical impasse of the 1950s outlined by Schapiro saw, for example, the

postwar economic boom in the United States accompanied both by wage increases and by a

notable decline in labor militancy, along with a general demobilization of

workers. This happened even though the amount of workplace democracy was not

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS

CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

increasing and despite the fact that the degree of worker self-representation was not

advancing in society as a whole.13

The political coordinates of this period have been crisply outlined by the eminent labor historian David Montgomery. Revealingly enough, Montgomery himself en-

tered graduate school in the 1950s only after he had first been blacklisted from factory

employment. Although a skilled machinist, he was forced out of this employment because he had organized a

strike as a member of the United Electrical, Radio, and

Machine Workers.!4 About the fate in the 1940s and 1950s of progressive labor tendencies, Montgomery has observed the following: The cold war found America’s union leadership purged of its left, tightly incor-

porated into the Democratic Party and committed to a social compact with busi-

ness, which the latter never really accepted. The workers themselves were alienated, dispirited and depoliticized by the union movement's orientation, and the

whites among them, at least, were incorporated without a collective voice into “international Fordism” of the postwar decades, which coupled sustained economic growth to mass consumerism. It was this demobilization of class solidar-

ity that decisively shifted the political center of gravity in the United States from the New Deal to the New Right.15

Schapiro, somewhat at a loss to explain how to reverse this stark decline of the socialist movement among U.S. workers, ended his 1957/8 commentary with a search-

ing question about this new period: “Are we entering a phase of history in which the economic prevails to such a degree that culture and politics and personal freedom are altogether secondary?”!6 There are some noteworthy methodological innovations by Schapiro within classical Marxism that connected his 1957/8 question about the political situation to his 1957 analysis of the critical significance of Abstract Expressionism. One of them involves how his interpretation treats the operation of ideology within postwar U.S. society.

Of note here for Schapiro’s viewpoint is that after the 1860s Marx wrote of how the structural cohesion (and thus the resistance to revolutionary change) of modern capitalist society had much to do with the loose network of ideological values, social practices, and economic accommodations produced in the workplace for and by the majority of people in relation to the process of commodity production per se. Conversely, the ascendancy of the ruling order was not maintained by any adroit implan-

tation from above of a “dominant ideology” that simply enshrined societywide the “bourgeois values” of the ruling class. (Adorno likewise advanced this view of Marx and Schapiro concerning the priority in society of labor relations and discursive prac-

tice over disembodied ideas. Adorno did so when he claimed that “the commodity

is its own ideology.”)!7

Accordingly, the majority perception of history would arise less from the top— down propagation of ideas favorable to the interests of the dominant class than it would from various responses by working people to the material structure, or rather structural logic, of modern capitalism. As a mode of production, capitalism also gen-

erates ideological values that are linked to its own peculiar labor practices, along with

THE

LEGACIES

AND

LINEAGES

OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

the distinctive manufactured goods resulting from them. This is the point that was empirically demonstrated by David Montgomery when

he observed, “The human

relationships structured by commodity production in large collective enterprises devoted to private gain generated bondings and antagonisms that were, in one form or

another, the daily experience of everyone involved.”18

In certain periods, then, social cohesion occurs more through “enlightened cyn-

icism” on the part of the majority, regarding the “dull compulsion of the economic” system (to quote Marx), than through the benighted views and “false consciousness” of a work force merely duped by any one dominant ideology that has been engineered from above by the ruling elite.!° Indeed, in an important study Abercrombie, Hill,

and Turner convincingly criticized the validity of this dominant-ideology thesis (although certainly not the existence of ideological values per se in a less omnipotent, no longer neo-Zeitgeist, role). They rightly pointed out that this mechanical thesis

concerning the dominance of ideology, or ideas, in society is itself a species of the very same idealism that it claims to challenge.2° By rejecting the dominant-ideology thesis, these British scholars put us in a better position to understand something that is empirically quite manifest about the

postwar period in the West. That is, it helps us to see how the generally ascendant ide-

ological values in society are so fissured and contradictory, so lacking in any seamless unity (of the type posited by neo-Hegelian Zeitgeistism), that they can hardly claim

the unthinking allegiance among the majority that any dominant ideology would

purportedly command. As such, this critique by Abercrombie et al. finally explains a well-documented and somewhat confusing fact of the Reagan-Thatcher years: how large numbers of people voted for these two leaders, owing to economic considerations, while many of these same voters also disagreed, sometimes strongly, with the social values and foreign policy championed by each of them.21 Revealingly, the dominant-ideology thesis is subtly yet significantly at odds with the best discussions of ideology by Western Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Gramsci demonstrated how hegemonic views depend upon a com-

bination of coercion, consent, and practical choices that are grounded in contemporary production as well as in cultural practices. Accordingly, Gramsci always allowed theoretically a substantial degree of ideological autonomy for the culture of the dom-

inated ethnic groups and classes (what he termed subaltern and/or organic countercultures). He did so as a consequence of the way in which he probatively outlined the never unchallenged nor ever absolute nature of the ideological values generally associated with a ruling class's dominion.22 Similar points would have to be made about the oppositional role played by art and culture in the thought of the Frankfurt School (Adorno on progressive modernism or “alternative” modernism versus official modernism)

and even in the structur-

alist framework of Louis Althusser. Far from simply reducing art to a form of knowledge or to a dominant ideology, Althusser actually disallowed such a reductionist position. Nonetheless, both Nicos Hadjinicolaou and, more recently, Michael Leja in his book on Abstract Expressionism, have erroneously evoked Althusser's name when

collapsing art and knowledge into mere ideology, as if there were a one-to-one corre-

lation between the two.23

37

38

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

In a reply to André Daspre (La Nouvelle Critique, April 1966), Althusser argued a view at odds with the one attributed to him by Leja:

I do not rank real art among the ideologies, although art does have a quite particular and specific relationship with ideology. . . . Art (I mean authentic art, not works

of an average or mediocre level) does not give us knowledge in the strict sense. . . . What art makes us see, and thus gives to us in the form of “seeing,” “perceiving,” and “feeling” (which is not a form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born

. ..a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distantiation from the very ide-

ology from which. . . [art] emerged.24

Significantly, by approaching the artistic practice of Abstract Expressionism as connected to but also as internally distanced from the “ordinary experience of working” within corporate capitalism (and not as a mere unmediated reflection in the superstructural realm of petit bourgeois ideology),25 Meyer Schapiro shifted his own art-historical analysis. He did so in order to address Abstract Expressionism as a countercultural phenomenon

(with filiations to various subaltern cultures) that respond-

ed to what he thought might be a new “phase of history in which the economic prevails to such a degree that culture and politics and personal freedom” were becoming of secondary concern, although not, of course, being either negligible or inconsequential.26 In addition, Schapiro moved his theoretical approach toward the later Marx’s contention that commodity production was a qualitatively different mode of production, one that was more capable of structurally generating ideological values and social relations internally (however fissured and deeply contradictory they were) than had earlier modes of production. These precapitalist modes of production (with their

quite different reliance on religious views and patrician birth) were accompanied by

a more pronounced production of ideology by the ruling class in the so-called superstructural realm of society. It should be quickly added that to posit such a view it is not necessary to claim a priori validity for the base-superstructure model. Nor could one maintain that this model is unproblematic. As Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and numerous others on the left have shown, the base-superstructure model is seriously flawed when it is used as a pregiven framework for any historical moment.27 For Marx, within capitalism it is the routine material logic of quotidian life and discursive practice in the workplace and beyond that most allows the system to continue reproducing itself - not some disembodied

corpus of ideas, moralizing dis-

courses, or blinding ideological beliefs disconnected from commodity production and endorsed by the populace in quasi-religious fashion. Having bleached social life of much of its traditional significance in the realm of ideas, the persuasiveness of utility and a

faith in technology thus subordinate the potentially emancipatory structural

change that is allied with use-value to the consumer system's actual delivery of mere

exchange-value only.28

Without such a situation, commodity production and modern consumerism

could not remain ascendant in the West today. As such, one would conclude that the

system of corporate capitalism in the postwar period has happened more on account

THE

LEGACIES

AND

LINEAGES

OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

of the social divisions generated in the economic sphere (and transposed to the domain of leisure) both within and between the dominated groups in the economy, than it has by virtue of some putatively unified worldview or dominant ideology that has supposedly been held in place within the realm of ideas by the ruling class.29

Merely important and also incomplete - rather than all-important or utterly dominant and unified - ideology as reconceptualized along these lines first by Marx, then by Meyer Schapiro, would thus be both true and false at the same time. It would be “true,” that is, in that it would provide reasonably accurate knowledge about the practical possibility of economic productivity, short-term quantitative output, and so

forth in the present. However, it would be “false” insofar as it encouraged the view — based upon actual workplace experience within capitalism - that no more egalitarian, self-managerial, or democratic organization of the workplace and the ownership of the means of production would be possible in the future. Thus, here ideology functions quite as Karl Korsch claimed that it would: as a form of synecdoche, the rhetorical trope whereby we discursively identify the part with the whole. More specifically, this is what occurs ideologically speaking when we mistake the partial “successes” of the economic system at present with the future interests and long-term needs of humanity as a whole.3° Indeed, it was precisely this point that Adorno had in mind when he emphasized that in the postwar period in the West

the present is not identical with itself - that is, the potential harbored by the present system is at odds with the present order of things resulting from this system.3! All of this explains why from the Communist Manifesto (1848) onward, Marx never ceased to sing the praises of the progressive accomplishments of capitalism, as well

as of the bourgeoisie (namely, the rational inquiry of the Enlightenment, the partial attainment of democracy, the separation of church and state, a secular or profane concept of aesthetic experience), even as he also relentlessly criticized the reactionary features of capitalism, as well as of the middle class - in what remains one of the most exemplary immanent critiques of society in modern world history.

Unlike the anarchists’ conception of socialism, which generally qualifies as a form of Romantic anticapitalism (a point to which I return in Chapter 5) - Marx defined

socialism as the unrealized potential inherent in capitalism. According to this view, the possibility of socialism, which emerged historically only with capitalism and modern bourgeois society, cannot however be brought to fruition by this same system. This impasse occurs owing to structural contradictions that capitalism could overcome only by becoming a postcapitalist system. Consequently, Marx’s deep ambivalence about capitalism and the middle class (to which he himself obviously be-

longed) has founda telling analogy in the profound ambivalence of the most progressive modernist artists toward Western modernization.32

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AND

THE

SOCIAL

HISTORY

OF ART

Significantly, the social history of art as applied to Abstract Expressionism has been plagued, if not undermined, both by an inability to orchestrate an immanent

39

40

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

critique and by an evident incapacity to understand the failings of any dominantideology thesis. For all their undeniable and sometimes considerable merits, these

studies often result in a form of left-wing populism laced with moralizing indignation. It is precisely because the social historians of art (whether Eva Cockcroft and Serge Guilbaut or T.

J. Clark and Michael Leja) have so successfully forced other schol-

ars to deal with the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and power that we

must also admit that they have largely failed to address adequately the decentered

and contradictory nature of this power relationship. The main questions asked and supposedly answered by this group of social his-

torians constitute a classic demonstration of just how inadequate the dominant-

ideology thesis really is. To quote Guilbaut (who is quoting Cockcroft approvingly as a point of departure), the question goes as follows: To understand why a particular art movement becomes successful under a given

set of historical circumstances requires an examination of the specifics of patronage and the ideological needs of the powerful.33

But does the general meaning of art, or indeed of anything worthwhile, really result simply from an ideological mandate and a consequent monologue by those in power? Perhaps in populist parlance, but certainly not according to a more concert-

ed emphasis on the dialogical nature of meaning as put forth by the classical Marxist tradition at its most probing. The signification and significance of art - whether or not it is attached by an “um.

bilical cord of gold” to the ruling class (to use an often misused metaphor of Greenberg’s) - results from a complex interchange. Such a multipoint interchange involves

the artistic intentions and aesthetic results of the artists responsible for the work plus the aims and interests of those who buy and/or promote the work plus the various in-

terpretations registered by the variegated groups, constituencies, and publics who respond to and struggle over the meaning of the work.

Whether in art or in life, it is obvious that the success of a movement is attribut-

able to much more than the ideological wishes or personal whims of those in the ruling class; and certainly the mortality, as well as susceptibility to change, of every so-

cial system and societal structure in history tells us much about the lack of absolute control enjoyed by any of them. The history of labor laws in the West since 1847-8, for example, from the elimination of child labor to the institution of the eight-hour

workday, demonstrates again and again how these gains were at first adamantly op-

posed by a hegemonic capital sector only to be won as a concession from the ruling

class by a mobilized, as well as combative, working class allied with progressive bourgeois or middle-class intellectuals.34 About the achievement in 1847 of a ten-hour

workday by the English labor movement, Marx (a progressive middle-class intellectual whose lack of naiveté in all this hardly need be noted) declared that it was “the first great victory of the political economy of the workers.”35 Success in all of these cases, as well as in numerous others, was a paradoxical and also provisional affair in which the ruling class had to compromise in order to retain

a disproportionate share of power— but certainly not a total monopoly on it - thus also attesting to the power, but not the equality, of the working class. Something sim-

THE LEGACIES AND LINEAGES OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

ilar can be observed about successes for the avant-garde and for alternative modernism, which occurred as a result of intellectual conflict and contestation, that is, as a concession by institutional powers to those who challenged and attempted to negate

the officially mandated culture. ~~ Here again, success involved neither the mechanical replication of a “dominant ideology,’ nor the simple manifestation of “the ideological needs of the powerful.” Succeés - and it was obviously partial as well as provisional ~ resulted from intense struggle and from a dislocating process that concluded with a

limited type of legiti-

macy for those in power, while also resulting in a monument to the admittedly qualified gains of those who challenged this ruling order. Further complicating matters in all this have been the intraclass as well as interclass conflicts that preclude our talking about class conflict in monolithic terms. Perhaps the most instructive thing to note of the one-dimensional thesis used by Cockcroft, Guilbaut, and their followers concerning the nature of power is how this

claim is so strikingly self-contradictory. If success in the spheres of art and culture really were reducible to the ideological interests of those in power, then, ironically enough, the undeniable success of Cockcroft’s article and Guilbaut’s book would merely indicate how well they too had served the ruling class. Moreover, such a success would in turn paradoxically ensure the untenability of their own supposedly oppositional reading of Abstract Expressionism. To the contrary, I would like to point out that the qualified successes of Guilbaut and Cockcroft are based upon a good deal more than any collusion with the dominant ideology of the petit bourgeoisie or the value of these art-historical studies as propaganda for the “liberality” or “tolerance” of the U.S. government and those in power. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning in the case of Guilbaut that his celebrity did indeed occur for the most part during the intensely right-wing heyday of Reagan and Bush and that his main thesis actually does have arresting points of convergence with that of the ideological agents of archconservatism in the United States at present. For

instance, there is an obvious link between Francis Fukuyama’s “triumph of the West” thesis of the 1980s and Guilbaut’s equally erroneous claim that, starting in the 1940s, U.S. conservative forces entirely succeeded in sponsoring a “de-Marxization” and capitulation of its own left-wing intelligentsia.36 Moreover, the recent refutation by Jacques Derrida of Fukuyama’s claim of final victory, along with the French thinker’s

linking of deconstruction toa still vital international Marxist tradition in the United States and elsewhere, also acts as a critique of Guilbaut’s premature position.37 Not

surprisingly, the objective correlative provided by Guilbaut’s view with that of Fuku-

yama demonstrates all too well the current proximity of left-wing pessimism to right-wing triumphalism. The source of Guilbaut’s single-minded and ill-advised drive to outline the dominant ideology of the postwar United States is related to his unfortunate desire to respond to a now famous proposal of Clement Greenberg, without his having first considered its implausibility. Used as the epigraph for chapter 1 of Guilbaut’s study, “The De-Marxization of the Intelligentsia,” Greenberg’s remark about the late 1930s was actually written only in 1961, after his own transformation into a right-wing sympathizer of McCarthyism and advocate of U.S. imperialism had already taken place. Green-

41

42

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

berg’s proposal went as follows: “Someday it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism which started out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art’s sake, and there-

by cleared the way, heroically, for what was to follow.”38 For whom, however, is this

summary valid?

In its present form this is clearly an implausible explanation for the Abstract Expressionists - none of whom ever accepted the idea of art for art’s sake or (with the sometime exception of Still’s ambidexterous radicalism) ever rejected their leftist politics. Nor is it an accurate characterization of Meyer Schapiro and Harold Rosenberg, who began and ended as nonaligned Marxists with little use for platitudes about art for art’s sake. In short, Greenberg’s quotation, far from encapsulating the dominant ideological journey of the U.S. art world, merely summarizes his own rather lonely,

even singular, trek to the right of the political spectrum.3?

An amended version of this transition that conveyed with accuracy and fairness what happened to the Abstract Expressionists would move along quite different lines and read something like this: “Someday it will have to be told how anti-Stalinism, which started out for some as Trotskyism - although for others it began and ended with a commitment to anarchism, democratic socialism, or social democracy — turned

into an embattled concept of vanguard aesthetics that was unjustifiably bowdlerized in ideological terms by one of its ‘defenders’ (i.e., Greenberg),

who

thereby cleared

the way for a formalist dogma of modernism that was narrow-mindedly presumed to follow.”40 Only an account along these lines - and Meyer Schapiro’s interpretation rather than Greenberg's is crucial for telling it - would do justice both to the evident integrity and problematic nature of the Abstract Expressionists’ position, as well as to the paradoxical fate that ultimately befell them. No clear evolution along “dominant ideological” lines, theirs was an uneven development that abounded in dissident views on the boundaries of mainstream values, even as their art became increasingly, if begrudgingly, acknowledged by much of mainstream society. About the book Art and Culture (1961), in which this above statement by Green-

berg was circulated, Meyer Schapiro stated the following in a 1992 interview: “In the

early 1960s, I was asked to write a piece about Greenberg, which I did, but the piece

was so negative that I decided not to publish it.”41 Although he had been on friendly terms with Greenberg through the mid-1940s, Schapiro became increasingly disturbed by Greenberg’s “dogmatic formalism, by his refusal to grant artistic intention or social context, much less iconography, any place in his analysis.”42 The Scottish painter and critic Thomas Lawson, who can hardly be viewed as an apologist for U.S. imperialism, has rightly observed how Guilbaut implausibly equated “Barnett Newman’s long commitment to anarchism with Clement Greenberg’s drift towards formalism.” Guilbaut evidently wished to “find a simple defection, a turning away from the left motivated solely by greed and ambition” on the part of the Abstract Expressionists (although not, interestingly enough, on the part of their Parisian counterparts, such as Pierre Soulages et al.).43 As Lawson concluded, “Guilbaut is so outraged by the whole system that it seems impossible for him to actually analyze what was going on.”44 Similarly, Benjamin Buchloh, who both praised Guilbaut’s

study and expressed dissatisfaction with its lack of “methodological complexity,”

THE LEGACIES AND LINEAGES OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM even suggested that Guilbaut’s approach might make “some readers suspect that he is in fact a Stalinist.”45 In fact, Guilbaut disavowed any desire to discuss the nature of the cold war hence, necessarily, the global dynamic and internal workings of corporate capitalism in the postwar period, along with the whole range of positions on the left marshaled

against it both in the United States and abroad. He decided instead merely to outline

in quasi-Baudrillardian terms the subjective way in which “the public reacted to the image of the Soviet threat forged by the government and the media.” Consequently,

he also sought to describe the supposedly concomitant dominant ideology - namely, that of the “vital center” of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and of cold-war liberalism.46

Not surprisingly, the lamentable failings of Guilbaut’s reductive approach surface rather rapidly with his unsuccessful attempt to locate the enlightened “center” of U.S. society.

Guilbaut fails to delineate adequately the specific role of this cold-war “new liberalism,” and hence of the material interests it manifests, because he neglects to discuss

its unabashedly doctrinaire procapitalism and largely ignores its distance from the

civil liberties and democratic values that are hallmarks of the classical liberalism to which the Abstract Expressionists and Dissent were deeply allied. In fact, Harold Rosenberg wrote an essay for Dissent in 1955, entitled “Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past,” in which he condemned the new cold-war liberalism as a betrayal of classical liberalism.47 Nor was it lost upon Rosenberg, Motherwell, or Schapiro that the greatest of the classical liberals, John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century and John Dew-

ey in the twentieth century, both ended up supporting democratic socialism.48 (In-

deed, as one scholar has convincingly argued, Dewey’s position was close to being one of “anarcho-communitarianism.”)49

All of these grave shortcomings of Guilbaut’s well-known book are ultimately linked to how he insists upon using a narrow tripartite taxonomy for political labels: conservative, cold-war liberal, and pro-Soviet communist. A framework like this ne-

cessitates bogus tsia. As a result, available during framework, this

claims, such as that of the “de-Marxization” of the U.S. intelligenthis approach does considerable conceptual violence to the options the 1940s~60s. Based as it is on a cramped and disenabling binary method uncritically reproduces the Stalinist and/or cold-war liberal

characterization of politics during this period. Consequently, we see how Guilbaut’s

book is as much an unwitting relic of the cold war as it is an analysis of that era. It would of course be quite appropriate to criticize constructively the plausibility of all the aforementioned left-wing positions in the United States - from the ultraleft

vision of Worker's Council socialism (Karl Korsch, Paul Mattick) and the patrician

pessimism of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) to the communalism of the anarchists (Goodman, Newman,

Rothko, Motherwell, Gottlieb), the clas-

sical Marxian political economy of the Monthly Review School (Sweezy, Braverman, Baran), the democratic, non-Leninist socialism of Dissent (Howe, Schapiro, Rosenberg), the various tendencies within Trotskyism (Krasner, James T. Farrell), the group of leftists with a sympathetic view of the Soviet Union (Reinhardt, Pollock, Norman Lewis) and, more recently, the Maoism of the Progressive Labor Alliance.5° However, it simply will not do to decree them all out of existence, as does Guilbaut, on behalf

43

44

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

of some dominant-ideology agenda and a concomitant binary framework that is quite incapable of encompassing this plurality of tendencies on the left.

Had he reconfigured and expanded his conceptual framework by heeding the

cautionary insights of Harold Rosenberg as well as those by others at Dissent and New Politics, Guilbaut would not have ended up misattributing centrist, or even “classical

liberal,” political acts to cold-war liberalism based solely (and uncritically) upon their

own ideological claims. A stringent review of the historical deeds of the cold-war lib-

erals before, during, and after the McCarthy period shows that, however pronounced

their differences on domestic social programs were from those of the cold-war conservatives, their position generally represented a rhetorical variation (with notable differ-

ences in tactics, but not so much in overall strategy) on the conservative resolve in foreign policy to institute corporate capitalism worldwide through military means, whatever the cost to countries in the Third World. Period U.S. documents, from Congressional Records to State Department policy statements, clearly confirm the frequent, though not constant, overlap between Mc-

Carthyism and the “vital center,” which claimed to be “equally aloof from the right and the left.” Such a critical study would clarify what Guilbaut’s uncritical account does not: How, if Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. stood for classical liberal precepts, could he support

Clement Greenberg's persecution of The Nation, be a mainstay of Commentary during its period of opposition to the free speech of “subversives,” and support

U.S. intervention in Vietnam throughout most of the 1960s? How, if President Truman’s “new liberal” administration officially featured an ideological “parallel” with the “aloofness” of Abstract Expressionism, could he sup-

port a position that they (including Clyfford Still) did not - namely, the Truman Doc-

trine (1947), without which the cold war, McCarthyism, and the intervention in

Vietnam, as well as in Latin America, would hardly have been possible? How, if “new liberals” like Hubert H. Humphrey and John F. Kennedy (the most cel-

ebrated embodiment of Schlesinger’s ideal) supported classical liberalism, or any so-called vital center, could they not only endorse, but in several cases initiate,

some of the most extreme cases of cold-war intolerance? (Kennedy, who refused to vote for the censure of McCarthy in 1954, used speeches in the U.S. House of Representatives to denounce university professors on the left for aiding the “loss” of China to communism

in 1949. Humphrey introduced an amendment in 1954

to ban the U.S. Communist Party, with the declaration that: “I do not intend to be half a patriot.”)51

Guilbaut’s homogenized presentation also does not prepare us to understand the

sheer quantitative Threat (1979), such tion in the size of Soviet Union, and

findings of such studies as Alan Wolfe’s Rise and Fall of the Soviet as the statistical fact that from 1947 to 1977 every major escalathe U.S. military budget, the number of confrontations with the the scale of antidemocratic interventions in the affairs of other

countries was directed by presidents personifying Schlesinger’s new or cold-war lib-

eralism52 rather than by those promoting classical liberalism or even old-time con-

servatism, like Eisenhower. (The post-1980 Reagan and Bush administrations clearly

understood this historical lesson, since their military interventions abroad and mil-

THE

LEGACIES

AND

LINEAGES

OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

itary buildup at home generally entailed the evocation of Truman and Kennedy to sanction their dramatic reinvigoration of cold-war policies, thus making them look

“centrist” and “bipartisan” approved). Hence, when Mark Rothko attended Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, Elaine de Kooning painted JFK’s portrait in 1962, or Ad Reinhardt supported Robert Kennedy in 1965 (according to unpublished correspondence),53 it was definitely not because these artists supported the cold-war foreign policies of Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam,

Latin America,

and elsewhere.

In fact, these three artists and virtually all the

other members of the New York School would publicly protest the foreign policies of Kennedy, Johnson, and the “vital center” (see Chapter 2). Rather, the New York

School artists occasionally identified thenselves with this group of cold-war liberals because of such things as the Kennedys’ stand on civil rights and on public funding for the arts in the United States. Accordingly, Reinhardt and the Abstract Expressionists were supportive of coldwar liberals only insofar as political leaders of the so-called vital center embraced classical liberal views on civil liberties at home and national self-determination abroad,

which is to say, sometimes on domestic issues and almost never in foreign policy involving the Third World, where the authoritarian project of “fighting communism” was supposedly the order of the day. Likewise, there was a short-lived moment of collaboration between the democratic socialists of Dissent and the Johnson administration: In 1964 Michael

Harrington (who was, according to Howe,

a “semi-orthodox Marxist”

and would soon work with Schapiro on the movement against Johnson’s policies in Vietnam)54 agreed to be a member of Sargent Shriver’s Head Start Task Force to fight

poverty and unemployment. This task force was in part inspired by Harrington's own famous 1962 critique from the left of conditions in the United States, The Other America. Because, however,

of the fears of the Johnson

administration

that the program

was becoming “too radical,” and of their attendant efforts to put a halt to this popular empowerment, Harrington left Shriver’s team. ° Ironically,

two of the most

important

statements

that Guilbaut

has adduced

to

“prove” the complicity of Abstract Expressionism with cold-war liberalism concerning foreign policy are statements that, upon detailed scrutiny, in fact demonstrate the opposite.55 One citation involves an anti-Stalinist and anti-Soviet letter drafted but never sent to Pablo Picasso in 1952 by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

(The ACCF was a group founded by Sidney Hook in 1939 that Howe, Schapiro, and

the others at Dissent would later denounce for misusing “anti-Stalinism” so as to suppress civil liberties.)5° Among the people associated with this newly formed “American Committee” were several longtime socialists or social democrats (some of whom had been or still were prominent Trotskyists): James Burnham, James T. Farrell, and

Sidney Hook. In addition, this heterodox group included some procapitalist coldwar liberals: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Clement Greenberg, and Irving Kristol.57

This committee considered sending a petition to Picasso requesting that he with-

draw his support from a Soviet regime that, they noted, would suppress the type of

art that Picasso produced were he working in the USSR. In a letter to Alfred Barr (De-

45

46

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQU:

cember 2, 1952), Irving Kristol claimed that among the signatures on which he could count for such a statement were those of three Abstract Expressionists: Motherwell,

Pollock, and Baziotes.58 Nonetheless, this endorsement of an anti-Stalinist statement

hardly equals either a commitment to procapitalism or any support for U.S. military intervention abroad, to name two positions essential to cold-war liberalism and the “vital center.” On the contrary, the plurality of views represented by this particular group underscores the previous example about the necessity of expanding one’s conceptual framework in order to explicate more incisively the specific points of political intersection between otherwise dissimilar positions. As British scholar David Anfam has rightly noted in his fine overview of Abstract Expressionism: “Few Abstract Expressionists began as doctrinaire radicals and those

who were closest to the description like Smith and Reinhardt did not abandon their socialist principles afterwards. Newman remained a lifelong anarchist, Still intensely antiauthoritarian, and Pollock, so far as is known, kept his youthful leftist views.”59 A recent admission that Pollock never renounced his socialist views was even made

by T. J. Clark when he conceded that in 1981 Greenberg told him that Pollock was a

“Goddamn Stalinist from start to finish.”6° Whether or not Greenberg's precise characterization of Pollock’s left-wing political views is accurate is another matter (and I think the ACCF document adduced by

Guilbaut shows that it needs qualification, since it was after all possible to be a nonStalinist sympathizer

with

the Soviet Union.) The fact remains

that Lee Krasner,

a

lifelong admirer of Trotsky, had periodic arguments with Pollock over his sympathy

for both the art of David Alfaro Siqueiros and developments in the Soviet Union.®! In a study of Krasner’s career, Robert Hobbs has noted how it was through her association with Harold Rosenberg that she had become a leftist and leader of the Art-

ists’ Union. Subsequently, “a major factor in her lifelong admiration of Trotsky” was,

he observed, that she embraced Trotsky’s pronouncements on art and culture. This included both Trotsky’s denunciation of “socialist realism”®2 and his vigorous defense of “the liberty of art itself.”63 These public declarations by Trotsky were made in 1938, when Meyer Schapiro was an intermediatory between Trotsky and André Breton. Trotsky’s view (along with that of Breton and Diego Rivera) of a united front on the left to counter the popular front of Stalin was published in New York in Partisan Review.

The manifesto by Trotsky, Breton, and Rivera included the following claims, with which Krasner and almost all the other members of the New York School would have

been in considerable sympathy: If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established ... to defend the liberty of art itself... . Marxists can march hand in hand with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the police-patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin.o4

Another major example chosen by Guilbaut to prove that the Abstract Expressionists were “nationalistic” involves a quotation by Barnett Newman from 1943 in which he declared the following:

THE LEGACIES AND LINEAGES OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

We have come together as AMERICAN MODERN ARTISTS because we feel the need

to present the public a body of art that will adequately reflect the new America

that is taking shape today and the kind of America that will, it is hoped, become the cultural center of the world. . .. We, who dedicated our lives to art - to mod-

em art....

America has the opportunity of becoming the art center of the world. It cannot do so if the perversion of our cultural forces makes possible the strengthening of

false artists and their movements. We mean to crystallize these forces.65

Because he published his study in the early 1980s, Guilbaut did not have the opportunity to peruse the excellent and generally comprehensive collection of writings by Barnett Newman that appeared in 1990 (with its Introduction by Richard Shiff regarding Newman’s anarchism) or the comparable anthology of writings by Robert Motherwell that was published in 1992.6 Thus, Guilbaut (following Max Kozloff and

Eva Cockcroft) understandably — but also erroneously - assumed that what Newman. meant by “American” was simply “from the United States.”67

However, a systematic study of Newman’s essays from the 1940s until 1970 dem-

onstrates clearly that what he generally meant by “American Art” was art of the Americas. This was an uncommonly progressive attitude for him to take in 1943/4. Furthermore, Newman

in denouncing the “Anglo-Saxon

tradition” in art criticism, for example,

(in 1944) instead called for an “inter-American consciousness” that would

be grounded in “a common hemispheric heritage.”8 As an anarchist from the 1930s through the 1960s, Newman

was opposed to nation-states, which is why he consis-

tently maintained that “there is no art of nations, only of people.”®9 And who in 1943/4 did Newman the antinationalist claim were among those who provided “hope for American Art” (i.e., hope for the art of the Americas)? Why,

Rufino Tamayo of Mex-

ico and Roberto Matta of Chile. Moreover, as the Argentinian painter César Paternosto has recently shown in a sustained analysis of the work and writings of Barnett Newman, the fact remains that Newman helped to produce an “abstract art of the Americas” with “roots outside neocolonial culture,” and one that is fundamentally opposed to any type of cultural na-

tionalism.70

As for Robert Motherwell,

a similar position of antinationalism emerges with a

stringent reading of his collected writings. In a letter to French art critic Christian Zervos (June 13, 1947), for example, Motherwell spoke as follows of Possibilities, the

magazine he was then coediting with Harold Rosenberg: Some of reaction possible ment in

us artists are beginning a small review to combat the indifference to and against, modern art in the United States. ... We are trying as hard as to make a magazine which is international in character, and in a mowhich the entire world is becoming chauvinistic, the task is not easy.7!

In 1967 when looking back upon his career - and his published essays now unquestionably corroborate his claim — Motherwell said: “I have always detested chauvinism . . .and one of the first things that impressed me about Pollock [in the 1940s] was his lack of chauvinism. . . . (Pollock in fact had very leftist views that seemingly

47

48

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

had little to do with his art).”72 Furthermore, Motherwell even complained in the Pages of Art Journal in May 1979 about the triumphant view that U.S. art since 1945 was “the undisputed world champion” and thus was seldom exhibited with the work of other countries from the same period. Motherwell’s suggestion for rectifying this situation went as follows:

I cannot understand why there is not a show in which the artists who emerged

after 1945, such as Dubuffet and Soulages and Balthus in France, or Tapies in Spain, or Francis Bacon in England, are not shown side by side with whoever are

their American correspondences. . . . !am tired of hearing, and of reading, of seg-

tegation. I want to see collectively in depth the international world of modernist art, before it began to fragment in the late 1960s.73

The other members of the first generation, many of whom were emigrants or the sons and daughters of emigrants, were also consistently antinationalistic in their pronouncements. About his dear friend Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning observed the following in 1966: “He said he hated it here. Lots of people hated America. All the intellectuals, all the writers, [and] painters.”74 Willem de Kooning’s own sentiments were not entirely dissimilar. In a 1963 interview for the BBC, not long before becoming involved in the antiwar movement, de Kooning stated: “It’s not so much that I’m

an American: I’m a New Yorker. . . . | feel more in common with artists in London or Paris. It is a certain burden, this American-ness.”75 Mark Rothko, whose family emigrated to the United States from Dvinsk, Russia

(now Latvia), when he was nine years of age, admitted later that he resented his own

enforced emigration and that he was “never able to forgive” his transplantation to “a land where he never felt entirely at home.”76 Among

the things of which he was

proud about his earlier life in Dvinsk was that “My father was a militant social democrat of the Jewish party, the Bund, which was the social democracy of that time. He was profoundly Marxist and violently anti-religious, partly because in Dvinsk . . . the

orthodox Jews were a repressive majority.”77

As his friend the art critic Dore Ashton has written, Rothko was influenced early on by the anarchist views of Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood, both of whom Rothko had heard speak. Thus, as a teenager Rothko “dreamed of being a labor leader,” and as an adult he lived according to “the ideal of the self-educated anarchist.”78 In an interview, Meyer Schapiro seconded this observation by Ashton when he stated: “I knew he [Rothko] was an anarchist, but we did not discuss his position at

length. He was very inclined to support workers and to value workmanship.”79 A not dissimilar lineage helps to explain Jackson Pollock's lifelong leftism, as Peter Wollen has only recently observed.8° Jackson’s father, Roy, with whom the art-

ist discussed progressive politics in his letters right up to the father’s death in 1933, had voted for Eugene Debs, supported the Wobblies, celebrated the Russian Revolution, and felt vindicated by the inaugural speech of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In that address, FDR blamed the misery of the depression on the “rules of exchange of mankind's goods.” In what was probably his last letter to his terminally ill father, Jackson Pollock repeatedly criticized the capitalist system and “the rest of the hokum

that goes with the price system.”8!

THE LEGACIES AND LINEAGES OF ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

Adolph Gottlieb summed up in very tart terms the relationship of the New York School, as they understood

it, to mainstream

U.S. culture: “during the 1940s a few

painters were painting with a feeling of absolute desperation . . . we felt like derelicts. The American establishment was obviously lacking in seriousness.”82 Similarly, in a 1973 interview in which Gottlieb was asked to compare the art world of the 1940s with that of the present, he stated: “There was more of a spirit of rebellion in the forties. The artists seemed to feel that they were in a vanguard and in the front line. 1 don’t see any sign of that now. It seems that most of the artists are young Republicans, although I don’t think they would admit it.”83 ¢

What of the major U.S. critics who originally wrote about Abstract Expressionists? Did they write about the New York School in nationalistic terms? The answer is not

really surprising. Those who were on the political right, like Clement Greenberg from. the mid-1940s onward, wrote about this art in very nationalistic terms (as we shall

see at length in Chapter 2). Those who were on the left, like Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, and Elaine de Kooning from the 1930s onward, generally rejected any

such nationalistic language. Schapiro felt that the idea of a national “American Art” was an insidious one. He observed that such a claim amounted to a fictitious veil in a highly stratified society with considerable racial, class, and gender divisions.84 Owing to these circumstances, Schapiro noted that the designation of “American Art” would simply publicize the singular interests of those at the top of the econom-

ic structure, who, because of attendant political power in a comparably disproportionate amount, would simply speak for everyone else, as if there really were a national consensus. As subsequent events attest, Schapiro’s point was both quite accurate and

largely ignored. Indeed, Clement Greenberg, for one, even insisted in the 1950s that “Abstract Expressionism” be relabeled as “American-Type Painting.”85 Among the more revealing examples of this internationalist perspective on the left was Harold Rosenberg’s essay on the world art scene in the early 1960s, in which he expressed the visionary and very sixties hope that the “current global art” would realize “its promise of a united human culture at some time to come.”86 The reason

for Rosenberg’s essay was that it allowed him to rebut the chauvinistic claim by August Heckscher, the Special Consultant in the Arts to the White House, that people in all other countries “look to the United States” for guidance. Rosenberg’s counterargument included the view that the advent of Abstract Expressionism had actually led to a decentering of the international art world, and it went as follows:

[To present America today as the heir of Paris is seriously misleading. Interna-

tionalism in art of the early twentieth-century type has been dead for thirty years, since the decline of Surrealism. . . . The earlier internationalism has been super-

seded by a global art whose essence is precisely the absence of qualities attached to any geographical center. In the present globalism, there is no opening for a

“new Paris.” . .. The work of an artist like Riopelle is equally at home in Amster-

dam, Paris, New York or Los Angeles.87

49

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE With Gottlieb, Rothko, Newman, or Nevelson, as with postwar French contempo-

raries like Soulages, Matthieu, or Dubuffet, the sense of locality was entirely replaced

by mythology, manner, metaphysics or formal concepts. . . . Their declaration of independence

from Paris resulted not in the establishment of an American

York “school” but in the end of any need for one.88

or New

CHAPTER

TWO

Abstract Expressionism and Left-Wing Discourse

What remains valid in Marx’s analysis is the negative force of its example in social unmasking, precisely the force of which hallucinatory Communism deprives it... . The consequence of the failure of the

proletariat in the face of the advancing socialization of production could, for Marx,

be nothing

else than “barbarism”.

... Within

this

half-formed world of specters, Marx’s criticism of modern industrial

society as centered on the proletarian void offers at least a conceptual foothold. The weapon of criticism is undoubtedly inadequate. Who

on that account would choose to surrender it? - Harold Rosenberg,

sent (1956).1

“Marxism: Criticism and/or Action,” Dis-

? The way to enrich or socialize painting is to get more and more people to paint, to use and handle colors - not to acquire skills of illustration. Mondrian, like Marx, saw the disappearance of works of art

when the environment becomes an aesthetic reality. In its dissatisfaction with ordinary experience, the impoverished reality of present-day

experience, an abstract painting stands as a challenge to disorder and

disintegration.

- Ad Reinhardt, “Abstraction vs. Illustration” (1943).2

A movement

‘T THE VERY MOMENT IN HISTORY WHEN MANY ART-HISTORICAL STUDIES

tell us that Abstract Expressionism was becoming a potent “reflec-

tion” of the national culture, the major artists associated with the justifiably pointed to a rather different relationship - without, however,

denying all cultural links to the United States or rejecting all aspects of that society. Just as Motherwell, in essays from the 1940s and 1950s, consistently and quite effec-

tively adumbrated the Abstract Expressionists’ alienation from the mainstream United States, so the “Spanish Elegy” series, his longest and most important, was begun in 1948 as a tribute to the leftist Republic defeated by fascism a decade earlier. (This series would later, in the 1950s, inspire a variant of anti-Somoza Abstract Expression-

ism by painter Armando Morales in Nicaragua. Subsequently, Morales would come to serve in the Sandinista-led government after the revolution in 1979.)

$2

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

Motherwell

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

started his series, then, shortly before the House

Un-American

Ac-

tivities Committee of the U.S. Congress publicly grouped the Spanish Refugee Relief Committee with other “front” organizations for the Communist Party, thus branding

sympathy for the defeated Spanish Left as an “anti-American” as well as subversive act.3 Undeterred, Motherwell continued working on this lament for the Spanish Left throughout the 1950s, while President Eisenhower signed a friendship treaty with the fascist dictator Franco, which sent U.S. troops to Spain in 1953 as a bulwark against “communism.” In 1943, Reinhardt drew a cartoon in which Franco was depicted as a puppet seated on Hitler's knee, and in 1959 in Art News, Motherwell decried “Franco's gloomy, suppressed Spain” while praising Miro’s socialist vision of the future.4 About this series and his own political convictions (which in the late 1940s gravitated away from Marxism to a position closer to anarchism), Motherwell stated the following in a 1979 interview:

I meant the word “elegy” in the title. I 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 never be

forgotten, even though /a guerre est finie. For years after the series began, I was often mistaken for a Stalinist, though I think the logical political extension (and

not that one need be logical: I hate dogma and rigidity) of extreme modernist in-

dividualism, as of a native American radicalism, is a kind of anarchism. . . . Wit-

ness Thoreau or Whitman or Reinhardt.5

In a related vein and also in keeping with his anarchist concept of the individual, Barnett Newman said, “It’s the Establishment that makes people predatory. . . .Only those are free who are free from the values of the Establishment. And that’s what anarchism is all about.”6 The Abstract Expressionists’ unsettling and generally marginal location in this period of U.S. history was charted by the artists themselves in 1950. These artists did so in a principled way that would nonetheless also seem to justify the accusation of “idealism” regarding their relationship to the postwar world. Of course it should be recalled here that Newman,

in his 1968 introduction to Kropot-

kin’s Memoirs ofa Revolutionist, defended idealism: “Kropotkin was an idealist - and he insisted on the ideal, for he understood that only by being an idealist can one keep

from falling into the trap of the false Utopias.”? The following discussion at Studio

35 should be seen in that light:

Newman: The thing that binds us together is that we consider painting to be a profession in an “ideal” society and insist on acting on our own terms. ... MOTHERWELL:

You mean

that we are not acting in relation to the goals that most

people in our society accept?

NEWMAN:

Yes. ...

Morherwetl: What distinguishes these people is that they are trying to act ideally in a non-ideal society. . . .

REINHARDT: Does not one have to remove oneself from the business world in order to create “fine” art or to exist as a “fine artist”?8

A similar interchange took place in 1964 with David Smith, who tightly said “I belong with painters” of the New York School - as do Louise Bourgeois and Aaron

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE

Siskind.? In an interview with art critic Thomas B. Hess, Smith said, “I think I’m an idealist.” When

Hess asked what his ideal was, Smith replied, “a true socialist society,

but I don’t know any ideology that meets my theoretical ideal.”!° Similarly, Smith claimed that “Art is always an expression of revolt and struggle. Progressive man and progressive art are identified with this struggle. That is our history as artists.”!1 As has been definitively demonstrated by Deirdre Robson, few if any of the Abstract Expressionists gained either widespread public acceptance or more than modest market success before the mid-1950s.12 This moderate monetary success occurred in the 1950s for Pollock and de Kooning, and somewhat less so for Rothko beginning in this period. Such success did not happen Newman,

until somewhat

later, if at all, for Still,

Motherwell, Reinhardt, Krasner, Lewis, Kline, and others. Significantly, the

increase in sales for Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko during the 1950s was at a time when the Abstract Expressionist manner (or “Tenth Street Touch”) was starting to be-

come institutionalized and critically “sublimated,” at least in part by a second generation of artists, who were often more Eurocentric artistically and less to the left politically than the first generation. Irving Sandler has, for example, written of the transition from ethical Abstract Expressionism to beautiful Abstract Expressionism during this period.!3 Nonetheless, the antiwar and pro-civil-rights activism of several of the best and most socially sensitive artists from this second generation of the New York School - specifically, Rudolf Baranik, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, May Stevens, Nancy Spero, and Helen Frank-

enthaler - means that such a statement cannot be made without notable qualifications.14

For all its increasing but never unqualified acclaim, then, the first strikingly public signs of “Abstract Expressionism’s market success came [only] soon after Pollock’s

death in 1956.”15 Despite the fair amount of success generated by his 1949 exhibition at Betty Parsons, Pollock’s 1950 show at the same gallery, when several of his greatest

works were exhibited for the first time, was a financial and critical failure (only one work was sold). It caused Pollock, in his own words, to “really hit an all-time low with

depression and drinking” because “NYC is brutal.”!6 Furthermore, as several commentators have rightly noted, even when financial success did come for him, Pollock was ill prepared to deal with it. (The same is also true for Rothko.)!7

About Pollock’s severe problem with drinking during the mid-1950s, the period of his greatest success, the author B. H. Friedman has admitted: “I felt he himself had

a sense of having been turned into an object, not magical but commercial.”!8 In a related vein, art critic Elaine de Kooning noted that “Jackson Pollock raises all sorts of questions. . . . He was the first artist to be devoured as a package by critics and collec-

tors ... and subsequently by the fashion magazines and the gossip columns.”19 The case of Rothko’s series of paintings (Fig. 24) commissioned in 1958 for a private restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York is equally instructive and attests quite well to the claim by English critic Charles Harrison that “Rothko tuned his

paintings to stand as negations of a certain cultural and moral world.”20 As the cloudy events of this controversy seem to indicate, Rothko’s working-class sympathies (noted in Chapter 1) and moral sensibility were among the factors that caused him to rescind the commission even though the series had, for the most part, been completed. Both Dan Rice, Rothko’s assistant in this period, and critic Dore Ashton, a close friend

53

54

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE at the time, make clear that Rothko thought somehow that the paintings for the Four Seasons Restaurant were to be installed in a room that would be visible to the workers in the Seagram Building, not just to clients in the restaurant. As Rice has observed: He [Rothko] did not want the project. . He accepted because he realized the challenge that it offered to build an environment. . . . He was terribly attracted to the original idea that the room could be seen through the open doors from the

cafeteria where the workers ate.21

In the spring of 1960, however, after he and his wife Mell had finally eaten in the newly opened restaurant of the Seagram Building, he returned to his studio in what Dan Rice said was “an absolute rage” and declared that “Anybody who will eat that

kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a picture of mine.”22 Shortly thereafter, Rothko, still depressed about the project, canceled the commission and

gave the works executed in this series to the Tate Gallery, the public museum of modern art in the United Kingdom.23 About

Rothko’s anguished

attitude toward

success, a recent commentator

has

tightly observed, “As an outsider, he felt bitter and deprived. Now as an insider, he felt uneasy and contaminated.”24 Much the same can be said of the other Abstract Expressionists and of Ad Reinhardt. Several of them, most notably Newman and Still, rejected awards, turned down opportunities to exhibit, and even refused free publicity in contemporary magazines, because of their rather extreme belief that such acceptance would be utterly inconsistent with their own values, both ethical and aesthetic.25 Furthermore, when such exhibition opportunities were not turned down by the various Abstract Expressionists, Ad Reinhardt then declared publicly that they had “sold out.” About Rothko’s modest recognition, for example, Reinhardt wrote, “The corruption of the best is the worst.”26

LEFT-WING

DISCOURSE

IN

THE

1950S

The social bleakness and repressive politics of this period in U.S. history notwithstanding, though, there was never a total capitulation by the U.S.

Left - whether in

the art world or outside it, although there certainly was a “de-Stalinization” (but not a de-Marxification) of the intelligentsia in the art world. There was, however, a dramatic decrease in the combativeness of mass movements, which generally made activism far less common, and this tendency would not be reversed until the 1960s. In-

deed, as one scholar recently observed with some justification, “After World War II, Marxism in America survived as an intellectual’s possession.”2? The truth-value of this claim was acknowledged in a recent award-winning study of the twentieth-century Left throughout the Americas cowritten by Roger Burbach and Orlando Nunez

Soto (who is one of the leading theoreticians of the Sandinista

Front in Nicaragua). These two authors noted, paradoxically enough, that it was from certain universities and journals in the United States “that the most creative Marxist

thinking began to emerge in the 1950s.”28 Among the publications that were in the forefront of this new chapter in socialist critique were Monthly Review (1949), Dissent

(1954), and subsequently New Politics (1961). Monthly Review, which opened its in-

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AND

LEFT-WING

DISCOURSE

Figure 24. Mark Rothko, Black on Maroon, 1958, oil on canvas (105% x 144”). Tate Gallery. Gift of the Artist. © 1999 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / ARS, N.Y. This painting was originally part of the series of works commissioned from Rothko for the private restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York City. Rothko ultimately withdrew his paintings and gave them to a public museum, the Tate Gallery, instead.

augural issue with an eloquent defense of socialism by physicist Albert Einstein, published progressive critiques throughout this period, including I. F. Stone’s momentous analysis of the Korean War in 1952.29 As Burbach and Nunez Soto observed, it was from the group of Marxist economists around Monthly Review that there arose a school of thinkers who built the transnational foundation for the ensuing development of Latin American dependency theory (a discussion of inequality in the Third World in relation to Western colonialism)

in the 1960s. Here, of course, it is important to remember the call by Newman (noted in Chapter 1) for an art based on “an inter-American consciousness” by progressive artists throughout the hemisphere. Furthermore, the interpretation of Abstract Expressionism by art critic Marta Traba was deeply indebted not only to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School but also to dependency theory. About this period in Latin American art, Traba wrote as follows:

The 1950s saw a blossoming of artists. . .. "Dependency” was the great subject of debate. The topic was first seriously addressed by sociologists and economists and was then taken up by art critics. . . . The subject of dependency was closely linked with that of “identity."30

55

56

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE The foremost figures of the Monthly Review School, who laid the groundwork in the 1950s for what came to be known as dependency theory, were several economists:

Paul Sweezy, Paul Baran, Harry Braverman, Harry Magdoff, and Leo Huberman. The

latter figure in this group, Huberman, was a onetime friend of art historian Meyer Schapiro. In the foreword to one of his Marxian studies of political economy, he even

thanked Schapiro for valuable editorial help.3! (Huberman was also, as Garnett Mc-

Coy has pointed out, a friend of Jackson Pollock’s brother, Charles, with whom he corresponded in the late 1930s about the fate of the Left within the labor movement.)32 About the work of Paul Sweezy in this period, Schapiro told me that he was familiar with it and admired it.33 Of these members of the Monthly Review School in New York City, it was Paul

Baran - a onetime fellow of the Frankfurt School at the Institut fiir Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) - who in his 1957 study The Political Economy of Growth evidently first included the argument that capitalist development of the type that had occurred in the West was precluded for the Third World by the very way in which multinational capitalism was then configured. The result was the phenomenon of underdevelopment, which involved the economic domination of Latin America by Western capital and led to U.S. military intervention when this dominion was seriously challenged.34 By demonstrating how multinational capitalism, because of its concentration in the West, would repeatedly undermine structurally the productive forces of the Third World, Baran opened the door for the major theoretical breakthroughs that led to the tise of a school of dependency theory throughout the Americas. This school included such scholars as Teotonio Dos Santos and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil,

along with Jaime Wheelock Roman of Nicaragua and Edelberto Torres-Rivas of Gua-

temala.35

About the inter-American theoretical movement that emerged from this theoret-

ical critique in the New York City of the 1950s, Orlando Nujiez and Burbach have ob-

served the following:

[DJependency theory was especially important because it marked the first fundamentally new school of thought on political economy to be developed with

contributions from radical intellectuals in both the United States and Latin Amer-

ica. . . . By the early 1970s virtually every major university in the United States

and in Latin America was influenced in some way by dependency theory, and virtually all revolutionary parties or organizations, including the Communist par-

ties, had adopted dependency theory as their framework for understanding the relations between the metropolitan centers and the periphery.3¢

Aside from the work of Monthly Review in the 1950s (both Sweezy and Huberman

also played key roles in publicly challenging the McCarthy hearings), there were other achievements of substantial import by the Left even in the darkest days of the cold war.37 In 1953, I. F. Stone founded the remarkable I. F. Stone Weekly, which through-

out the McCarthy period and its aftermath provided an alternative viewpoint for assessing the postwar epoch.*% Stone also wrote for The Nation, a left-liberal weekly that barely survived the McCarthy witch-hunts - which in this case were led by art critic

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE

Clement Greenberg.39 Like The Nation, Dissent continually published critiques of U.S.

policy during these years.

Of note in the 1950s for analyzing the non-Western cultures that influenced Ab-

stract Expressionism was the birth in the thropology led by Eleanor Burke Leacock New York professors launched sustained tialism in order to explain the historical

United States of a Marxist approach to anand Eric Wolf. These two City University of reconsiderations of colonialism and impeconstruction of machismo, patriarchy, and

ethnocentrism.4° It is this tradition in anthropology to which, for example, the more

recent work of James Clifford on “Ethnographic Surrealism” is at least partially indebted.4! The disciplines of history and sociology in the 1950s also produced important work in the Marxist tradition by both new and established scholars representing a whole range of political positions on the left in the United States. These diverse positions were represented by such scholars as William Appleman Williams, Howard Zinn,

Herbert Aptheker, Philip Foner, and C. Wright Mills.42 Nor should one forget the period political writings of nonaligned Marxists and socialists like Paul Mattick (a friend of Meyer Schapiro throughout this entire period and a contributor to New Politics) or Michael Harrington (a frequent voice in Dissent), or even the pieces by the social dem-

ocratic commentators at Dissent.43 As for the importance of such Marxian critiques in the United States in the 1950s, when relatively little working-class activism occurred, art critic Harold Rosenberg addressed this issue quite effectively in a provocative 1956 piece for Dissent that was revealingly entitled “Marxism: Criticism and/or Action.” In this essay, Rosenberg concluded as follows, in a passage that could serve as an excellent characterization of the predicament of the entire U.S. Left in the 1950s, including the Abstract Expressionists

and Meyer Schapiro:

[W]hat remains valid in Marx's analysis is the negative force of its example in persistent social unmasking, precisely the force of which hallucinatory Communism deprives it. Moreover, the systematic indication in Marx’s writings, though from

the point of view of Marx himself they cannot surmount the impotence of mere criticism, have by no means lost their pertinence so long as the processes that

produce a proletariat continue to operate; under these circumstances, they may

even be indispensable for an understanding of the situation presented by proletarian nonaction. The consequence of the failure of the proletariat in the face of the advancing socialization of production could, for Marx, be nothing else than “barbarism.” . . . Within this half-formed world of specters, Marx’s criticism of modern indus-

trial society as centered on the proletarian void offers at least a conceptual foothold. The weapon of criticism is undoubtedly inadequate. Who on that account would choose to surrender it??44

A number of noteworthy critiques of the 1940s and 1950s, which would have considerable impact on the New Left of the 1960s, were written by several members of the Frankfurt School. This group of scholars, which included Max Horkheimer,

T. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, and Franz Neumann, was located at a research institute in New York City that was affiliat-

57

58

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

A dev cmnnn ade Ky

AS

PL

CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

ears

webchigg Heiter” te Ay Re Ah ee, 6 FN

wey

Figure 25. Meyer Schapiro, Marcuse and Horkheimer at a Meeting of the Institute for Social Research in New York City, Sepa Jeane — tember 1938, graphite on paper,

Collection of Werner Hofman.

ed with Columbia University from 1934 to 1944. In the 1950s several of these figures would collaborate with the critics of Dissent on some significant publications.45 Indeed,

in a

least one case, that of Erich Fromm,

a member

of the Frankfurt School

would become a member of Dissent’s editorial board. One such key collaborative effort involving the Frankfurt School and Dissent was

the significant anthology entitled Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America. Published in 1957, the year of Schapiro’s piece on Abstract Expressionism in Art News, and edited by Bernard Rosenberg (an editor of Dissent), this collection involved a multipoint

critique, like that of Schapiro’s essay on the New York School. These critical essays concentrated on the logic of the culture industry and the dynamic of consumerism in relation to the modern corporate state. In his contribution to this anthology, entitled “Notes on Mass Culture,” Irving Howe wrote as follows:

Ina fascinating study, “On Popular Music [1941],” T. W. Adorno makes remarks on the

standardization

of popular

music

[by which

both

Howe

and

Adorno

meant “mass culture”] that seem a specific working-out of the views expressed

here: “. . . the harmonic cornerstone of each hit . . . will lead back to the familiar

experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced. . . . The composition hears for the listener. This is how popular music divests the listener of his spontaneity. . . . Boredom has become so great that only the brightest colors have

any chance of being lifted out of the general drabness. Yet it is just those violent

colors which bear witness to the omnipotence of mechanical, industrial prod-

ucts.”46

Also included in the Mass Culture anthology were two important pieces by members of the Frankfurt School: Adorno’s “Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture” (1954) and Leo Lowenthal’s “Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture” (1950).47 Sig-

nificantly enough, cases of Abstract Expressionists actually drawing directly on culture critiques by members of Dissent and the Frankfurt School have been documented.

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AND

LEFT-WING DISCOURSE

59

Aten Shape Figure 26 (above). Meyer Schapiro, Portrait of Leo Lowenthal at the Institute for Social Research in New York City, September 1938, graphite on paper, Collection of Werner Hofman. Figure 27 (right). Meyer Schapiro, Portrait of Erich Fromm and Unidentified Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in New York City, September 1938, graphite on paper, Collection of Werner Hofman.

Meyer

Shaper

One instance involves Ad Reinhardt’s use of and commentary on Walter Benjamin's writings. A second example is that of sculptor Herbert Ferber, who studied with Her-

bert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. Yet another case in point is the bibliography for Robert Motherwell’s course syllabus of 1955 at Hunter College, which included books by the Frankfurt School: five lectures on the nature of man under capitalist society (ref.: Section 5, Erich

Fromm, The Sane Society) . .. one lecture on the theory of the leisure class and the conspicuous display of wealth (ref.: Thorstein Veblen) and one lecture on the modern artist’s definition of the “bourgeois Philistine” (ref.: Baudelaire, Matthew Arnold, Delacroix, et al.).48

Throughout the entire decade of 19344, Meyer Schapiro had been in fairly close

contact with Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, and T. W. Adorno.4? In a 1938 public

gathering at the Institute for Social Research to which he had been invited by Adorno, for example, Meyer Schapiro did a series of quick portrait sketches of various members of this group. These pencil drawings include portraits of Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Franz Neumann,

and Erich Fromm

(Figs. 25-27).

Schapiro stated in a 1992 interview that of all the members of the Frankfurt School then exiled in New York City, “the one with whom

I had the longest relationship

[from 1934 to 1992] was Leo Lowenthal.”5° Similarly, Lowenthal had (to quote Mar-

60

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

tin Jay) “immense admiration and respect for Meyer Schapiro,” and he acknowledged “having been given sound editorial advice” by Schapiro for the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung.51 Meyer Schapiro, of course, while in Paris during the summer of 1939, served as a

representative of the Frankfurt School, in an effort to convince Walter Benjamin to emigrate to New York City, where he would be a Fellow at the exiled Institute for Social Research.52 It was in the Institute’s Zeitschrift that Benjamin had already pub-

lished some of his more famous essays, including “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936).53 Among the reasons that Schapiro was happy to

meet with Benjamin on behalf of the Frankfurt School (although he unfortunately

did not succeed in convincing Benjamin to emigrate to the United States) was his considerable admiration for Benjamin’s published studies. Schapiro said of this mission: “they [Horkheimer, Adorno, et al.] knew that I was very sympathetic to him [Benjamin]. I had read some of his work; he wrote for their magazine.”54 For our purposes it is worth noting that the conception of what was called “critical theory,” with its clear debt to the writings of Karl Korsch (a thinker also much ad-

mired by Schapiro), originated in Schrift fiir Sozialforschung. This was published writings by Korsch in a namely, the Marxist Quarterly. (His

1937-8 in the Frankfurt School's also precisely the moment when journal that he coedited and for now famous essay “The Nature of

journal, the ZeitSchapiro himself which he wrote, Abstract Art” ap-

peared in its pages in 1937.) In addition, this was the time when Schapiro was giving editorial advice to Leo Lowenthal, who was the reviews editor for the Zeitschrift.55

In 1938, soon after the publication of “The Nature of Abstract Art,” Schapiro published a short (and until now overlooked) essay on modernism for the Zeitschrift (Fig.

28). Revealingly enough, this later piece - a review essay in German on Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement - made a case for the progressive role of subjec-

tivity in the arts. (For the text of this essay, see Appendix A.) Along these lines, the use

of subjectivity was seen as a critical counter to the soulless “objectivity” and standardization of culture by both the one-dimensionality of workplace practices and the homogenizing forces of the culture industry. Accordingly, Schapiro faults Pevsner for inadvertently defending the regressive features of capitalist modernization by being insufficiently dialectical in approach,

owing to his homogenizing evocation of Zeitgeist to explain the period as an undiffer-

entiated “whole.” These failings were pinpointed by Schapiro as follows:

While extremely sensible in his assessment of specific achievements, Pevsner is nonetheless contradictory and unclear in his general historical characterizations

and in his theoretical pronouncements. . . . This same tendency, to displace the

analysis of an historical situation through a general psychological category, sur-

faces in the frequent references to the Zeitgeist and to the “essence” of the century as such. He advances from the representation of our time as a “practical” and “collective” century — somehow, the ordering structure of architecture reflects the

Geist of rational planning in society — and forgets thereby the social conflicts and

class divisions, all of which are subsumed under the collectively based sense of practicality. It is also entirely in the sense of an uncritical concept of mainstream

society, with his erroneous judgment of society as “collective,” that Pevsner re-

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AND LEFT-WING

Zeitschrift

DISCOURSE

fiir

Sozialforschung

Herausgegebon im Auftrag des Institats far Sozialforsohung von

Max Horkheimer

Jabrgang VII/1938

Figure 28. Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, vol. 7 (1938), edited by Max Horkheimer and Leo Lowenthal. This volume contained a review essay by Meyer Schapiro on Pevsner’s concept of modernism. See Appendix A for a complete transcript of this text.

LIBRAIRIE FRLIX ALCAN, PARIS,

jects the subjectivity and individualism of the last three hundred years, and sees

in them instead the increasing acceptance of an idealistic and mystical outlook, to the development of which modern art is said to contribute. Cubism, though,

is evaluated as the impersonal, decorative by-product of this collective architec-

ture. “The artist,” writes Pevsner, “who is representative of our century must be detached, since he is entering a century quite cool with steel and glass, of which

the precision allows less room for subjective expression than any epoch of the past.”56

There is a clear analogy here (as there was above with Irving Howe’s essay on

Adorno and mass culture) between Schapiro’s emphasis on the progressive, or dereifying, role in artistic production of a critical subjectivity and the general historical concerns of the Frankfurt School along related lines from the 1930s through the 1960s. All of this is notably underscored by the fact that Schapiro’s review essay appeared in the same issue of the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung as did T. W. Adorno’s now celebrat-

ed piece on the fetishistic character of all mass-cultural musical products, whether jazz or classical in genre, that had been integrated “into [the] commercialized mass production” of an increasingly reified subjectivity within the workplace of the modern corporate state.57

61

62

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE Both Schapiro’s position and that of the Frankfurt School presupposed, then, a deep and very early grasp of how the homogenizing logic of the “culture industry” (to use a concept coined by Adorno and Horkheimer) was motivated by the fact that,

within corporate capitalism, mass production necessitates the production of masses.

At a time when efforts at increasing production were especially linked to securing markets, the role of mass culture was a crucial one for two reasons: to reproduce hierarchical labor relations even within the sphere of leisure and to help regulate the sensibility of these new consumers so as to ensure the expansion of internal markets for

these ever more standardized goods.58 Why would Schapiro along with the Frankfurt School and, subsequently, the artists of the New York School as well, be so opposed to the culture industry? Some primary documents from the early period of advertising illuminate well enough the decidedly hierarchical, very ethnocentric, and utterly antidemocratic aims of those who were then inventing the culture industry. Two remarks by prominent businessmen

and early twentieth-century proponents of the advertising industry show how the “rationalization” of consumption was entirely in keeping with the dictates of “scien-

tific management” in the workplace. One major corporate sponsor would state the following in a book of 1929 about the purportedly “civilizing” virtues of consumer-

ism:

To national advertising has recently been attributed the growth of a national ho-

mogeneity in our people, a uniformity of ideas which, despite the mixture of the

races, is found to be greater here than in European countries.5?

Serious impediments to this nationalization of consumption were most community values and ethnic cultural practices. This is why so much of early advertising, as Stuart Ewen has documented, took on distinctly ethnocentric, if not racist, overtones. The need of the culture industry at that particular moment

in history to

“massify” and to deny difference on all but a superfical level - that is, to reify subjectivity - was spelled out by a business executive in Successful Living in the Machine Age,

published in 1931: “[A]ll our educational institutions . .. must concentrate on the great social task of teaching the masses not what to think, but how to think.”61

The Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung was significant not only for being the first forum

in which critical theory could be used to assess the culture industry but also for providing a critical bond among the scholars of the Frankfurt School. As Jiirgen Habermas has written,

“It was the organizational core and the intellectual center of

...a

small group of scholars, who in the cramped space of emigration banded around the journal’s standard.”62 As the most well-known of Adorno’s students, Habermas said

that “if ever there were a single datable and localizable Frankfurt School it was in New

York, between 1933-1941.”63 Among the most noteworthy essays to appear in this journal were those by Max

Horkheimer (vol. 6, no. 2, 1937) and by Herbert Marcuse

(vol. 6, no. 3, 1937), in which the term critical theory first surfaced as a critique of the

positivism and scientism that were concomitant with the commodity production of corporate capitalism.°+ Of comparable import to the contemporary achievement and consequent legacy

of the Zeitschrift were such well-known essays as Walter Benjamin’s analysis of art and

mechanical reproduction (vol. 5, no. 1, 1936), Leo Lowenthal’s critique of the novels

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM of Knut Hamsun

AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE

(vol. 6, no. 2, 1937), T. W. Adorno’s discussion of Thorstein Veblen’s

concept of culture (vol. 9, no. 3, 1941), and Friedrich Pollock’s analysis of state capitalism (vol. 9, no. 2, 1941). In addition, over a third of each issue was composed of

a book review section that featured such short critiques as those by Karl Korsch on Lenin and Sorel (1932 and 1933), Georg Lukacs on the collected works of Marx and Engels (1933), Ernst Bloch on John Dewey (1935 and 1936), Henri Lefebvre on Paul Nizan (1937), and Paul Mattick on the New Deal Programs (1938).65 About his own

warm

relationship with Adorno

from 1938 to 1941

(when Ador-

no moved to California to advise Thomas Mann in the early 1940s on music theory in preparation for Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus), Schapiro stated in some recent interviews:

I saw Adorno constantly and he was very friendly with me. We usually discussed the situation in Germany, which greatly disturbed him. Since he lived on the

Upper West Side near Columbia, Adorno would drop in on me quite often. . . .66

He did some interesting writing on music - he was a composer and a friend of several composers. I admired his passion for ideas, and, of course, his close friend-

ship with [Walter] Benjamin counted for a lot in my respect for him.67

Nonetheless, Schapiro did say that there were certain points on which he and Adorno had divergent views, for all their many points of commonality. One involved Adorno’s concept of the “avant-avant-garde” or, more specifically, the almost unremittingly negative role allotted to modernist art for canceling out existing cultural practices.8 Schapiro’s somewhat different view, to which we shall return shortly, was more concerned with the affirmative role of art than with its capacity for negation. In this respect at least, Schapiro was more closely linked to the heritage of classical

Marxism. Herbert Marcuse was another notable member of the Frankfurt School who, like Leo Lowenthal, chose to remain in the United States after Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany in the late 1940s. In 1955 Marcuse published Eros and Civilization,

his brilliant if utopian study interrelating the thought of Marx, Freud, and Schiller.6?

Moreover, in 1956 when Marcuse was debating Erich Fromm in the pages of Dissent

over the appropriate way to synthesize the ideas of Freud with those of Marx, so as to maintain the critical edge of each,7° Meyer Schapiro was also first writing about the importance of Freud for progressive art historians. It was precisely then that Schapiro published his own classic assessment of Freud’s book on Leonardo, entitled simply “Leonardo and Freud: An Art Historical Study.”7! Schapiro’s art-historical essay was also about claiming the most progressive aspect of Freud’s contradictory legacy for the Left.

By the way in which he grounded alienation and revolutionary change in Freud’s

concept of “the return of the repressed,” Marcuse provided a new left point of intersection for the Surrealist belief in “natural” insurrection and the Abstract Expressionist affirmation of “spontaneity” as an inherently progressive force based on human nature. Subsequently, in a 1979 article for Social Text, Fredric Jameson would use a neo-Marcusian approach to the paintings of Willem de Kooning, discussing what

Jameson deemed the potentially emancipatory return to visibility of the bodily repressed.72

63

64

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

TO

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

CONSIDERATIONS:

SCHAPIRO’S

ART

It was in relation to this diverse and multipoint Marxian discourse in New York,

extending from the 1930s through the 1960s, that Schapiro arrived at a conceptual framework for analyzing adequately the dialogical character of art. An early articulation of this methodological framework, which went along with his previous arthistorical analyses, can be located in a unpublished 1939 paper by Schapiro on theory. Entitled “Art and Society,” it outlines a theoretical approach that I shall briefly summarize here, since it has provided some of the rudiments for my own analysis of Abstract Expressionism.73 This summary served as the basis for the opening presentation in and introduction to a 1939 lecture series in the arts that Schapiro himself organized at the Brook-

lyn Academy of Music - and which included presentations by T. W. Adorno, MoholyNagy, and Walter Gropius. Furthermore, this lecture compliments his short 1938 critique of modernism, namely, the aforementioned review in the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung of Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement, in which Schapiro emphasized the necessity of affirming subjectivity as a critical force in modern society.74 Schapiro began his lecture by underscoring the role of art as a constitutive social bond, one that functions more through the visual language or aesthetic experience

of the artwork than through any explicit political message. Art, Schapiro argued, has “a social function by virtue of its capacity to unite or consolidate [people], to concretize their common experience, and to enable the individual to acquire the results

of other’s thinking and feeling and perception.”75 Schapiro thus defined art in a performative way as an informally bonding agent within society that furthered in aesthetic terms — that is, by means of the relative autonomy of the specific visual language used - the process of human self-realization.

This entailed both the noninstrumental refinement of the senses and the critical engagement of the intellect. Art was also construed as a social bond in extra-aesthetic ways - that

is, in ethical, political, and

ideological terms - since “art is a value in-

volved in other values, and potentially a means in all human relations.”76 Nonetheless, because of the contradictory structure of Western capitalist society,

the potential of art as a progressive social bond or formative force was constrained,

though not entirely deferred beyond the present. On the one hand, Schapiro maintained that there was “the importance of the highly individualized arts for future

democratic society.” On the other, he observed that these “individualized arts” of the period were often “bound up with conformity and anxiety, not with freedom” in any systematic sense, owing to how they are interwoven with the deeply contradictory

social fabric of Western society.77 Consequently, Schapiro, in this 1939 Brooklyn Academy of Music lecture, outlined the social nature of art with recourse to five fundamental attributes. First, there is the aspect of art that is “social in its communicative and symbolic character,” since

art is a language and a “language is social,” through both its “means of conveying meanings” and its existence as a “common

mode of transaction and reflection.”78

This particular point, which obviously looks ahead to Schapiro’s later concern with

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING

DISCOURSE

semiotics, also notably recalls the subsequent insistence by several of the Abstract Expressionists on giving priority to the “language of painting” (to quote Motherwell in 1950), rather than to topical issues or illustrative subjects. It meant seeing art as

a language “in its abstract structural sense rather than in [terms of] its descriptive-

ness.”79 Finally, both Schapiro’s points and those of Motherwell and the other Ab-

stract Expressionists find some contemporary justification theoretically in the work

of thinkers like Hayden White, who have emphasized the constitutive agency of languages, whether visual or otherwise, as a manifestation of their relative autonomy qua

languages in relation to existing social formations.8°

The second social attribute of art, according to Schapiro’s analysis, involves the

nature of the social bond being fostered by authentic art. Focusing as he does on “art vs. performance or entertainment,” he contends that “art not only communicates but [also] makes a community.”8! This point in particular was one that Schapiro would

later develop in his 1957 piece on Abstract Expressionism, when he spoke of how it negated the normal means of communication in the United States and affirmed a more contemplative mode of communication as a precondition for an alternative community. Such a community would not, even when drawing upon human spontaneity to a greater extent, be based upon the thoughtless instantaneity orchestrated by the culture industry. In this sense, he saw the art of the New York School at its most

profound as a sustained critique of the “normal” means of communication within the community as organized by corporate capitalism. As such, the critical cultural remove of Abstract Expressionism was a counter to the fetishized familiarity of masscultural communication that depends on a false abrogation of the difference between

life and art.82

The third and most obvious attribute of art’s social nature is that it is linked to “particular institutions or social groups - religion, state, war, morals, political party.”83 These institutional filiations hardly mean, however, that modern art merely reflects the structure or dominant values of these institutions in any one-to-one manner, involving as art does an uneven, discoordinated relationship to these institutions. This latter point was deftly made in 1947, amid the crystallizing mature manner of many of the Abstract Expressionists (specifically, Pollock, de Kooning, Krasner, Still, and

Lewis),84 when Schapiro, in a discussion of the progressive social character of aesthet-

ic experience, compared modern art with medieval art (whose emancipatory side he

had sketched elsewhere):85

One could easily show that contemporary art, though unreligious - and precisely because unreligious — is bound up with modern experiences and ideals no less than the old art with the life of its time. This does not mean that if you admire modern works, you must also accept modern institutions as good - much of the

best art of our day is, on the contrary, strongly critical of contemporary life.8&

Significantly, Schapiro’s analysis, as well as drawings, of medieval art and its antecedents apparently influenced some of the Abstract Expressionists. Lee Krasner spoke highly of his lectures on Celtic art, and the first Abstract Expressionist artwork to

make the cover of Art News (1951) was Adolph Gottlieb’s painting Romanesque Facade

from 1949 (Fig. 29), with its affinity to Schapiro’s own drawings of Romanesque archi-

65

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

Figure 29. Adolph Gottlieb, Romanesque Facade, 1949, oil on canvas (48” x 3534”), Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana. © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/ licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. tecture (Fig. 30). In addition, there were important works with medieval allusions by other Abstract Expressionists, including Richard Pousette-Dart’s Cathedral — The Ascension (1948) and Barnett Newman's Cathedra (1951).

The fourth and, in some respects, perhaps the most fundamental aspect of art’s social nature, according to Schapiro’s analysis, is art's existence as a form of labor that

is “acquired and developed collectively and in time,”87 and that thus involves specif-

ic instruments, particular techniques, and special forms. Because Schapiro saw the medium as only one aspect of that form of labor, he could underscore the crucial significance of formal analysis in understanding art as a process of artistic production, yet also avoid the reification of art as its medium alone (which was the obvious failing of Greenberg's reductive concept of art). Additionally, and equally important, Schapiro’s astute focus upon art as a form of labor (of which artistic form and uses of the medium are key elements) allowed him to address the constitutive or performative role of art in helping to remake humanity itself. Here his interpretation of art as

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING

DISCOURSE

Figure 30. Meyer Schapiro, Notre Dame de la Couture, Le Mans, France, 1927, pen and ink on paper. Collection of Dr. Lillian Milgram. Photograph: Karen Berman. social labor directly well-known passage in New York City by which was reprinted

recalls central tenets of classical Marxism. This view relates to a from an essay by Friedrich Engels that was republished in 1938/9 one of Schapiro’s former students, Milton Brown. In this essay, in the Marxist journal Dialectics, Engels wrote:

Labour . . . is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such

an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created humanity itself.88

While elaborating on this insight, Engels provided the groundwork for Schapiro’s

own discussion of Abstract Expressionism as an immanent critique of labor within the capitalist mode of production proper. Revealingly, Engels’s discussion ended with a commentary on the consequences of labor history for art:

[T]he hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Labour,

adaptation to ever new operations, the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and,

over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and

the ever renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more

complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the picture of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Pagani

67

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

But the hand did not exist alone, it was only one member of a integral, highly complex organism. And what benefited the hand, also benefited the whole body

it served . . . from the law or correlation of growth, as Darwin called it.89

The fifth aspect of art’s social nature is how art is “shaped in its content by exist-

ing society,” but not in a way that is free of contradictions or that permits instant analysis.9° Accordingly, Schapiro’s dynamic and contrapuntal method for analyzing the various dimensions of art’s roles within and links with society permitted him to assess class relations without having to assume any one-to-one correspondence be-

tween a particular class and a given style in art - avoiding the fundamental mistake made by T. J. Clark, for example, in his recent essay on Abstract Expressionism.?!

Schapiro was thus able to forgo what most orthodox Marxist commentators have not: the reductionist equation of a style with a specific class ideology.92 This was the case because Schapiro recognized that any style, such as that which is called Abstract Expressionism, is, among several other things, a site of convergence for competing ide-

ological values and a network of often contradictory concerns, all of which entails an

interplay in the arts of the subaltern and the hegemonic, of horizontally situated or-

ganic practices and of vertically directed official values. The composite result of addressing these five dimensions of art’s social nature was further enhanced by two other features of Schapiro’s methodological approach: (1) his sophisticated and indeed unusual use of a nonlinear, multilateral, and nonEurocentric concept of uneven historical development, which relates to the seminal theoretical work of Karl Korsch (to which we shall return in the ensuing section) and

(2) his emphasis on how major artworks are usually marked by problematic and con-

tradictory features that attest to “the contingencies of a prolonged effort.”93 For Schapiro, then, the standard belief in seamless artistic harmony or formal resolution in

fact harbors an unwarranted idealization of the act of perceiving “which may be com-

pared with a mystic’s experience of the oneness of the world.”94 Hence, he main-

tained that the perception of art and life always involves a dialectical interplay of forces and a

dialogical interchange of positions. To quote Schapiro:

Critical seeing, aware of the incompleteness of perception, is explorative and dwells on details as well as on the large aspects that we call the whole. It takes

into account other's seeing; it is collective and cooperative.95

As a

result of considering these five coordinates for charting art’s social nature,

Schapiro concluded in this 1939 paper that it would be implausible to speak of any art that is “non-social or less social.” Rather, we should speak instead of the diverse ways in which divergent artworks and different styles are social. In particular, he noted that this would mean discussing (a) an art's range of audience and (b) its reference

to particular social groups. As such, he contended that any “critique of greater or less sociability is really a disguised form of (a) or (b). But these are not criterion of either

social worth or artistic worth.”96 This concluding and indeed conclusive point in Schapiro’s paper on “Art and Society” was bolstered by two earlier essays that he had published in 1937 in Marxist Quarterly (for which, recall, Schapiro was a founding editor). The first piece was “The

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE Nature of Abstract Art,” his now famous critique of Alfred Barr’s discussion of mod-

em art, in which Schapiro brilliantly rejected yet again the linear framework of “modernism vs. realism.” He did so by stating that the “opposition of realistic art and abstract art,” along with the unilinear notion of historical development presupposed. by it, were “thoroughly one-sided and rest on a mistaken idea of what representation

is.”97 About Schapiro’s well-known refusal in the 1930s to side either with figuration

or abstraction during the debates at the John Reed Club, painter Raphael Soyer has recalled: “One of his [Schapiro’s] statements has stayed with me . . . probably in criticism of the Club’s philosophy of social realism - ‘No Kapital on art has yet been writ-

ten.’”98

The second of these two articles was “The Patrons of Revolutionary Art,”99 his

constructive criticism of the commanding “epic works” by Diego Rivera (who was then being hailed by Leon Trotsky as the “greatest interpreter” of the ideals of the October Revolution).!© In it, Schapiro pointed out the disjuncture between artistic intention and reception, noting the frequent distinction between the intended political import of an artwork and the subsequent political signification that it actually acquired: “The fact that a work of art has a politically radical content therefore does not

assure its revolutionary value, nor does a non-political content necessarily imply its

irrelevance to revolutionary action.” As history demonstrates, Schapiro noted, “works without political intention have by their honesty and vigor excited [people] to a serious questioning of themselves and their loyalties: they have destroyed the faith in feudal or bourgeois values and helped to create the moral courage necessary for revolutionary action and will.”101 Among the consequences of Schapiro’s 1939 paper on “Art and Society,” which outlined much of what was so distinctive about his art-historical method from the early 1930s through the 1970s, was how it helps us to see that he drew on classical Marxism without using it as a closed, teleological system of inquiry. He was thus able to underscore the open-ended role of major artworks for both affirmation and nega-

tion. Significantly, this flexible framework, which approached art as a constitutive bond capable of constructing community, would in turn be quite capable of addressing many of the major issues posed by Abstract Expressionism, since this movement represented, to quote Robert Motherwell, “the particular acceptances and rejections” of artists reacting to modern society.102 As Motherwell’s writings demonstrate, the interchange between Schapiro and Motherwell in the early 1940s had a subtle impact on the ideas of Motherwell as well as on those of his colleagues. It is to their ideas

that we now turn.

AFFIRMATIONS

OF

COMMUNITY

AND

THE

NEGATIVITY

OF

MODERNISM

At this point it is illuminating to discuss how the New York School's desire for an alternative sense of community, along with its drive to negate existing society, related in various respects to a vision of the future found in classical Marxism. Although for the most part unintentionally, the Abstract Expressionists were nevertheless linked

69

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EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

in a variety of ways to this particular left-wing tradition through the political discourses of the 1940s and 1950s in New York City (see the opening section of this chapter). In order to demonstrate convincingly the surprising breadth of these dis-

parate filiations connecting the New York School with a future-oriented and subjectively formative concept of art that emerged in the early writings of Marx, I first sum-

marize the main points of Marxian tradition in this regard; thereafter I single out the

related views on similar issues of Ad Reinhardt and the Abstract Expressionists. The emphasis on art, with communitarian overtones, as a paradoxical combina-

tion of the affirmative and the negative can, for example, be located easily enough in the texts of classical Marxism by citing passages from the hands of Marx and Engels. These extend the discourse by Engels, noted in the previous section, on art as a constitutive form of social labor. The foremost of these citations, from Karl Marx’s Eco-

nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, deftly outlines how the most profound human import of art derives, paradoxically enough, from art’s antipathy to practicality, its opposition to pedestrian serviceability. Every one of the Abstract Expressionists opposed the one-dimensional reduction of art to practical concerns (as did all the members of the Frankfurt School, from Adorno and Horkheimer to Marcuse). One need only recall here Newman's belief that

the morality of art resided in its uselessness, or Willem de Kooning’s related claim that “It is in its uselessness that art is free,” or Reinhardt’s similar, if more mordant,

remarks about any worthwhile art’s being based upon the “divorce between the aesthetic and the practical.”103 Marx’s famous counterpositioning of artistic experience to practical activities nevertheless presupposed an endorsement of the relative autonomy of art as a constitutive force both for constructing subjectivity and for shaping society. His position went as follows: Just as music alone awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beau-

tiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear - so the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my senses go (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) - for this reason the senses of the social man are other senses

than those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded rich-

ness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a mu-

sical ear, an eye for beauty of form - in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated

or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses - the practical senses (will, love, etc.) - in a word, human sense ~ the human nature of the senses — comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature. The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present... .

The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For the

starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract

being as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be

impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals, The care-burdened man in need has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in miner-

als sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the unique nature of

the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the hu-

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE man essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make

man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance. 104

Along related lines, Marx maintained in his later writings that serious art is a form of disalienated labor, even when the artist is otherwise alienated from society. As such, he contended that “capitalist production is hostile to certain aspects of intellectual production, such as art and poetry.”!°5 Not surprisingly then, Marx and Engels attributed the circumscription of the audience for high art less to elitist behavior than to elite

training unevenly distributed or generally unavailable as a consequence of the division of labor in modern society as a whole. The inaccessibility of high art, in terms of both production and reception, thus resulted from structural impediments much

more than from the fact that artists chose to be “obscure.” As such, the belief that art

can or should be instantly understandable to the majority, even when their level of participation in society has not been increased or their education enhanced through structural change, is less a Marxist position than it is a populist misconception of this vantage point.

Far from wishing to abrogate or level high art, Marx and Engels hoped to expand access to it, thus transforming it from within through elevating the general engagement of the populace with it. This position follows from their commentary in The German Ideology. The “exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass” of people is, they argued, “a consequence of the division of labor” within capitalism, not the result of any biological mandate from nature.106 Conversely, in a future society on the far side of state socialism, something quite new will obtain owing to the general level of aesthetic literacy. To quote Marx and Engels: “In a communist society there will be no painters but rather people who,

among many other things, also paint.”!07 A precondition for such a society in which everyone will be an artist is the constructive and rational use of the “new productive

power of humanity” so that, after having met everyone’s material needs, it will give “each individual sufficient leisure time” to be an artist.108 ¢ A not dissimilar and equally visionary view of the future was articulated by Ad Reinhardt, Norman

Lewis, Barnett Newman,

and Robert Motherwell. In each case, it was

this view that allowed the artist to defend modernist and/or abstract painting over traditional illustration or picture making. In a revealing lecture from 1943 entitled

“Paintings and Pictures,” for example, Reinhardt both defended (versus anecdotal pictures) and detected a future that was already long socialist and probable member of the Communist Party in the Reinhardt spoke of a future that had a distinct affinity to the one the Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology:

abstract painting emerging. A life1930s and 1940s, put forth in both

[There] was the realization that the artist was not a special kind of human being,

but that every person was a special kind of artist. Aesthetic values were found to

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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE be around in all activities. Jobs with shorter hours and better pay permitted many

apparently artless people to lead a richer aesthetic life than the picture artist. . ..

More leisure, more education, more direct and complete participation of all people in aesthetic activity was what had been needed, not more pictures.109

This line of theory was pursued further in another essay of 1943 by Reinhardt, entitled “Abstraction vs. Illustration,” in which he declared the following:

The way to enrich or socialize painting is to get more and more people to paint, to use and handle colors - not to acquire skills of illustration. Mondrian, like Marx, saw the disappearance of works of art when the environment itself became an aesthetic reality... . To me there is nothing more pathetic than an artist who, with his “pictures in frames,” tries to compete with pictures in magazines and movies and at the same time attempts to keep pace with an enormously free and stimulating ab-

stract painting, which year after year becomes increasingly less private, involving more and more people artistically, in more and more democratic creative activ-

ity, 110

Furthermore, when around 1952 Reinhardt made his transition to “art-as-art” (which is definitely not to be confused with “art for art’s sake”) and even to his Black Paintings somewhat later, he never renounced this earlier vision of the future, however less likely it appeared. In 1965 when Reinhardt discussed his remarkably nuanced and understated Black Paintings, he did so “As if those who are going to read us will

belong to a civilization more delicate and subtle than any we know.”111 An equally eloquent statement on behalf of both progressive modernism and the hopes of humanity also originated with Norman Lewis, a close friend of Reinhardt and a fellow traveler if not member of the Communist Party. As an African-American.

painter on the left with the additional burden of daily confronting racism in the United States, Norman Lewis felt compelled in 1946 (the year in which he produced his first gestural overall paintings) to warn against “the limitations which every Negro American who is desirous of a broad kind of development must face - namely, the limitations which come under the names, ‘African Idiom,’ ‘Negro Idiom, ’ or ‘Social Painting.’” Rather than through using topical idioms, the African-American artist,

through “the excellence” of an internationalist modernist painting, had to register the “most effective blow against stereotype and the most irrefutable proof of the arti-

ficiality of stereotype in general.”112

Norman Lewis's defense of an alternative modernism was in turn linked in a very intelligent way to the tradition of classical Marxism, as he acknowledged in a letter

of 1947:

“After seriously painting and thinking scientifically I came to certain definite

conclusions - which you will find yourself doing, if you approach painting as a true Marxist.”!!3 These thoughtful conclusions had been enunciated in his “Thesis” of 1946, in which he stated the following:

This concept treats art not as reproduction or as convenient but entirely second-

ary medium for propaganda but as the production of experiences which combine intellectual and emotional activities in a way that may conceivably add not only to the pleasure of the viewer and the satisfaction of the artist but to a universal

knowledge of aesthetics and the creative faculty which I feel exists for one form

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE

of expression or another in all men. In this sense, art comes to have a life of its

own; to be evidence of the emotional, intellectual and aesthetic level of men in a specific era; to be always changing and going towards greater understanding of human beings; to enrich living for everyone . . . thus contributing to the rise of

cultural and general development.!14

Despite the fact that he was strongly opposed to the Communist Party from the 1930s onward, Barnett Newman embraced a related concept of the future throughout his career. His vision of the future was a consequence of his lifelong commitment to the anarchist views of Peter Kropotkin; because however much Kropotkin rejected the view of Marx and Engels concerning the necessity of state power in a postcapitalist society, he nevertheless also drew deeply upon Marx's critique of the division of labor within capitalism.1!5 This position of Kropotkin, which had been influenced by Marx and was coupled with an admiration of the MIR, the peasant commune in Russia, was

repeated and promoted by Barnett Newman, even when the latter was criticizing orthodox Marxism. (Newman was careful, however, in at least some of his essays from the 1940s to distinguish the Surrealist use of Marxism that he respected from the Communist

Party’s evocation of Marxism to defend the doctrine of Socialist Realism,

which he did not respect.)!16

In 1968 in his critique of corporate capitalism, Newman unintentionally includ-

ed the vestigial influence of Marxism via his own avowed anarchism. His remarks went as follows:

Kropotkin was deeply concerned with the dehumanization which was happening

as a result of the industrial revolution and the division of labor. His ideas on the

problems of integrating rural and urban life, his opposition to the division of labor, make him the precursor of all those who have theorized on the subject... [like] Paul Goodman. He believed that problems of equality could not be solved

by solving the problems of distribution and was opposed to controlled underpro-

duction. . . . He advocated overproduction and believed that it would provide for everyone’s needs and would make possible the leisure for creative life. .. . The art critic Thomas B. Hess makes the point that the reason that political

scientists and social planners have difficulty understanding the modern artists is

that they cannot understand how anybody is able to make anything, particular-

ly a work of art, spontaneously or directly ~ a primo. . . . By the same token, the

same intellectuals cannot understand the anarchist idea of social spontaneity or the direct formation of social communities.!!7

This critique of the structural logic of capitalism in the name of communitarian

values reminds us of how Newman could justifiably summarize his work from 1948 to 1970 (shortly before his own death). He spoke of the intended affirmation through his art of alternative values, both aesthetic and extra-aesthetic, that were decidedly

at odds with some, but not all, aspects of post-1945 U.S. society. His discussion went along these lines: I hope that my work transcends the issue of being American . . . all these issues in the end, whether it’s American or whether it’s painterly, are false issues raised

by aesthetes. . . .

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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

There's no question that my work and the work of the men Irespect took a revolutionary position, you might say, against the bourgeois notion of what a

Painting is as an object.

.

Some twenty-two years ago in a gathering [in 1948}, I was asked what my paint-

ing really means in terms of society, in terms of the world, in terms of the situ-

ation. And my answer then was that if my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism . . . and I still believe,

that my work in terms of its social impact does denote the possibility of an open society, of an open world, not of a closed institutional world.!18

Here it should be noted that the term state capitalism was a significant one for the

anti-Stalinist left during the 1930s-1960s, and it appeared in at least two of the journals with which Newman was associated: Dissent and New Politics. First, there was an earlier and less partisan use of this term in New York by a member of the Frankfurt School. This was the now famous 1941 essay by that title, which was written by Fried-

rich Pollock and appeared (in English) in the Institute of Social Research’s official journal. Pollock, a fellow of the Institute and a friend of Adorno, used the term for various contemporary state configurations (fascist, New Deal, and Soviet), which he saw

as being part of an intermediary period in history. He treated these various state formations rather nonjudgmentally, if at times ambiguously, as democratic state capitalism in the case of the United States or the Soviet Union (and as totalitarian state cap-

italism in the case of fascism). These types of state capitalism are seen to combine

both progressive and conservative attributes.119

The second source, though, was the more likely precedent for Newman's partic-

ularly perjorative use of the term. This usage, which can be found, for example, in an article by theorist Paul Mattick for New Politics, went back to the workplace-based democratic socialism of Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, and Karl Korsch.!20 This

particular tradition of Marxism, with very strong affinities to anarchism, condemned

both state capitalism (in the United States and Europe) and state socialism (in the Soviet Union); indeed, it even equated the two - an equation with which anarchists gen-

erally agreed. In conducting a critique of Leninism via Pannekoek, Mattick wrote the

following:

Just as he did in his earlier criticism of Social Democracy, so here, too . . . [hle [Pannekoek] pointed out that the Russian Revolution, though an important episode in the development of the working class movement, aspired only to a system of production which could be called state socialism, or state capitalism, which are one and the same thing.!21

Thus, it is this latter source in Mattick and Korsch that almost surely ended up be-

ing the precedent for Newman’s own anarchist use of the words “state capitalism.”122

Furthermore, Schapiro (who was a friend of Mattick and an admirer of Korsch) confirmed for me that he used “state capitalism” in the traditional Luxemburgian and

Korschian sense in his own political analyses.!23 °

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE The emphasis in art on affirmation, on the intimation of a radically different society in the future, does not offset the fact that the work of Reinhardt and the Abstract Ex-

pressionists (as numerous quotations by Motherwell et al. show) was often about negation, rejections, and what Harold Rosenberg termed the creation of “cultural distance.”124 Indeed, Reinhardt’s own development led him even to negate Abstract Expressionism, as well as almost all other aspects of U.S. culture, in the name of art that would be kept “free of all meaning.”125 At one point, Reinhardt even approached the pure negation of nihilism when (in attacking virtually everyone else’s art but his own) he stated, “I heard someone say that it is easy to attack everything, and I have been thinking about how difficult it is. I would like to attack almost everything.”!26 Yet Reinhardt’s criticisms of the other members of the New York School during the 1950s and 1960s, while no doubt wellintentioned, were also as uneven as they were harsh. Some of his criticisms were on

the mark (although many of these also applied to him as well), while the rest of his rejections — particularly the prating about “purity,” as if he alone had it - devolved into a sanctimoniousness that often made him look self-serving. Their serious theotetical failings notwithstanding, the Abstract Expressionists as a group have always had an integrity and dignity that is indisputable. Furthermore, the Inquisitional indexing by Reinhardt of individual “traitors” in the New York School is at odds with a rigorous critique of the structural failings of society. Genuine social critique is not about castigating the wayward behavior of individual personalities; nor is it about constantly blaming others for “selling out.” Owing to how he accorded negation a central place within modernism, Adorno’s concept of progressive art - which was much more negative than that of Marx and Engels or even Schapiro - was closer to the position of the Abstract Expressionists than was the positivist conception of modernism codified by Greenberg.!2? Adorno contended that “The concept of modernism is privative, indicating firmly that something ought to be negated . . . modernism is not a positive slogan.” 128 Furthermore, Adorno argued that “In art, direct protest is reactionary.” Thus, for him, genuinely committed art was generally that which has been “defamed as formalism.”129 However, the very strength of “negative” modernism, and of all art without a topical message, was also the source of its most serious weakness; for, as Adorno noted,

“what gives committed art its aesthetic advantage over tendentious art also renders the content to which the artist commits himself or herself inherently ambiguous.” 130 Accordingly, Adorno contended as follows when discussing the priority given to negation in art:

Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions . . . but to work at the level of fun-

damental attitudes. . . . The notion of a “message” in art, even when politically radical already contains an accomodation to the world as it is... . This is not a time for political art, but politics have migrated into autonomous art, and never

more so than when they seem to be politically dead.131

According to Adorno, then, modernism is different from all previous art “in that

its mode of negation is different,” so that instead of negating previous styles alone,

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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQU: “modernism

negates tradition itself.”!32 Modernism

thus ends up in a paradoxical

“state of general uncertainty.” Adorno summed up as follows this contradictory tra-

jectory: “[M]odernism is myth turned against itself. Through modern art, the timeless quality of myth becomes a catastrophic instant wherein all temporal continuity

is destroyed.”133

Among the explanations of postwar New York abstract painting by the artists themselves - obviously including those already noted by Reinhardt, Lewis, and New-

man - several approximate in tone and even intent this adroit explication of the

dilemma of modernism. This modernist dilemma hinges on an unrequited desire for

community and the inability of discovering it at present, coupled with the need to negate the social formations that stand in the way of reaching such an organic com-

munity. These statements by the Abstract Expressionists also feature the concept of

debunking that Adorno used as the basis for his discussion of modernism’s negativ-

ity. Perhaps the most eloquent of these claims was one made by Robert Motherwell in 1948, while he was discussing the sublime:

Suppose that we assume that, despite defaults and confusions, modern art succeeded in ridding us of the costumes of the past, of kings and queens and the glory of conquerors and politicos and mountains, rhetoric and the grand, that it became, though “understood” only by a minority, a people's art, a peculiarly modern

humanism,

that

its tactics

in relation

to the general

human

situation

were those of gentle, strong and humane men defending their values with intel-

ligence and ingenuity against the property-loving world.134

Ina related statement from earlier in the 1940s, Reinhardt argued something sim-

ilar, his analysis going as follows: “In its dissatisfaction with ordinary experience, the

impoverished reality of present-day society, an abstract painting stands as a challenge

to disorder and disintegration. Its activity implies a conviction of something construc-

tive in our time. . . the content is not in a subject matter or story, but in the actual

painting activity.”135 The historical context for these readings of modernism in general and of Abstract

Expressionism in particular was provided by Robert Motherwell in a paper that he

himself (in a letter to William Baziotes) termed “a socialist analysis.”!36 This was his crucially important piece entitled “The Modern

Painter’s World,” which originally

appeared in 1944 in a Surrealist publication named Dyn.!3? For breadth of reference,

quality of mind and depth of insight, this essay by Motherwell remains one of the two or three finest by any member of the New York School. It should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the historical emergence of Abstract

Expressionism in the mid-1940s. In addressing the relation of the modern artist to the ruling order, Motherwell opened with the anarchist claim that “The modern states we have seen so far have all been enemies of the artist; those states which follow may be, too.” As for the role of

the artist in modern times, it is not one of “anti-intellectualism” but rather one of aes-

thetically reasserting the wholeness of the individual in a fragmented world. To quote

Motherwell again, “he function of the modern artist is by definition the felt expres-

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE sion of modern reality. . . . By feeling is meant the response of the ‘body-and-mind’ as a whole to the events of reality. . .. With Marx this notion is coupled with the feeling of how material reality is.”138 From here, Motherwell went on both to observe that the popular view of mod-

ern art is one of “its remoteness from . . . the values of the majority.” He argued in justification of this distance, since “the remoteness of modern art is not merely a question. of language, of the increasing ‘abstractness’ of modern art.” Rather, this remoteness

or abstractness from ordinary affairs was also predicated on an informed historical rejection “almost en toto, of the values of the bourgeois world.”139 While making this case for the negativity of modernism, Motherwell demonstrat-

ed a serious command of ly made by Christopher (which we all have) and banks, which only a tiny

Marxian categories. He did so by citing the distinction rightCaudwell, a British Marxist, between “private possessions” “private property” (that is, the ownership of industry and minority have). It is this latter type of property that, accord-

ing to Marx, constitutes the “historical base” of modern society and thus is the struc-

tural source of modern inequality and alienation. Generally, Motherwell said, “the artist is greatest in affirmation”; yet for the above-noted historical reasons it is the

strategy of negation that, while not devoid of an affirmative side, most often prevails

in modern art owing to the artist's alienation from modern Western society. 140 Alienated as he is from “the great social classes, by the decadence of the middleclass and the indifference of the working class,” the modern artist must produce a “highly formal art.”!41 Modern artists must do so in order to continue expanding the communicative resources of the visual arts until such time as they can be properly used and extended by humanity in a more equitable postcapitalist society. Nonetheless, the very historical impasse confronting progressive forces in the mid-1940s did not mean that either socialists or modernists were irrelevant, even though they were

both obviously ineffectual in a number of respects. In regard to this historical blockage and the inability of progressive forces to overcome it, Motherwell wrote of how negation nevertheless harbored an affirmation: The weakness of socialists derives from the inertness of the working class. The weakness of artists derives from their isolation. Weak as they are, it is these groups who provide the opposition. The socialist is to free the working class from the

domination of property, so that the spiritual can be possessed by all. The function

of the artist is to make actual the spiritual, so it is there to be possessed. It is here that art instructs, if it does at all.142

In a conclusion to his lecture that illuminated his own class-based isolation as much as it did any period inactivity of the working class, Motherwell deftly articulat-

ed the tense intertwinement of negation and affirmation in the type of modernist art being produced by the members of the New York School. His summation went like this: The argument of this lecture is that the materialism of the middle class and the inertness of the working-class leave the modern artist without any vital connec-

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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

tion to society, save that of opposition. . . . [Yet] his opposition to middle class society gives him a certain strength. Until there is a radical revolution in the values of modern society, we may look for a highly formal art to continue. We can be grateful for its extraordinary technical discoveries. 143

CHAPTER

THREE

The FBI Files on the New York School

The cold war is a delusionary struggle between real interests. ... The joke of the cold war is that each of the rivals is aware that the other's

idea would be irresistible if it were actually put into practice. ... The West wants freedom to the extent that freedom is compatible with pri-

vate ownership and with profits; the Soviets want socialism to the ex-

tent that socialism is compatible with the dictatorship of the Commu-

nist bureaucracy. . . . [In fact] revolutions in the twentieth century are

for freedom and socialism. Instead of conservatives, the U.S. has greedy, disgraceful little Birch-

ers and sophists of privilege, to whom the history of freedom means

only what it has left in their pockets; while the Soviets have Stalinists, to whom socialism is the interests of the party . . . both sides keep insisting hypocritically on the purity of their position. Today the menace is nuclear war. To abate this menace, a realistic

politics is essential, a politics which would get rid once and for all of the fraud of freedom versus socialism.

~ Harold Rosenberg, “The Cold War,” Partisan Review (1962)!

S WAS THE CASE IN THE YEARS LEADING UP TO 1952, WHEN THE REPUBA

licans gained control of both houses of Congress, the 1990s have

witnessed the use of McCarthyist invective against prominent figures on the left, some of whom were associated with the Abstract Expressionists. Meyer Schapiro, for example, was attacked in the January 1992 issue of the American Spectator for his “imperishable faith in socialism,”2 while the late I. F. Stone has been assailed

yet again as a purported “KGB agent” by a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)

(New York Times, 13 August and 26 September

1992).3 Ironically, this neo-McCarthyist position is currently being reasserted even as the triumphalist mainstream interpretation of the cold war’s conclusion — that is, as

a “victory” for corporate capitalism and as a vindication of the American Way - is being rendered ever less tenable both by new historical documents and by recent histotical developments.4 In this chapter, I reexamine by means of new primary sources the era of Mc-

Carthyism, from the mid-1940s up through the early 1960s. These include U.S. gov-

ernment documents that I have obtained through the Freedom of Information Act 79

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EXPRESSIONISM

AS

CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

(FOIA) and that demonstrate the perceived national security threat posed in this period by Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Lee Krasner,

and Norman Lewis. This new material helps to consolidate and to strengthen one of the main themes of my book: the dissident if also paradoxical nature of the New York School that disallows any sustained ideological linkage of Abstract Expressionism with the so-called vital center in the political arena of the postwar United States.S

U.S.

GOVERNMENT

THE

ABSTRACT

SURVEILLANCE

OF

REINHARDT

AND

EXPRESSIONISTS

In 1966, one year before the untimely death of Ad Reinhardt and four years prior to Mark Rothko’s tragic suicide, the U.S. Congress finally passed the Freedom of Information Act. For the first time, this allowed private citizens access to records involving the clandestine surveillance of U.S. citizens considered subversive by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — the agency that was set up in 1908 as the domestic investigative arm of the Department of Justice. According to a congressional audit of 1975 by the General Office of Accounting, there were as many as 160,000 open files concerning “subversive matters” in the United States.® What we are in fact talking about in almost all of these cases against people on the left, particularly those against the Abstract Expressionists, is a resolute antifascism. coupled with a commitment to some form of socialism (whether democratic socialism, social democracy, anarchism, or Soviet-style socialism). These two “subversive”

stands were interrelated with support for domestic movements on behalf of racial equality, opposition to U.S. imperialism abroad, and an embrace of classical liberal

civil liberties at home. FBI claims to the contrary notwithstanding, we are dealing neither with pro-Soviet allegiances that led to some form of espionage (of which Lee Krasner was falsely accused in 1957), nor with actual collusion with foreign agents of the USSR (in the case of Ad Reinhardt and all the Abstract Expressionists noted above).

It should be remembered here that throughout the decade of the 1980s, which was generally a period of right-wing resurgence in the United States, there was a per-

sistent (if only partially successful) effort by the Reagan administration to eviscerate

the Freedom of Information Act and thus the civil liberties as well as political rights

guaranteed by it. This strategy of constraint was advanced through Executive Order

12356 of 1982 and through an even more constrictive presidential decree of 1986 a decree that was put forth shortly after the 1985 disclosure of records through the FOIA that Ronald Reagan had served as an FBI informant, known as “Agent T-10,”

throughout the 1940s while being a member of the Screen Actor's Guild.” The public presentation here, for the first time in a book-length study, of the formerly top secret government documents about Reinhardt, Krasner, Motherwell, Roth-

ko, and Gottlieb helps to demonstrate two things: first, the ongoing, if also limited, access still permitted by the Freedom of Information Act; and second, the heavily censored form in which these documents now appear (if they are released at all) owing to the executive maneuvers of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Of these five members of the Abstract Expressionist group whose left-wing po-

litical actions were deemed subversive by the FBI, Reinhardt’s file is far and away the

THE FBI FILES ON THE NEW YORK SCHOOL most extensive: It runs to around 123 pages (of which only 100 were released, with a sizable portion of those being blotted out for reasons of “national security”), whereas Motherwell’s comprises 45, Rothko’s 21, Gottlieb’s 5, and Krasner’s a mere 2 pages,

albeit very provocative ones. In the case of Reinhardt, the reason for the greater degree of monitoring was no doubt a geopolitical one directly related to his pro-Soviet socialism. The reduced concern elicited by the others was a result of their being anarchists or Trotskyists who were associated with the anti-Stalinist and nonaligned socialism of the political journal Dissent. The remarkable size of Reinhardt’s file makes it the third largest one on an artist to be obtained to date. The biggest FBI file is of course Picasso’s, which is 187 pages in length, followed by Ben Shahn’s, which holds 146. Significantly, Picasso and Shahn, like Reinhardt, were either members of the Communist Party or fellow travelers who enjoyed the support of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.? A 1951 memorandum in Shahn’s file states quite revealingly that although Shahn had “denied being a Communist,” he was nonetheless “identified with pro-Communist activities” through the making of posters “for various trade unions in New York City, and he has been very successful in the modern art field.” A subsequent FBI memorandum in 1952, the year Charlie Chaplin was being forced by the U.S. government to leave the

country, specifically mentions Shahn as a “candidate for deportation.”10 There is a particularly sobering fact about Reinhardt’s file, who by his own concession was a lifelong socialist, as Barbara Rose and others have duly noted.1 Every memorandum about him from 1941 to 1966 is labeled with the coded designation “SM-C” or “Security Matter-C,” which if spelled out in lay terms means the following: According to the FBI, along with other government agencies, the subject constitutes a national security threat and is a subversive because his or her sympathies for communism and/or socialism make him or her a “potential” collaborator with foreign agents.

As author Herbert Mitgang has remarked, these secret dossiers “cast a shadow of criminality” over the subjects whose actions they monitored.!2 Reinhardt’s dossier begins with an eight-page FBI memorandum of October 16, 1941, includes various clandestine reports from throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, and ends with a fivepage report submitted on November 1, 1966, filed a few months before Reinhardt’s death. The material compiled by the FBI incorporates substantial information that originated with other government agencies, including the State Department, foreign embassies of the United States, the U.S. Navy, and the Counter-Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Marine Corps.!3 Indeed, so concerned were these various branches of the U.S. government with Reinhardt’s pro-Soviet (although not pro-Stalinist) politics that page 1 of the earliest FBI memorandum states: “Subject is being considered for the custodial detention list. Description set out. Custodial detention memorandum being prepared.” Among the reasons given were Reinhardt’s “membership and apparent activity with the Communist Party.”15 Here it should be noted that a few months later, in 1942, Executive

Order 9066 authorized the U.S. Army to set up just such a detention camp for every Japanese-American on the West Coast; some 110,000 people were held prisoner in these concentration camps by the U.S. military for over three years. Furthermore, in 1950 the U.S. Congress passed the Internal Security Act, which allowed for the estab-

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EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

lishment of additional detention camps during periods of an “internal security emergency.” Thus, suspected subversives such as Reinhardt and Shahn could have been

held indefinitely without trial. (Incidentally, this law was repealed only in 1968.)!5

A twenty-three page FBI document in Reinhardt’s file is dated January 5, 1955 — this was after Senator Joseph McCarthy had been censured by the U.S. Senate. Most of the first page, like many of the subsequent twenty-two, has been blackened out be-

cause of an exemption called “b-1,” first authorized in 1986 by the Reagan adminis-

tration. Materials so exempted “(A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and (B) are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive Order.”16 In short, we cannot know all the details about the Department of Justice’s findings in the Reinhardt case, since such general knowledge, according to the Reagan administration, would threaten “national security.” Among the list of groups in this early 1955 report - which identifies for the first time one of several “subversive aliases” of Reinhardt (the pseudonym “Daryl Friedrich,” which he evidently used while on the Editorial Council of Soviet Russia Today in 1937) — are all organizations classified as “Communist Party Front Groups” with which he either had worked or was still working. In fact, Reinhardt had done a draw-

ing (as like FBI

for Soviet Russia Today as late as 1947. Between 1936 and 1947, he had contributed Michael Corris has only recently established) over 350 drawings to publications The New Masses that were associated with the Communist Party.!7 This lengthy list of so-called front groups included these organizations and institutions: Friends of the United American Artists Workshop ACA Gallery Committee for the Defense of Public Education American Artists Congress

Artist’s League of America

Book and Magazine Guild [which was affiliated with the United Office and Professional Workers of America,

the CIO,

the American

Labor Party, and the American

Committee for Peace and Democracy - the latter of which had been “cited as subversive by Attorney General Tom Clark” on September 21, 1948]!8 The Thomas Jefferson School [where Ad Reinhardt and painter Norman Lewis taught

in the 1940s and which was], “designated as subversive by Attorney General pur-

suant to Executive Order 10450.”19

Civil Rights Congress [all FBI commentary here blotted out in accordance with so-

called national security concerns]

National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions [entry mostly blotted out due to

the “b-1” exemption, except for a portion stating that this group is “a Commu-

nist Front” according to the May 14, 1951, Guide to Subversive Organizations and

Publications}

American Jewish Labor Council fagain, entry blotted out almost entirely, except for a reference to Executive Order 10450]

American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born [entry blotted out, except fora citation of Executive Order 10450] The New Masses Soviet Russia

Today.2

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It was precisely his identification with the Civil Rights Congress that led to writer Dashiell Hammett’s imprisonment for six months in 1951 after he refused to name the various other people who had been associated with this group, among whom

were Ad Reinhardt and William Faulkner. In fact, it was Faulkner's support of the 1951 position taken by the Civil Rights Congress in the case of Willie McGee that led to that author's being monitored as a “subversive” by the FBI.2!

In 1948 Reinhardt had executed a series of drawings for a pamphlet by the American Jewish Council entitled The Truth about Cohen. A prominent feature of this publication, which calls for a militant stand against all racism, not just anti-Semitism, is the consistent identification of the class-based exploitation of workers with the socially divisive use of scapegoating by the ruling class. Several passages explicitly relate this divisive logic of corporate capitalism within society to anti-Semitism’s resurgence.2? Accordingly, some observations are in line here concerning the issue of ethnicity in this 1948 pamphlet and its broader links to the U.S. Left during this period. First, we must recall that four of the major figures among the first generation of Abstract Expressionists were Jewish — Barnett Newman,

Mark

Rothko,

Lee Krasner,

and Adolph Gottlieb — as were several of the major critics defending the Abstract Expressionists on the left, namely, Meyer Schapiro, Harold Rosenberg, Elaine de Kooning, Dore Ashton, and Thomas B. Hess. This was at a time when some sectors of the

U.S. government were openly racist. The Truman administration actually recruited over a hundred scientists who had formerly served the Nazi government in Germany to work in the U.S. space program; and, in fact, the U.S. government knowingly admitted as many as 10,000 former Nazis into the country during this period, since they were intransigent opponents of “communism.”23 As a member of the U.S. Justice Department conceded in a 1987 interview, “The United States was a haven for Nazi war criminals” throughout the late 1940s and 1950s.24

Second, we should remember that 1948, the year that Reinhardt’s drawings appeared in the American Jewish Council’s pamphlet, was the same year that Robert Motherwell explicitly related an interest in the sublime to a critique of capitalism; and it was around this same date when Barnett Newman told art critic Harold Rosenberg that “if he and others could read it [my work] properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.”25 Earlier in the 1940s in New York City, moreovert, members

of the Frankfurt School

had addressed the issue of ethnic marginal-

ization through the “anti-Semitic question” (a locution that they preferred to the “Jewish question”) in a way that closely related to the subsequent analysis used by Reinhardt in The Truth about Cohen.26 After having been affiliated with Columbia University for almost ten years as the director of the exiled Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research, Max Horkheimer was hired by the American Jewish Council

in 1944 to direct its newly created Depart-

ment of Scientific Research.2”7 During Horkheimer’s tenure there, the department

launched a multivolume series of Studies in Prejudice, the most famous achievement of which was the volume entitled The Authoritarian Personality, coauthored by Ador-

no and three other scholars and published in New York in 1950.28 Earlier, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was written in the United States during 1943-4 (and published in Amsterdam in 1947), Adorno and Horkheimer con-

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tended in the chapter on anti-Semitism that ethnic minorities, as in the case of the

Jews, were prime targets of the totalitarian identity principle of instrumental rationality that is intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production. Such was the situation, since minorities remained the most resolute repository of otherness and difference in a Western system predicated upon ever greater standardization and homogeneity. In

conjunction with commodity production, ideology produces an equation between things or human attributes that are notably unequal or radically dissimilar. Thus, ideological tendencies operating along these lines homogenize the world in terms of conventional views or “official” values.29

The analysis of Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment went as follows: Anti-Semitism as a national movement was always based on an urge which its in-

stigators held against the Social Democrats: the urge for equality. . .. Anti-Semitic

behavior is generated in situations where blinded men robbed of their subjectivity are set loose as subjects... .

Bourgeois anti-Semitism has a specific economic reason: the concealment of

domination in production. . . . Anti-Semitism has virtually ceased to be an independent impulse and is now a plank in the platform. Anyone who gives a chance

to Fascism, subscribes to the destruction of the trade unions and the crusade against Bolshevism; he automatically subscribes as well to the destruction of the

Jews.30 Furthermore, and no less significant, this discussion of anti-Semitism relates very

closely to how Adorno defined ideology with respect to the internal logic of the capitalist mode of production. Just as commodity exchange effects an equation between unequal things, things that are never commensurable, so does ideology in the West. In this sense, ideology was defined by Adorno as a form of “identity thinking” entailing a paranoid style of rationality that transmutes the uniqueness and plurality of

things into mere diminished simulacra, or stereotypes, of themselves. As such, the opposite of ideology’s reductive naming would not be truthfulness so much as irreducible difference or heterogeneity. In a word, ideology homogenizes the world, so that

even difference is misrepresented within a “false totality.” For Adorno, modernist art at its best was one of the most profound forces within. society on behalf of negating this misleadingly homogenizing logic within the capitalist mode of production. Thus, one of the aims of this type of modernist art, with its clear accent on the unevenness of historical development, would be to defend the nonidentical, the differential, and the irreducible as part of the “negative dialectic” of

the alternative or dissident modernism noted in Chapter 2.3! Significantly, Ad Reinhardt had already drawn the ire of some U.S. congressmen in 1944 (which he notes wittily in his 1966 “Chronology”) when he did a series of drawings for a pamphlet entitled Races of Mankind coauthored by Ruth Benedict, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University.32 In this publication the issues of racism and class-based inequality were deftly addressed by Reinhardt in twelve drawings. Particularly impressive as well is the way that he dealt with the problem of ethnocentrism (or, better, Eurocentrism) by underscoring the richly multicultural nature,

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or understated differences, of Western cuisine. In several of these drawings, Reinhardt also illuminated the ways in which cultural practices and national traits have been historically constructed, rather than biologically mandated.33

Moreover, the way Reinhardt constantly placed the word “races” in quotation marks, thus highlighting its problematic standing, reminds us of the more recent observations by Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and others that the category of race

is of little merit to biologists. This is the case because the range of physical variations

within “racial” groups is often more pronounced than the degree of general physical differences between various “racial” groups.34 Thus, here again one sees how the conventional use of the word “race” often features an ideological operation that homog-

enizes difference within ethnic groups while rigidly maintaining the often less pronounced difference between ethnicities. The result in each situation is a stereotype, in

one case stemming from the suppression of diversity and in the other from the reification of diversity. The seventh memorandum in Reinhardt’s FBI file, which is from April 22, 1958, exemplifies yet again the wish of some figures in U.S. government posts to punish

Reinhardt for his political commitments. After Reinhardt applied for a passport and denied ever having been a member of the Communist Party, the State Department on April 16, 1958, secretly requested more information about “his denial of Communist Party membership.”35 Accordingly, people in the State Department asked the rep-

resentatives of the Department of Justice “if there was sufficient information upon which to initiate prosecution under section 1001 or 1542, Title 18, U.S. Code” (June

22, 1958).36 No further action was taken, however, to prosecute Reinhardt for perjury. It was also in the mid-1950s that Lee Krasner, though a

lifelong admirer of Trot-

sky, was nonetheless investigated by the FBI for espionage, which in their eyes would almost surely have had to do with aiding the Soviet Union. However, because everything has been deleted by the U.S. government - so as not to divulge a “confidential source” — the report extending from November

14 through December 16, 1957, dis-

closes little about why Krasner would have been suspected as a foreign agent against

the United States.3? Furthermore, it was in the mid-1950s that Meyer Schapiro and his wife Lillian Milgram were questioned about the “communist views” of his students by FBI agents who came to their private residence in Greenwich Village. As the Schapiros’s neighbors later told them, the day before these agents had questioned various

people in the neighborhood about the “communist views” of the Schapiros.38 °

Subsequent FBI reports make clear that Reinhardt’s travels abroad were monitored by the U.S. government;

the entry from

November

8,

1960,

for example,

notes that

“there was no indication the subject traveled to a Soviet oriented country.”39 Later files likewise detail Reinhardt’s other foreign travels, but it was in the early 1960s with

his support for liberation movements in the Third World, along with his involvement with anti-imperialist groups, that the FBI and other U.S. government agencies, including the State Department and Department of Defense, reintensified their surveillance of Reinhardt. Furthermore, it was at this time that Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb

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were added to the clandestine purview of the FBI owing to their commitment to various progressive movements of the early 1960s. An FBI memorandum

of January 25, 1962, again labeled “Security Matter-C,”

details Reinhardt’s involvement with the U.S. Friends of Mexico group - a group that included other members of the Abstract Expressionists’ circle aside from Rothko and Gottlieb, namely, David Smith, and less directly Rudolf Baranik and May Stevens.4° In addition, many prominent figurative painters were involved with this group, the

most well-known of whom were Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, Jack Levine, and Philip Evergood, as well as both Issac and Moses Soyer. (The specific composition of this group also reminds us that in the future, more

broad-ranging discussions of Abstract Expressionism will be necessary. Such studies will have to address not only how these paintings of the New York School related to those by other groups of abstract artists from Canada, Europe, and Latin America, but also how the social concerns of the Abstract Expressionists were sometimes interrelated with those of figurative artists on the left, such as Shahn or Evergood. To approach the work along these lines - and the semifigurative paintings of Rudolf Baranik, whose works are linked to those of his former friend Reinhardt, provide a notable point of intersection for these two different tendencies — we shall have to advance beyond the tired conceptual framework of “modernism versus realism” to a less constrictive yet also more critical approach.)*1 Both the FBI and the U.S. State Department considered the Artists Committee to Free Siqueiros, which was the avowed aim of the U.S. Friends of Mexico, to be an

alarming organization. David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was deported from the United States in 1932 and who upon his reentry in 1936 was Pollock’s teacher in an experimental workshop, was jailed in 1960 by the Mexican government after he led a demonstration in Mexico City that erupted in violence. Owing to a national law specifying harsh penalties for insurrectionary leaders that foment “social dissolution,” the

judiciary branch of the Mexican government had sentenced Siqueiros to eight years in prison. (He actually served four years before being released by the Mexican government.)

In establishing an artists committee to lobby for Siqueiros’s release, the aforementioned artists signed public manifestoes on Siqueiros’s behalf and also held a public art exhibition during January 2-6, 1962, at the ACA Gallery.42 As pages 1 and 2 of Reinhardt’s file for February 25 of that year clearly show, the FBI did in fact send a secret agent to the exhibition, in order to monitor attendance at it. This agent recorded that he saw no more than twenty-five people visit the gallery on the two days that

he went there.43

Overlapping with Reinhardt’s FBI file during this period are those of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom not only signed the statements in support of Siqueiros but also supported the antiwar as well as the civil rights movement from the very beginning. The latter two commitments (but not the first) were shared by

Motherwell, Newman, Lewis, the de Koonings, Schapiro, and Rosenberg, as well as other members of the New York School. A communiqué (on January 8, 1963) from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico to the U.S. Department of State is included in Gottlieb’s

folder.

his official report refers to the public letter’s appeal that Siqueiros be released

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from prison and notes that this appeal was the subject of a news story in the New York

Times on December 31, 1962. According to the communiqué,

The advertisement mentioned in the Times story was placed fairly prominently in Excelsior, one of Mexico’s leading and conservative daily newspapers, on December 29. It was a salute to Siqueiros on his 66th birthday “From the Intellectuals of the United States” and urged his release from prison so that “he may continue enriching the art of Mexico and the world.” The advertisement was dated from New York on December 29 and “signed” by a number of “intellectuals,” whose

names are listed below as of possible interest to Washington’s agencies.44

The material in Rothko’s file was part of a secret report drawn up by the FBI at the request of the White House staff (January 11, 1965) upon receiving a telegram signed by Rothko and Gottlieb - a telegram that, as the FBI responses indicate January 1 and June 4, 1965), was a strong protest against U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia.45 (That telegram similarly prompted a 1965 FBI report on Gottlieb.) The report - which included a subversive-pseudonyms check on Rothko (whose address is listed as “Rus-

sia”) without turning up any alias - explicitly linked the U.S. Friends of Mexico group

with the new anti-interventionist movement that was just then beginning to emerge in the United States. The FBI assessment, as detailed in the June 4, 1965, memoran-

dum for Rothko’s dossier, proceeds along rather ominous lines as follows after summarizing the Siqueiros letter:

David Alfaro Siqueiros, a top Mexican Communist Party leader, had been impris-

oned for several years for engaging in acts of “social dissolution,” that is, acting

to dissolve illegally the Mexican government. He reportedly had been engaged in activity in behalfof Soviet intelligence, and in 1940, was reported to have led

an abortive attempt on the life of Leon Trotsky. On April 5, 1965, the FBI received information that an individual by the name of Mark Rothko signed a “Writers and Artists Protest” against the continuation of

the present American policy in Vietnam. The protest was a plea to obtain funds in order to publish an advertisement in The New York Times encouraging individuals to protest to the United States Government. . . .46

It should be quickly noted here that the Siqueiros Affair, as it was called in the pages of New Politics and also Dissent, led to an animated public exchange among the members of the art-world Left - between the “Soviet sympathizers” who supported Si-

queiros and those among the “anti-Stalinist” or democratic socialist contingent who

did not. In this debate the latter group numbered among its ranks Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Philip Guston, Meyer Schapiro, and Harold Rosenberg, as well as

Irving Howe. In fact, Reinhardt and Schapiro wrote polemical pieces for their respective sides that appeared in Dissent. (Newman wrote about Siqueiros in a 1962 review in Art News.)47 Perhaps not surprisingly, Reinhardt’s contribution, which was printed in the Win-

ter 1963 issue of the journal, was quite ad hominem ogy” in the catalog accompanying his retrospective Reinhardt referred to this episode as artist “Dissents from the Artists Committee to ‘Free Siqueiros’ from

in tone. Later, for the “Chronolat the Jewish Museum in 1966, from Dissent magazine’s dissent Prison.” After attacking “action

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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE painters” with questions like, “What is a myth if it’s not as good as a pile?” and claiming that he was for “an Artists’ prison,” which would take care of all artists who are guilty of not being “mere artists” but of “being myths of one kind or another,” Reinhardt posed the following questions: If Siqueiros is not a “persecuted artist and champion of school teachers and of political freedom,” what is he? What do the protesters against the protest of Siqueiros’s imprisonment want “done” to him, if he is what they think he “infa-

mously” is?48

A less personal yet still pointed reply to Reinhardt was written by Meyer Scha-

piro and appeared in the Spring 1963 issue of Dissent. Schapiro, who stated in a 1992 interview that he was still dismayed by the fact that Rothko, an anarchist, ever would

have signed such a “pro-Stalinist” statement,4? responded to Reinhardt along the following lines:

I have been asked several times during the last years to sign a statement request-

ing the Mexican government to release the painter Siqueiros from prison. . . .

From what I have heard of the law, it seems to me unjust. . ..

In calling for the release of Siqueiros the signers of the petition have made

much of the fact that Siqueiros is a great painter and therefore deserves a special treatment . . . [thus] they divert attention away from his sinister political role. If one takes justice seriously, one must describe the painter in a somewhat different and less glamorous way. In 1940, he organized and led an attack on the house of the Russian Revolutionist, Leon Trotsky. . . . He was also accused of a part in the

assassination of Trotsky. Siqueiros never denied this role in the attack on Trotsky’s

house and boasted of this action as “one of the greatest honors of my life.” . . . He has never been tried for his crimes. It is my knowledge of this history that keeps me from signing the appeal in Si-

queiros’s behalf. To defend Siqueiros as a victim of injustice, without telling the truth about his crimes, is to maintain injustice. . ..

1 urge those who have approved the Siqueiros letter to read the statement is-

sued by a group of French writers, addressed to the committee that sponsored an

Exhibit in Homage to Siqueiros. .. . [This letter was published in the Winter 1963

issue of New Politics.] It is their statement, I hear, that led Picasso to refuse to join the sponorship of the exhibition.50 ¢ We must, however, return to the cause of anti-imperialism, which all of the Abstract

Expressionists supported, however much they disagreed over the Siqueiros Affair. It is

rather revealing that some of the material in Rothko’s FBI File about his involvement at the inception of the antiwar movement was provided by the Head of the CounterIntelligence Branch of the U.S. Marine Corps (April 5, 1965). All of this clandestine

reportage clearly indicates that especially in the early and mid-1960s - that is, before

the antiwar movement gained massive popular support (which occurred only around

1969-70) - the U.S. government viewed such opposition to its war efforts (or what it called overseas “police actions”) as highly subversive if not treasonous.5!

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Occurring as it did at a time when the Latin American Left was experiencing a resurgence inspired by the successes of the Cuban Revolution (including a recent victory in 1961 over U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary forces that Reinhardt included in

his 1966 retrospective’s “Chronology” as “the Bay of Pigs fiasco”),52 the gestures of in-

ternational solidarity by the New York School with movements of national liberation no doubt alarmed various government agents. In fact, as the extensively documented accounts of Noam Chomsky, Philip Agee (himself a former CIA agent in Ecuador), and others make clear, the CIA and the U.S. State Department were even more active in counterinsurgency throughout Latin America from the early 1960s onward than had been the case previously.53 The FBI domestically and the CIA internationally so strongly targeted the above-

mentioned network of anti-imperialist movements and civil rights groups that sever-

al of the Abstract Expressionists would be viewed as subversive figures requiring secret surveillance. Key reasons for this conduct by the U.S. government have been deftly summarized by political economist Paul Sweezy of Monthly Review. In discussing why the Vietnam War was “a turning point in the postwar history of U.S. imperialism,”

Sweezy observed that even before the United States plunged into the Vietnam morass there was a strong stimulus in this direction provided by the combination of the burgeoning civil rights movement and the Cuban Revolution, both of which had begun to radicalize a part of the white youth in the United States.54 This process was notably intensified as the commitment of U.S. troops to Vietnam increased while the return flow of casualties swelled. As the 1960s proceeded, the

various dissident forces potentiated each other. The domestic situation resulting from. the war reached its nadir after Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. By the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, then, as Sweezy noted, U.S. imperialism

found itself in a seriously weakened position, due in part to the war itself and in part to the relative loss of economic power to its major capitalist allies and/or rivals.55 When we look back to the first major anti-interventionist manifesto published in the New York Times, a “Declaration to [U.N.] Ambassador Adlai Stevenson” (April 18, 1965), we find the names of Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman (who were then the coeditors of Monthly Review) along with those of Dissent editor Irving Howe and beside those of Ad Reinhardt, Rudolf Baranik, and May Stevens. The letter opened with this

statement: “We have watched in dismay as our government - by its actions in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic - has clearly violated the United Nations Charter, international law, and . . . fundamental principles of human decency.” This group, who called themselves Artists and Writers Dissent, therefore urged Adlai Stevenson to

resign as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and to become a spokesperson for those who were opposed to the U.S. government's recourse “to unilateral military in-

terventions.”5¢

Another public antiwar statment shortly after this one was organized by several

members of the New Kooning,

York School, namely, Rudolf Baranik, Ad Reinhardt, Elaine de

May Stevens, and critic Dore Ashton. This statement,

entitled “End Your

Silence,” also appeared in the New York Times and was signed by over five hundred artists and writers, including many members of the first and second generation of Abstract Expressionism. In its declaration of opposition to U.S. imperialism, whether in

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Southeast Asia or Latin America, this declaration went far beyond being a mere call for peace (which, as Rudolf Baranik said in a recent interview, was precisely the point).57 The statement, which appeared in June

1965, read as follows:

A decade ago, when the people of Vietnam were fighting colonialism, the artists

and intellectuals of France - from Sartre to Mauriac, from Picasso to Camus called on the French People’s conscience to protest their leader's policy as im-

moral and to demand an end to that dirty war ~ “la sale guerre.” Today, we in our

country can do no less.

Our President must be made aware that his words of “peace” will not be heard above the din of the bombs falling on Vietnam, that his concern for “freedom”

in South Vietnam is mocked by eleven year’s maintenance there of brutal police regimes assisted by American money,

American guns, and finally . .. American

blood. Our President must be told that our actions in the Dominican Republic are nothing less than armed intervention ina civil war of another nation. Our leaders must be reminded that in vieTNAM and the DOMINICAN REPUBLIC they are

violating international law, the charter of the UN, and, indeed, the spirit of our constitution.

They must learn that their plans for United States hegemony . . for a “Pax

Americana” . . . must not lead to peace but to death and destruction.58

The FBI file on Reinhardt closes with several secret memoranda about his antiwar activities; and one report from November 1, 1966, includes yet another round of

subversive-name checks to determine if Reinhardt was also active under any of his former aliases.59 Of all the members of the New York School, though, none had a longer or more

principled record of involvement with the causes of anti-imperialism than did Robert Motherwell. On numerous occasions from the late 1950s until his death in 1991,

Motherwell sided with Third World movements for national liberation in their strug-

gle against U.S, intervention. Among the countries in relation to which Motherwell took such a principled public stand were Algeria, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic,

Chile, and Nicaragua.© Along these lines he was even involved in a boycott of the USS. Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale. A Public Letter of June 5, 1970, which was

signed by Motherwell and several other artists, made clear the following: (The undersigned artists are] denying the use of their art as a cultural veneer to

cover policies of ruthless aggression abroad and intolerable repression at home.6!

It is not surprising that, after having supported the Allende Government in Chile during the early 1970s (as did Joan Mir6 and Roberto Matta) and the Sandinistas in

Nicaragua during the 1980s, one of Motherwell’s last public stands was against Senator Jesse Helms.

In 1990,

Motherwell

donated

work

to the senatorial campaign

of

Harvey Gantt, the African-American opponent of Helms. The latter's ultra-right-wing involvement in U.S. policy toward countries like Nicaragua, coupled with his censorious actions on the floors of the U.S. Senate against contemporary US. art, have long

made Helms an adversary of all progressive people.2

THE FBI FILES ON THE NEW YORK SCHOOL In fact, it was was just such opposition to U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic that caused Motherwell’s dissident stands to be monitored as subversive by branches of the U.S. government. The extent of this clandestine surveillance of Motherwell is revealed by the forty-six-page “FBI Files of Cross-References on Robert Motherwell,” which I have only recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The first memorandum involving an FBI investigation into Motherwell’s activism dates from May 11, 1965, when a subversive-name check on him was initiated. The reason for this name check is recounted (in wording that we have seen previously in Rothko’s file) in the concluding report on May 21, 1965: On April 5, 1965, the FBI received information that an individual by the name Robert Motherwell signed a “Writers and Artists Protest” against the continuation of the present American policy in Vietnam. The protest was a plea to obtain funds in order to publish an advertisement in The New York Times encouraging individ-

uals to protest to the United States Government. . . . ©

It was also in 1965 that the U.S. Senate, greatly alarmed by the early militancy of the anti-imperialist movement, commissioned a staff study for the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws. Entitled The Anti-Vietnam Agitation and the Teach-In Movement: The Problem of Communist Infiltration and Exploitation, this report lists a twenty-page booklet, Alternative Perspectives on Vietnam, along with its sponsors; these include Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt. Moreover, both Dissent and Monthly Review are among the leftist publications listed as encouraging opposition to U.S. foreign policy.6* Far from dealing merely with Motherwell’s dissident political activities, though, the FBI inquiries also featured other claims as well about the subversive nature of Abstact Expressionist paintings. In a letter of March 17, 1958, an FBI informant notes that there were a number of left-wing artists chosen to represent the United States in a world exposition in Brussels, since they include “Robert Motherwell and others who

are all communistic artists” according to the Congressional Records of the 82d and 84th Congresses. The informant then asked Director J. Edgar Hoover: "What can be done to prevent this exhibition of subversive art [from] going out of the U.S.?”65 On March 24, 1958, the FBI summarized this informant’s accusations and sent an investigatory letter to the U.S. government representatives in Brussels about the Mu-

seum of Modern Art’s selection, which included work by Motherwell, Grace Hartigan, Ad Reinhardt, and William Baziotes. In requesting an explanation about the U.S. entry at Brussels, Hoover repeated this informant'’s charges and noted that in this person’s view, the Museum of Modern Art “sponsors subversive art and recognizes members of the John Reed Club.” In response, the U.S. Coordinator of Performing Arts Program, George Staempfli, told Hoover that the “artists were chosen on their artistic merit alone” and conveyed the following reassurance: “Let me assure you that in our 19th century Folk Art Exhibit there are a great number of works which counterbalance completely the small group of contemporary paintings.”66 Despite the fact that their “negative” modernism was most about an ideological

critique, or a negation of existing values, Reinhardt and the Abstract Expressionists did in fact produce several works of this period that were more explicitly political, or

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Figure 31. Rudolf Baranik, Napalm Elegy, 1972, oil and mixed media on canvas (72” x 72”). Collection of the Artist.

at least much more topical in orientation, than was generally consistent with the basic premises of their aesthetic. Along with Rudolf Baranik’s remarkable “Napalm Elegy” series from 1966 to 1974 (Fig. 31), which is one of the finest achievements of this

entire period, there was Barnett Newman’s well-known “lace-curtain” sculpture for

Mayor Daley of Chicago after the 1968 police repression visited upon countercultur-

al forces and antiwar groups during the Democratic Party’s National Convention.®”

As named by Robert Motherwell in his classic 1950 essay on “The New York School,” sculptor Louise Bourgeois was the member of this first generation who was

most concerned with topical political commentary, from her emergence on the New

York scene in 1949 right up to the present.68 Indeed Bourgeois’s semifigurative man-

ner, with its profound debt to the multivalent eroticism and matching disquietude of much Surrealism, was rather effective in its cursive critique of repressive forces in the Unied States.

Significantly, one of her most successful pieces in this regard was The

Blind Leading the Blind (1949), an anti-cold-war work consisting of a lintel and spiked post with an animated use of repetitive units (Fig. 32). As Lucy Lippard has noted, this

pointed sculpture was done in response to the fact that Bourgeois was then being in-

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Figure 32. Louise Bourgeois, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1949, painted wood (67¥%" x 64%” x 1644”), Photograph: Peter Moore Becon Collection, Ltd. vestigated for subversion by the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. An equally impressive set of pieces allied with the progressive movements of the 1960s were Bourgeois’s sculpture of 1968 named Molotov Cocktail and her 1972 piece entitled The Marchers. The latter artwork was one in which columns of various sizes and colors were faceted together in a configuration that evidently was meant to imply popular mobilization and was “neither chaotic nor ordered.”®? Illuminating this piece when it was shown at the Whitney Museum in 1972/3 was a raking light that both accentuated the sense of implied motion and accented how the FBI would monitor and search the participants of demonstrations during this period.79 Yet the semifigurative references elicited by Bourgeois’s work in this respect (much the same can be said about Baranik’s series) made it less of an aloof ideological critique than was the case with Abstract Expressionism at its most noninstrumental.

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More surprising, in light of his own well-known dismissal of all “political art” including Guernica (which he labeled a mere “cartoon”), was Ad Reinhardt's one direct-

ly engagé political piece, a lithograph entitled No War (Fig. 33), which was created in 1967 as a print/poster for an Artists and Writers Protest portfolio.”! This print is in the form of a standard U.S. airmail postcard revealing both the address side and the side with the message. On one side it is directed to “War Chief, Washington, D.C., USA,”

while on the reverse side in Gothic calligraphic script is one of Reinhardt’s declarations through unqualified negation. The list of twenty-four negatives begins as follows: No War

No Imperialism No Murder

No Bombing

No Napalm... On the side of the address, he provides one of his famous serial nondefinitions

of art’s relationship to other phenomena

(in this case, to war). This list of ten dis-

avowals begins with the following:

No Art of War No Art in War No Art to War No

Art on War

No Art by War. ..72 +

All of this raises some pressing problems for the type of engagement accomplished. through modernist works, such as those of Reinhardt along with the Abstract Expressionists, and as theorized by T. W. Adorno. On the one hand, such alternative mod-

ern art is about working on the level of attitudes, as well as through concrete bodily encounters, to foster critical thought rather than to loosen reflexes or to promote policy change, as does tendentious art and propaganda. Aside from its democratic emphasis on a dialogue with the spectator, rather than on a heavy-handed and didactic monologue aimed at the spectator, this progressive modernism is more capable of systemic critique precisely as a result of its greater degree of critical detachment.

In a

word, the type of modernism produced by the New York School and advocated by Adorno is meant to contest the entire system, rather than specific things in it, which in being resolved practically would merely leave the abstract structural contradictions

of the system unresolved.

On the other hand, the very ambiguity and generality that permit such modern-

ist art to contest a system of values, and not just policies of a system, are precisely the

traits that allow mainstream critics to construe this art as a commentary on the trag-

ically unchanging condition Inunaine, rather than on a given historical system with

tragic flaws that necessitate change. Owing to just such interpretations as this, Ab-

stract Expressionism and the work of Reinhardt have often gone from being rejections

THE FBI FILES ON THE NEW YORK SCHOOL

Nowa NO Impeniatism Wo munpeR No Someing

No Nar

ca aTiOW

We EnepipiLiTycat NO PROPaSanba No BULLSHIT

we jo Hare fo Industice se ingumanity

No cattousness

COMSCIONSLESSHOSS

NONo CONSCLLACELESINESS. mae

mw

maw

2

\

\

\

\

MT

Figure 33. Ad Reinhardt, No War, 1967, lithograph (264 x 21%”), from The Artists and Writers Portfolio (1968), compiled by Jack Sonenberg. Courtesy of the Museum of Moder Art, New York.

LT

mm

ee

a

a

wa

of determinate historical circumstances to being rejoinders to all history in some in-

determinate sense. Accordingly, the price of such cross-temporal structural relevance is precisely a

lack of pertinence to a particular event in time, such as the Vietnam War in the early 1960s. At a moment like this, ideological critique, with its commitment to the longterm contestation of values (such as instrumental thinking and mere topical consid-

erations), is clearly quite ineffective in the arena of practical politics. Hence, there was

at least the tacit acknowledgment of such a dilemma implicit in the paradoxical decision by Reinhardt and Newman to produce artworks in the 1960s that definitely were about short-term messages and timely, rather than “timeless,” issues. (Here we return

in a qualified way to an important thesis of Cockcroft and Guilbaut: that art of such indirection in ideological terms as that by the Abstract Expressionists is particularly susceptible to appropriation or co-optation by institutions with entirely different or even contrary political agendas.)

95

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EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

That such issues were indeed a matter of concern for the members of the New York School and their critical advocates can be clearly demonstrated by recalling some of the competing interpretations of this artwork’s social import by major art critics of the day, namely, Lawrence Alloway and Elaine de Kooning (Fig. 34). Their differences over the contestorial character of Willem de Kooning’s paintings are revealing in this regard. In reviewing the 1969 retrospective of de Kooning’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Alloway wrote of how the artist was seen to be involved in a struggle against “all those forces that reduce the complexity of life to the simplicity of convention; that is, to art.”73 De Kooning’s work thus has an aggressive, even defamatory quality, while nonetheless being open to “all possibilities.” At once inspired and unsettled by this body of work, Alloway nonetheless wrote of how, “For all his vigor and wit, de Kooning’s position has the effect of making his pictures, early and late, run together in a melee of suspended possibilities which, instead of celebrating freedom, perpetuates indecision.”74 Thus the very integrity of de Kooning’s concern with the irreducible quality, or nonrepresentational aspect, of aesthetics and ethics also leads ironically to a potentially ineffectual deferral of any one critical interpretation of them. Conversely, Elaine de Kooning argued that the very way in which this work was ambiguous was precisely what made it permanently unsettling, hence a much more effective counter to the ri; of authoritarian systems. After all, Willem de Kooning did criticize stylistic closure in 1948 with the declaration that in art “order, to me,

is to be ordered about and that is a limitation.””5 The openness of field painting's pictorial logic, gestural or Color Field, was in Elaine de Kooning’s view what made it so troubling to the closed society of a Joseph Stalin or a Joseph McCarthy. In a certain sense, then, she articulated some of the reasons that modernist painting would be seen as oppositional during the McCarthy period as a whole - without, however, showing why it could be seen as critical of a particular event in U.S. history, such as the Vietnam War. Her position was presented as follows: The tyrannies of the present differ in this way from those of the past. . .. Now the tyrant doesn’t want a boost from art. He just doesn’t want to be attacked and he

knows attack doesn’t come from obvious subject matter, like Diego Rivera's silly revolt. The dangerous people are those who think for themselves. Abstract Art in no way comments on the absurdity of bureaucracy and yet they are ten times more afraid of it than they are of left-wing [realist] painters who can be bought

for a dime a dozen. But you can’t but a tough, hard, bitter guy like Gorky or Bill

or Stuart Davis.76

McCARTHYISM ALTERNATIVE

VERSUS

THE

NEGATIVITY

OF

MODERNISM

In a widely publicized congressional speech of 1949, entitled “Modern Art Shackled to Communism,” U.S. Representative George Dondero went from citing Kandin-

sky’s onetime friendship with Trotsky and Picasso’s self-characterization as a com-

munist to fingering four of the Abstract Expressionists as communist-allied artists.

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Figure 34. Elaine de Kooning, Untitled (Black Mountain #14), 1948, enamel on paper and canvas (33” x 38”). Courtesy of Cline LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Congressman Dondero declared: “Add to this group of subversives the following satellites, and the number swells to a rabble: Motherwell, Pollock, Baziotes, Dave Hare.” Thus, one could understand, Dondero claimed, “the link between the Com-

munist art of the ‘isms’ and the so-called modern art of America.”77 This well-known and influential position, which Dondero employed in the U.S. Congress for almost a decade, was also specifically used against the Abstract Expressionists elesewhere, as is

confirmed by the recently released FBI Files on Robert Motherwell (discussed in the preceding section). The position of Dondero and his supporters in the FBI was based both on the geopolitical fear and the ethnocentric concern that modernist art, as

part of some international conspiracy, was of “foreign origin” and was thus “unAmerican.” Indeed, as late as 1959, in what was a clear McCarthyist message to the dissident artists of the New York School still associated with “negative” modernism, members of HUAC would again attack Jackson Pollock (who had died in 1956) in Congress. These congressmen both criticized Pollock’s supposedly “meaningless abstractions”

and denounced “affiliations with Communist causes” on the part of left-wing modern artists.78 The general position underpinning this assault on the “negative” mod-

97

98

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

ernism of Pollock and Motherwell by George Dondero and his subsequent congressional allies went as follows: Modern art is Communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not

glorify our beautiful country. ... . Art which does not glorify our beautiful coun-

try in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It

is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create [it] and promote it are our enemies.79

As new government documents show, Dondero’s supporters (both in and out of Congress) continued to use his line of argument to link Abstract Expressionism with a subversive lineage of modernism even after Dondero retired from Congress at the end of 1956. Two important entries in the FBI File on Robert Motherwell Cross-References repeat Dondero’s arguments against Pollock and Motherwell almost verbatim. One confidential communiqué

from March 24, 1958, in this dossier condemns the selec-

tion of abstractionists like Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt to represent the U.S. at the World's Fair in Brussels, because they were “revealed

in the Congressional

records of the ‘82nd and 84th Congress’ as communist artists.”80 Another secret communication in Motherwell’s dossier by an FBI informant (December 26, 1965) refers directly to Dondero’s earlier invectives against modern art: Art texts today fail to record the abstract-art movement as an international com-

munist cultural weapon ... from 1917 to 1931 it was official art in Russia. In 1931, [deleted] expelled abstraction from the borders of Russia and uses it now

intentionally to undermine the art of the Western tradition. .. .

The late Reginald Marsh, N.Y.C. artist, told me that Robert Motherwell was a communist. He is editor of the Documents of the Museum of Moslem

[sic] Art.81

The reintensification in 1956 of the U.S. governmental attack on “subversive” art and artists included, as Jane DeHart Mathews has so aptly shown, not only modern-

ism but also social realism and indeed any artists with left-wing political affiliations.82 Furthermore this tendency was accompanied by derisive remarks in mass-media publications like Time Magazine (20 February 1956), where Pollock and other Abstract Ex-

pressionists were seen as counterparts to the lawless, renegade bikers led by Johnny (Marlon

Brando) in a movie released in 1954 entitled The Wild One.

Interestingly enough, there evidently was an actual connection between Pollock and the willful if not wild character of Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire (also played by Marlon Brando), since Tennessee Williams (who was an amateur

painter) was a friend of Krasner and Pollock when he wrote that play. Subsequently, another Williams play even featured characters who were evidently based on Krasner and Pollock.83 Along the lines of the mass-cultural reading in Time Magazine of Pollock’s work, “highbrow” critic Hilton Kramer claimed in 1957 that Pollock’s art grew out of an “anarchic sensibility” and resulted in “nullifying pastiche.”84

One result of all this was the governmental suppression in 1956 of two exhibi-

tions of “modern art” that were to travel abroad under the auspices of the U.S. Infor-

mation Agency (USIA). Sport in Art, which the American Federation of Art had orga-

nized for the USIA to coincide with the Olympics, was canceled owing to the left-wing

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ON

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ae

Figure 35. Meyer Schapiro, Abstract Painting, 1950s, oil on canvas board. Collection of Dr. Lillian Milgram.

political views of participating artists. In addition, a show organized by the College Art Association was censored by the Eisenhower administration because the exhibition included artworks by Pablo Picasso, who had been a critic of U.S. saturation

bombing in Korea during the early 1950s.85 Among the issues at stake here was an

intrastate struggle between different factions of corporate capital, one that saw coldwar liberals associated with the Museum of Modern Art pitted against ultra-right-wing Republicans linked to the cowboy capitalism of the Hunt family in Texas.8¢ It was in this fractious and high-voltage situation of 1956-7 that Meyer Schapiro not only published his sophisticated response to these attacks against modern art by certain sectors of corporate capital and some figures in the U.S. government, but also painted modernist abstractions of his own (Fig. 35). Schapiro’s incisive analysis of Abstract Expressionist artwork, entitled “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,” pointed out the non-Eurocentric nature and anti-mass-cultural impetus of this work. It also addressed the issue of social liberation through a distinctive form of disalienated labor.

By focusing on this latter aspect of alternative modernism (which is the subject of Chapters 5 and 6), Schapiro was able to emphasize the fundamental incompatibility of workplace democracy as well as political self-determination with the hierarchical and dehumanizing nature of the capitalist mode of production. Circumventing the Manichean framework of having to choose between corporate capitalism and So-

99

100

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

viet communism, Schapiro implied that the choice in the United States was instead between economic democracy and state capitalism. He thus contrasted one “American” tradition with another, thereby outflanking those who would respond to his un-

usual redefinition of this choice with the crude accusation of “anti-Americanism.” In 1957, then, Meyer Schapiro’s dissenting assessment of Abstract Expressionism ~ like that of Irving Howe at Dissent - served as a counter both to Clement Greenberg’s cold-war formalism and to Dondero’s born-again “realism” (which is not to be confused with the social realism by painters like Ben Shahn and Philip Evergood, the latter of whom was still associated with the Communist Party). This alternative interpretation of modern art by Schapiro in 1957 specified that, “In a number of respects, painting and sculpture today may seem to be opposed to the general trend of life. Yet, in such opposition, these arts declare their humanity and importance.”87 About the era of McCarthyism and his own admiration of modern art during this period, Irving Howe had something similar to say. Like Schapiro’s analysis, that of Howe recalls Marx’s concept of the law of uneven development among different spheres in society: By the SOs . . . the abominations of McCarthyism, the crudities of the Cold War

were jarring to sensitive people: it seemed best to pull away and dig in... .. What

remained was culture. . . . They sought in art and literature what they were seek-

ing in “personal relations,” a world more attractive (as Trotsky had once said)... . Some new developments were pleasing: the English Labour government had

agreed to free India [in 1948] . . . and here in New York we had that outburst of modernist art called “action painting,” perhaps the richest creative impulse of our moment. . . . | began to look at the abstract expressionist paintings. . . [and] re-

sponded most to Franz Kline and Mark Rothko.88

It was between 1947 and 1953 that the “un-American” implication of both dissident modernism and social realism became semiofficial, with governmental declara-

tions on modern art. In 1947, when the U.S. State Department cancelled an exhibition entitled Advancing American Art after a public outcry, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced there would be “no more taxpayers’ money for modern art.” Likewise, A. H. Berding of the USIA proclaimed in 1953 that the government “should

not sponsor examples of our creative energy which are non-representational.”89

About social realism, such as that by artist Anton Refregier on display in a San

Francisco Post Office, several congressmen had equally condemnatory things to say. Richard M. Nixon, then a congressman from California, wrote the following in a letter of July 18, 1949:

I believe a Committee of Congress should make a thorough investigation of this type of art in Government buildings with a view to obtaining removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.9°

The above-mentioned debates around the unacceptability of dissident art and the negative nature of modernist art (see Chapter 2) necessitate a further look at the ideological values underlying these historical disputes of the 1940s and 1950s. Aside from

addressing, for example, the mythic — or rather, largely erroneous - self-representations

THE FBI FILES ON THE NEW

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common to much of mainstream U.S. society, we must also examine the generally contrary “mythmaking” project of the U.S. Abstract Expressionists, whose desire for an alternative society generally took on a visionary quality at some remove from the values most common to mainstream mythmaking. In explaining why his own artworks and those of other artists in the New York School were based on a dissident variant of mythmaking, Rothko noted how ancient “pre-American” myths encapsulated supposedly elemental truths about humanity's “fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time . . . be they Greek, Aztec, Icelandic, or Egyptian.”9! Although many commentators continue to reduce the

work of the Abstract Expressionists to platitudes about “personal expression” and “pure form” or to clichés about “escapism” and “apoliticism,” neither of these easy assessments, whether celebratory or dismissive, helps us to understand the structural logic of mythmaking or the general values (aesthetic, ethical, and ideological) produced by it in paradoxical relation to mainstream values. Far from being an intended flight from reality, as Motherwell noted above, the re-

barbative mythmaking of the Abstract Expressionists was instead conceived as a visual declaration of critical distance from a contemporary U.S. society that was deemed quite inadequate. In an important insight of this period, Harold Rosenberg noted how the advent of the New York School in the 1940s coincided with a general sense of the bankruptcy of Western European art and the insidiousness of contemporary U.S. culture.92 As other scholars such as Erika Doss and Cécile Whiting have rightly pointed out,

the reclamation of so-called timeless values, such as a sense of the sublime, functioned

as part of an ideological strategy (which was generally unsuccessful) to advance beyond an alienating present toward a reconstituted sense of community in the future. Just how alienating these present circumstances were for some artists was noted by

Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, who relied on analogies with guerrilla warfare and anticolonial insurrection to characterize the situation in the United States at this time. To quote Gottlieb on the 1940s, “There seemed to be an

enormous vacuum that needed to be filled; but by what?”%3 Subsequently, Gottlieb described the advent of the New York School with respect to anticolonialism: If I may use a political metaphor, French art was sort of imperialistic and the American artists were like colonial subjects, and then in the 1940s American

artists had something equivalent to the Boston Tea Party, we threw the foreign [French] tea overboard.94

Notable gains registered by this anti-Eurocentric tendency notwithstanding, the struggle of the New York School was hardly one destined to triumph against a culture industry that was based not in Europe but in the United States. It was this insidious local culture industry that was responsible for promoting the neocolonial American Way worldwide. As Gottlieb pessimistically claimed with regard to this ascendancy of conservative values, “the great quantitative audience is for Hollywood and Walt Disney and I think that’s the future of art - in that direction. More and more people will get their kicks from Disneyland.”%5 (Disneyland, which still signifies mainstream values of the 1950s, was opened in 1955.)

101

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS

CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

In a similarly defiant vein, Barnett Newman contended that “only those people practice destruction and betrayal who hunger to accept completely the values of the

establishment.” This contention was very much in keeping with the anarchist position that he maintained throughout this period even though the McCarran-Walter

Act of 1952 made it illegal for an anarchist from another country to visit the United States.

The one Abstract Expressionist to express any sympathy at all with McCarthyist

anticommunism was Clyfford Still,9’ and this was no doubt because of Still’s relent-

lessly anti-Stalinist or implacably antiauthoritarian vantage point. Nonetheless, Still was equally emphatic in distancing himself from the mainstream values of the contemporary U.S. society defended by McCarthy and Dondero. As Susan Landauer has

observed, Still frequently employed the analogy of guerrilla warfare when explaining the untenablility of being an artist in the United States. One such example was this declaration to students in the late 1940s: “You're not going to win and you can’t withstand the forces, but you can harrass them.”98 Aside from using an Eliotic, or perhaps Poundian, language that was at once deep-

ly conservative and ultraleft - as when he labeled the Museum of Modern Art in New York a “gas chamber” and called all art galleries “brothels” — Still was also generally

contemptuous of virtually the entire postwar U.S. culture, as indicated by the following statement:

I’m not interested in illustrating my time. A man’s “time” limits him, it does not

truly liberate him. Our age - it is of science - of mechanism - of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage... .

The sublime? A paramount consideration in my studies and work from my ear-

liest days.99

CRITICAL

CHALLENGES

POSED

BY

MYTHMAKING

In light of this extremely contentious situation, I focus in Chapter 4 on contem-

porary myths along with the practice of mythmaking. The first part of that consider-

ation features observations about U.S. society by culture critics and intellectuals both from here and abroad. These insights are then used to define seven of the ascendant

mainstream myths that generally mapped, however unevenly and inconsistently, the “official” vectors of the public sphere in relation to the private domain. This being done, we shall be in a better position to move on to address the countermyths, or so-

called elemental truths, in fictional form that were central to the production of Ab-

stract

Expressionist artworks.

To speak of this loose cluster or constellated network of contradictory main-

stream myths in the United States is, of course, to speak of views that enjoyed some

minimal topical grounding in empirical observation. Nonetheless, the highly limited

truth-value of these modest facts (about, say, “Soviet aggression” abroad) were broad-

ened to assume an explanatory insight into the postwar world order that did enor-

mous violence to the far more complex dynamic of history in this period. Hence,

THE FBI FILES ON THE NEW YORK SCHOOL what started out as factual at least in certain cases became largely fictive in a dangerous way through the historical overextension and hysterical presentation of a homogenized version of things in this era. Not surprisingly, the bruisingly synedochal theory of left-wing conspiracies and imminent Stalinist dominion around the world, which was a precondition for McCarthyism, tended to “naturalize” the historically achieved structure of a mainstream U.S. society - a society that was indeed embattled at this time, albeit for quite different reasons than those adduced by the McCarthyists and cold-war liberals.

Ina very real sense, then, these mainstream myths were not only about the naturalization of existing hierarchies, but also about either the sublimation or the repression of dissident artistic production within the United States and elsewhere. Conversely, the countermyths of the New York School were often, but not always, about a “return of the repressed” in cultural practices and a desublimation of artistic production. In turn - and this point needs highlighting - the very scope of governmental coercion necessary in the McCarthy era reminds us of just how tenuous the pop-

ular consent was concerning the mainstream myths of the postwar period. Here as elsewhere, coercion is most likely when there is no firm faith in the official story on the part of many people, all of which indicates the general uncertainty of any such moment in history. The strength of repression by a given order is thus often inversely proportional to the weakness of popular support. It is this state of affairs that led to the massive repression in the period of McCarthyism, which reminds us of why I. F. Stone could write insightfully of “the myths that menace America’s future.”111 Before discussing the seven menacing myths of the era, though, I should note that an important point of departure for analyzing some of the New York School’s countermyths can be drawn in part from the anthropological work of Claude LéviStrauss. In 1955 the anthropologist published his landmark article “The Structural Study of Myth” in the Journal of American Folklore.'12 Like the Abstract Expressionists, Lévi-Strauss was inspired by American Indian culture (particularly from the Northwest Coast and the U.S. Southwest) as a critical counter to capitalist modernization, was influenced by Surrealism (he knew and was friends with several members of the group)

with its alternative vision of the logic of society, and was impressed by the Museum

of Natural History in New York City (which he visited while exiled in the U.S. during 1941-8), since it was a repository of these countercultural forms.

During this period, Lévi-Strauss met Meyer Schapiro while they were both lecturing at the New School in New York City.!13 About their relationship, Meyer Schapiro

noted the following: I knew Claude Lévi-Strauss very well. We talked often during the mid-1940s. We also met with each other in Paris, as for example in 1952. He gave lectures at the New School for Social Research from 1942 to 1945. Once at least, he wrote a letter asking for my opinion on an anthropological point concerning an issue in

folklore.114

Drawing as he did on Marxism, geology, and psychoanalysis, Lévi-Strauss wrote of myths in synchronic (or nonhistorical) terms, that is, as manifestly collective dreams that have a latent ideological content. This deep or implicit content is based.

103

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EXPRESSIONISM

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CRITIQUE

on concrete human experience over a long time frame, and it is also quite inconsistent with the “common sense” of practical affairs in everyday life. According to Lévi-

Strauss’s now famous formulation: “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model

capable

of

overcoming

the

contradiction

(an

impossible

achievement

if,

as

happens, the contradiction is real).”115 Here he was specifically referring to contradictions plaguing the efforts of any culture to present itself as merely synonymous with nature, as if any culture could ever exist in a one-to-one or nonmediated relationship with nature. Hence, by confronting the meaning of myths - especially in the case of Abstract Expressionism - through their structural relationships and transformational rules (as

opposed to reading their literal narratives), we can understand their indirect truths, or rather their disclosure of “unwelcomed contradictions.” As a rule, Lévi-Strauss concluded, the ethical message of most “primitive” myths, such as the communitarian values invoked by the “mythmakers” of the New York School as a justification for

their own work, is that, contrary to Sartre, “Hell is ourselves” - or, put less belletristi-

cally, that “self-interest is the source of all evil.” The latter message is one that is quite at odds with the self-centered values enshrined in the globally intrusive twentieth-

century myth of the American Way.116

CHAPTER

FOUR

Mythmaking in the McCarthy Period

Most Americans would be surprised to hear that they had an ideology. It sounds so foreign... . [Yet] the American ideology is a belief

that our economy is somehow a triumph of free enterprise - individualistic,

private,

and

competitive. ...

It takes

a bold

politician

question the hallowed superstitutions of free enterprise. ~ I. F Stone, The Myths That Menace America’s Future (1962).!

to

°

With an enormous command of instrumentalism, with possession of a secure technology, we glorify the past and idealize the status quo, i stead of seriously asking how we are to employ the means at our disposal to form an equitable and stable society. This is our great abdication. It explains why we are a house divided against itself. - John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (1930).2

B

ECAUSE HE WAS A JEFFERSONIAN SOCIALIST AND A DEMOCRATIC MARXIST, I. F. Stone occupied political terrain outside of, or at least in contradiction to, the purported period options that were “necessary” in

both the United States and the USSR. As such, Stone, who is one of the more notable

newspaper columnists in U.S. history, provided an uncommonly insightful analysis of the “haunted fifties.” In a series of journalistic pieces for The Nation, P.M., and his own I. F, Stone Weekly (begun

in 1953), he discussed several of the seven prominent

mainstream myths of the period on which I focus in this section.

MYTHS

THAT

MENACE

AMERICA’S

FUTURE

The first of these myths, as Stone observed, was the “conspiratorial theory of history” or the “bogeyman theory of history.”3 In noting how a

refusal to address glaring so-

cial injustice as the cause of unrest often leads to blaming “foreign” elements for social conflict, he observed that “to shut off ‘subversion’ is to shut off peaceful progress . .. [since] societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police.”4 As for the conspiratorial concept of history, which reduced humanity’s struggle for food, equality, and education to unjustified “subversion,” this article of faith for 105

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EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

cold-war “liberals and conservatives alike” was predicated on a quasi-Nietzschean notion that “Communists are some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic masterminds in that distant Kremlin, engaged in a satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave all mankind.”S Nor were those on the left, who were opposed to this mythic view, helped much by the actual state of affairs in the Soviet Union (which

Stone visited on several occasions). Among the many unfortunate consequences of this “them vs. us” binary framework (that is, everyone must line up either with the Soviet Union or the United States, either for “freedom” or “against it”) was how it

denied free choice to every other nation in the world wishing to pursue policies that traveled along a different geopolitical and ideological route. Furthermore, the relationship of the USSR to Marxism as well as to the Left worldwide was anything but a simple one. Indeed, Stone himself, in such articles as “The Legacy of Stalin” (28 May 1956), contended that the USSR was Marxist only in an “un-Marxist sense,” owing to Stalin’s imposition of “an iron-clad conformity that had

disgraced the socialist ideal.”© Obviously, this view of the USSR under Stalin would have been embraced to varying degrees by any number of different tendencies on the left, which included Dissent, Monthly Review, and the Fourth as well as the Second Socialist Internationals, along with some groups that were then aligned with Maoism. Furthermore, about the “mid-Victorian” visual arts in the twentieth-century Soviet Union, Stone declared that “‘Socialist realism’ in architecture is about as vulgar and

as ostentatious as Miami and just about as socialist.””

The second myth of the cold war that Stone enumerated was the “myth of free

enterprise.” This was an economic corollary of the above-mentioned historical falla-

cy, and Stone specifically labeled it one of “the myths that menace America’s future.”8 By constantly privileging the private sector at the expense of the public sector, proponents of corporate capital misrepresented the U.S. government's often impressive record concerning the Works Progress Administration (particularly with respect to the

Hoover Dam Project and the Tennessee Valley Authority). The U.S. business sector thus propagated the myth that “anything the public ever does is bad,” whereas only the private sector “works.” (Such a view is clearly inadequate empirically in light of the notable gains in living standards under the Labour Party in Great Britain and

through social democracy in various Western European countries, several of which

after all have the highest per capita living standards in the world.) As we have seen, I. F. Stone pointed out that “the American ideology is a belief that our economy is somehow a triumph of free enterprise - individualistic, private,

and competitive.”? By overlooking the fact that every major “private” corporation in the U.S. has been massively subsidized by public tax money, even as business leaders

speak of private profits made entirely “on one’s own,” the U.S. public has often been

unable to advance in the economically equitable terms envisioned by Schapiro, Howe, and the Abstract Expressionists (see “McCarthyism versus the Negativity of Al-

ternative Modernism” in Chapter 3). The real economic goal of a just society, wrote Stone, would not be so-called free enterprise but rather to “free real enterprise.”!0

Just how dangerous the myth of “free” enterprise had grown during the McCar-

thy period was shown by the all-out assault on the New Deal programs, such as the

WPA, and on those people who so manifestly gained from them in the period ex-

MYTHMAKING

IN THE

MCCARTHY

PERIOD

tending from 1934 to 1943. This latter group included all of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, excepting Motherwell and Newman. In fact, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), which gained such notoriety during the McCarthyist years of Congressmen Nixon and Dondero, was originally established in the 1930s by ultra-right-wing members of Congress in order to investigate the “subversive” nature of the New Deal programs.!! As Whitney Chadwick has pointed out in her survey of women artists, the New Deal’s relatively nondiscriminatory policies meant that of the artists receiving aid from the WPA in 1935, approximately 41 percent were women, with some of them (like Lee Krasner) being in positions of institutional leadership.!2 Furthermore, the first woman ever to hold a U.S. cabinet-level post was Frances Perkins, who was FDR’s

Secretary of Labor. Since the WPA had also insulated both men and women artists somewhat from the role of the market in regulating access both to artworks and to the profession of artist, the demise of the New Deal had very negative repercussions for anything approaching gender parity in the arts. To quote Chadwick on this is-

sue:

Women artists active in public arts programs during the 1930s found themselves

on a less secure footing in the next decade as government patronage gave way

to private art galleries, and as social ideologies promoted sexual difference as a cause for removing women from productive labor.13 Something comparable can be said about the more egalitarian recruitment of artists along class lines during the WPA period. As sociological studies have shown,

around 31 percent of the artists who worked for the New Deal were from working-

class families (as was Jackson Pollock, whose father was a rural wage laborer).!4 This

percentage markedly contrasts with what has generally obtained in U.S. history since then. Revealingly, from 1776 to 1944 the general rate at which artists came from the working class was on the average of less than 10 percent.!5 Thus, the New Deal pro-

grams in the arts, which registered over a 200-percent increase in the number of professional artists emerging from working-class families, made artistic production more publicly accessible, rather than simply making the products of art more publicly visible. The emergence to prominence of Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, and other Abstract

Expressionist is inextricably related to this resituation by the WPA of artistic production in greater public proximity to working-class communities. The left-of-center presidential candidacy in 1948 of Henry Wallace, who was supported by 24 percent of all Democrats, was in fact a last-ditch defense of the New Deal against Harry Truman’s much more right-wing “Square Deal.” In effect, the broad support for the 1948 Wallace campaign, which was linked to the old popularfront forces, was effectively used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover to decry the large number of “subversives” operating in mainstream society. In a now well-known memo, Clark Clifford, Truman’s campaign manager, wrote that their strategy would be to “point out that the core of Wallace’s backing is made up of Communists and fellow travellers.”16 The consequences in 1953 of this nationwide argumentum ad hominem were recorded by I. F. Stone when he analyzed mainstream political discourse at the time.

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AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for example, who had never bothered to attack

the very different variety of state capitalism used in Nazi Germany or Falangist Spain, could declare in a public speech “that ‘bloody’ revolution might someday be necessary in this country to combat the ‘statism’ of the New Dealers.” This military action would entail “liberation not from dictatorship but liberation from the Welfare

State.”17

The third myth of this period in the United States narrowly defined individualism in terms of consumption rather than of workplace self-determination (a necessary precondition for artistic production). This myth, resulting from the first two, was

already evident in the early 1930s when philosopher John Dewey wrote such essays as “America - By Formula” and “The United States Incorporated.”18 The more that “efficient” managerial hierarchy disallowed the “messiness” of workplace democracy, and the more instrumental thinking based on “quantification, mechanization,

and

standardization” became all important, the more individualism became an economic liability to “free” enterprise, with its armylike command system. Dewey was already lamenting in 1930 that within the U.S. workplace “critical thinking is conspicuous by its absence”; consequently, there was a “perversion of the whole ideal of individualism to conform to the practices of a pecuniary culture.”!9 A basic precondition for restrictively redefining “individualism” along these lines was the implantation of Fordism and Taylorism in the workplace in relation to the massifying logic of the culture

industry in society at large. Just as Albert Einstein had remarked in surprise after his 1921 trip to the United States that “there is much more uniformity both in outlook on life and in moral and aesthetic ideas among Americans than among Europeans,”?° so other visitors from abroad have made significant observations about the peculiar form of “individual freedom” common

in mainstream U.S. society. Jean-Paul Sartre noted the following

about U.S. citizens after his visit here in 1945: It is when he is acting like everyone else that he feels most reasonable and most American; it is in displaying his conformism that he feels freest. . .. The peculiarity of the American, on the other hand, is the fact that he regards his thought as universal.21 To this telling point, Simone de Beauvoir, who also visited the United States dur-

ing the late 1940s and early 1950s, added an observation that helped explain the institution in 1947 of the Truman Doctrine. This doctrine, which gave the U.S. govern-

ment the unilateral “tight” to intervene in the domestic affairs of any other nation in order to stop “communism,” was strongly opposed by the Abstract Expressionists in their rejection of all forms of imperialism (see “U.S. Government Surveillance . . .” in Chapter 3). Because of an uncritical attitude toward the purported “universality” of mainstream American values (to quote de Beauvoir), “imperialism takes on the guise of charity in the eyes of the average American.” As such, imperialist intervention in

other countries could be seen as simply “imposing on others that which is good,” that is, the ordinary pecuniary and cultural practices of the private sector in the United States. All of this moved Simone de Beauvoir to note caustically: “The miracle is that

the key to paradise should be in their [the United States’] hands.”22

MYTHMAKING

IN THE MCCARTHY

PERIOD

One need hardly limit the discussion of the myth of individual freedom and the actuality of a coerced conformity in this period to foreign observers, though: Even classical liberal publications from the United States with integrity during this period addressed this issue quite well. One example is an editorial of March 9, 1953, that appeared in the New Republic, which had been a mainstay of New Deal support in the 1930s and 1940s. This commentary went as follows: A most distressing aspect of the American corroding of individual liberty under the public conscience has become sodden with appointed purveyors of a servile brand of

way of life, circa 1953, is the subtle guise of fighting Communism. The irrational fears generated by the selfpatriotism. These fears, cloaked in

anti-Communist colors, are being directed at those who refuse to conform to ac-

cepted patterns of thought and action. With increasing frequency, it is becoming

socially, professionally,

terms.?3

and economically unprofitable to act in unorthodox

Self-righteousness about the superiority of “American” values, concomitant with a belief in the “naturalness” of capitalism, were preconditions for the fourth myth of postwar U.S. society, namely, the one concerning “national security.” Ironically, no one was more eloquent in debunking this cold-war myth than the world-renowned scientist most responsible for the insights in physics that led to the production of the very nuclear weapons that were supposed to guarantee U.S. “national security.” In a 1950 public address given at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein (who in 1953 would call for civil disobedience against HUAC)

summarized

the mis-

guided views and human costs of the cold war. He did so in a way that recalls the Harold Rosenberg epigraph in Chapter 3, which was in turn related to Einstein’s own 1949 defense of democratic socialism in the pages of Monthly Review. To quote Einstein at length: The

idea of achieving

security through

national

armament

is, at the present

state of military technique, a disastrous illusion. . . . This mechanistic, technical-

military psychological attitude has had its inevitable consequences. Every single

act in foreign policy is governed by one viewpoint: how do we have to act in order to achieve utmost superiority over the opponent.

. . .

Within the country: concentration of tremendous financial power in the hands

of the military; militarization of the youth; close supervision of the loyalty of the citizens, by a police force growing more conspicuous everyday. Intimidation of

people of independent political thinking. Subtle indoctrination of the public by radio, press, and schools. Growing restrictions of the range of public information

under the pressure of military secrecy.24

Only if we overcome this obsession can we really turn our attention in a reasonable way to the real political problem, which is, “How can we contribute to make

the life of man on this diminishing earth more secure and more tolerable?”25

In his own field, Einstein said the U.S. government was disrupting scholarly exchange and rational discussion through “the obstruction of the travels of Ameri-

can scientists and scholars abroad and of foreign scientists seeking to come to this country.”26

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Einstein’s description of the McCarthy period was seconded in 1953 by art historian Erwin Panofsky, another famous German-speaking scholar who had also fled the Nazis and who likewise held a position at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. In noting that there was in the United States a “terrifying rise

of precisely those forces which drove us out of Europe in the 1930s: nationalism and intolerance,” he complained of a neofascist tendency wherein “dissent is equated with heresy.” Panofsky, whose own views seem to have been those of a moderate so-

cial democrat, quite bravely said that “we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that Americans may now be legally punished” not only for any illegal activity, but simply

“for what they say or have said, think or have thought.”27 Among those facing economic destruction for merely holding dissenting views, Panofsky noted, were “the economist who doubts the divine nature of the free enter-

prise system” or the museum director who deviates from the “the standards of George

Dondero.”28 Nonetheless, this commendable statement did not keep Panofsky from

making some dismissive remarks about Abstract Expressionism that led to a 1961 exchange in Art News over a Latin phrase used by Barnett Newman as a painting title,

Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly Newman prevailed in this philo-

logical debate with Panofsky, owing in part to behind-the-scenes coaching from Mey-

er Schapiro.29

The fifth myth of the postwar United States - the myth of final victory in a total

war ~ was easily one of the most menacing as well as unremittingly apocalyptic of all cold-war fictions. Such a final solution presupposed a belief in utterly evil, entirely

unredeemable foes. Not surprisingly, mass culture featured such adversaries on a regular basis throughout this period. From 1948 to 1954 ~ after U.S. movie directors had been “disciplined” by HUAC - Hollywood produced more than forty anticommunist films, which ranged from I Married a Communist to I Was a Communist for the FBI.3°

Similarly, mass-circulation publications, including both newspapers and magazines, continually ran such features as “Communists Are After Your Children” and “How Communists Get That Way,” with one story about a Communist who suppos-

edly infiltrated the FBI being serialized in five hundred newspapers and shown on television. Paradigmatic of this fictive view of period foes was a 1951 dectective story

by Mickey Spillane entitled One Lonely Night. In this book, which sold over three million copies, the unblinkingly tough-guy hero, Mike Hammer, boasts of the following:

I killed more people tonight than I have fingers on my hand. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it... they were commies . . . red sons-ofbitches who should have died long ago.31 The most pervasive, if also indirect, presentation of the myth of final victory in a total war was aptly identified, however, in 1965 by Susan Sontag in her insightful essay on science fiction, Hollywood, and the mass-culture industry.32 What sciencefiction films are probably most often about, she observed, is neither the advances of

science nor the differences of aliens but the threat of disaster: disaster on a global or even cosmic scale. As in Star Wars, for example, the “natural” confrontation with de-

struction is such that it calls for extreme moral simplifications. These include a selfrighteous belief in the utter evil of foreign foes, a necessary collaboration between

MYTHMAKING

IN THE MCCARTHY

PERIOD

scientists and the military to destroy “them,” a dispassionately removed or technocratic view of destruction, and, above all, a “noble war” devoid of all ethical nuances as well as dissident views.33 That so little is often known about these alien adversaries attests to the ideology of xenophobia upon which the “foreign policy” of science fiction has generally been based. As should be obvious, though, the “strange” scenario for standard science fiction has frequently been analogous to the official discourse about the nature of U.S. foreign policy since the Second World War. From Truman through Reagan and Bush (up to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott more recently), the extraordinary ethical and intellectual simplifications intrinsic to much science-fiction entertainment have also been

presented to the same public in another (albeit hardly entertaining) guise - namely, as a “historical” account of how the United States is ominously threatened by foreign

powers.

It is especially revealing how the conceptual framework for science-fiction films has often been used, at least in part, to frame discussions of foreign-policy options. As Alan Wolfe compellingly showed in the late 1970s, “the recent hysteria about the Soviet military buildup has much more to do with domestic politics than it does with the security of the United States.” In this way, Wolfe noted that the “magical politi cal quality of the Soviet threat” has been used to give U.S. foreign policy “an apo! ical quality, as if it had nothing to do with partisan strife but was a unified response to an external enemy.”34 Thus, principled dissent is supposedly impossible and lack of support for “national foreign policy” is in some ways analogous to treason. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan’s widely publicized call for developing U.S. laser and satellite weaponry to defeat the USSR in outer space even became known as Star Wars technology, after the highly successful Hollywood film of this name. Nonetheless, it would of course be naive to attribute these intersections of cold-war military discourse with the cosmos of science fiction to either a dominant ideology or to any conspiracy involving filmmakers and politicians. Still, it is perhaps worth noting that former Secretary of State Alexander Haig was on the board of directors of MGM

when it pro-

duced The Final Option, a 1983 movie that equated antinuclear activism with “Communist terrorism.”35 The prevalence, production, and popularity of science-fiction films from the 1940s through the 1980s was unquestionably related to the contemporary mass trauma concerning nuclear holocaust, which effected a sizable portion (if not the majority) of U.S. citzens during this period.

In showing a successful conclusion of these “noble wars,” science-fiction films acted to exorcise at least momentarily the threat of one own's destruction. As Sontag has noted, it is hardly fortuitous that films about global disaster (with New York and Tokyo being cinematically destroyed many times) have generally been made in the United States and Japan, the only two countries ever involved in an actual nuclear ex-

change.3¢ To the perennial themes of momento mori and heroic individual death (two staples of art history as discussed by Panofsky and others), science fiction added the new angst felt by many about collective extinction coupled with the extermination of all history. By involving the transcendence of such destruction, though, science fiction placed in pleasing abeyance some of the deeper anxieties of the cold-

war era.

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However, these films sometimes went from normalizing disaster to neutralizing

much of the public’s relationship to it. Catharsis was intermingled with entertainment, and an unconscious reprieve was granted the audience, if not the future. By advancing the myth of final victory in a total war, this same cinematic relief became an actual agent of the very disaster it was supposed to overcome in fiction. This was Son-

tag’s point when she wrote that “The imagery of disaster in science fiction films is

above all the emblem of an inadequate response.”37

In two noteworthy essays of the 1930s and 1940s, which are insightful for our purposes here, members of the Frankfurt School published an analysis of the political logic of dystopian science fiction and an explication of the political economy of militarism within corporate capitalism. One of these was Adorno’s striking critique of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which could also serve as a dissection of George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).38 Both are works of genuine literary merit about a future that is either irrepressibly totalitarian or irresistibly apocalyptic. As such, Huxley and Orwell avoid the naively sunny message of liberal technocrats such as Wendell Wilkie or Alvin Toffler - for whom all current social problems will be ironed out automatically through “technotopian modernization” and technocratic or “third wave” thinking. Rather, Huxley (like Orwell) used the gadgets of futuristic technology along with the oddities of alien worlds as a pretext for searing social critiques, thus also avoiding the fallacy of attributing independent agency to technology. Nonetheless,

weighted as he was by pessimism about what

could not be done,

Huxley mechanically circumscribed what really can be done. Full of unjustified chagrin about the calamity that supposedly awaits us, he and Orwell failed to address how such a calamity depends upon our prior resignation to it. As Adorno observed in the conclusion to his critique of Huxley’s best-selling book: “The practical consequence of the bourgeois ‘Nothing to be done,’ which resounds as the novel’s echo, is precisely the perfidious ‘You must adjust’ of the totalitarian Brave New World.”39 Similarly, the political economy of military conflict presupposed by corporate capitalism’s global expansion - and by the mass-culture industry’s concomitant efforts to aestheticize war - were summed up by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay on art and mechanical reproduction. All of this was done in a way that deftly outlined some of the vectors of the cold war’s subsequent emergence. As Benjamin noted:

The technological formula may be stated as follows: only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. . .. Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war: “For twenty-

seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic. ... Accordingly, we state: ... War is beautiful because it creates new

architecture, like that of big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke signals from burning villages, and many others.”40

Since the socially beneficial utilization of productive forces is impeded by the inequitable distribution of private property and political power within corporate capitalism, Benjamin explained that the further development of technology would be increasingly channeled into a nonsocially useful direction, that is, the aesthetics of war. As such, the considerable discrepancy between new technological possibilities and

MYTHMAKING

IN THE MCCARTHY

PERIOD

outmoded and, hence, impractical uses of them would result in a convulsive situation. Innovations would go from being tools of construction to being implements of destruction, even as the officially declared aim of this modernization would be to

build the future. It is for this reason that there has been a convergence not only between science-

fiction films and cold-war discourse but also between fascism (a desperate attempt to salvage the status quo by means of authoritarian state capitalism) and a few of the regressive tendencies within the plurality of otherwise progressive modernist movements (as, for example, with Futurism’s “machinalotry” or the “pure” expression of certain German Expressionists, such as Emil Nolde and Gottfried Benn).4!

What, though, was the response of the New York School to this myth of final vic-

tory in a total war, with all its attendant ethical simplifications and hierarchical jus-

tifications that made militarism “inevitable,” whether in official policy or in science fiction? In what is one of the more valuable parts of his previously discussed study

(see the Introduction), Serge Guilbaut addressed the Abstract Expressionists’ response to this postwar trauma about nuclear holocaust. After having documented quite ef-

fectively how such artists as Philip Evergood and Ralston Crawford tried in the 1940s

to paint abstract images of atomic destruction that were then widely circulated by mass culture, Guilbaut contended plausibly enough that one of Pollock's all-over paintings from 1946, Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance, was “the atomic bomb transformed into myth.”42 Although Guilbaut does not cite the following remark, it

is worth noting here that in 1950 Pollock himself did suggestively refer to modern art as expressing “this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio.”43 In order to consolidate Guilbaut's insightful interpretation of this painting, though, some effort must be made to assess the nature of Pollock’s pictorial rejoinder to this myth as either accepting or contesting. Did Pollock think that humanity per

se was simply doomed to self-destruction 4 la Huxley and Orwell? Or did he view the possibility of atomic destruction as a logical consequence of global conflict induced by capitalist expansion - and thus as something that could be averted? Certainly U.S. capital was facing a grave situation in 1945-6 precisely because its level of economic production was so high that the war-devastated world did not have the requisite markets to absorb its products. This paradox, the contradiction of overproduction, is of course a problem that is largely endemic to an economic system predicated on commodity production, as opposed to one that depends on the production of use-value for local needs. Hence, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the consequent cold-war ambience were all structurally necessary for acquiring access to overseas markets, so as to avert U.S. economic stagnation.

The answer to the above query, insofar as one can be obtained, seems to follow

from both Pollock’s left-wing perspective and the actual situation of the moment. Why was he so alarmed in 1946 about atomic war when the only country in the

world with atomic weapons at that point was the United States? Since the Soviet

Union did not develop the atomic bomb until after 1949 or achieve nuclear parity until much later (long after Kennedy’s Cuban missile crisis in 1962), Pollock was hardly

demonstrating much trust in U.S. cold-war political leaders. The basis for his anxiety, then, would seem to be located at least in part in his dissident and “mistrustful”

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ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE political position, along with the economic and political analysis that would follow logically from it. It is revealing that Norman

Lewis was also quite preoccupied with the threat of

nuclear war in this period, as evidenced both by paintings such as Every Atom Glows:

Electrons in Luminous Vibration and by the accounts of contemporaries. Joan Murray Weissman, a friend of Lewis during this period, stated that even though Lewis was deeply involved with the burgeoning civil rights movement, that “the real interest for all of us and for Norm were the issues of world destruction - dropping the atom

bomb. That was much more on our minds.”44 Among the most astute commentators on this issue, as on most others concern-

ing the New York School, was Elaine de Kooning. In her 1967 statement in Art News about Jackson

Pollock, she located Pollock’s art in relation to several issues, among

which was the threat of nuclear holocaust. Significantly, she did so less by means of any subject matter than by means of the distinctive “Gothic quality” that character-

ized Pollock’s visual language per se:

What did distinguish the man and the work was a unique and astonishing ener-

gy. There was no existing framework for his energy and it was not until 1947 that,

throwing away what he knew - the preconceived forms which hampered him he arrived at what he was - which he didn’t know, finding paths impassable for

anyone else in his own labyrinth. Hunched over his huge canvases, completely in control of his new-found whiplash skeins of paint, he evolved his radiant panora-

mas that inspire relief along with a lurking sense of disquietude characteristic, it seems, of all great art.

The beautiful poet Frank O’Hara, who lies a few feet away from Pollock in the graveyard at The Springs, East Hampton, wrote of the artist in 1959 {in what was

the first monograph on Pollock] in answer to his own proliferating questions and insights: “This new painting does have qualities of passion and lyrical despera-

tion, unmasked and uninhibited, not found in other recorded eras; it is not sur-

prising that faced with universal destruction, as we are told, our art should at last

speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which may well be

non-existent, in a last effort of recognition which is the justification of being.”45

Among the New York School members who supported the disarmament movement, Ad Reinhardt was probably the most active. As unpublished correspondence from the early 1960s indicates, Reinhardt donated one of his paintings to be auctioned at Woburn Abbey in 1963 in an effort to raise money for the cause of international peace. A letter (on September 24, 1963) from Bertrand Russell, the famous

philosopher and democratic socialist, expresses gratitude for Reinhardt’s contribution to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation:

Your support for our efforts in the struggle against nuclear war is deeply appreciated. The exhibition at Woburn Abbey promises to be an outstanding event, which your work enhances.#6 Among the sponsors of this foundation were Prime Minister Nehru of India, who

was also the leader of the nonaligned movement in the Third World, and cellistcomposer Pablo Casals, then living in Puerto Rico.47

MYTHMAKING IN THE MCCARTHY PERIOD All five of these above-noted public myths about history, free enterprise, individualism, national security, and final victory in a total war presupposed a subject. This period subject, whatever his or her opposition to all of the above myths, nonetheless shared some of the mainstream preconceptions as to the “nature” of personal

identity. Nowhere is this more clear than with the ascendant views of what constituted “normal” gender roles and “natural” racial relations. It is to a consideration of

these last two mainstream myths of the period that we now turn.

THE

CULT

OF

MASCULINITY

The belief in “natural gender roles” was in fact embraced in almost equal measure by both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum in the United States through-

out this era. Intriguingly enough, Harold Rosenberg identified quite well the sixth myth of this period, which presupposed a view of natural gender roles, namely, “the cult of masculinity.”48 (Needless to say, it is not necessary to claim that Rosenberg himself was disconnected from sexism in order to grant the considerable merits of

these comments about the nature of U.S. sexism during this time frame.) Suitably enough,

Rosenberg’s essay appeared

in the November

1967 issue of

Vogue, a fashion magazine for women that also reproduced paintings by Reinhardt and Pollock (as Phyllis Rosenzweig was evidently the first to note).*9 In his deftly epigtammatic manner, Rosenberg debunked a myth marking all points on the political compass in postwar society right up to the prominent emergence of the feminist movement at the end of the 1960s. As defined by Rosenberg in this piece, the cult of masculinity united the most desperate of adversaries, the most disparate of positions:

In America, masculinity is associated primarily with the outdoors. . . . [Yet] the

outdoors, representing once-hostile nature, has been transformed into a stage set. Masculinity in the American sense has thus lost its locale. . .. Masculinity today is a myth that has turned into a comedy. . . .

Hemingway’s he-man performance was, among other things, a means of com-

batting the American stereotype of the writer as sissy. In the United States, the artist and man of ideas have always lived under the threat of having their mas-

culinity impugned . . . the “stigma of effeminacy,” was branded upon intellec-

tuals by political bullies, ranging from Tammany Hall leaders . . . to Communist

Party hacks

in the

1930s,

who denounced

independent

writers as “scented

. Hemingway's strategy included identification with the new activist

male image of the Depression decades: the leather-jacketed revolutionist allied

with the peasant and factory worker. . . .

The post-Hemingway he-man labored under the handicap that is generally recognized to be a masquerade. . . . The relation between masculinity that has been

put into doubt and violence reveals itself most clearly in the recent history of the Civil Rights Movement. The black has derived from white America the lesson that physical force is the mark of mankind. White society is “the Man,” whose insignia of power are the club, the whip, the bloodhounds. . . To confront the Man, the black militant has resurrected the figure of the radical activist of the

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thirties, the model of Hemingway's he-man, honor-bound to risk his life in phys-

ical combat. An article in the New York Times on the Black Panthers is illustrated by photographs of its two leaders. Both wear the traditional leather jacket and berets of the Left fighters thirty years ago — these could be photographs of two Lincoln Brigade volunteers. .. . ”The ghetto black,” said Bobby Seale, “isn’t afraid to stand up to

the cops, because he already lives with violence. He expects to die any day.”50

Rosenberg then concluded that the cult of masculinity was often an ideal of the oppressed as well as of the oppressor, that is, it was often an attribute of “the frustrated, not a fact of biology.”5! As such, Rosenberg recognized that gender roles were socially constructed to a notable extent, that the fixation on masculinity was simultaneously the alienated expression of a conservative society and also a paradoxical reaction on the left against the alienating repression of this same society. The cult of masculinity as it extended from the proletarian partisans of the 1930s to the New Left militants of the 1960s was compellingly documented in Richard Hof-

stadter’s 1963 study entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In a careful account, Hofstadter shows how the position of the Communist Party (CP) on so-called mas-

culinity was part of a “national code at large,” so that “with few changes in terms, the party code is similar to certain attitudes expressed by businessmen.” The CP in the United States, for example, inveighed against “fairy literature,” and Mike Gold of The

New Masses once told Sinclair Lewis that writers of his ilk were jealous because they had been “deprived of masculine experiences.” Similarly, Gold accused Thorton Wilder of propagating a pastel daydream of “homosexual figures in graceful gowns mov-

ing archaically among the lilies.”52

The so-called Proletarian realism expected from Mike Gold and the Communist Party was summed up briskly enough by one working-class author who declared that

The New Masses should be written and read by “lumberjacks, hoboes, miners, clerks, sectionhands, machinists, harvesthands, waiters. ... It might be crude stuff - but

we're just about done primping before a mirror and powdering our shining noses.” Indeed Mike Gold even admitted on one occasion that within the CP, “The word ‘intellectual’ became a synonym for ‘bastard.’” According to this formulation, the dissident Lovestone faction within the CP was composed of effete “college men,” while Trotsky was dismissed along similar lines by fellow travelers like critic Malcolm Cowley, with the rationale that “I have never liked the big city intellectuals of his type.”53

The rhetoric of the anti-Stalinist left was hardly less sexist or macho. As Irving Howe conceded in his memoirs of the 1980s, one will search largely in vain in the documents of this period to find more equitable relations among the Trotskyists, democratic socialists, or social democrats. About the gender relations in the 1930s of

the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a Trotskyist group, Howe admitted that “it’s em-

barrassing to think back on the complacence that many of us showed toward the feelings of women comrades.”54 He then said that subsequently he had asked former female cohorts in the SWP from this period whether or not they had been upset by this patronizing and inequitable conduct by most of the males with whom they had worked. The answer of these women was that “of course” they had been, but that at the time these concerns seemed less pressing, and even more “divisive,” than other

issues of the day.55

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MCCARTHY

PERIOD

Even the major anarchist leaders often clung unwittingly to the cult of masculinity through their recourse to homophobic views. One such anarchist leader was Emma Goldman, who was cited favorably in the writings of Barnett Newman and who also inspired Mark Rothko through the powerful speeches that he first heard her give in 1915.56 In her anaylsis of the role of militarism within capitalism, for example, Goldman objected to it not only because militarism was responsible for exploiting workers and oppressing women, but also because in the barracks it led to “sexual perversion,” or homosexuality and male prostitution.S” This view was coupled with her own avowed embrace of Nietzsche's concept of ultraindividualism (Rothko evidently heard Goldman lecture on Nietzsche and women’s rights), which in turn made her dismiss the woman suffrage movement as “altogether a parlor affair” that was cut off from working-class women. As for woman’s lib-

eration, Goldman clearly declared that it began neither with acquiring the right to

vote nor with the civil rights movement but with individual autonomy. She claimed,

then, that “Until woman has learned to defy them all, to stand firmly upon her ground and to insist upon her unrestricted freedom ... [s]he cannot call herself emancipated,”58 Among the few, indeed very few, public repudiations of homophobia by the Left in this era is one to be found in a stinging critique of 1938 by Meyer Schapiro. Published in Partisan Review, this review of a book by Thomas Hart Benton deserves citation, since it was such an uncommon rejection of what Hofstadter has called some-

thing approaching a “national code” for gender discussion in the United States.59 Schapiro’s hardly indelicate dissection of the “cult of masculinity” as championed by Benton went as follows: The exaggerated awkward energy [of Benton's murals] is the male counterpart of the effeminacy that he cannot tolerate in homosexuals and that he cheaply denounces in his book as a menace to the coming American culture. It is a mannered art, for Benton imposes his tics and ambitions on everything. His lack of pathos makes us regret that he is not more feminine. The coarse, sweetish color-

ing reminds one of commercial painting.

Similarly, in 1942 Adorno wrote that “the continued existence of traditional so-

ciety has warped the emancipation decay of the worker’s movement as culinity in mainstream society, as Motherwell’s appearance before the

of women. Few things are as symptomatic of the its failure to notice this.”61 About the cult of maswell as on the left, one need only recall Robert draft board in the 1940s. The first question asked

by the military officers was, “Are you a homosexual?” When Motherwell said no, the members of the military board refused to believe him, since “anyone who lived in

Greenwich Village and was an artist had to be a homosexual.”62 Even after Motherwell told them that he was married, they declined to believe him and issued him an “undesirable” exemption from the U.S. armed services. As Selective Service announcements from this period indicate, artists were routinely grouped with hairdressers,

dressmakers, and interior decorators.

Just how unsettling the left-wing variant of the “cult of masculinity” was for most of the Abstract Expressionists and for Ad Reinhardt can be ascertained easily enough by a careful look both at their own statements and at period accounts of their actions.

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Far from being manic proponents of the pathological machismo of the period, the male painters of the first generation of Abstract Expressionism were edgy and an-

guished about this issue because they found themselves in a situation of having their

virility and sexual orientation routinely questioned. This was at a time when being “abnormal” was equated with sickness. Many of Jackson Pollock’s more notorious macho antics, for example, should be seen as efforts at “proving” to the period Left of people like Mike Gold that he was neither a “scented whore” nor a “fairy,” however “effeminate” his profession and impractical his artworks. As a recent biography

shows, Pollock’s shaky sense of sexual identity was hardly secure, and his anguish about his own bisexual tendencies was thus considerable.+ Conversely, in light of the above discourse about the effeminacy of artists and their official grouping with hairdressers as well as dressmakers, we must reconsider the meaning of Pollock's choice in 1950 to allow three of his finest paintings to be reproduced in Vogue and as a backdrop for three elegant women models. To conclude simply that such an act represented the definitive “decadence” of Pollock’s career would

ironically be to reproduce anew the very homophobic gender discourse of the 1930s and 1940s. Such a discourse is now recognized as so untenably essentializing that it

currently enjoys little credibility with thoughtful people.®5

While this choice of venue by Pollock (at a time when he badly needed money) is marked on the one hand by an evident collusion with commodity fetishism, it is

marked on the other by an even more compelling transgression of gender stereotypes, such as those

that dismissed

artists and

intellectuals as costly courtesans.

Indeed,

what strikes the reader at this point is how self-assured and immune to homophobic discourse Pollock evidently was at this particular moment in his life, so that he could even flirt ironically with the derisive period discourse noted above. As other docu-

ments show, such moments were surely rare in Pollock’s often uncertain life.66 Various episodes concerning Willem de Kooning and period behavior are quite revealing in this regard as well. His rather atypical relationship with Elaine de Kooning (Fig. 36) is also indicative of a sense of indecision that he demonstrated concerning the “natural” gender roles of this era. About their unorthodox marriage, Marjorie Luyckx, the sister of Elaine, observed as follows: [I]n day-to-day life there was not the slightest chance that, as a wife, she would

put on an apron, cook, and serve. If he said, “I’m hungry,” she said, “So am I.”

Between the roles of traditional wife and artist, she chose the latter. Early in their

marriage, Bill turned to her and said, “We live like a couple of bachelor roommates. What we need is a wife.”67

Conversely, Willem de Kooning was sufficiently influenced by the homophobic discourse that it almost kept him from meeting Mark Rothko for the first time. In a

1979 interview, de Kooning related the circumstances of their original introduction to each other. While he was sitting in Washington Square one night in the Depression, aman came up and sat down beside him. De Kooning almost got up and left because,

to quote him, “Maybe people would think we were a couple of old queers or some-

thing.”68 Nonetheless, he hesitated, and at this point he and Rothko fell into a conversation that led to a friendship. Furthermore, it is interesting to note here that Elaine de Kooning was well aware of how the wives of some of the other painters of

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Figure 36. Elaine de Kooning, Bill at St. Marks, 1956, oil on canvas (72” x 44”). Courtesy of Cline Lew-

Allen Contemporary, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

the first generation of Abstract Expressionism were in a less equitable relationship than the one that she enjoyed.® Pollock himself seemed to careen back and forth between being a Mike Gold-like working-class hero and a shy man whose wife did most of the talking for him. Indeed, so much was the latter role assumed in public that Robert Motherwell, like several

others, complained that Lee Krasner “dominated” Pollock in this relationship.7° The complexity of Pollock’s manner along these lines has been noted by Grace Hartigan, who as Pollock’s junior by a decade was a member of the second generation of the New York School. On the one hand Pollock could boast to her on their first meeting that “Well, everybody is shit except me and de Kooning” (which was not a view he held at other moments), while on the other hand he would shortly thereafter recommend her work to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.7! His relationship with Lee Krasner was wildly contradictory in a related vein. At times he was verbally abusive in a threatening way and at other times he was deeply supportive of her professional career during a period when neither Peggy Guggenheim nor Clement Greenberg would take her seriously as an artist. About this facet of

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their relationship, Krasner has stated: “We had a continuing dialogue. . . . I honestly don’t remember feeling competitive with him.” She continued: “He treated me like

a professional painter. If he didn’t, we wouldn’t have stayed together.”72 According

to Krasner

(see Fig. 23), there were only two other male painters in the New

York

School who “acknowledged that I painted at all.” These were Bradley Walker Tomlin and Franz Kline, who both spoke to her “sympathetically about my plight.”73 This situation was comparable with that of Joan Mitchell, who was twenty years Willem de Kooning’s junior and who later would call herself “the last of the Abstract Expressionists.”74 One of the most gifted painters of the second generation (Fig. 37), she said, “I always got mad at women who quit”; and yet she also spoke of the gen-

eral lack of solidarity among women artists in this period.”5 About this moment in

history, she has stated:

I’ve always had close women friends and taken a special interest in younger women’s work, but in New York in the 1950s women artists were very much against each other. I suffered from that. Men actually helped me more than women. When

I brought my painting in to the Ninth Street show

[a now famous inde-

pendent exhibition held in an empty store in 1951 as a protest against uptown

rejection of the new art], Leo Castelli said he’d have to see if there was room, but de Kooning and Kline were there and they really liked it, so it was hung.76

Indeed, a close reading of period accounts generally demonstrates that the male artists among the first generation of the New York School were more likely to be supportive of artwork by their female counterparts than were either gallery dealers or

most art critics. A highly instructive example in this regard comes from an art critic

who in 1946 wrote the following about Louise Nevelson’s solo show at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York: “We learned the artist was a woman in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among the moderns.”77 It is hardly surprising then that both Krasner and Elaine de Kooning chose to sign their works with initials only or that Grace Hartigan briefly adopted the sobriquet of “George,” after George Sand and George Eliot. As Whitney Chadwick has noted, this manuever was apparently based less on an effort to hide their identities than on an attempt to evade being labeled

as “feminine” by period commentators.78

As Lucy Lippard has pointed out, Mitchell’s paintings have a scale and a vigor of

application that precludes their being called “feminine” or “delicate,” just as Mark

Rothko’s paintings are (as Shirley Kaneda has noted) among the most “feminine” in

conventional (i.e., stereotypical) terms.79 All of this reminds us that it is quite im-

plausible to posit any one-to-one correlation between the technical handling of the medium and the gender of the artist within the New York School. To reduce Pollock’s paintings to being “masculine” or “malelike,” for example, is to overlook the dense-

ly mediating role of artistic languages and to essentialize these paintings both by means of a mechanical recourse to biography and by means of gender roles that were hardly “natural” or even stable. Furthermore, according to Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, the “virile” male

gestural painters, such as Kline, de Kooning, and even Pollock, were less discrimina-

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Figure 37. Joan Mitchell, Hemlock, 1956, oil on canvas (91” x 80”), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Gift of the Friends of the Whitney. Photograph: Geoffrey Clements, © 1997, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

tory in their treatment of women as artists than were the “feminine” Color-Field painters. Concerning Rothko, Gottlieb, and Newman, Elaine de Kooning remarked in 1981 that “The wives were kind of shadows of their husbands.”8° As for Ad Reinhardt’s attacks on the Abstract Expressionists, it is interesting to recall that therein he utilized the above-noted CP discourse of the 1930s on masculinity. To indicate that de Kooning had supposedly “sold out,” Reinhardt said that this artist “lived like Elizabeth Taylor,” whereas in his cartoons for P.M. Reinhardt depicted the abstract painter as a hard-hat-wearing proletarian.®! This particular combination of working-class sympathies with masculinist rhetoric helps us to explain the distinctive allure of the Cedar Tavern Bar. As B. H. Friedman said of this bar, “It was simply that place down the block where the maintenance crew went . . . where drinks were cheap and one wondered how the owner ever paid the rent.”82

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The aim of all this should not be to rank the Abstract Expressionists in terms of who was least sexist, nor to claim quite unconvincingly (as has Michael Leja), that the female artists of the New York School, like Krasner, were so disenabled by “the dom-

inant ideology” that they were “both disinclined and disempowered to produce.”83 While no doubt being undermined at times by the cult of masculinity, these woman

artists were hardly done in by it. Thus, even here there was no so-called dominant ideology that went entirely unquestioned or that was unthinkingly reproduced either by the women or men who belonged to the New York School. To claim that there was any such totally crushing victimization is to underestimate the contradictory nature

of ideology and to be utterly insensitive to the impressive body of work produced in

this deeply troubled period by Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, and Grace Hartigan, as well as several other women

artists (see Figs. 23, 32, 34).

The aim ofa rigorous immanent critique cannot be one of taking the quick path of categorical condemnation, as if all we now need is to assume the moral high ground from which to make such self-serving pronouncements about gender relations a half century ago. Rather than easy moralizing about sexism, we need instead to analyze with much greater sophistication and far more stringency just how enmeshed, yet not incapacitated, all the members of the New York School were in this

dense, but not totally disempowering, web of hierarchical relationships and discriminatory discourses. As Montaigne once observed, it is much easier to accuse one sex completely than to excuse the other entirely. No one grasped this insight better or used the knowledge yielded by it more incisively than did Simone de Beauvoir in her landmark study of 1949 entitled Le Deuxiéme Sexe (The Second Sex). In one of the greatest books produced in this entire era,

de Beauvoir refuted the legend that some putative psychological destiny imposes an

eternal hostility between men and women. Accordingly, she avoided the path of de-

monizing one gender and instead discussed the social and institutional relationships that help to maintain this inequitable, as well as deeply conflicted, situation - a situ-

ation that was so unstable and paradoxical that it was hardly guaranteed an endless

future:

It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is

so hard to break, it is because each sex is the victim of the other and of itself . . .

the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each side is giving

aid and comfort to the enemy. . . . [Like men] women

play on both sides, demanding old-fashioned respect and

modern esteem, banking on the old magic and their new rights.84

Among the institutions that the Frankfurt School blamed in this same period for the patriarchal tenor of Western society was the institution of marriage, particularly as it was interwoven with the “enforced community of economic interests” then ascendant. This view led Adorno, who like Schapiro was critical of homophobic discourse in the 1930s and 1940s, to contend in Minima Moralia in 1944 that “Marriage

as a community of interests means the degradation of the interests of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world’s arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation.”85 Among the thinkers singled out by Adorno be-

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cause they were unable to mount an effective critique of either the plight of marriage or the reifying nature of femininity was Friedrich Nietzsche — a prime author of the “modern man” discourse and a figure who was often cited for his iconoclasm by both anarchists and the Abstract Expressionists, as Dore Ashton has noted in her classic

study of the New York School.8¢ About Nietzsche's failure on this issue, Adorno pointed out that his scrutiny of gender roles stopped so short of any serious critique that he simply took over the unverified image of feminine nature from a European Christian civilization “that he otherwise thoroughly mistrusted.” Thus, Adorno noted in 1945 that Nietzsche “fell for the fraud of saying ‘the feminine’ when talking of women. Hence the perfidious advice not to forget the whip: yet femininity is itself already the effect of the whip.”87 While on this particular point of the “modern man” discourse he might well have discouraged critiques of gender roles by some members of the New York School, Nietzsche had little if any impact on Abstract Expressionism in another highly important respect related to that discourse, namely, its unmitigated Eurocentrism. In fact the Eurocentric nature of Nietzsche’s “modern man” discourse was flatly, at times even brilliantly, contradicted by the Abstract Expressionists’ views on non-Western culture and by the nature of their transcultural artistic production.

“CONTEMPORARY “MODERN

MAN”

MAN”

DISCOURSE

VERSUS

DISCOURSE

Far from being in line with this particular aspect of the “modern man” discourse, then, the Abstract Expressionists and Reinhardt conceived a noteworthy alternative to it that is both far less ethnocentric and much more multicultural in the most profound sense of this word. Not surprisingly, this particular issue brings us to the sev-

enth and final myth of the cold-war period that the New York School had to confront, namely, “the myth of Europe's cultural superiority,” and the concomitant belief in a racial inequality that was a tragic hallmark of the postwar period leading right up to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. More specifically, this myth of Eurocentrism and its corollary embrace of racial inequality, were based on what Samir Amin has called the fallacy of Western universalism, which claims, whether in art or

political economy, “that imitation of the Western model is the only solution to the challenges of our time.”88 Nietzsche, who admired classical Greek culture as much as he disparaged the eclectic historicism of nineteenth-century Europe, used the “modern man” discourse in a paradoxical manner. He employed this discourse both to lambaste nationalism within European countries and also to laud the prospects of some emergent pan-

European culture with roots in the soil of ancient Greece. At once antinationalist and unabashedly ethnocentric, Nietzsche’s “modern man” discourse promoted a Eurocentric universalism that derived from some presumed pure distillation of Greek culture. Nowhere is the hierarchical and quite ethnocentric devaluation of non-Western cultures as a plausible stimulus for “modern man” more on display than in his celebrated essay “The Use and Abuse of History,” which was part of his study from 1873-6

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entitled Thoughts Out of Season (Unzeitgemdsse Betrachtungen). Nietzsche’s candid claim

for Eurocentrism went as follows:

How could history serve life better than by anchoring the less gifted races and peoples to the homes and customs of their ancestors?. . . .

{Yet] we moderns have nothing of own. We only become worth notice by fill-

ing ourselves to overflowing with foreign customs. . . . The Roman

of the Empire ceased to be a Roman

through the contemplation

of the world that lay at his feet; he lost himself in the crowd of foreigners that streamed into Rome,

and degenerated

amid the cosmopolitan carnival of arts,

worships and moralities. It is the same with Modern Man.89 And how was the “modern man” to gain his bearings in such a situation of dis-

enabling heterogeneity? Nietzsche ended his essay with an animated response, a toast to the “greater moral character” of the Greeks that alone produced “true culture.” If the “modern

man”

thought himself back to his “true needs,” Nietzsche concluded,

“the Greek idea, as against the Roman, will be discovered.” Revealingly, there was only one major figure associated with the New York School to embrace the Eurocen-

tric universalism propounded by the “modern man” discourse. This, of course, was Clement Greenberg. Conversely, all the other significant critics and all of the major artists of the New York School were fundamentally opposed to any view that granted the superiority of Western culture and European peoples. In addition, all of the Abstract Expressionists were against the linear concept of historical development upon which the West-is-best thesis depended (as did Greenberg’s equally abortive concept of Modernism); nor were any of the Abstract Expressionists either proponents of ethnic purity or advocates of the possibility of any complete return to pristine roots (this is one of the many positions that distinguishes them from the German Expressionists, for example).9! All of these differences notwithstanding, Greenberg repeatedly insisted that Abstract Expressionism was explic-

able only by means of a European lineage - a view fundamentally at odds both with the avowed artistic intention of the artists themselves and with the assessments by their astute defenders, namely, Meyer Schapiro, Elaine de Kooning, and Harold Rosen-

berg.

In his 1955 piece “American-Type Painting,” Greenberg insisted of the New York

School, “it remains that every one of them started from French art and got his instinct for style from it, and it was from the French, too, that they all got their most vivid no-

tion of what major, ambitious art had to feel like.”92 Indeed throughout the McCar-

thy period and beyond it was as if Greenberg had to thwart the McCarthyists’ ethno-

centric attacks upon the “alien” (or non-Western) nature of modernism, by means of

repeated assurances of the supposedly pure Western pedigree of modern art, such as that of the Abstract Expressionists.93 Subsequently, Greenberg’s triumphalist view of U.S. postwar art gave way increasingly to an all-out defense of Western culture as a whole against “multi-cultural hordes.” There is a definitive summation from the early 1980s of how Greenberg readily endorsed

the Eurocentric tenets of the “modern

man”

discourse, albeit not without

a sense of Spenglerian foreboding about the West's future (as was also true of Nietz-

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sche’s aforementioned essay). Greenberg’s unqualified promotion of precisely what

Samir Amin identified above as Eurocentrism went as follows:

Western culture’s present position is that it’s reach is earth-wide, that it’s become the first global urban culture, one that intrudes everywhere and threatens to

dominate everywhere. . . . It’s not just because Western power, with its industri-

al and preindustrial technology has laid waste, and lays waste, to all other cultures. ...

In much greater part it was because of how much better, how much more alive, recent art from the West was than anything being done in traditional ways at home. . . . Now there is such a thing as truly international art, visual anyhow (including architecture). But it remains Western art, stays charged from and centered in the West. Just as the course of Greco-Roman culture wasn’t, seemingly, affected by its spreading beyond its homeland or, on the other hand, even by incursions of barbarian outsiders, Western culture with its art seems to keep on evolving according to its own

large.94

inner logic, its entelechy, uninfluenced

at bottom by events at

Far from being at odds with Greenberg's decidedly ethnocentric view of U.S. modernism from the 1940s onward, this above assessment by Greenberg is an obvi-

ous corollary to how he has insistently and quite implausibly demoted if not denied

the non-Western and popular cultural contributions to avant-garde art in general and to postwar U.S. art in particular.

—

Since [have discussed Greenberg’s conceptual framework at length elsewhere, I note only the following here. First, in keeping with his doctrine of medium purity, Greenberg repeatedly celebrates the “purity” of great Western art, that is, its disconnection from society; yet such a view is utterly incompatible with his concomitant / Eurocentric claim that Western art is great as a result of how it embodies “pure” Western values. Second, Greenberg treats Greek and Roman culture as if they were isolated achievements, singular essences, even when serious scholarship from Rudolf Wittkower through Samir Amin shows the opposite.95 In fact, both were multicultural from their inception and subsequently multilineal in their influences. In short, here as elsewhere, we agree with Amin that many “Western values” are not just Western.96

Neither Rosenberg and Schapiro nor any of the Abstract Expressionists operated, as did Greenberg, with the mistaken assumptions of the “modern man” discourse when it came to cultural forms, ethnic identity, or the logic of history. The Eurocen-

tric “modern man” discourse of Greenberg was about cultural homogeneity, national identity, and ethnic purity. Conversely, the anti-Eurocentric artworks of Abstract Expressionism were about cultural heterogeneity, polycentric identity, and artistic mestizaje, all of which are traits that we now associate more with postmodernism than with modernism. In writing about the achievement of Pollock, de Kooning, Hofmann, and Newman, Harold Rosenberg quite rightly introduced the “contemporary

man” discourse to distinguish these artists from most European modernists:

Modern modern art - that is, art since the World Wars ~ arises from the conviction

that the forms of Western culture, including its art forms, have permanently col-

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lapsed . . . the forms of Western art are no longer capable of arousing deep feelings or affecting major experiences. . .

The modern modern poet or painter, as distinguished from the old modern art-

ist, picks his way among the bits and pieces of the cultural heritage. .. The fragmentary art of transformal Action painting engages itself within the

fragmentary world of contemporary man and the fragmentary outer world in

which the cultures of all times and places are blended and destroyed.°7

This “contemporary man” discourse, with its multicultural practices, multilateral sense of time, and multilingual articulation of place, was a frequent feature of both the wri ings and the art of the Abstract Expressionism from the 1940s onward. Ironically, this was the case even when they used the term “modern man,” since it hardly signified the same for them that it did for mainstream apologists. (Michael Leja’s mistaken belief that a term like “modern man” essentially signifies the same regardless of who uses it and in what context it occurs constitutes one of the most telling shortcomings of his important new study of Abstract Expressionism.)%8 In fact, the more Reinhardt and the Abstract Expressionists arrived at their mature positions, the more

they became “contemporary men” on the issue of Eurocentrism, while often still remaining “modern men” on the issue of gender relations. Meyer Schapiro declared in his 1957 essay on postwar modern art that within

modernism non-Western art was “seen as existing on the same plane of creativeness

and expression as ‘civilized’ Western art,”99 and the Abstract Expressionists entirely agreed on this point. Barnett Newman could not have been more clear when he wrote of how “modern art stands as an island of revolt in the narrow stream of Western aesthetics” and of how the great non-European traditions influencing modernism “stand

apart as authentic aesthetic accomplishments that flourished without benefit of European history.”! In discussing his role as a curator of non-Western, specifically preColumbian art for the Wakefield Gallery in 1944 in New York, Newman did not side-

step the issue of colonialism when he praised the work, saying: “we brought together outstanding examples of the art of the Valley of Mexico,

of Costa Rica, Guatemala,

and Brazil, produced before the white man destroyed their cultures.”101

Accordingly, Newman condemned the patronizing Eurocentrism of “modern

man” discourse while writing of the need to produce multicultural art resulting from

“our inter-American consciousness” and based upon “our common hemispheric heritage.”102 Such a strategy involved according non-Western art the same respect as that of any other artistic tradition and much more esteem than either classical Greek art

or European classicism merited in his view. About the term “primitivism,” Newman

had criticisms to make of its patronizing usage by most other people. This criticism

in turn anticipated Rasheed Araeen’s subsequent critique in the 1980s of both “primitivism” and the term that replaced it, namely, “ethnic arts.”!3 Nor is it irrelevant

here that when discussing the heterogeneity of modernism and “ethnic arts,” Araeen specifically cited Newman and Reinhardt as artists whose work exemplified how modernism was indebted to Asian art, as well as to Islamic culture and North African tra-

ditions. Newman’s criticism of the contemporary signification of “primitivism” in the West went as follows:

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A full appreciation of these [non-Western] works should force us to abandon our

condescending attitude toward the “primitive” label, with all its confusing im-

plications of childlike perception. ... Are not these masterpieces the best any

man can do?!04

A year later, in 1945, Barnett Newman praised Rufino Tamayo and Adolph Gottlieb as two of the best new artists of the Americas, owing to their “deep understanding and respect for the indigenous art of the aborigines” in the hemisphere. This was the case he believed because these artists, like Newman himself, did not overlook the role of this art as a constitutive social bond, along with the fact that “in [the] healthy,

primitive, well-integrated societies of the Northwest Coast, abstract painting was the standard tradition.” 105 From there, Newman the “contemporary man” of hydridity and heterodoxy went on to challenge explicitly the orthodox Eurocentrism of the “modern man” discourse, linked as it was to the Western project of capitalist modernization, of which he was also critical: There is an answer in these [indigenous] works to all those who assume that modern abstract art is the esoteric exercise of a snobbish elite, for among these simple peoples, abstract art was the normal, well-understood dominant tradition. Shall

we say that modern man has lost the ability to think on so high a level?106

Two more observations must be made about this position of Newman and the mythmakers. First, Newman acknowledged that it was necessary to attempt, yet impossible to have, a “pure” understanding of the non-Western cultures that colonialism had gravely fragmented. He thus spoke of understanding Oceanic art better than had the Surrealists, so that the members of the New York School had necessarily “reinterpreted Ocean art.” Second, Newman made clear that identity was something to be constructed as much as rediscovered. Hence, he wrote of his own artistic production, “I’m not interpreting nature or reality - I’m making it.”1°7 All of these points intersect with some of the most nuanced as well as advanced views currently being articulated as part of “postcolonial” discourse (within postmodernism) by the likes of Stuart Hall, Samir Amin, Gioconda

Belli, Paul Gilroy, and Gerardo Mosquera.

As Stuart Hall of Jamaica has noted, we are less and less able to reduce either na-

tionality or regional identity (such as pan-Europeanism) to “essential” cultural values or presumed ethnic “purity” that signify some “homogeneous” nation or region of a legendary past. Instead, we are compelled to talk about the specific set of ethnic convergences, both interracial and transcultural, that most distinctively locate what can

only be the multiethnic and multiregional character of any nation or people at present. Thus, the ultimate unity ofa nation comes not from any racial or cultural essentialism but from the geographic boundaries, cultural practices, and national or region-

al institutions (political, economic, social) that have been constructed to render either

more or less compatible and hierarchical the various groups currently situated within the national or regional boundaries - boundaries that are explicable as much in international terms as in national or regional ones. This nexus of relationships upon

which all “racial” and ethnic identity depend reminds us yet again that any genuinely

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emancipatory process will be one wherein a people remake themselves by redefining this unavoidable heterogeneity in less hierarchical and more progressive terms. !08

The Latin American art critic Gerardo Mosquera corroborated Hall's analysis quite well when he wrote the following in his 1988 essay entitled “Raices en Accién” (Roots in Action):

Instead of feeling like second-rate Europeans, or “Indians” and “Blacks” who do not belong in the West, or like victims of chaos, we are building on the multi-

lateral nature of our culture, thus constructing our own synthesis that allows us to incorporate naturally the most diverse elements. We seek identity as a form of action, not as a type of exhibition. In the “search for national identity,” some have advocated an “expression of our roots” that has caused a grave cultural misfocus. . . . This is a serious mistake, since the problem is not to find an identity but to construct one. This is what it means to be our-

Selves.109

Returning to the artists of the New York School, with this “contemporary man” discourse: Did they act upon these postcolonial views not only through their art but also in other domains? The answer to a notable degree is “Yes.” Several interchanges

during this period with artists of color are indicative of why the Abstract Expressionists and Ad Reinhardt would be among the most forceful supporters in the art world of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1949, Robert Motherwell met (as had Jackson Pollock) with the artist Wifredo

Lam, who was then a supporter of the Communist movement in Cuba and who was also a member of the French Surrealist group that had earlier been exiled in New York City. Motherwell’s disquisition on their meeting is highly instructive along the above-

noted lines: The conditions under which an artist exists are nearly unbearable; but so they are everywhere in modern times. Sunday last I had lunch ina fisherman’s inn in Montauk overlooking Gardiner’s bay with Wifredo Lam, the Cuban and Parisian painter, who is half-Chinese, half-Negro; he has difficulty in remaining in this country because of the Oriental quota; 1 know he is humiliated on occasion in New York, for example, in certain restaurants. . . .

.

[A] refrain that ran through his questions is less easy to answer, whether artists

were always so “unwanted.” I replied that artists were more wanted in the past when they spoke for a whole community ... we modern artists constitute a community of sorts. ... Lam and I parted advising each other to keep working;

it is the only advice one painter ever gives another. . . .

Until the structure of modern society is radically altered, these will continue to be the conditions under which modern artists create. No one now creates with joy; on the contrary, with anguish. . . . In so doing, one discovers who one is, or,

more exactly, invents oneself. If no one did this, we would scarcely imagine of what

a man is capable, !10

Similarly, Franz Kline commiserated with the African-American painter Sam Middleton, a longtime friend, about the stark racial divide in the United States during this

era. Indeed, the latter still remembers Kline saying in the 1950s that Middleton would

MYTHMAKING

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PERIOD

have a better chance of making it in Europe than in the United States. Kline said: “It won't matter if you’re good here. If you're a Negro they’ll only take you one at a time: like Richard Wright, then Baldwin.” Furthermore, Kline contended that “They'll only take realistic images [from black artists].”!11 There was no extensive socializing between black and white artists in the New York art world, despite the fact that several white dealers did have shows of work by African-American artists - Marian Willard showed Norman Lewis from 1946 through 1964; Samuel Kootz exhibited the work of Romare Bearden between 1946 and 1948; Betty Parsons of Wakefield Gallery featured work by William H. Johnson in‘1943-4. Although Hale Woodruff, for example, taught at New York University along with William Baziotes and Tony Smith, and sometimes drank at the Cedar Tavern Bar, “he

was not part of the gang” (to quote one of his former students).112 The reasons for this relatively small amount of multiethnic socializing evidently had much to do with the unspoken strictures of institutional racism in this period. Indeed, recently an African-American comedian wittily summarized this state of social

invisiblity when he related how he went to a Hollywood studio to try out for a part in a movie about the 1950s. The director of the movie, according to this joke, replied

to him: “You don’t understand. There were no Blacks in the 1950s!”113 The artist Ronald Joseph, who like Lewis and Bearden lived in Harlem at this time, gave a more somber but related assessment of this period: I would like to explain . . . we didn’t mix socially. . . . Now, if you don’t mix into a group, I suppose there are only two reasons. Either you don’t want to, or you

cannot. Well, if I look back and explain it now, it seems to me a mixture of every-

thing. . .. What is the common denominator? Is it social life? Is it education? Is

it being in the same neighborhood? Probably the neighborhood. Neighborhood is direct and explicit.114

Notwithstanding the infrequency of socializing across ethnic lines owing to these social barriers, the Abstract Expressionists and Ad Reinhardt (a lifelong friend of Norman Lewis and probably the person most reponsible for encouraging Lewis to participate in the Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 in 1950) were exemplary supporters of two of the national groups in the vanguard of the civil rights movement during the early 1960s, namely, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). During May 23-29, 1963, for example, at the Mar-

tha Jackson Gallery in New York, there was an art exhibition and sale to benefit CORE.

The artists who donated works for the cause included Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, James Brooks, and

Hans Hofmann.115 About these art exhibitions on behalf of CORE, national director James Farmer said:

The wonderful generosity of the contributing artists helped to make our Freedom Rides possible. The results of those rides, I think, are well known . . . the courage and the restraint of the Freedom Riders, in the face of the most dreadful violence

and abuse, gave an immense forward thrust to the whole civil rights movement.116

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A similar art exhibition and sale was organized in 1963 by the Artists Committee of SNCC. The chair of this committee was Jacob Lawrence, and the vice-chair was Ad Reinhardt;

Norman

Lewis and Romare

Bearden were committee

members.

Among

the sponsors were Elaine de Kooning and critic Dore Ashton. The letter of appeal by the Artists Committee of SNCC recounted its support of the Freedom Rides, sit-ins, and the voter registration drive, and declared: Artists, too, yearn for an end to racial injustice and the birth of equality for all

men. Inspired by the students, we pledge ourselves to guarantee support for this vital effort in which we deeply believe and upon which our futures hinge. 117

In light of the above-noted ethnic situation, it is not surprising that many mem-

bers of the New York School who were not African-Americans nonetheless had to contend with ethnocentric remarks about their own work. As Harold Rosenberg ironically observed of “the New York School,” it actually originated elsewhere, since it was largely made up of immigrants and sons or daughters of immigrants. Furthermore,

most of them came not from Western Europe but from points further east or south.118 In 1947, for example, when William Baziotes won

First Prize at an exhibition in the

Art Institute of Chicago, his modernist paintings (which drew on non-Western and preindustrial art) were denounced in the Daily News as “foreign art,” thus recalling the pervasive period view that modernism was “Ellis Island Art.”119

In 1947 when the U.S. government was pressured into canceling an exhibition of contemporary artwork to be sent abroad - which included paintings by Adolph Gottlieb and Philip Guston - ethnocentrism was among the factors. Indeed, President Truman himself (who does deserve credit for desegregating the U.S. military) used a rac-

ist remark to denigrate one painting in the show - a work by the Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi - saying: “the artist must have stood off from the canvas and thrown paint at it . . . if that’s art, I’m a Hottentot.”!2° Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marshall, the author of the Marshall Plan, declared that henceforth the U.S.

State Department would use “no taxpayers’ money for modern art.”!2! Accordingly, in 1948 the Boston Institute of Modern Art changed its name to the Institute of Con-

temporary Art, because the term “modern art” was seen as too “foreign,” that is, as “subversive” and thus likely to attract unwanted attention. 122 + As should be clear by now, the aforementioned myths about “national security,” the

“naturalness” of corporate capitalism, and the “universality” of so-called American values did indeed function, as Lévi-Strauss noted myths would, as an attempt at reconciling quite contradictory phenomena: the doctrine of “free expression” versus an

opposition to “subversive” values; the claim of “free speech” versus the dictates of alleged “national security”; the dogma of the “American Way” versus the commitment to “equality”; the “cult of masculinity” versus the recognized instability of “natural” gender roles, and so forth. As to how all these ideological dictates and political acts

were in turn further related to profound structural contradictions in the sphere of

political economy, John Dewey has observed the following:

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With an enormous command of instrumentalism, with possession of a secure technology, we glorify the past and legalize and idealize the status quo, instead

of seriously asking how we are to employ the means at our disposal to form an

equitable and stable society. This is our great abdication. It explains why we are

a house divided against itself.123

Before concluding this chapter, however, I should mention the signs of hope for reconstituting

the future along

more

polycentric

and

heterodox

lines that were

glimpsed by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the New York of the 1940s. As he noted in his 1983 essay “New York post- et préfiguratif”: “New York was decidedly not the urbanmetropolis I had expected, but an immense, horizontal disorder attributable to some

spontaneous upheaval.”!24 As such, it was a place that juxtaposed both ancient and recent cultural strata, shards of past ethnic groups with strains of current ones in a glittering mosaic of transcultural creativity that allowed its citizens to be anthropological fldneurs (to use James Clifford’s memorable phrase), as well as practicing multi-

culturalists.125 The nucleus for what would soon become the transcultural aims and multilateral dynamic of Abstract Expressionism were already observable in the streets of Manhattan, as well as on display in the city’s Museum of Natural History. Accordingly, Lévi-Strauss wrote of watching Chinese opera being performed under the Brooklyn Bridge, of seeing amazing collections of Eskimo art in the Bronx, and even of unexpected experiences while he was doing research:

I felt myself going back in time no less when I went to work in the American

toom of the New York Public Library. There, under its neo-classical arcades and between walls paneled with oak, I sat near an Indian in a feather headdress and a beaded buckskin jacket - who was taking notes with a Parker pen. . . . New York (and this was the source of its charm and its peculiar fascination) was

a city where anything seemed possible. Like the urban fabric, the social and cultural fabric was riddled with holes.!26

But how would the Abstract Expressionists attempt to use the frayed fabric of the existing order, with its new openings (as well as old tears) to reconstruct society’s di-

vided house while embracing difference? After all, their art was not just about ex-

panding the communicative resources of art but also about reconstituting commu-

nity by means of it. This is one of several issues that I address in the next two chapters. In following up the key work of Meyer Schapiro, and also of Harold Rosenberg, I focus in Chapter 5 on the Abstract Expressionists’ critique of contemporary labor through art - on their use of artistic labor as a means of criticizing mainstream social relations, all in the name of a promise that they nevertheless seemed to hold for the future. Just as Schapiro contended that the artistic production of modern art in the 1950s

was at odds with the “ordinary experience of working” within corporate capitalism,

so Rosenberg posited the following tenets about Abstract Expressionism, which the

works of the New York School and the writings of Meyer Schapiro will allow us to assess in a sustained way:

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Action painting became a mythical substitute for the myth of the American social revolution. .. . The outlines of art as action began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Marx

speaks of the liberation of work, and defines free work as work for the sake of the

worker, as distinguished from work for the sake of the product. In this idea, which puts creation above the object, whether artifact or commodity, Marx anticipates the thought of . . . the Action painter. !27

CHAPTER

FIVE

Automatism and the Age of Automation

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It sub-

jects them to the implacable demands of objects. . . . To deprive thought of the movement of spontaneity is precisely to annul its necessity. — T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1944/5).1

¢

I think we are craftsmen . . . but we have no position in the world absolutely no position except that we just insist upon being around. - Willem de Kooning, Modern Artists in America (1950).2

+

Art is a form of action. ... . [It is] an activity of bodily gesture serving

to sharpen consciousness. . . . For this reason, the act of painting is a

deep human necessity, not the production of a handmade commod-

ity....

I think to myself how the interior walls need the sensuality and

moral integrity of modern painting; but then one cannot help reflecting that what lies behind this building [Lever Brothers in New York City] is not the possibility of collaboration between men on “ultimate

concerns,” but instead big business. . . . It is strange when a commodity is more powerful than the men who make it. - Robert Motherwell,

The Painter and the Audience (1955).3

¢ Most work, even much

scientific work, requires a division of labor, a

separation between the individual and the final result. . . . Standard-

ized objects produced impersonally and in quantity establish no bond between maker and user. They are mechanical products with only a pass-

ing instrumental value. . .. What is most important is activity by which we live is no longer satisfying. . . [Modern paintings] may be regarded as means of dividual in opposition to contrary qualities of the ence of working.

that the practical . affirming the inordinary experi-

- Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,” Art News (1957).4

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p=

AS

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CRITIQUE

THE 1950S, MEYER SCHAPIRO DEFENDED ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

not only for its progressive use of non-Western cultural practices but

also for its critical counter to the contemporary definition of labor. Schapiro’s discussions of this North American movement both as a form of labor “opposed to the characteristics of industrial production” and also as a new visual language “opposed to communication as it is understood now” are found in his exemplary essay of 1957, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art.”5 Owing to the way he illuminated

these

fundamental

artistic attributes, Schapiro

could

further claim

that this postwar U.S. avant-garde helped to “maintain the critical spirit” in the face of an ever ascendant corporate capitalism.

Of notable theoretical import is how Schapiro simultaneously analyzed Abstract Expressionism as a form of labor and as a new visual language. Each of them was seen

in relation to human self-realization and in light of a dialogical aesthetics necessitating viewer engagement. Recent critiques of language have much advanced this nexus of relationships by demonstrating that humanity shapes itself as much through language as through labor. In acting as a formative force, not simply as a reproductive one, languages do more than passively reflect society. Rather, they actively function as material components whereby a society variously defines and produces what it is. Indeed, languages (spoken, visual, written) provide the basic network of ideological and communicative bonds that are both a precondition for and a result of the social relations of production in the workplace. Without language there simply would be no collective labor, as Charles Darwin was one of the first to note scientifically with his Descent of Man.6 Since the destruction of the craft mode of production by the division of labor within industrial capitalism, art’s relation to labor has been as contradictory as it is ill

defined in Western society. It was an awareness of this general problem that led Walter Benjamin and the other members of the Frankfurt School to shift their critical analysis away from the old “form and content” antinomy toward both an examination of the nature of artistic production signified by an artwork and a critique of this artistic production in relation to the general mode of production in society. As Benjamin stated in “The Author as Producer” (1934): “Rather than ask, ‘What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I would like to ask,

‘What is its position in them?’” The answer to this query would be ascertained by an analysis of the technique responsible for the artwork, because “the concept of technique provides the dialectical starting point from which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed.”” In place of asking if the artwork thematically declares the “correct” political position or the “right” subject matter, Benjamin said that one must instead ascertain if the artist has incisively addressed his or her position in the process of production. If accomplished compellingly through one’s technique (and Benjamin insisted that an artist who does not teach other artists teaches no one), then the resulting character

of artistic production will help advance historical change by challenging art's institutional relationship to the public. Thus, the new means of technical production conceived by artists “is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers - that

AUTOMATISM

AND

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AGE

OF AUTOMATION

is, readers or spectators into collaborators.”8 Such a process is most likely to occur if the productive means of the artist is alienated from the capitalist mode of production in such a way as to point beyond the existing order of things.

With characteristic subtlety and insight, Meyer Schapiro (who, as noted in Chapter 2, admired Walter Benjamin’s essays in the 1930s) approached Abstract Expressionism in 1957 as a distinctive new mode of artistic production that was fundamentally at odds with developments in postwar U.S. society. As such, Schapiro provided a compelling answer to Benjamin's general challenge concerning art in contemporary society. My initial aim in this chapter is to extend Schapiro’s contention that Abstract Expressionism at its best affirmed a historical concept of humanity “in opposition to

the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working”? within corporate capitalism during the heyday of Taylorism.

I then further explain how Abstract Expressionism was intended to embody a critical repudiation of instrumental thinking in conjunction with an implied ideological critique of technologism. Accordingly, Chapters 5 and 6 address several related

issues:

Schapiro’s original critique;

period developments in political economy that form the historical setting for his position;

statements by the Abstract Expressionists themselves that show how their methods for

producing art were intentionally at odds with the nature of work within the dom-

inant mode of production in the postwar period; and the unresolved difficulties that afflicted the positions of Abstract Expressionism and

anarchism, thus permitting the partial appropriation of this art for contrary ends.

Also included is a look at how Clement Greenberg used a technocratic interpretation of Abstract Expressionism to suppress its negativity and critical edge (see “The Age of Au-

tomation and ‘Scientific Management’ in the present chapter). Greenberg’s technologist reading was nevertheless challenged not only in the United States but, as discussed in the Introduction, by Marta Traba, perhaps the most important art critic in Latin America, and also by Umberto Eco, who was probably the most incisive European respondent to Abstract Expressionism during the heyday of the New Left. Both of these positions seconded the critical reading that had already been put forth by Schapiro in 1957.10

Once this reassessment has been achieved, it will be possible for us to understand why Abstract Expressionism was neither an escapist flight into “pure art” nor a misguided retreat to mysticism. Rather, this art manifested a profound form of Romantic anticapitalism with substantial strengths and considerable weaknesses.!1 Not surprisingly, in contradicting the society from which it arose this art was itself also deeply contradictory. Nonetheless, it was paradoxical in ways that were often historically unavoidable and politically reprehensible only in part.

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ABSTRACT

AS CULTURAL

EXPRESSIONISM

AS

CRITIQUE

ROMANTIC

ANTICAPITALISM

Since Schapiro’s discussion of how Abstract Expressionism contravened postwar wage labor has been almost entirely ignored, I begin by outlining his position before seeking corroboration from political economy as well as from statements by the Ab-

stract Expressionists themselves. In maintaining that the radical changes in postwar U.S. art were “related to a broader and deeper reaction to basic elements of common experience,” Schapiro contended that a consideration of this art should address “new problems, situations, and experiences” that had arisen in society as a whole.!2 Among these issues, he listed the challenge of social conflict, the problem of the subject, and concomitant developments in science as well as in technology. His critical focus was principally upon painting in the postwar United States — and his article was accom-

panied by a reproduction of Jackson Pollock's watercolor No. 7, 1951 - because at that

moment, painting was “the domain in culture in which the contradiction between the professed ideals and the actuality” of society was most painfully clear.!3 While eloquently adumbrating the historical location for the paradoxical relation of Abstract Expressionism to U.S. society, Schapiro stated the following: In a number of respects, painting and sculpture today may seem to be opposed to the general trend of life. Yet, in such opposition, these arts declare their humanity and importance. Painting and sculptures, let us observe, are the last handmade, personal objects within our culture. Almost everything else is produced industrially, in mass, and through a high division of labor. Few people are fortunate enough to make something that represents themselves, that issues entirely from their hands and minds. .

Most work, even much scientific work, requires a division of labor, a separation

between the individual and the final result. . . . Standardized objects produced impersonally and in quantity establish no bond between maker and user. They are mechanical products with only a passing and instrumental value. . . .

What is most important is that the practical activity by which we live is not sat-

isfying: we cannot give it full loyalty, and its rewards do not compensate enough for the frustration and emptiness that arise from the lack of spontaneity and per-

sonal identifications in work: the individual is deformed by it.14

In response to these alienating conditions within the postwar United States, Abstract Expressionism emerged, according to Schapiro, as a form of labor, as a way of producing art that was fundamentally at odds with the capitalist mode of production. This new artwork intentionally symbolized above all a profound degree of selfrealization within the work process. In a moving passage that deftly defined what

most distinguished Abstract Expressionism from all earlier art, Schapiro further stat-

ed that this new artwork was more “passionately than ever before, the occasion of

spontaneity or intense feeling.”!5 He then enumerated the resulting formal traits that were most characteristic of the new visual idiom of Abstract Expressionism from New

York City.

This new all-over idiom with a decentered pictorial logic and an innovative use

of line to reestablish the figure-ground relationship was generally characteristic of all

AUTOMATISM

Figure 38.

AND

THE

AGE

OF AUTOMATION

Willem de Kooning, Ashville, 1949, oil and enamel on cardboard, mounted on compo-

sition board (25% x 32”). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

the major works by both the first and second generation of Abstract Expressionism (and, to a lesser extent, of art informel and tachisme in Paris and Montréal, as well as

in Latin America).!© Nonetheless, it was especially in the most successful paintings by Pollock and de Kooning from 1946/7 through the early 1950s, such as Autumn Rhythm (see Fig. 14) or Ashville (Fig. 38), that these formal attributes were most often com-

mandingly in evidence. To quote Schapiro:

The consciousness of the personal and spontaneous in the painting and sculpture stimulates the artist to invent devices of handling, processing, surfacing, which

confer to the utmost degree the aspect of the freely made. Hence the great impor-

tance of the mask, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation -

all are signs of the artist’s active presence. All these qualities may be regarded as means of affirming the individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working . . . [contrary] characteristics of industrial production, may be found also in the different

sense of the words “automatic” and “accidental” as applied in painting, tech-

nology and the everyday world.

Modern painting is the first complex style in history which proceeds from el-

ements that are not pre-ordered as closed articulated shapes. The artist today cre-

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AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

ates an order out of unordered variable elements to a greater degree than the art-

ist of the past. ... While in industry accident is that event which destroys an order... in painting the random or accidental is the beginning of an order... a kind of order that in the end retains the aspect of the original disorder as a mani-

festation of freedom. . . . This art is deeply rooted, I believe, in the self and its re-

lation to the surrounding world. And the pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within a culture that becomes increasingly organized through industry, economy, and the state intensifies the desire of the artist to create forms that will

manifest his liberty in a striking way . . . to reach out into common life. It be-

comes then a possession of everyone and is related to everyday experience. .. . If the painter cannot celebrate many current values, it may be that these values

are not worth celebrating.!7

Abstract Expressionism was seen by Schapiro as a repudiation of the capitalist mode of production and the disempowering division of labor on which this type of work was predicated. (Here would be an example of what Althusser called art's “internal distanciation” from the ideological values of the society that produced the art.) Similarly, the art of the New York School was also discussed as a

rejection of the instru-

mental thinking orchestrated by this new technocracy’s means of communication. In Schapiro’s view, another aspect of Abstract Expressionism “which is opposed to our actual world and yet is related to it” was the contradiction between the formal logic of this painting and that of mass culture, or “what are called the ‘arts of communication.’” The hegemonic mode of communication for the U.S. culture industry was one of streamlined exclusions - “a world of social relationships which is impersonal, calculated and controlled in its elements, aiming always at efficiency.” Yet, conversely, what “makes painting and sculpture so interesting in our times is their high degree of non-communication.” As such, this new art failed to signify in conventional codes. It had no “practical” message, “no clear code or fixed vocabulary.”18 Abstract Expressionism thus signified a visual language “in which communica-

tion seems to be deliberately prevented,” thus representing Adorno’s emphasis on the progressive variants of modernism as those that attempted the “negation of society's negativity.” Consequently, the reception of this art, like its production, was “a process ultimately opposed to communication as it is understood now.” This was true, Scha-

piro observed, because these artists did not wish simply to transmit an “already pre-

pared and complete message to a relatively indifferent and impersonal receiver.”!9

In abrogating the normal function of language by affirming values that went beyond mere instrumental or technocratic concerns, the Abstract Expressionists wished to trigger a different thought process in the spectator. Rather than the prescribed mes-

sage passively consumed, this artwork depended on active “contemplativeness and

communication with the work of another human being,” even as this experience be-

came for some “an equivalent of what is regarded as part of religious life.” Ironically enough, Schapiro maintained that the contemplative but probing approach to culture

elicited by Abstract Expressionism helped to “maintain the critical spirit.”20 By linking a meditative approach to art with a critical attitude to society, Schapiro thus anticipated in his essay a later theme of liberation theology in relation to revolutionary movements throughout Latin America in the 1970s: the act of contempla-

AUTOMATISM

AND

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tion as a stimulus for left-wing activism. The Nicaraguan priest and revolutionary Father Ernesto Cardenal summed up this unlikely position when he declared during the Nicaraguan Revolution, “I became politicized by the contemplative life. Meditation is what brought me to radicalization. . . . It can be said that the gospels made me a Marxist.”21 Aside from the impediments posed by the antidemocratic organization of the workplace within corporate capitalism and the considerable control by multinational corporations over the means of communication within society at large, realization of the oppositional intentions of Abstract Expressionism was also thwarted by the institutions within the U.S. art world. Precisely because of the way visual artists produced objects, Schapiro said, they were exposed, “more than [those in] the other arts, to dan-

gerous corruption.” Even while advancing certain dimensions of human existence in material form, this artwork could also succumb to the humanly negating logic of commodity fetishism as “a unique commodity of high market value.” On the other hand, though, Schapiro noted that as of the mid-1950s “no profession is as poor as

the painter's. . . . The painter cannot live by his art."22 Here we should comment on the peculiar class location of the modern artist, including that of the Abstract Expressionists, since to a certain extent it was precisely this unusual location in the class hierarchy of modern Western society that, as Schapiro noted in a later article, would give the New York School a place from which to launch their critique of mainstream society.23 On the one hand the artist is a worker, working for someone else, in the sense that he or she produces for others (dealers, museum directors, or patrons) who have accumulated enough capital to purchase the objects made. On the other hand, the professional artist enjoys a far greater degree of workplace democracy owing to how little he or she has been afflicted in immediate production by the managerial command system of Taylorism. Accordingly, in keeping with the artisanal production of medieval guilds, the modern artist even has a marked degree of self-managerial control over the fruits of his or her labor that one associates with the entrepreneur (a term first coined in precapitalist Europe, and thus one that can hardly be accurately treated as an automatic synonym for capitalist). These are all key points that Schapiro made when, in his 1964 article on the modern artist and contemporary patronage, he observed the following: the [modern] artist is a producer who possesses his own tools of work and is personally responsible for his entire product, without any division of labor. .. . As such, he is an exception in modern society, an anomalous survival of the medi-

eval artist. . . . From this feature arise certain features of the artist’s outlook and behavior, or, at least, the situation seems to justify and support them: his feeling of separateness, his sympathy with the marginal, his informality of manners, and greater freedom in other contexts of moral and social life.24 Here it should be added that a contrary claim by Marcel Duchamp about the modern artist (which has been repeated in thought-provoking essays by Thierry de Duve and Yves-Alain Bois) was that the modern painter, at least since the manufacture of tubes of paint in the 1840s, is working both with readymades and with the sion of labor within the workplace as everyone else, that is, with the “stig-

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AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

mata of the mass-produced.”25 As Duchamp noted: “Let's say you use a tube of paint;

you didn’t make it. You bought it and used it as a readymade.”26 Thus, according to this rather hasty view of artistic production, the artist is simply engaging in normal

commodity production within advanced capitalism. However, this view of painting’s

nonexistence except in capitalist terms, like many of Duchamp’s other sweeping

claims, is at once very original and somewhat superficial. If genuine intellectual in-

sights consist above all in making fine distinctions, then Duchamp’s rather crude conflation here of several dissimilar economic categories manifestly fails to provide us

with any new insights.

Two quick points are thus in line to disentangle this issue somewhat. First, although modern artists do indeed work with the products of Taylorism in the factories,

they do not directly produce by means of Taylorism in the workplace. (Artists do so

in this sense only by choice - a choice that someone subject to Taylorism in the workplace simply does not have.) Artistic self-management - and there is no artistic production that is unintentional, at least on some level (including Duchamp’s intentional choice of readymades) - is fundamentally antithetical to the complete lack of workplace self-management on the part of workers under Taylorism. Second, owing to the division of labor within modern capitalism, commodity

production does not allow for either worker improvisation or worker agency in the intellectual conception of the products being made. (Again, Duchamp’s readymades depended heavily upon his conception of the process as a way of validating them.)

Thus, although modern artists do indeed make special products that later become commodities, they do not engage in the form of commodity production that emerged only in the late eighteenth century during the definitive arrival of industrial capitalism. Similarly, even when art like that of the Abstract Expressionists does subsequently become commodified by market forces, this art still also exists as something other

than a commodity. (All of this will, | hope, become clearer in the discussion of Taylorism in the next section.)

Conversely, however, the institutionally mediated reception of these paintings, which increasingly encourages the fetishistic view of them as the most costly humanmade objects in the world, could lead to the appropriation or evisceration of both the

critical edge and aesthetic import of this artwork by the very existing order these painters intended to criticize (as Schapiro noted in “The Liberating Quality of AvantGarde Art”); since, in the ascendant U.S. art world, the perception of success “stamped the painting as an object of speculation, confusing the values of art.”27 Furthermore, the reception of this artwork could generate ideological legitimacy for the artwork’s owner, rather than leading to the contestation of the whole process whereby this re-

definition of art occurred. Nonetheless, having located the Abstract Expressionists in this paradoxical, even debilitating position, Schapiro then reminded the reader that Abstract Expressionism had still not garnered the type of monetary success that would have caused such an ideological transvaluation of its contumacious aims.28 With this unresolved conflict between the institutional framing of art and the in-

dividual intentions of artists, Schapiro’s analysis reached an impasse concerning the broader signification of Abstract Expressionism. Subsequently, the paintings of Ab-

stract Expressionism - which arose partly as an assimilation of non-Western cultural

AUTOMATISM AND THE AGE OF AUTOMATION traditions and as a repudiation of commodity production in the United States - would indeed sometimes become quite precious commodities exalting the American Way; yet they would also remain many other, often contradictory, things as well, at least some of which rendered this process of commodification fundamentally unstable and never entirely uncontested. (It is of note here that formalist critics such as Clement

Greenberg, ever concerned with bowdlerizing this art and blunting its critical edge, would celebrate in 1960 how “The Jackson Pollock Market Soars.”)29 This later state of affairs, however, neither invalidates Schapiro’s observation about the artistic intent

motivating the work’s conception nor forecloses now a progressive reinterpretation of Abstract Expressionism along similar lines. The frequent but hardly prevailing signification at present of this artwork within the U.S. art world as mere disengaged private expression does point to some serious

limitations of this art, at least as it is currently construed. Such a situation does not demonstrate, however, the uselessness of Abstract Expressionism for posing critical alternatives. Rather, we are reminded of the ongoing pertinence of such an alternative reading of Abstract Expressionism, however marginalized and incomplete this interpretation might be in the United States at present. There is little doubt that Willem

de Kooning encapsulated both the original intent of this art and its anticipated early misreception when he stated: “I think we are craftsmen . . . but we have no position

in the world — absolutely no position except that we just insist upon being around.”30 Similarly, in 1947 Mark Rothko recognized well the process of appropriation threatening the Abstract Expressionists, and indeed of all other art as well, when he observed

the following about artistic reception:

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling

act to send it out into the world.3!

THE

AGE

OF

AUTOMATION

AND

“SCIENTIFIC

MANAGEMENT”

Far from simply reflecting ideological and industrial developments either in the United States or Europe, Abstract Expressionist paintings at first contested existing labor relations and then only later seemed to confirm fundamental structural devel-

opments in other spheres of society. A summary of the historical context in the postwar United States will clearly demonstrate how the Abstract Expressionists’ aforementioned process of making art originally embodied an astute critique of what occurred

in the workplace during this period. Along with the enormous new accumulation of wealth in the postwar United States, which saw per capita living standards rise substantially, there were some regressive developments concomitant with the wholesale consolidation of what has been

called the third great revolution in technology, namely, the “Age of Automation,” particularly as explicated by Friedrich Pollock and Ernest Mandel, as well as others.32

Whereas the early nineteenth century saw a transition from handicraft-made steam

141

142

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

engines to machine-made steam engines, and the early twentieth century ushered in a change to electric or combustion engines, the post-1945 period was dominated by the generalized control of machines through electronic apparatuses. The principle behind this impetus toward fully automated mass production, which resulted even in machine-made raw materials and synthetic food stuffs, was one of “‘emancipating’ industry from the human hand” (to quote Mandel).33 The postwar drive by Western capital “to eliminate living labor from the process

of production”4 involved an effort to reduce wages while simultaneously reconstituting the industrial reserve army. Predicated as it was on private property and commodity production, this process of capitalist “modernization” was based on the generation of surplus value for capital by lowering wages in relative terms. Such a relative diminution in wages was achieved by an expansion of the labor force in tandem with the use of more automated technology to accomplish a new level of global unemployment, which is what apologists for this system euphemistically term a heightening of “competition” among workers. (Needless to say, the use of automation by and on behalf of the worker force - as opposed to its frequent use at present as a weapon against the working class - will be consistently possible only in a postcapitalist society based upon workplace democracy.)

The new job insecurity of the postwar United States resulting from the growing threat of displacement through automation was permitted by several changes: the aforementioned political repression in the 1950s of the Left; a demobilization of the labor organizations so powerful and progressive in the 1930s (through such legislation as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947); and an unprecedented succession of U.S. mili-

tary interventions abroad (both to expand the source of cheap labor and to deny democratic self-determination by foreign workers), thus stratifying workers worldwide

through the “international division of labor” that was identified by dependency theorists.35 All of this drastically lowered wages in the Third World, as multinational U.S. cap-

ital penetrated economic regions that were previously characterized by a low organic

composition of capital. The key doctrine for these military aggressions in “the periphery” of the world economic order was the Truman Doctrine of 1947 (see “Myths That Menace America’s Future” in Chapter 4), which endorsed a global U.S. campaign against “communism”

(or, as its opponents

countered,

against the right of non-

Western workers to resist being reduced to cheap labor by “free” enterprise). As such, this doctrine resulted in systematic U.S. support for a remarkable number of ultraright-wing military dictatorships that dutifully guaranteed “economic stability” for

Western capital.

The substantial success enjoyed by U.S. capital in the “Age of Automation,” particularly from the mid-1940s through the early 1960s, has been amply documented by official U.S. statistics. From 1946 to 1961, the domestic working class increased by 35 percent, and its total physical output rose by 70 percent; yet because of the above-

mentioned intimidation and demobilization, workers’ real wages rose only 29 percent, all of which translated into a notable rise in the rate of surplus value expropriated by capital during 1940-66.3¢ Investment in automation reached 18 percent of all

new investments by 1963, and 21,000 of the 32,000 major U.S. manufacturing estab-

AUTOMATISM

AND THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

lishments had become largely automated by the early 1960s. This particular process of modernization through automation followed various pathways:

1. a transfer of parts between successive productive processes based on automatic 2.

devices, as in Detroit automobile plants; continuous-flow processes with automatic controls over the flow, as in chemical,

3.

oil, gas, and electric utilities; computer-controlled processes, as in the communication

4.

a combination of the above.37

industries; or

In U.S. society as a whole, the postwar age of automation, which is now misleadingly known as the hi-tech or so-called postindustrial era, has produced two main myths or ideological tendencies to legitimate these inequitable and markedly non-

democratic developments. These are the ideologies of technologism and of “scientific management,” which taken together constitute what the Frankfurt School has aptly labeled the “instrumental thinking” of scientism. As Ernest Mandel has maintained,

“belief in the omnipotence of technology,” not just its potential efficacy, has gained ascendancy with corporate capitalism.38 Similarly, just as technocratic decisions are made a matter of professional expertise and not of popular debate, so Western modernization is increasingly defined in the quantitative terms of economic “efficiency,” not with respect to a qualitative progression in the living standards of the majority. Indeed, the contradictory nature of gauging modern development strictly along the quantitative technical lines of the “leading economic indicators” was suitably summed up in the 1970s by a Brazilian president who stated that his country’s economy was doing fine although most people in Brazil were not. (Brazil experienced a U.S.-backed military coup in 1964, which overthrew the democratically elected Goulart government. Since, then it has suffered through four decades of what Wall Street once called an “economic miracle.”)39 Significantly, it was in the 1940s that T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote their critique of technology,

scientism,

and instrumental

thinking,

The Dialectic of

Enlightenment (see “U.S. Government Surveillance . . .” in Chapter 3). Their analysis of the paradoxical role of “reason” in modern Western society underscored how it has signified on the one hand “the idea of a free, human, and social life” and on the oth-

er hand “the court of practical calculation subordinate to the “ratio of capital.”40 In this way, the contradictory development of reason in modern Western society has been both progressive and regressive simultaneously. From being a necessary means both of societal self-preservation and general human self-realization, reason (Vernunft) has also become its opposite, namely, instrumental thinking or understand-

ing (Verstand), a narrowly circumscribed tool of domination whereby a minority has protected its privileges against the interests of the majority. This is what the Frank-

furt School had in mind when it spoke of how instrumental or practical thinking for short-term gains had increasingly preempted a recourse to rational thought in broader terms and thus on behalf of more long-term human needs. In league with capitalist modernization, instrumental thinking first hardened in-

to a technologist view for the domination of nature and then into a technocratic view for the domination of labor. Early on in this process, nature was stripped of all integra-

143

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

tive qualities and instead became a phenomenon to be controlled for quantitative gain. Human reason itself also became constrictively redefined as part of this system’s “pragmatic” logic. From being a fundamental mode of self-realization interdependent with the progress of humanity in general, synthetic reason has been diminished and rationality itself often reduced to a narrow technique for instrumental thought and self-interested thinking.

The progression of human reason in a rational society is inextricably connected to the end of all exploitation, but instrumental thinking conversely operates untroubled in exploited and exploitative circumstances. This reification of reason into what Marcuse incisively called “one-dimensional thought,” or technocratic thinking, was based on a fetishism of science. Modern science at its best is a way of empirically describing natural phenomena in quantitative terms; scientism (the ideological form of fetishized science) is the unjustified transposition of this technique for quantification into historical situations and political circumstances that are necessarily qualitative,

never merely natural, and certainly not neutral.41 Significantly, the above critique concerning technologism and scientism was one that appeared in Dissent and New Politics at exactly the moment when the Abstract Expressionists had become directly associated with them. Indeed, their association here with these ideas simply reminds us of how these themes were abiding concerns in the artistic production of the New York School from the early 1940s onward. In 1961, for example - a year in which many of the Abstract Expressionists contributed to the Dissent Art Show (see Fig. 1) and a cover design by Elaine de Kooning appeared on the

Summer issue- there was an important essay by Herbert Marcuse on the theme of instrumental thinking. Entitled “Language and Technological Society,” Marcuse’s piece addressed the increasing “functionalization of language” in Western society as indicative of how the political sphere was being closed off to noninstrumental forms of social critique based on democratic engagement by the majority.42

Along with this piece by Marcuse in the Winter 1961 issue of Dissent was a review essay by David Sachs about Paul Goodman's new book Growing Up Absurd.43 Good-

man, who was an important influence on the anarchist thought of Newman

and

whose concept of communitas was (as Thomas B. Hess has noted) one of the ideas de-

bated within the meetings of the New York School during 1947-51, argued something similar to the above-noted view of Marcuse concerning the disempowering expansion

of technocracy. Goodman likewise observed that workers were increasingly disempowered politically because they were ever more unacquainted with “the machinery and materials they use both at home and at work.” The conclusion that Goodman. drew from all this was that there was a diminished “pride of place,” with the result being “The Missing Community” (to quote the title of the final chapter in Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd).*4 These essays by Marcuse and Goodman were followed up in Dissent by such related pieces as Irving Howe's “Cybernation: The Trauma That Awaits Us” (Spring 1962) and Raymond Williams’s “Prelude to Alienation” (Summer 1964),

as well as an essay in New Politics by Paul Mattick: “The Economics of Cybernation”

(Summer 1962).48

Meyer Schapiro, who helped to organize the artists’ fund-raising campaign for

Dissent, conveyed the following (among other points) in his letters of solicitation for

the Dissent Art Shows of the New York School in 1961, 1963, and 1966 (see Figs. 1, 2):

AUTOMATISM

AND THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

Dissent is, in one sense, an old-fashioned venture. It depends upon the idealism and commitment of a few people who believe in the need for radical social and cultural criticism. It has played a valuable part in the American intellectual community as a critic of the Establishment, an ally of the struggle for civil rights, an opponent of cultural accommodation.46

The human abuses of applied scientism and technocratic thinking, as criticized by the Frankfurt School, Goodman, Schapiro, and Howe, were nowhere more obvious

than in the workplace of post-1945 U.S. society. It was there, in the heyday of the Age of Automation, that Frederick W. Taylor’s principles of “scientific management”

were first used in a systematic way throughout the entire work force.47 Unlike Adam

Smith’s eigthteen-century discussion of the new division of labor during the early phase of the industrial revolution (when Smith assumed that this development in specialization would not lead to ever more intellectual disengagement by ordinary

workers),48 Taylor’s view was that further “progress” depended on just such an elimination of all remaining intellectual involvement by wage labor. According to Taylor’s principles,

which were consolidated to an unparalleled degree only after 1945, all intellectual engagement must henceforth become the exclusive prerogative of management and the factory owners.49 Known as “scientific management,” F. W. Taylor's three basic concepts involved telentlessly undisguised ways to cheapen further all manual labor, thus reducing overhead and enlarging output along with further concentrating power in fewer hands. First, management should dissociate the labor process from any need for skills on the

part of workers. Second, management should orchestrate a thorough separation of conception from execution within the workplace, thus eradicating any intellectual decision making by workers. Third, management should exercise complete control

over all knowledge necessary for production, so as to ensure itself total authority.5°

The alienation fostered by such work conditions in postwar society was clear

enough to open-minded commentators, as Schapiro’s above-cited discussion of the

workplace demonstrates. In fact as early as 1844 (and long before the more extreme from of the division of labor known as Taylorism emerged), Marx observed how the antidemocratic and dehumanizing logic of capital would increasingly cause wage laborers to be alienated in four ways: (1) from the object of production, (2) from the process of production, (3) from each other, and (4) from themselves (as thinking, feel-

ing, and physically developing human beings who were capable of doing far more than this system allowed).5!

Perhaps no one else, though, was more eloquent in concretely describing the immediate human consequences and long-range social effects of such a system than was English art critic and writer John Ruskin. In his magisterial 1853 study entitled The Stones of Venice, Ruskin declaimed as follows: We have much studied and perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the

division of labor; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour

that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men - broken into small fragments and crumbs of life: so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in mak-

ing the head of a pin, or the head of a nail.52

145

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

Ruskin’s analysis was subsequently seconded in the late nineteenth century by

numerous others, including the French Impressionist painter Renoir, who himself

had been thrown out of work owing to the greater mechanization of porcelain painting at Limoges. Renoir’s related lament was that “Machinism, division of labor, have transformed the worker into a simple robot and have killed the joy of working.” As a result of this “suppression of intelligent work in the manual professions,” there occurred an “abnormal increase in the number of painters and sculptors,” since these latter object-makers were still permitted to work with their intellects as well as with

their hands.53 Revealingly, Robert Motherwell explicitly referred to Renoir’s remarks about the destruction of craft and the demise of intellectual engagement in manual

work as a result of capitalist modernization:

One doesn’t want a picture to look “made,” like an automobile or a loaf of bread

in waxed paper. . . . One admires Léger. But machinery created with brush and

paint, all the same, is absurd. . . . | agree with Renoir, who loved everything handmade.S4

Furthermore, in 1959 art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote an essay for The Nation in which he praised a book by the British socialist Raymond Williams precisely because of the way in which Williams interrelated industrial capitalism, cultural critique, and

reconstituted community. Rosenberg noted of this now well-known study, Art and Culture, that it was “worth a library” owing to the way in which it dug into the “ideological layers that envelop modern politics.”55 Among Rosenberg’s more important comments for our purposes were these:

The idea of culture, Williams tells us, first appeared in England around the dawn

of the Industrial Revolution . . . the history of the term has been a history of ex-

posing the evils of industrialism . . . [by means of] the claims of inwardness and

the “whole man” as against the “external and mechanical” compulsions of the factory-centered society. . . . In the past three decades, we have not only culture but “mass culture.” To Wil-

liams the very term “mass,” synonymous with “mob,” is derogatory, and in his view “the whole theory of mass communication depends, essentially, on a minority in some way exploiting a majority.” True communication implies not only reception but an opportunity to reply; the absence of this opportunity in the

mass-culture audience induces a sullenness and withdrawal of interest. . . . In

other words, mass culture must be changed into the culture of democracy in prac-

tice...

Williams endeavors to distinguish an ethic of solidarity, responsible for work-

ing-class achievements in unionism and in politics . . .in which he shrewdly dis-

cerns “real personal unselfishness . . . within a larger selfishness.” [Conversely] Service, he argues, maintains the status quo . . . since the ladder of success is the

symbol of divided society and each man climbs it alone.5&

As for the conflict between capitalism and democracy in post-1945 North America, economist and labor historian Harry Braverman of Monthly Review summed it up well when in 1974 he observed that “workers in each industry today are far less capa-

ble of operating that industry than were the workers of a half-century ago.” Further-

AUTOMATISM

AND

THE

AGE

OF AUTOMATION

more, the process overseen by “scientific management” has “concentrated in 3% of

the entire working population” the technical knowledge necessary to operate U. dustry.57 Now, in a country of almost 260 million people, less than 100,000 individuals from the corporate boards and their managerial staffs have any sustained intellectual involvement with the very industry on which the entire United States depends. In keeping with this configuration of power, economist Milton Friedman (the major North American apologist for corporate capitalism and an advisor to right-wing military dictators in Latin America, like Pinochet in Chile) has even assumed that pro-

nounced inequality in economics is a prerequisite for political “freedom.”58 Nor is it surprising that “scientific management” would have a counterpart to a certain extent in some formalist art criticism, which (as Greenberg acknowledged) was also based on positivism - the analogue in philosophy for technologism and scientism.59 As Casey Blake and Leo Steinberg have both noted, the desire to reconcile postwar U.S. art, such as Abstract Expressionism, with contemporary industrial developments expressed itself at least in part in Greenberg’s transformation of vanguard cultural radicalism into technocratic instrumentalism, “the administration of a self-

referential cultural idiom by a cultural elite.” Leo Steinberg put it this way in “Other Criteria”:

Contemporary American formalism [in the 1960s] . . . analyzes specific changes within a linear conception of historic development . . . [and] reduces the art ofa hundred years to an elegant one-dimensional sweep. ... Modernism may have to be redefined - by other criteria. . .. The dominant formalist critics today tend to

treat modern painting as an evolving technology wherein at any one moment

specific tasks require solution — tasks set for the artist as problems are set for researchers in the big corporations . . . the solution matters because it answers a problem set forth by a governing technocracy. . . . It is probably no chance coincidence that the descriptive terms that have dominated American formalist criticism these past fifty years run parallel to the contemporaneous evolution of the Detroit automobile . ... What I am saying here relates less to the pictures them-

selves than to the critical apparatus that deals with them. . . . There is obviously

no affinity for industrialism in Pollock.61

Likewise, Casey Blake has contended that Greenberg's concept of artistic progress was actually a variant of technological determinism, with the critic being a “scientific manager,” or rather “quality controller,” of formal progression along the assembly line of artistic evolution. The consequence, he observed, was “aesthetic engineering,” so that Greenberg came to redefine “the relationship between critic and artist . along lines parallel to the individual division of labor between administrator and worker.”62 The ideological impetus of Greenberg’s approach is thus revealed by a look at his technocratic view of modernism, namely, as mere medium self-criticism. Such a consideration makes clear that Greenberg's linear concept of history was as much a result of technologism and positivism as it was a residue of orthodox Marxism via

Trotsky. (Moreover, the multilateral dynamic of uneven historical development that is central to classical Marxism is of course antithetical to Greenberg's unilateral notion of historical movement.)6&

147

148

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE Whereas all the most significant avant-garde movements, including Abstract Ex-

pressionism, questioned art’s conceptual use and historical position, Greenberg simply defined modernism retrospectively as a limited questioning of a specific medium’s usage. Contrary to Greenberg's claims, avant-garde modernism explicitly contested the physical borders of art by expanding art conceptually, thus disclosing the stultify-

ing narrowness of exclusively formal concerns. No one made this point more resoundingly than did Motherwell when he wrote in opposition to Greenberg in 1950

about the New York School: “Modern emphasis on the language of art . . . is not merely a matter of internal relations, of the so-called inherent properties of a medium.”® In other words, avant-garde self-criticism in the use of modernism involved a general concern with the social and linguistic limits of art, whereas modernism as redefined

by Greenberg was reduced to an instrumental preoccupation with the formal limits of a medium. Nevertheless, the mere acceptance of such medium self-criticism as a predeter-

mined aim excluded a much more profound self-criticism concerning the unstable historical nature of art. This theoretical failing shows in turn that Greenberg’s concept of medium self-criticism was itself assumed to be beyond any further self-criticism.

Aside from the automatic, even doctrinal, political conformity inherent to his onedimensional definition of art, Greenberg's view of modernism was never about sus-

tained self-criticism but rather about the technocratic suppression of formal negation or critical affirmation even as issues to be considered. Furthermore, as Annette Cox has shown, Greenberg's outspoken role as a McCarthyist in the 1950s was of course very much about quelling the type of U.S. left-wing dissidence that was associated with Dissent, The Nation, and Monthly Review.65 Not surprisingly, then, Greenberg’s anemic self-criticism was really a barrier to any rigorous self-criticism of the type

common to avant-garde art at its most profound. Hence, the importance of Greenberg’s technocratic concept of modernism in the postwar United States resided at least

in part in its frequent ideological convergence with the values constellated around

workplace practices in the corporate capitalism of this period. Revealingly, the entirely different conceptual framework used by Meyer Schapiro to discuss Abstract Expressionism finds much more ready corroboration both in the paintings of these artists and in the Abstract Expressionists’ unequivocal opposition

to scientism, technologism, and wage-labor alienation. Far from being (as the formalist version of modernism asserts) the consequence of predetermined formal problems or the mere homologue in culture of assigned laboratory research, these modern ar-

tistic innovations occurred at the historical juncture of notably diverse and internally divergent as well as culturally “impure” developments. Abstract Expressionism was,

as Schapiro said, “a break with the kind of painting that was important in the 1920s” because “the experiences of the last twenty-five years have made such confidence in the values of technology less interesting and even distasteful.”66 The military rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Holocaust, other horrors of the Sec-

ond World War, and finally the use of the atomic bomb in 1945 accounted for the way that progressive forces in the West, including Meyer Schapiro and the Abstract Expressionists, repudiated the unqualified adulation of technology by the early avantgarde (particularly the machinalotry of Futurism and the “machine aesthetic” of the

AUTOMATISM

AND THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

1920s).67 It must be emphasized, however, that this new position did not necessarily

entail a neo-Luddite rejection of technology per se but rather a critical appraisal of technology as not being an end in itself - a position contrary to the ideology of technologism. Thus, technology was seen by postwar progressives as an awesome force

no better or worse than the system of political economy that used it. As Schapiro indicated, the Left had increasingly recognized after the 1930s that technology, instead of automatically producing new social relations, is itself more likely to be reproductive of the social relations manufactured by the established order controlling the design, use, and deployment of this new technology. (Of course, here one should recall that such a usage would be contradictory, thus opening up space for maneuver within new technologies, as well as calling for opposition from without.) In an important exchange in 1943 in the pages of Partisan Review, Schapiro followed Walter Benjamin’s exemplary earlier critique concerning the reactionary use of technology as an end in itself. Such a strategy, he noted, deflected criticism away from a systemic militarism that was then presumed to be a “neutral social need.”68 Forced to write under the pseudonym “David Merion” to protect himself from reprisals, Schapiro ably rebutted Sidney Hook's belief in the alleged “inherent social benefits” of the scientific method, regardless of who was using it: The fact that scientific method in psychology and the social fields may also be ap-

plied for fascist and counter-revolutionary ends . . . should keep us from this emp-

ty veneration of method. . . . The choice today is not between supernaturalism and naturalism, irrationality and science. It is between the socialist program and

the half dozen schemes which are, more or less naturalistic and scientific in their economic and political calculations, but are designed to maintain the present sys-

tem with all its cruelities and chaos. The greatest enemy is not the metaphysician

or priest, dangerous as he may be, but the armed class opponent who uses the re-

sources of science for his own ends.69

Concerning the catalytic character of the earlier machine age for the socially progressive avant-garde before 1940 - from Parisian Cubism through Russian Construc-

tivism and from the early Bauhaus through Léger’s “machine aesthetic” - Perry Anderson has explained how it occurred at a certain moment in history when such an affirmation of technology was possible because of “the imaginative proximity of social revolution.” In Europe during this period, bourgeois democracy had not been completed as a form, nor had the European labor movement been co-opted as a transformative force. The possible revolutionary result of a downfall of the old European

order was as yet still ambiguous. As for the historical preconditions for Cubism, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus before the 1930s, Anderson has noted that the promise

of the new machine age was a forceful stimulus for the emergent avant-garde.7° Nonetheless, a precondition of this new-machine-age interest was the abstraction of techniques and artifacts from the social relations of production that were responsible for them, so that in no case was capitalism as such ever exalted by any brand of “modernism.” This cultural extrapolation was still possible owing to the sheer incipience of the as-yet unforeseeable socioeconomic pattern that was later to consolidate so inexorably; hence it was not obvious where these developments were going to lead,

149

150

ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

namely, to Taylorism and Fordism in the West. The result was an ambidextrous celebration of the avant-garde from Right and Left alike - by Marinetti on the one hand and Léger on the other.7! Consequently, the European avant-garde of 1900-35 emerged at the historic intersection of a still potent classical past, a still indeterminate technological present, and an as-yet undetermined political future. All of these coordinates were altered but not eliminated by the First World War. Instead, it was the Second World War which,

in markedly determining the fate of each of these three developments, abrogated the earlier historical context in relation to which the European avant-garde had attained its greatest vitality and most profound promise. The new relations that emerged in the West after 1945 have been incisively outlined by Anderson as follows:

Bougeois democracy was finally universalized. . . . At the same time Fordism ar-

tived in force. . .. There could no longer be the smallest doubt as to what kind of society this technology would consolidate: an oppressively stable, monolithical-

ly industrial, capitalist civilization. . . . Finally, the image or hope of revolution

faded away in the West, with the onset of the Cold War and the Sovietization of

Eastern Europe, for a whole historical period. . . . In their place, there now reigned

a routinized, bureaucratized economy of universal commodity production, in

which mass consumption and mass culture had become virtually interchangeable

terms. The post-war avant-gardes were to be essentially defined against this quite

new backdrop. . . . After the moment of Abstract Expressionism - the last genuine

avant-garde of the West. . .. What marks the typical situation of the contempo-

rary artist in the West, it may be said, is, on the contrary, the closure of horizons.

This is not true, manifestly of the Third World . . . [where] socialist revolution

haunts these societies as a permanent possibility. ... These are the conditions that

have produced the genuine masterpieces of recent years: novels like Gabriel Gar-

cia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, from Columbia or India, or films like Yilmiz Giiney’s Yol from Turkey.72

Among the things that this explication by Anderson illuminates is why Surrealism, the European avant-garde least identified with Western modernization and technologism, should be the most potent force for Abstract Expressionism’s ideological negativity after 1945. In addition, we can also understand why Surrealism itself has increasingly found renewal or, better, redefinition (as Breton predicted it would) in the Third World.73 The realismo magico of contemporary Latin American art is in many ways one of the most profound heirs to the Surrealist movement, whose subsequent lineage also led to Abstract Expressionism.

CHAPTER

SIX

The Abstract Expressionist Critique of Technologism

There is no question that my work and the work of the men I respect

took a revolutionary position. . . .Some twenty years ago in a gathering, I was asked what my painting really means in terms of society, in terms of the world, in terms of the situation. And my answer then was

that if my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism . . . and I still believe, that my work in

terms of its social impact does denote the possibility of an open society, of an open world, not of a closed institutional world. — Barnett Newman,

“An Interview” (1969).!

°

The argument often used that science is really abstract and that painting could be like music . . . is utterly ridiculous. That space of the sci-

ence — the space of the physicists - I am truly bored with now. . . . There seems to be no end to the misery of the scientists’ space. - Willem de Kooning,

(1951).2

“What Abstract Art Means to Me”

VEN A CURSORY CONSIDERATION OF THE STATEMENTS BY THE ABSTRACT

Expressionists themselves is sufficient to demonstrate the thesis that Schapiro maintained: These artists intended their “automatic” handmade works to be a commentary on the dehumanizing developments intrinsic to the Age of Automation after 1945. Such a strategy not only involved a reclamation of “outdated”

preindustrial

artforms from the Northwest

Coast or Latin America,

but

also a recourse to non-Western techniques, such as one for working on the floor that was related to the Navajos’ technique for sand painting. All of these maneuvers were of course allied to a redefinition of Western oil painting through the assimilation of a mural-sized format from Mexican art. In turn, all of these traits were related to a new vocabulary of improvised visual forms, which accented the artisanal and inalienably human quality of this process of artistic production. In her informative discussion of the emergence of automatism in 1940-1 within what would become the New York School, Martica Sawin (who also wrote some significant early reviews of Abstract Ex-

pressionist work) has shown how the emphasis on experimentation was a legacy of

the WPA and noted that automatism was as much about technical concerns as it was about access to the unconscious.3

151

152

ABSTRACT THE

EXPRESSIONISM

RESPONSE

TO

AS

CULTURAL

TECHNOLOGISM

CRITIQUE AND

SCIENTISM

As Jackson Pollock noted, “Craftsmanship is essential to the artist” for responding to “the aims of the age we’re living in.”4 The hand-inflected, manual traces of these paintings in turn interrelated with the nonmimetic character of Abstract Expressionism, because, as Pollock observed, “the modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have mechanical means of representing objects.”5 Similarly, Hedda Sterne, who participated in the discussions at Studio 35 in 1950, wrote in Tiger’s Eye (1947)

of the key place occupied by artisanship in artistic production: “You are as good a craftsman as you are an artist and vice versa . . . craftsmanship and conception are alternatively cause and effect.”6 Furthermore, Sterne’s painting entitled Machine (which

was reproduced by Motherwell and Reinhardt in Modern Artists in America in 1951) is at once geometric and organic, featuring as it does semifigurative references to machinelike forms that seem both dynamic and broken, energetic and imprecise. Willem de Kooning was no less insistent on the interventionary role of artisanal

labor in the production of art. In the well-known discussions at Studio 35 in 1950, de Kooning prefaced his remarks on the necessity of craftsmanship and his need to “force my attitude upon this world,” with the view that in making art, “there is no

such thing as being anonymous.” Significantly, much of the discussion among the artists at Studio 35 involved whether or not an artwork should look or be “finished.”

De Kooning himself said: “I refrain from ‘finishing’ it. I paint myself out of the picture.” He then criticized contemporary French painting for evincing a certain “touch”

that “makes them look like a ‘finished’ painting” - both in the mechanized sense of being more calculated before hand and in the classical sense of being more centered compositionally and more constrained technically.” Other Abstract Expressionists and the artists associated with them generally voiced a comparable view. Barnett Newman declared: “I think the idea of a ‘finished’ picture is a fiction.” He subsequently said: “The artist’s intention is what gives a specific thing form.”8 (Both of these concepts utterly contradict the concern of formal-

ists like Greenberg with “resolved” art that is important not because of artistic intent but because of the finished object that results, whether intentional or otherwise.) Reinhardt added a statement analogous to that of Newman when he said that “the emphasis with us is upon a painting experience.” This position moved Reinhardt to ask:

“Is there anyone here who considers himself a producer of beautiful objects?” (to which no one responded affirmatively).9 James Brooks, a less well-known first-generation Abstract Expressionist, said: “Often I don’t know when a work is ‘finished’. . . . I think you have to abandon it while

it is still alive and moving.” That this sense of “unfinish” constituted an affirmation of human labor and a testimony to human self-realization was also a point made by Brooks when he observed that the “end” of a painting was established “not by the form that is ‘finished,’ but by the fact that I have worked on it. It satisfies a need of some kind,”!0 Elsewhere, Robert Motherwell specifically identified this new concept of painting

as a signifier of improvised, nonregulated human labor and thus asa critique of the standardization and instrumentalism endemic to the capitalist mode of production in the postwar United States:

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EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM

If a painting does not make human contact, it is nothing. . . . Pictures are vehicles of passion, of all kinds and orders, not pretty luxuries like sports cars. . . . For this reason, the act of painting is a deep human necessity, not the production of

a hand-made commodity.!!

In elaborating on the making of art, Motherwell explained that, “painting and sculpture are not skills that can be taught in reference to pre-established criteria,” but entail “a process, whose content is found, subtle, and deeply felt.”!2 He extended this line of reasoning in his highly adulatory piece on Miré for Art News in 1959, in which he spoke of how “Miré has increasingly devoted himself to the world of the artisan.”13 Motherwell then quoted Miré approvingly along these same lines: “I have a profound conviction of a society better than one in which we live at this moment, and of which we are still prisoners. I have faith in a future collective culture .. . where the sensibility of each will be enlarged. . . . In America, the artisan has been killed. In Europe, we must save him.” . . . [With Mird] the picture finds

its own identity and meaning in the actual act of being made, which I think is

what Harold Rosenberg meant by “action-painting.”!4

With two contemporary papers - “The Renaissance and Order” (1950) and “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951) - Willem de Kooning reinterpreted classic art as well

as modernist art in such a way as to emphasize the improvisatory human engagement

of artistic production and to repudiate the ideologies of technologism and scientism. In the first of these, de Kooning specifically rejected the idea that what was most important to the Renaissance artist was the science of perspective (a misguided view he ascribes to “philosophers and educators of commercial art”). Far from being a matter of mechanical rules, he said, “Painting was more intellectual than that.”!5

However, according to de Kooning, this use of art that both artisanally and conceptually affirmed human self-realization (the real subject of art to him) became increasingly uncommon because of the demands placed on artists by practical-minded bourgeois patrons. Concerning the ever more mechanical, ever less humanly meaningful production of paintings, de Kooning declared: “That’s what happened when the burghers got hold of art, and got hold of man, too, for that matter.”16

In discussing the growing use of paintings to celebrate objects per se, rather than the human acts that went into producing them (all of which increasingly occurred in the mercantile phase of capitalism to which he was referring), de Kooning added:

“although I, myself, don’t care for all the pots and pans in the paintings of burghers ... Ido like the idea that they - the pots and pans I mean - are always in relation to man.”!7 Significantly, the legacy of Renaissance art for ordering nature effectively was equated by de Kooning with the desire to quantify nature as well as society - a view that directly recalls the critique of instrumental thinking by Adorno and Horkheimer (see “The Age of Automation . . .” in Chapter 5). These Frankfurt School thinkers observed in 1944 that contemporary “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence” (i.e., by quantifying all qualities and by equating unequal things),!8 and de Kooning ended his essay of 1950 with a delightful anecdote that ridiculed the pervasive quantification of nature and humanity.

There was the village idiot. His name was Plank and he measures everything. He measured roads, toads, and his own feet; fences, his nose and windows, trees,

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saws, and caterpillars. Everything was there already to be measured by him... . He had no nostalgia, neither a memory nor a sense of time. All that he noticed

about himself was that his length changed.!9

Ina slightly later commentary on the “machine aesthetic” of the avant-garde before the Second World War, de Kooning both admired and rejected this type of art, in addi-

tion to the scientism it presupposed. As he explained the historical link between scientism and the machine aesthetic, de Kooning also stated that the ultimate and un-

wanted results of this Weltanschauung based on a reification of science were twofold: (1) military conflict and (2) “purely” formalist art. He declared:

These latter-day artists were bothered by their apparent uselessness . . . these es-

theticians proposed that people up to now understood painting in terms of their

own private misery. Their own sentiments of form instead was one of comfort.

The beauty of comfort. . . . To compose with curves like that and angles, and make works of art with them could only make people happy, they maintained, for the only association was one of comfort. That millions of people have died in war since then, because of the idea of comfort, is something else.

This pure form of comfort became the comfort of “pure form.” The ‘nothing’ part in a painting until then .. . they generalized with their book-keeping minds,

into circles and squares. . . . But this idea made them go backward in spite of the fact that they wanted to go forward. That ‘something’ which was not measurable,

they lost by trying to make it measurable. . . . The sentiments of the Futurists were simpler. . . . Either a man was a machine or else a sacrifice to make machines with.20

From here de Kooning went on to attack sharply the fetishism of science by postwar U.S. society. In so doing, he caustically referred to the new technocratic romance with

atomic weaponry:

The argument often used that science is really abstract and that painting could

be like music . . . is utterly ridiculous. That space of science - the space of the physicists - I am truly bored with now. .. . There seems to be no end to the misery of the scientists’ space. .. .

‘Today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the

concept of painting once and for all. The eyes that actually saw the light melted out of sheer ecstasy. For one instant, everybody was the same color. .. . 21

In his critique of the prevailing values responsible for instrumental thought, scien-

tism, and formalism, Willem de Kooning underscored the dissident position of him-

self and of other Abstract Expressionists. In his defense of this group, de Kooning

presented it as avant-garde in the deepest sense, namely as a movement not simply on

behalf of a new style for art, but rather one also in favor of a new concept of life through art.22 Robert Motherwell certainly corroborated such a view when he wrote in 1951: “I believe that the New York School, like Surrealism, is less an aesthetic style... than a state of mind. ... Anda mode of life.” In a discussion of Dada, also in 1951, Motherwell stated: “The problem now, as then, is to change the epoch, not to pass through it uninvolved. 23

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EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM

As Peter Birger has observed of the avant-garde, what was negated by an avant-

garde group was not an earlier form of art so much as “Art” institutionally disconnected from life, from praxis.24 Nonetheless,

for the avant-garde

the demand

for “rele-

vance” was not raised at the level of the content of individual works. Instead, Birger stated, the avant-garde directed itself through its pictorial logic and its critique of the ascendant belief in the “organic artwork” to the way art critically functions by means of negation in society.25 De Kooning attested to this avant-garde strategy when he rejected formalism by observing, “I never was interested in how to make a good painting.”2¢ (This did not keep Greenberg from erroneously declaring of the Abstract Expressionists in his most famous essay about them: “These American painters did not set out to be advanced. They set out to paint good pictures.”)27 De Kooning then countered Greenberg’s contention in 1947 that Matisse’s greatness resulted largely from an escapist desire to produce art that functioned as an armchair for the tired businessman. As John O'Brian.

has noted, this view was intended as Greenberg’s advice to the New York School at

a time when these artists were much involved with “extra-aesthetic concerns.”28 To

the contrary, de Kooning wrote as follows:

Art never seems to me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melo-

drama of society. . . . Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they

are sitting on. ... They do not want to “sit in style.” Rather they have found that

painting . . . is a way of living today, a style of living. That is where the form of it lies. Those artists do not want to conform.?9

In 1963 de Kooning recapitulated these ideas, if at times elliptically, when he again opposed Greenberg's variety of formalism, while also expressing a sense of alienation

from many of the hegemonic values of the postwar United States. About being an artist in the United States, de Kooning remarked: “America never really cared much for

people who do those things.” He then concluded, at a time when he was supporting

Dissent and becoming a public opponent of the Vietnam War, “it is a certain burden, this American-ness. . . . I feel much more in common with artists in London or Paris.” Similarly, in looking back on his work from the 1950s, de Kooning expressed surprise at the depth of alienation conveyed by his “Women” series, which in order to be dis-

cussed properly needs to be compared and contrasted with Elaine de Kooning’s series

of “Portraits of Faceless Men” that was begun in 1949 (see Fig. 36). About his “Wom-

en” paintings, Willem de Kooning said: “I look at them now and they seem vocifer-

ous and ferocious.”30

None of the Abstract Expressionists, however, was more systematic in his or her

critique of postwar culture than was Barnett Newman (Figs. 39, 40). Contrary to what many have maintained, Newman’s principled position on behalf of being engagé did not collapse into an escapist variant of “art for art’s sake.”31 From the early 1930s until his death in 1970, Newman

developed an increasingly nuanced defense of anar-

chist ideals that he consistently, indeed insistently, related to his own

artwork.

Although he was somewhat unusual among the Abstract Expressionists in two respects — he did not work with the WPA Federal Art Project and he was never a fellow

traveler of the Communist Party - Barnett Newman was, like several of the rest, a

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CRITIQUE

longtime anarchist (Gottlieb, Motherwell, and Still evidently arrived at this position

somewhat later). As early as 1933, Newman ran for mayor of New York City as an an-

archist. Among his proposals were several that related to Paul Goodman’s ideas on

communitas in the modern urban environment:

the city or community ownership of banks, business, and housing; a system of municipal galleries and orchestra halls providing free services to the public;

the closing of streets to private automobiles so as to reinvigorate public space for

pedestrians as well as cafés; and a whimsical call for playgrounds for adults.32

All of these views were clearly predicated on the anarchist contention — from Bakunin and Tolstoy through Kropotkin to Emma Goldman and Paul Goodman - that the decentralized commune (as in pre-Revolutionary Russia with the peasant communes known as MIR) had already demonstrated the superiority of communal forms of social development over those that were either dominated by private property (as in the United States) or directed by a centralized national state (as in the USSR).33

From the mid-1940s through the late 1960s, Newman published a series of arti-

cles on the history of art in which he used anarchist terminology. Only a few years be-

fore cold-war liberals were celebrating the “American century” in technologist terms and McCarthyists were denouncing modernist art as subversive of the American Way, Newman wrote in 1942 that art glorifying U.S. life, particularly in regionalist guise, resembled “fascist ideology” by using “intensified nationalism, false patriotism, the ap-

peal to race, the re-emphasis on the home and homey sentiments.” Similarly, in 1946, when both liberals and conservatives were euphoric about the new superpower status of the United States, Barnett Newman was of a different mind. Instead, he noted that

they were “living in times of the greatest terror the world has known.”34

Figure 39. Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950/1, oil on canvas (7° 11” x 17°9”’), Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Gift of Ben Heller.

THE ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM -

—

2

*,

zs

7s

—_

*

Figure 40. Barnett Newman, The Broken Obelisk, 1967, corten steel (25° 1”). The Rothko Chapel Plaza, The DeMenil Foundation, Houston, Texas.

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In his moving 1948 memorial tribute to Arshile Gorky, for example, Newman critiqued instrumentalism and technocracy, while also voicing his own alienation from the contemporary United States: Only by first ridding itself of this obsession for utility, this human desire for a set

of hierarchies of usefulness, can a true morality be postulated. The moral act is the aesthetic one. ... No man was more fanatically and passionately devoted to the life of the artist than Arshile Gorky. .

. Here in America, where the violence

of human living is at its highest daily pitch, where there never is, as in Europe,

any respite or “good living” between holocausts, Gorky’s tragedy was more con-

spicuous. . .. The world here makes no bargain of expediency with him [the artist] in the name of culture.35

Against this postwar historical backdrop in 1947, Newman published an essay,

“The Ideographic Picture,” for an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery of recent work by Hans Hofmann, Boris Margo, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Theodoros

Stamos,

and Clyfford Still. In it he remarked

that it was time “to make

clear the community of intention” motivating this group of artists “who are not ab-

stract painters although working in what is known as the abstract style.” True to his own anarchist concept of human nature, and its belief in the superiority of utterly unordered “spontaneity” (with all that this implies about the unmediated “natural goodness” of people, as opposed to the Marxist view that humanity only has a nat-

ural potential for goodness), Newman claimed that “spontaneous and emerging from

several points” there had arisen “a new force in American painting that is the mod-

ern counterpart of the primitive art impulse.”36 As did all the other Abstract Expressionists on various occasions, Newman specifically underlined three aspects of this art, all of which contradicted precepts of Greenbergian formalist criticism: 1. that their aim was not “to renounce the living world for the meaningless mate2. 3.

rialism of design”;

that they were not concerned with “pure art” along with “its overload of pseu-

do-scientific truths”; and

that this art was not about pleasing form, but rather about “the hard, black

chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy.”37

Later in 1947, Newman

published an eloquent essay, entitled “The First Man Was

an Artist,” in which he penned the most lengthy rejoinder to the ideology of scientism by any Abstract Expressionist. Significantly, this critique of scientism was written in the name of modern science, as well as on behalf of human progress, so that it

would be erroneous to argue that Newman was simply promoting a species of irrationalism.

In fact, as Schapiro noted of him in his memorial address of 1970 (cited in the Intro-

duction), Newman was trained as a scientist.38 Indeed, it was probably Newman’s ed-

ucation as a botanist and ornithologist, as much as his anarchist politics, that led him to admire Peter Kropotkin so intensely. (As Stephen Jay Gould has only recently noted, Kropotkin’s contribution to the discipline of biology remains considerable, if perhaps less well-known than his importance to anarchist thought.)39

Accordingly, Newman was pointing out, as had Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944,

that science - for all its immensely positive contribution to the welfare of humanity

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EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM

- was also currently being reified in such a way as to aid the exploitation of humanity and the spoilage of the environment. Similarly, Newman was not so much rejecting reason as arguing for its genuine redefinition in terms that went beyond mere i

strumentality. Such a broadened sense of rationality would thus encompass human self-realization through disaliented labor and aesthetic acts: Shall we artists quarrel with those who need to wait for the weights of scientific

proof to believe in poetry? . . . In the last sixty years, we have seen mushroom a

vast cloud of “sciences” in the fields of culture. ... Why the invasion? . . . Has science, in its attempt to dominate all realms of thought, been driven willy nilly to act politically?. ... To accomplish this expansion, the scientist abandoned the

revolutionary act... .

So intense is the reverence for this symbol, scientific method, that it has be-

come the new theology . . . it has overwhelmed the original ecstasy of scientific quest, scientific inquiry . . . [which] has validity because the question is basic for the attainment of descriptive knowledge and permits a proper integration be-

tween its quest, the question what constantly maintained, and its tool, mathe-

matics or logic, for the discovery of its answer.40

From this thought-provoking discussion of the difference between legitimate scien-

tific inquiry and the illegitimate reification of science (which so clearly relates both to Herbert Marcuse’s explication of how “one-dimensional thought” had gained ascen-

dancy in the West and to Goodman’s explanation of the loss of community), Newman went on to defend the impulse toward aesthetic development as an elemental realization of human nature that had become unjustly suppressed in corporate capitalism. Just as the supposedly “ideal” order and rules of Classical art came to signify alienation through scientism, so Newman’s deep sympathy for “ethnic art” unquestionably disclosed yet again the avant-garde character of Abstract Expressionism. As Poggioli has noted, avant-garde alienation insistently features the call for artiving at some “clean cultural slate” whereby human history can be placed on a new

foundation for future development that more justly accommodates humanity’s in-

tellectual potential as well as its material needs.4! Postwar U.S. society, then, was cul-

pable because it was believed to deny structurally the aesthetic realization intrinsic

to disalienated human development. Thus, art had little place in the United States, because it could never be reduceable to the instrumental uses or practical concerns

then overdetermining all values. To this point, Newman added the following: [T]he job of the artist is not to discover truth, but to fashion it.

. What was the

first man? .. . undoubtedly he was an artist . . . the aesthetic act always precedes

the social one . . . the necessity for dream is stronger than any utilitarian need. ...

The human in language is literature, not communication. . . . Even the animal makes a futile attempt at poetry. . . . His [humanity's] behavior had its origin in his artistic nature.

In our inability to live the life of a creator can be found the meaning of the fall

of man. It was a

fall from the good, rather than the abundant life. And it is pre-

cisely here that the artist today is striving for a closer approach to the truth concerning original man. . .. What is the explanation of the seemingly insane drive of man to be painter and poet if it is not an act of defiance against man’s fall and

an assertion that he return to the Adam of the Garden of Eden?42

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In this passage as elsewhere, Newman gave a distinctly anarchist account of art histo-

ty. For him, the artistic process was both independent of social labor and inherent to human

nature. (Conversely, for Marx aesthetic acts were interdependent with labor

and sociality, as well as grounded in human potentiality.)43 Precisely because Newman placed art in a dichotomous relation with social developments, he sometimes

transvalued alienation from society into an alienation from sociality as such - which is why some of his pronouncements were clearly existentialist in tone. This conflation of discontent at a certain moment in history with the rejection of history in any progressive sense is a common failing of much anarchist thought. This failing in turn leads to an apocalyptic view of change rather than to a concept for the structural transformation of the existing order. It is this total opposition of anarchists to the established system that surfaced in Newman’s denunciation of ex-

isting politics per se - a position that some art historians have erroneously interpreted as an “apolitical” attitude to the postwar developments.*4

Nowhere were Newman’s anarchist views of completely “spontaneous” art, in addition to his apocalyptic belief in the end of history, more clearly present than in his famous text of 1948, “The Sublime Is Now.” Classical beauty, because of its undue de-

mand for rational precision along with its excessive dependence ona set of rules first codified in Greece, was seen as a barrier to humanity’s “natural desire in the arts” for self-realization. Hegel and Kant, whom

Newman

said discussed the sublime less suc-

cessfully than did Edmund Burke, subordinated artistic production to Classical beauty, “thus creating a range of hierarchies in a set of relationships to reality that is com-

pletely formal.”45 In rejecting the “fetish of quality” resulting from the restriction of art making to supposedly “perfect form,” Newman asserted: “The impulse of modern art was the desire to destroy beauty.” Yet all earlier European avant-garde movements, according to Newman, had failed to achieve a definitive rupture with this classical reification of form because the Cubists, Dadaists, and all the others were caught in “the grip of the rhetoric of exaltation.” As such, they accomplished only a “transfer of values instead

of creating a new vision.”46 Implicit in Newman’s critique, however, is the implausible belief in a “natural” form of aesthetic communication utterly unmediated by the “artificiality” of rhetoric. What radically distinguished the Abstract Expressionists’ concern with the sublime, Newman

claimed, was that for them Classical beauty was not an issue either to

affirm or to negate. Instead of becoming another chapter within art history, these new artists supposedly left the realm of art history by “reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted” (see Fig. 39) in opposition to “the tawdry, the picayune, the brutish.” In this way, the painters of the sublime emptied painting of formal problems and technica] issues, because “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 nos-

talgic glasses of history.”47 In 1962, Newman further affirmed the anarchist intent of his art in conjunction with his political ideals. He spoke of his own painting as being “spontaneous” and

“anti-anecdotal.” The implications of these traits for his painting were its presumed

negation of conventional ways of seeing, and its “denial of dogmatic principles, its re-

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EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM

pudiation of all dogmatic life,” its contestation of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.48 Perhaps nowhere else in his written oeuvre, though, did Barnett Newman so extensively interrelate his political views, social ideals, and artistic concern’s than in

his exemplary Foreword to the 1968 edition of Peter Kropotkin’s autobiography, Mem-

oirs of a Revolutionist.49

Newman left no doubt that during the 1930s~1960s, the anarchist ideals and political activism of Kropotkin were of central importance to his own life and art, which is an avowal that has been confirmed independently by Meyer Schapiro and Thomas

B. Hess, as well as by his widow Annalee Newman.‘° Newman began this Foreword by complimenting the book’s reissuance “at this moment of revolutionary ferment,” and he praised it at the expense of all other state socialist alternatives on the left, which he considered “dogmatic.” (Among the major proponents of dogmatism, according to

Newman, were Marx, Mao, and Marcuse along with Che Guevara).5! In declaring that it was no longer enough to voice opposition to the establishment, Newman stressed what he deemed the signal importance of Kropotkin’s ideas for authentic revolutionary change. According to Newman, Kropotkin’s indispensability came especially from his commitment to “the autonomy of the Individual” and from his resolute opposi-

tion to “all forms of domination.”52 This meant the following:

For him [Kropotkin] only spontaneous, self-organized communes, now fashionably known as participatory democracy, based on mutual aid and respect for each person’s individuality and person, are practical and realistic. . .. He saw that all dogmatic systems no matter how radical, are as much a tyranny as the State and he took a stand against all Establishments. . . . Kropotkin was deeply concerned with the dehumanization which was happening as a result of the industrial revolution and the division of labor. His ideas on the problems of integrating rural and urban life, his opposition to the division of labor, make him the precursor of all those who have theorized on the subject . . . and would make possible the leisure for a creative life.53 In adding his own views to those of Kropotkin, Newman

made some noteworthy

points. He approved of ideas in the 1960s among student radicals, for whom “the pursuit of science” had become transformed into a “trap set by the Establishment to submerge them in the technocracy that can only end in total war.” Newman related how

in the 1940s he had felt “destroyed by established institutions.” He acutely noted that “only those people practice destruction and betrayal who hunger to accept completely the values of the Establishment.” In positing that “It’s the Establishment that makes people predatory, “ Newman further declared, “only those are free who are free

from the values of the Establishment. And that’s what Anarchism is all about.”54

Concerning the relation of his anarchist ideas to his production of art, Newman summed it up well by outlining the views of his adversaries:

they cannot understand how anybody is able to make anything, particularly a work of art, spontaneously or directly - a prima. The idea that someone can make

anything without planning, without making sketches upon sketches from which

one renders a finished product, is incomprehensible to them. By the same token, the same intellectuals cannot understand the Anarchist idea of social spontane-

ity or the direct formation of social communities.55

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Two concepts in particular are notable in this passage, especially insofar as they intersect with the views of other Abstract Expressionists. First, this declaration by Newman

reaffirmed the artistic tendency within anarchist thought represented (and at odds with the competing line put forth by Proudhon) that the concerned not with a particular style of message-oriented art but with a of artistic production that was “disalienated.” Second, this new means art in turn drew on a concept of human nature that involved both the man “spontaneity” unregulated by repressive social institutions and the

by Kropotkin anarchist was specific mode of producing belief in a huview (defend-

ed eloquently by Kropotkin in his famous biological concept of mutualism) that a

“natural” consequence of allowing autonomous individualism would not be selfishness.56 Rather, what would “naturally” emerge is the mutual creation of interdependent and egalitarian communities capable of accommodating individual spontaneity. In all of these respects, Newman’s theory of art was in the tradition of nineteenth-

century artists such as Pissarro, Seurat, and Signac, who were all deeply influenced by Kropotkin’s particular definition of artistic autonomy. Here it is also important to note that Robert Motherwell actually translated into English one of Signac’s books, D’Eugene Delacroix au Neo-Impressionisme.S Signac stated the following about anarchist artists in a lecture from 1902 that was deeply grounded in Kropotkin’s views: The anarchist painter is not one who will show anarchist paintings, but one who without regard for lucre, without desire for reward, will struggle with all his individuality, with personal effort, against bourgeois and official conventions. . . . The subject is nothing, or at least only one part of the work of art ... when the eye is educated, the people will see something other than the subject in pictures. When the society we dream of exists, the workers freed from the exploiters who

brutalize them will have time to think and to learn. They will appreciate the different qualities of the work of art.S8

DILEMMAS

OF

ANARCHISM

Abstract Expressionism at its best signifies not only the social wholeness and improvisation embodied in artisanal traditions but also an implicit affirmation of the anarchist belief in “natural” or utterly unmediated spontaneity. To the extent that it is based on a faith in socially unmediated, or “direct,” art, Abstract Expressionism raises questions about the degree to which this art, for all its reputed “elitism,” is in fact an art based on certain populist assumptions. As Motherwell said of this art in

1948, “it became, though, ‘understood’ only by a minority, a people's art.”59 However, while the formal sophistication of Abstract Expressionism along with its egalitarian intent clearly exempt this art from the charge of populism, the theoretical views on which it was based cannot escape this criticism. Indeed, it was precisely

the populist assumptions intrinsic to the theories of the Abstract Expressionists that

ultimately led to a certain naiveté about the way society at large would “naturally” interpret these hardly naive artworks. One of the avenues for grappling with the misguided theoretical presuppositions of the sublime wing of Abstract Expressionism comes from an unlikely source. In crit-

THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM icizing the historical sin of Tolstoyism (a populist position with anarchist aspects that

obviously relates to Kropotkin), Lenin provided a point of departure for addressing certain theoretical shortcomings of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly insofar as they are linked to anarchist traditions. (To agree with Lenin’s criticisms here does not

mean that one has to be a Leninist with little or no appreciation for the merits of anarchism.) It is worth recalling Art and Language’s portraits from the 1980s of “Lenin in the style of Jackson Pollock.” As Charles Harrison has noted, they addressed the “aesthetic” not as an intentionally attainable quantity, “but rather as an accidental and

possibly unavoidable residue.”©° Moreover, it is of interest here to recall that on at

least one occasion in the 1960s, Robert Motherwell explicitly cited and endorsed one of this Bolshevik’s favorite maxims: “‘one can never be as radical as reality.’ — Lenin.”61 Lenin demonstrated, for example, how Leo Tolstoy’s idealization of the oppressed popular classes ultimately led from a commiseration with their history to an ahistotical adulation of them as they were. By considering the peasants “naturally” superior to their oppressive landlords, Tolstoy came to praise the educational deprivations responsible for their “spontaneous” simplicity. Thus, he failed to recognize that some of these “natural” virtues were partially a result of the way the social order denied the intellectual potential of the peasantry to be otherwise.62 A notorious consequence of this populist and anarchist admiration, which turned Russian peasants into something like noble savages, was Tolstoy's book What Is Art? In this study, Tolstoy dismissed almost the entire history of the fine arts in the West, from Michelangelo through Beethoven (Jean-Francois Millet’s paintings of peasants are among the few artworks exempted), as “naturally” incomprehensible to the majority of people, who were peasants. In so concluding, Tolstoy made no allowance for the potential of the majority to learn far more than present circumstances allowed. Thus, he artificially limited the discussion of humanity’s intellectual potential to what seemed the “natural” abilities of the peasantry within an educationally deprived and demeaning system. Furthermore, Tolstoy’s political desire to change these exploitative circumstances became less pronounced and his commitment to pacifism more so, as he decided against altering people whom he loved as they were.63 Atelated problem with populism came to haunt the Color-Field or sublime wing of Abstract Expressionism. By endorsing the anarchist view that people are naturally good, and hence most creative when they act as “spontaneous” and heroic “individuals,” Newman, Rothko, and Still sometimes transformed an alienation from modern society into an alienation from sociality as such. Since people when freed from soci-

ety’s prejudices could “naturally” understand sublime art, yet in general were having difficulties, it was society (indeed, all societies) that was seen to be standing in the way

of this presumed elemental understanding. The anarchist answer was thus to call for the immediate end of all states so as to eliminate these occlusions to “natural” development. This overly hasty and somewhat ahistorical view is, for example, intrinsic to Newman's previously cited claim that an Abstract Expressionist painting “can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”6+ What further followed from the way that they confused alienation from a certain historical situation with a messianic alienation from the advance of history in any form was a paradoxical need for alienation per se. In this way, the demand for free-

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EXPRESSIONISM AS CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

dom from alienation became inverted into a feeling of freedom through alienation®S - hence, the embrace by Motherwell and several others of existentialism’s ahistorical

concept of alienation. Consequently, the call of these artists for profound change was at least partially undermined by the nature of the change that they proposed - one that went from seeming unlikely to being undesired.

Unlike Tolstoy, Newman and the Color-Field painters did not of course dismiss the Western fine arts as “incomprehensible” to the populace. Nonetheless, very much like Tolstoy, the Abstract Expressionists became enamored with their own alienation

to the point of embracing the conditions that necessitated “sublime” art. This understandable but self-contradictory view was eloquently conveyed by Mark Rothko when in 1947 he wrote: “The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artist to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation.”6© Nowhere does this paradoxical state of affairs (resulting from the perceived impasse between “naturally” good people and an “inherently” perverting society) find

more extreme expression than in the ultra-anarchist and politically ambidextrous

judgments of Clyfford Still. These pronouncements are at one and the same time im-

minently apocalyptic and remotely possible, at war with the present and disbelieving in the future. The primary reason for Still’s increasingly bitter as well as isolating assessments was less personal misanthropy than the anarchist ideal of absolutely autonomous and “naturally” free behavior - behavior that he found ever more difficult to achieve as the years went by. It should perhaps be noted here that this viewpoint is opposed both to the capitalist faith in “natural” selfishness and to the Marxist belief in human potentiality capable of realization in various directions, depending on the social structure encountered. For Marxists, then, further appreciation of the merits of Abstract Expressionism

would be based on progress through history - on a dynamic interplay between individual agency and structural determinants (neither of which enjoys dominance) - not on Still's implausible and neo-Nietzschian idea of “transcending” history altogether. There are few if any parallels within Western art for the degree of alienation expressed by Clyfford Still both from the contemporary United States and from Western history in general. Still’s alienation was of such intensity that it permitted no solution, thus becoming what Bertolt Brecht once labeled an alienation from which one

does not return, Simultaneously, Still spoke of an inescapably totalitarian system in

the United States and also implied that somehow a

few good people could escape its

institutional reach, not to overturn the system but to avoid its otherwise unchecked

authority. Postwar society, then, was deemed without hope, except for a few individuals who could flourish on the margins of society by means of “natural” virtues. It was in the bleakest terms that Still outlined the coordinates of contemporary life: In the few directions we were able to look during the 1920s, whether to past cultures or the scientific, aesthetic, and social myths of our own, it was amply evident that in them lay few answers valid for insight or imagination. . . . Selfappointed spokesmen ...dumped upon us the combined and sterile conclusions of Western European decadence.

For nearly a quarter of a century we stumbled

and groped through the nightmare of its labyrinthine evasions. . .. No one was

permitted to escape its fatalistic rituals — yet I, for one, refused to accept its ultima-

THE ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM

tums. . .. The omnivorousness of the totalitarian mind, however, demands a rig-

or of purpose and subtlety of insight from anyone who would escape incorpora-

tion . . . semantically and ethically the corruption is complete.”

According to Still, the totalitarian system of the postwar United States was maintained by a network of institutions, such as the dominant concept of art upheld by museums as well as other “authoritarian devices for social control.” This system was also sustained by pervasive ideological values, such as, “shouting about individualism,” or formalist aesthetics with its “superficial value of material,” or the pseudoscientific “morbidity of ‘the objective position.’”68 A consequence of these institutions and ideologies was the reactionary reception of art that they fostered. This situation was summarized by Still in terms at once strongly antihierarchical and quite oracular: “behind these reactions is a body of history matured into dogma, authority, tradition. The totalitarian hegemony of this tradition I despise, its presumptions I reject. Its security is an illusion.”69 From here, Still went on to despair of how “spontaneous” or unmediated reactions to his paintings would never be common, even as he maintained that such reactions were nonetheless possible. Thus, in the name of pristine and natural values which he himself claimed had no hope of ascendancy in U.S. society, Still denounced the ideology of narcissistic individualism as a corollary of totalitarism. Nonetheless, Still observed that to “achieve a purpose beyond vanity, ambition, and remembrance” artists must do it alone and in solitude.”° The contradictory relationship of individual to society, as described by Still, was sometimes one of almost complete predetermination by hegemonic values and other times one of sublime autonomy in the face of impossible odds. The very impossibility of one set of circumstances thus capsized into its converse, which in turn became all the more exalted because of its own presumedly immitigable state. Caught in an impossible bind,the sublime artist simultaneously refused to propagandize for any position that advanced hierarchical and artificial values and yet had his or her position overwhelmed by these very same conventional, even totalitarian

values because the public for the art was enmeshed in the system. Here, as elsewhere, Still’s reliance on an anarchist position not unlike that of Georges Sorel — with all that this implies about the belief in dichotomous relationships and monolithic structures - theans that he (along with the other painters of the sublime) overlooked both in-

ternal contradictions within progressive art that allow for dialogical interchange and intrinsic fissures within reactionary societies that always present progressive possibil-

ities. The result is the untenable belief in an art without faults versus a society without virtues — a society that cannot be changed, only renounced. (It is hardly by chance

that Still used the word “Absolute” to characterize his paintings.) As such, Still’s position recalls less Kropotkin’s transformation of society than Bakunin’s call for its annihilation, with complete destruction being the highest form of creation.

The impossibly paradoxical position in which Still located his art is clear enough when one examines his brief against museums, technology, science, and viewer reception. In neo-Bakunist terms, Still proclaimed a faith in absolute autonomy that was extremist even by the standards of earlier anarchists, such as Emma Goldman:

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EXPRESSIONISM

AS

CULTURAL

CRITIQUE

By 1941, space and the figure in my canvases had been resolved into a total psy-

chic entity. ... My feeling of freedom was now absolute and infinitely exhilarat-

ing. . . . 'm not interested in illustrating my time. . . . Our age - it is of science -

of mechanism - of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage. The sublime? A paramount consideration in my studies and work from my ear-

liest student days. In essence it is most elusive of capture or definition. . . . The

values involved, however, permit no peace, and mutual resentment is deep when

it is discovered that salvation cannot be bought. Demands for communication are both presumptuous and irrelevant. The observer usually will see what his fears and hopes and learning teach him to see. But if he can escape these demands that hold up a mirror to himself, then perhaps

some of the implications of the work may be felt. . . . It is the price one has to pay for clarity when one’s means are honored only as an instrument of seduction or assault.7!

Not only did Still claim that the very clarity of his paintings would render them

unclear to the dogmatic, but also that this incomprehension on the part of the dogmatic would unfortunately aid the appropriation of his paintings. In addition, Still admitted of his works that their “power for life” was hardly capable of overturning artworld institutions, from existing museums to established criticism.?2 When writing about the appearance of his own paintings in an important exhibition at a leading

museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Still again resorted to a rigid binary classification to describe the relationship between his work and the museum:

The paradox manifest by the appearance of this work in an institution whose meaning and function must point in a direction opposite to that implied in the paintings - and my own life — was accepted. I believe it will not be resolved, but instead will be sharpened and clarified.73 Similarly, Still was resigned to a dissident, even permanently guerillalike, status within society, as opposed to any role in the transformation of society, with this position emerging clearly enough in his dismissive attitude toward all contemporary art criticism. Instead of engaging in a debate about what was wrong and also right about the mainstream interpretation of his works (as did Newman and Motherwell in their critiques of “Anglo-American” criticism from Fry through Greenberg),”4 Still at-

tempted rather implausibly to sequester his artworks from a public discourse that he deemed

unrelievedly totalitarian in nature. At one and the same time, his “subver-

sive” paintings were supposed to be on behalf of all humanity, yet they needed to be

guarded from most encounters with society while being discussed hardly at all in print.

A ideals (This about

1948 letter to Betty Parson from Still demonstrated well the self-contradictory following from an ultra-anarchist faith in the absolute autonomy of engagé art view is opposed to the historically achieved relative autonomy of modern art. which Adorno wrote.) Still instructed as follows:

Please - and this is important, show them [my paintings] only to those who have some insight into the values involved, and allow no one to write about them.

THE ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM

NO ONE. ... Men like Soby, Greenberg, Barr, etc . . . are to be categorically reject-

ed. And I no longer want them shown to the public at large, either singly or in

a group.75

Far from being either an endorsement of cold-war liberalism or an embodiment

of the “vital center,” Still’s position here — like that of all the other Abstract Expressionists, which Still represented in an extreme form - is indicative both of an opposition to postwar Western society and of a desire for an ideological position on the far margins of it. As such, the “absolutely autonomous” position of Still and the other members of the Color-Field wing reminds us of what historian E. J. Hobsbawm has

observed about the inception of anarchism during the period after the revolutions of 1848. With its populist hatred of all governments as well as hierarchies, along with its ideal of “naturally” autonomous communes, anarchism often represented simultaneously a revolt of the preindustrial past against the present and a distinctive manifestation of the present in its unwitting convergence with laissez-faire individualism.7® In fact, an excellent critique of both Still’s ultra-anarchist antagonism and New-

man’s neo-Kropotkin nostalgia for the peasant past has been provided within the anarchist tradition by Noam Chomsky, a “libertarian socialist” who is a proponent of the anarchist tradition on behalf of decentralized socialism.?”7 Chomsky has outlined what are the two dominant strains in modern anarchist thought: 1, the tradition associated with Kropotkin that has an “inherently pre-industrialist vision” of the applicability of libertarian socialist ideas, and 2. another tradition, that of, “anarcho-syndicalism which simply regarded anarchist ideas as the proper mode of organization for a highly complex advanced indus-

trial society.”78

This latter strain has often merged, or at least intersected, with the Luxemburgian tra-

dition within Marxism that led to the Worker’s Council socialism of Anton Pannakoek, Karl Korsch, and Paul Mattick (to which Meyer Schapiro was long sympathetic).79

Chomsky argued that it was the latter of these two positions that was most plausible, since he did not believe that anarchist concepts necessarily must “belong to the pre-industrial phase of human society.” This is so because, he contends, “industrialization and the advance of technology raise possibilities for self-management over a broad scale that simply didn’t exist in an earlier period.” Such a libertarian socialist approach would, Chomsky maintains, not only be one in which autogestion, or work-

place democracy, is the rule. Such a radically democratic and decentralized society would also be one in which workers are in a position to make decisions “concerning the structure of the economy, concerning social institutions, concerning planning regionally and beyond.”8° Yet because nineteenth-century anarchist leaders such as Bakunin (or twentiethcentury artists like Still) considered virtually any political action within the estab-

lished state to be a reactionary endorsement of that state, the praxis of anarchists has frequently vacillated between apocalyptic bomb throwing aimed at exploding the status quo and the tactic of “militant” abstentionism designed to discredit the existing order (neither of which have resulted in significant successes).8! It is with recourse to

this all-or-nothing framework for praxis of some anarchist thought that we must dis-

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ABSTRACT

EXPRESSIONISM

AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE

cuss Barnett Newman’s 1943 call for artists to reject “an outmoded politics” - a call that some scholars have misinterpreted as a summons to apoliticism.82 As for the “absolute” opposition and unceasingly embittered resolve of anarchists

like Still, with their apocalyptic statements about “no choices,” Chomsky has made some highly germaine criticisms from within a more recent anarchist tradition. His critique in 1968 went as follows:

Anger, outrage, confessions of overwhelming guilt may be good therapy; they can also become a barrier to effective action. . . . No less insidious is the cry for “revolution,” at a time when even the germs of new institutions do not exist, let alone

the moral and political consciousness that could lead to a basic modification of social life. If there will be a “revolution” in America today, it will no doubt be a move towards some variety of fascism.

‘We must guard against the kind of revolutionary rhetoric that would have had

Karl Marx burn down the British Museum because it was merely part of a repres-

sive society. It would be criminal to overlook the serious flaws and inadequacies in our institutions, or to fail to utilize the substantial degree of freedom that most

of us enjoy, within the framework of these flawed institutions, to modify them or even replace them by a better social order.83

Another theoretical dilemma, as well as concrete historical problem, with much

anarchist thought involves its concept of the relationship between nature and society (as manifested in a privileging of the sublime in nature). In rightly arguing for a more just society, anarchists seek to free people from social bondage yet overlook the possibility of freeing people from enslavement to nature. Just as the Abstract Expressionists, like the anarchists, opposed the capitalist fallacy of dominating nature (which is also a basic precept of the scientism, technologism, and Western modernization that the Abstract Expressionists criticized), so both the anarchists and at least some of the Abstract Expressionists (primarily those of the Color-Field wing) seemed at times to commit the fallacy of accepting the domination of people by nature. A more plausible and progressive extension of the critique of scientism would not

end with an inverted variation of unqualified naturalism but rather lead to a new integration and interdependence of technology with nature, of science with humanity, within a postcapitalist order that presupposed neither scientific instrumentalism nor natural determinism. This new order would be predicated on a dynamic interchange between science and nature, not on the ascendancy of one over the other. Although the Abstract Expressionists moved

in the direction of such a

dialectic, with their cri-

tique of scientism, these artists also succumbed to what Newman and Rothko called a “fear of nature” that acknowledged too broadly nature’s power over any historical

advances by humanity. However, progressive developments by humanity, precisely

because they would neither disrespect nor ignore the forces of nature, would hardly need to be fearful of a nature whose power was afforded due respect (see Fig. 40). Public development along these lines would place such forces on the side of technology and society. A trajectory like this would make technological success in history directly proportional to ecologically sound planning, which implies a pervasive deference for natural cycles as well as the forces of nature.

THE THE

ABSTRACT

DECENTERED

EXPRESSIONIST

SUBJECT

OF

THE

CRITIQUE

NEW

OF TECHNOLOGISM

YORK

SCHOOL

This antinomian view of nature and culture also found an analogue in the dichotomous way that the New York School emphasized either the absolutefe autonomy of the artist (as did all of the Abstract Expressionists) or the complete autonomy of art (as did Reinhardt and Still). In turn, the doctrine of the utterly independent subject reminds us of the elective affinity between many of the Abstract Expressionist and a1 European existentialism, a subject that they often discussed in the 1940s and 1950s. As Dore Ashton, Thomas B. Hess, and others have shown, these discussions of exis-

tentialism were rather common.84

This intellectual link is revealing even if only one member of the New York School, namely, Robert Motherwell, explicitly called himself an “existentialist artist.” (This was around the same time he also identified himself as an anarchist.)85 Just as_ Franz-Joachim Verspohl, for example, has demonstrated the noteworthy connections between the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and the paintings of certain European Abstract Expressionists such as Wols,86 so Renato Poggioli wrote of how post-1945 avantgarde art, with its “anarchistic spirit” and unalloyed individualism, found considerable realization in the moment of existentialism during the postwar period. Poggioli analyzed the situation as follows: It is precisely as a function of this theoretical and practical individualism that the

recent movement of existentialism shows itself to be avant-garde, even though it appeals to ancient and eternal cultural sources . . . existentialism reveals its avant-

garde character precisely through its agonistic and nihilistic tendencies, and by its

own awareness of how difficult it is for individualistic and anarchistic nostalgia to co-exist or survive within the collectivism of modern life [in the West]. . . . This difficulty derives from what we might call the untimeliness of anarchistic ideology within contemporary civilization. . . . In other words, avant-garde communism is the fruit of an eschatological state of mind, simultaneously messianic

and apocalyptic.8”

Poggioli is clearly on the mark here. Unlike classical Marxism, whose historical subject enjoys only relative autonomy, both anarchism and existentialism (each of

which was influenced by Nietzsche) depend upon a subject with absolute autonomy that is independent from any historical context. As such, both anarchism and existentialism — like such members of the New York School as Motherwell, Newman, and Stilt: - posit a singular, unified, and self-determining subject that is in opposition to classical Marxism’s incomplete and interdependent subject. The latter subject is historically decentered ‘because it both constructs history and is constructed by it, as part of a process of dynamic interchange. If for anarchism and existentialism, as well as for Abstract Expressionism, the subject is only ontologically given, for classical Marxism it is necessarily also historically constructed.88 Nonetheless, the connection of the New York School here with existentialism on the issue of the absolutely autonomous subject soon gives way to a competing and quite contradictory concept of the subject for the Abstract Expressionists. This occurs

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the moment we also consider the emphasis by the New York School on the unconscious (particularly as discussed by Freud, who after all coined the term decentered subject in his discussions of it).89 This cleavage, if not irreconciliable difference, between. Abstract Expressionism and existentialism opens up, because to grant a major determining role to the unconscious in the subject’s constitution is to undermine at least

in part the very idea of a unified and centered subject that operates largely by means

of conscious volition, as it was defined by Jean-Paul Sartre. Although theAbstract Ex-

pressionists did to varying degrees accept such a role for the unconscious in artistic

production, Sartre was unwilling to admit such a predetermination of the subj

which he insisted instead was consciously self-determining.9° Indeed, in his 1947 critique of Surrealism, Sartre dismissed that movement as inconsequential because its overriding use of the Freudian unconscious meant “that

subjectivity is dissolved,” that the subject had completely lost its singularity and autonomy.?! Conversely, the Abstract Expressionists (though certainly not Reinhardt) depended upon Surrealism and the unconscious at least in some qualified or diminished sense, so that the absolute autonomy granted the subject by anarchism and existentialism was no longer really plausible for them to the extent that they agreed with the Surrealists. Accordingly, the basic contradiction between Surrealism and existentialism reemerged within Abstract Expressionism per se.

The result is an unackowledged but still pervasive concept of the subject that is deeply contradictory. In sum, this implicit concept of the subject as autonomous on the one hand and as influenced by, if not predetermined by, the unconscious on the other hand is precisely why we must speak of the unresolved and decentered character of Abstract Expressionism as a salient feature of the entire group. Moreover, the decenteredness of the Abstract Expressionist subject, which was at once willful and

unwilled, was inextricably related to the polyvalent and dialogical nature of New York School artworks that served as a field of competing aesthetic and ideological values capable of consolidation and extension in a variety of subsequent directions. All of this alerts us to how the analysis of Abstract Expressionism and the assignment of meaning to the New York School are part of an important and ongoing struggle over whose explanation of the past will prevail. After all, as Walter Benjamin once observed:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe if the enemy wins. ... The

tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergence” in which we

live is not the exception, but the rule.92

APPENDIX

A

Meyer Schapiro, “A Critique: Pevsner on Modernity” (1938) Translated by David Craven

HIS BOOK [PIONEERS OF THE MODERN MOVEMENT] IS A CAREFUL, CONCISE, AND

well-documented overview of the history of modern architecture and the industrial arts, up to the First World War. Pevsner traces the movement, which had its

beginning with and was advanced by William Morris and his followers, who sought to reestablish the artisanal skills and aesthetic quality that had been lost during the decline of the Victorian period and which included the following: an aesthetic opposition to the machine; the change of taste in the ’90s of the last century, from Pevsner’s viewpoint, as much in architecture as in painting; the emergence of Art

Nouveau; the extraordinary absorption of art into technology during the nineteenth century; the new Grundbegriffe [basic principles] of an art that applied new materials and was governed by the ideals of technology; and finally the confluence of three major sources - Morris, Art Nouveau, and the Industrial Arts - into a modern post-First World War style. While extremely sensible in his assessment of specific achievements, Pevsner is nonetheless contradictory and unclear in his general historical characterizations and in his theoretical pronouncements. On the one hand, he to a certain extent explains the decline of art in the mid-Victorian period by means of the devastating consequences of industrialism; yet, on the other hand, when he attributes art’s revitalization in the nineteenth century to one of these developments, he does so by means of a reactive climate of spiritual opinion. This leads him as a result to group together otherwise basically different artists like Cézanne, Van Gogh, Munch, Rousseau, Valloton, and Seurat, as if they were all pursuing a common goal. The authenticity of

their form, their intellectual integrity, their spiritual feelings, their abstractness and their intensity were supposed to have displaced the superficial sensuality and hedonism of Impressionism (Renoir!), which in turn supposedly reflected Victorian matetialism. Similarly, Pevsner explains the movements of Symbolism and Art Nouveau of the same epoch in the nineteenth century, at one point, as coming from the driedup sources of Realism and Impressionism and, at another point, as emanating from the ever strongly emergent projection of cheerfulness that brought fresh air and sunshine into the stuffy Victorian world. But these movements are also still ultimately

characterized by an “enervating atmosphere,” a “muggy dream.”

Van der Velde, a founder of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), in Pevsner’s

account, appears then as an unhealthy aesthete, indifferent to unbearable disorder and to dirty conditions. Although Pevsner recognizes the tendency of William Mor-

Tis’s art to entail a medievalizing Romanticism, he neglects this reactionary side, as he did with Art Nouveau and symbolism, and he describes Morris’s work instead as mere171

172

APPENDIX A ly progressive because it provided a basis for the art of the twentieth century. Pevsner

is forced to concede the substitution of Art Nouveau for Impressionism as involving a thoroughgoing transformation of the artistic impulse. Nonetheless, operating as he does with an erroneous construction that around 1890 there began an entirely new world (or a new Geist), he speaks emphatically of an irreconcilable opposition between the two styles. Since Pevsner does not distinguish between different phases and

tendencies within Impressionism, he does not see the moment or aspect of continuity between it and the art that followed - Monet’s Giverny Garden and decorative paintings, for example, have a very strong connection with Art Nouveau. The relationship between the formal and the technical aspects of architecture remains unsound within this argument, so that one begins to have the impression, on the one hand, that the form is the mere goal-directed solution of a technical problem and, on

the other hand, that the form is the product of fantasy or the expression of a moralizing outlook. The weak point in Pevsner’s method, despite his scholarly care, can be located in his train of thought about the psychology of certain national folk characters and the

nature of the present. No sooner has he used these ideas than he has a pronounced historical change to explain concerning the so-called Volkseele (national soul of a people): After 1900 the Volkseele of the English was transformed, bringing into being new

forms, since the new forms were necessarily democratic and that would have been “to

go against the core of the English character.” Pevsner is, however, repeatedly contra-

dictory in the characterizing a peoples’ folk character: In one passage, he gives the impression that the effusive, unbridled, energetic ornamentation of the architect August Endell embodies the “eternal unity of German art,” yet, in another place, the same is true of the unornamented, stringent form of Gropius, whose “uncompromis-

ing directness” represents the German national character. This same tendency, to displace the analysis of a historical situation through a general psychological category, surfaces in the frequent references to the Zeitgeist and to the “essence” of the century as such. He advances from the representation of our time as a “practical” and “collective” century - somehow, the ordering structure of architecture reflects the Geist of rational planning in society - and forgets thereby the social conflicts and class divisions, all of which are subsumed

under the collectively

based sense of practicality. It is also entirely in the sense of an uncritical concept of mainstream society, with his erroneous judgment of society as “collective,” that Pevsner rejects the subjectivity and individualism of the past three hundred years, and sees in them instead the increasing acceptance of an idealistic and mystical outlook, to the development

of which

modern

art is said to contribute.

Cubism,

though,

is

evaluated as the impersonal, decorative by-product of this collective architecture. “The artist,” writes Pevsner, “who is a representative of our century must be detached,

since he is entering a century quite cool with steel and glass, of which the precision allows less room for subjective expression than any epoch of the past.”

APPENDIX

B

Meyer Schapiro, “An Antiwar Speech at Columbia” (May 18, 1972)

Te or

IS more

NOTHING years

1 CAN

SAY

ABOUT

THE

WAR

THAT

WAS

NOT

EVIDENT

FIVE

ago.

If in 1968 one had doubted the President's promise to end the war, it would have meant that one doubted either his sincerity or his ability as a peacemaker. Who would have believed then that four years later he would still be making the same promise in his bid for reelection? Whether insincere or incompetent, his policy has prolonged and intensified the destruction and misery that our government has caused in Vietnam before him.

Never have we seen so long and so stubbornly maintained an irrational course in war. Already in 1964 and ’65 the military had assured the president and his advisors that the war would be won in a year or two at most. For nearly a decade appointed observers, accredited officials and experts, have reported to Washington the futility of the war. But the President and his most trusted counselors have preferred to follow the recommendations of the military, in spite of the repeated deceptions. Their calculations have proved to be wrong and costly beyond expectation. But rather than admit the mistakes, they would destroy that poor country utterly and risk serious damage to the economy and morale at home and sacrifice thousands of young Americans.

Reading the documents disclosed in the Pentagon Papers we cannot help seeing that the nation has been manipulated by a military caste for whom the highest good is the strength and prestige of the armed forces. The outcome of the My-Lai trials is a clear example of this power and the role of the military. But the generals have had their way because their interest has meshed so smoothly with the interests of the powers in Washington who exploit the crudest popular ideas about communism and inevitably back anticommunist dictators. After having supported without success the French rulers of Vietnam against the natives, our government is prolonging a war to

maintain the oppressive rule of General Thieu. One senses in the peace terms offered by the President his hope that he can still prevent a victory of the Vietcong and North Vietnam, or postpone it a few more years. If a coalition of parties, as proposed by the Vietcong and Vietnam, governed South Vietnam, I do not doubt that within a year or two the communists would prevail. Our government is surely aware of this likelihood. Whatever one thinks of the Vietnamese communists — and I fear that they will be repressive and imprison or kill dissenters as the communists have done wherever they have won power - this eventual victory 173

174

APPENDIX

B

is no justification of our support of the present undemocratic repressive government of South Vietnam and our continued destruction of the country. It is our immense and monstrous capacity for destruction, built up ostensibly for defense of our own land, that makes it so easy for strategists, seated at comfortable distances of thousands of miles, to unloose that force on a small country, without counting the human costs or having to cope with the reactions of those at home who are outraged by those costs. Never in our history have so many been frustrated by so few.

APPENDIX

C

Interviews with Meyer Schapiro and

Lillian Milgram Schapiro (uly 15, 1992-January 22, 1995)

From July 15, 1992 until October 1, 1995, I interviewed Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Mil-

gram around fifteen times. The longest of these interviews, those at their homes in Raw-

sonville, Vermont, and on West 4th Street in New York City, lasted around six hours. The shortest of these interviews (by telephone) lasted only between twenty minutes and an

hour. In July 1992, I first arranged to meet with the Schapiros for an interview and visit, after having been invited by Richard Wrigley to be the guest editor ofa special issue

of the Oxford Art Journal that would pay homage to Meyer Schapiro in 1994, the year of his 90th birthday.

As a consequence of the trust and friendship that developed between the Schapiros and

myself through these interviews, they allowed me in May 1993 to consult the unpub-

lished “Personal Papers of Meyer Schapiro” at his home in New York. This permission was granted in order to help me to clarify or amend various points about his views on art and politics in the art-historical literature. The highlights transcribed here from this lengthy series of interviews disclose much that was not previously in print about Meyer

Schapiro’s lifelong commitment to social justice in tandem with vanguard art. °

DC: It has been suggested by some people that you were involved behind the scenes in the Erwin Panofsky-Barnett Newman debate that took place in the pages of Art News in 1961. Could you confirm or refute this claim? MS: Yes, I was in Israel in the spring of 1961 when I read Panofsky’s letter in Art News. I sent Barnie one letter, with the understanding that my counsel be kept confidential, in which I pointed out that Panofsky was wrong. I told him to

check a large Latin Dictionary and he would see that both “sublimis” and “sublimus” are acceptable, as demonstrated by their appearance together in Cicero’s

citation of a passage from Accius. Both bits of advice appear in the first letter.

Everything else in those two letters was contributed by Barnie himself.

DC: What type of relationship did you have with the philosopher John Dewey? MS: I was a student of John Dewey, whose classes I very much enjoyed. Dewey asked me to do a critical reading of Art as Experience in manuscript form.? The

book is important, of course, but it is marked by a tendency to treat humanity

and art as extensions of nature, as products of nature, without dealing with how

humanity reshapes and remakes nature, hence also itself. This lack of emphasis on mediating nature, on humanity using craft and art to redefine itself, is a problem of the book. 175

176

APPENDIX C DC: Did you ever meet the Marxist theoretician Karl Korsch when he was in the U.S.? MS: I admire his work very much, but I only met him once or twice. His critique

of the Stalinist misuse of Marx’s thought is of fundamental importance.3 DC: How often did you see Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo when they were in New York City in the early 1930s? MS: We met with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo several times. Diego was very enter-

taining and on one occasion he railed with great emphasis against color reproductions of artworks. LM: Frida was quite taken with Meyer. She gave him gifts a few times, including a pre-Columbian figurine that we still have.

DC: On October 6, 1977, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida gave a presentation at Columbia University, in which he responded to your refutation of Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s 1886 oil painting of shoes that is now in the

Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.‘ This presentation by Derrida would later ap-

pear in a longer version as “Restitutions” in his book La Vérité en peinture (1978).5

Derrida’s paper is surprising because of how the whole tenor of the piece becomes so shrilly ad hominem. Yet on the one occasion when

I had a

chance to talk with Derrida up close, in

April of 1983 when he was speaking at Cornell University, I found him to be quite approachable and unpretentious, even though I was taking issue with some things that he had said in his public talk about Western Marxism.® He welcomed this ex-

change and was much more put off by the sycophantic behavior of some other

people in attendance. This is why I find Derrida’s reaction to you so surprising and

perhaps uncharacteristic. What happened at his presentation in 1977? MS: He was challenged strongly by many people in the audience. I was abrupt with him, because he neither understood

nor cared to understand

the nature of my

criticism, Furthermore, I discovered later that Heidegger changed his interpre-

tation of the Van Gogh painting when he did an annotated commentary of his own essay and that he ended up admitting that he was uncertain about whose

shoes they were. This material will appear in Volume 4 of my selected writings. . One of Derrida’s obvious shortcomings is that he entirely disregards artistic intention in his analysis.”

DC: How well did you know the remarkable school of political economists who edit-

ed the Monthly Review, which was started in 1949? I am thinking especially of Paul

Sweezy and Leo Huberman, the latter of whom praised your editorial help in one of his most well known books. MS: I knew Leo Huberman well in the 1930s, but we lost touch after that. I never

met Sweezy, but I know and respect his writings.? DC: Were you harrassed by the U.S. government during the McCarthy period? MS: The FBI visited us in the 1950s to ask whether or not certain students of mine were

“reds.” They

Sweency was a

visited us again

in the 1960s to ask me whether

“red,” since he had once invited Léger to the U.S.!

or not J. J.

INTERVIEWS

WITH

MEYER

SCHAPIRO

AND

LILLIAN

MILGRAM

SCHAPIRO

LM: When they visited us in the 1950s, they had first asked all of our neighbors

about Meyer’s communist affiliations! DC: What do you think of Serge Guilbaut’s book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art from Paris?10 MS: Not much. I never finished reading it. The title alone is rather silly. All art is “taken” from other art.

DC: What of your relationship with Clement Greenberg over the years? After all, his interpretation of Abstract Expressionism is quite at odds with yours. MS: In the 1940s we were on friendly terms, but I grew increasingly disturbed by Greenberg's dogmatic formalism, by his refusal to grant artistic intention or social context, much less iconography, any place in analysis. .. . The problem is that Greenberg does not know how to characterize a painting. . . . In the early 1960s, I was asked to write a piece about Greenberg, which I did. But the essay was so negative that I decided to withhold publishing it.

- From an interview at the summer home of the Schapiro’s in Rawsonville,

Vermont

(July 15, 1992)

>

DC: What of your political involvements on the left since the 1950s? This is a question that needs to be asked because there are those who erroneously claim that in the early 1940s you came to reject socialism and the writings of Marx.!! MS: What are the political credentials of those who say this? What type of activism have they engaged in? I am still a member of the steering committee of the Democratic Socialists of America and I am still on the editorial board of Dissent, a socialist magazine. I was a founding editor of the Marxist Quarterly and I continue to recommend that people read Marx as a way of discovering conceptual tools for

grappling with an analysis of art and society. I am, like Irving Howe, against all slogans and labeling. Our views of socialism often overlap.!2 DC: Were you active in the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s? MS: Yes, I was always opposed to the war. In 1968 I spoke at Columbia’s largest anti-

war rally, along with a professor in physics.!3 1 worked in the antiwar movement and the democratic socialist movement with Michael Harrington. -

From a telephone

interview (August 20, 1992)

¢

DC: Were you and T. W. Adorno friends when he was in New York City from 1938 to 1941 with other members of the Frankfurt School, all of whom were affiliated with Columbia University? MS: Adorno and Iwere close then. I saw him constantly and he was very friendly with me. We usually discussed the political situation in Germany, which dis-

turbed Adorno greatly. He lived on the Upper West Side near Columbia, so he

would drop in on me often. While I was on the board of the Brooklyn Academy

177

178

APPENDIX C of Music, I arranged to have Adorno give a talk on Schoenberg’s music and also to have Walter Gropius speak on the Bauhaus. Both of these talks were held at the

Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1939. . . . Of all the members of the Frankurt

School, Leo Lowenthal was the one with whom

I have had the longest relation-

ship. We have been friends since the 1930s. [He died in 1993 - DC.] His primary field was European, specifically German literature, and he had a broad interest in theoretical problems. In the late 1930s, he was the book review editor for the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung. At a memorial ceremony in 1967 at the Goethe House in New York City for Siegfried Kracauer, Lowenthal and I were the two

main speakers.14 DC: What of your famous article on Santo Domingo de Silos?!5 Did it mark a funda-

mental shift in your approach to analyzing art? Was it influenced by Soviet thought, specifically by Mikhail Lifshitz’s 1938 interpretation of Marxism and art?16 MS: I have never read the book by Lifshitz, nor am I interested in doing so. The

conceptual framework for my 1939 Silos article was first used in my 1929 dissertation on Moissac. The third part of this dissertation, which has never been pub-

lished, uses a Marxist concept of history.!7 Originally, after the first part of the dissertation appeared in the 1931 Art Bulletin, | planned to revise the second part

on iconography and then to publish this plus the third part on the historical context for Moissac. For various reasons, I never found the time to complete the re-

vision of this second part, so the last two parts have never appeared in print. . . . In 1927, I was a guest of the monks at Santo Domingo de Silos. Much of my article was conceived then and it was written long before it was published in 1939.18 DC: There is a certain reading of your 1936 essay “The Social Bases of Art” that has led to the belief that you had been opposed to modern art before a dramatic change of

perspective in 1936/7.19 How would you respond to this claim? MS: My essay on the social bases of art was never meant to be a blanket condemnation of modern art, but only a criticism of some aspects of it. I was never interested in any position that forced you to choose between social realism and modern art. In fact, members of the Communist

Party and of the John Reed Club, espe-

cially during the Burkewitz controversy of 1931, accused me of being against “art for the people,” because I said that with one or two exceptions the social realists

were bad artists from whom the people stood to gain little.2° -

From a telephone interview (February 19, 1993) >

DC: From how many languages have you produced translations for publication? MS: From German and French, as well as from Latin and Italian. One of these arti-

cles was by an eighteenth-century German physicist named

Lichtenberg, who

wrote on Hogarth’s work. .. . He stated in his essay on philosophy: “In all languages, the verb ‘to be’ is irregular, hence metaphysics.” I also translated and in-

troduced an essay by Diderot.2!

INTERVIEWS

WITH

MEYER

SCHAPIRO

AND

LILLIAN

MILGRAM

SCHAPIRO

DC: What about twentieth-century French thinkers? Did you ever meet Jean-Paul Sartre? MS: I read Les Temps modernes when it first came out in 1945. And although I was unable to meet Sartre when he came to the U.S. in 1946, I subsequently met with

him in the late 1940s.

DC: What about Merleau-Ponty? MS: I spent more time in Paris talking with Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenologie de la perception (1945) I found to be impressive. Merleau-Ponty’s thought was close to my own. His work on Cézanne and on the nature of perception shared a lot with my concerns.?? No other philosopher seemed to know as much about the material process, the concrete techniques for making art or about the complexity of perception. LM: We knew Jacques Lacan also, because he was André Masson’s brother-in-law.

We heard him lecture and read his books. DC: Did you have any interchange with Bertolt Brecht when he was in the U.S. during the mid-1940s? MS: I saw Brecht several times in this period. Once, we went with Brecht to dinner at the house of Max

Wertheimer

(of the Gestalt Psychology School]. Wertheimer,

who was more conservative than Brecht, pressed him about the legitimacy of violent insurrection on behalf of bread. Brecht responded by saying: “In fact, if I had time, I would write a play called A Piece of Bread.” Through such a play,

Brecht said he could go from looking at the struggle over bread to an examina-

tion of the production of bread to a consideration of the general structure of society. At this time Brecht was somewhat at odds with the members of the Frank-

furt School over their criticism of Stalin and the Soviet Union.

DC: But of course you were even more critical of Stalin than were the members of the

Frankfurt School? MS: That is true. -

From an interview at the home of the Schapiros on West 4th Street in New

York City (April 3, 1993)

°

DC: When did you first read Rosa Luxemburg’s work? MS: I first read her in the early 1930s and I admired her letters from prison a great deal.23 . . . Paul Mattick, a friend of mine, was a Luxemburgian thinker of impor-

tance. DC: On the cover of Arnold Hauser’s Social History of Art (1951) are favorable com-

ments by you and by Thomas Mann, the great German novelist.24 Could you elab-

orate on this?

MS: I wrote a prepublication discussion for the publisher of Hauser’s book, whose wealth of knowledge and range I admired. Nonetheless, I had serious reservations about the study, since it was not sufficiently grounded in history. During

179

180

APPENDIX C the 1950s, while Hauser was teaching at Brandeis, he visited me in New York and

we had a

pleasant conversation about art.

DC: In your writings there is a conception of historical meaning as something that

emerges from a dynamic interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, with neither one

being the final determinant of truth value. One looks in vain for any traces of the type of epistemological realism that often marks the claims to complete objectivity or so-called value-free inquiry by orthodox Marxists and those Western scientists

who are positivists. Could you say something about this?

MS: What is a fact? According to most languages it is a product of labor. Consider the word for fact in German, Tatsache - which means “thing done” - in French fait - which means “made” - or even the Latin base for the English word “fact” - which is the word factum and is related to “manufacture,” which means “made

by hand.” . . . What is the truth? The truth is what is made. There is an important letter in this regard by the scientist Galileo to the painter Cigoli, in which Galileo spoke of the truth as a synthesis of the technique of the artisan plus the

knowledge of the artist.25 -

From an interview at the home of the Schapiros on West 4th Street in New York City (May 20-22, 1993)

° DC: Did you have much interchange with Claude Lévi-Strauss when he was in New York during the war? MS: I knew Claude Lévi-Strauss very well. We talked often during the mid-1940s. ‘We also met with each other in Paris, as for example in 1952. He gave lectures at

the New School for Social Research from 1942 to 1945. Once at least, he wrote a letter asking for my opinion on an anthropological point concerning an issue

in folklore.26

At Columbia, Lillian and IJ studied anthropology with Franz Boas. Margaret

Mead, who was Boas’s assistant, subsequently marked Lillian’s exams. DC: Did you see Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner much during the 1950s? MS: Lillian and I saw Pollock, who was generally taciturn and drank heavily, on several occasions at the home of Jeanne Reynal, who was the daughter of the famous publisher, and her husband Tom Sills, who was an African-American painter. Lee Krasner was more approachable and sociable. On one occasion, at a Pollock opening at the Betty Parsons Gallery, probably in 1950 or ’51, I asked Pollock if he had made the right choice in using gold paint intertwined with other colors in one of his large all-overs and Pollock became furious! He was very volatile

if ever questioned about a choice he made while creating one of his works. — From a

telephone interview (November 11, 1993) >

DC: Did you ever discuss anarchism with Mark Rothko?

INTERVIEWS

WITH MEYER SCHAPIRO AND LILLIAN MILGRAM

SCHAPIRO

MS: I knew he was an anarchist, but we did not discuss his position at length. He was very inclined to support workers and to value workmanship. -

From an interview at the home on the Schapiros in New York City June 5, 1994) ¢

DC: What is the source in your own analysis for the concept of “state capitalism”? MS: It means a situation in which the state, like private capital, has a monopoly

over the means of production, so as to disallow workplace democracy. It denotes an antidemocratic organization of the workplace and of society in general. Ultimately it is a critique of Leninism, as well as of capitalism. As for the source, it

goes back to Luxemburg and Korsch.2” DC: What of Robert Motherwell’s claim in his 1944 article “The Modern Painter's World” that “The modern states that we have seen so far have all been enemies of

the artist”?28

MS: This view is too extreme and historically reductive. It is a position typical of

much anarchist thought.29 DC: You mean that Motherwell was insufficiently attentive to what was both progressive and reactionary about the state at any given historical moment? MS: Yes. It is not merely a matter of the state’s being the enemy or not. The secular state in the medieval period was not only an institution of repression. This was

the case with the communes, which were sometimes at odds with other states or institutions, specifically those that were religious. The communes represented a state formation that was quite important for creating a space within which a

type of artistic freedom could begin to emerge.3° -

From a

telephone interview (January 22, 1995)

181

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Notes

In an interview with me, Meyer Schapiro

|TRODUCTION

responded critically to Wald’s book, since it

1. Meyer Schapiro, “The Patrons of Revolutionary Art,” Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3

“narrows the period political options too

Meyer Schapiro was a founding editor of Marx-

the following in 1992: “Iam, like Irving Howe,

not Trotskyist) publication that lasted only

and

(October-December

1937): 462-6, at p. 465.

ist Quarterly, an anti-Stalinist and socialist (but four issues. This short period of duration was

the result of internal contention among board

members, and not the consequence of any de-

much.” About his own lifelong commitment

to socialism and democracy, Schapiro declared

another longtime socialist, against slogans labeling.

Our

views

of socialism

often

overlap. ... I still recommend that people read Marx as a way of discovering conceptual

tools for grappling with an analysis of society

fection from left-wing ideals. Schapiro’s other contributions to Marxist Quarterly included an essay, “The Nature of

and art.” From an interview with Meyer Scha-

1937): 77-98; an introduction to and translation of writings by German art historian Max Raphael, “A Criticism of Thomism” (vol. 1,

Marxism” (as he terms it), see: David Craven,

Abstract Art” (vol. 1, no. 1, January-March,

no. 2, April-June 1937): 285-92; an exchange

with Delamore Schwartz over the relation of

art to politics (vol. 1, no. 2, April-June 1937):

305-14; and a review of Mortimer Adler's Art and Prudence (vol. 1, no. 3, October-December 1937): 406-17. 2. T. W. Adorno,

“Commitment”

(1962),

piro by the author (August 10, 1992), telephone.

For more on Schapiro’s own “unorthodox

“Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch, and the Emergence of Critical Theory,” Oxford Art Journal,

vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 42-54. 4. On the connections between

main-

stream readings of “official” modernism and the structural logic of corporate capitalism,

see: Patricia Hills, “The Modern Corporate

State, the Rhetoric of Freedom, and the Emer-

gence of Modernism in the United States,” in

translated by Francis McDonagh, reprinted in

Art Criticism since 1900, edited by Malcolm

Continuum, 1978), pp. 300-18, at pp. 303-4,

For some discussions of “alternative mod-

The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: 317-18.

3. Irving Howe, “Socialism and Liberalism”

Gee (Manchester: Manchester Press, 1993), pp. 143-63.

University

ernism” and left-wing politics, see: Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left

and introduced by Irving Howe (New York: Methuen, 1979), pp. 58-80, at pp. 61-2, 74.

Review, no. 144 (March-April 1984): 96-113; Rita Eder, “El Muralismo Mexicano: Modernismo y Modernidad,” in Modernidad y Moderni-

Howe's conception of socialism, see: the vari-

broise (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte,

(1977), Twenty-Five Years of Dissent, compiled

For an orthodox Marxist-Leninist critique of

ous passages on both Irving Howe and Meyer

Schapiro by Alan Wald in The New York Intel-

lectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalin-

ist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

zaci6n en el Arte Mexicano, edited by Olivier De-

1991), pp. 67-81; Robert Farris Thompson,

“Afro-Modernism,”

Artforum,

vol. 30, no.

(September 1991): 91-4; Terry Smith, Making

1

the Modem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and David Craven, “The Latin

183

184

NOTES TO PP. 3-4

American Origins of ‘Alternative Modernism,” Third Text, no. 36 (Autumn 1996): 2944. 5. A portion of this material was previously published in a short article. See: David Craven, “New Documents: The Unpublished FBI Files on Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb,” in American Abstract Expressionism, edited by David Thistlewood (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press and the Tate Gallery, 1993), pp. 41-52. 6. See, e.g., the list of editors in Dissent: A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion (hereafter simply Dissent), vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 1954) and in New Politics, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 1961). 7. The history of the various journals in question has been discussed in several studies, with the two most comprehensive being the following: Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); and Wald, New York Intellectuals. See also: Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Avon Books, 1965). For a history of Art Front, see the following: Gerald M. Monroe, The Artists’ Union of New York (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1971); and Francine Tyler, Artists Respond to the Great Depression and the Threat of Fascism: The New York Artists Union and Its Magazine Art Front (1934-37) (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1991). For a history of the American Artists Congress and its publications, see: Garnett McCoy, “The Rise and Fall of the American Artists Congress,” Prospects, vol. 13 (1988): 325-40; and Matthew Baigel and Julia Williams, editors, Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986). On the John Reed Clubs, see: Helen A. Harrison, “John Reed Club Artists and the New Deal,” Prospects, vol. 5 (1980): 24068; and Arthur Hughes, Proletarian Art and the John Reed Club Artists, 1928-1934 (Masters thesis, Hunter College, CUNY, 1970). Among the best critical accounts of Schapiro’s own writings and political involvements with these journals in the 1930s and 1940s are those by Andrew Hemingway and Patricia Hills. See: Andrew Hemingway, “Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 13-29; and Patricia Hills, “1936: Mever Schapiro, Art Front,

and the Popular Front,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 30-41. Two other essays

in the same issue of the OAJ also deal with

Schapiro's politics during this period: Otto Karl Werckmeister, “Jugglers in a Monastery” (pp. 60-4),

and Alicia Azuela,

“Public Art,

Meyer Schapiro, and Mexican Muralism” (pp. 55-9). In addition, see: Willibald Sauerlander, “The Great Outsider: Meyer Schapiro,” New

York Review of Books, vol. 42, no. 2 (February

2, 1995): 28-32.

On the topics of modern art, art theory, and

socialism, Schapiro from the 1930s through the 1960s contributed an impressive number

of pieces to various publications on the left.

These publications ranged from those allied with the Communist Party and the Trotskyists to those that were nonaligned and democrat-

ic socialist. A numerical tabulation of this list goes as follows: seven contributions to New

Masses, seven to Partisan Review, five to Marx-

ist Quarterly, six to The Nation, three to Art

Front, three to Dissent, and at least one to eight

other leftist publications — Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, New Politics, New International, Dyn,

The Call, Politics, Instead, Labor Action, and the

New Republic, For a complete list and full citations, see: Lillian Milgram Schapiro, Meyer

Schapiro: The Bibliography (New York: George Braziller, 1995).

8. Irving Howe, Introduction, in Echoes of

Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917, edited by William

O'Neill

(Chicago:

Quadrangle,

1966),

p. 5; and Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, “A

Word to Our Readers,” Dissent, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter

1954):

3-7. See also: Annette

Cox,

Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist AvantGarde and Society (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), p. 133. For a more favorable as-

sessment of the Communist Party in this period, see: Lawrence H. Schwartz, Marxism and

Culture: The CPUSA and the Aesthetics in the 1930s (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980).

9. Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of Amer-

ican Art, Roll N/69-100: 732 and 69-101: 297. See also: Patricia Passlof Papers, Archives of

American Art, Roll N/69-45, The latter docu-

ment was also cited by Nancy Jachec in “Myth

and the Audience,” in American Abstract Ex-

pressionism, ed. Thistlewood, p. 144.

10. “The DISSENT Art Show,” Dissent, vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer 1961): 332. The cover for

NOTES TO PP. 4-7

this issue of Dissent was designed by Elaine de

Kooning. There were also two other important

exhibitions of New York School artwork on behalf of Dissent: the Second DISSENT Art Show held in 1963 and the Third DISSENT Art Show held in 1966. See, e.g.: Dissent, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 244.

11. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 237-8. See note 3 for Schapiro's 1992 acknowl-

edgment that his conception of socialism was

Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Ste-

phanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford Universi:

ty Press, 1992), p. 61. At various points, T. J. Clark has emphasized modernist negation in his essays about the School of Paris and the

New York School. See, e.g.: T. J. Clark, “Clem-

ent Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” in Pollock and

After: The Critical Debate, edited by Francis Fra-

scina (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 47— 63.

19.

Ad Reinhardt,

frequently close to that of Irving Howe. 12. Ibid., pp. 211, 214-16, 235-6.

(1952),

as a look at Barnett Newman's editorial work

1975), pp. 50-1.

13. For a reprint of The Tiger's Eye, as well

with this journal, see: Ann Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodi-

cals (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990),

pp. 25-32. 14.

Paul Goodman, “The Emperor of Chi-

“Abstract Art Refuses”

reprinted in Art-as-Art: The Selected

Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara

Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 20. Barnett Newman, “Arshile Gorky: Poet

and Immolator” (1948), reprinted in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John O'Neill and introduced by Richard Shiff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990),

an architect, gave Robert Motherwell his first

pp. 111-12, at p. 112. 21. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 61. 22. Ibid., pp. 77-8. 23. Ibid., pp. 80-1.

New York School. See: Paul Goodman, “What

74,

Practical Proposals (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962).

26. Two sets of these interviews have been published. See: James Thompson and Susan Raines, “A Vermont Visit with Meyer Schapiro

well, see: Robert Mattison, “The

no. 1 (1994): 3-12; and David Craven, “Meyer

na,” Possibilities, no. 1 (Winter 1947-8): 7-15.

In 1951/2, Paul Goodman's brother Percival,

who was a leading anarchist thinker as well as

commission for a public building. Paul Goodman also wrote essays about the work of the

Is a Picture?” (1959), in Utopian Essays and For a discussion of this painting by Mother-

Emperor of

China,” Art International, vol. 25, no. (Novem-

ber-December 1982): 8-14. For a discussion of the aesthetic merits of Goodman’s poem, see: Robert C. Hobbs, “Re-Review, Possibili-

ties,” Art Criticism, vol. 1, no. 2 (1979): 101-2.

24. Howe, Margin of Hope, p. 290. 25. Howe, Twenty-Five Years of Dissent, p.

(August

1991),” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17,

Schapiro and Lillian Milgram Schapiro with David Craven: A

Series of Interviews (July 15,

1992-January 22, 1995),” Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997): 159-68, at p. 168.

27. Meyer Schapiro, “Commentary on

15. Howe, Margin of Hope, p. 242. For an-

Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875”

“On Paul Goodman,” Under the Sign of Saturn

1950s”), one page in length, Personal Papers

other view of Goodman, see: Susan Sontag,

(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 3-12.

16. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expres-

sionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New

p. 67.

Haven:

Yale University

Press,

1993),

17. Willem de Kooning, “Artists’ Sessions

at Studio 35” (1950), in Modern Artists in Amer-

ica, edited by Robert Goodnough, introduced

by Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt (New

York: Wittenborn, 1951), pp. 9-22, at p. 20. 18.

Robert

Motherwell,

“A

Personal

Ex-

pression” (March 19, 1949), in The Collected

(1957/8),

in

Folder

37

(“Marxism:

1930s—

of Meyer Schapiro, New York City.

28, Meyer Schapiro, “Barnett Newman:

Talk at the Memorial Meeting at Campbell Funeral Chapel” (New York City, July 6, 1970),

Personal Papers of Meyer Schapiro, New York City, three pages in all. There is also anoth-

er unpublished address about Newman,

one

page long, that Schapiro presented a decade later. Entitled “On Barnett Newman, a Memo-

rial,” it was given on the occasion of the pre-

sentation of the Creatio et Spiritus Award to Annalee Newman

on Barnett Newman’s

be-

half at St. Peter's Church (February 15, 1980).

185

186

NOTES TO PP, 9-15

29. Schapiro, “Barnett Newman: Talk.”

Hutton, “Left of Center, against the Grain:

30. See: Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole

T. J. Clark and the Social History of Art,” Rad-

Chicago, 1983); and Eva Cockcroft, “Abstract

New Left Review, no. 182 July-August 1990):

the Idea of Modern Art from Paris, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War,” Art-

forum, vol. 12, no. 10 June 1974): 39-41.

31. Juan Acha, Las culturas estéticas de Amé-

rica Latina (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional

Autonoma de México, 1993), pp. 160-1. For articles about the considerable importance of

Acha to Latin American criticism, see: the in-

troduction by Bélgica Rodriguez to Juan Acha,

ical History Review, no. 38 (1987): S8-71; Perty Anderson,

“A Culture in Contraflow - II,”

85-95; and David Craven, Introduction, in Die

Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur (1970), by Rein-

hard Bentmann and Michael Miiller, translat-

ed by Tim Spence and David Craven (Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press, 1992), pp. xi-xvii.

33.

See: Octavio Paz, “Two Centuries of

de los Archivos y Centros de Documentacién de

American Painting (1776-1971),” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, translated by Helen Lane (New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-

(1983): 9-13; and Angelica Valenzuela, “Dos

Conde, Historia minima de Arte Mexicano en

libros del critico de arte Juan Acha,” El Uni-

el Siglo XX (Mexico City: ATTAME Ediciones,

“La critica de Arte en Latinoamerica,” Boletin

Arte Moderno y Contemporaneo, vol. 10, no. 19 versal, Cultural Section June 23, 1995): 2.

For another instructive article along these

lines see the one by Cuban

vanovich, 1987), pp. 292~7; and Teresa del 1994), p. 101.

34. Marta Traba wrote about this experi-

critic Gerardo

ence in an article entitled “Testimonio,” Sem-

School, which was published by critic Radl Quintanilla and a group of artists within the

graphical sketch of Traba that mentions this

was accompanied by several reproductions of

(Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, 1994), pp. vii-xiv. For a summation of the importance of Traba’s criticism for Revolutionary Nicaragua, see: Ral Quintanil-

Mosquera on abstraction and the New York

Nicaraguan Union of Visual Artists. The essay

Jackson Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (1950). See:

Gerardo Mosquera, “Meyer Schapiro: Marxis-

mo y arte abstracto,” Artefacto: Revista de Arte

y Cultura, nos. 8-9 (vol. 2, nos. 3-4), (March-

ana, Bogota (January 1983). For a brief bio-

expulsion, see: Belisario Betancur, Foreword to Marta Traba, Art of Latin America: 1900-1980

within the Marxist tradition, of Schapiro’s fa-

la, Introduction, in Marta Traba, “Soy tu mar y en miconfia,” Artefacto, no. 6 (June-August 1993): n.p.

including that of the New York School. 32. Guilbaut, How New York Stole, and T. J.

City: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1973), p. 6.

June

1994):

29-35. This article is a defense,

vorable interpretation of much abstract art, Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” October, no. 69 (Summer 1994): 23-48. Clark

claims that Abstract Expressionism is simply

“the style of a certain petty bourgeoisie’s aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cultural

power” (p. 36).

For two critiques of Clark’s recent tendency

to reduce the subject of analysis (be it Impres-

sionism or the writings of Schapiro) to some monolithic

entity along

reflectionist

lines,

see: Hemingway, “Meyer Schapiro and Marx-

ism”; and Adrian Rifkin, “Marx’ Clarkism,” Art History, vol. 8, no. 4 (December 1985):

488-95. For three essays about Clark’s importance to the discipline of art history during the 1970s and the early 1980s, prior to his more schematic approach since the mid-1980s, see: John

35. Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plasticas latinoamericanos (Mexico

36. Ibid., pp. 3-4. See also: Acha, Las culturas estéticas, pp. 160-3. 37. Lily Kassner, Morales (Rome: America

Arte, 1995), p. 42. This passage mentions the influence

on

Morales

Motherwell and Tapies.

during

the

1950s

of

38. Ibid., p. 193. 39. Ibid., p. 207.

40. Juan Martinez, “The Los Once Group and Cuban Art in the 1950s,” in Guido Llinds

and Los Once after Cuba (Miami, Art Museum

at Florida International University, February 28-April 2, 1997), pp. 5-10. 41.

Gerardo Mosquera, “Raw! Martinez,” in

Nosotros: Exposicién antologia Raiil Martinez

(Havana, Museo Nacional, Palacio de Bellas

Artes, July 19-September 4, 1988), n.p.; and

David Craven, “The Visual Arts since the Cu-

NOTES TO PP. 15-18 ban Revolution,” Third Text, no. 20 (Autumn 1992): 77-102.

42. Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 108;

and p. 277 for a tribute to Jackson Pollock in 1988 by Cuban artist Alexis Somoza.

43. Ibid., p. 108. 44, Fidel Castro, Speech in the early 1960s,

cited by Eva Cockcroft, “Cuban Poster Art,” in Cuban Poster Art: A Retrospective, 1961-1982

(New York, Westbeth Gallery, January 16-Feb-

Tuary 9, 1983), n.p. See also the excellent discussion of Cuban cultural policy since 1959

in Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, pp. 125-37. 48.

Guido Llinds and Los Once, p. 25. There

is a color reproduction on this page of Llinds's homage to Robert Motherwell.

46. Rail Martinez, Interview by Sandra Levinson (Havana, 1984), Archives of the Center for Cuban Studies, New York City. Cited in Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, p. 125. In addi-

tion, see the fine interview with Ratil Martinez

by Shifra Goldman, in Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 146-7. 47. Guilbaut, How New York Stole, pp. 1112.

48.

For an earlier treatment of these issues,

see: David Craven, “Abstract Expressionism and

Third

World

Art:

A

Post-Colonial

Ap-

proach to ‘American’ Art,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 7 (1991): 44-66.

wrote: “There's a style of painting gaining

ground in this country which is neither Ab-

stract nor Surrealist, though it has suggestions

of both, while the way the paint is applied . . . is suggestive of methods of Expressionism. I

feel some new name will have to be coined for it, but at the moment I can’t think of any. Jackson Pollock . . . and William Baziotes are of this school.” Later, in 1946, Coates wrote as follows in “The Art Galleries,” New Yorker, vol. 22 (March 1946): 83, “Hofmann

is certainly one of the

most uncompromising representatives of what some people call the spatter-and-daub school and I, more politely, have christened abstract Expressionism” (emphasis added). This review has been made more accessible through republication in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, An Anthology, edited by Clif-

ford Ross (New York: Abrams, 1990), p. 230. 54. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 34.

55. Although the term decentered was invented by Freud, it was first applied in a systematic way to literature and the arts by Pierre

Macherey, Pour une théorie de la production littéraire (Paris: Librairie Francois Maspero, 1966):

chap. 7.

56. The “law of uneven development” is discussed by Marx in the Introduction to his Grundrisse of 1857/8. See: Karl Marx, “The Grundrisse,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton,

49. Coco Fusco, Introduction, in Signs of

1978), pp. 244-6. One of the finest discussions of the relationship between art and society

um of Contemporary Hispanic Art, 1988), n.p.

application of the “the law of uneven develop-

Transition: 80s Art from Cuba (New York: Muse-

A similar view is expressed at greater length in: Acha, Las culturas estéticas, pp. 160-3.

within a Marxist framework predicated on an

ment” to artistic production can be found in

Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, Las ideas estéticas de

logical approach is of course Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Marx: Ensayos de estética marxista (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, SA, 1965), pp. 96ff. This book,

Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-

is simply brilliant. To date, this study remains

50.

A key text for formulating such a dia-

Rabelais and His Worlds (1965), translated by

versity, 1984). Schapiro first read Bakhtin’s writings in the late 1930s. See: Thompson and Raines, “Vermont Visit with Meyer Schapiro,” p.7. 51.

Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 29.

52. Meyer Schapiro, “Art and Society,” Preliminary outline, 1939, four pages handwritten, p. 2, in Folder 17, Personal Papers of Meyer Schapiro, New York City. 53.

Robert

Coates,

“Assorted

Moderns,”

New Yorker, vol. 20 (December 1944): 51,

which has gone through numerous editions,

one of the finest applications ever of a Marxist

method to the analysis of the main theoretical

issues surrounding artistic production. Furthermore, Sanchez Vazquez has had a salutary influence on revolutionary cultural policy both in Cuba and in Nicaragua. See: Gerardo

Mosquera, “Sanchez Vazquez: Marxismo y Arte Abstracto,” Temas (Havana), no, 9 (1986):

23-37. 57. Cockcroft,

“Abstract

Weapon,” pp. 39-41.

Expressionism:

187

188

NOTES

TO

PP.

18-31

$8. For a perceptive look at how Ben Shahn was unknowingly recruited for the U.S. side during the cold war, see: Francis Pohl, Ben Shahn: New Deal Artist in a Cold War Climate: 1947-1954 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). 59. Guilbaut, How New York Stole, pp. 143, 202. 60. Michel Ragon, “The Artist and Society,” Art and Confrontation, translated by Nigel Foxell (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1968), p. 32. 61. Lawrence Kilman, “U.S. Poll Shows Majority Don’t Care for Abstract Art,” International Herald Tribune (May 14, 1985), p. 3. 62. Phyllis Rosenzweig, The Fifties: Aspects of Painting in New York (Washington, D.C. Hirshhorn Museum and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), p. 29. A more recent essay qualifies, but does not overturn, Rosenzweig’s assessment. See: Bradford Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract Expressionists, 1948~ 51,” Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2 June 1991): 283-308. 63. Lawrence Alloway, “Field Notes: An Interview,” Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y., 1987), p. 130. 64. Ibid., pp. 130-1. 65. Newman, Selected Writings, p. 264. For more on the British reception of Abstract Expressionism, see: Charles Harrison, Essays on Art and Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 229, 331; John Tagg, Grounds of Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 179-80; and Paul Wood, “Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expression ism,” in Investigating Modern Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, in association with the Open University, London, 1996), pp. 109-28. 66. Interview of Rasheed Araeen by Helen Pivec, quoted by Paul Overy, “The New Works of Rasheed Araeen,” in Rasheed Araeen (London: South London Gallery, November 11December 18, 1994), p. 17. 67. Ibid. 68. Interview with Rasheed Araeen by the author (April 6, 1995), Albuquerque, N.M. 69. John Roberts, Pastmodernism, Politics and Art (Manchester: University of Manchester

is art that has deprived itself of meaning and presents itself as destitute of meaning. . . here,

70. For more on this sce: Craven, “Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art,” pp. 44~

and less complete edition, in two volumes, was published by Albert Skira in Geneva. An

Press,

1990), p. 184.

66; and David Craven, The New Concept of Art

and Popular Culture in Nicaragua since the Revolution in 1979 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen.

Press, 1989). 71. Susan Landauer, “Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism in San Francisco,” in

Clyfford Still (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1992),

pp. 91-104. 72.

I. F Stone,

The Haunted Fifties: 1953-

1963 (New York: Little, Brown, 1963). The title of the book and the decade to which it corresponds make this point well enough.

73. Adorno, “Commitment,” pp. 300-18.

See also:

the public debate between Adorno

and Lucien Goldmann

in “Discussion extraite

des actes du second colloque international sur la

sociologie de la littérature tenue a Royaument”

(January 1968), in Hommage a Lucien Gold-

mann, Revue de l’institut de sociologie de l’Uni-

versité Libre de Bruxelles, nos. 3-4 (1973): 52S— 42. In the course of this debate, Adorno made

the following point: “radical modern art. . . is that which, in opposition to the affirmative moment of traditional art, refuses meaning: it

then, the negation of meaning is the ultimate

meaning [of art].” 74, Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 47. 75.

César

Paternosto,

The

Stone

and

the

Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, translated

by Esther Allen (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1996), pp. 235, 251.

76. Georg Lukacs was evidently one of the

first people to use this term in his Die Theorie des Romans (1920), translated by Anna Bostock

(Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press,

1971),

p. 19.

Lukacs mentioned “the philosophically as

well as politically uncertain attitude of romantic anti-capitalism. Originally, say in the young Carlyle or in Cobbett, this was a gen-

uine critique of the horrors and barbarities of

early capitalism — sometimes even, as in Carlyle’s Past and Present, a preliminary form of socialist critique” (p. 19).

For further discussion of this concept, see: Robert Sayre and Michel Lowy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” New German Cri-

tique, no. 32 (Spring-Summer 1984): 42-92. See

also:

Claude

Lévi-Strauss,

La

Voie

des

masques (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1979). An earlier

NOTES TO PP. 32-6

English translation by Sylvia Modelski was published by the University of Washington Press in 1982. 77. Norman

Lewis,

“Artists’

Sessions

at

Studio 35” (1950), in Modern Artists in America, edited by Robert Goodnough,

by

Robert

Motherwell

and

Ad

introduced

Reinhardt

(New York: Wittenborn, 1951), pp. 9-22, at

p. 16.

on

in Folder 37 (“Marxism: 1930sone page in length, Personal Papers Schapiro, New York City. It is internote that Schapiro also wrote a one-

page meditation on Critique ofthe Gotha Pro-

gram in 1933; it too is preserved in Folder 37

of his Personal Papers. In this earlier piece, Schapiro focused on the quite different issue

of ethicality as a guiding principle within

Marxian thought. Corroboration

for this point comes

141-7.

3. The Collected Writings of Robert Mother-

well, edited by Stephanie Terenzio (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 68.

4. Meyer Schapiro assisted Leo Steinberg in

organizing the exhibition Artists of the New

York School: Second Generation, which was held in March 1957 at the Jewish Museum in.

Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Joan Mitchell.

Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875”

(1957/8), 1950s”), of Meyer esting to

Today,” The Listener, vol. 4 January 26, 1956):

New York City. Aside from including works by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, this exhibition featured paintings by Elaine de

CHAPTER ONE. THE VARIOUS LEGACIES AND DIVERSE LINEAGES OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

1. Meyer Schapiro, “Commentary

189

from

the noted medieval scholar John Plummer, a

former graduate student and personal friend of Meyer Schapiro. In an interview at the Pierpont Morgan Library, Plummer recalled having had a discussion with Schapiro soon after the latter’s return from lecturing in England in 1947/8. Schapiro was quite enthusiastic and hopeful about the prospects for democratic

5. Thomas B. Hess, “De Kooning Paints a Picture,” Art News, vol. 52, no. 1 (March 1953):

30.

6. James Thompson and Susan Raines, “A

Vermont Visit with Meyer Schapiro (August 1991),”

Oxford Art Journal,

(1994): 3-12, at p. 5.

vol.

17,

no.

1

7. Thomas B. Hess, “Sketch for a Portrait

of the Art Historian among Artists,” Social Re-

search, vol. 45, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 8-9. For

Schapiro’s own

tribute

to Hess,

see:

Meyer

Schapiro, “On Thomas B. Hess (1920-78),” Art in America, vol. 66, no. 6 (November-December 1978):

12-13. For another important as-

sessment of Hess's contribution, see: Donald

B. Kuspit, “Two Critics: Thomas B. Hess and

Harold Rosenberg,” Artforum, vol. 17, no. 1 (September 1978): 32-3.

8. Schapiro, “Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.”

9. Marx stated as follows in his Theories of

Surplus Value (1961/2): “capitalist production

tions. Similarly, regarding Schapiro’s own art-

is hostile to certain aspects of intellectual production, such as art and poetry.” Reprinted in Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, edited by

ward, Plummer stated: “There is always a set of

Telos Press, 1973), p. 64.

however topical the article might seem... .

Adolfo

socialism in the United Kingdom, where the British Labor Party had won national elec-

historical approach from the early 1930s on-

Marxian values submerged in his approach, [Yet] nothing I have ever seen or heard would

ever indicate to me that Meyer was a Stalinist at any point in his career.” Interview with the author (May 20, 1993), New York City.

2. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality

of Avant-Garde Art,” Art News, vol. 56, no. 4

(Summer 1957): 36-42, at pp. 41-2. A shorter and less stringent piece on Abstract Expressionism was published a year earlier: Meyer

Schapiro, “The Younger American Painters of

Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (St. Louis:

For an insightful look at this issue, see: Sanchez

Vazquez,

Las

ideas estéticas

de Marx: Ensayos de estética marxista (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, SA, 1965), pp. 187-95, 216-21.

10. Schapiro, “Marx’s Critique of the Gotha

Program.” 11. 12.

13.

Ibid. Ibid.

Ibid.

14. Michael Kazin, “Class History,” The Nation (September 5, 1987): 201-4.

190

NOTES

TO

PP.

36-9

15. David Montgomery,

“Labor's Long

Haul: A Review of Mike Davis's Prisoners of the

American Dream,” The Nation, vol. 243, no. 2 uly 19-26, 1986): 52-4. Montgomery is most well known for his book The Fall of the House

of Labor (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987); the previously noted essay by Michael Kazin (see note 14) is a review of this book. See also: Stanley Aronowitz, “The Un-

silent Fifties,” in False Promises: The Shaping of

American

Working Class Consciousness

ham: Duke University Press, 1992).

(Dur-

16. Schapiro, “Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.”

17. Adorno’s concept of ideology is put

forth in, e.g., Negative Dialectics (1966), trans-

lated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury

Press, 1973), p. 3. See also: Terry Eagleton, Ide-

ology: An Introduction (London: Verso Press,

1991), p. 88.

add that Hadjinicolaou’s subsequent work on Delacroix, avant-gardism, and especially El Greco is quite important, and has not been marked by such a schematic framework to the same extent. See, e.g., Nicos Hadjinicoloau, “On the Ideology of Avant-Gardism,” Praxis,

no. 6 (1982): 39-109. 24.

Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in

Reply to André Daspre” (1966), in Lenin and Philosophy, translated by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 222-3. 25. I have addressed these facets of Schapi-

ro’s position at greater length elsewhere. See: David Craven, “Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch,

and the Emergence of Critical Theory,” Oxford

Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 42-54.

26. Schapiro, “Marx's Critique of the Gotha

Program.”

18. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor,

27. On the problems of using the basesuperstructure model, especially in the work

19. This concept was introduced by Peter

and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural The-

p.l.

Sloterdijk

in

Kritik

der zynischen

Vernunft

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984). See also: Eagleton, Ideology, pp. 26-7.

20. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephan Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, The Dominant Ideolo-

gy Thesis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980).

21. Eagleton, Ideology, pp. 33-5. 22.

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cul-

tural Writings, translated by W. Boelhower,

edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-

Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press, 1985); and Gramsci, Selections from the

Prison Notebooks, edited by Quentin Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers,

of Althusser, see: Raymond

Williams, “Base

ory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture

(London: Verso, 1980), pp. 31-49; and the per-

tinent sections (particularly the diagrams) in

E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 31-6. For a defense of the base-

superstructure model in a more qualified sense, see Eagleton, Ideology, pp. 73ff.

For another discussion of Williams's posi-

tion here, see: Janet Wolff, The Social Produc-

tion of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1984), pp. 77-80. 28. Eagleton, Ideology, pp. 30-6.

29.

Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 95. Korsch’s most important

1971). One of the best overviews

book was his 1923 study Marxism and Philos-

“The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci," New

early Frankfurt School. On this issue, see: Mar-

23. See, e.g., Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in

Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 5, 10, 13. For some different evalu-

1993), pp. 1, 5. He simply equates visual rep-

Paul Mattick and Fred Holliday, the latter of whom does a Leninist critique of Korsch. See: Paul Mattick, “The Marxism of Karl Korsch,”

of Gramsci’s position is in Perry Anderson,

Left Review, no. 100 (November 1976-January 1977): 5-78.

the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, resentation

with

knowledge

and

knowledge

with ideology. For a recent critique of Hadjinicolaou’s work along these lines, see: John

Roberts, Introduction, in Art Has No History!,

edited by John Roberts (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 10-11. Nonetheless, I should hasten to

ophy, which had a profound influence on the

tin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social ations, there are some important essays by

Survey (October 1964): 86-97; Leon Trotsky, “La Defense de I’URSS et I'Opposition,” Ecrits (Paris), vol. 1 (1955): 1-15; and Fred Halliday,

Introduction, in Karl Korsch, Marxism and Phi-

NOTES TO PP. 39-43

losophy, translated by Fred Halliday (New York:

‘Triumph’ of Western Art,” Third Text, no. 25

31. T. W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman

lian Milgram by the author (July 15, 1992),

Monthly Review, 1971), pp. 7-26.

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 14: “Asthetische Identitat soll dem Nichtident-

ischen beistehen, das der Identitatzwang in

der Realitat unterdriickt . . . Kunstwerke sind

Nachbilder des empirisch Lebendigen, soweit sie diesem

zukommen

lassen,

was

ihnen

drauen verweigert wird.” 32. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aes-

thetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 89. 33.

Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the

Idea of Modern Art from Paris, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983), p. 11. 34.

For a

fine discussion of these issues,

(Winter 1993-4): 3-9,

41. Interview with Meyer Schapiro and Lil-

Rawsonville, Vt. The Schapitos were not certain that a copy of this critique of Greenberg by Meyer Schapiro still exists. 42. Ibid. 43. Thomas Lawson, Review of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, Artforum, vol.

22, no. 10 June 1984): 83. See also: Casey

Blake, Review of How New York Stole the Idea of Moder Art, Telos, no. 62 (Winter 1984-5): 211-17; and Rudolf Baranik, “Philistinism in

Front of Art and Art History,” Art Criticism, vol. 2, no. 3 (1986): 39-45.

44. 45.

Lawson, Review of How New York Stole. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “A Concrete

History of Abstract Expressionism,” Art in

see: Wolfgang Abendroth, Sozialgeschichte der europiiischen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1965), chaps. 1 and 2.

America, vol. 72, no. 3 (March 1984): 21. See also: Guilbaut’s attack on the anti-Stalinism of

1977), pp. 412-13.

cin de ciertas obras de arte, translated by Carlos

and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and

para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), pp. 147-

35. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867), translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Random House, 36.

Guilbaut, How New York Stole, chap. 1;

the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 37. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (1993), translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York:

Meyer Schapiro and others in Serge Guilbaut,

“La cruzada de los medievalists: Meyer Scha-

piro y Pierre Francastel,” in Sobre la desapariBonfil (Mexico City: Curare / Fondo Nacional

234. 46.

Guilbaut, “La cruzada de los medieval-

ists,” pp. 189-203.

Routledge, 1994), pp. 56-63. 38. Clement Greenberg, “The Late Thirties in New York” (1957), in Art and Culture (Bos-

47. Harold Rosenberg, “Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past,” Dissent, vol. 2, no. 4 (Au-

tion is used as the epigraph for chap. 1 of Guil-

Political Economy, edited by W. J. Ashley (Lon-

ton: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 230. This quotabaut’s How New York Stole, p. 17.

39. Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Ab-

stract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society

tumn 1955): 317-28. 48. See, e.g.: John Stuart Mill, Principles of

don: Longmans Green, 1929), book 2, chap. 1, sec. 3, p. 208; or John Dewey, “Capitalistic

(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), chap.

or Public Socialism?” (1929) in Individualism Old and New (New York: G, P. Putnam’s Sons,

be required reading for all students of his crit-

Dross: John Dewey's Anarcho-Communal-

8. This excellent examination of Greenberg's politics from the mid-1940s onward should

icism. More recently, see: Caroline Jones, “La

politique de Greenberg et le discours postmoderniste,”

Les Cahiers du Musée

national d’art

1962), pp. 101-20. 49.

Arthur

Lothstein, “Salving from the

ism,” Philosophical Forum, vol. 10, no. 1 (Fall 1978): 55-111. See also: John Lothstein, From

Privacy to Praxis: The Case for John Dewey as a

modeme, nos. 45-6 (Autumn-Winter 1993):

Radical American Philosopher (New York Uni-

ty: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s

Schapiro’s assessment of John Dewey, see: David Craven, “Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram Schapiro with David Craven: A Series of Interviews (July 15, 1992-January 22, 1995),” Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997): 159-68, at p. 159 See also: John Ryder, “Community, Struggle,

105-37; and Lisa Bloom,

“Ghosts of Ethnici-

and 1980s,” Socialist Review, vol. 24, nos. 1-2 (1995): 129-63. 40. Fora look at the theoretical framework

that sustained these right-wing views, see:

David Craven,

“Clement Greenberg and the

versity, Ph.D. dissertation, 1979). For Meyer

191

192

NOTES TO PP. 43-7

and Democracy: Marxism and Pragmatism,” Studies in Soviet Thought, no. 27 (1984): 10721. 50. Guilbaut, How New York Stole, chap. 1. $1. See Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); and Joyce Kolko and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy: 1945-1954 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). For a very fine summary of this period, see: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 422-8. See also Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 52. Alan Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the “Soviet Threat”: Domestic Sources of the Cold War Consensus (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1979). See in particular chap. 7 in the revised and expanded edition of this book, published in 1984 by South End Press in Boston. 53. Letter to Ad Reinhardt from Robert F. Kennedy (February 2, 1965), Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, Roll N/69-101: 0089. 54. This information about Schapiro’s work on the antiwar movement comes from an interview with Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram by the author (April 3, 1993) in New York City. For a recent tribute by Howe to Harrington, see: Irving Howe, “In Honor of Mike: Thirty Years after The Other America,” Dissent, vol. 40, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 340-4. See also: Meyer Schapiro, “Ending the Vietnam War,” an antiwar speech at Columbia University, New York City (1972), Personal Papers of Meyer Schapiro, New York City (see Appendix B). 55. See: Guilbaut, How New York Stole, pp. 68-70; and Serge Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games,” in Reconstructing Modernism, edited by Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 73. 56. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 216: “Neither I nor such friends as Lewis Coser or Meyer Schapiro were invited to join the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. Had we been, we would of course have refused.” 57. Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games,” p. 73. 58. Letter to Alfred Barr from Irving Kristol (December 2, 1952), Alfred Barr Papers, Ar-

chives of American Art, Roll 2178: Letter no, 169. 59. David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism

(London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 55. 60.

T. J. Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Ex-

pressionism,” October, no. 69 (Summer 1994):

23-48, at p. 45.

61. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White

Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New

York: Harper & Row, 1991), p. 406. 62.

Robert Hobbs, Lee Krasner (New York:

Abbeville, 1993), p. 18.

63.

Ibid.

64, André Breton and Leon Trotsky [with

Diego Rivera], “Manifesto: Towards a Free Rev-

olutionary Art” (1938), reprinted in Theories

of Modern Art, edited by Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley:

University

of

California

Press,

1968), pp. 485-6. This English translation by

Dwight MacDonald was originally published

in Partisan Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (Fall 1938): 49—

53.

65.

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and

Interviews, edited by John O'Neill and intro-

duced by Richard Shiff (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1990), pp. 29-30. Guilbaut has since

made a spirited but unsuccessful attempt to re-

read Newman's position here in keeping with

his own earlier and now very dated argument

from 1983. See: Serge Guilbaut, “Aztequés et celtes: A I’assaut de I’histoire contemporaine,” in Arte, historia e identidad en America, vol. 3

(Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Auténo-

ma de México, 1994), pp. 809-20. 66.

I discuss

Motherwell’s

writings

length elsewhere. See: David Craven,

at

“Aes-

thetics as Ethics in the Writings of Mother-

well and Schapiro,” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (1996): 25-32. 67. Max Kozloff, “American Painting dur-

ing the Cold War,” Artforum, vol. 13 (May

1973): 43-54. See also the various other arti-

cles about the reception of the New York School that have been reprinted in the anthology compiled by Cecile and David Sha-

piro, Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record

(Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990).

68. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 61-2.

Here I am very much in agreement with the

position presented by Cécile Whiting in Anti-

fascism in American Art (New York: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1989), pp. 170-96. Along these

NOTES TO PP. 47-53

87. Ibid., pp. 206-7. 88. Ibid., p. 209.

lines, see also: Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock and

the Politics of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). ed.

69. Ibid., pp. 72-3 and 70; emphasis add70.

César

Paternosto,

The

Stone and

CHAPTER TWO. ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM AND LEFT-WING DISCOURSE

the

Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, translated

by Esther Allen (Austin: University of Texas

1.

Harold Rosenberg, “Marxism: Criticism

Press, 1996), pp. 235ff and 251. 71. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 44. 72. Robert Motherwell, “Jackson Pollock:

and/or Action” (1956), reprinted in Twenty-five

66, no. 2 (April 1967): 29-30, 64-7, at p. 65.

3.

Years of Dissent, edited by Irving Howe (Lon-

An Artists’ Symposium, Part I,” Art News, vol.

don: Methuen, 1979), pp. 241-53, at pp. 252~

73. Motherwell, Collected Writings, pp.

2. Ad Reinhardt, “Abstraction and Illustration” (1943), in Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose (Berke-

234-5.

74, The Collected Writings of Willem de

Kooning, edited by George Scrivani (New York

ley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 47-9, at p. 49.

76. John Fischer, “Mark Rothko: Portrait of the Artist as an Angry Man,” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 241 (July 1970): 17. 77. Personal Files of Lee Seldes, New York

Committee, Congressional Record, 81st Conress, 1st session, 1949, vol. 95, pt. 9: 11586.

A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago

Reinhardt’s drawing, see: James Beck, “Ad

and Madras: 75. Ibid.,

Hanuman Books), p. 139. p. 75.

City. Cited in James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko:

Press, 1993), p. 15.

3.

U.S.

House

Un-American

Activities

4. The Collected Writings of Robert Mother-

well, edited by Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 115. About

Reinhardt in Retrospect,” Arts Magazine, vol.

78. Dore Ashton, About Rothko (New York:

54 (June 1980): 148-9,

79.

with Robert Motherwell,” in Inside New York's

Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 8-10.

Interview with Meyer Schapiro and Lil-

lian Milgram by the author (June 5, 1994), New York City.

80. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp.

77ff. 81. Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, pp. 29, 232-3, 231. 82. Adolph Gottlieb, “Jackson Pollock: A

Symposium,” Art News, vol. 66, no. 2 (April

1967): 31. 83. Adolph Gottlieb, “Two Views,” in Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s, edited

by Jeanne Siegel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 35. 84. Meyer Schapiro, “Race, Nationality,

and Art,” Art Front, vol. 2, no. 4 (March 1936): 10-12.

85. Clement Greenberg, “American-Type

Painting,” Art and Culture, pp. 208-29, at pp.

208-9. 86. Harold Rosenberg, “International Art and the New Globalism,” The Anxious Object (New York: Collier Books, 1964), p. 212.

5.

Barbaralee Diamonstein, “An Interview

Art World (New York: Rizzoli, 1979), pp. 244-5.

6. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and

Interviews, edited by John O’Neill and intro-

duced by Richard Shiff (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1990), p. 51. 7. Ibid., p. 47.

8.

“Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35” (1950),

in Modem Artists in America, edited by Robert

Goodnough, introduced by Robert Mother-

well and Ad Reinhardt (New York: Witten-

born, 1951), pp. 9-22, at p. 16.

9. David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism

(London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 139.

10. David Smith, edited by Garnett McCoy

(New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 179.

11. Elaine de Kooning, “A Stroke of Genius”

(1984), in The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings, introductory essay by Rose Slivka and Preface by Marjorie Luyckx (New

York: Braziller, 1994), p. 219 (hereafter cited

as E. de Kooning, Selected Writings). 12.

Deirdre Robson, “The Market for Ab-

stract Expressionism,” Archives of American Art

Journal, vol. 25, no. 3 (1985): 19-23. See also:

193

194

NOTES TO PP. 53-6

Deirdre Robson, “The Avant-Garde and the On-Guard: Some Influences of the Potential Market for the First Generation Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s and Early 1950s,” Art Journal, vol. 47, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 215-21. Still's contempt for the market has long outlasted his own death. On this, see: Andrew Decker, “Still Waiting,” Art News, vol. 94, no. 2 (February 1995): 112-15. 13. Irving Sandler, The New York School (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 19-23. 14. See: David Craven, Poetics and Politics in the Art of Rudolf Baranik (Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 11-46. (This book was actually published in December 1996 but copyrighted for 1997.) 15. Robson, “Market for Abstract Expressionism,” p. 23. 16. Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, edited by Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene V. Thaw (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), document no. 94, p. 257. 17. Ellen Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989), p. 205. 18. B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), P- XX, pp. 260-1. 19. E. de Kooning, Selected Writings, p. 203. 20. Charles Harrison, Essays on Art and Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 240. 21. Arnold Glimcher, Interview with Dan Rice, in Mark Rothko: The 1958-59 Murals (New York, Pace Gallery, 28 October-25 November 1978), p. 2. Cited in Mark Rothko: The Seagram Mural Project (Liverpool, Tate Gallery, 28 May 1988-12 February 1989), p. 11. 22. Mark Rothko: Seagram Mural Project, p. 14.

23. Ibid. 24. James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 5. 25. Richard Shiff, in his fine Introduction, discusses Newman's career in this regard. See: Newman, Selected Writings, p. xxvi. 26. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: Selected Writings, p. 190. 27. Nicholas Xenos, “Uncommon Ground: Marxism in the USA,” The Nation (une 27, 1987): 895. See also: Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present (London: Ver50, 1987). Buble doesa good job of discussing

the importance during this period of Monthly Review, Dissent, New Politics, and other U.S.

publications on the left during the 1950s and

1960s. 28. Roger Burbach and Orlando Nunez So-

to, Fire in the Americas (London: Verso Press,

1987), p. 35.

29. I. F Stone, The Hidden History of the Ko-

ean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952).

30. Marta Traba, introductory essay, Mu-

seum of Modern Art of Latin America: Selections

from the Permanent Collection (Washington, D.C.:

General

Secretariat,

Organization

American States, 1985), p. 15. 31. Leo Huberman, Man’s

(1936)

(New

York:

1952), p. vii.

Monthly

of

Worldly Goods

Review

Press,

32. There are seven letters from Leo Huberman to Charles Pollock in 1937/8 in which

they are discussing as well as debating the role

of the Communist Party within the Congress

of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union in Detroit. This correspondence is in the Charles

Pollock Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington,

D.C.

I am

grateful to Garnett

McCoy for calling this material to my attention.

33. Interview with Meyer Schapiro and Lil-

lian Milgram by the author (July 15, 1992),

Rawsonville, Vt. 34,

Burbach

and Nijiz

Soto, Fire in the

Americas, p. 35. For a tribute to Baran, See: Paul Sweezy, “Paul Alexander Baran: A Person-

al Memoir,” Monthly Review, vol. 16, no. 11 (March 1965): 32ff. 35. Burbach and Nufiez Soto, Fire in the

Americas, p. 36. The first Spanish edition of Baran’s book appeared in Mexico City: Paul Baran, La Economia politica del crecimiento (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econémica, 1959).

Because it quickly emerged as a best-seller in Latin America, this book went through five reprintings between 1959 and 1973. In 1975 a revised second edition was published that

has now gone through seven reprintings. 36.

Burbach and Nufiez Soto, Fire in the

Americas, p. 36.

37. Concerning the courageous role of Leo

Huberman in publicly challenging the Mc-

Carthy hearings, see: I. F. Stone, The Haunted

Fifties: 1953-1963 (New York: Little, Brown, 1963), pp. 43-5. 38. Ibid., pp. xv-xxi.

NOTES TO PP. 56-62

39. For Clement Greenberg's starring role

in the witch-hunts, see: Annette Cox, Art-asPolitics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde

and Society (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,

Culture,” pp. 47-58, both in Mass Culture, ed. Rosenberg and White.

48.

Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 298.

For information on Herbert Ferber studying

1982), pp. 141-52.

with members of the Frankfurt School, see:

Anthropology,” in The Left Academy, edited

itics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997),

40.

Eleanor Burke Leacock, “Marxism and

by Bertell Ollman and Edward Vernoff (New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 24276.

41. James Clifford, “Ethnographic Surreal-

ism,” in The Predicament of Culture (Cam-

Ann Gibson, Abstract Expressionism, Other Polp. 173.

49, Interview with Meyer Schapiro by the

author (February 19, 1993), telephone.

50.

Ibid.

51. Interview with Martin Jay by the au-

bridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988),

thor (May 13, 1993), telephone. For essays

42. See, e.g., the essays on history and so-

thal (1900-1993),” Telos, no. 93 (Fall 1993):

pp. 117-51.

ciology in The Left Academy, ed. Ollman and

Vernoff, pp. 9-52, 202-42. Among the most noteworthy Marxian studies published during

the 1950s (and there were a number of others as noted above) were the now classic works

by William Appleman Williams - American-

about Lowenthal, see: Martin Jay, “Leo Lowen-

127-30; and also the earlier 1980 special issue entitled “Tribute to Leo Lowenthal,” Telos, no.

45 (Fall 1980).

52. Interview with Meyer Schapiro by the

author (February 19, 1993), telephone.

Russian Relations, 1781-1947 (1952) and The

53. Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbar-

(1951) and The Power Elite (1956). For an ex-

Pierre Klossowksi in Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, vol. 5, no. 1 (1936): 40-68; reprinted as

Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) - and by C. Wright Mills, such as his White Collar cellent tribute to a prominent scholar and left-

wing dissident during the worst excesses of

the McCarthy period, see: Mike Wallace, “William Appleman Williams,” The Nation (April 9, 1990): 476-7. This harsh period also saw the

publication of such studies on the left as How-

ard Zinn’s La Guardia in Congress (1959) and

keit,” published in French translation by

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schock-

en, 1969), pp. 217-51.

54. Interview with Meyer Schapiro by the

author (February 19, 1993), telephone. 55. Ibid.; and Interview with Martin Jay

various volumes in the monumental project

by the author (May 13, 1993), telephone.

Movement (1947-78).

Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement, Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, vol. 7, nos. 1-2

by Philip Foner, History of the American Labor

43. Interview with Meyer Schapiro and Lil-

lian Milgram by the author (July 15, 1992), Rawsonville, Vt. 44.

Rosenberg, “Marxism: Criticism and/or

48.

For a history of the Frankfurt School's

Action,” pp. 252-3.

exile in New York City, see: Martin Jay, The

Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frank-

furt School and the Institute of Social Research,

1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 39-40. 46. Irving Howe, “Notes on Mass Culture,”

in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America,

edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Man-

ning White (New York: Glencoe Press, 1957),

Pp. 496-503, at p. 497.

47. T. W. Adorno, “Television and the Pat-

terns of Mass Culture,” pp. 474-88, and Leo

Lowenthal, “Historical Perspectives of Popular

56.

Meyer Schapiro,

Review of Nikolaus

(1938): 291-3. The translation from the Ger-

man text, which is in Appendix A, was first

published as follows: Meyer Schapiro, “A Critique: Pevsner on Modernity (1938),” translat-

ed by David Craven, Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997): 157-8.

57. T. W. Adorno, “Ober den Fetischchar-

akter in der Musik and die Regression des Hér-

ens,” Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, vol. 7, no.

3 (1938): 321-56. 58. Fora tightly documented presentation

of the main theoretical points of the Frank-

furt School, see: Stuart Ewen, Captains of Con-

Sciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill,

1976).

59. Frank Presbrey, The History and Devel-

opment of Advertising (Gatden City, N.Y.: Dou-

195

196

NOTES TO PP. 62-5

bleday, 1929), p. 613. Cited in Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, p. 4. 60. Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, pp. 41-8. 61. Edward A. Filene, Successful Living in the Machine Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1931), p. 157. 62. Jiirgen Habermas, “The Inimitable Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung,” Telos, no. 45 (Fall 1980): 219-21. For some critiques by Habermas of his mentors in the Frankfurt School,

see: Jiirgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985): chap. 5, on Adorno and Horkheimer; and the essays on Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse in Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophischepolitische Profile (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981). 63. Habermas, “Inimitable Zeitschrift,” p. 219. 64. For a discussion of the etymology of the term critical theory, see: Jay, Dialectical Imagination, chap. 2. 65. The reader is directed to the various issues of the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, vols. 1-8 (nos. 1 & 2), all of which were published in German from 1932 to 1939 (even after the journal was moved to New York in 1934), and to those of its heir, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vols. 8 (no. 3)-9, published in English from late 1939 through 1941. 66. Interview with Meyer Schapiro by the author (February 19, 1993), telephone. 67. James Thompson and Susan Raines, “A Vermont Visit with Meyer Schapiro (August 1991),” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 3-12, at p. 9. 68. Ibid. 69. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and C ization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955). 70. See: Herbert Marcuse, “A Reply to Erich Fromm,” Dissent, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1956): 79-81; and, in the same issue, Erich Fromm, “A Counter-Rebuttal” (pp. 81-3). 71, Meyer Schapiro, “Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 17 (1956): 147-78. A shorter version by Schapiro also appeared as “Two Slips of Leonardo and a Slip of Freud,” Psychoanalysis: Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychology, vol. 4 (1955-6): 3-8. The longer version was based ona lecture that Schapiro gave on January 12, 1955, at the William Alanson White Institute,

New York City. For an important recent dis-

cussion of the contribution of Schapiro to this debate around Freud, see: Teresa del Conde, Las ideas estéticas de Freud (Mexico City: Grijal-

bo, 1985), pp. 136-46. In an interview, Meyer Schapiro stated: “My interest in Freud goes back to my teenage

years when I first read about Freud in a social-

ist publication, The Call... . Althoughit is rewarding to read Freud’s work,

his reductive

approach to human development is unfortunate. Freud does not allow for the transforma-

tion of people, owing to numerous historical

factors, within the process of maturation - a

process that is far more complex, far less predetermined than Freud allows in such books as Civilization and Its Discontents.” Interview

with the author (February 19, 1993), tele-

phone.

72. Fredric Jameson, “Towards a Labidinal

Economy of Three Modern Painters,” Social Text, vol. 1, no. 1 (1979): 189-99.

73. Meyer Schapiro, “Art and Society,”

February 1939 lecture and Introduction to the Fine Arts Lecture Series at the Brooklyn Acad-

emy of Music (unpublished four-page type-

written manuscript), in Folder 17, Personal Pa-

pers of Meyer Schapiro, New York City. 74, Schapiro, “Critique: Pevsner on Modernity,” pp. 157-8. 75. Schapiro, “Art and Society” (typescript), p. 1. 76. 77.

Ibid. Ibid.

79. 81,

Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 81. Hayden White, “The Burden of Histo-

78. Ibid., p. 3.

ry,” in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 27-50. 81. Schapiro, “Art and Society” (typescript), p. 3.

82. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Qual-

ity of Avant-Garde Art,” Art News, vol. 56, no.

4 (Summer 1957): 36-42, at pp. 41-2. 83, Schapiro, “Art and Society” (typescript), p. 3. 84.

All the major

experts on the formal

morphology or stylistic development of Ab-

stract Expressionism rightly agree on 1946-7 as the crucial period for the above-mentioned artists. Only Gottlieb, who originated his pictographs in 1941/2, arrived at his first mature style somewhat earlier. On this issue, see the

NOTES TO PP. 65-9

very perceptive piece by Hubert Damisch, Fenétre jaune cadmium, ou Les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1984), p. 78. By means of some tight formal analysis, Damisch locates the emergence of Pollock’s mature

style in 1946.

See also: Irving Sandler, The Triumph of

(1937), pp. 23-31, and an important book,

The Painting of the French Revolution (1938).

Dialectics, which lasted for nine issues, was published from 1937 to 1939.

One of Meyer Schapiro’s earliest publica-

tions was a translation with commentary (that went unsigned) of Engels’s 1847 critique of

American Painting (New York: Harper & Row,

Goethe. It appeared in New Masses, vol. 8, no.

Greenberg, “American-Type Painting,” in Art

tensive discussion

1970),

pp.

125,

109-10,

158;

or Clement

3 (September 1932), pp. 13-14. For a more exof this piece,

see: David

of Critical Theory,”

Oxford Art

and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp.

Craven, “Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch, and the

tensive scholarly treatment of the transitional

Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 42-54.

208-29, at pp. 216-19. Perhaps the most ex-

moment for Abstract Expressionism is to be found in Robert C. Hobbs and Gail Levin, Ab-

Stract Expressionism: The Formative Years (Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F. Johnson Museum, 1978).

See also: Mackie Alwyn, Art/Talk, Theory and Practice in Abstract Expressionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Stephen

Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-

ty Press, 1991); Paul Schimmel, The Interpreta-

tive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism (Newport Beach, Calif.: Newport

Beach Harbor Art Museum, 1986); and Jef-

frey Wechsler, Abstract Expressionism, Other Di-

mensions (New Brunswick, N,J.:

Jane Voorhees

Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 1989).

85. Meyer Schapiro, “From Mozarabic to

Emergence

89. Engels, “Part Played by Labor,” p. 359.

90. Schapiro, script), p. 3. 91.

“Art and Society” (type-

T.J. Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Ex-

pressionism,” October, no. 69 (Summer 1994):

23-48, at pp. 23-48. See note 32 to the Introduction.

92. For an insightful look at this point, see: Alan Wallach, “In Search of a Marxist Theory of Art History,” Block, no. 4 (1991): 15-17.

93. Meyer Schapiro, “On Perfection, Co-

herence, and Unity of Form in Content,” in

Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, edited by Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1966), pp. 3-15, at p. 5.

94. Ibid., p. 14. 95. Ibid., p. 15.

96. Schapiro, “Art and Society” (type-

Romanesque in Silos,” reprinted in Roman-

script), p. 4.

George Braziller, 1977), pp. 28-101

86. Meyer Schapiro, “On the Aesthetic At-

stract Art,” Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1 January-March 1937): 77-98. Reprinted in Mod-

titude in Romanesque Art” (1947), in Roman-

esque Art, pp. 1-27, at p. 1. 87. Schapiro, “Art and Society” (type-

em

George Braziller, 1978), pp. 185-211, with the quotation in question on p. 195.

esque Art, vol. 1 of Selected Papers (New York:

script), p. 3.

88. Friedrich Engels, “The Part Played by

Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man”

(1876), reprinted in Karl Marx and Friedrich

97. Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of AbArt:

98.

Selected Papers,

vol.

2

(New

York:

Dore Ashton, The New York School: A

Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of Cal-

ifornia Press, 1992), p. 56.

99. Meyer Schapiro, “The Patrons of Revo-

al Publishers, 1984), pp. 358-68, at p. 358.

lutionary Art,” Marxist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3 (October-December 1937): 462-6.

Dialectics, no. 8. (1938-9): 1-14. This was a

Epoch” (1938), reprinted in Leon Trotsky on

Engels: Selected Works (New York: Internation-

The essay by Engels was in fact published in

100.

Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics in Our

left-wing New York journal about art and

Art and Literature, edited by Paul Siegel (New

Milton

Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist (Boston: G. K.

Marxism that was founded by the Critics Group Series, which included art historian

Brown,

a former student

of Meyer

Schapiro. Through this Critics Group Series, Milton Brown also published an essay, “The Marxist Approach to Art,” Dialectics, no. 2

York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 104-14, at

p. 110. For more on this, see: David Craven, Hall, 1997). 101. Schapiro, “Patrons of Revolutionary

Art,” p. 465.

197

198

NOTES TO PP. 69-76

85.

102. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p.

103. Newman: Selected Writings, p. 112; The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, edited by George Scrivani (New York and Madras: Hanuman Books), p. 57; and Reinhardt, Artas-Art: Selected Writings, pp. 27-8. 104, Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 140-1. 105. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (1861/2), translated by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, reprinted in Marx and Engels on Art and Literature (St.Louis: Telos Press, 1973), pp. 72-3, at p. 64. 106. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1947/8), edited by C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1977), p. 109. 107. Ibid. 108. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872), translated by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, reprinted in Marx and Engels on Art and Literature, pp. 72-7, at p. 73. 109. Ad Reinhardt, “Paintings and Pictures,” in Art-as-Art: Selected Writings, pp. 11820, at p. 119. 110. Ad Reinhardt, “Abstraction vs. Illustration,” in Art-as-Art: Selected Writings, pp. 479, at p. 49; emphasis added. 111. Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: Selected Writings, p. 10. 112. Norman Lewis, “Thesis, 1946,” in Norman Lewis: From the Harlem Renaissance to Abstraction (New York, Kenkeleba Gallery, 10 May 1989-25 June 1989), p. 63. 113. Norman Lewis, “Letter to James Yeargans” (1947), in Norman Lewis, p. 64. 114. Lewis, “Thesis, 1946,” p. 63. 115. Among the important contemporary thinkers to acknowledge this theoretical link between Marx and Kropotkin is Noam Chomsky. See Noam Chomsky, “The Relevance of Anarcho-Syndicalism,” in Radical Priorities, edited by C. P. Otero (Montréal: Black Rose Press, 1981), pp. 245-62. 116. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 95-6. 117. Ibid., pp. 50-1. 118. Ibid., pp. 304-8. 119. Friedrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, vol. 9, no. 2 (1941): 200-25,

120.

Paul

Mattick,

“Anton

Pannekoek

(1873-1960),” New Politics, vol. 1, no. 2 (Win-

ter 1962): 107-15. 121.

122.

Ibid., p. 112.

Newman used this concept with an

emphatically anarchist inflection. See: New-

man, Selected Writings, pp. 307-8. 123.

Interview with Meyer Schapiro by the

author (January 22, 1995), telephone; David

Craven, “Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram

Schapiro with David Craven: A Series of Inter-

views (July 15, 1992-January 22, 1995),” Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997): 159-68, at pp. 167-8.

124, Harold Rosenberg, “Signs [On Adolph

Gottlieb’s Pictographs],” Artworks and Packages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969),

p. 198.

125.

Reinhardt,

Art-as-Art: Selected

Writ-

ings, p. 50. For a very fine discussion of this

dimension of Reinhardt’s aesthetic, see: YveAlain Bois, “The Limit of Almost,” in Ad Rein-

hardt (New York, Museum of Modern Art, May 30-September 2, 1991), pp. 11-35. See also:

Gary Kornblau,

“The

Inside-Out Art of Ad

Reinhardt,” Art Issues, no. 18 (Summer 1991):

10-12; and David Pagel, “The Politics of Neg-

ativity,” Art Issues, no. 18 (Summer 1991): 1317.

126.

Ad Reinhardt, “The Philadelphia Pan-

el,” in It Is, edited by Irving Sandler and Philip Pavia (Spring 1960), p. 35.

127. For an analysis of Greenberg's basis

in positivism,

see: David

Craven,

“Clement

Greenberg and the ‘Triumph’ of Western Art,”

Third Text, no. 25 (Winter 1993-4): 3-9.

128. T. W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), p. 38: “Er [der Moderne] ist privativ, von Anbeginn mehr Negation dessen, was nun nicht mehr sein soll, als positive Parole.” 129. T. W. Adorno, “Commitment” (1962), translated by Francis McDonagh, reprinted in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, edited by

Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York:

Continuum, 1978), pp. 317, 312. 130.

Ibid., p. 304.

131. Ibid., pp. 303, 318.

132, Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, p. 38: “Er

negiert aber nicht, wie von je die Stile, vorher-

gehende Kunstiibungen sondern Tradition als solche.” 133. Ibid.,

p. 41:

“Insofern

ist Moderne

Mythos, gegen sich selbst gewandt; dessen

NOTES

TO

PP.

76-82

Zeitlosigkeit wird zur Katastrophe des die zeitliche Kontinuitat zerbrechenden Augen-

274. Lasch’s insightful but disturbing essay

134, Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 53.

mentioned studies by Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Kolko, Howard Zinn, and Ellen Schrecker.

blicks.” 13S.

Reinhardt,

136.

Robert Motherwell, Letter to William

ings, p. 49.

Art-as-Art: Selected Writ-

Baziotes, in Amagansett (September 6, 1944), William Baziotes Papers, Archives of American

Art, N:70-21: no. 139. 137. Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter's World,” Dyn, vol. 1, no. 6 (1944): 9-

14. Because this essay was extensively edited by Stephanie Terenzio for The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, | am citing the rather

inaccessible - but complete - version in Dyn. The essay was edited in a way that deletes much of the leftist political analysis, especially those passages where Motherwell draws on

Marxian discourse. Nonetheless, the book is invaluable otherwise, and Stephanie Terenzio is to be commended for her considerable efforts. 138. 139. 140.

141. 142. 143.

S. An earlier version of the first part of this chapter, which was based on fewer documents (since I had not yet received the FBI Files on Krasner and Motherwell) was presented at the

Tate Gallery, Liverpool, in October 1992 and

then published as “New Documents: The Un-

published

“The

Cold

War”

(1962), Discovering the Present (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 301-4; emphasis added.

See also: Harold Rosenberg, “Breton - A Di-

alogue,” View, vol. 2 (1942): n.p. 2. Concerning the incident with Schapiro, see: Elizabeth Pochoda, “Reading The Nation (February 3, 1992): 129. 3. About the debate around I. F. the following: “Strange New Pals in Editorial, New York Times (August

Around,”

Stone, see the KGB,” 13, 1992);

“The Stone Affair Deconstructed,”

Editorial,

New York Times (September 26, 1992); D. D.

Guttenplan, “Izzy an Agent?” The Nation (August 3-10, 1992): 124-5; and D. D. Gutten-

plan, “Stone Untumed,” The Nation (September 28, 1992): 312-13.

4. Christopher Lasch, “The Costs of Our Cold War,” New York Times (July 13, 1990), p.

Files on Ad

Reinhardt,

Mark

Abstract Expressionism, edited by David Thistle-

wood (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press and the Tate Gallery, 1993), pp. 41-52. 6.

Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Ex-

posing the Secret War against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), p.9

7. Ibid., pp. 15-17. 8. Herbert Mitgang,

“When

Picasso

Spooked the FBI,” New York Times (November

11, 1990), sec. 2, pp. 1, 39. See also: Donald

Drew

Egbert, Social Radicalism and the Arts

(New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 340-6.

9. Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers, pp. 20710. Ibid., p. 214. 11.

Rosenberg,

FBI

Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb,” in American

21.

CHAPTER THREE. THE FBI FILES ON THE NEW YORK SCHOOL 1. Harold

about the Cold War should come as no surPrise to those who are familiar with the afore-

Barbara Rose, Introduction, in Art-as-

Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. xiv. Reinhardt's lifelong commitment to socialism has also been

acknowledged by one of his friends on the left

in the art world, namely, Rudolf Baranik. Interview with Rudolf Baranik by the author (une 10, 1994), New York City.

12. Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers, p. 12.

13. Because this material is presently un-

published and is unpaginated except within each separate government memorandum, I refer to the pagination of these documents by

means of those localized references. 14. FBI File on Ad Reinhardt, Archives of

the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.,

unpublished (October 16, 1941), pp. 1, 11.

15. See, e.g., Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper &

Row, 1980), pp. 407-8. See also: Jasmine Alinder, Virtual Pilgrimage: Patrick Nagatani’s Japan-

ese American Concentration Camp Portfolio (Al-

buquerque: Albuquerque Museum, 1998).

16. Executive Order 10450: Explanation of

199

200

NOTES

TO

PP. 82-7

Exemptions (Washington, D.C.: Department of Justice Publishing Wing, December 4, 1986), p. 1. 17. Michael Corris, “Ad Reinhardt: The Invisible College of Conceptual Art,” Flash Art International, vol. 27, no. 178 (October 1994): 49. See also: Michael Corris, “The Difficult Freedom of Ad Reinhardt,” in Art Has No History!, edited by John Roberts (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 63-110. 18. FBI File on Ad Reinhardt (January 5, 1955), pp. 8-10. Much of the information is deleted because of exemption “b-1.” 19. Ibid., p. 11. 20. Ibid., pp. 12-14. 21. Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers, pp. 89,. 37-42. 22. Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, Roll N/69-100: 395-412. 23. Andrew Rosenthal, “The U.S. Was a Haven for Nazi War Criminals: An Interview with Allan Ryan,” New York Times (April 26, 1987), p. E2. See also two related studies: Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists (New York: Little, Brown, 1988); and Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1988). 24. Rosenthal, “U.S. Was a Haven.” 25. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John O'Neill and introduced by Richard Shiff (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 251. 26. For a comprehensive discussion of this work of the Frankfurt School during the 1940s, see: Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute ofSocial Research, 1923-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 170-2, 219-39. 27. Ibid. 28. T. W, Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levison. and Stephen R. Nevitt, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Row,

1950).

Races of Mankind (New York: Public Affairs Committee,

1943). For Reinhardt's chronolo-

gy, see: Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: Selected Writings,

p.6.

33.

Benedict and Weltfish, Races of Man-

kind, pp. 24, 14-15. 34, Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: DuBois and the Illusion

of Race,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1 (Au-

tumn 1985): 21. This article was in a special issue entitled “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference”

that was organized and edited by Henry Louis

Gates Jr.

35.

FBI File on Ad Reinhardt (April 22,

36.

FBI

37.

FBI File on Lee Krasner, Archives of the

1958), p. 1.

1958), p. 5.

File on

Ad

Reinhardt

(June

22,

Department of Justice, Washington, D.C. (November 14-December 16, 1957), pp. 1-2.

38. Interview with Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram by the author (July 15, 1992),

Rawsonville, Vt. 39.

FBI File on Ad Reinhardt (November 8-

40.

FBI File on Ad Reinhardt January 25,

11, 1960), p. 1.

1962), pp. 1-3.

41. Fora discussion of Baranik’s centrality to this artworld activism, see: David Craven, Poetics and Politics in the Art of Rudolf Baranik

(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities

1997), pp. 11-46. 42.

Press,

FBI File on Adolph Gottlieb, Memoran-

dum from the U.S. State Department (January

8, 1963), pp. 1-3. 43.

FBI File on Ad Reinhardt (February 25,

45.

FBI File on Mark

1962), pp. 1-2. 44. FBI File on Adolph Gottlieb (January 8, 1963), pp. 1-3. Rothko,

Memoran-

dum to the White House, Special Assistant to

the President (June 4, 1965), pp. 1-3. 46.

Ibid.

47. For the public statement signed by

Motherwell et al., see: “A Matter of Record,”

29. Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectik der Aufklirung (1944), translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 168ff

Dissent, vol. 9, no. 3 (Summer 1962), editorial

31. T. W. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, pp.

man’s critique of Siqueiros, which appeared

32. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The

Critic in the September 1962 issue of Art News,

30. Ibid., pp. 170-1, 173, 201.

41-5,

page. A related note about this incident and

statement also appeared in New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought, vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 128, as “The Siqueiros Affair.” For New-

in a book review of John Canaday's Embattled

NOTES TO PP. 88-91

see: Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 124-9. See

also: Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: Selected Writings, p. 8.

48.

Ad

Reinhardt,

“What

Are

Artists’

Crimes as Artists?” Dissent, vol. 10, no. 2

(Spring 1963): 200, reprinted in Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: Selected Writings, p. 178. 49.

Interview with Meyer Schapiro and Lil-

lian Milgram by the author (July 15, 1992),

Rawsonville, Vt.

50. Meyer Schapiro, “On David [Alfaro] Si-

queiros ~ A Dilemma for Artists,” Dissent, vol.

10, no. 2 (Spring 1963): 106, 197. $1.

FBI File on Mark

Rothko,

Memoran-

dum from Head Counter-Intelligence Branch,

U.S. Marine Corps (April 5, 1965), pp. 1-4. $2.

Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: Selected Writings,

53.

Noam

p.8.

Chomsky

and Edward S. Her-

man, The Political Economy of Human Rights, 2 vols. (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

54. Paul Sweezy, “U.S. Imperialism in the

1990s,” Monthly Review, vol. 41, no. 5 (October 1989): 5-6. For a perceptive and welldocumented study of the key role played by

the Cuban Revolution in the emergence of the

New Left during the 1960s, see: Van Gosse,

Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of the New Left (London: Verso,

1994).

55. Sweezy, “U.S. Imperialism in the

1990s.”

56. “Declaration to U. N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson,” New York Times (April 18, 1965S),

p. 22. The

credit line says that this

statement was initiated by Artists and Writers

Dissent. A copy of the statement and signatures can be found in the Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, N/69-101: 0081.

57.

Interview with Rudolf Baranik by the

author (May 19, 1993, and June 10, 1994),

New York City. 58.

“End

Your Silence,” New

York Times

(une 27, 1965), p. 18. The credit line here asks for further contributions to Artists Protest. A

copy of this statement exists, e.g., in the Per-

sonal Papers of Rudolf Baranik, Santa Fe, N.M.

in America, vol. 60, no. 2 (March-April 1972): 13.

59. FBI File on Ad Reinhardt (November 1, 1966), pp. 1-6. 60. This material is aptly cataloged for the most part in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. xviixxvii. For a Motherwell’s

more extensive discussion of political activism, see: David

Craven, “Aesthetics and Ethics in the Writ-

ings of Motherwell and Schapiro,” Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (1996): 2832,

61.

Robert Motherwell et al., An Open Let-

ter to the U.S. Government (June 5, 1970), cited in Lucy Lippard, A Different War: Vietnam in

Art (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1990), p. 120. 62.

On behalf of the Harvey Gantt for U.S.

Senate Campaign in 1990, Gemini GEL printed a “limited

edition

series of signed

and

numbered prints especially by a group of outstanding artists to help Harvey Gantt defeat

Jesse Helms. We are pleased to announce that

the Gantt campaign has agreed to offer a print of your choice, depending upon availability, with a donation

of $1,000.” This statement

comes from a Gemini GEL Public Announcement (Fall 1990) that was made available through six different U.S. Galleries in New York City (including Leo Castelli, Hirschl & Adler, and

Ronald Feldman). 63.

FBI

File

on

Robert

Motherwell,

Ar-

chives of the U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.: Cross-Reference no. 1:

Memorandum from the White House on May

11, 1965, and the FBI Response to this Mem-

orandum on May 21, 1965, pp. 1-4. 64.

FBI File on Robert Motherwell, Cross-

Reference no. 6 (1965), pp. 1-6. This document includes several pages of photocopies from a 1965 U.S. Senate Judiciary Commitee

study, which was prepared by the Subcommit-

tee to Investigate the Administration of the In-

ternal Security Act and Other Internal Securi-

ty Laws. Published by the U.S. Government

Printing Office (USGPO)

in 1965, this study

For a discussion of art-world activism during

was entitled The Anti- Vietnam Agitation and the

icalization of the Avant-Garde,” Art in America,

Infiltration and Exploitation. On pp. 194 and

97ff. See also Baranik’s emendations of the ar-

investigation for his role in supporting antiwar agitation.

this period, see: Therese Schwartz, “The Politvol. 59, no. 6 (November-December

1971):

ticle: Rudolf Baranik, “Letter to the Editor,” Art

Teach-In Movement: The Problem of Communist

248, Robert Motherwell is cited as being under

201

202

NOTES

TO

PP.

91-8

65. FBI File on Robert Motherwell, CrossReference no. 4 (March 17-24, 1958), p. 3. 66. FBI File on Robert Motherwell, Referral no. 2, Archives of the Department of State, Washington, D.C. (May 2-9, 1958), p. 2. 67. For an assessment of Newman as an artist-activist, see: Barbara Rose, “The Passing and Resurgence of Barnett Newman,” New York Magazine (November 8, 1971): 8ff. Rose refers to Newman as “the unregenerate anarchist who practiced what he preached.” 68. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 76. 69. Lucy Lippard, “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside,” in From the Center (New York: Dutton, 1975), pp. 238-49. See also: Donald B. Kuspit, “Louise Bourgeois: Where Angels Fear to Tread,” Artforum, vol. 25 (March 1987): 115-20. 70. Lippard, “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside,” pp. 240-1.

71, See Ad Reinhardt’s dismissive comments about “political art” in “How Effective Is Social Protest Art?,” a panel discussion moderated by Jeanne Siegel on August 10, 1967, on WBAI in New York City, transcript reprinted in Artwords: Discourse on the 60s and 70s, edited by Jeanne Siegel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), pp. 101-19. 72. Ad Reinhardt, Untitled, from the Portfolio Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1965/6. Collection of the Museum

of Modern Art. For a fine overview of the art-

world mobilization against the war, see: Lippard, A Different War, and David E. James, Review of A Different War, Art Issues, no. 18 (Summer 1991): 26-7. See also the outstanding book on film in the 1960s by David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), which deals with Vietnam in films; and the very important article by Fredtic Jameson, “Periodizing the ‘60s,” in The Ideologies of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 53-92. 73. Lawrence Alloway, “Willem de Kooning” (1969), Topics in American Art since 1945

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), pp. 62-4, at p. 63. For a more favorable view of the untesolved quality of de Kooning's work, see the first monograph published on the artist: Thomas B. Hess, Willer de Kooning (New York: George Braziller, 1959). 74. Alloway, “Willem de Kooning,” p. 64.

75.

The

Collected

Writings

of Willem

de

Kooning, edited by George Scrivani (New York and Madras: Hanuman Books), p. 11.

76. Elaine de Kooning, Statement from her

Notebooks of 1951, Personal Papers of Elaine

de Kooning, cited by Marjorie Luyckx in her preface to E. de Kooning, Selected Writings,

p. 16.

77. George Dondero, “Modern Art Shackled to Communism,” Congressional Record,

81st Congress, 1st session (1949), vol. 95, pt. 9: 11584-S. For an accessible reprint, see: The-

ories of Modem Art, edited by Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 496-7. See also: George Dondero, Speech in the U.S. House of Representatives June 14, 1956), Congressional Record,

84th Congress, 2d session (1956), vol. 102, pt.

8: 10419-25. 78. U.S. Congressman Francis Walter claimed, for example, that thirty-four of the sixty-seven artists in a USIA exhibition of that year, which included Pollock's Cathedral, had affiliations with communist causes. See Con-

gressional Record, 86th Congress, Ist session

(1959), vol. 105, pt. 7: 9746-8. The best article

about art and McCarthyism is one by Jane De-

Hart Mathews, “Art and Politics in Cold War

America,” American Historical Review, vol. 81,

no. 4 (October 1976): 762-87. See also: Taylor Littleton and Maltby Sykes, Advancing Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation

at Mid-Century (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989); and William Hauptman, “The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade,” Artforum, vol. 12, no. 2 (October 1973): 48-52. 79. An interview with Congressman Don-

dero by art critic Emily Genauer, quoted in Emily Genauer, “Still Life with Red Herring,” Harper’s Magazine, vol. 199 (1949): 89.

80. FBI File on Robert Motherwell, CrossReference no. 4 (March 17-24, 1958), p. 3. 81. FBI File on Robert Motherwell, CrossReference no. 8 (December 26, 1965~January

3, 1966), pp. 4-5. 82.

DeHart Mathews,

pp. 762-87.

“Art and Politics,”

83. Ellen Landau, Jackson Pollock (New York: Harry Abrams, 1989), pp. 15-17, 125.

For a look a the FBI monitoring of Tennessee

Williams's left-wing involvements, see: Mit-

gang, Dangerous Dossiers, pp. 119-21.

NOTES TO PP. 98-106

84. Hilton Kramer, “The Jackson Pollock Myth” (1957), reprinted in The Age of the Avant-Garde (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 336. 85. DeHart Mathews, “Art and Politics,” 770-1. 86. The point about competing factions of corporate capital was made by Jane DeHart Mathews (ibid., pp. 768-9). Her point was advanced somewhat by Fred Orton in a later essay. See: Fred Orton, “Footnote One: The Idea of the Cold War,” in American Abstract Expressionism, ed. Thistlewood, pp. 185ff. This essay was recently republished in Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 205-18. 87. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,” Art News, vol. 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 36-42. 88. Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 173, 197, 290. 89. DeHart Mathews, “Art and Politics,” p. 778. 90. Richard M. Nixon, Letter to Charles E. Plant (uly 18, 1949), Hudson Walker Papers, Archives of American Art. Cited by DeHart Mathews, “Art and Politics,” p. 766. 91. Mark Rothko, “The Portrait and the Modern Artist” (1943), in New York School: The First Generation, edited by Maurice Tuchman (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1965), pp. 24-6. 92. Harold Rosenberg, “The Concept of Action in Painting,” in Artworks and Packages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 214-17. 93. Adolph Gottlieb, “Jackson Pollock: An Artists’ Symposium, Part I," Art News, vol. 66, no. 2 (April 1967): 31. 94. Adolph Gottlieb, “Gottlieb at Seventy: An Interview with Jeanne Siegel” (1973), in Artwords, ed. Siegel, pp. 30-40, at p. 34. 9. Ibid., p. 40. 96. Newman, Selected Writings, p. 51. 97. Interview with Jon Schueler, a former student of Still, by Susan Landauer (November 13, 1988). Cited in Susan Landauer, “Clyfford Still and Abstract Expressionism in San Francisco,” in Clyfford Still (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1992), pp. 91-104, at pp. 93, 101. 98. Emest Briggs, quoting Still in an inter-

view with Mary Fuller McChesney (April 20, 1966), Private Collection, cited in Susan Landauer, “Clyfford Still,” pp. 94, 101. 99. Clyfford Still, Statement, in Clyfford Still (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, October 18November 29, 1963), pp. 9-10. See also: Andrew Decker, “Still Waiting,” Art News, vol. 94, no. 2 (February 1995): 112-15. 111. I. F Stone, “The Myths That Menace America’s Future” (May 14, 1962), in The Haunted Fifties: 1953-1963 (New York: Little, Brown, 1963), pp. 295-9. 112. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 78, no. 270 (October-December 1955): 428-44. 113. Interview with Meyer Schapiro by the author (November 11, 1993), telephone. 114. Ibid. 115. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (1958), translated by C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 229. 116. Edmund Leach, Claude Lé i-Strauss (New York: Viking Press, 1970), p. 88. CHAPTER FOUR. MYTHMAKING THE McCARTHY PERIOD

IN

1. LF Stone, “The Myths That Menace America’s Future” (May 14, 1962), in The Haunted Fifties: 1953-1963 (New York: Little, Brown, 1963), pp. 295-9, at p. 295. 2. John Dewey, “The House Divided against Itself” (1929), in Individualism Old and New (New York: G. Putnam, 1930), pp. 9-18, at p. 18, 3. I. F Stone, “The First Welts of McCarthyism” (March 15, 1954), in Haunted Fifties, pp. 64-8, at p. 67. 4. Ibid., p. 68. $. IF Stone, “The Cost of Anticommunism” (August 9, 1954), in Haunted Fifties, pp. 68-70, at p. 69. 6. I. Stone, “From Moscow: A New Kind of Confession” (April 11, 1953), in Haunted Fifties, pp. 2-5, at pp. 53-4. 7. 1. F, Stone, “A Visit to Moscow” (May 7, 1956), in Haunted Fifties, pp. 127-31,at p. 130. 8. Stone, “Myths That Menace,” pp. 295-9.

203

204

NOTES TO PP. 106-12

9. Ibid., p. 295. 10. Ibid., p. 299. 11, Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War against America’s Greatest Authors (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 103. 12. Whitney Chadwick, Woman, Art and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), pp. 297-302. For a probing assessment of this book, see: Patricia Mathews, review essay, Art Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 2 June 1991): 336-40. 13. Chadwick, Woman, Art and Society, p. 298. 14. Lawrence Shornack, The American Artistic Elite (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1976), pp. 16, 53. For two rather less favorable assessments of the New Deal programs, see: Meyer Schapiro, “Public Use of Att,” Art Front, vol. 2, no. 10 (November 1936): 4-6; and Jonathan Harris, “State Power and Cultural Discourse,” Block, no. 13 (19878): 28-42. 15. Shornack, American Artistic Elite, p. 16. 16. Clark Clifford, 1948 Memo to President Truman, cited by Gary Wills, Afterword to Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman (London: Weidenfield, 1975), pp. 152ff. 17. 1. F Stone, “John Foster Dulles: Portrait of a Liberator” January 24, 1953), in Haunted Fifties, pp. 12-16, at p. 15. 18. John Dewey, “America ~ By Formula” (1930), pp. 19-34, and “The United States Incorporated,” pp. 35-50, both in Individualism Old and New (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962). 19. Dewey, “America - By Formula,” p. 24. 20. Albert Einstein, “My First Impressions of the USA” (1921), in Ideas and Opinions, edited by Carl Seelig (New York: Crown Publishing, 1954), pp. 3-7, at p. 5. 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Individualism and Conformism in the United States” (1945), in Literary and Philosophical Essays, translated by Annette Michelson (New York: Collier, 1955), pp. 104-13, at p. 108.

(February 13, 1950), in Ideas and Opinions, ed.

Selig, pp. 157-61, at p. 159.

25. Albert Einstein, “Symptoms of Cultural

Decay” (1952), in Ideas and Opinions, ed. Seel-

ig, pp. 166-7, at p. 167.

26. Ibid., pp. 166-7.

27. Erwin Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States” (1953), in Mean-

ing in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 321-46, at pp. 344— 5. For an important reassessment of Panofsky’s

place in art history, see: Andreas Beyer, “Interview with Martin Warmke: The ‘Renationaliza-

tion’ of Art History,” Art Newspaper, no. 19 Qune 1992): 3-4. 28.

Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art Histo-

29.

In an interview with the author on July

Ty,” p. 344-5.

15, 1992, in Rawsonville, Vt., Meyer Schapi-

ro and Lillian Milgram cleared up the facts concerning Schapiro’s behind-the-scenes role in the debate between Newman and Panofsky.

See: David Craven, “Meyer Schapiro and Lil-

lian Milgram Schapiro with David Craven: A

Series of Interviews (July 15, 1992-January 22,

1995),” Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997): 159-68, at

p. 159 (hereafter cited as Craven, “Schapiro

and Milgram: Interviews” and reprinted as Ap-

pendix C). 30.

Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the

United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980),

pp. 340-6. 31. Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night (1951), cited in Howard Zinn, People’s History,

p. 428. 32. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Dis-

aster” (1965), in Against Interpretation (New York: Delta Pub., 1966), pp. 209-25, at pp.

215-17. 33.

34.

Ibid., p. 215.

Alan Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the “So-

viet Threat”: Domestic Sources of the Cold War

Consensus

(Washington,

D.C.:

Policy Studies, 1979), pp. 2, 35. 35.

Institute

for

Aljean Harmetz, “Five Films with Polit-

22. Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs ofa Du-

ical Statements Due in Fall.” New York Times

guin, 1963), p. 75. Cited by Lisa Appignanesi in Simone de Beauvoir (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 104-5. 23. Faitorial, “Conformity versus Freedom,” New Republic, vol. 128, no. 10 (March 9,

323. 37. Ibid. 38. T. W. Adorno, “Aldous Huxley und die Utopia,” in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesell-

tiful Daughter (1988) (Harmondsworth: Pen-

1983): 5

24. Albert Einstein, “National Security”

(September 10, 1983), sec. 2, p. 1.

36. Sontag, “Imagination of Disaster,” p.

schaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), pp. 112-43. For our purposes, it is worth noting

NOTES that Adorno

wrote this critique of Huxley's

book while in the United States in the 1940s. As his “Drucknachweise” to Prismen makes

clear (p. 343): “[Es war] geschrieben im Zusam-

menhang mit einem in Los Angeles 1942

gehaltenen Seminar des Instituts fiir Sozial-

TO

PP.

112-17

48. Harold Rosenberg, “Masculinity: Style

and Cult” (1967), in Discovering the Present

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973),

pp. 42-7. 49. Phyllis Rosenzweig, “The Fifties: Aspects of Criticism in New

York,”

The Fifties:

forschung, in dem Herbert Marcuse iiber Brave New World referierte, wihrend Max Horkheim-

Aspects of Painting in New York (Washington,

trugen. Publiziert in Die Neue Rundschau 1951.”

ly, T.J. Clark focused on these photographs

er und der Autor Thesen iiber Bediirfnis vor39.

Ibid., p. 138: “Die praktische Konse-

D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), pp. 42-7. Subsequentin “Jackson Pollock's Abstraction,” in Recon-

quenz des biirgerlichen ‘Man kann nichts

structing Modernism, edited by Serge Guilbaut

halt, ist genau das perfide ‘Du mu8t dich fii-

243.

machen,’ wie es als Echo des Romans nachgen’ in totalitaren Brave New Worlds.”

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 172-

50. Rosenberg, “Masculinity: Style and

40. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit

Cult,” pp. 42-6.

furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), pp. 42-3.

in American Life (New York: Random House, 1963), pp. 293-4. For an informative overview

(1936): Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie (Frank41,

About the convergence between Futur-

ism and fascism, see: Franz Drége and Michael

Miiller, Die Macht der Schonheit: Avantgarde und

Faschismus

oder Die Geburt der Massenkultur

(Hamburg: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1995),

$1.

$2.

Ibid., p. 47.

Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism

of Hofstadter’s scholarship and politics, see: Eric Foner,

“The Education

of Richard

Hof-

stadter,” The Nation (May 4, 1992): 597-603.

53. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism, pp.

pp. 176, 268.

294-S.

Idea of Modern Art from Paris, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of

York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 45.

42.

Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the

Chicago, 1983), pp. 96-7. 43.

William

Wright,

“An

Interview with

Jackson Pollock” (1950), in Francis V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of

54, Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope (New

55. Ibid., pp. 43-4.

56. On Rothko’s relationship to Emma Goldman’s thought and to anarchism, see: Dore Ashton, About Rothko (New York: Oxford

Modern Art, 1967), p. 79.

University Press, 1983), pp. 8-10; and James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chi-

by Ann Gibson (June 26, 1987), New York

35-6, 40, 72, 174. As for Newman's citation of

44, Interview with Joan Murray Weissman

City, cited in Ann Gibson, The Search for Free-

dom: African American Abstract Painting, 1945-

1975 (New York and Kenkeleba, May 19-July

14, 1991), p. 14, 42. See also: Ann Gibson, Ab-

Stract Expressionism, Other Politics (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 67ff. 45.

Elaine de Kooning,

“A Stroke of Ge-

nius” (1984), in The Spirit of Abstract Expres-

sionism: Selected Writings, introductory essay by Rose Slivka and Preface by Marjorie Luyckx (New York: Braziller, 1994), p. 204. 46. Bertrand Russell, Two Letters to Ad

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.

Emma Goldman, see: Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John O'Neill

and introduced by Richard Shiff (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 21, 44. For Scha-

piro on Rothko's lifelong connection to anar-

chism, see: Craven, “Schapiro and Milgram: Interviews,” p. 167 (reprinted in Appendix C). $7. Emma Goldman, “Patriotism,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1911), pp. 127-

44, at pp. 143-4. As for Goldman’s praise of Nietszche, see: Emma Goldman, Preface, Anar-

Reinhardt (September 24, 1963, and March 9,

chism and Other Essays, p. 50. On her praise

ican of Art, N/69-100: 0032.

ibid., p. 69. On her view of Emerson, Thoreau,

1964), Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of Amer47.

Bertrand

Russell,

0729

and N/69-101:

Letter to Ad Rein-

hardt (August 3, 1965), Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, N/69-101: 0156.

of Leo Tolstoy, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, see and Whitman as anarchists, see ibid., p. 77.

58.

Emma

Woman's

Goldman,

Emancipation,”

“The

Tragedy

in Anarchism

Other Essays, pp. 213-25, at p. 228.

of

and

205

206

NOTES TO PP. 117-20

59. Meyer Schapiro, “Populist Realism,”

Partisan Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (January 1938):

published typed manuscript. On p. 4, Elaine

53-7. Schapiro had also challenged the cult-

de Kooning specifically addresses the abovementioned issue.

earlier essay: his critique (under the pseudo-

An Artists’ Symposium, Part I,” Art News, vol.

of-masculinity discourse in at least one other nym John Kwait) of Wyndam Lewis: John

Kwait, “Notes on a ‘Genius,’” New Masses, vol.

8 (August 1932): 27. On Schapiro’s relation-

ship to the artists and intellectuals of the John Reed Club, who were associated with publica-

tions like the New Masses, see: Craven, “Scha-

piro and Milgram: Interviews,” pp. 164-5 (re-

printed as Appendix C). 60. Schapiro, “Populist Realism,” p. 57.

61. T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschadigten Leben (1944-7) —

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), p. 115:

“Zugleich aber hat der Fortbestand der traditionellen Gesellschaft die Emanzipation der

Frau verbogen. Weniges ist so symptomatisch

fiir den Zerfall der Arbeiterbewegung, wie daB sie davon keine Notiz nimmt.” 62. This incident in the 1940s concerning

Motherwell was recalled by Ben Heller. Cited in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith,

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York:

Harper & Row, 1991), p. 479. 63.

Dore

Ashton,

The New

York School: A

Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of Cal-

ifornia Press, 1992), p. 147.

64.

479-82.

Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, pp. Rosalind Krauss,

in The Optical Un-

conscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993),

a highly original reading of Pollock's work, discusses his paintings in relation to sibling rivalries and the concomitant insecurity as well

as desublimated desire triggered by them. 65.

Unfortunately,

Clark seems

to repeat

70.

Robert Motherwell, “Jackson Pollock:

66, no. 2 (April 1967): 29-30, 64-7, at p. 65.

71. The most probing and fair-minded

analysis of this situation can be found in Lucy

Lippard, “Joan Mitchell” (1972), in From the

Center (New York: Dutton, 1975), pp. 181-4.

On Grace Hartigan and Jackson Pollock, see: Charlotte S. Rubenstein, American Women Artists (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 280. 72. Grace Glueck, “Scenes from a Marriage: Krasner and Pollock,” Art News, vol. 80, no. 10 (December 1981): 56-60, at p. 58. For some

thoughtful assessments of the Krasner—Pollock relationship, see: John Berger, “A Kind of Shar-

ing,” in Keeping a Rendezvous (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 105-16; Anne Wagner,

“Lee Krasner as L. K.,” Representations, no. 25 (Winter 1989), pp. 42ff; and Anna Chave, “Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript,”

Res, no. 24 (Autumn

1993): 95-111.

For a

much harsher view of this relationship and

others of the period, see: Griselda Pollock,

“Killing Men and Dying Women,” in Fred Or-

ton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1996), pp. 219-94. 73. Glueck, “Scenes from a Marriage,” p.

58. See also: Barbara Rose, “Lee Krasner and the Origins of Abstract Expressionism,” Arts

Magazine, vol. 51, no. 6 (February 1977): 96

100; Barbara Rose, “Jackson Pollock at Work: An Interview with Lee Krasner,” Partisan Review, vol. 47, no. 1 (1980): 82-92; Cindy Nemser, “A Conversation with Lee Krasner,” Arts

this standard masculinist reading of the 1930s

Magazine, vol. 47, no. 6 (April 1973): 43-8;

See: Clark,

ville, 1993); Caroline Jones, “Finishing School:

about the “decadence” of these photographs. pp. 172-9,

“Jackson

Pollock's Abstraction,”

66. Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, pp.

478-85.

67. Marjorie Luyckx, Preface, in E. de Kooning, Selected Writings, p. 28.

68. The Collected Writings of Willem de

Kooning, edited by George Scrivani (New York

and Madras: Hanuman Books), pp. 180-1. 69. Phyllis Tuchman, “Interview with Elaine de Kooning” (August 27, 1981), Elaine

de Kooning Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. This is an eleven-page, un-

Robert Hobbs, Lee Krasner (New York: Abbe-

John Cage and the Abstract Expressionist Ego,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 4 (Summer

1993): 628-65; and Kuthy Sandor and Ellen

Landau, Lee Krasner-Jackson Pollock: Kiinstler-

paare-Kiinstlerfreunde (Bern: Kunstmuseum, 1989-90).

74. Klaus Kertess, “Joan Mitchell,” Art in

America, vol. 80, no. 12 (December 1992): 100.

Sce also: Judith Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills, 1988).

75. Lippard, From the Center, p. 182. 76. Ibid., p. 183.

NOTES TO PP. 120-6

77. Chadwick, Woman, Art and Society, p.

308. 78.

Ibid., p. 306.

79. Shirley Kaneda, “Painting and Its Oth-

ers,” Arts Magazine, vol. 65, no. 10 (Summer 1991): 58-64. 80. Tuchman, “Interview with Elaine de

Kooning,” p. 4. 81.

Ad Reinhardt, Art-as-Art: The Selected

Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 27; and Ad Reinhardt, “How to Look

at a Cubist Painting,” PM. Newspaper (January

Painting,” Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1961), pp. 208-29, at p. 211. 93.

On Greenberg's use of criticism in this

regard, see: Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The

Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp.

141-58. For a recent critique of Greenberg's ethnocentrism, see: Lisa Bloom, “Ghosts of Ethnicity: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s and 1980s,” Socialist Review, vol. 24,

nos. 1-2 (1995): 129-63.

94. Clement Greenberg, “To Cope with Decadence,” in Modemism and Modernity, edit-

27, 1946), p. 1J. See also: Thomas B. Hess, The

ed by Benjamin Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut, and

borough Gallery, 1975), p. 29.

Design, 1983), pp. 161-3.

Comics and Satires of Ad Reinhardt (Rome: Marl-

82. B. H. Friedman, Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. xviii.

83. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Ex-

pressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s

(New

Haven:

Yale

University

Press,

1993), p. 267. In his generally favorable review

of this book, Robert Hobbs nonetheless made a point similar to the one I am presenting

here. See: Robert Hobbs, review essay, Art Jour-

nal, vol. 53, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 107.

84. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxiéme Sex (1949), translated by H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 214. 8S. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen, p. 29.

86. Ashton, New York School, p. 17.

87.

Adorno,

pp. 120, 121.

Minima Moralia: Reflexionen,

88. Samir Amin, L’Eurocentrisme: Critique d'une l'idéologie (1988), translated by Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press,

1989), p. vii. 89.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Unzeitgemiisse Be-

trachtungen, pt. Il (The Use and Abuse of History), translated by Adrian Collins (New York

and Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), pp. 18, 24, 28-9.

90. Ibid., p. 72. 91.

On the relationship of the German Ex-

pressonists, especially Emil Nolde, to the con-

cept of “racial purity,” see: Jill Lloyd, “Emil Nolde’s ‘Ethnographic’ Still Lifes: Primitivism,

Tradition, and Modernity,” in The Myths of Primitivism, edited by Susan Hiller (New York:

Routledge, 1981), pp. 90-112.

92. Clement Greenberg, “American-Type

David Solkin (Halifax: Nova Scotia School of

95. David Craven, “Clement Greenberg and the ‘Triumph’ of Western Art,” Third Text, no. 25 (Winter 1993-4): 3-9. See also: Rudolf

Wittkower: Selected Lectures, The Impact of NonEuropean Civilizations on the Art of the West, ed-

ited by Donald Martin Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Amin, LEurocentrisme; and Paul Gilroy, The Black At-

lantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

96. Amin, L’Eurocentrisme, pp. v

97. Harold Rosenberg, “The Concept of

Action in Painting,” in Artworks and Packages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969),

pp. 214-17, at pp. 214, 216-17. 98.

In the conclusion of her favorable re-

view of Leja’s book, Nancy Jachec implied something similar about the ahistorical and

“discourseless” or essentializing nature of Leja’s

particular use of the “modern man” discourse.

See: Nancy Jachec, review essay, Art History, vol. 17, no. 2 June 1994): 297-9.

Leja’s most recent effort at such an analysis

seems more sophisticated theoretically, more nuanced. See: Michael Leja, “Barnett Newman's Solo Tango,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 21, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 556-80.

99. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Qual-

ity of Avant-Garde Art,” Art News, vol. 56, no. 4 (Summer 1957): 36-42, at p. 37.

100. Newman, Selected Writings, p. 106.

101. Ibid., p. 63. 102. Ibid., p. 61-2. 103. Rasheed Araeen, “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts,” Third Text: Third World Perspec-

tives on Contemporary Art and Culture, vol. 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 22.

207

208

NOTES TO PP. 127-32

104. 108. 106. 107.

Newman, Ibid., pp. Ibid., pp. Ibid., pp.

Selected Writings, p. 62. 73, 75. 106-7. 102, 246.

Geography of Modern Art” (1954), in Discovering the Present, pp. 101-2. For a discussion of the nature

108. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global,” in Culture, Civilization and the World-

System, edited by Anthony D. King (Bingham-

ton: State University of New York, 1991), pp.

19-40. Hall’s thesis was developed further by Paul Gilroy in Black Atlantic, pp. 1-19. 109.

Gerardo

Mosquera,

“Raices

en

Ac-

cién,” Revolucién y Cultura (Havana), no. 2 (February 1988): 37-9. 110. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 68; emphasis added. On Lam, see: Wifredo Lam

and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952 (New York,

Studio Museum of Harlem, December 6, 1992April 11, 1993); and also Julia Herzberg, “Wifredo Lam,” Latin American Art, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 18-24. 111, Interview with Sam Middleton by Ann Gibson (March 3, 1988), Amsterdam, Netherlands. Cited by Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 13, 40. See also: AKua McDaniel, “In-

stitutional Support of African American Art: 1930-1945,” in from the Harlem lanta: National 19-27, 112. Gibson,

Selected Essays: Art and Artists Renaissance to the 1980s (AtBlack Arts Festival, 1988), pp.

(quote on p. 12).

Search for Freedom, pp. 12-13

113. Richard Pryor, television appearance,

¢. 1991, 114. Gibson, Search for Freedom, pp. 12-13. 115. Artists for CORE (New York City, Martha Jackson Gallery, May 23-29, 1963). The announcement for the show, which includes an introduction by James Farmer of CORE, lists the artists who contributed to the show as well as its patrons (like Dore Ashton, James Baldwin, and Thomas B. Hess). A copy of this

announcement is in the Ad Reinhardt Papers,

Archives of American Art, N/69-100: 0687-9.

116. Ibid., N/69-100: 0688. 117. Jacob Lawrence, An Open Letter on Behalf of the Artists Committee for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1963), New York City, p. 1. A copy of this letter, which lists Ad

Reinhardt as an officer and Norman Lewis as a

member of the Committee at Large, is found in the Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of Amer-

ican Art, N/69-100: 736. 118.

Harold

Rosenberg,

“Tenth

Street:

A

of art-world

institutions,

see: Har-

old Rosenberg, “The Art Establishment” (1965), in The Sociology of Art and Literature, edited by M. C. Albrecht, J. H. Barnett, M. Griff (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 388-95. 119. These derisive comments about Baziotes by C. J. Bulliet of the Daily News of Chicago are cited in Dore Ashton, New York School, p. 147. 120. The comment by President Truman is cited by Jane DeHart Mathews in “Art and Politics in Cold War America,” American Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 4 (October 197 762-87, at p. 777. William Leuchtenberg, Di tinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a past President of the American Historical Association, has written a forthcoming book on Truman’s racialist views. 121. “Announcement of Secretary of State Marshall: No More Government Money for Modern Art,” New York Times (May 6, 1947), p. 24. Cited in DeHart Mathews, “Art and Politics,” p. 778. 122. DeHart Mathews, “Art and Politics,” p. 774. On this issue, see: Serge Guilbaut, “The Frightening Freedom of the Brush: The Boston Institute of Contemporary and Modern

Att,” in Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Bos-

ton (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art,

1985), pp. 52-93. 123. Dewey, “House Divided against It-

self,” pp. 16-17.

124. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “New York postet préfiguratif,” in Le Regard éloigné (Paris: Plon, 1983), pp. 345-56. The English translation comes

from the edition

in Claude

Lévi-

Strauss, “New York in 1941,” in The View From Afar (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 258— 67. 1am much indebted to the fine discussion of this piece by James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 236-46. 128, Clifford, Predicament of Culture, p. 238. 126. Lévi-Strauss, “New York in 1941,” p. 266. 127. Rosenberg, “Concept of Action in Painting,” p. 220. For a related rereading of Rosenberg's position, see: Fred Orton, “Action, Revolution and Painting,” in American Ab-

NOTES

stract Expressionism, edited by David Thistlewood (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press and the Tate Gallery, 1993), pp. 147-78. This

essay has been republished in Avant-Gardes

and Partisans Reviewed, pp. 177-204. For comments about Rosenberg’s eloquence and intelligence, see: Mark Rothko, Letter to Barnett

Newman (August 10, 1946), Barnett Newman Papers, Archives of American Art, N/3481:

0323. For perceptive essays about Rosenberg’s

TO

PP.

133-7

3. The Collected Writings of Robert Mother-

well, edited by Stephanie Terenzio (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 61, 78, 108-9, 105-6.

4. Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality

of Avant-Garde Art,” Art News, vol. 56, no. 4

(Summer 1957): 36-42, at pp. 38, 39 (emphasis added). 5.

Ibid., pp. 39, 41.

6. Charles

Darwin,

The Descent of Man

contribution to art criticism, see: Donald B.

(1871), in Darwin, edited by Philip Appelman

old Rosenberg,” Artforum, vol. 17, no. 1 (September 1978): 32-3; Donald B. Kuspit, Review of Discovering the Present, Artforum, vol. 13, no. 7 (March 1975): 58-60; and Dore Ashton, “On Harold Rosenberg,” Critical Inquiry, vol.

ducer” (1934), in Reflections, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p.

Kuspit, “Two Critics: Thomas B. Hess and Har-

6, no. 4 (1980): 615-24. See also: Marjorie

Welish, “Harold Rosenberg: Transforming the

Earth,” Art Criticism, vol. 2, no. 1 (1985): 10— 30; and Brian Winkenweder, “Art History,

Sartre, and Indentity in Rosenberg’s America” (forthcoming in Art Criticism). For an excellent recent dissertation on Rosenberg, see: Elaine O’Brien, The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg (Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 1997). For a less im-

pressive but earlier treatment of Rosenberg,

(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 161ff. 7.

222. 8.

Walter Benjamin,

“The Author as Pro-

Ibid., p. 233.

9. Schapiro, “Liberating Quality of AvantGarde Art,” pp. 38-9.

10. Marta Traba, Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plasticas latinoamericanos, 1950-1970

(Mexico City: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1973),

pp. 1-7; and Umberto Eco, Opera aperta (1962), translated by Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989),

p. 103. 11.

On

Romantic

anticapitalism,

see:

see: James Herbert, The Political Origins of Abstract Expressionist Art Criticism: The Early Writ-

Georg Lukacs, Die Theorie des Romans (1920), translated by Anna Bostock (Cambridge,

(Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1985).

12. Schapiro, “Liberating Quality of AvantGarde Art,” p. 38. 13. Ibid., p. 42.

ings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg

14. Ibid., p. 38.

CHAPTER FIVE. AUTOMATISM AND THE AGE OF AUTOMATION nen

18.

1. T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexioaus dem beschddigten Leben (1944-7) -

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), pp. 42, 161-2: “Die Technisierung macht einstweilen

die Gesten

prazis

und

roh

und

damit

die

Menschen. Sie treibt aus den Gebarden alles

Zégern aus, allen Bedacht, alle Gesittung. Sie

unterstellt sie den unverséhnlichen, gleich-

sam geschichtslosen Anforderungen

der

Dinge (p. 42).... Indem man aber den Ge-

danken des Moments

der Unwillkiirlichkeit

beraubt, wird gerade seine Notwendigkeit kassiert” (pp. 161-2). 2. The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, edited by George Scrivani (New York and

Madras: Hanuman Books), p. 122.

Mass.: MIT Press, 1971).

Ibid.

16. The excellent work of Francois-Marc

Gagnon on postwar Canadian art is, for example, crucial to expanding our sense of how

much important artistic production was oc-

curring in the Americas

outside the United

States after 1945. See, e.g.: Jean-Francois Gagnon, Paul-Emil Borduas (Ottawa: National Gallery of Art, 1976); Paul-Emil Borduas: Ecrits/ Writings, introduced and edited by Francois-

Marc Gagnon, English translation by F-M. Gagnon and Dennis Young (Halifax: Nova Scotia School of Design Press, 1978); and FrancoisMarc Gagnon, “New York as Seen from Mon-

tréal by Paul-Emil Borduas and the Automa-

tists, 1943-1953,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montréal 1945-1964,

edited by Serge Guilbant, pp. 130-43. For an-

209

210

NOTES TO PP. 138-41

other effort at emphasizing the significance of French Canadian “abstract expressionism” as nonderivative from the New York School, see: David Craven and Richard Leslie, “The Automatist Paintings of Riopelle,” Artscanada, vol. 38, nos. 240-1 (March-April 1981): 47-50. The issue of analyzing the ideological values motivating the creation of l'art informel in French-speaking Canada is an especially important one in relation to the New York School, because of the dissident views and avowedly anarchist position of the Refius Global group in Québec. In an uncompromisingly defiant and very controversial manifesto of August 9, 1948, which was based on anarchist precepts, this group called for a “Global Re-

See, e.g., Traba’s exemplary piece on Arman-

do Morales and the Praxis Group from Nicara-

gua, along with its legacy for the 1979 Revo-

lution: Marta Traba, “Mirar en Nicaragua,” El

Pez y la Serpiente (Managua), no. 25 (Winter

1981), pp. 27-86. For a well-known overview of modern art in Latin America, including arte

informal, see: Damian Bayén, Aventura Plastica

de Hispanoamérica: Pintura, cinetismo, artes de la accién: 1940-1972 (Mexico: Fonda de Cultura Econémica, 1991). The first edition was published in 1974.

17. Schapiro, “Liberating Quality of AvantGarde Art,” pp. 38-40, 42.

18. Ibid., p. 40-1.

“Que ceux tentés par l’aventure se joignent

a nous. “Au terme imaginable, nous entrevoyons Vhomme libéré de ses chaines inutiles, réaliser dans l’ordre imprévu, nécessaire de la spontanéité, dans 'anarchie resplendissante, la pléntitude de ses dans individuels emphasis added]. “D'ici 18, sans repos ni halte, en communauté de sentiment avec les assoiffés d’un mieux étre, sans crainte des longues échéances, dans I'encouragement ou la persécution, nous poursuivrons dans la joie notre sauvage besoin de libération” (p. 106). As for arte informal and tachisme in Latin America, particularly as regards the group Los Once in Cuba, the literature is far less extensive than it should be. The best studies to date are by Juan Martinez. See: Juan Martinez, “The Los Once Group and Cuban Art in the 1950s,” in Guido Llinds and Los Once after Cuba (Miami, Att Museum at Florida International University, February 28-April 2, 1997), pp. 5-10. Works of considerable merit on Latin American arte informal include, above all, the essays by Marta Traba on art from Columbia and Nicaragua.

Ibid.

21.

Ernesto Cardenal, La santidad de la revo-

20. Ibid., pp. 41-2.

fusal.” Their manifesto, written by Paul-Emil

Borduas and signed by fifteen other artists (including Jean-Paul Riopelle), articulated a critique quite similar to the one arrived at by Newman, Still, Motherwell, Rothko, and Gottlieb. For this manifesto, see: Refus Global, August 9, 1948, reprinted in Borduas et les automatistes, Montréal: 1942-55 (Montréal, Musée d’Art Contemporain, December 2, 1971-January 16, 1972), pp. 95-106, It concluded as follows:

19.

luci6n (Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Sigueme,

1976), p. 20. See also: John Beverly and Marc

Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Cen-

tral American Revolutions (Austin: University of

Texas, 1990), pp. 85ff.

22. Schapiro, “Liberating Quality of AvantGarde Art,” p. 42 (emphasis added).

23. Meyer Schapiro, “On the Relation of Patron and Artist” (1964), reprinted in Theory and Philosophy of Art, vol. 4 of Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1994), pp. 22738.

24.

25.

Ibid., p. 235.

Yves-Alain Bois, “Painting: The Task of

Mourning,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge,

Mass., MIT Press), pp. 229-44, at p. 232. For the passage by de Duve that Bois cites, see:

Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” Artforum, vol. 24, no. 9 (May 1986): 115-16. 26. Marcel Duchamp, Interview with Kath-

erine Kuh, cited in Katherine Kuh, The Artist’s

Voice (New York, 1961), p. 90. Quoted in Bois,

“Painting,” p. 232.

27. Schapiro, “Liberating Quality of Avant-

Garde Art,” p. 42. 28. Ibid.

29. Clement Greenberg, “The Jackson Pollock Market Soars,” New York Times Magazine

(April 16, 1961), pp. 42¢f. 30. W. de Kooning, Collected Writings,

p. 122. 31.

Mark Rothko, Statement for “The Ides

of Art: The Attitudes of Ten Artists on Their

Art and Contemporaneousness,” The Tiger's

NOTES TO PP. 141-6

Eye, no. 2 (December 1947), p. 41. Reprinted

ma

search Press, 1990), p. 136.

(Summer

in Ann Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor: UMI Re-

32. Emest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1972), translated by Joris De Bres (London: Verso Press, 1975), p. 191. See also: Friedrich Pol-

That

Awaits

Us,”

Dissent,

vol.

9, no.

2

(Spring 1962): 107-10; Raymond Williams, “Prelude to Alienation,” Dissent, vol. 11, no. 3 1964): 303-15;

Paul Mattick, “The

Economics of Cybernation,” New Politics, vol. 1, no. 4 (Summer 1962): 18-33.

46. Meyer Schapiro, Letters to Artists on

lock, Automation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag,

behalf of Dissent, October 15, 1963, and Sep-

(quote).

in the Ad Reinhardt Papers, Archives of American Art, N/69-100: 0732 and N/69-101: 0297.

1964). 33. Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 120, 193 3A.

Ibid, p. 193.

35. See: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en Améri-

ca Latina (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1969). For

a discussion of dependency theory in Latin

America, see:

Roger Burbach and Orlando Nu-

itez Soto, Fire in the Americas (London: Verso Press, 1987), pp. 35-7.

36. For these statistics and others, see: The Economic Report of the President to the U.S.

Congress (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, January

1962). See also Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp.

176-9. 37. Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 194-8. For this discussion of the process of automation,

see: Julius Rezler, Automation and Industrial

Labor (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964). 38. Mandel, Late Capitalism, p. 501.

39. Cited by Paul Sweezy, “Center, Periphery, and Crisis,” in Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies,” edited by Hamza Alari and Teodor Shanin

(New York: Monthly

view Press, 1982), pp. 210-17, at p. 217. 40.

Re-

Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno,

Dialectik der Aufklérung (1944), translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment by John Cumming

(New York: Continuum, 1993), pp. 3-42.

tember 28, 1966. A copy of each is to be found

47. Capital 1974), 48.

Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly (New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 113-33, 231-42. See, e.g., Frederick W. Taylor, Principles

of Scientific Management (1911), reprint (New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 36. For the very different position of Adam Smith, see: Adam

Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Intro-

duction by Max

Lerner (New York:

Random

House, 1937), p. 9. Smith associated the divi-

sion of labor with increasing numbers of inventions by workers themselves, and not by

management. 49. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, pp. 22, 36-8, 62. Cited in Braverman,

Labor and Monopoly Capital, pp. 112-21. 50. Ibid, p. 22. $1.

Karl Marx,

Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan

(New

York:

1964), pp. 106-15. 52.

John

International

Ruskin,

The

Stones

Publishers, of

Venice

(1853), sec. II, chap. VI. Reprinted in Kenneth

Clark’s anthology entitled Ruskin Today (Har-

mondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 282-3.

53. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Letter to Henri

Mottez, which was used as the Introduction to

Al. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 146ff.

Victor Mottez’s translation of Cennino d’Andrea Cennini’s Il libro delil’arte (Paris: Galli-

ter 1961): 66-77. In the previous issue, Richard Wollheim had published an article on

with these issues.

42. Herbert Marcuse, “Language and Technological Society,” Dissent, vol. 8, no. 1 (Win-

Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution, en-

titled “Socialism and Culture” (vol. 7, no. 4

[Autumn 1960]: 491-5). 43.

David Sachs, “Thwarting the Young: A

Review of Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman,”

93-7.

Dissent,

vol. 8, no.

44, Ibid, p.94.

1 (Winter

1961):

45. Irving Howe, “Cybernation: The Trau-

mard, 1911), p. 21. Robert Herbert is currently working on a book about Renoir’s engagement $4. Robert Motherwell, Statement (1963),

in Twentieth Century Artists on Art, edited by

Dore Ashton (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 236. 55. Harold Rosenberg, “The Threat of Culture: Review of Raymond Williams's Culture

and Society,” The Nation, vol. 188, no. 6, Febtuary 1959, Reprinted in Harold Rosenberg,

Discovering the Present (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1973), p. 176.

211

212

NOTES TO PP. 146-52

56. Rosenberg, Discovering the Present, pp.

77, 179-80.

57. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capi-

tal, pp. 231, 242.

Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), pp. 14158.

For Milton Friedman’s linkage of “free-

66. Schapiro, “Liberating Quality of AvantGarde Art,” p. 39.

Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of

68. David Merion [Meyer Schapiro], “The

58.

dom” and “inequality,” see: Milton Friedman,

Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 5, 17. For a critique of the economic policies of Pinochet and Friedman, see: Orlando Letelier, Chile: Economic “Freedom” and Political Repression (Washing-

ton, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1989).

Less than a month after this critique of Mil-

ton Friedman was first published in The Nation

(August 28, 1976), Orlando Letelier was assassinated by Chilean Secret Service Agents on September 21, 1976, within a few blocks of the White House in Washington, D.C. See:

John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination

on Embassy Row (New York: Random House, 1980).

59. Fora discussion of Greenberg's theoretical linkage to positivism, see: David Craven, “Clement Greenberg and the ‘Triumph’ of

‘Western Art,” Third Text, no. 25 (Winter 19934): 3-9, For a particularly incisive dissection

of Greenberg's critical reaction to Abstract Ex-

pressionism, see: Francois-Marc Gagnon, “The Work and Its Grip,” Jackson Pollock: Questions

(Montréal, Musée d’Art Contemporain, 1979),

pp. 16-43. 60. Casey Blake, “Aesthetic Engineering,”

Democracy, vol. 1, no. 4 (October 1981): 3750, at p. 41. 61.

Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” (1968),

in Other Criteria (Oxford: Oxford University

67.

Ibid.

Nerve of Sidney Hook,” Partisan Review, vol.

10, no. 1 January 1943): 248-62, at p. 257. 69.

Ibid.

70. Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review, no. 144 (March-April 1984): 96-113, at pp. 104-5. 71. Ibid.

72.

Ibid., p. 106-9.

73. André Breton specifically underscored

the non-Western impetus for Surrealism in the

mid-1940s. See, e.g., the following from his

trip to Haiti: André Breton, “An Interview with René Belance” (1945) and “Speech to

Young Haitian Poets” (1945), in What Is Surrealism?, edited by Franklin Rosemont (New

York: Pathfinder Press, 1978), pp. 256ff. The

non-European nature of Surrealist collage has

been insightfully discussed by Dawn Ades,

“Reviewing Art History,” in The New Art Histo-

ry, edited by A. L. Rees and F. Borzello (Atlantic Highlands, N,J.: Humanities Press, 1988), p. 17.

CHAPTER SIX. THE ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGISM 1. Barnett Newman,

“An Interview with

Press, 1972), pp. 66, 77-80. 62. Blake, “Aesthetic Engineering,” p. 42.

Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John

different discussions of Greenberg's relation

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), pp. 307-8.

63.

For three noteworthy

and somewhat

to Trotskyism and Marxism, see: T. J. Clark,

“Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art,” in Pol-

lock and After: The Critical Debate, edited by Francis Frascina (New York: Harper & Row,

1985), pp. 47-63; Fred Orton and Griselda Pol-

lock, “Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed,” in Pollock and After, pp. 167-84; and John Roberts, Postmodernism, Politics and Art (Manches-

ter: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 18ff. 64.

Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 79.

65. On Greenberg's role as a McCarthyist,

see: Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics:

The Abstract

Emile de Antonio” (1969), in Bammett Newman:

O'Neill and introduced by Richard Shiff (New

2. Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art

Means to Me” (1951), in The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, edited by George Scriva-

ni (New York and Madras: Hanuman Books), pp. 58-9.

3. Martica Sawin, “‘The Third Man,’ or Au-

tomatism American Style,” Art Journal, vol. 47,

no. 3 (Fall 1988): 181-6. Concerning Sawin’s own early reviews from the 1950s, see, e.g.,

M.S., “In the Galleries: Franz Kline,” Arts Mag-

azine, vol. 32, no. 9 (Summer 1958): 57-8.

4. Jackson Pollock, Response to question-

naire, Arts and Architecture (February 1944), re-

NOTES

printed in American Artists on Art, edited by Ellen Johnson (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p.2. §. Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibil-

ities, no. 1 (Winter 1947-8), reprinted in American Artists on Art, p. 6. 6. Hedda Sterne, Statement for “The Ides

of Art: The Attitudes of Ten Artists on Their Art and Contemporaneousness,” The Tiger's

Eye, no. 2 (December 1947): 42-6. Reprinted in Ann Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor: UMI Re-

search Press, 1990), pp. 137-8. 7. W. de Kooning, Collected Writings, pp. 123, 117, 118-19. 8. “Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35” (1950), in Moder Artists in America, edited by Robert

Goodnough,

introduced

by Robert

Mother-

well and Ad Reinhardt (New York: Witten-

born, 1951), pp. 9-22, at pp. 12, 18. 9. Ibid., p. 18. 10. Ibid., p. 17. 11.

Robert Motherwell, Statement in The

New Decade (1955), reprinted in American Artists on Art, edited by Ellen Johnson, p. 29. 12, Robert Motherwell, Statement (1951),

reprinted in Twentieth Century Artists on Art, edited by Dore Ashton (New York: Pantheon,

1985), p. 235. 13. The Collected Writings of Robert Mother-

well, edited by Stephanie Terenzio (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 116. 14.

Ibid.

15. W. de Kooning, Collected Writings, pp.

18, 20. 16. Ibid., pp. 27-8. 17. Ibid., p. 33. 18.

Max

Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno,

TO

PP.

152-8

vanguardia en la retaguardia?” in El tiempo

sagrado: La mitificacin del arte contempordneo,

edited by José Miguel Cortes with Juan Vicen-

te Aliaga (Valencia: Instituto Valenciano de la Juventud, 1991), pp. 93-105. Subirats concludes the following about the historical dy-

namic of the avant-garde: “La dialéctica de las

vanguardias comprende precisamente ambos momentos: el negativo de la critica y la ruptura, de la subversion de valores y de la utopia

de una nueva dignidad humana, y el de la afirmacién de la construcci6n artificial de un mundo

integralmente

técnico como

nuevo

principio universal de redencién” (p. 105). 23. Motherwell, Collected Writings, pp. 82, 92.

24. Peter Birger, Theorie der Avantgarde

(1974), translated by Michael Shaw (Minne-

apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 12-13. 25. Ibid., pp. 49, 72-3. 86.

26. W. de Kooning, Collected Writings, p. 27. Clement Greenberg, “American-Type

Painting,”

Art and

Culture

(Boston:

Press, 1961), pp. 208-29, at p. 209.

Beacon

28. John O'Brian, “Greenberg's Matisse and the Problem of Avant-Garde Hedonism,”

in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montréal 1945-1964, edited by Serge

Guilbant, p. 145. As O'Brian perceptively notes, Greenberg “stood in opposition to the

views

of those American

artists he valued

most highly” (p. 145). 29. W. de Kooning, Collected Writings, pp. 57-8.

30. Ibid., pp. 72, 75, 84.

31.

Newman’s dismissals of “art for art’s

Dialectik der Aufkldrung (1944), translated as Dialectic of Enlightenment by John Cumming

sake” are numerous. See, e.g., Newman, Select-

35-6,

kin’s admiration for the Russian peasant com-

(New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 7. 19. W. de Kooning, Collected Writings, pp.

20. Ibid., pp. 49-53. 21. Ibid., pp. 58-60.

22. Renato Poggioli, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (1962), translated by Gerald Fitzgerald

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 18. For a more recent and also quite insightful explication of the avant-garde’s use of nega-

tion and affirmation, see the essay by philoso-

pher Eduardo Subirats of Catalufia: “Esta la

ed Writings, pp. 40, 57, 108. 32. Ibid., pp. 3-8. 33.

Among the first to note how Kropot-

mune was useful for understanding Newman's

political theory was Annette Cox, Art-as-Poli-

tics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and

Society (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), p.77.

34. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 23-4,

100.

35. Ibid., p. 112.

36. Ibid., p. 108.

37.

Ibid.

213

214

NOTES TO PP. 158-62

38. Meyer Schapiro, “Barnett Newman: Talk at the Memorial Meeting at Campbell Funeral Chapel” (New York City, July 6, 1970), Personal Papers of Meyer Schapiro, New York City, three pages in all. 39. Stephen Jay Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” in Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 325-39. 40. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 16-7. 41. Poggioli, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia, pp. 119-21. 42. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 158-60. 43. For the best discussion of Marx on human nature, see: Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation ofa Legend (London: Verso Press, 1983). 44. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art from Paris, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983), p. 70. 45. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 170-3, quote at p. 171. 46. Ibid., p. 172. 47. Ibid., p. 173. 48. Ibid., pp. 248-51. 49. Ibid., pp. 44-53. 50. Interview with Annalee Newman by the author (April 8, 1992), telephone. In the course

of this

interview

she

noted

that

not

only did Newman write the Introduction, but also that he and Paul Goodman were responsible for Kropotkin’s book having been republished in the first place. According to Annalee Newman: “Ben Raeburn of Horizon Press had for several years asked to publish Barnett Newman’s own memoirs. During the Vietnam War, which Barnett strongly opposed, he regretted the turn of the students to the brand

of Marxist thought represented by Marcuse and felt instead that the student radicals should be ready for the anarchist views of Kropotkin. Thus, Bamett told Ben Raeburn to publish Kropotkin’s memoirs, rather than his own, and he would write an introductory es-

say

for them,

Paul Goodman

was involved in

getting Kropotkin's book published. . . . Peter Kropotkin and Alexander Herzen were lifelong points of reference for Barnett’s work." 51. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 44-5. See also: Carter Ratcliff, “Barnett Newman: Citizen of the Infinitely Large Small Republic," Art in America, vol. 79, no. 9 (September

1991): 92ff. The emphasis here on Newman

and the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Walt Whitman

(the latter of whom

is a key

figure for anachists, according to Emma Gold-

man) allows this essay to serve as a pendant

for another piece on Pollock by the same author:

Carter

Ratcliff, “Jackson

Pollock and

American Painting’s Whitmanesque Episode,”

Art in America, vol. 82, no. 2 (February 1994):

pp. 64ff. 52. Newman, Selected Writings, p. 45. 53. Ibid., pp. 46, 50-1. 54. Ibid., pp. 49, 51. 55. 56.

Ibid. Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid” (1902);

57.

Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. xviii.

an abridged version was reprinted in Darwin, edited by Philip Appelman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 405-15. 58. Paul Signac, “Impressionistes et Révolutionnaires,” La Révolte, edited by Jean Grave Qune 13-19, 1891), translated by Linda Noch-

lin, reprinted in Impressionism and Post-Impres-

sionism, 1874-1904 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 125. Meyer Schapiro published two important studies of Seurat that probably would have been known to various

Abstract Expressionists: Meyer Schapiro, “Seurat and ‘La Grand Jatte,’” Columbia Review,

vol. 17, no. 1 (November 1935): 9-16; and “Seurat,” Art News, vol. 57, no. 2 (April 1958): 22-4, 44-S, 52, reprinted in Modern Art: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978),

pp. 101-9.

For two early and still important discussions

of the relation of Neo-Impressionism to anar-

chism, see: Robert and Eugenia Herbert, “Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of

Pissarro, Signac, and Others,” Burlington Mag-

azine, vol. 102, no. 692 (November 1960): 479ff; and Eugenia Herbert, The Artist and So-

cial Reform: France and Belgium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). See also: Joan Hal-

perin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in

Fin-de-Siécle Paris (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1988); John Gage, “The Technique of

Seurat: A Reappraisal,” Art Bulletin, vol. 69, no.

3 (September 1987): 448-54; and Robyn Roslak, “The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony: NeoImpressionism, Science, and Anarchism,” Art

Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 3 (September 1991): 38190.

NOTES TO PP. 162-9

59. Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 53. 60.

Charles

Harrison,

Essays

on Art and

Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 145.

61. 62.

Motherwell, Collected Writings, p. 149. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov Lenin, “Leo

Tolstoy and His Epoch,” in The Collected Works of Lenin, vol. 17 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), pp. 51-3.

63. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (1898), translated by Aylmer Maude (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1969), pp. 243-65. 64. Newman, Selected Writings, p. 173.

65. Arelated point about Rothko was made by Barbara Braun in “Freedom’s Just Another

Word .. .,” Village Voice (May 29, 1984), pp.

49-50. For two more articles that acknowledge Rothko’s alienation from capitalism while also

discussing the limitations of his viewpoint,

see: Jonathan Harris, “Mark Rothko and the Development of American Modernism,” Ox-

ford Art Journal, vol. 11, no. 1 (1988): 40-50;

and Terry Atkinson, “Rothko: Convention and

Deconstruction,” Art Monthly, no. 131 (No-

vember 1989): 10-16. 66. Mark Rothko, “The Romantics Were Prompted,” Possibilities, no, 2 (Winter 1947—

8): 84. 67.

Clyfford

Still, Statement

(1959),

re-

printed in Theories of Modern Art, edited by

Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 574-6, at pp. 574-5. This statement was originally a letter to Gor-

don Smith, Director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y. January 1, 1959).

68. Ibid., p. 575. 69.

Clyfford Still, Statement (1952), in Fif-

teen Americans, edited by Dorothy Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952), pp. 21-2, at p. 21. 70. Still, Statement (1959), pp. 575-6. 71. Clyfford Still, Statement (1963),

in

Clyfford Still (University of Pennsylvania, Insti-

tute of Contemporary Art, 1963), pp. 9-1 and Still, Statement (1952), pp. 21-2. 72. 73.

Still, Statement (1952), p. 22. Still, Statement (1959), p. 574.

74. On the criticism of what he termed

“Anglo-American

traditions of art criticism,”

see: Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 39, 55-6,

and 83ff.

75. Clyfford Still, Letter to Betty Parsons,

March 20, 1948, Betty Parsons Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., N/68-72. 76. E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (New York: New American Library, 1975), pp. 175-7. 77. Noam Chomsky, “The Relevance of Anarcho-Syndicalism,” in Radical Priorities, edited by C. P, Otero (Montréal: Black Rose Press, 1981), pp. 245-62, at p. 245. 78. Ibid., pp. 248-9. 79. Ibid., p. 248. 80. Ibid., pp. 248-9. 81. For a fine survey of anarchism, see: James Joll, The Anarchists (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980). 82. Newman, Selected Writings, pp. 23, 29. 83. Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969), pp. 17-18. On the issue of art and anarchism, see also: Stephen F. Eisenman, “The Intransigent Artist; or, How the Impressionists Got Their Name,” in The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886 (San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum, 1986), pp. 51-60. For a classic critique of nineteenth-century anarchism, see: Friedrich Engels, The Bakuninists at Work: Review of the Uprising in Spain in the Summer of 1873 (originally published in Der Volkstaat, nos. 108-7, October 31 and November 2 and 5, 1873), reprinted by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971. The passage cited is on p. 8 of the reprint. 84. Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 174-92. 85. Motherwell, Collected Writings, pp. 216-17. 86. Franz-Joachim Verspohl, “Die Konkreten Dinge Stehen in Zweiten Rang: Wols und Sartre,” Idea: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle, vol. 6 (1987): 109-40; and Franz-Joachim Verspohl, “Die Moderne auf den Priifstand: Pollock, Wols, Giacometti,” in Moderne Kunst, vol. 2, edited by Monika Wagner, FranzJoachim Verspohl, and Hubertus Gassner (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohit Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), pp. 513-32. 87. Poggioli, Teoria dell’arte d’avantguardia, pp. 98, 100. 88. On this issue, see: Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review,

215

216

NOTES

TO

PP.

170-6

no. 144 (March-April 1984), pp. 96-113, at pp. 110-11; and Geras, Marx and Human Na-

bia University. Among the other speakers were Eric Foner, Assistant Professor of History;

and use of the term decentered for dream work,

Work; Julie Simon of the Student Mobilization Committee; and Bill Starr of the Anti-Imperi-

ture (1983). 89. For a discussion of Freud’s invention

see: Richard Wollheim, Sigmund Freud (New

York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 60-72.

90. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littéra-

ture (1947), translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 169-81. 91. Ibid., p. 169. 92.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Phi-

losophy of History,” in Illuminations, translated by H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 258-64, at pp. 255, 257.

Francis Piven, Associate Professor of Social

alist Organization.

For more on Schapiro’s activism against U.S.

imperialism and how it was in keeping with the democratic socialist position of Irving Howe and the editors at Dissent, see the inter-

views about socialism and Marxism in Appendix C. T would like to thank Dr. Lillian Milgram

Schapiro for calling this unpublished document to my attention and for allowing me to publish it here for the first time. The original

manuscript is found in the Personal Papers of APPENDIX A. MEYER SCHAPIRO, “A CRI IQUE: PEVSNER ON MODERNITY” The author would like to thank both the late

Prof. Meyer Schapiro and his wife Dr. Lillian Milgram Schapiro for reading over the trans-

lation in the spring of 1993, discussing it with him, and suggesting some minor revisions in

keeping with the original intent of his essay.

This is the first translation into English of a

review essay by Meyer Schapiro that was orig-

inally published in German in the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, vol. 7, nos. 1-2 (1938): 291-3. The Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung was

the official publication during 1932-41 of the

Institute for Social Research

(better known

Meyer Schapiro, New York City.

APPENDIX C. INTERVIEWS WITH MEYER SCHAPIRO AND LILLIAN MILGRAM SCHAPIRO The author is much indebted to the late Mey-

er Schapiro and his wife Dr. Lillian Milgram Schapiro for sharing their rare time and numerous

unpublished

documents

with

me.

Moreover, in September 1996, Dr. Milgram

kindly

read

my

transcription

of the

inter-

views, in order to corroborate the accuracy of

its content and to make some scholarly editorial suggestions.

as the “Frankfurt School”). The Institute has

1, The letter by Panofsky initiating the debate appeared in the April 1961 issue of Art

furt since 1923, except when it was affiliated with Columbia University from 1934 to 1944.

issue, did include the aforementioned infor-

been associated with the University of Frank-

Among the most notable essays to appear in

this journal were those by Max Horkheimer

(vol. 6, no. 2, 1937) and by Herbert Marcuse (vol. 6, no. 3, 1937), in which the term critical

theory was coined and the theoretical concerns

of the Frankfurt School were identified.

This translation previously appeared in Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997): 157-8.

News. Newman’s response, in the May 1961

mation supplied by Schapiro. The September

1961 issue concluded the exchange with yet

another letter by Panofsky along with a fine response by Newman. 2. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934)

(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980). In the

Preface, Dewey wrote: “Dr. Meyer Schapiro was good enough to read the twelfth and thirteenth chapters and to make suggestions which I freely adopted.”

APPENDIX B. MEYER SCHAPIRO, “AN ANTIWAR SPEECH AT COLUMBIA”

This public address was given by Schapiro at a huge antiwar demonstration held at Colum-

3. See: Karl Korsch, “Leading Principles of

Marxism: A Restatement,” Marxist Quarterly,

vol. 1, no. 3 (October-December 1937): 35678. As one of the founding editors of this journal, Meyer Schapiro was among those re-

sponsible for the publication of this essay by

NOTES TO PP. 176-8 Korsch. For a sustained discussion of the the-

oretical links between Craven,

“Meyer

the two, see: David

Schapiro,

Karl Korsch,

and

Arthur Goldhammer

Chicago, 1983).

(Chicago: University of

11.

This, of course, is what Serge Guilbaut,

12.

For a moving

the Emergence of Critical Theory,” Oxford Art

among others, claims; ibid., chap. 1.

4. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object - A Note on Heidegger and Van

piro's lifelong commitment to democratic soCialism, see: Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope

vol. 4 of Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1994), pp. 135-42.

pp. 237-8: “From the start [in 1954], Meyer

Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 42-54.

Gogh” (1968), in Theory and Philosophy of Art,

5. Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions,” in La Vé-

rité en peinture (The Truth in Painting) (1978),

translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 255-82. 6. Derrida only recently published an ex-

cellent defense of a certain reading of Marx-

ism, specifically what he termed a critical “spirit of Marxism which I will never be ready to renounce.” See: Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 88-92. 7. The text of Heidegger’s handwritten re-

vision of his position in his own personal copy of “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” is published in Meyer Schapiro, “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh,” Theory and Philosophy of Art, p. 150. 8. See Leo Huberman, Man’s Worldly Goods

(1936) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952). In the Preface to this book, Huberman

thanked “Dr. Meyer Schapiro, for his critical reading of the manuscript and stimulating

suggestions.”

9. Even before becoming a founding editor of Monthly Review in 1949 (he had taught eco-

tribute to Meyer Scha-

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982),

Schapiro, the art historian served as an editor

[for Dissent]... we were happy to have so eminent a mind ready to stand by us... It mattered much that Meyer Schapiro attended

some board meetings, speaking in his passionately lucid way about socialism as the fulfill ment of Western tradition.” 13. For a thoughtful and insightful look

at Schapiro’s relation to the antiwar move-

ment, see: Francis Frascina, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice: My Lai, Guernica, MOMA,

and the

Art Left, 1969-70,” pts. 1 & 2, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 30 (1995): 481-511, 705-28.

14. As Professor Martin Jay, a longtime

friend of Lowenthal at Berkeley, informed me

in a telephone interview of May 13, 1993,

“Leo Lowenthal had immense admiration and

respect for Meyer Schapiro. Lowenthal acknowledged having been given sound advice by Meyer Schapiro while Lowenthal was reviews editor for the Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung.” The Lowenthal-Schapiro correspondence is now in the Archives of the Institute

for Social Research at Frankfurt University in

Germany. 15. Meyer Schapiro, “From Mozarabic to

nomics with a celebrated book, The Theory of

Romanesque in Silos,” reprinted in Romanesque Art, vol. 1 of Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1977), pp. 28-101.

1970. As period remarks on the cover of the book declare, “Since its first publication in 1942, this book has become the classic analyt-

view essay on Meyer Schapiro’s Romanesque Art, Art Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 2 (1979): 214.

fine discussion

Fellow Emeritus at the Pierpont Morgan Li-

nomics at Harvard until 1946), Sweezy had made

his name

in 1942 in the field of eco-

Capitalist Development. A revised edition published by Monthly Review Press appeared in ical study of Marxist economics.” For a very of the

contribution

of the

Monthly Review School of political economists to the emergence of dependency theory in the Americas, see: Roger Burbach and Or-

lando Nifiez Soto, Fire in the Americas (Lon-

don: Verso Press, 1987), pp. 35-7.

10. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the

Idea of Modern Art from Paris, translated by

16. Karl Werckmeister speculates as to such an influence in his well-known essay on SchaPiro’s Silos article. See: O. K. Werckmeister, re17. John

Plummer,

the Senior Research

brary in New York City and a student as well

as associate of Schapiro’s during 1945-55, observed the following in an interview with me

on May 29, 1993: “There is always a set of

Marxian values submerged in Meyer's approach, however topical the article might

seem. ... He is a masterful dialectician. Kus-

217

218

NOTES TO PP. 178-81

pit’s article on this aspect of his approach is as chap. 2 of his book Structural Anthropology, excellent.” See: Donald B. Kuspit, “Dialectical translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Reasoning in Meyer Schapiro,” Social Research, Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1962). There vol. 45, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 93-129. is also a fine essay by Lévi-Strauss on New York 18. For an accessible reprint of Section 1 City as he first came to know it in 1941, entiof his dissertation, see: Meyer Schapiro, The tled “New York post- et préfiguratif,” in Le reSculpture of Moissac (New York: George Brazil- gard éloigné (Paris: Plon, 1983), pp. 345-56. ler, 1985). For an incisive analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s 19. Meyer Schapiro, “The Social Bases of view of New York City, see: James Clifford, The Art” (1936), reprinted in Artists against War Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harand Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ vard University Press, 1988), pp. 236-46. Congress (New Brunswick: Rutger's University 27. See: Karl Korsch, Three Essays on MarxPress, 1986), pp. 109-14. ism, Introduction by Paul Breines (New York: 20. For a fine discussion of “The Social Ba- Monthly Review Press, 1972). ses of Art,” see: Andrew Hemingway, “Meyer 28. Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s,” Oxford Painter's World,” Dyn, vol. 1, no. 6 (1944): Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1994): 13-29, at pp. 9-14, 20-2. 29. Elsewhere, Robert Motherwell wrote: 21. See: Meyer Schapiro, “Diderot as Art “Society stands against anarchy; the artist Critic,” Diderot Studies (Geneva, Paris, Droz), stands for the human against society; society vol. 5 (1964): 5-11. therefore treats him as an anarchist.” See: Rob22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s ert Motherwell, “Beyond the Aesthetic” (April Doubt” (1947), in Sense and non-Sense, trans- 1946), in The Collected Writings of Robert Mothlated by Hubert Dreyfus (Evanston: North- erwell, edited by Stephanie Terenzio (New western University Press, 1964), pp. 9-25. York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 35-9, 23. See: Rosa Luxemburg, Leninism or at p. 38. Marxism? (1904), translated by Integer, reFor a discussion of how Schapiro’s values printed in The Russian Revolution and Leninism and his example influenced some of Motheror Marxism? (Ann Arbor, University of Michi- well’s other views, see: David Craven, “Aesgan Press, 1961). thetics as Ethics in the Writings of Motherwell 24. Amold Hauser, The Social History of Art, and Schapiro,” Archives of American Art Journal, 4 vols., translated by Stanley Godman (New vol. 36, no. 1 (1996): 25-32. York: Vintage Books, 1951). On the book cov30. For more on this, see: Meyer Schapiro, er of each volume, Meyer Schapiro is quoted “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque as follows: “the most serious and comprehen- Art” (1947), in Romanesque Art, vol. 1 of Select sive work of its kind that | know, a book based ed Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1977), on great knowledge of both the arts and his- pp. 1-27, at pp. 1-3. tory. | have found in it many original, peneFor two very fine and quite recent assesstrating observations.” ments of Schapiro’s contribution to progres25. On Galileo and Cigoli, see: Erwin Pa- sive art history, see: Alan Wallach, “Meyer nofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Schapiro, 1904-1996: Marxist Art Historian,” Hague: Mouton, 1954). Against the Current, no. 62 (May-June 1996), 26. Some major early essays by Claude p. 52; and Thomas Crow, “Village Voice: On Lévi-Strauss date from his stay in New York. Meyer Schapiro,” Artforum, vol. 34, no. 10 See, ¢.g.: Claude Lévi-Strauss, “L’analyse struc- (Summer 1996): 9-10, 122. Crow justifiably turale en linguistique et en anthropologie,” concludes that Schapiro “almost single-handin Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New edly laid the foundation for the modes of adYork, vol. 1, no. 2 (1995). This essay appeared vanced interpretation that we know today.”

Bibliography of Primary Sources

Unpublished Primary Documents A. The Personal Papers of Meyer Schapiro, estate, New York City. B. The Personal Papers of Rudolf Baranik, estate, Santa Fe. C. FBI Files, Archives of the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., and referral documents and cross-references from the U.S. State Department, the Counter-Intelligence

Branch of the U.S. Marine Corps, the U.S. Navy, the White House, and several U.S. embassies. These documents were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act: FBI File on Adolph Gottlieb FBI File on Lee Krasner

FBI File on Robert Motherwell FBI File on Ad Reinhardt

FBI File on Mark Rothko

D, Interviews 1, Interview with Donaldo Altamirano and Rat! Quintanilla (July 8, 1986), Managua, Nicaragua.

2. Interview with Rasheed Araeen (April 6, 1995), Albuquerque, N.M.

3. Series of interviews with Rudolf Baranik (1988-95), New York City and Albuquerque, NM. 4. Interview with Professor Sam Hunter (July 10, 1980), Princeton, N.J. 5. Interview with Professor Martin Jay (May 13, 1993), telephone. 6. Interview with Ouida Lewis (uly 6, 1995), New York City. 7. Interview with Annalee Newman (April 8, 1992), telephone. 8. Interview with Professor John Plummer (May 20, 1993), New York City. 9. Interviews with Dore Ashton (May 11-14, 1996), Albuquerque, N.M. 10. Series of twelve interviews with Professor Meyer Schapiro and Dr. Lillian Milgram (from July 15, 1992, to May S, 1995), Rawsonville, Vt., and New York City, telephone. Parts of these interviews were published in: “Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram Schapiro with David Craven: ASeries of Interviews July 15, 1992-January 22, 1995),” Res, no. 31 (Spring 1997): 159-68. 11. Interview with Hedda Sterne (April 1, 1998), New York City. E. Papers in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. William Baziotes Papers Betty Freeman Papers Elaine de Kooning Papers Thomas B. Hess Papers Norman Lewis Papers Barnett Newman Papers Patricia Passlof Papers Charles Pollock Papers Jackson Pollock Papers 219

220

BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF PRIMARY

SOURCES

Ad Reinhardt Papers Mark Rothko Papers David Smith Papers Marion Willard Papers Il.

Published Primary Sources

A. Anthologies of writings by the first generation of the New York School 1. Elaine de Kooning, The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism: Selected Writings, introduc-

tory essay by Rose Slivka and Preface by Marjorie Luyckx (New York: George Bra-

ziller, 1994).

2. The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning, edited by George Scrivani (Madras and

New York: Hanuman Books, 1988). 3. Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real, edited by Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948). Revised edition in 1967. 4. The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited and introduced by Stephanie Terenzio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

5. Bamett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by John O'Neill, Introduction by Richard Shiff, Notes and Commentary by Mollie McNickle (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990). 6. Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited and introduced by Barbara Rose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). The original 1975 edition appeared in the Documents of 20th Century Art Series edited by Robert Motherwell. 7. David Smith, edited by Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger, 1973). B. Bibliography Meyer Schapiro: The Bibliography, compiled by Lillian Milgram Schapiro (New York: George Braziller, 1995). C. Anthologies for Vart informel in Canada 1. Paul-£mil Borduas: Ecrits/Writings, 1942-1958, edited and introduced by FrangoisMarc Gagnon, English translation by Frangois-Marc Gagnon and Dennis Young (Halifax: Nova Scotia School of Design Press, 1978). 2. Paul-Emil Borduas, Refius Global (August 9, 1943), reprinted along with several other documents in Borduas et les automatistes, Montréal: 1942-1955 (Montréal: Musée d'Art Contemporain, December 2, 1971-January 16, 1972). D. Anthologies and interviews for arte informal in Latin America

1, Manifiestos y declaraciones del Grupo Praxis (Galerie Praxis, Managua, 1963-75). For

a fairly comprehensive bibliography of writings both by and about Praxis, see: Jorge Eduardo Arellano, Historia de la pintura nicaragiiense (Managua: Banco Central de

2,

Nicaragua, 1994), pp. 171-82.

“Painters into Poster Makers: A Conversation with Two Cuban Artists [Raul Martinez and Alfredo Rostgaard],” in Shifra Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 143-56. 3. “Entrevista con Roberto Estopifidn por Alejandro Anreus” (August 11, 1998), Wood-

side, Queens, Personal Papers of Alejandro Anreus, Roselle Park, NJ.

E.

Anthology of artist journals Ann Gibson, Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-Run Journals (Ann Arbor: UMI

Research Iconograph The Tiger's Possibilities

Press, 1990). This anthology includes reprints of five major journals: (and The New Iconograph) (1946-7) Eye (1947-8) (1947-8)

Instead (1948-9) Modern Artists in America (1952)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

OF

PRIMARY

SOURCES

F. Selected list of left-wing period journals with significance for the New York School Art Front (1934-7)

Dissent (1954-) Daily Worker (1931-6) Dialectics (1937-9) I. F. Stone Weekly (1953-70) Labor Action

Marxist Quarterly (1937-9) The Masses (1911-17)

Modern Monthly (1932-6) Monthly Review (1949-)

The Nation (1865-)

New Masses (1926-37) New Politics (1961-3) New Republic (1914-) P.M. Newspapers (1940-9) Soviet Russia (1937-47)

Worker's Age (1932-6)

Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung (1932-9), which in 1939 became Studies in Philosophy

and Social Science (1939-41)

221

Index

N.B.: Pages followed by an “f" are those displaying Figures. Abercrombie, Nicholas, 37 abstract art, public opinion polls, 20 Abstract Expressionism and African-American artists, 28, 72-3, 114, 128-30, 180 and “all-over,” 29 and anticolonialism, 101, 126 and anti-imperialism, 6, 8, 10, 24, 80, 8-94, 101 and cold-war liberalism, 17-18, 20-2 and “counterrevolutionary art,” 16 “essential eight,” 28 and Latin America, 9-13, 15-17, 136-9 and Pakistan, 22-4 origin of term, 18 as Romantic anticapitalism, 135, 136-41, 149 and Surrealism, 150, 154, 170 see also New York School ACA Gallery, 82, 86 Accius, Lucius, 175 Acha, Juan, 10-11, 17 action painting, 100, 131-2, 153 mock, 20, 21f Adomno, T. W., 27, 36, 63, 74, 133 140, 153 ‘on committed art, 1, 133 ‘on culture and mass culture, 58, 61-2, 63, 65 and Frankfurt School, 43, 57, 60, 70 ‘on gender roles, 117, 122-3 on Huxley, 112, 205n38 on modernism, 63, 75-6, 84, 94, 166; alternative/progressive, 37, 138, 188n73 Schapiro on, 177-8 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The, 83-4, 143, 158 Agee, James, 89 Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 166 Algeria, and national liberation, 90 Alloway, Lawrence, 21-2, 96 alternative/progressive modernism, 3, 28, 40-1, 72, 91-101, 183n4 Adomo on, 37, 138, 188n73 and Lewis, 72-4 Schapiro on, 99-100 see also modernism Althusser, Louis, 37-8, 138 American Artists Congress, 82 American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), 45-6

American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, 82 American Federation of Art, 98 American Jewish Committee, 83 American Jewish Labor Council, 82-3 American Labor Party, 82 American Modern Artists, 47 American Spectator, 79 Amin, Samir, 123, 125, 127 anarchism, 6, 7, 8, 26, 43, 102, 135, 156, 162-70, 210n16, 214nS8, 215nn81,83 Abstract Expressionism and, 7, 26; see also specific artist and anti-Stalinism, 42 and cult of masculinity, 117 Goodman and, 6, 144, 185n14, 21450 Nietzsche and, 123 and socialism, 39; democratic, 74 anarcho-communitarianism, 43 Anderson, Perry, 149-50 Anfam, David, 46 anticolonialism, 101, 126 anticommunism, U.S., see communism, and U.S. foreign policy; Federal Bureau of Investigation; House Un-American Activities Committee anti-imperialism and Abstract Expressionism, 6, 8, 10, 24, 80, 85-94, 101 in Latin America, 9-13, 15-17 and Los Once, 15 New York School and, 88-91, 108 antinationalism, 46-8 anti-Semitism, U.S., 83-4; see also race and racism anti-Sovietism, 4, 45 anti-Stalinism, Frankfurt School on, 3-4, 6, 8, 42, 45-6, 74, 87, 102, 116, 183n1 antiwar activities, see art, antiwar; Vietnam ‘War, protested

Aptheker, Herbert, $7 Araeen, Rasheed, 22-4, 126 and New York School, 22 Green Painting, 22 Oh Dear, Oh Dear, What a Mess You Have Made!, 22, 22f Archives of American Art, 4, 223

INDEX.

Amold, Matthew, 59 art

antiwar, 92, 94, 95f for art’s sake, 42 committed, 1, 27, 75-6, 94-6, 133 “counterrevolutionary,” 16

dialogical, 17-18, 40 Dissent shows, 4, 5f, 144-5, 185n10 “ethnic,” 126 global/international, 49 McCarthyism and, 18, 28, 97, 124, 156 Marxism and, 18, 34, 69-71, 132, 160, 189n9, 197n88 vanguard: Canada, 86, 137, 209n16; Cuba, 11-12, 16; Nicaragua, 11-12 see also specific artist, critic, or style; social history of art

Art Bulletin, 178

Art Front, 3

art informel, 137 Art Institute of Chicago, 130 Art Journal, 48 Art News, 52, 58, 65, 87, 110, 114, 153, 175 Art Nouveau, 171-2 Artist Sessions, see Studio 35 Artists and Writers Dissent, 82 Artists Committee of SNCC, 130 Artists Committee to Free Siqueiros, 86 Artists League of America, 82 Ashton, Dore, 48, 53, 83, 89, 123, 130, 169 automation, age of, 141-50 automatism, 136-41 Bacon, Francis, 48 Bakunin, Mikhail, 156, 165, 167 Baldwin, James, 129 Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola), 48 Baran, Paul, 43, 56 Baranik, Rudolf, 53, 86, 199n11, 200n41 antiwar activities, 89-90 Napalm Elegy (and series), 92, 92f Barr, Alfred, 45 Baudelaire, Charles, 59 Bauhaus, 149, 178 Baziotes, William, 46, 91, 97, 129-30, 187nS3 Bearden, Romare, 129, 130 Beauvoir, Simone de, 108, 122 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 163 Belli, Gioconda, 127 Benedict, Ruth, 84 Benjamin, Walter, 59-60, 62-3, 112-13, 134-5, 149, 170 Benn, Gottfried, 113 Benton, Thomas Hart, 117 Berding, A. H., 100 Bertrand Russel! Peace Foundation, 114 Betty Parsons Gallery, 53 Black Panthers, 116 Blake, Casey, 147-8 Bloch, Ernst, 63 Boas, Franz, 180 Bois, Yves-Alain, 139 Book and Magazine Guild, 82

Bourgeois, Louise, 52, 122 Blind Leading the Blind, The, 92, 93f Marchers, The, 93 Molotov Cocktail, 93 Brandeis University, 180 Brando, Marlon, 98 Brazil, U.S. intervention in, 143 Braverman, Harry, 43, 56, 146-7 Brecht, Bertolt, 164, 179 Breton, André, 46, 150 British Museum, 168 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 64, 177-8 Brooks, James, 152 Brown, Milton, 67 Buchloh, Benjamin, 42 Bund, 48 Burbach, Roger, 54-6 Burger, Peter, 155 Burke, Edmund, 160 Burkewitz controversy, in Communist Party, 178 Burnham, James, 45 Bush, George, 17, 20, 41, 44, 80, 111 Cambodia, U.S. intervention, 89 Camnitzer, Luis, 16-17 Camus, Albert, 90 Canada, vanguard art, 86, 137, 209n16 Cardenal, Ernesto, 139 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 56 Casals, Pablo, 114 Castro, Fidel, 16 Castelli, Leo, 120 Caudwell, Christopher, 77 Cedar Tavern Bar, 121, 129 Celtic art, 28 Central Intelligence Agency, 10, 18, 20, 22, 89 Cerrato, Boanerges, 24 Triptych, 25f Cézanne, Paul, 171, 179 Chadwick, Whitney, 107, 120 Chaplin, Charlie, 81 Chile, 90, 147 China, 6, 35, 44 Chomsky, Noam, 89, 167-8 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 175 Cigoli, Lodovico Cardi da, 180 City University of New York, 57 Civil Rights Congress, Reinhardt and, 82-3 civil rights movement, 6, 53, 114, 115, 117, 123, 128-30 New York School and, 31, 86, 89-90 Clark, T. J., 26, 40, 46, 68, 185018 Clark, Tom Campbell, 82 Clifford, Clark, 107 Clifford, James, 57, 131 Cockcroft, Eva, 9, 18, 26, 40-1, 47, 95 Coates, Robert, 18 cold war, 4, 16-18, 22-4, 36, 43-4, 79, 92, 99100

College Art Association, 99 Color-Field painting, 29, 121 Columbia University, 34, 177 and Frankfurt School, 58, 63, 83-4

INDEX

Commentary, 44 committed art, 27, 75-6, 94-6 Adomo on, 1, 133 Committee for the Defense of Public Education, 82 commodity production, 36-8, 62, 139-40 communism, 52, 71, 73, 79, 81-2, 85, 107, 109, 116, 184nn7,8 Latin American, 128 and modernism, 96-8 New York School and, 96-8, 202n78; see also specific artist Soviet, 99-100, 106 Stalinist, 26 and USS. foreign policy, 83, 108, 111, 142; Schapiro on, 173-4 Communist Party (CP), 44, 184n8 artists and, 20, 71, 73, 85, 87, 100, 155; custodial detention considered for, 81 and cult of masculinity, 116, 121 linked to organizations and institutions, 4, $2, 82, 184n7, 194n32 Schapiro and, 178, 184n7; FBI inquiries, 85, 176-7 communitas, 144, 156 Conde, Teresa del, 10 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 129-30 Congressional Record, 44, 91, 98 Constructivism, 149 Consuegro, Hugo, 13 “contemporary man” discourse, 125-8 Cornell University, 176 Cortis, Michael, 82 Counter-Intelligence Branch, U.S. Marine Corps, 81, 88 Cowley, Malcolm, 116 Cox, Annette, 148 Crawford, Ralston, 113 critical theory, 9-10, 134, 216(AppA) Frankfurt School and, 11, 55, 60-3 Cuba Revolution, 12-13, 15-17, 89, 128 vanguard art, 11-12, 16 Cuban missile crisis, 113 Cubism, 61, 149, 160, 172 cult of masculinity, 27, 115-23, 130, 206n59 Dada, 154, 160 Daily News, 130 Daley, Richard J., 92 Darwin, Charles, 68, 134 Daspre, André, 38 Davis, Stuart, 96 de Kooning, Elaine, 34, 49, 53, 96, 155, 189n4 antiwar activities, 89-90 marriage to W. de Kooning, 118-19 on New York School, 96, 114, 120-1, 124 works, 45, 144, 185n10 Bill at St. Marks, 119f Untitled (Black Mountain #14), 97 de Kooning, Willem, 6, 34, 53, 119f and antinationalism, 48 on art and artists, 6, 70, 141, 151, 152, 153-5

critics on, 63, 96 and gender roles, 118-19, 120-1 Ashville, 137, 1376 Woman One, 34 Debs, Eugene, 48 decentering, in Abstract Expressionism and dominant-ideology thesis, 40 of international art world, 49 of subject, 169-70 of visual conventions, 17-18, 136 Delacroix, Eugene, 59, 19023 Democratic Party, 36, 92 democratic socialism, 8, 109, 114, 116 Abstract Expressionism and, 4, 26, 27, 43, 80, 87 and anarchism, 74 and anti-Stalinism, 42 of Dissent, 43, 45, 87, 216(AppB) Schapiro and, 26, 27, 35-9, 177, 184n7, 189n1, 21712 dependency theory, 17, 55-6, 142, 211035 Derrida, Jacques, 41, 176 Dewey, John, 43, 63, 105, 108, 130, 175 dialogical art, 17-18, 40 Dialectics, 67 Diderot, Denis, 178 Disneyland, 101 Dissent, 58, 63, 74, 88, 144, 155, 177 art shows sponsored, 4, Sf, 144-5, 18510 critical of U.S. policy, 57, 89, 91, 148 socialism of, 3-4, 6, 55, 81, 106; democratic, 43, 45, 87, 216(AppB) dominant-ideology thesis, 17, 36-7, 39-44, 111, 122, 165 Dominican Republic, U.S. intervention, 89-91 Dondero, George, 7, 96-8, 100, 102, 107 Panofsky on, 110 on Pollock and Motherwell, 97 Dos Santos, Teotonio, 56 Doss, Erika, 101 Dubuffet, Jean, 48, 50 Duchamp, Marcel, 139-40 Dulles, John Foster, 108 Dyn, 76

Eco, Umberto, 135 Einstein, Albert, 55, 108-10 Eirez, Antonia, 13 Eisenhower, Dwight, 44, 52, 99 El Greco, 190023 Eliot, George, 120 Endell, August, 172 Engels, Friedrich, 70-1 67-8 On the Role of Labour Enlightenment, 2, 39 Ethiopian colonial wars, 112 “ethnic arts,” 126 ethnocentrism, 123-5, 130; see also race and racism ethnographic Surrealism, 57 Eurocentrism, 7, 20, 26, 27-8, 53, 84, 123-7 Evergood, Philip, 86, 100, 113 Ewen, Stuart, 62

225

INDEX

Excelsior, 87 Executive Orders: (1942), 81; (1948), 82; (1982), 80; (1986), 82 existentialism, 169-70 expressive fallacy, 29 Farmer, James, 129-30

Farrell, James T., 43, 45

Faulkner, William, 83

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 107, 110 and Abstract Expressionists, 3, 6, 26, 93

files on artists, see specific artist

and Schapiro, 85, 176-7

Ferber, Herbert, 59 Fernandez, Augusto, 12-13 Foner, Philip, 57 Fordism, 108, 150 Franco, Francisco, 12, 52 Frankenthaler, Helen, 34, 53, 189n4 Frankfurt School, 6, 37, 43, 57-8, 70, 74, 179, 190n30, 195nn48,58, 196n62 on anti-Semitism, 83-4, 200n26 on art, 134 and critical theory, 11, 55, 60-3 on mass culture, 58-9, 62, 112 and Schapiro, 59-61, 177-8 on scientism/technologism, 143, 145 on society, 122, 153 see also specific member; Institute for Social Research; Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 79, 80, 91 “b-1” exemptions, 82 Freedom Riders, 129-30 Freud, Sigmund, 63, 170, 196n71, 216n89 Friedman, B. H., 5: Friedman, Milton, 147 Friends of the United American Artists Workshop, 82 Fromm, Erich, 57-9, 59f, 63 Fry, Roger, 166 Fukuyama, Francis, 41

Fusco, Coco, 17 Futurism, and fascism,

112-13,

148, 154

Galilei, Galileo, 180 Gantt, Harvey, 90 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 150 Gates, Henry Louis, Jt., 85 gender roles Adorno on, 117, 122-3 W. de Kooning and, 118-19, 120-1 see also cult of masculinity General Office of Accounting, 80 German Expressionism, 124 Gilroy, Paul, 127 Gingrich, Newt, 111 Gogh, Vincent van, 171, 176 Gold, Mike, 116, 118-19 Goldman, Emma, 48, 117, 156, 165 Goodinan, Paul, 144-5, 189 and anarchism, 6, 73, 156, 214nS0 and communitas, 144, 156

Gorky, Arshile, 158 Gottlieb, Adolph, 49, 81, 101, 127, 130 anarchism and, 156 FBI files on, 3, 85-7 Alchemist, The, 29 Romanesque Facade, 65, 66f Gould, Stephen Jay, 158 Goulart, Joao, 143 Gramsci, Antonio, 37 Greenberg, Clement, 40-6, 135, 141, 152, 154~ 5, 158, 166-7 on Pollock's “Stalinism,” 46 and positivism, 147-8 “American-Type Painting,” 49, 124 Art and Culture, 42, 177 Gropius, Walter, 64, 172, 178 Guilbaut, Serge, 9, 18, 26, 40-7, 95, 113, 177 Guevara, Ernesto Che, 15f, 161 Guggenheim, Peggy, 119 Guide to Subversive Organizations and Publications (US. govt.), 82 Giiney, Yi

Guston, Philip,

150

87, 130

Habermas, Jiirgen, 62

Hadjinicolaou, Nicos, 37 Haig, Alexander, 111 Hall, Stuart,

127-8

Hamilton, Elaine, 23 Hammer, Mike (character), 110 Hammett, Dashiel, 83 Hamsun, Knut, 63 Hare, David, 97 Harlem (New York), 32, 129 Harrington, Michael, 45, 57, 177 Harrison, Charles, 53, 163 Hartigan, Grace, 34, 53, 91, 119, 122, 189n4 Hauser, Arnold, 179-80 Haywood, Big Bill (William Dudley), 48 Head Start Task Force, 45 Heckscher, August, 49 Hegel, Georg W. F,, 160 Heidegger, Martin, 176 Hemingway, Andrew, 8 Hemingway, Ernest, 115-16 Hess, Thomas B., 4, 5, 53, 73, 83, 144, 161, 169

Hill, Stephan, 37 Hitler, Adolf, $2 Hobbs, Robert, 46

Hobsbawm, E. J., 167 Hofmann, Hans, 125, 129, 158. Hofstadter, Richard, 116-17

Hogarth, William, 178 Hook, Sydney, 45, 149

Hoover,J. Edgar, 91, 107 Horkheimer, Max, S8f, 59, 62-3, 153 and Frankfurt School, 43, 57, 60, 70 Dialectic of Enlightenment, The, 83-4, 143, 158 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 24, 52, 79, 93, 97, 107, 109; see also McCarthyism

INDEX

Howe, Irving, 4, 7f, 87, 89, 100, 106, 116, 177 on Adorno and mass culture, 58, 61 and Dissent, 3, 6, 43, 45, 144 and Marxism, 6 on socialism and liberalism, 1-2, 8 Huberman, Leo, 56, 89, 176 Humphrey, Hubert, 44 Hunt Family, 99 Hunter College, $9 Huxley, Aldous, 112-13 Brave New World, 112, 205n38 1. F Stone Weekly, 56, 105 immanent critique, 2, 40, 122 imperialism, 7, 10, 11, 16-17, 24, 41, 57 New York School and, 23-4 see also anti-imperialism India, 100, 114, 150 Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), 48, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, 110 Institute of Contemporary Art, 130 Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, 56 in New York, 59, 74, 83, 195n45, see also Frankfurt School; Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung instrumental thinking, 7, 11, 95, 135, 138, 1434, 153 Internal Security Act (1950), 81-2 Jackson Gallery, 129

Jameson, Fredric, 63 Japanese-Americans, detention camps for, 81 Jay, Martin, 59-60 Jewish Museum, 87

Jewish Social Democracy, 48

John Reed Club, 69, 91, 178, 184n7 Johns, Jasper, 189n4 Johnson, Lyndon B., 45 Johnson, William H., 129 Joseph, Ronald, 129 Kahlo, Frida,

176

Kandinsky, Wassily, 96 Kaneda, Shirley, 120

Kant, Immanuel, 160 Kennedy, John F,, 44-5, 113 Kennedy, Robert, 45 Kline, Franz, $3, 120, 128-9 Kootz, Samuel,

Korsch, Karl, 39, 43, 60, 63, 68, 74, 167, 176, 181 Kozloff, Max, 47 Kracauer, Siegfried, 178 Krasner, Lee, 28-9, 46, 53, 81, 98, 120-1, 180

FBI files on, 3, 85

and Pollock, 119-20, 206n72 and WPA, 107

Untitled, 32£, 120

165, 167 on division of labor, 161 on mutualism, 162 Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 130

158,

122,

161-3,

6, 52, 161

La Nouvelle Critique, 38 labor disalienated, 34 division of, 145, 161 Marx on British reforms, 40 Labour Party (Great Britain), 100, 106 Lacan, Jacques, 179 Lam, Wifredo, 128, 208n110 Landauer, Susan, 102 Latin America Abstract Expressionism and, 9-13, 15-17, 136-9 art criticism in, 9-10, 186nn31,34 art movements in, 11, 12-13, 15, 16, 209n16 communism in, 128 dependency theory and, 55-6, 211n35 Lawrence, Jacob, 86, 130 Lawson, Thomas, 42 Leacock, Eleanor Burke, 57 Lefebvre, Henri, 63 Léger, Fernand, 146, 149, 150, 176 Leja, Michael, 6, 26, 37-8, 122, 126 Lenin, V. L., 33, 35, 63, 74, 163 Leninism, 163, 181 Les Temps modernes, 179 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 103-4, 130, 131, 180 Levine, Jack, 86 Lewis, Norman, 3, 7, 28-9, 71, 107, 129 and alternative/progressive modernism, 72-4 and classical Marxism, 72-4 on New York School, 32 Every Atom Glows: Electrons in Luminous Vibration, 114 Klu Klux, 31f Mumbo Jumbo, 30f Processional, 31f Lewis, Sinclair, 116 liberalism classical, 1, 6, 8, 17, 43-5, 80, 109; and New York School, 7 cold-war, 7, 28, 43-6, 99, 103, 106, 156; and Abstract Expressionism, 17-18, 20-2;

129

Korean War, 55, 99 Kramer, Hilton, 47

Kristol, Irving, 45-6 Kropotkin, Peter, 6, 8, 52, 73, 156,

Shahn and, 18 Howe on socialism and, 1-2, 8 liberation theology, and Marxism, 139 Lichtenberg, G. C., 178 Life Magazine, 2 Lifshitz, Mikhail, 178 Limoges porcelain production, 146 Lippard, Lucy, 92, 120 Llinas, Guido, 13, 15-16 Por R. Motherwell, 16 Sin titulo (Untitled), 14f

Los Cinco (Cuba), 11, 13, 15

227

228

INDEX

Los Once (Cuba), 11, 13, 15-16, 20916 Lott, Trent, 111 Lovestone, Jay, 116 Lowenthal, Leo, 57-9, 59f, 62-3, 178 Luxemburg, Rosa, 74, 167, 179, 181 Luyckx, Marjorie, 118 McCarran Act (1950), see Internal Security Act McCarran-Walter Immigration Act (1952), 102 McCarthy, Joseph, 26, 44, 82, 96, 102 McCarthyism, 7, 26, 31, 41, 44, 56, 79, 100, 102, 107, 148 and art, 18, 28, 97, 124, 156 McCoy, Garnett, 56 McGee, Willie, 83 Magdoff, Harry, 56 Mailer, Norman, 4 Mandel, Ernest, 141-3 Mann, Thomas, 63, 179 Mao Zedong, 6, 161 Maoism, 43, 106 Marcuse, Herbert, 43, 57, S8f, 59, 62-3, 70, 144, 159, 161 Margo, Brian, 158 Marinetti, Filippo, 112, 150 Marion Willard Gallery, 129 Marsh, Reginald, 98 Marshall, George, 100, 130 Marshall Plan, 113, 130 Martinez, Rail, 11, 13, 15-16 Siempre Che, 156 Sin titulo (Untitled) (1958), 14f Sin titulo (Untitled) (1961), 14f Marx, Karl, 33-6, 38-40, 51, 63, 70, 72, 77, 145, 160, 161, 167, 177 Communist Manifesto, 39 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 70-1 German Ideology, 71 Marxism, 38, 54-63, 145, 167, 186n31, 187nS6, 189nn1,9, 19542, 217nn6,9,17 and anthropology, 57 and art, 18, 34, 69-71, 132, 160, 189n9, 19788 base-superstructure model, 38 classical, 26, 40, 43, 63, 147, 169; and New York School, 71-5 exchange vs. use value, 38 Howe and, 6 and human nature, 158, 160, 164, 214n43 Lévi-Strauss and, 103 and liberation theology, 138-9 Motherwell and, 76-7, 1991137 Newman on, 214n50 orthodox vs. unorthodox, 8, 45, 68, 73, 147, 180,

183n3

Schapiro on, 176, 177, 178; in writings, 9, 66-9, 178, 189n1, 217n17; and democratic socialism, 35-9 and Soviet Union, 106 Marxist Quarterly, 1, 34, 60, 68, 177 Masses, The, 3 Masson, André, 179

Mathews, Jane DeHart, 98 Mathieu, Georges, 50 Matisse, Henri, 4, 155 Matta, Roberto, 47, 90 Mattick, Paul, 43, 57, 63, 74, 144, 167, 179 Mauriac, Francois, 90 Mead, Margaret, 180 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 179 Middleton, Sam, 128-9 Milgram, Lillian, Dr., 8, 85, 175, 176, 177, 178 Mill, John Stuart, 43 Millet, Jean-Francois, 163 Mills, C. Wright, 57 Minimalism, 27 MIR peasant commune, 73, 156 Mir6, Joan, 90, 153 Mitchell, Joan, 34, $3, 120, 122, 189n4 Hemlock, 121f Mitgang, Herbert, 81 “modem man” discourse, 6-7, 123-7 modernism, 3, 17-18, 147-50, 156, 183n4 Adomo on, 63, 75-6, 84, 94, 166, 188n73 Clark on, 185n18 and communism, 96-8 as ethnocentric vs. multicultural, 124-6, 130 Greenberg on, 124-5, 147-8 and imperialism, 24 Motherwell on, 76-8, 148 Schapiro on, 17, 42, 60-1, 63, 69, 126, 184n7 see also alternative/progressive modernism; Romantic anticapitalism Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 64 Moissac, 178 Mondrian, Piet, 72 Monet, Claude, 172 Montaigne, Michel, 122 Montgomery, David, 36-7 Monthly Review, 54, 56, 89, 91, 106, 109, 146, 148, 176 Monthly Review School, 43, 55-6, 176, 217n9 Morales, Armando, 11-13, 51, 186037 Guerrillo muerto I (Dead Guerrilla I), 12, 12f Morris, William, 171-2 Mosquera, Gerardo, 127-8 Motherwell, Robert, 3, 34, 46, 47, 53, 71, 83, 162, 166, 18514 and anarchism, 6, 52, 76, 156, 169, 218n29 anti-imperialism, 90-1 on art and artists, 33, 48, 92, 128, 146, 152-3, 181 and communism, 97-8 FBI files on, 3, 81, 91, 97-8 and Frankfurt School, 59 gender roles and, 117 and Marxism, 76-7, 1990137 on modernism, 76-8, 148 on New York School, 7-8, 17-18, 27, 69, 92,

148 and Siqueiros Affair, 87 Elegy to the Spanish Republic #34, 13f Emperor of China, The, 6 “Spanish Elegy” series, 12, 13f, 51

INDEX

Munch, Edvard, 171 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 18, 81, 91, 99, 102

Museum of Natural History, 103 mythmaking, 101-4, 105-31 Stone on “myths that menace,” 105-15 Nation, The, 44, 56-7, 105, 148 Navajo sand painting, 151 Nazism, and U.S, space program, 83 negation/negativity in Abstract Expressionism, 7, 65, 75, 76, 91, 94, 97-8, 150 and anti-Stalinism, 4 in modernism, 63, 75-6, 84, 185n18, 188n73 Nehru, Pandit Jawahrla, 114 Neue Sachlickheit, 171 Neumann, Franz, $7, 59 Nevelson, Louise, 50, 120 New American Painting (1958-9), 22 New Deal, 32, 74, 107-8, 109 programs, 63, 106-7; see also Works Progress Administration New Left, 20, 57, 116, 135 New Masses, The, 3-4, 82, 116 New Politics, 3, 6, 54, 57, 74, 87-8, 144 New Republic, 108 New School for Social Research, 34, 103, 180 New York Public Library, 131 New York School, 7-8, 22 and anti-imperialism, 88-91, 108 and civil rights movement, 31, 86, 89-90 and classical Marxism, 71-5 and communism, 96-8 E, de Kooning on, 114 and imperialism, 23-4 Lewis on, 32 Motherwell on, 7-8, 17-18, 69, 92, 148 origin of term, 7 and Siqueiros Affair, 86-8 see also Abstract Expressionism New York Times, 87, 89-91, 116 New York University, 34 Newman, Annalee, 161 Newman, Barnett, 7-8, 27, $3, 70, 71, 83, 101, 121, 168, 185n13 and anarchism, 6, 9, 22, 42, 46-7, 52, 73, 102, 117, 144, 155-6, 160, 163-4, 198n122; of Kropotkin, 158, 161-2, 214nS0 and antinationalism, 46-7 on art and artists, 152, 156. 158, 159-60, 161; non-European, 126-7 and classical liberalism, 22 critics on, 50, 192n6S debate with Panofsky, 110, 175, 204n29, 216n1 Schapiro on, 9, 158, 175, 185n28 on scientism, 158-9, 161 and Siqueiros Affair, 87 works, 92, 95; Newman on, 151, 160, 166 Broken Obelisk, The, 157f Cathedra, 66 Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 110, 156f, 175

Nicaragua Revolution, and Abstract Expressionism, 12, 24, $1, 90, 139 vanguard art, 11-12 Nierendorf Gallery, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 117, 123-5, 169-70 Nixon, Richard, 89, 100, 107, 172, Nizan, Paul, 63 Nolde, Emil, 113 Niifiez Soto, Orlando, 54-6 O'Brian, John, 155 O'Hara, Frank, 114 Oliva, Tomés, 13 Orwell, George, 112-13 Oxford Art Journal, 175 Paganini, Niccold, 67 Pakistan, Abstract Expressionism and, 22~4 Pannekoek, Anton, 74, 167 Panofsky, Erwin, 110-11, 175 Parsons, Betty, 129, 166 Partisan Review, 3, 6, 46, 79, 117, 149 Paternosto, César, 17, 27, 47 From the Archetypal Geometry Series #1 (6), 28f Paz, Octavio, 10 Pentagon Papers, 173 Pérez, Rigoberto Lopez, 12 Perkins, Frances, 107 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 60-1, 64, 171-2 Picasso, Pablo, 4, 45, 88, 90, 96, 99 and Communist Party, 81 Pinochet, Augusto, 147 Pissarro, Camille, 162 PM., 3, 105, 121 Poggioli, Renato, 159, 169-70 Poliakoff, Serge, 12 Pollock, Charles, 56 Pollock, Friedrich, 57, 63, 74, 141 Pollock, Jackson, 7, 107, 152 and atom bomb, 113-14 and communism, 97-8, 202n78 critics on, 114, 180, 18753, 206n64, 214nS1 gender roles and, 118, 120-1 and Krasner, 119-20, 206n72 leftism of, 46, 48 works: exhibited, 53; as influence, 22-4, 187n42; mass-cultural representations/ reproductions, 20, 21, 98, 115, 118 Autumn Rhythm, 23f, 137, 186031 Cathedral, 202n78 No. 7, 1951, 136 Sounds in the Grass: Shimmering Substance, 113 Pollock, Roy, 48 Pop Art, and Cuban Revolution, 15-16 populism, 162-4 left-wing, 40 positivism, 11 Possibilities, 6, 47 postcolonial theory, 27, 127 postmodernism, 125, 127 Pousette-Dart, Richard Cathedral ~ The Ascension, 66

229

230

INDEX

pre-Columbian art, 126 “primitivism,” 126-7 Progressive Labor Alliance, 43 progressive modernism, see alternative/ progressive modernism Proudhon, Pierre, 162 public opinion, of abstract art, 20 race and racism, 80, 115, 127-9 Reinhardt on, 83-4, 85 see also civil rights movement Ragon, Michel, 20 Rama, Angel, 11 Raphael, 67 Rauschenberg, Robert, 15, 189n4 Reagan, Ronald, 17, 20, 37, 41, 44, 111 as FBI informant, 80 constraints on FOIA, 80, 82 realismo magico, and Surrealism, 150 Refregier, Anton, 100 Reinhardt, Ad, 34, 53, 54, 70, 91, 126, 152 antiwar activities, 89-90, 114 on art and artists, 7, 22-3, 71-2, 121 and Civil Rights Congress, 82-3 and classical Marxism, 75-6 and communism, 71, 81, 85, 98, 121 FBI files on, 3, 80-2, 85, 90 and Frankfurt School, 59 and liberalism, 7, 45 ‘on racism, 83-4 and Siqueiros Affair, 87-8 and socialism, 46, 199n11 works, 95; donated, 114; reproduced, 115 No War, 94, 9Sf Number 88, 1950 (Blue), 23f Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 146, 171 Republican Party, 49 Reynal, Jeanne, 180 Rice, Dan, 54 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 49 Rivas, Juan, 24 Untitled (After Pollack), 25f Rivera, Diego, 46, 69, 176 Roberts, John, 24 Robson, Deirdre, $3 Rockefeller family, 22 Roman, Jaime Wheelock, 56 Romanesque art, 65-6, 178 Romantic anticapitalism, 39 Abstract Expressionism as, 31, 135, 136-41 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 109 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 48, 107; see also New Deal programs Rose, Barbara, 81 Rosenberg, Bernard, 58

Rosenberg, Harold, 3, 4, 6, 42, 47, 75, 109, 146,

153 and Abstract Expressionists, 46, 83, 101, 124, 130-2 on

cold

war,

79

on “contemporary man” discourse, 125~6 on cult of masculinity, 115-16 and Dissent, 43-4

on global art, 49 on Marxism,

51, $7

Rosenzweig, Phyllis, 21, 115 Rothko, Mark, 45, 50, $3, 141, 163-4, 168, 215n65

and anarchism, 48, 117, 205nS6; Schapiro on, 88, 180-1

FBI files on, 3, 81, 85-7, 88

and gender roles, 118, 120,

121

and Seagram Building, 53-4, 5Sf Black on Maroon, 55f Rothko, Mell, 54

Rousseau, Henri, 171

Rushdie, Salman, 150 Ruskin, John, 145-6 Russell, Bertrand, 114 Russell, Bill, “action painting” ad, 20, 21f Russian Revolution, 48, 69, 74, 98 Sachs, David,

144

Sand, George, 120 Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), 12, 24, 51, 54, 90 Sandino, Augusto César, 12

Sandler, Irving, 53 Santo Domingo de Silos, 178 Sao Paulo Bienal, 12 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 90, 104, 108, 169-70, 179 Sawin, Martica, 151 Schapiro, Meyer, 1, 8, 33, 56, 88, 122, 131, 133, 148-9

on Abstract Expressionists, 144, 151, 158 and Benjamin, 60 and communism, 173-4, 178, 184n7; FBI inquiries, 85, 176-7 and Dissent, 3, 4, 8, 144-5 and Frankfurt School, 59-61,

177-8

and Greenberg, 42, 49 on Marxism, 176, 177, 178; in writings, 9, 66-9, 189n1, 217n17

on modernism, 17, 42, 63, 69, 126, 184n7; alternative/progressive, 99-100; critique of Pevsner, 171-2 in Newman-Panofsky debate, 110, 175, 204n29, 216n1 on Rothko’s anarchism, 48, 88, 180-1

on Siqueiros, 88

and socialism, 167; democratic, 26, 27, 35-9, 43, 177, 184n7, 189n1, 217n12 and Vietnam War, 45, 173-4, 177

Abstract Painting, 99f “Art and Society” (1939), 17, 64-9 “Commentary on Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program,” 8, 33-5 “Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art,” 8, 11, 26, 33-4, 126, 133-41

“Nature of Abstract Art, The,” 34, 60, 68 Notre Dame de la Couture, 676 portraits of associates, 7f, 58f, 59, 59f

Schiller, Friedrich, 63

Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr, 7, 43-5 and vital center, 43 Schoenberg, Arnold,

178

INDEX

Scientific Management, see Taylorism scientism

Frankfurt School on, 143, 145 Newman on, 158-9, 161 W. de Kooning on, 151, 154 Screen Actor’s Guild, Reagan as FBI informant in, 80 Seagram Building, Rothko and, 53-4, 55f Security Matter-C (SM-C), 81, 86 Seurat, Georges, 162, 171 Shahn, Ben, 18, 86, 100, 188nS8 and Communist Party, 81 Shiff, Richard, 47 Shriver, Sargent, 45 Signac, Paul, 162 Sills, Tom, 180 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 46, 86-8 Siskind, Aaron, 52 Smith, Adam, 145 Smith, David, 52-3, 86 and socialism, 46, 53 Smith, Tony, 129 Soby, James, 167 social democracy, 6, 7, 42, 48, 57, 74, 110, 116 social history of art, 9, 20, 26, 39-49 socialism, 45, 46, 57, 146 Abstract Expressionism and, 7, 11, 26, 46, 80 of Dissent, 3-4, 6, 55; see also democratic socialism Howe on liberalism and, 1-2, 8, 183n3 libertarian, 167 Reinhardt and, 46, 71, 81, 199n11 Rosenberg on cold war and, $1, 79 Schapiro on, 1, 9, 11, 34-5, 183nn1,3; attacked for views, 79 Worker's Council, 6, 43, 167 see also democratic socialism; state socialism Socialist Realism, 16, 73 Socialist Workers Party (SWP), 116 Somoza, Anastasio, 12 Sontag, Susan, on science fiction, 110-12 Sorel, Georges, 63, 165 Soulages, Pierre, 20, 42, 48, 50 Painting, 19f Soviet Russia Today, 3, 82, 156 Soviet Union, 44-6, 105, 106, 111; see also antiSovietism; anti-Stalinism; cold war Soyer, Issac, 86 Soyer, Moses, 86 Soyer, Raphael, 69 Spanish Civil War, 12, 52 Spanish Refugee Relief Committee, 52 Spero, Nancy, 53 Spillane, Mickey, 110 Sports Illustrated, 20 Springs, East Hampton, 114 Staempfli, George, 91 Stalin, Joseph, 46, 96, 106, 179 Stalinism, 26, 79, 176; see also anti-Stalinism Stamos, Theodoros, 158 state capitalism, 63, 74, 83, 100, 108, 113, 151, 161, 181 state socialism, 71, 74, 161

Steinberg, Leo, 147 Sterne, Hedda, Machine, 152 Stevens, Adlai, 89 Stevens, May, 53, 86 antiwar activities, 89-90 Still, Clyfford, 53, 101, 102, 158, 163-7 and anarchism, 156 Stone, I. F, 26, $5, 56, 79 on cold-war myths, 105-15 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 129-30 Studio 35, Artist Sessions at, 32, $2, 152 sublime, 76, 102, 160, 164, 166 Surrealism, 49, 63, 73, 76, 92, 103, 128 and Abstract Expressionism, 150, 154, 170 Sweeney, James Johnson, 176 Sweezy, Paul, 43, $6, 89, 176 Symbolism, 171-2 tachisme, 137 Taft-Hartley Act (1947),

Tamayo, Rufino, 127 Tapies, Antoni, 12, 48

142

Tate Gallery, 22, 54

Taylor, Frederick, W., 139 Taylorism (Scientific Management), 108, 135, 139-40,

141-50

technologism, Frankfurt School on, 143, 145 Thatcher, Margaret, 37 Thomas Jefferson School, 82 Thompson, E. P., 38

Thompson, James, 8

Thoreau, Henry David, 52 Thorwaldsen,

Bertel, 67

Tibol, Raquel, 10 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 119 Tiger's Eye, 6, 152 Time Magazine, 98 Tolstoy, Leo, 156, 163-4

Tomlin,

Bradley Walker,

120

Torres-Garcia, Joaquin, 27

Torres-Rivas, Edelberto, 56 Traba, Marta, 17, 135.

on Abstract Expressionism and anti-

imperialism, 10-11

‘on art and dependency theory, 55

Trotsky, Leon, 46, 87, 88, 96, 100,

147

Trotskyism, 42, 43, 45, 46, 88, 116, 184n7

Truman, Harty S., 45, 83, 107, 130 Truman Doctrine (1947), 26, 44, 108, 113,

Turner, Bryan S., 37

142

underdevelopment, Third World, 56 uneven historical development, 18, 26, 68, 100, 147 United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, 36 U.S. Friends of Mexico, 86-8 U.S. Information Agency (USIA), 98, 100 Vallaton, Félix, 171

Veblen, Thorstein, 59, 63 Velde, Van der, 171

231

232

INDEX. Venice Biennale (1970), 90

Verspohl, Franz-Joachim, 169 Vidal, Antonio, 13, 15-16 Sin titulo (Untitled), 14f Vietnam War, 52, 95, 96 and liberalism, 44-5 protested: by New York School, 31, 45, 87, 89-91, 94, 155; by Schapiro, 45, 173-4, 177 Vogue, 115, 117 voluntarist concept of history, 29 Wakefield Gallery, 126, 129

Wallace, Henry, 107

Warhol, Andy, 15

Weissman, Joan Murray, 114

Weltfish, Gene, 84 Wertheimer, Max, 179

West, Cornell, 8S

White, Hayden, 65

White House staff, 49, 87 Whiting, Cécile, 101 Whitman, Walt, 52 Whitney Museum of American Art, 93 Wilder, Thorton, 116

Wilkie, Wendell, 112 Williams, Raymond, 38, 144 Rosenberg on socialism of, 146 Williams, Tennessee, 98 Williams, William Appleman, 57 Williard, Marion, 129 Wittkower, Rudolf, 125 Wobblies, 48 Wolf, Eric, 57 Wolfe, Alan, 44 Wollen, Peter, 48 Wols, Wolfgang, 169 Woodruff, Hal, 129 Worker's Council, 6, 43, 167 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 106-7, 151, 155 Wright, Richard, 129 Wrigley, Richard, 175

Writers and Artists Protest, 87, 91, 94

Zeitschrift flir Sozialforschung, 60-3, 61f, 64, 178, 216(AppA); see also Frankfurt School; Institute for Social Research Zervos, Christian, 47 Zinn, Howard, 57