Artist as Author: Action and Intent in Late-Modernist American Painting 9780226753003

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Artist as Author

​Artist as Author Action a nd I nt ent in L ate -­M oder nist American Paint ing

​Christa Noel Robbins

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by Christa Noel Robbins All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­75295-­2 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­75300-­3 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226753003.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Robbins, Christa Noel, author. Title: Artist as author : action and intent in late-modernist American painting / Christa Noel Robbins. Other titles: Action and intent in late-modernist American painting Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020040704 | ISBN 9780226752952 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226753003 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Painting, American—20th century. | Modernism (Art)—United States—History—20th century. | Art, Abstract— United States—History—20th century. Classification: LCC ND212.5.M63 R63 2021 | DDC 759.13/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040704 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction. The Artist as Author 1

Part I 1. The Act-­Painting 23 2. The Expressive Fallacy 42 3. Rhetoric of Motives 63

Part II 4. Self-­Discipline 89 5. Event as Painting 114 6. Conclusion: Gridlocked 142 Acknowledgments 159 Notes 161 Select Bibliography 193 Index 207

Introduction: The Artist as Author

What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self? — W. K . W i m s at t a n d M . C . Be a r d s l e y, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946)

The evening, by most accounts, was a disaster. Gathered at the Ninety-­Second Street YMHA one night in late February 1967, an audience of New York sophisticates was confronted with a visually and audibly chaotic event. Film projections above and to the sides of the audience’s seats, television cameras, monitors, and intermittent performances all swirled around a finely set dinner table at which were seated seven artists (and one dance critic) dressed in formal attire (fig. 0.1). With four of the artists seated with their backs to the audience, the evening’s program was synchronized with a five-­course dinner, apparently planned by the art critic Michael Fried, and served to the artists by tuxedoed waiters.1 Though each of the diners was miked, with the intention of broadcasting their dinner conversation to the audience, so were the cutlery and dinner settings. The auditorium was filled with an increasingly disorienting din, which caused the audience to first grow restless and then to openly revolt. The lack of context for what it was witnessing must have added to the audience’s frustration. A modest advertisement in the New York Times promoted the evening as an “illustrated discussion.” It promised an encounter with seven “contemporary” artists: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, the poet Robert Creeley, the New York School painter Jack Tworkov, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, and the electronics artists Billy Klüver and Len Lye. While the Ninety-­Second Street YMHA was known as a venue for advanced art practice, only Cunningham would have been a familiar figure to regular attendees. They might have seen him dancing with Martha Graham’s company. But this anarchic spectacle was a far cry from Graham’s minimalist choreography. Titled TV Dinner—Homage to E.A.T. (Food for Thought), the dinner-­cum-­ performance was the final event in the traveling program “Contemporary Voices in the Arts,” which had been organized by the New York State Council on the Arts. Described by Grace Glueck as “the most exotic intellectual road show

F ig u re 0.1. Jack Tworkov, TV Dinner—Homage to E. A. T. (Food for Thought), final event of “Contemporary Voices in the Arts,” sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts, at the 92nd Street YWHA in New York, February 25, 1967. On stage a five-­course dinner was served, at which the performers’ voices and the clinking of the silverware were electrically amplified. Tworkov’s painting Barrier No. 4 hung above the table. Seated at the table, clockwise starting with Stan VanDerBeek in the background left, are Jack Tworkov, Billy Kluver, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Creeley, David Vaughn (who managed the group’s tour), and Len Lye. © Adelaide de Menil; courtesy Estate of Jack Tworkov.

ever to hit the College Belt,” the program visited college campuses around the state in order to promote dialogue across the arts and to cultivate an interest in “new media.”2 Creeley, who wrote a report on the program for Arts Magazine, describes the difficulties faced at each performance, including the conflicting goals of the seven artists and a perpetual struggle with equipment and facilities. According to Creeley, however, the “most continual limit” was the intransigent “habits . . . of the audience,” as the traveling group insistently defied audience expectations of both performance and professionalism. The final event at the Y, with a crowd made up of “neither students nor faculty,” but, rather, of “sophisticated” Manhattan art patrons, was no exception. They met the “Contemporary Voices” group, as Creeley reports, with a “fairly discreet rage.”3 Suspended above it all, like a banner signaling a newly banded league, was Jack Tworkov’s large-­scale Abstract Expressionist painting Barrier No.  4 (1961; pl. 1). In this context, the expressionist canvas may have been read as announcing the evening’s purpose: to proclaim, once and for all, that such all-­ engrossing, uncomposed, and performative experiences were the true “legacy of Jackson Pollock,” as Allan Kaprow had put it a decade before.4 Indeed, the evening’s indeterminate boundaries and cultivated chaos would have looked a

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lot like a “happening,” the art form that Kaprow predicted would take the place of painting in Pollock’s wake and which had, that very month, turned up as a cover story by Barry Ferrell in Life Magazine. Happenings, according to Ferrell’s report, “exist only as experiences, moments in which art is torn away from the context of culture to become a part of life.” They defy our compulsion to always discover a “craftsman” or “artisan” behind the art object—indeed, they defy our compulsion to discover an object in art at all.5 That much was clear from the hectic “feedback” that grew out of the evening’s antics, which rendered the TV Dinner production increasingly incomprehensible to its audience and ever more absorbing for its artist-­participants—“I don’t think I ever had a better piece of meat,” Creeley concluded.6 It was Tworkov’s suggestion that the program culminate in an onstage dinner, in the hope that the format—part discussion, part performance—would offer a compromise between the participants’ divergent aesthetic commitments. A close friend of Willem de Kooning’s and a “first generation” New York School painter, Tworkov admits in his journals to often feeling at odds with the other artists. On the tour, he was reluctant to show his paintings, which were occasionally projected as slides, worrying that they appeared “staid and static” when set against the “visual and oral excitement” that characterized the series.7 That worry was realized with a kind of hurting clarity when Tworkov first saw Barrier No. 4 installed above the stage for the final evening’s performance. Upon entering the auditorium as it was being prepped for the dinner, Tworkov discovered VanDerBeek and Klüver hauling in electronic equipment in anticipation of another new-­media extravaganza. Tworkov, imagining how the evening might unfold, was filled with doubt: “My painting . . . was hanging like a stage prop ready to be lowered or raised. It looked dirty and needed to be cleaned and varnished. What possible relation can this modest painting have to this hap­pening?”8 The static quality with which the energetic Barrier No. 4 presented itself to Tworkov seems to be the product of painting’s inability to synchronize with a shift in the terms of artistic temporality. That shift was exemplified in the “Contemporary Voices” program by John Cage’s commitment to an aesthetics of indeterminacy. Cage stressed the “process” of performed composition in a manner that stood apart from what he called the “object in time.” Such an object—a musical recording, for example—could be nothing but a token of a past experience. The important thing was not to look back, according to Cage, in an effort to preserve the known, but to rest in “non-­knowledge,” the “not yet happened,” the indeterminate.9 In relation to Cage’s celebration of indeterminate process over and above the static object, Barrier No. 4 could not help but appear to be the residue of a past event, an object frozen and circumscribed by its static frame—the thin wooden edge constructed around its exterior—as much as by its identity as a self-­consciously Modernist work of art. More than ever, it struck Tworkov that painting and performance are two deeply divergent practices. “Painting is feeble as a performing art,” Tworkov writes. “It hardly has any role as such. It is rarely shaped by any conscious intention to produce an effect.

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When it is we recoil from it. . . . It is a narrow medium—limited in range of expression.” Tworkov, who bemoaned the publication of the “happenings” essay in Life ahead of the YMHA event, was hard-­pressed to continue to assert those limits in the context of the “Contemporary Voices” series: “Every art can only say what its medium allows it to say.”10 The shift that the juxtaposition of Barrier No. 4 and Cagian indeterminacy revealed was not, of course, limited to happenings and performance. It was at the heart of the most advanced practices that would come to be identified as the neo-­avant-­garde, the overarching period-­style under which art historians group happenings, performance art, the neo-­Dada practices of Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as the minimalist and conceptual experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. Tworkov’s presence in the “Contemporary Voices” series and the awkward inclusion of his Abstract Expressionist painting in the final performance initially struck me as a perfect illustration of the bifurcated commitments of the New York art scene in the late 1960s. The most emphatic difference that emerged from this scene was the definition and presentation of authored action, which was necessarily revised once indeterminacy and temporality were embraced. Tworkov’s description of Barrier No. 4 as “modest” points to this revision. At more than 12 × 7 feet, Barrier No. 4 is anything but modest. A robust, labor-­intensive painting, it is a testament to the hard work of the man who made it. But in the context of the event-­structure of TV Dinner, all that labor is forced into the past, rendering the painting “punctual,” to use Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’s term.11 By contrast, the new-­media experiments and performances put on by the other “Contemporary Voices” participants refused the break that results from the punctuality of authored action. Placed next to Tworkov’s finished painting, their ongoing, open-­ ended practice recalls Tony Smith’s oft-­quoted 1966 interview with Samuel Wagstaff wherein he recounts his experience of driving with a group of students on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike. The immediacy and expansiveness of the unfolding event, which Smith relates when characterizing the shifting aesthetics of the 1960s, defied any easy framing: “Most paintings look pretty pictorial after that,” Smith concluded.12 Tworkov’s continued allegiance to pictorial limits, to this particularly “narrow medium,” may seem to have secured his outsider status as a participant in the “Contemporary Voices” program. But attending more carefully to the concerns Tworkov voiced, which orbit around questions of intention, effect, and temporality, also reveals something held in common across that scene: a concern with the question of authorship and a commitment to investigating its significance in and as practice. Looked at with more care, the differences we are quick to see between neo-­avant-­garde and Modernist practice are less ideological than technical. That is to say, such differences are best located in the means by which questions such as authorship arise, rather than in the questions themselves. This book makes this clear by looking carefully at Modernist painters working in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to Tworkov, a careful consideration of Arshile Gorky, Helen Frankenthaler,

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Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin demonstrates that Modernist painters, like their neo-­avant-­garde contemporaries, were involved in a critical inquiry into the question of the artist as author. The same year that Tworkov and Cage shared the stage at the TV Dinner event, Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author” was published for the first time.13 Appearing in Aspen’s 1967 “Minimalism Issue,” the essay was solicited by the artist and critic Brian O’Doherty, who was acting as guest editor. Wanting to focus on “the notion that art, writing, etc., was produced by a kind of anti-­self that had nothing to do with whoever ‘me’ was,” O’Doherty approached Barthes and asked for a contribution.14 Barthes responded by submitting “The Death of the Author.” Aspen was a particularly appropriate forum for Barthes’s essay, which Seán Burke describes as “the single most influential meditation on the question of authorship in modern times.”15 A decentered assemblage of art works and texts, which O’Doherty requested from a host of neo-­avant-­garde artists, including Cage, Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Mel Bochner, and Sol LeWitt, the “Minimalism Issue” established a link early on between the neo-­avant-­garde and the “death of the author” thesis (fig. 0.2).16 Any ordering of the magazine’s contents has to be arrived at via the activity of the reader/viewer alone, offering a material analogue to Barthes’s essay with its vision of the text without an author as “a multi-­dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.”17 The link between Barthes’s essay and the neo-­avant-­garde has only strengthened in the years since, and few art historians have been more influential in binding them together than Rosalind Krauss. Krauss argued early in her career that the works of artists like Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Serra took a conscious stance against a picture of the self as private, which was ostensibly promoted in certain naïve receptions of Abstract Expressionism. By demonstrating that meaning is a product of such public structures as institutional setting and the situatedness of viewers both as bodies in space and socially constituted subjects, such artists exposed and defeated the monadic self at the heart of certain strains of Modernist practice and criticism. As Krauss phrased it in her 1977 primer Passages in Modernist Sculpture, a text that positions minimalism as the apotheosis of a Modernist sculptural critique of the self as private: The ambition of minimalism was to relocate the origins of a sculpture’s meaning to the outside, no longer modeling its structure on the privacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional nature of what we might call cultural space.18

By “privacy of psychological space” Krauss means the intentional, mental space of authorship, and by “cultural space” she means something akin to Barthes’s notion of language when he writes that “it is language which speaks, not the author.”19 Krauss’s “cultural space,” this is to say, is a structure into which and

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F ig u re 0 . 2 . Issue 5+6 of Aspen (1967), edited and designed by Brian O’Doherty. Pictured here are the issue’s various items, including, on the far left, cardboard cutouts designed by Tony Smith that can be made into a model of his sculptural installation Maze, and the white box O’Doherty designed to house the magazine’s contents. On the right are phonographic recordings of Merce Cunningham, Marcel Duchamp, and Richard Huelsenbeck, as well as a reel of Super 8 film featuring clips of works by Hans Richter, László Moholy-­Nagy, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, and Stan VanDerBeek. Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

out of which practice emerges and which can never be said to find its origins in the artist alone. Krauss’s claim that minimalism unseated an idealistic picture of the self as private and originary has been extremely influential, but other scholars have been less careful in distinguishing the claims made by individual works of art from their reception.20 Krauss argued that it was a mistake to read Abstract Expressionist paintings, for example, as uniformly “expressionistic”—a reading that Krauss argues gave rise to superficial stylistic distinctions. The early views of [Jackson Pollock’s and Willem de Kooning’s] work proceeded from the very logic of “expression,” seeing every mark on their canvases as asking to be read in the context of a private self from which the intention to make that mark has been directed. In that sense, the public surface of the work seemed to demand that one see it as a map from which could be read the privately held crosscurrents of personality—the artist’s inviolable Self.21

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Such a reading of art promotes a theory of authorship that starts with a false notion of the artist as unmediated self. The viewer then takes up the painting itself as evidence of an originary and ultimately private intent. But it is important to acknowledge that Krauss was not criticizing Pollock’s and de Kooning’s paintings here. Rather, she was criticizing a mistaken reading of those paintings. In Krauss’s view, minimalism’s critique of the private self was not new; it was a project initiated early in the history of Modernist practice, reaching back at least to the late nineteenth century, carrying through the Modernist paintings and sculptures of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and into the experiments of the neo-­avant-­garde.22 Krauss’s tracing of the deep history of the critique of the “private self ” in experimental art practice throughout the twentieth century stands opposed to the presentation of minimalism as a reaction against and break with a Modernist painting thoroughly under the “sway of the author.”23 In his highly influential essay “The Crux of Minimalism,” for example, Hal Foster pre­sents minimalism as a “contemporary crux, a paradigm shift toward postmodernist practices.”24 In regarding minimalism as a crux, Foster helpfully relates the practice to its Modernist precedents, but even as he does so, he drives an ideological wedge between them. He argues that minimalism continues Modernist painting’s commitment to the perceiving subject.25 As such, Foster pre­sents Modernist painting as retaining a residual idealism in its clinging to the first-­person perspective of the phenomenological “I perceive.”26 Foster regards minimalism as promising an escape from that idealism. In placing the perceiving body at the interface of art and the institutional spaces of viewership, the minimalist object opens the door out of the ostensible privacy of Modernist making and viewing, and into a structuralist publicity. “In this way,” Foster writes, “the stake of minimalism is the nature of meaning and the status of the subject, both of which are held to be public, not private, produced in the physical interface with the actual world, not in the mental space of idealist conception.”27 In such a narrative, neo-­ avant-­garde artists like Carl Andre and Donald Judd are said to have initiated a rejection of Modernist painting’s commitment to the artist as sole crafter of meaning, as well as the attendant idea that meaning issues from the privacy of interior thought.28 It strikes me as no coincidence that the most ardent dismissals of authorial presence in Modernist painting followed fast on the heels of a stringent critique of so-­called Neo-­Expressionism in the early 1980s. In late 1982, for example, Art in America published the first of a two-­part special issue dedicated to what the editors termed “the expressionism question.” The question was provoked by a seeming tidal shift away from the poststudio practices of conceptualism and minimalism, and toward a renewed interest in an emotionally expressive mode of painting, typified in the works of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Eric Fischl.29 In part a cataloguing of the field of Neo-­Expressionism, the two issues also featured polemical essays by Craig Owens, Carter Ratcliff, and Foster, the main goal of which was to expose the false consciousness at the heart of this

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new, ostensibly market-­driven trend. In these critical essays, Neo-­Expressionists were accused of cynicism and complicity (by Owens), insincerity and bad faith (by Ratcliff), and ideological confusion (by Foster). Most of the criticism was aimed at the insincerity of an expressionist ethos that denied “its rhetorical nature” and, in its celebration of “immediacy,” promoted a false picture of “the self as originary.”30 In ignoring the “many social and historical mediations”31 that stand between the self and its signification, these scholars concluded, Neo-­Expressionism was a gross capitulation to “the machinations of power,” as Owens put it.32 For art historians, such as Owens and Foster, committed to the critical avant-­ garde, the turn toward traditional media and the lack of concern with the influence of private markets seemed like nothing less than a rappel à l’ordre, as Benjamin Buchloh dubbed it in a 1981 special issue of October called Art World Follies.33 As in the Art in America issues of the following year, the majority of the “follies” identified by the October scholars were located in and around the exhibition and interpretation of painting, which seemed to proceed as though the theoretical and political gains earned in the 1960s—gains that were understood to have been produced in and around the neo-­avant-­garde—had never occurred. In the face of what appeared a horrifying reversal of the hard-­won battles of the 1960s and 1970s, contributors to journals such as Art in America and October felt the need to confront head-­on what Tom Hayden later termed “antisixties neoconservatives” on both the cultural and political fronts.34 It was bad enough that advanced culture had retreated to the safe haven of capital exchange. But in addition, Neo-­Expressionists appeared “to recenter the self,” offering its viewers and buyers a comforting picture of the self as private, contained, and autonomous.35 The dominant art theory of the late 1990s grew out of this moment in the early 1980s. I moved from painting to art history around the same time—in my early twenties. The critical vanguard was represented by Douglas Crimp’s On the Museum in Ruins (1993), the publication of Craig Owens’s collected essays in 1994, and Hal Foster’s The Return of the Real: The Avant-­Garde at the End of the Century (1996).36 These texts formed a kind of neo-­avant-­garde canon.37 Together, they showed me that painting, Modernism, and expressionism were all dead. Each of those deaths was a side effect of the much more important death of the author, which, as each of these scholars argued, had repeatedly perished throughout the twentieth century. While this discourse was influenced by texts such as Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986), her nuanced claims about twentieth-­century engagements with theories of the self became a far simpler narrative of the 1960s as breaking away from a vision of art as limited to authorial control. And certainly, if you subscribe to the picture of 1960s practice as enacting a definitive “methodological and epistemological” break,38 “paradigm shift,”39 or “turn”40 away from a Modernist metaphysics, then the supposed return to expressionism and painting in the 1980s will appear to threaten or retreat from the radicalism of that moment. But the opposition functioning in such historical narratives is not nec-

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essary. We do not have to understand this history as a simple march from one form of figuring the self (as private, individuated, autonomous, and authorial) to a radically different one (as public, contingent, and in-­process). In this book, I focus, instead, on the moment when late-­Modernist painting and neo-­avant-­ garde practice shared questions and preoccupations. Part I traces the interrogation of the question of authorship to the very heart of the New York School in the 1950s. In Part II, I follow the development of that investigation into the High Modernist paintings of the 1960s, when the Modernist idiom is often said to have purged all traces of the self through a rigorously formal and restrictive technical development. While multiple studies have been written about the neo-­avant-­garde’s critical engagement with the question of the artist as author, few studies have been offered that pre­sent Modernist painters as similarly critical, which is to say, as self-­conscious agents taking up the question of authorship in order to investigate its terms.41 This is surprising, considering the amount of attention explicitly dedicated to the concept in the discursive field out of which Modernist painting developed in New York following World War II. Crucially, the very term “authorship” entered pictorial discourse in response to the attribution of the name “Abstract Expressionism” to the paintings of postwar American Modernists. In a spirit of critical and historical assessment not unlike that of the 1980s and 1990s, the circulation of this phrase, along with a newfound public and market interest in contemporary American art, spurred an open discussion among artists and critics concerning the stakes of making Modernist art and what the role of the artist as author is or should be with respect to their publics. One document of this discussion is a report and partial transcript of debates that took place in 1952 at “The Club,” an organization for New York City painters, sculptors, and art writers committed to experimental Modernist practice.42 At issue was art critic Thomas Hess’s characterization of American Modernist painters as “abstract Expressionist,” a phrase that combined two modes of production that had previously been viewed as radically divergent: “abstract,” a nonreferential, often hard-­edge, geometrical mode of painting; and “expressist,” a looser mode, which included external reference.43 In his retrospective account of these debates, Philip Pavia, The Club’s de facto manager, claimed that the communal interrogation of the respective values of abstraction and expression allowed for “a new space” to emerge: an “art space” that “could embody authorship directly, without symbols or narrative.”44 This new “authorship space,” as Pavia named it, “was the war booty resulting from the internecine wars between the abstractionists and the expressionists at the Club.”45 This is a fascinating claim. Essentially, Pavia argues that, through the involved conversations over the relation between abstraction and expression, a new space was opened up, not just in artists’ thinking, but in their practice. In that new space, the question of authorship could be interrogated as a central concern in the construction of a pictorial problem.

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The debates over authorship at The Club were part of a larger discussion among artists and art writers concerning the public framing of American Modernist painting and its growing market success. By 1948, the year The Club was founded, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock both had solo exhibitions that received a great deal of critical attention. The Life magazine feature on Pollock, which asked if he could be “the greatest living painter in the United States,” was a continuation and escalation of that attention.46 Exhibitions at the increasingly successful Kootz Gallery, such as the “Intrasubjectives” (curated by Samuel Kootz and Harold Rosenberg in 1949) and “New Talent” (curated by Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro in 1950), were well received and helped to define a loose community of artists as a coherent “New York School,” as well as to propel American artists into the national and international spotlight. In November 1950 the New York School group identity was further formalized when Life published a photograph of “the Irascible Group.”47 As Irving Sandler said, by 1952, the year The Club held debates about Abstract Expressionism, the “battle for modernism was won”—at least as far as the public and the markets were concerned.48 The question of authorship emerged out of the exigencies of this moment, as the highly localized gathering of confederates in downtown Manhattan evolved into a publicly recognized school.49 This book returns to this moment in the history of US Modernism, when artists were impelled toward a self-­conscious consideration of their roles as the authors of both their own individual works and the Modernist field that granted those works an identity. In my determination to treat Modernist painters as self-­aware actors, I mean to offer an alternative to the tendency to view Modernist painting in the United States as little more than an effect or symptom of the shifting postwar social context. Studies of how late-­Modernist paintings relate to that context tend to veer in one of two directions. The first recollects the social interests of the artists and critics in question, which usually involves recounting their Marxist commitments and documenting their involvement in the Works Progress Administration.50 The second reads the paintings in the context of prosperous, postwar America’s mass culture.51 That is to say, postwar Modernist American painting is related either to prewar socialism or to postwar consumerism, providing Modernist paintings and artists alike with a readymade form of collective identification. While such arguments have been crucial in advancing our understanding of American Modernist painting, they have their drawbacks: the former for the manner in which it glides over the ambivalences expressed by Modernists in the United States concerning the terms of committed practice,52 the latter for the degree to which it must sever the painting from the stated desires of the artists in demonstrating the ease with which the culture industry appropriated paintings intended to resist that very structure.53 In both cases an impasse is reached when it comes to reconciling the highly reticent paintings of American Modernism, which communicate so little and seem to organize nothing beyond their own compositions, with their stated personal and social ambitions. This difficulty has prompted some art historians to accuse the artists of the

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period—especially those who voiced their desires to make works that would slow the gears of postwar American capitalism—of bad faith. As Matthew Rampley argued in 1996, the easy appropriation by national and market agendas of paintings by artists such as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, both of whom were vocal anticapitalists, “does not necessarily indicate capitalism’s ability to domesticate and recoup everything, even its own negation.” Rather, that appropriation, Rampley contends, arises “from the fact that the features of Newman’s oeuvre unconsciously lent it to such uses through the political meanings of sublimity,” just as Pollock’s “symbolic language and the conception of the unconscious which that language represents . . . unwittingly bear the imprint of capitalist ideology.”54 As Rampley’s use of the terms “unconsciously” and “unwittingly” makes clear, he was not interested in considering whether such artists may have turned to precisely these forms of practice because they were themselves devices deployed within the system of capital. But to propose that an artist might have a considered relation to the forms with which they work—and the mechanisms by which those forms overlap and interact with specific social structures—would be highly questionable, according to Rampley’s thinking, for it would be “to maintain the mastery of the artist over the meaning of the work,” an accusation Rampley levels at the social historian Stephen Polcari in the same essay.55 While Rampley’s rhetoric is unhelpfully ideological, he does mark a fundamental problem that has haunted the literature addressed to late-­Modernist painting: that it is unclear where exactly the artist as author should be said to enter into the painting’s public reception. This lack of clarity is sedimented into the paintings themselves, which are troubling in their coupling of an emphasis on making, on the one hand, with a muteness, an unwillingness to actually author an explicit content or meaning, on the other. This book takes it as given that the ambiguities that arise from this coupling are intentional—intentional because repeated and cultivated by each of the artists I discuss. Such ambiguity is apparent in the paintings of first- and second-­generation “New York School” artists discussed in Part I—Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, and Helen Frankenthaler—in their placing a premium on pictorial processes even while attempting to mediate their own conscious aims. Ambiguity only increases in the work of later artists, discussed in Part II: Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin. These late-­Modernist painters radically reduced the possibility of painterly incident and formal organization, but maintained a commitment to locating painting’s value in its status as a made object. In each of the cases discussed in this book, an artist as author takes center stage, only to fade away within the horizon of viewership. Instead of eliding or explaining away such cultivated ambiguity, I look to it as a crucial organizing structure, a way to navigate the increasingly problematic notion of authorship in late-­Modernist American ­painting. In this I follow William Empson’s advice not to work from the “forces” that might retrospectively be seen to “hold together,” or make sense out of, or explain

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away ambiguity. Instead, he counsels, we should work from ambiguity toward such forces.56 That is, for Empson, complexities and contradictions are sources of meaningful practice. They need not be regarded as evidence of a painter’s bad faith or unsophisticated understanding of the complex workings of meaning and value. Rather, the presence of ambiguity is evidence that something is being worked through. It signals not clear intent or determining structure, but a meaningful engagement with specific practical and aesthetic concerns. Empson regards the manifestation of ambiguity as a purposeful harnessing of the unavoidable complexity that arises from an intelligent encounter with material replete with already functioning social and historical meanings. For Empson, writing about literature, that material is words.57 For the artists in and around the New York School, that material is not just paint, brush, and canvas, but Modernist art itself; its styles, commitments, and audiences are the very stuff out of which meaningful practice was cultivated. Our art-­historical address to authorship in general and the topic of intention in particular, especially as it has structured our history and analysis of Modernist painting, has suffered from a certain “paranoid” avoidance of the ambiguous, its very presence often pointed to as proof of the misleading nature of intention and authorship as such.58 Variously characterized as private, lonely expressions of singularity, celebrations and theorizations of labor, symbolic manifestations of individualism, or bureaucratic automations standing at the helm of a new posthuman era, art history’s “alternative reactions”59 to postwar Modernist painting are themselves confirmation of a commitment to the ambiguous.60 Instead of making sense out of ambiguity, my approach throughout this book is to analyze the sense ambiguity itself makes, paying particular attention to ambiguous manifestations and representations of authorship. How, I ask, if these paintings were not involved with the recording of intentional content or expression or communication or even productivity, are we to understand their nearly uniform concern to evidence a work’s making? If we begin not with the various reasons provided by our retrospective interpretations of these paintings, but with the paintings themselves and the various ambiguities they cultivate, it is necessary to account for this seemingly conscious commitment to foregrounding a work’s facture. As such, my primary focus is on practice—a repeated activity in which one engages in order to improve upon that activity. The question inevitably arises as to what exactly is being improved upon in this considered commitment to the practice of painting. The answer is necessarily varied, depending on specific works and specific artists. However, for the works studied in this book, works that can mainly be defined as or in their explicit relation to canonical Modernist art, I argue that a unifying action or concern ameliorated in and as practice is the artist’s qualification for entry into the Modernist identity. The paintings are one moment in an extended practical act aimed at making visible and demonstrating membership in the American Modernist field. This is why my focus is solidly on painting and not sculpture. The history of sculpture differs from that of painting, and writing and reading that history

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helps to undermine some of Modernism’s most tenacious mythologies.61 But painting was understood to be the dominant art form during the period taken up in this study.62 In the multiple attempts in the postwar period to define both abstraction and Modernism for an American public, painting was consistently the default medium curators and historians described. Both Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg went so far as to argue that painting bore all the dominant traits of contemporary Modernist culture and, as Greenberg argued, disseminated those traits to other media, such as sculpture and architecture.63 Pavia also consistently uses the phrase “modernist painting” in his essays, as though Modernism was synonymous with painting—and Pavia was a sculptor. The sculptors James Rosati and Ibram Lassaw, both active members of The Club, complained about Pavia’s preferential treatment of the painters in the various panels he organized.64 James Schuyler, a New York School poet, also acknowledged the dominance of painting in guiding advanced practice: “In New York, the art world is a painter’s world; writers and musicians are in the boat, but they don’t steer.”65 This does not mean that painting was or is actually superior to other art forms. But during this period, rightly or wrongly, it was granted a hegemonic position. While the practices I attend to are diverse—talking, studying, writing, reading, looking, folding—all are emphatically committed to the practice of painting, signaling a conviction in the ability of such an activity (if not always the object it produces) to hold meaning in the contemporary world, even if only in a restricted corner of it. Often the object itself is only one moment of articulation or enunciation on a continuous line of practice, which includes activities, relations, and thought processes that precede the act of making (or viewing, as the case may be) the work itself. It is out of this extended notion of practice, I show, that the very idea of authorship emerges as a possible content on which to go to work.66 In my conviction that these artists were engaged in a practice, which includes but is not limited the production of an art object, I hope to lay the groundwork for reimagining the relation between painting and maker. That reimagining is only possible if we move away from our own increasingly intransigent claims regarding intentional or authorial meaning and attend instead to the manner by which individual works themselves provoke and draw into question such claims in and as practice.67 Through a process grounded in archival research and close analyses (of both texts and paintings), I argue that the question of authorship— where and how it should enter into painterly technique; whether it is accessible to audiences at large; whether it is original or imitative, symbolically manifest or structurally contingent—was a dominant concern defining this period in the history of Modernist painting.68 The paintings themselves served as the site where these questions were worked through, not only as conceptual problems, but also as practical engagements with the question of authorial presentation. By analyzing the question of authorship as a concern structuring the production and reception of Modernist painting, I mean to return to artists some of the agency that the “death of the author” thesis has denied them. This is more than

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a corrective exercise for me. I understand this book to be in part a consideration of the ethics involved in removing authors from critical and historical projects. In Giving an Account of Oneself Judith Butler questions the possibility of moral questioning in a theoretical environment within which the subject doing the questioning has become radically displaced. Butler makes a compelling argument that moral questioning in the absence of an “I”—which is to say, outside a theory of and, indeed, a postulation of a self—is simply not possible. Her text does not return us to a notion of a stable and universal subject, but takes the very instability and opacity of the subject as a foundation for moral questioning. Such a moral inquiry begins from an understanding that the subject is always already in relation and, as such, in need of accounting for that relation.69 In order to perform such a critical accounting of the self in relation, it is necessary to track the material, lived details by which the subject, in its “divided, ungrounded, [and] incoherent” state, gets folded into a normative, universalizing figure—an operation whereby lived incoherence is erased.70 There are grave consequences to simply taking the erasure of the subject as given and failing to attend to the details of this operational process. As Gayatri Spivak compellingly argued in her critique of Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s overly generalized theories of power, neglecting to account for the lived situation by which representational regimes both erase and construct subjects actually “reintroduces the undivided subject,” in that all erasure is taken to be given and equally experienced.71 Without offering an account of the particularities by which subjects are enfolded into representational regimes and, indeed, accounting for one’s own role in the expansion of those regimes, critique is not possible. This is the same claim that Butler makes in the context of moral critique: “critique finds that it cannot go forward without a consideration of how the deliberating subject comes into being and how a deliberating subject might actually live or appropriate a set of norms.”72 One must track, Butler contends, the details of the emergence of the subject, not only as it appropriates norms, but also as that very appropriation produces a subject. Absent a careful consideration of this operation, not only do we risk falling out of or disowning the project of critique, we also, as Spivak reminds us, risk perpetuating the very operations by which the subject is violently appropriated. In attempting to write a history of art, absent authors, not only do we fail to consider how “a deliberating subject might actually live or appropriate a set of norms,” that is, how individual artists and works of art are assimilated into larger social structures such as “Modernism.” We also fail to account for the role we ourselves play as authors in constructing or perpetuating our own set of norms. This book is an attempt to consider the history of Modernist painting, the dominant “norm” defining the cultural field in the twentieth century in the United States, as a history of assimilation and appropriation. The artists working in relation to this field viewed it as such. This is why the question of authorship emerged as a question in the first place: as artists found themselves occupying an increasingly well-­defined public enclosure, they deliberated, to use

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Butler’s term, over how their individual practice could possibly be understood to relate to the normalization of the field of Modernist practice. This deliberation can be said to have produced these artists as artists, an identity that took on increasingly well-­defined boundaries as American Modernism gained a visible structure following World War II. In part I, I describe the ambiguous foundations of the New York School and Abstract Expressionism. I begin with an artist who practiced being, though never quite became, a Modernist author: Arshile Gorky, who committed suicide in 1948, when the New York School was only a nascent formation. Chapter 1 tracks Harold Rosenberg’s reliance on Gorky’s work in establishing his controversial concept of “action painting,” among the most cited Modernist theories in more contemporary critiques of authorship. To begin with Gorky, who established “allusion and parody” as key devices in American Modernist painting, demonstrates that a deep skepticism about originality was present at the very beginnings of a “New York School.”73 Chapter 2 moves into the culture of the 1950s and early 1960s, when we see artists processing the public consolidation of “multiple individualit[ies],” as Robert Goldwater wrote, into a singular, stylistic unity called “Abstract Expressionism.”74 While Gorky actively played with and tried on modes of authorial articulation through the appropriation of sanctioned Modernist styles of the past, the artists discussed in chapter 2 self-­consciously figured their practice in relation to the public consolidation of American Modernist identity. Considering the contents of It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art, a journal that sought to extend the conversations initiated at The Club, along with the paintings of Jack Tworkov, this chapter analyzes “gesture” as a marker of authorial presence in late-­Modernist painting. I show that the increasingly explicit use of gesture as a sign of authorship was in part the outcome of debates over the relation between abstraction and expressionism that unfolded in The Club and the pages of It Is in the mid- to late 1950s. Chapter 3 looks at the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, who worked self-­ consciously in the wake of the ratification of “Abstract Expressionism” as a public style. Frankenthaler, who is repeatedly described as the “bridge” that allowed younger artists to move beyond Abstract Expressionism, was a canny student of that school and its techniques. I show that through her early education in Modernist idioms, as well as her training in rhetorical analysis, Frankenthaler pursued a mode of painting that was an explicit exploration of what her one-­ time professor Kenneth Burke termed the “rhetoric of motives.”75 Most often discussed in the context of her “discovery” of stain painting, a technique that is celebrated for its removal of expressive authorship, I show that Frankenthaler’s work is better understood for its investigations into the viability of both “gesture” and symbolic representation as carriers of Modernist pictorial meaning. The paintings Frankenthaler produced in the 1950s and 1960s are best understood as critical analyses of the limits of expressive content in the wake of Ab-

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stract Expressionism’s institutional success. She is, in short, far more than a bridge. Part II looks at those painters whose work Frankenthaler’s paintings are said to have made possible. Typically regarded as actively abjuring the terms of authorship as established by the New York School, these “post-­Pollock”76 painters are often identified by their tendency toward minimal, hard-­edge, and “uncomposed” works.77 Complicating this reading of the younger generation of late-­Modernist painters, I demonstrate that artists such as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Sam Gilliam continued the practical investigation into authorial presence initiated by the New York School, rather than simply rejecting its terms. The major shift for these artists was not simply away from previous figurations of authorial expression in painting. It was, rather, a shift in the methods of addressing the problem of authorship and its role in pictorial practice. In chapter 4, I discuss Noland’s sparse paintings. Here, authorial practice is diverted from the process of laying down and working in paint, and into the self-­ preparation needed to complete a painting “in one shot.”78 For Noland, the disciplinary work that preceded the act of painting had a therapeutic value, which, as I explain, he understood to be continuous with his commitment to a Reichian program of psychotherapy. Coupled with his emphasis on viewership as the central device in both the production and the reception of the work of art, Noland’s paintings can be regarded as deeply ambivalent objects in their simultaneous commitment to authorial priority—a priorness that multiple theorists connect with a naïve notion of authorship—and authorial belatedness, which we tend more readily to associate with the structuralist critique of the self as explored by neo-­avant-­garde artists.79 This ambivalence can be traced to Frankenthaler’s influence, particularly her self-­conscious occupation of the (historically male) role of Modernist painter. A similar self-­preparation defines Sam Gilliam’s occupation of the Modernist identity in the 1960s, the focus of chapter 5. Ten years younger than Noland, Gilliam was the most junior member of the Washington Color School, known for its hard-­edge and serial methods. But in 1967, for his solo exhibition at the Phil­lips Collection, Gilliam moved away from hard-­edge abstraction and began to work loosely and expressionistically with poured paint, often folding the surfaces of his paintings while they were still wet. This was the start of a career-­ long inquiry into the relationship between pictorial and literal space. I analyze Gilliam’s understudied interest in pictorial literalism in the context of Michael Fried’s well-­known critique of the same in relation to painters like Frank Stella and in opposition to an emergent minimalist sensibility. Histories of literalism generally focus on the role of the viewer in relation to minimal form, but I consider literal space in relation to Gilliam’s status as an author. His folded and draped paintings address the literal not just as a generalized mode of embodiment (as minimalism so often does), but also as a real-­time social and political space within which particular identities are given form. The specificity of experience that the literal opens onto would have mattered to Gilliam as a Black artist

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who doggedly questioned how his paintings should be understood in relation to both a well-­established late-­Modernist tradition and an emergent Black Arts Movement. In chapter 6, I conclude with an analysis of one of the most ambiguous Modernist painters of the twentieth century: Agnes Martin. In Martin’s work all the productive ambiguities of Modernism-­in-­formation throughout the 1950s and 1960s seem to coalesce—an accretion of twentieth-­century complexity due in part, as I explain, to her careful study of the art of the recent past and her striking determination to register as a participant in that field. Even more than the works of the other artists I discuss, Martin’s work has suffered from the imposition of unities. In order to disrupt this unity and to recover the ambiguity of her early paintings, I take seriously Martin’s assertion that she “[is] an Abstract Expressionist.”80 This statement invites a reconsideration both of Martin’s role as an author within the Modernist field (a role that has been downplayed in the multiple readings of her work as “egoless”)81 and of the meaning or, better to say, the function of that largely discursive formation that is “Abstract Expressionism.” Martin’s assertions that she was an Abstract Expressionist came in response to questions about her relation to minimalism and postminimalism, with which she is sometimes grouped. In considering her work instead in relation to Abstract Expressionism, I do not mean to reclaim her for that earlier moment, but to consider how histories of late twentieth-­century abstraction might productively view Modernist painting and the neo-­avant-­garde as participants in a common field. This concluding chapter considers Martin’s highly personal use of the grid, alongside Krauss’s description of the “grid’s mythic power” in the history of Modernist painting, in order to describe an ambiguity that includes the popularity of structuralist systems in the 1960s. In working with the grid, Martin occupied that idiom most frequently associated with the author’s death. As such, the book ends by following the drama of ambiguity into the discursive heart of the neo-­avant-­garde. Each chapter, then, attends to an unresolved relation, an authorial ambiguity as it appears in the spectrum of late-­Modernist practice in the United States: between tradition and innovation, self-­actualization and self-­discipline, the illusive and the “real,” schema and spontaneity. As I discuss throughout, each artist was highly conscious of their position relative to the broader field of Modernist practice. In referring to Modernist painting as a field, I mean to channel the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu, whose The Field of Cultural Production has been central to the demythologizing of Modernist art and its markets.82 Bourdieu’s theory provides a helpful salve to the tenacious disagreements that continue to dominate discussions of postwar American art, for he understood his field-­ theory approach to provide a means of mitigating arguments between players in a given field by characterizing those arguments as themselves positions within a shared space and essential to the constitution of the field itself.83 I favor Bourdieu’s field theory for its attention to “position-­takings” over a strictly structural-

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ist analysis of the “system” within which those positions take form. In analyzing the relation between these positions within the field, Bourdieu is able to focus on the “social agents” it comprises, which can include groups and institutions as well as individuals.84 Though Bourdieu asserts that his field theory allows one to move beyond a monographic analysis of “individuals” in its study of “strategies” of positioning within a field, it still promises a more complex view of how agency unfolds there—something that strictly structuralist analyses are unwilling and ill prepared to address. While there has been ample research into the manner by which groups and institutions enter into and are productive of the field of power that produces the work of art, the individual in this field is often treated as being as much the product of the belief produced therein as the work of art itself. Such a view necessarily disregards how, exactly, individual agents and groups of individuals navigate and become legible as participants in a field of production, which Bourdieu demonstrates can take myriad forms. These manifestations of membership—often expressed as what Bourdieu calls the “doxa” or “common sense” of the members of the field—are not always conscious and can be hardly discernible to anyone outside the field (historically or otherwise).85 The work of art can itself be regarded as a mode of position-­taking within the late twentieth-­ century Modernist field. This book is concerned to address it as such and to consider the agencies, the various visibilities and acts, that it articulates in relation to the particular positionings it materializes. This returns me to my initial description of Tworkov as uncomfortable with the position of his painting in close relation to the performative aesthetics of the neo-­avant-­garde. His Barrier No. 4, hanging above the TV Dinner event, was suddenly positioned differently from its intended location within the Modernist field. In this new position, his painting appeared to be directed toward similar concerns—concerns about the temporal, bodily, present-­tense activities of the artist and about the immediate relation to be obtained between audience and live or recorded events. The one thing this new positioning buried, the thing that a too strict distinction between late-­Modernist painting and the neo-­avant-­garde elides, is the manner by which Tworkov understood his painting to question all these relations. Hung above the unfolding activities of Cage, VanDerBeek, and Klüver, Barrier No. 4 no longer reads as an open and active inquiry into the possible configurations of authorial presence and spectatorial experience. Instead, it appeared dusty and “static,” an afterthought: literally an object that came after a thought, as opposed to the ongoing “practical activity” that it was.86 What was erased, this is to say, was the painting’s ambiguity. While the contrasting temporality of the stage performance (with its own set of ambiguities) makes this apparent, this does not mean that this historical document should be read as evidence of the divided commitments of Modernist and avant-­garde practices. Rather, their common field is brought into view through these apparent divergences, as are their shared concerns. Those concerns, taking form within a wide field of activity, included the role of the artist, the artist’s status as an author, and

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the possible omniscience of the spectator. Where their differences lie is not in their commitments, beliefs, or even their objectives. The differences lie, rather, in their practice, in the details and terms by which they sought improvement. Within that shared space, of which the photograph of Tworkov’s painting suspended above TV Dinner affords us a glimpse, both Modernist painting and the neo-­avant-­garde can be shown to have registered a deep concern over the authorial self as the sole source, content, and aim of the work of art.87

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1. The Act-­Painting

History is always and above all a choice and the limits of this choice. — Ro la n d B a rt h e s , Writing Degree Zero

No critic is more sharply associated with the naïve theory of painting’s relation to the artist as author than Harold Rosenberg. In Rosalind Krauss, Yve-­Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Hal Foster’s widely used textbook on twentieth-­ century art, Rosenberg’s critical method is summed up as “an affirmation of the ego, a half-­romantic, half-­petty-­bourgeois version of the Cartesian ‘Cogito ergo sum.’ ” This textbook summary of Rosenberg is typical of a widespread tendency to dismiss his theory of “action painting” for its ostensible celebration of a notion of creativity that springs from a private, autonomous self that is prior, if not directly opposed, to the social and communal structures that exceed and determine selfhood. “[For] Rosenberg, the stuff of the Abstract Expressionist painter is his uniqueness; his duty is to let us enter the inner sanctum of his feelings; his art is bound to reveal his very own self as the kernel of his originality.”1 Setting aside the fact that any close reading of Rosenberg quickly demonstrates that his conception of the “self ” is not so easily summed up, it is important to acknowledge from the start that Rosenberg was dismissive of the concept of originality—a curious component of his theory of action that is rarely addressed in any detail in the multiple histories and criticisms of his texts. This chapter looks more closely at Rosenberg’s understanding of originality, considering it in the larger context of his theory of action, as well as tracking it as a point of analysis in his discussion of particular paintings. In order to do so, I expand my analysis of Rosenberg beyond a reading of his notorious 1952 essay “The American Action Painters” to consider his attachment to the Turkish Armenian painter, Arshile Gorky. It is first worth taking a moment to introduce the concept of authorial originality in its wider cultural context, before thinking about its specific meaning in relation to Rosenberg’s immediate artistic milieu and his reading of the painter whom he valued more than any other. The language used by Foster and his coauthors in their dismissal of Rosenberg is indicative of the kind of commonsense logic that connects authorship

to notions of originality. In his critical history of authorship, Andrew Bennett points out that the term “author” can be traced to the Latin verb augere, which means “to make, to grow, originate, promote, increase.”2 Martha Woodmansee traces the collapsing of this concept of making and cultivation with uniquely original authorial acts to eighteenth-­century Romanticism. Singling out the author as “a special participant in the production process” is, she argues, “a by-­ product of the Romantic notion that significant writers break altogether with tradition to create something new, unique—in a word, ‘original.’ ”3 The characterization of Rosenberg cited above confirms the link between Romanticism and a concept of authorial originality, reinforcing the view that Abstract Expressionism was invested in a Romantic notion of the artist “as radically independent, autonomous and self-­creating.”4 Abstract Expressionist painters are themselves partly responsible for this connection. Michael Leja helpfully catalogs the many statements made by postwar painters describing the authorial self as the original content of their art. Jackson Pollock, for example, stated that “the modern artist . . . is working and expressing an inner world”; Barnett Newman famously said that today, “instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.” In his 1944 essay “The Modern Painter’s World,” Robert Motherwell asserted that the Modernist painter “must draw from himself. If the external world does not provide experience’s content, the ego must.”5 Such statements serve to reinforce the idea that in the years following World War II, American Modernists increasingly abandoned the social world in order to explore their own, personal states of mind.6 Irving Sandler, in his laudatory history of postwar art, The Triumph of American Painting, confirms this turn toward the personal when he writes: “Unwilling to continue known directions or to accept any other dogma, the Abstract Expressionists turned to their own private visions and insights in an anxious search for new values.”7 The Abstract Expressionist artist, in “his” inward regard, is seen as the sole originator of a work’s content: “his art [is] bound to reveal his very own self as the kernel of his originality.”8 It is just as easy, however, to cull public statements from this group that reject such commonsense understandings of authorship as bound up with originality. John Graham, a Modernist painter and art theorist who is widely recognized as having influenced New York School artists like Gorky and Pollock, baldly stated that “there is nothing more vulgar and incompetent than originality.”9 In his influential 1951 text Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, Thomas Hess pokes fun at the “American myth of sacrosanct originality,” which, he muses, was “probably initiated by patent lawyers, but today [is] perpetuated by all retailers, especially art dealers.”10 Jack Tworkov is similarly dismissive: “The artist who acts as if he could have conceived his art by himself, sealed off from other artists and their work and their thoughts, is stupid—he merely tries to conform to the idiotic romantic image of the artist as a primeval energy, as a demi-­urge.”11 Motherwell, in the same text Leja quotes from, characterizes the artist’s interest in the ego as the result of the current historical

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situation, when community is disrupted and class alienation exacerbated. He is also clear that the turn to the ego as subject matter is only one option among others—one he does not advocate. For Motherwell, it is important to acknowledge the historical underpinnings of the choices left to the artist in any particular situation.12 Such statements come from the heart of New York School discourse, from artists and writers who were among Rosenberg’s closest interlocutors. If we consider them along with the more frequently quoted assertions regarding inner worlds, egos, and feelings, it emerges that this group of artists was deeply ambivalent about the notion of originality. A frequent topic of consideration in the multiple New York School debates, originality tended to be addressed on two fronts. On the one hand, it emerged as a question of whether there was anything original about “what is happening in America,” as opposed to what was “happening in Europe.”13 On the other hand, the question of originality was raised as a technical concern, as a question regarding “the creative process.” The technical question of origin, which was something of a refrain in New York School conversations, considers the place of “preconceived” ideas in the pictorial process, which can act as either a control restricting the final form of the work or as a starting point for improvisation.14 These two approaches to originality— a question of American artists’ relation to tradition and of the role of preconceived content in practice—were often joined, the one drifting into the other, as artists considered what was unique in their work at both the individual and group levels. The conclusions drawn were tentative, and artists’ claims regarding the value of authorial originality were very often tempered by references to European precedents that explored the same.15 While the precise meaning of the term “originality” in its midcentury use is exceptionally vague, one thing is clear: it was a term that played a role in a number of different, sometimes conflicting discourses. It can be considered a “keyword,” in Raymond Williams’s sense: a term that appears at multiple different discursive sites simultaneously and, while broadly used, does not cohere around any singular meaning or stable use.16 Williams viewed such instability as an indication that certain concepts were actively undergoing historical revision; such terms are, in a word, ambiguous. This, I contend, was the status of “originality” in mid-­twentieth-­century American culture. It was a keyword being used by some of the most influential cultural critics, but to divergent ends. For Rosenberg, as a participant in that larger cultural field, it makes sense that originality would have both an implicit and explicit role to play in his thinking as he forged his theory of “action painting.” Given more recent readings of that theory as a naïve and Romantic attachment to authorial priority, it is a crucial starting point in this study of authorship in late-­Modernist painting. Any consideration of Rosenberg’s theory, however, cannot be limited to his 1952 essay “The American Action Painters.” It must include his much earlier theorization of action as it developed in the context of an evolving address to the status of humanism in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Among the most ridiculed claims Rosenberg makes in “The American Action Painters” is that “what counts” in painting “is its special motive for extinguishing the object.”17 Rather than producing objects (the main purpose of which, Rosenberg always made clear, is to circulate as commodities), the painter demonstrated the possibilities of acting in the world and, in the process, laid bare the structural determinants of action. While it is easy to read such claims as evidence of the influence of what would, beginning in the early 1940s, come to be called existentialism, it would be a mistake to view Rosenberg as no more than a passive participant or reader in that field. He was, rather, an active and often skeptical contributor to a critical reconsideration of humanism in the postwar period. Attached to political and literary communities in Manhattan preceding the war, Rosenberg began publishing in the early 1930s in journals such as Symposium, Commentary, and Partisan Review. The figures connected to such journals were bound together in their mutual interest in existentialism (which for Rosenberg was linked as much to Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber as to Jean-­Paul Sartre), Marxist theory, and a consideration of the state of “man” in the wake of fascism and following the revelations regarding the Soviet Union.18 Rosenberg’s active involvement in the discourse of postwar humanism provides yet another counter to overly simplistic readings of his criticism. Whether it be Krauss’s 1972 complaint against “the psychologizing whine of ‘Existentialist’ criticism,” Serge Guilbaut’s portrayal of Rosenberg’s “optimism” regarding “individual internalization” as a response to political pessimism in the wake of fascism, or Leja’s folding Rosenberg’s theory of action into the ideology of a postwar “modern man discourse,” Rosenberg, like the artists he wrote about, is portrayed again and again as a product or symptom of a crisis gripping postwar Americans uniformly.19 The response to that crisis is described, more often than not, as broad and reactionary, crystallizing into a preservation of the White, male, bourgeois, liberal subject, whose private interior was in need of both expression and protection. It is notable in this respect that Rosenberg was unambiguously critical of such sweeping characterizations of the postwar scene. This is evident in his very cynical response to what he termed the “post-­radical criticism”20 of writers such as David Reisman, Vance Packard, and William H. Whyte. Critical of their celebration of the “human personality” and individual self-­sufficiency, Rosenberg was bitingly skeptical of such writers’ indiscriminate suspicion of the newly rationalized, “other-­directed” social formations that they saw as dominating US culture in the 1950s and 1960s.21 In a 1959 essay Rosenberg complained about the “nostalgic” attachment to the individuated personality in these pseudo-­sociological accounts of the invasive practices of modernization. Referring to these pop culture intellectuals as “the Orgman-­critics”—a riff on Whyte’s widely read Organization Man (1956)—Rosenberg argued that the “flattening of the personality” in 1950s America, about which such writers complained, was neither unique to the postwar period, nor a problem that applied

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“universally” to the American public.22 “With his own success achieved,” Rosenberg concludes, “the only issue the intellectual can see as remaining for society is ‘personality’.”23 In an earlier essay, “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-­Garde Its Own Mass Culture?” Rosenberg similarly criticized writers for speaking in overly general terms of alienation as unique to the postwar American experience. The essay is a strongly worded rebuke of postwar cultural and social critics’ tendency to speak of a “common experience” and to oppose “the individual” to “the mass.”24 In this and similar essays dating from the late 1940s into the 1950s, Rosenberg voices his emphatic distrust of humanistic celebrations of both “individuality” and the mythical “personality.”25 Rosenberg’s close reading of Marx, his skepticism toward both postwar liberalism and the increasingly doctrinaire demands of the Communist Party, along with his exposure to the most advanced philosophical thinking of his day, readied him to be a careful student of human agency—a theoretical and social “riddle” that preoccupied him for the whole of his career.26 It was in this context that Rosenberg first pitched his essay “The American Action Painters” to Les Temps modernes, “as a kind of explanation to the French of what was cooking” in American art.27 The French literary journal, which was then being edited by Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-­ Paul Sartre, accepted Rosenberg’s essay for publication.28 However, Rosenberg pulled the piece after falling out with Sartre, presenting it instead to Thomas Hess, then editor of Art News, where it was finally published.29 Placing “The American Action Painters” in this context challenges any portrayal of Rosenberg as attached to a naïve understanding of artistic agency, for it was over just how to define agency in relation to individual human choice that Sartre and Rosenberg broke. In a letter to Merleau-­Ponty, dated June 29, 1955, Rosenberg expressed his frustration with what he saw as Sartre’s overly simple picture of human agency, especially as the philosopher adapted his ontological concept of “freedom” to the politics of the Communist Party in the 1950s.30 Rosenberg asserts that Sartre’s continued party affiliation was responsible for his failure to understand the proper terms of action: I believe you touch a fundamental weakness of Sartre: his incapacity to grasp the difficulty of a true act. For him the action is simply an extension of the subjective gesture of choosing, and is guaranteed by that gesture. . . . For Marx the actor is an intermediary between a reality that is both changing yet resistant to change and . . . one that must come into being either through addition, transformation or loss.31

Rosenberg’s objections to Sartre are made even clearer in his rather caustic essay, “Does the Jew Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play about Anti-­Semitism.”32 Published in Commentary in 1949, the essay responded to Sartre’s Anti-­ Semite and Jew (1946). Rosenberg directly attacks Sartre’s application of his concept of “bad faith,” first developed in Being and Nothingness (1943), to the

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historical situation confronted by people of Jewish descent in the aftermath of World War II. In particular, Rosenberg takes issue with Sartre’s conception of authentic and inauthentic modes of being. Sartre’s notion of authenticity (without which one is in “bad faith”) ultimately grounds action in choice—a choice, moreover, that assumes a knowledge of one’s situation.33 Rosenberg objects to the idea that individuals can ever gain enough distance from their situation to choose their particular actions. In order to do so, Rosenberg argues, individuals must first know themselves, which he views as an impossible scenario, given that action and identity emerge simultaneously: “In the particular situation we cannot choose ourselves, since our action in it [the situation] is the means by which we discover ourselves.”34 According to Rosenberg, Sartre’s insistence on choice ignores the forms that precede the act of doing and making—that “reality” which is “resistant to change,” as he said to Merleau-­Ponty.35 In his study of Marx’s philosophy, Rosenberg was able to locate a very different model of action than that of the postwar Communist Party. This model of action, which Rosenberg began to articulate in the early 1930s, was fundamentally concerned to understand how and whether the individual can act in relation to the in-­place structures that precede them.36 As he put it in the preface to a group of essays collected in 1972 under the title Act and the Actor: Making the Self, whatever the topics he took on over “a period of about twenty years,” he found himself returning to “the same motif,” which he admits was something of an “obsession”: “that of the identity of an actor, individual or collective, sham or genuine, forming itself through an act.”37 His fullest description of the “identity of the actor” came early in his writing career, when he published “Character Change and the Drama” in the short-­lived “little magazine” The Symposium in 1932.38 He would later describe this essay as “the basic piece . . . which in a way I keep elaborating on.”39 In it he details the limits and possibilities of human action as framed within an “impersonal system,” using drama and the law as his case studies.40 Action, Rosenberg argues, is dependent upon an individual’s interpellation into a formal system that is beyond their scope of influence.41 More than that, it is only through such interpellation that a subject becomes recognizable as such—as, in Rosenberg’s terms, either a “personality” or an “identity,” both of which Rosenberg identifies as attributes of a publicly recognized and defined “character.” He points to the law, the field in which he was first trained, as an exemplary instance of a formal system in which a subject is identified according to their perceived actions: “The law visualizes the individual as a kind of actor with a role whom the court has located in the situational system of the legal code. In contrast with the person recognized by the continuity of his being, we may designate the character defined by the coherence of his acts as an ‘identity.’”42 Action in this context is not conceived as a demonstration of unhampered individual “freedom.” It is, rather, the very product of the system in which it is identified. The law designates the individual belatedly and in accordance to a particular situation. Their action is already coded according to a formal definition of what

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Rosenberg terms “identity.” Rosenberg opposed the overdetermined concept of identity to the “continuity” of the individual “being,” represented via the more transient designation “personality.” Identity, in his thinking, is the product of the interface between individual and system; it is not something possessed by the individual, but something lent to them and yet still of them. “The American Action Painters” cannot be understood outside this wider theory of action, which arose out of Rosenberg’s participation in postwar debates over humanism, his disagreements with Sartre, and his attendant commitment to prying loose the details of Marx’s theory of agency from the increasingly doctrinaire rhetoric of the Communist Party. While Rosenberg’s interest in agency has been discussed before, very rarely is a detailed analysis of that engagement extended to his descriptions of specific artists and works of art.43 For most scholars this is largely because Rosenberg seldom engaged very deeply with individual works due to his interest in the formation of identity and the experience of individual actors over and above works of art. I do not deny that this is the case. But the question remains as to what value Rosenberg found in attending not only to the products of art, but also to the extended processes of its making. If Rosenberg’s concept of action cannot be described, as Sartre’s can, as an individual’s “intentional” act aimed at “an anticipated result,” if the very identity of the individual actor as something externally designated is in question, then what exactly is “art as action”?44 One answer is that “art as action” refers to the relation of the work of art to both individual and cultural history. “The American Action Painters” begins with Rosenberg asking whether it can be said that “there is anything original in the recent American painting.”45 Like so many other critics attempting to identify some unifying character that would help to describe a postwar American art “movement,” Rosenberg positions New York artists in relation to their European counterparts. “Quantitatively,” Rosenberg states, it is the case that the “Modern” styles on display in American paintings “are accretions to the ‘School of Paris.’” However, Rosenberg concludes, “at the center of this wide practicing of the immediate past,” something “different” has emerged: “a consciousness of a function for painting,” which distinguishes itself from both European and American precedent.46 Rosenberg shared his characterization of Modernist painting in the United States as amalgamations of the “immediate past” with other early attempts to define a “New York School” of painting. Both artists and critics took historical precedent as the starting point in their inquiry into the very possibility of such a school. In the introduction to the 1951 exhibition “The School of New York,” a title that intentionally evokes the “School of Paris,” Motherwell stresses the importance of knowing the history of Modernist art when making Modernist art: “Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and critique, and anything he says a gloss.”47 In his 1955 dissertation on the New York School—the first to be written on the subject and among the first attempts

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to systematically define “Abstract Expressionism” as a coherent movement or style—William Seitz states that American painters’ “relationship to history has changed.” In the hands of these artists, “history becomes a vast repository of ideas, forms and feelings to be appropriated, altered, or montaged on the basis of one particular individual’s felt reality.”48 In the 1940s, artists who identified as Modernists, coming from disparate backgrounds and finding no strong stylistic or practical formation in the United States with which to align themselves, looked instead to outside sources: exhibitions of mainly European art in the uptown galleries of Manhattan, the Museum of Non-­Objective Painting, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as in the pages of journals such as Cahiers d’art.49 They were students of Malraux’s “imaginary museum,” and found their own hand by imitating others.50 Rosenberg was particularly interested in the implications of this appropriative tendency in Modernist American painting. It is at the heart of his interest in Arshile Gorky, a painter who delighted in masquerading as a Modernist artist, in both his life and his paintings. This accounts for Rosenberg’s dual interest in Gorky, the subject of one of his very few monographic studies, titled, appropriately, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea (1962).51 In addition to describing Gorky’s use of appropriation as a key Modernist technique, Rosenberg was interested in how those aesthetic interests bled into the way the painter lived his life, the way he acted out the role of being a Modernist painter in his self-­ presentation. Rosenberg is most often attacked for his desire to track the significance of works of art into the lives of their makers. But tracing the relationship between Gorky’s practice and the way he lived his life was of a piece with Rosenberg’s desire to think through the problem of action in specific situations. In his study of Gorky, that situation included Gorky’s fraught relation to both his own past and to the United States, to which he fled as a refugee of the Armenian genocide; his particular relationship to Modernist art as a received history of European culture; as well as the role he played in the close-­knit community of New York painters, which Rosenberg understood Gorky to have helped to form. These are the various components that make up Gorky’s practice, the situation out of which his identity took form. It is perhaps in his inability to separate biography from form that Rosenberg most seems to promote Modernist painting as providing testimony to a hidden, interior self. He did, after all, make the claim in “The American Action Painters” that the “act-­painting” is “inseparable from the biography of the artist” and that it “is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence.”52 Returned to their context, however, such statements take on a very different tenor than the one that has most often been attributed them. The question to ask is what Rosenberg meant by “biography” and “existence,” and how either could be seen as painting. Gorky’s Organization (fig. 1.1), which was painted on and off between 1933 and 1936, may seem an odd candidate for Rosenberg’s “action painting” rubric. Unlike the reworked and plastic surfaces of Jackson Pollock’s and Willem de Koon-

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F ig u re 1 . 1 . Arshile Gorky, Organization (1933–36). Oil on canvas, 50 × 59 13/16 in. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2020 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ing’s paintings, Organization is clean in its line and contained in its expression. While the labor of the artist is in evidence, the kind of work put into the painting is decidedly not spontaneous. On the contrary, a tortured deliberateness is manifest in the finality of the painting’s composition. As Harry Cooper has argued, it is as though it was the act of organization itself that Gorky deliberated over with such intent, approaching the canvas again and again over approximately three years, until, it must be presumed, the proper composition was achieved.53 An earlier version of Organization can be seen in a picture of Gorky standing with de Kooning in the former’s Union Square studio sometime in the mid-­1930s (fig. 1.2). The compositional differences between this earlier version and the final painting are striking. They demonstrate the great amount of thought and time Gorky put into each compositional iteration and his unique approach to process. The procedural nature of Organization is evidenced in the many layers of paint Gorky applied to the canvas, a dense accrual of paint that is typical of this period in his career. Gorky revised the composition by painting over, rather than scraping away, building up thick strata of oil paint until he achieved not just the appropriate organization, but also the kind of surface he most desired. If Rosenberg’s theory of action painting is taken merely to emphasize the activity of making a painting, we might look no further than to the many layers that make up Gorky’s encrusted canvases. But Rosenberg did not locate Gorky’s action as a painter in this protracted labor. Rather, he found it in Gorky’s very particular approach to the styles of other painters, in his particular talent for

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Figure 1.2. Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning in Gorky’s studio at 36 Union Square, New York City, standing in front of an earlier version of Organization, c. 1937. Rudi Blesh Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Photo: Oliver Baker.

building his compositions out of “allusion, parody, quotation.”54 Organization does not just organize a composition; it coordinates a host of references to other artists’ styles. The division of areas of the canvas into blocks of solid color, separated by thick black lines, recalls, for example, Piet Mondrian; the appearance of levers and pulleys points to Francis Picabia; the combination of organic shapes and geometric abstraction references Joan Miró.55 What made Gorky the ideal artist for Rosenberg, what made him a model for the critic’s theory of “action,” was the “deliberate rejection of originality” that this appropriative tendency signals. It is worth quoting Rosenberg at some length on this aspect of Gorky’s practice: One cannot speak of Gorky without the question of originality coming up—it is as if he personified the problem of who’s who in a work of art. This, of itself, sets him on a plane of the highest esthetic interest, except for ideologists of Expressionism for whom the ultimate is a fingerprint. Gorky copies Picasso, who parodies Ingres. . . . The artist’s masquerade resembles that of art itself, in which a constructed image, to begin with a “copy of nature,” keeps reappearing for centuries in a succession of metamorphoses. Gorky’s act of labeling himself with another man’s device lies at the root of his processes as a painter and the metaphorical art that blossomed out of them.56

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In his acts of appropriation, Gorky made himself into a Modernist artist. His stylistic borrowings do not simply make a picture; they make a life. They provided Gorky with a means for “self-­invention.”57 Gorky’s considered masquerade is at the heart of Rosenberg’s theory of action painting. In donning “another man’s device[s],” Gorky performs the role of a Modernist artist. As such, Gorky’s paintings offer an important counterexample to the “myth” that action painting was an unthinking outpouring of emotion. Written in 1962, the Gorky monograph can be thought of as one of several correctives Rosenberg wrote in order to combat the characterization of his “action painting” theory as a celebration of “self-­expression” and “Schmerz.”58 It is also a lesson in method, in that it lays out the critical and historical requirements for analyzing an “act-­painting”—a fundamentally different set of criteria than is required of the formalist critic who focuses on the object in its material facticity, segregated from its author. In his analysis of Gorky, Rosenberg offers a sustained description of the process by which an artist constructs an identity in and through paint. In “The American Action Painters,” he termed this process the artist’s “rôle”: “what gives the canvas its meaning is not psychological data but rôle, the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation.”59 The action painter, this is to say, does not demonstrate unhampered freedom. They work, rather, within predetermined, fixed structures, demonstrating their “assigned” or “assumed” role therein.60 This was a considered and conscious practice, according to Rosenberg. Modernist painters like Gorky conduct “intelligent” and critical explorations of the limits of freedom and selfhood at a particular historical moment. “Gorky stands for the importance of intellect in painting,” Rosenberg contends, “even in that kind of painting that verges upon automatism and draws upon buried sources.”61 Elsewhere, Rosenberg argues that for Gorky and other “Action Painters, the canvas was not a surface upon which to pre­sent an image, but a ‘mind’ through which the artist discovers, by means of a manual and mental hypotheses, signs of what is or might be.”62 In describing painting as a mind, Rosenberg pre­sents it as that which, beyond a painter’s desires and intentions, receives and processes the world. “For Gorky,” Rosenberg writes, “learning, analysis, hypothesis, were phases of his work as an artist, as drawing and painting were his means for understanding life and for trying out assumptions about it and about himself.”63 Gorky’s goal in acting in painting was to achieve understanding, of himself and the world, not simply to produce an object. The painter was not merely engaged in a project of recording his actions as an already formed artist. Rather, he submitted himself to the “act-­painting” in an attempt to “understand” his own role as a Modernist artist: Gorky’s submissiveness to the activity of understanding points to a motive entirely removed from that of “Expressionism.” For him, the drama of art consisted in his striving to derive his character from his painting and from his thoughts concerning the traditional image of the artist, rather than in giving

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vent on canvas to motor impulses of personality. With Gorky, to be an artist counted far more than to be himself.64

The intelligence and intention evident in Gorky’s practice are not, then, to be discerned simply in the gesture or the act of écriture or representation. Rather, Gorky’s practice is a manifestation of his intention to be an artist. That intention, which never finds an end in a single object, is evident, according to Rosenberg, in Gorky’s practice construed broadly: in the relationships he forged with artists of the past—Uccello, Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso, Miró—and in “his succession of friendships with [living] painters,” as much as in his “hard talking” performance as a man of the world, his voracious consumption of the history of Modernist art, and his “labors in the studio.”65 That all these activities go into making Gorky “the man” recalls Rosenberg’s earlier writings, such as “Character Change and the Drama” and “Pathos of the Proletariat,” the latter a text that seeks to describe the figure that occupies Marx’s agentless characterization of capitalism.66 Both texts consider the nature of the act itself, as opposed to the products of a person’s labor. How is an act possible, Rosenberg asks, within the systems that frame and enable it? How is it discernible and available to judgment? Like the objects of these studies— Marx’s Capital and The German Ideology, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the discourse and practice of law—so Gorky’s extended practice is looked to for its intelligent and rhetorical consideration of “the act.” This is not to say that nothing can be gleaned from Gorky’s paintings alone, but they do require a careful attunement to the “situation” they engage and a knowledge of the styles the artist chose to intelligently appropriate, including the readymade relations to the artist as author that those styles bring with them. A look at three paintings that move through successive styles—The Artist and His Mother (c. 1926–42; fig. 1.3), The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (1944; fig. 1.4), and Diary of a Seducer (1945; fig. 1.5)— demonstrates the point. The haunting and highly personal painting The Artist and His Mother (fig. 1.3) is one of two paintings Gorky made from a photograph of himself as a child, standing alongside his Armenian mother, who starved to death shortly before he and his sister fled to the United States. The painting is significant not only for its autobiographical subject matter, but also for the amount of time, around twenty years, during which Gorky dwelt in its making. Rosenberg attributes Gorky’s inability to put an end to the painting to the way the autobiographical subject interceded in the process of painting. Gorky, according to Rosenberg, was unable to “grasp himself even in appearance” and so struggled for years to complete the portrait.67 Rosenberg’s analysis of Gorky in this regard is very like his analysis of Hamlet in his 1932 essay “Character Change and the Drama.” Rosenberg argues that Hamlet’s initial inaction, not unlike Gorky’s, is a result of his preoccupation with his “personality” and his inability to recognize his predesignated “identity” as heir to his father’s throne and avenger of his father’s murder. In order to act, according to Rosenberg, it was necessary for Hamlet to

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F ig u re 1 . 3 . Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, c. 1926–42. Oil on canvas, 59 15/16 × 50 in. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1979.13.1. © 2020 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

transition from a preoccupation with his own perceived personality into a preordained identity. The nonacting Hamlet, as personality, suffers from a “structural insufficiency,” Rosenberg contends, because of “his failure to be part of an action system.”68 Which is to say, Hamlet refused (at first, anyway) his assigned “role” in relation to the formal systems that confronted him. Only after he submits himself to the plot of the play does action finally unfold, even if that action only works to bring the plot to an end. In his reading of Gorky, it is style that serves as a kind of plot to which the artist must submit himself. Through the extrapersonal, intermediary form of style Gorky was able to figure himself for himself, as well as for others in his immediate community. The artist’s only recourse, according to Rosenberg, was to distance himself from the boy in the photograph from which he painted by transferring any “likenesses . . . into painting concepts in order to take hold of these people as his own creation.”69 The “painting concepts” that come into play in The Artist and His Mother are Modernist approaches to portraiture in the guise

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F ig u re 1 . 4 . Arshile Gorky, The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, 1944. Oil on canvas, 73 1/4 × 983/ 8 in. Albright-­Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. © 2020 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Albright-­Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, New York.

F ig u re 1.5. Arshile Gorky, Diary of a Seducer, 1945. Oil on canvas, 50 × 62 in. Museum of Modern Art, NY. © 2020 The Arshile Gorky Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

of Ingres and Picasso (or in the guise of Picasso’s appropriating Ingres). Which is to say, while likeness is the goal, it is only achieved once a “character” is located in the history of portraiture. Gorky was only able to exert creative control over this encounter with his past once it was mediated by historical form. The mediating function of historical style enters differently in Gorky’s appropriation of more abstract devices that are attributable to expressionist strains of European Modernism. In The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (fig. 1.4) and Diary of a Seducer (fig. 1.5), for example, Gorky appropriates two forms of pictorial expressionism: in the former, an appropriation of German expressionism in the style of Wassily Kandinsky, and, in the latter, the automatically generated idioms of Joan Miró, Roberto Matta Echaurren, and André Masson. Gorky’s adoption of such styles demonstrates a rhetorical approach to expressionism, ostensibly among the most spontaneous and self-­referential Modernist manners. We can see this in Gorky’s recursive references to Masson. The French Surrealist is present in both paintings in Gorky’s iconographical references, such as the ornithological allusions and the ovoid, pudenda-­like openings that pervade Gorky’s paintings throughout the 1930s. Gorky doubles that allusion by referencing Masson in titles such as The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb. “Once again,” Rosenberg writes, noting this doubled appropriation of Masson, “[Gorky] not only produced a derivation but felt the need to signal the fact by taking over Masson’s heart shape and by echoing in his titles the Frenchman’s Cock Fight and Battle of the Birds.”70 Such references make explicit Gorky’s rhetorical interest in formal devices meant to signify unmediated self-­expression. Diary of a Seducer displays the graphic linearity of Masson’s automatic drawings, and The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb mimics Kandinsky’s energetic and high-­hued mark-­making. Both appropriate the look of expressionism while drawing the mythos of authorial presence into question by situating it as one style among many. As an added assurance that we will read his paintings as musings on authorial originality, Diary of a Seducer refers to Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary,” a section of the philosopher’s 1843 work Either/Or.71 Beyond the fact that Kierkegaard was “the first modern existentialist,” it is revealing to consider “The Seducer’s Diary” as a possible reference point for Gorky’s painting.72 Either/Or is a collection of pseudonymous texts by three (possibly four) authors, all of whom are, of course, Kierkegaard himself. The book claims to pre­sent the texts of two writers with divergent life views—one aesthetic and one ethical—which are staged as having been found by chance and edited by a “Victor Eremita.” A diary, the third text, is included as a kind of appendix to the book. The first writer, representing the aesthetic point of view, claims to have chanced upon the diary and submitted it to Eremita (chance is a major theme in the text). Eremita doubts this claim and attributes the diary to the author himself, complaining, in his editorial introduction, that disowning the authorship of the diary “contribute[s] to making my [Eremita’s] own position so complicated, because it pre­sents the one author as lying inside the other, as in a Chinese-­box puzzle.”73 Rosenberg describes the similarly nested authorial voices in Gorky’s paintings

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as “signifying simultaneously on . . . multiple levels of the esthetic, of nature and self-­disclosure.” Finding in Gorky’s work “an equivalent in painting of a passage in Finnegans Wake or one of the Quartets of Eliot”—literary projects that are built out of citation—Rosenberg understands the bricolage of references in Gorky’s paintings to be as much a method for developing a Modernist identity as a means of inscribing the personal into the public surface of the canvas.74 The more you know about Gorky the “man,” his interests, commitments, and influences, the more his pictorial references unfold. Gorky’s use of appropriation as personal disclosure recalls Jasper Johns’s well-­noted romantic attachment to Marcel Duchamp. Johns not only relied on the precedent of Duchamp’s conceptual punning and readymade aesthetics, but also enjoyed secreting iconic and indexical references to Duchamp in the surfaces of paintings such as According to What (1964).75 This amounted to a much more intimate relation to Duchamp than mere appropriation—one that is only discovered once something of the biography of the artist is known. Both Johns’s and Gorky’s intimate allusions move beyond the depersonalizing processes of appropriation as it was described in the 1980s and 1990s and become a means by which personal expression is established, even as it inscribes the limits of such personalism in the overdetermined record of historical style.76 Despite the career-­long engagement with other people’s stylistic innovations, Rosenberg insisted that you could still detect a self being produced in and through Gorky’s paintings. The signs of that self only emerged, however, once stylistic forms conventionally assigned to exploring self-­expression were addressed by the artist as themselves preexisting tropes to occupy. “It was to take a full decade for his art to pass from mimicry of other artists to the poetry of allusion,” writes Rosenberg, “and from the ‘rhetoric’ of the individual master to an independent utilization of the common place alphabet.”77 In “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg proposes something very similar when he writes that, “guided by visual and somatic memories of paintings he has seen or made,” the American action painter “gesticulated on the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare him and his art to be.”78 While the terms “gesticulated” and “novelty” may put us in mind of blind performance and unmediated expression, we cannot overlook that Rosenberg understood such actions to be guided by the artist’s “memories of paintings he has seen or made.” By engaging with the “alphabet” provided by these historical styles and methods, the act of painting “declares,” after the fact, the identity of artist and art work alike. Identity signified for Rosenberg the very possibility of acting within the predetermined forms that exceed the personality—an acting in form, which, as I have already noted, had preoccupied Rosenberg long before he embarked on a career as a critic of the visual arts. Gorky was not alone among the artists of the New York School in using the public language of art’s history in order to discover a relation to himself in paint. A similarly self-­conscious approach to the self via publicly available iconographic and stylistic references is evident in the work of Willem de Kooning and

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Jackson Pollock. As Michael Leja has succinctly demonstrated, the iconography explored in Pollock’s most personal paintings was drawn from publicly available symbols of the unconscious.79 Leja has helpfully identified the sources of Pollock’s unconscious depictions, from the iconography of Native Americans to stylistic tendencies in Orozco and Picasso, and he argues that even Pollock’s most personal drawings, such as the ones made for the artist’s Jungian psychoanalyst, Joseph L. Henderson, exhibit the “absence of a distinction between public and private imagery.”80 Much as Rosenberg argued of Gorky, Leja claims that “Pollock’s representation of the unconscious was forged through his adaptation of modernist visual schemata.”81 Willem de Kooning, who repeatedly stated that he was first initiated into the language of Modernist painting as an onlooker in Gorky’s studio at 36 Union Square, demonstrated a similarly historical and appropriative approach to painting.82 His 1949 painting Asheville is an assemblage of references, which have been traced in the painting’s various readings (pl. 2).83 The Phillips Collection identifies the upper central shape as the Blue Ridge skyline. Charles F. Stuckey, reading William Faulkner’s American South into Asheville, found evocations of “flames, smoke and ashes,” “torn and displaced legs, elbows, and torso,” and “lips cracked to expose teeth.”84 Most art writers discover figurative fragments littered throughout de Kooning’s paintings from this period: “somatic shapes” (Clement Greenberg), “fleshy body parts in layered space” (Irving Sandler), a “wall of living musculature” (William Seitz).85 For Thomas Hess, who described Asheville as a “continual outpouring of ambiguity,” de Kooning’s “process” was as much an extension and layering of referential content as plastic engagement. Embedded in the painter’s belabored surfaces, Hess discovered references to Ingres, Rubens, Miró, Soutine, and Picasso, which emerge as mastery of line, lush flesh tones, organic shapes, and grimacing mouths.86 Like Rosenberg, Hess refers to the associative aesthetics of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, describing de Kooning’s “prolonged addition of meaning and interpretation” through stylistic allusion.87 Gorky’s “ambiguity of association” bears much more in common with de Kooning than with Pollock in this regard. His goal was not, as it was for Pollock, to find representational equivalents for unconscious states. Rather, Gorky was after something far more tangible:an identity—a public-­facing persona that could mark Gorky as a Modernist artist. Painting as practice was, for Gorky, a means for generating a life, a means of acting in the world—an act, it seems important to note, that Gorky made the choice to end on his own terms when he was only forty-­four years old.88 In his essay “The Diminished Act,” Rosenberg writes that “in Action painting the pressing issue for artists was: When is a painting finished?” This was a technical question that was raised by artists in public discussions such as the 1950 Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35.89 The question, which solicited wildly varied responses, speaks to the ambiguities of process when it comes to making an Abstract Expressionist painting. Rosenberg, nearly twenty years later, provided an answer of his own: the painting is finished “at exactly the end of the artist’s lifetime. Acting to the end, instead of waiting for

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the end. In both acting and waiting, there is no outcome, no conclusion, except the condition itself.”90 Rosenberg did not look to Gorky’s paintings for evidence of intent, nor did he simply attend to Gorky’s life for explanations of the paintings’ meaning. But he also did not argue, as some formalists have, for an outright denial of intent. In insisting that Gorky is an “intellectual,” Rosenberg emphasized the carefully considered relations desired and obtained by the artist in opposition to what, at the beginning of his book on Gorky, he termed “the myth of art” as “an eruption of mindless energy.”91 Given the cultural community within which Rosenberg began to write, it is difficult to imagine that his theory of action and insistence on the discernible presence of artistic intelligence in painting was not influenced by debates over artistic intention among his contemporaries in literary studies.92 Most influentially, literary critic W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and analytic philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley, who defined intention as the “design or plan in an artist’s mind” prior to making the work, argued that intention was not a proper object of study in critical analysis. They did not deny that there is intention behind the text; they simply argued that there is no way to discern it with any accuracy, and that the author does not always fulfill a carefully crafted intention in their work.93 Rosenberg, who often pointed to the literary and sociological context within which such debates emerged, was inclined to view them as symptoms of a larger historical crisis within humanist discourse as it navigated the question of human action in the late twentieth century. Rather than coming down on any one side in such debates, Rosenberg was committed to describing cultural and philosophical works that captured the ambiguities of human action. In this he was in line with the revised description of intention advanced by postwar continental philosophers. Sartre, for example, explaining Edmund Husserl’s description of intent as something that does not point back to a prior moment of conception, argues that “intent” is not prior, because it is itself something that always points away from the subject. Sartre, following Husserl, identified intention with the fact that consciousness is always “consciousness of something other than itself.”94 Here the priorness of consciousness is denied; instead, what is described is an awareness (of both self and world) that emerges in and as difference. It is the very act of differentiating that articulates the self as such: “for consciousness has no ‘inside,’” Sartre explains. “It is just this being beyond itself, this absolute flight, this refusal to be a substance which makes it a consciousness.”95 In his commitment to describing this flight from substance, Sartre’s existentialism was, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, “the philosophy of ambiguity.”96 De Beauvoir argued that Sartre refused the uniformities provided by “reasonable metaphysics” or “consoling ethics” in an effort to preserve the ambiguity of the “complex situation” that is Being.97 Sartre’s desire to maintain ambiguity is captured in his phenomenological analyses, which reveal a self in flight beyond itself: his description of “man” as the “being whose being is not to be.”98 Rosenberg, as so many of his detractors have claimed, was certainly in dia40 | C h ap t e r O n e

logue with the existentialists, through Les Temps modernes, as well as through organized panels at The Club.99 However, he did not uncritically celebrate the individuated subject in its freedom. As with Sartre, his interest in existentialism was grounded in an investigation into the very possibility of our felt but deeply compromised experiences of freedom. The “human act,” according to Rosenberg, is deeply ambiguous, elusive, and indeterminate. Rosenberg found that the best art of the modern era did not represent, demonstrate, or offer a “solution” for this ambiguity, but rather took form in a historical situation wherein action, “the outstanding riddle of the twentieth century,” was transformed from a habitual process into a self-­conscious problem.100 In the intellectual context of postwar humanist discourse, where action was reduced to historical emplotment, scientific explanation, and social symptom, “the creative act” remained the only site where human freedom and its limits could be worked through, not as subject matter, but as a form of what Raymond Williams called “practical consciousness.”101 In his commitment to viewing culture as practice, Rosenberg remained ardently resistant to seeing the paintings of the postwar period as no more than objects aimed at an unknowing and unknown audience.102 They were, rather, in-­process formations, modes of getting on in the world. As he put it in the preface to a collection of his essays on action spanning from the 1940s into the 1960s, “the performance itself is the highest aim” of the agents he studied, for “it is their evidence of being alive.”103 In Passages in Modern Sculpture, Rosalind Krauss claims that Rosenberg equates “the painting itself with the physical body of the artist who made it.”104 In a passage where she does not grant the same nuance to Abstract Expressionism’s critics as she grants to its practitioners, Krauss continues: Just as the artist is made up of a physiognomic exterior and an inner psychological space, the painting consists of a material surface and an interior which opens illusionistically behind that surface. This analogy between the psychological interior of the artist and the illusionistic interior of the picture makes it possible to see the pictorial object as a metaphor for human emotions that well up from the depths of those two parallel inner spaces.

At this point in her text, Krauss reproduces de Kooning’s 1960 Door to the River (pl. 3). Krauss points to its darkened interior as an example of the false “analogy” she understands critics like Rosenberg to draw “between the inaccessibility of illusionistic space and an intense experience of the privacy of the individual self.”105 I hope that this chapter has made clear that such a description, often taken as a given in contemporary writing about Rosenberg, misrepresents Rosenberg’s theory of action in that it elides the deeply ambiguous thing that art is when figured in and as a practical, lived action. The notion that New York School painters like de Kooning might have had a similarly complex understanding of painting as a site for analyzing the conditions and possibilities for human action is explored in my next chapter. 41 | T h e A c t - P a i n t i n g

2. The Expressive Fallacy

Expression is an impossible word. If you want to use it I think you have to explain it further. —Ad Reinhardt (1967)

Willem de Kooning’s 1960 Door to the River (pl. 3) offers an indexical record of its own making.1 More than 6 × 5 feet in size, the painting tracks the body that made it, offering just enough space for the painter to “stretch [his] arms.”2 Added to this material presentation of the artist as author is an emotional attitude that is signaled in the energy of de Kooning’s marks. The wet-­on-­wet paint application, the drips and splatters, and the overall lack of finish signify not just a laboring body, but also a feeling subject. At the center of the painting, framed by three discrete brushstrokes, a void opens (the eponymous “door”), motioning toward a darkened interior somewhere behind the more surface-­bound of de Kooning’s gestural strokes. A symbolic doubling of the artist’s own interior, the painting’s darkened center reads as a depiction of illusory depth that opens onto a world, inviolate and contained.3 The material honesty of de Kooning’s vigorous mark-­making and the symbolic weight of the canvas’s hollowed-­out interior work together to secure the painting’s identity as an authentic expression of the psychological depth of the artist who made it. Charles Taylor argues that the “expressivist turn” (which, like originality, is a byproduct of Romantic thinking) introduced not just “the idea of articulating our inner nature,” but also the historically novel idea that “this inner domain [has] depth.”4 The two go hand in hand, according to Taylor: “The subject with depth is . . . a subject with . . . expressive power.”5 Most critics fault expressionistic painting on just these grounds: that its self-­referentiality implies inner depth, a subject replete with meaning prior to the act of painting. Krauss’s use of de Kooning’s Door to the River as an illustration of an ostensibly naïve concept of expressionism is just one example of such a criticism. Hal Foster’s 1983 essay “The Expressive Fallacy” is another. In that essay Foster debunks expressionism’s mythology of indexical directness by describing it “as a specific language.” Such a characterization, Foster contends, necessarily works against what he sees as expressionism’s false ideology: that it is immediate, transparent, and

free of the intermediary processes imposed by cultural and social codes. Expressionism’s denial of “its own status as a language,” Foster argues, is “a denial that is necessary given its claim to immediacy and stress on the self as originary.”6 In this chapter I look more closely at expressionism as a contested notion among Modernist painters working in the 1950s and 1960s, paying particular attention to artists’ mixed feelings toward the “gesture” as a device by which authorship is signified. Through a reading of the conversations that grew up around The Club and the journal It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art (pl. 4), I offer an account of that inquiry and the multiple ambivalences that it produced. I end the chapter with a discussion of Jack Tworkov, one of the founding members of The Club and a first-­generation New York School painter. Tworkov is a good example of the practical exploration of the relationship between “abstraction” and “expressionism,” out of which, as Philip Pavia argued, the question of “authorship” emerged as a problem in its own right for American Modernists. As I explained in the introduction, Pavia understood that question to be “the war booty resulting from the internecine wars between the abstractionists and the expressionists at the Club.”7 Those “wars” escalated following the publication in 1951 of Thomas Hess’s Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, which argued that American abstract painters had forged a path between abstraction and expressionism—the two tendencies between which artists had previously been divided.8 Hess argued that New York School painters combined the organic and seemingly referential tendencies of expressionism with the nonobjective and more programmatic aims of abstraction. When Tworkov, who represented the expressionist camp in debates at The Club, moved into abstraction in the 1950s, it was always in just this vein of mediated compromise. Abstraction, in the form of schematic structure, provided Tworkov’s expressionist tendencies with, in his own words, “a space for meditation,” and a means by which his own feelings of “alienation” from the canvas could be curbed.9 What emerged out of this contemplative and mediated approach to an abstract expressionism might well be described, following Pavia, as a kind of “authorship space”: a site where the question of authorial control and presence is self-­consciously worked through as a practical problem. After introducing the historically specific definition of expressionism as it arose in the art discourse of the 1950s—relying, in part, on Pavia’s reporting as the primary chronicler of proceedings at The Club—I turn to a discussion of the problematic development of “gesture painting” out of abstraction’s expressionist moment. Tworkov, a definitively gestural painter, demonstrated an extraordinary ambivalence toward gesture as device, characterizing it as an undisciplined “brute force,” which lacked “intelligence.”10 And yet Tworkov continued to use gesture as a central device in his paintings throughout the 1950s and 1960s, while always anchoring it in “disciplined” form.11 In doing so, Tworkov produced some of the most ambiguous Abstract Expressionist paintings of the moment. Those ambiguous paintings, and the discourse out of which they emerged, demonstrate the historically specific ad-

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dress to authorship at this founding moment of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art (pl. 4), which reproduced and extended topics of discussion first explored at The Club, was Pavia’s journal. Published between 1958 and 1964, it was specifically dedicated to abstract art, the only art journal at the time with such a stated restriction. A collection of notebook fragments, transcriptions of past Club panels (as provided by Pavia and heavily edited), parodies, manifestos, and tirades, It Is attempted to document the positions and philosophies preoccupying this community as it faced increasing commercial and art-­historical interest. The contributors of written pieces—Elaine de Kooning, Ad Reinhardt, Jack Tworkov, Ray Parker, Allan Kaprow, David Hare, Dore Ashton, Friedrich Kiesler, Robert Goldwater, Hans Hofmann, William Baziotes, Thomas Hess, John Cage, and Harold Rosenberg, among others—and the copious works that were reproduced in both full color and halftone (too numerous to list here, but including, in addition to the artists listed above, a range of other artists, such as Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Hedda Sterne, Perle Fine, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Robert Rauschenberg) offer a cross-­section of the community that Pavia located along Eighth Street in downtown Manhattan. Although the essays, manifestos, jottings, and abundant reproductions collected during the journal’s brief run do not represent a unified approach to art-­making and art-­writing, an affiliation with the journal was itself an indication of a commonly held commitment to foregrounding and honoring the voices and intentions of artists. It Is provided an important record of their divergent points of view and acted as one of the few forums specifically dedicated to representing artists’ discourse against increasingly voluble critical responses to their work.12 Pavia opened each issue of It Is with a “Manifesto-­in-­Progress.” The manifestos, which make sweeping claims about history, old masters, and unnamed abstract artists, and which delight in the use of bold type and the capitalization of common nouns, can strike the uninitiated reader as obscure and vaguely mystical. They can also be read, however, as idiosyncratic distillations of some of the main subjects discussed during The Club’s many panels and debates. Pavia’s first manifesto, for example, describes an emergent “Problem” that is very likely a reference to arguments over the respective values of abstraction and expressionism. Pavia does not come down on one side of this debate; instead he identifies this problem as a new subject matter in Modernist art. Pavia argues that in working through its difficulties, American artists were able to bring together abstract formal concerns and expressive content, creating a relationship that Pavia names “pure plastic experience.”13 Displacing both style and history, Pavia argues that the problem provides the artist with the ideal opportunity to realize “his individuality,” which arises in making decisions concerning “the particulars of abstract art” (7). That is to say, Pavia contends that the artist’s individuality is best realized by confronting technical and formal problems that

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emerge out of practice, as opposed to being formulated for the artist according to historical precedent or stylistic imperatives: “the state of making decisions is related to the particulars in abstract art which in turn increase the sense of the personal in his work.” Abstract, material engagement, Pavia concludes, “intensifies individuality” (7). In an attempt to render his abstruse statements somewhat more concrete, Pavia concludes his manifesto with an “example-­in-­proof.” He directs his readers to imagine a mile-­long gallery having, end to end, only representational and impressionistic paintings hanging on one side; then, hanging on the opposite side, end to end, a row of pure abstract paintings. Look at the first wall, look hard, and see History—with its terrific power of generalizing not only the art but the artist as well. The wall of abstract painting would offer quite the opposite feeling: it would be one continuous panel of individual after individual like stars, without history; but each will have its own deep unique twinkle and presence (7).

Such passages demonstrate Pavia’s primary concern: to promote a strictly abstract art and to stress its particular ability to articulate the unique experience of the individual. Pavia’s second manifesto, which is a slightly more direct discussion of the ideal relation of abstraction to expressionism, ends with a similarly celebratory musing on the unique ability of abstract form to reveal something specific about the individual. American abstract artists, Pavia argues in the second manifesto, introduced a “second” or “sub-­space” to the strictly formal concerns of early abstract styles. In addition to both formal and illusory space, American abstract artists achieved an affective dimension in their paintings, a depth of feeling signifying the artist’s “singularity.” After discussing the terms of that singular depth, Pavia concludes with this query: “Has the new sub-­space exposed the ‘texture’ of the individual? Can this ‘texture’—which is tactile—be translated by the world of psychology? The individual’s texture revolts against the psychology of multiplicity.”14 The texture of the individual is revealed in the tactile details of the work: a material event that signifies individual, but never group, psychology. Pavia’s emphasis on the “twinkle and presence” and “texture” of individuals reads like a caricature of the most stereotyped picture of the alignment between postwar individualism and the so-­called “triumph of American painting,” as Irving Sandler phrased it.15 And Pavia, himself an expressionist sculptor, was most certainly a dyed-­in-­ the-­wool individualist. However, even this celebration of the “twinkle and presence” of individuality and revelation of the “texture” of the unique individual in expressive form moves cautiously, questioningly toward its subject, admitting various ambiguities and confusions. In Pavia’s first manifesto, for example, he discusses the central role that “drawing, drawing and more drawing” plays in clearing the way for artists to engage the “Problem” without the distractions of history, “reverie,” or stylistic dic-

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tates. Drawing is a technical tool, according to Pavia, a “hard-­discipline conditioning” that makes this clearing possible (3). A focus on drawing, on the simple task of “reduc[ing] a sense of space to a one-­dimensional experience” and “experience[ing] space in relation to the displacement of light” initiates an “attitude” in the artist, one that enunciates their separateness from things (4; the emphasis is Pavia’s). But here Pavia raises an important question: could this “individual-­ ness” be itself “derived from drawing”? Pavia asks, this is to say, whether drawing should be regarded as a tool chosen by this newly individualized subject or whether the newly individualized subject should be viewed as itself the result of using such a tool. Pavia, despite his seeming celebration of unfettered and individual action, indicates that the latter is most likely the case: it is the practice of drawing, he contends, that allows the abstract artist to conceive of “his individuality as a ‘one,’ not a ‘part’” (4). Pavia understood the practice of drawing to articulate, make legible, the actions of the individual actor. Drawing may begin from within, but it is always already oriented toward the outside, not so much navigating the space between internal impulse and exterior action as occupying it, forming itself out of it, in much the same way that Rosenberg understood action to be an identity-­in-­formation. Pavia’s emphasis on drawing pitches practice as a negotiation between intentional mark-­making and material delimitation. Jean-­Luc Nancy’s description of drawing as “a semantic field where act and force are combined” comes closest to describing the liminal activity drawing is. Nancy, sounding like Sartre in his description of being as a “flight” beyond itself, argues that drawing, above all other practices, limns the vector that is the desiring self’s outward orientation: “To exist is to sketch oneself [s’esquisser] . . . to open oneself to the desire of (letting oneself ) being drawn to the outside.”16 In this sense, drawing and self are simultaneous occurrences. In a point that recalls a topic returned to with some frequency at The Club, Nancy, in describing the “gesture of the artist,” writes that the “ordering of causes completely withdraws here”: the drawn mark does not act as a record of intention or interior impulse, but orients and defines a self in and as mark-­making-­in-­process.17 Like intention or desire, the mark is not that which originates within and seeks its object, but a directional orientation of a self toward an object and, in that outward vector, it defines—gives form to, which is to say, draws—a self as such.18 In a manner certainly less worked through, Pavia’s presentation of the individual in relation to the problem similarly characterizes the practice of drawing and self-­realization as simultaneous. The experience of and commitment to individuality that the problem realizes are cast as effects of the “method” or “tool” of drawing, which, Pavia argues, “vanguarded” the “new abstract art” (4). Pavia pre­sents the “twinkle and presence” of postwar individuality as originating not in the individual subject, but in and as practice: “Drawing and drawing is practised over and over again” (3). Pavia offers a capsule history of abstract artists’ use of drawing as a basic and necessary tool, mentioning key Modernist figures, such as Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Duchamp, in addition to Chi-

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nese ink drawings. He concludes that what results from this shared dedication to drawing as practice is not a “style” or uniform technical approach, but a disposition: a way of comporting oneself or acting in the world. Demonstrating his own skeptical awareness of “the Orgman-­critic’s”19 version of postwar individualism, Pavia claims that the new abstractionist “found a philosophical about-­ face to the current theories of the individual as a smug social unit, and he found a new subjectivity: the Problem” (4; Pavia’s emphasis). The problem, which Pavia first describes as a set of formal and technical procedures, transforms into a recognizable “subjectivity.” Like Rosenberg’s “true act,” where personality is transcended in order to obtain the visibility of identity, Pavia’s problem allows for a practical realization of the subject. In confronting this eminently material, “plastic” problem, an artistic subject takes on form. If we read Pavia’s manifestos as distillations of concerns that were first addressed at The Club, his description of the material and symbolic realization of individuality in and as practice can be seen as a direct response to the multiple debates around the value and meaning of expressionism in its relation to abstraction. In this context, Pavia’s properly named “Problem” seems a thinly disguised reference to “the Hess problem,” which is to say, the problem of an abstract expressionism. His description of the problem as “pure plastic experience” shows that Pavia agreed with Hess’s claim that abstraction and expressionism had come together in the current “American phase” of abstraction. The expressionists at The Club were identified according to their interest in the artist’s touch and material facture over and above abstractionists’ prioritizing of composition and form. Chaim Soutine’s thickly painted, dark and moody still lifes were routinely pointed to as important precursors for the expressionist “camp,” while Kandinsky’s more intellectual, idealist abstractions served as reference points for the abstractionists.20 Despite these seemingly divergent interests, however, the American Modernists associated with The Club were mainly working abstractly. In this abstract tendency, the very notion of expressionism came into question. If expressionism were not to be identified with referential content, it was increasingly unclear as to what exactly was being “expressed.” It is worth taking a moment to consider the history of the term “expressionism” in order to better understand its altered form in the context of postwar American Modernism. Pictorial expressionism originated in Europe in the early twentieth century.21 In the mid-­twentieth century, in the United States, it was most often traced to Germany and was identified with what Paul Fechter, in his 1914 book Der Expressionismus, described as an emphasis “upon the experience of feeling and on its formulation in the most intensely concentrated manner possible.”22 European expressionism was regarded mainly as keeping with a symbolist tradition, which remained grounded for the most part in representation. In the earlier part of the century American curators and critics often distinguished Expressionism’s “inner-­directed” mood from more naturalistic modes of Modernist

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art, such as Impressionism. As Alfred H. Barr put it in his catalog essay for the 1931 exhibition, German Painting and Sculpture, “Impressionism implies subservience to nature; expressionism implies subservience to the human imagination.”23 As the term came to be applied to contemporary painting in the United States beginning in the mid-­1940s, however, it was used more often to describe a specific technique than a kind of content. This was, in fact, Robert Coates’s use of the term in what may have been the first application of the phrase “abstract expressionism” to Modernist American painting. In a 1946 review of a Hans Hofmann exhibition at the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, Coates referred to the “spatter-­ and-­daub school of painting,” which he “christened abstract Expressionism,” and which he took note of for its “emphasis on accidental effects.”24 This “abstract Expressionism,” we can surmise, was meant to stand apart from “symbolic expressionism,” a phrase Coates used in an earlier piece to describe Robert Motherwell’s more Surrealistically (that is, European) inflected works.25 Motherwell himself, despite Coates’s grouping him with the Europeans, pointed to these more technical as opposed to symbolic interests as exemplary of a specifically American approach to abstraction. In his 1944 essay “The Modern Painter’s World,” Motherwell introduced the concept of “plastic automatism” in order to distinguish American painters’ interest in abstraction and “individual freedom” from a Surrealist celebration of the “individual ego.” “Plastic automatism” described the thoroughly materialist approach to abstract painting in America, whereas the ideography and automatic writing of the European Surrealists channeled and represented the psyche. Motherwell termed this European strain of abstraction “verbal automatism”—a play on André Breton’s notion of “psychic automatism.” In the hands of the Americans, according to Motherwell, the finished painting was not an expression or representation of the ego, but its “objectification” through “form.”26 “Form” here means material, plastic process, but it also means social form—a means of connecting to the world at large. Pavia’s notion of “plastic experience” bears a lot in common with Motherwell’s “plastic automatism.” Both describe a material encounter between, in Motherwell’s words, “a sentient being and the external world.”27 This relational modality and interest in automatism as a technical device earned the expressionists the most ridicule in the many debates dedicated to the topic at The Club. Before the debates sparked by Hess’s use of the phrase “abstract Expressionism” in his book, abstractionists and expressionists frequently sparred, arguing over the various merits of their given and, in their minds, divergent aesthetics. Excerpts from debates dated July 1950 and April 1951, which Pavia later published, reveal how the battle lines were drawn. The abstractionists defended geometry and informed design, and accused the expressionists of having “no composition.” The expressionists defended distortion, human presence, and materiality, and accused the abstractionists of being overly formulaic. The debates that followed the publication of Hess’s book played out these positions, articulating even more explicitly where their differ-

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ences lay.28 Those invited to participate in the panels included Tworkov, Philip Guston, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Goldwater, Ad Reinhardt, William Baziotes, Perle Fine, Franz Kline, Harold Rosenberg, John Ferren, Milton Resnick, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Al Leslie, Frank O’Hara, and Elaine de Kooning, along with several others—Pavia working hard, according to his own account, to offer the diverse “clubs within the club” their chance to weigh in on the debate. The artists’ struggle with the collapsing of abstraction and expressionism is evident in the titles given to each panel, which Pavia was persistently asked to revise (fig. 2.1). While the first panel was titled “Expressionism,” it was changed to “abstract Expressionism” in the second in order to better reflect Hess’s phrase. The third panel was retitled “abstract-­Expressionism,” because Ad Reinhardt (the most vociferous of abstractionist partisans) demanded a hyphen, only to have other artists reject the hyphen, requesting the now more established title “Abstract Expressionism” for the fourth. For the fifth evening, Pavia got rid of the phrase entirely, “because opposition was getting stronger,” calling the panel instead, “The Structural Concept of the Twentieth Century.” Pavia reports that for the penultimate panel, “The Purists’ Idea,” Reinhardt “forbade” the use of the phrase altogether. The multiple, sometimes quite heated exchanges over the respective values of expression and abstraction tended to circle around the necessity of evidencing the painter’s hand in the work, the proper ratio of disciplined composition to improvised process, and the value of working from or refusing preliminary concepts and designs. Whatever the focus, there was general agreement that “the essence of expressionism” is the presence in the work of art of “a sense of authorship.”29 There was no agreement, however, as the irreverent interventions into Pavia’s titles show, about what value, if any, that “sense” provided to the works of either individuals or groups of painters. Disagreements arose not only over the value and significance of expressionism, but also over whether it described the main direction that abstract artists had developed in the United States since the 1940s. A primary concern among the participants was that marrying abstraction to expressionism, or rendering abstraction as no more than a qualifier of expression, risked subsuming abstraction to representational tendencies. As Pavia summarized the concern: after such long underground resistance, they [the abstract artists] were to be swallowed up by representational art. Instead of proud, pioneering abstract artists, they were to be nothing but bastardized near abstract artists with hybrid experiences. A bastard word, a bastard idea and a bastard artist would be a compact paraphrase of complaints [against the concept of an abstract expressionism].30

Such concerns were voiced, as Pavia points out, against the backdrop of the public definition of American Modernists as a somewhat unified school.31 The debates over the “unwanted title” Abstract Expressionism that followed upon

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F ig u re 2.1. Philip Pavia, “The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism in Two Parts. Part I: The ‘Hess-­Problem’ and Its Seven Panels at The Club, 1952.” It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 5 (1960): 10.

the publication of Hess’s book also unfolded in the wake of the commercial successes of Pollock and de Kooning, as well as the well-­received “Ninth Street Show,” a large group exhibition organized by Club members that provided a public representation of the New York School as a cohesive group.32 But the panels on Abstract Expressionism make clear that such cohesion was far from complete and that expressionism was among the most resisted stylistic unities in circulation. Driving the resistance to expressionism was its growing popularity among a younger generation of artists gathering at the margins of The Club. Included in both the Ninth Street Show and the panels on the “Hess problem” were several artists who would come to be identified as “second generation” Abstract Expressionists, such as Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg. What distinguished these artists was their shared interest in gesture: painted or drawn passages that signified human touch. Describing this group in the introduction to the exhibition catalog for the Jewish Museum’s 1957 show “The New York School: Second Generation,” Leo Steinberg argued that, following on the heels of previous cultural “rebellions,” these young Modernist painters were “the first generation that is not in revolt.”33 In place of revolt, Steinberg discovered a “creative adventure” and an unfettered celebration of human invention. Sandler similarly characterized this new generation as “the inheritors, not the initiators, of a revolution,” noting the confidence that was lent this new generation by a burgeoning art market.34 While Steinberg and Sandler celebrated the new freedoms exhibited by these young painters, they were more commonly met with suspicion. Since they had come of age in a newly accommodating cultural and economic environment, the gestural trend they helped to ratify appeared “professional” and “craftsmanlike,” lacking the sincerity that was attributed to the first generation of pathbreakers.35 Artists and critics alike began to wonder whether this latest generation of expressionist painters weren’t simply “tak[ing] advantage of a boom,” as Tworkov put it.36 As Sandler reports Greenberg as saying at a 1956 panel on art criticism at The Club, by the mid-­1950s “gesture painting had become ‘timid, handsome, second-­generation . . . in a bad way.’ ”37 The main concern was whether there wasn’t some fundamental contradiction at play in refining expressive painting into a kind of style—a definition of expressionism to which the first generation of New York School artists had most vociferously objected. The objections became more pronounced as one of the core members of the first generation himself transitioned into a more “academic” gestural style.38 In the late 1950s, de Kooning moved away from the tightly composed, revisionary method he had become known for earlier in the decade (see pl. 2, for example) and began to make large, open, and robustly gestural pictures. As Merritt Parkway (1959; fig. 2.2) demonstrates, the paintings were made quickly with large brushes and a loose, viscous paint that preserves the “full arm sweep” de Kooning used when making these paintings.39 Painted with a limited palette, the works isolate the gesture as the primary signifying unit. Like Door to the

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F ig u re 2 . 2 . Willem de Kooning, Merritt Parkway, 1959. Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 1/ 2 in. Detroit Institute of Arts. © 2020 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts, USA, Gift of W. Hawkins Ferry / Bridgeman Images.

River (pl. 3), Merritt Parkway draws an explicit link between the painting’s plastic reality and the body that made it. After a highly successful exhibition of these paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery in May 1959, there emerged a tendency to describe the second-­generation Abstract Expressionists as de Kooning followers. In a review of the Janis show, for example, Fairfield Porter wrote that “the phrase ‘abstract expressionist’ is now seen to mean ‘paintings of the school of de Kooning.’”40 In 1960 Greenberg referred to a “de Kooning and Kline school,” arguing that expressive gesturalism had degenerated into a “mannered” academicism.41 Sandler points out that reference to a “‘school’ of de Kooning” was a way for critics to dismiss the second generation of New York School painters as “derivative.”42 If, it was persistently

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asked in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the gestural approach to painting can be learned, then how can it continue to be thought of as authentic expression? And, further, how is a viewer to distinguish between a sincerely meant expressionist painting and an opportunistic counterfeit? This was the task that Hess assumed in reviewing three large, highly regarded exhibitions in the winter of 1959—the Whitney Museum Annual Exhibition, the Guggenheim International Award Exhibition, and the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture—which made plain just how widespread gestural abstraction had become. Viewing these exhibitions, Hess was disturbed by the ubiquity of gesture painting: “the slash of a gesture that must have jerked a painter around like an acrobat moves through these neo-­stratospheres like toy sparks.”43 He was even more emphatically disturbed by the artists’ seeming desire to “deceive” the viewer, to convince the audience of some sincerely felt emotion, when no apparent intent could be discerned behind the effort. Its increased presence in the commercial galleries cropping up in downtown Manhattan demonstrated gestural abstraction to be the darling of a newly robust American art market.44 As the color-­field painter Friedel Dzubas put it in 1959, along Tenth Street, in downtown Manhattan, “one [could] find all the tricks of the current trade, the dragging of the brush, the minor accidents (within reason), the seeming carelessness and violence ever so cautiously worked up to.”45 Dzubas’s comment comes from his contribution to a two-­part discussion organized by Art News in 1959 around the question of whether expressionism had finally ossified into “a new academy.” The discussion was meant to address, as Sandler put it in the editorial introduction, the worry that “so-­called Abstract Expressionist idioms, whose primary value has been individuality, have been turned into prescriptions for painting and sculpture.”46 Such public conversations expressed a general “uneasiness” in the arts community over the susceptibility of the expressive gesture to fraudulence and imitation.47 One response to Abstract Expressionism’s institutional and market success and its consolidation into a gestural style was a complete rejection of expressive and gestural mark-­making. In the late 1950s an alternative mode of Modernist abstraction emerged, which favored large colored fields, hard edges, and serial design over expressive or “painterly” process.48 I turn to these postpainterly Modernists in Part II, but for now some time needs to be spent describing how Abstract Expressionists themselves, living through this ostensible reduction of expressionism to gesture painting, understood that method as both an ideological myth and pictorial device. Such an understanding continued to unfold at the practical interface between abstraction and expressionism. While first-­generation Abstract Expressionists like de Kooning appeared to have abandoned any practical investigation into this relation by the late 1950s, his less visible confederates continued to find the compromised, or “bastardized,” joining of expressive freedom to abstract structure a compelling problem to work within. Tworkov, the New York

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School painter most like de Kooning in temperament and style, is exemplary in this regard. For Tworkov never abandoned either the gesture of expressionism or the structure of abstraction. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he continued to work through their relation as a fundamental problem defining his particular generation of American Modernists. As such, the gestural abstractions he made during this period of Modernist painting’s institutionalization can be looked to as critical reflections on and inquiries into the continued viability of expressionism as a Modernist method in the late twentieth century. Tworkov’s paintings would seem to perfectly embody the “professional,” “craftsmanlike,” and even “handsome” approach to gesture painting that critics had grown weary of by the late 1950s (see pls. 1 and 5).49 Tworkov always approached gesture with a consideration that is easily read as mannered and academic. But instead of reading his self-­conscious use of gesture as an indication of his lack of sincerity or overwrought determination to obtain an expressive look, it is important to understand Tworkov’s considered use of the gesture as indicating his interest in it as a problem, both practical and conceptual, defining abstract painting at midcentury. Tworkov’s relation to expressionism was secured early in his career, while his status as an abstractionist was somewhat more tentative. Throughout the 1940s he continued to make and exhibit still lifes and portraits. In his first solo exhibition, at the Charles Egan Gallery in 1947, Tworkov decided to show only still lifes, despite Egan’s interest in his early abstractions. In a review of the show, his paintings were praised for their expressive qualities, in particular for his use of “fine line” and “the elegant signature of each brushstroke.”50 Aligned with the “expressionist” camp at The Club, which he was frequently tasked with defending, Tworkov is often credited with putting into circulation a functioning description of the expressionist sensibility in his 1950 review of Chaim Soutine’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.51 Tworkov discerned a shared sensibility between Soutine’s work and American Modernists in their mutual commitment to process. Despite Soutine’s strictly representational content, Tworkov argued that in both process and “attitude” the Russian-­French painter had much in common with “the most original section of new painting in this country.” Soutine’s all-­over treatment of the canvas, his “thick, slow-­flowing, viscous” use of paint, which rendered the pictorial surface “material” and “sensual,” and his preservation of the “tracks” of the painting’s making all aligned Soutine with postwar abstract painting in the United States, according to Tworkov.52 Tworkov’s emphasis on process exhibits his agreement with contemporary definitions of expressionism in the United States.53 In a 1957 discussion with Sandler, Tworkov defined “expressionism” (which he refused to think of as a “style”) as the foregrounding of “technique”: “material, brushwork, organization, color are themselves the direct way in which a picture speaks.”54 Tworkov asserts that this alone is the “main idea” defining expressionism, not its abstract or depictive subject matter. Tworkov’s emphasis on technique over sub-

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ject matter is partly a defense of his own continued interest in “nature” and external reference as starting points for his paintings. As he himself admits, it was due to his continued attachment to referential content that he was often grouped with a younger generation of artists.55 In both his attachment to external referents and his cultivated interest in gesture, Tworkov has much in common with second-­generation Abstract Expressionists like Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers, whom Sandler grouped under the rubric “gestural realists.” By “realism” Sandler meant painters’ incorporation of objective reference points, which anchored the automatic and subjective feel of gesture in systems, whether schematic or representational, that were “external to the self.”56 That external reference point could include representational content (as in Hartigan’s portraits and Mitchell’s naturescapes) and art-­historical allusion (as in Hartigan’s and Rivers’s historical appropriations). Also to be included in the category of “gestural realism” was the self-­conscious cultivation of a technique that, while implicit in many first-­generation Abstract Expressionist paintings, was an explicit technical device for this second generation: repeatable and schematic design. While Tworkov favored allusive content throughout much of his career, his turn to schematic structure in the late 1950s demonstrates that he held much in common with these younger expressionist painters, as well as an emergent neo-­avant-­garde. Admitting to being disenchanted, by the late 1950s, with what he described as the “automatic aspect of abstract expressionist painting of the gestural variety,” Tworkov began casting about for “more disciplined contemplative forms.”57 His use of the term “automatic” here (not to be conflated with Motherwell’s) refers to the look of spontaneity in certain Abstract Expressionist paintings. Tworkov was consistently skeptical of the kind of explosive, unrepeatable action that he associated with the “mechanical” nature of “automatic techniques.”58 “Disciplined contemplative forms,” in contrast, signals something both practiced and repeatable, capable of mediating individual choice and preference through preselected objective form. Tworkov distinguishes here between two manifestations of authorship, one spontaneous and one carefully considered and designed. Despite favoring the latter, Tworkov continued to make use of the gesture, anchoring its process-­based modality in “disciplined” structure, both allusive and schematic, as a “kind of framework to hold the picture in place.”59 Schema did not simply supply Tworkov with a means by which he could continue to use the gesture. It offered him a framework wherein the rhetorical and aesthetic value of the gesture could be articulated and interrogated. Predetermined design provided him with a “starting point for composing a painting” and allowed gesture to enter as a consciously chosen subject matter, rather than as an arbitrary and merely “mechanical” technique.60 The 1966 painting Plain (pl. 5) exhibits this considered exploration of gesture as an expressive idiom. A vertical painting 6 × 5 feet in size, Plain materializes an ambiguity in its systematic and heavy-­handed gesturalism, which both follows and obliterates an underlying schematic and somewhat allusive

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structure. Beneath a dense mass of markings, a hand-­drawn grid can be seen, which covers the entire surface of the canvas. That base-­level grid is repeated in a deeply etched, all-­over black scoring. In the mainly vertical and horizontal orientation of those marks, the large black mass that they build into has the appearance of being divided into smaller, rectangular units. This regulated appearance emerges even as the hard-­pressed, seemingly spontaneous mood of those black marks challenges such regulation. The oppositional tension built up between automatic and schematic, subjective and objective mark-­making is amplified by the inscription of the whole canvas with uniform, diagonal lines, which appear as both a hard-­edge patterning in the upper left of the canvas and as sweeping black strokes, threaded throughout the monolithic, black form. Despite their regularity, the diagonal redirection disrupts the ordered coherence of the picture, infusing the whole with a pointed ambiguity. That ambiguity is confirmed in Tworkov’s awkward conflation of external and self-­reference. Tworkov’s lines, for example, behave as both automatic, freestanding gesture and delimiting, intentional inscription. Confusing referential cues litter the composition. The curved line in the bottom left quadrant, for example, begins to delineate an ending both in its marking the bottom edge of the black mass and in its appearing to be under the other marks, intimating a referential border. Similarly, the massed gestures come to an abrupt end in a manner that indicates external reference. The three vertical forms in the upper left and the fingered lines that reach toward the bottom right arrive at what feel like predetermined stopping points, even as the overall shape of the central form and the gestural strokes that fill it out signify automatically generated design. Schema and gesture, external reference and self-­expression: these are the devices that Tworkov coordinated in order to arrive at this eminently ambiguous composition. His ambivalent approach to gesture is made all the clearer when we consider the strong resemblance between the composition of Plain and the compositions explored in his “Barrier Series,” which includes Barrier No. 4 (pl. 1), the painting that hung above the “Contemporary Voices in the Arts” event discussed in the introduction. Barrier No. 4 and East Barrier (1960; fig. 2.3), for example, both feature a similar, blocky mass, with spokes jutting above and below. This was a formation that Tworkov returned to repeatedly and which was the subject of multiple drawn studies (figs. 2.4 and 2.5), demonstrating his commitment to marrying automatic, spontaneous gestural action and carefully considered, predetermined design. The sheer excess of Tworkov’s actions and his recursive search for “external” forms by which their signifying potential might be curtailed are the surest indications that he was interested in gesture as a rhetorical device. Tworkov makes use of the gesture not in order to signify his own “expressive power” and “inner depth,” but to work with and against the “idea” that was Abstract Expressionism.61 For Tworkov art was always about ideas, and he “had the sharpest appetite for the ideas around painting.”62 This is not to say, however, that Tworkov’s paintings are merely analytic or conceptual exercises. For all the schematic

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F ig u re 2 . 3 . Jack Tworkov, East Barrier, 1960. Oil on canvas, 91 3/4 × 80 7/ 8 in. Albright-­ Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. © 2020 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

framing that he lends to the gesture, it is still just that in paintings like Plain and East Barrier: an eminently psychical and affective record of human action. The excessive presence of his mark-­making, the literal labor-­time that it tallies, provides Tworkov’s gesture with the very thing that schematic order seems designed to deny: pathos.63 The glut of mark-­making in paintings like Plain formalizes the pathos to which Rosenberg understood action painting to give rise in its historical relation to predetermined, self-­exceeding structures. Tworkov’s is a “pathetic” action realized not in “creativity” and invention, but only in recursively coming up against its own limits.64 In a 1971 interview with Phyllis Tuchman, Tworkov, after characterizing Modernism as a project of “emptying out” the content of painting, wondered whether the “gains” that were made in that process were worth the “losses,” which, Tworkov concluded, “have been tremendous.”65 The procedural surfeit and “labored stammer” that characterize his 1960s abstractions seem to be in part about that loss.66 Loss here need not be thought of as loss of meaningful subject matter, about which Tworkov was pointedly ambivalent.67 Instead, he indicates the loss of social standing for art in general. Given this social alien-

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F ig u re 2.4. Jack Tworkov, Study for East Barrier, c. 1960. Graphite and conté crayon with erasure and stumping on cream wove paper, 13 5/ 8 × 10 13/16 in. Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund. © 2020 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ation, Tworkov says he “has sometimes thought that abstract painting, on the social level (rather than on the individual level) was an expression of despair.”68 Tworkov’s overburdened, gestural abstractions might be read as a formalization of this despair, an articulation of the empty gesture that Modernist painting had become. In his 1958 essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” Allan Kaprow argues that Pollock, who had died two years earlier, in transforming the painted picture into an absorbing field of energetic action had “destroyed painting.”69 In the wake of that destruction, Kaprow asks, “What do we do now?” He pre­sents his reader with two options. One is “to give up painting entirely” and turn instead to “the space and objects of our everyday life.” In other words, Kaprow understood Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist paintings as opening onto a postmedium field of practice that we now know as the neo-­avant-­garde. The other option is to continue in the “vein” of Pollock, making somewhat “good ‘near paintings,’”

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F ig u re 2 . 5 . Jack Tworkov, Study for East Barrier, 1959. Graphite and conté crayon with erasure and stumping on cream wove paper, 13 3/4 × 11 in. Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund. © 2020 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

as though the “near destruction” of the pictorial tradition could be indefinitely postponed.70 I suggest that Tworkov’s decision to continue to act in painting is a refusal of both options. His increasingly excessive use of the gesture at the very moment of its widespread “colonization” demonstrates his continued faith not in expressionism or gesturalism or in any other style of painting.71 It is, rather, a demonstration of his faith in painting as a medium capable of lending form to the historical problem that is art’s relation to the social structures that exceed it. Included in that social problem was the question of authorship, the status and value of which the commercial packaging of Abstract Expressionism as a style drew into question. As his response to seeing Barrier No. 4 in the context of performative practices at the “Contemporary Voices” event shows, Tworkov understood painting neither as an “arena” in which to freely act, nor as a “record” of a past freedom.72 As a “narrow medium—limited in its range of expression,” painting was, rather, a means by which the social and personal could be

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related.73 As he said in describing his turn to elemental geometry in the 1960s, “Geometrics or a systematic order gives me a space for meditation, adumbrates my alienation.”74 In painting, Tworkov is not freed of that alienation. Rather, his alienation is adumbrated, which is to say sketched: outlined and lent form. The material object that is painting is a necessary part of this project. It is the mechanism by which the limits of both self-­expression and individual action are productively investigated. In this Tworkov agreed with Rosenberg, who refused Kaprow’s call to abandon the art object altogether. A former student of Rosenberg’s, Kaprow understood his declaration that painting had come to an end to be supported by the critic’s theory of action. But Rosenberg argued vehemently that painting, as a historical medium, provided a necessary limit to both the artist’s actions and the audience’s demands. “To remove the object,” Rosenberg wrote in his 1969 essay “The Concept of Action,” “and make the artist’s action into the work of art is to bring the artist face to face with the audience.” While this may be an effect that Kaprow desired, Rosenberg finds it a questionable aspiration, for, he contends, “the audience is the personification of the art market.” In addition to protecting the artist from the “demands” of the audience, and releasing the audience from the “demands” of the artist, the art object provides the artist with something “outside himself,” which can “animate his next move.”75 That is, the artist may be free of the audience in action painting, having locked that unknowing community out of the studio, but that does not mean the artist is free. If anything, for Rosenberg, the work of art is a record of unfreedom: whether art seeks action or release from action, the purpose of the artist in regard to the works themselves is doomed to be defeated by the social process that transforms his creation into an artifact hanging as a trophy on the wall of a collector or acquired by an institution as an educational datum. In sum, the relation of art remains a subjective reality, the reality of creating it.76

While the multiple dematerialized practices that developed in the 1960s promised a newfound freedom, not just from the restrictions of Modernist imperatives but also, as Lucy Lippard put it, “from the tyranny of a commodity status and market-­orientation,” Rosenberg never saw such an escape as achievable.77 What remains imperative is the “act” itself—the “subjective reality” of creating the work of art in order to articulate the limits of human action in the social field. Tworkov remained adamantly committed to exploring and figuring such limits. In that commitment, he resisted the performative aesthetics of the neo-­ avant-­garde and the expressive personalism of late-­Modernist gestural abstraction, both of which struck him as designed to “stimulate the reply.”78 After moving into the more comforting schemas provided by geometry in the mid-­1960s, he continued his mark-­making activities, but in a more deeply—it might even be said, more defeatingly—regulated environment, as can be seen in his 1969 Idling series, which followed the “Contemporary Voices in the Arts” events.

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F ig u re 2 . 6 . Jack Tworkov, Idling III, 1970. Oil on canvas, 80 × 70 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of the artist (80.98). © 2020 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

Where a painting like Plain, as with so many of Tworkov’s paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, exhibits an expressive, hard-­pressed mark, the Idling paintings are composed of line after line of well-­organized and carefully finessed vertical strokes. The surfaces of the three paintings that make up the series, each of which measures 80 × 70 inches, are covered in a gray wash and regularly lined with quickly made strokes that measure between 4.5 and 6 inches long. Idling III (fig. 2.6), the most constrained of the three, is a field of carefully mapped gestural marks. Each stroke is almost exactly 5 inches tall, and the strokes are organized in straight rows across the canvas. With the same mark applied at regular intervals in carefully maintained horizontal formations, the painting seems to have been executed at one go: a rote exercise, allowing for variation only as the artist attempts to maintain the proper amount of pigment on the brush as he moves along. Far from idle in making these paintings, Tworkov empties out the expressive gesture of all but the reiterative action of laying pigment down on canvas. This protraction of labor without the payoff of expressive content signals that Tworkov, as author, is himself idling here, as an engine idles, paused within the prac-

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tical space of painting itself. As such, these paintings can be read as pathetic realizations of the limits of pictorial expressivity. It is crucial to note, however, the considered nature of this pathetic statement, which demonstrates Tworkov’s self-­conscious, rhetorical mediation of the “brute” act of gesture painting. The grisaille palette, left-­to-­right orientation, and systematic application of the painted mark transform the gesture from index (record of the painter’s psycho-­ physical presence) to symbol (a rhetorically deployed, conventional device). This reflective use of the gesture opens up an “authorship space,” as Pavia called it, wherein the stakes of authorial action are not simply demonstrated, but investigated. His continued use of gesture is not the only thing that Tworkov held in common with second-­generation Abstract Expressionists. His enduring faith in the critical possibilities of painting also aligns him with that younger generation. Helen Frankenthaler, the one painter who was said to have finally offered a “bridge” out of the gesturalism of latter-­day Abstract Expressionism and into the denuded fields of “Post Painterly Abstraction,” may seem to leave the questions raised by Tworkov behind. But a more careful consideration of her early paintings demonstrates that the characterization of her work as a transition from the painterly to the postpainterly, from the Modernist paintings of the New York School to the High Modernist paintings of the 1960s, misses her much more complex, much more considered relationship to the paintings of the immediate past. In the next chapter I address Frankenthaler’s continued engagement with the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism and her “charting,” to use the language of her one-­time professor Kenneth Burke, of the passage of the gesture from a “practical” to a “symbolic act.”79

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3. Rhetoric of Motives

There are no flat rules for getting at the workings of a painting, but I feel more than ever that the secrets lie in ambiguity; ambiguity that makes a complete final statement in the painting whole. — H e l e n F r a n k e n t h al e r

Helen Frankenthaler’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (pl. 6) cultivates ambiguity. Large areas of poured and loosely brushed-­on paint stand alongside purposively drawn lines. The two modes of application, one medium-­bound, the other driven by hand and wrist, coincide with another complex relationship: spontaneous, expressive passages as opposed to linear, iconographic picture-­making. These two pictorial modes do not simply coexist in paintings like Seven Types of Ambiguity, but neither do they attain symbiosis. Rather, they share in the space of painting. Their tentative, deeply ambiguous coordination demonstrates Frankenthaler’s self-­conscious approach to the multiple meanings that traditionally accompany both the drawn line and the spontaneous pour. In this chapter I pre­sent Frankenthaler’s paintings as studies in ambiguity. They are at once rhetorical analyses of the ambiguous manifestation of authorial presence in Modernist painting and themselves instances of pictorial ambiguity: the “secret,” as Frankenthaler puts it in the epigraph to this chapter, of a painting’s “workings.” The title Seven Types of Ambiguity comes from a book by the literary critic William Empson. “It’s a play on Empson, who used the title,” Frankenthaler recalled, adding that the painting addresses “the fact” that the pictorial medium is “full of ambiguities.”1 The “types of ambiguity” that Empson studied are complexities of meaning that arise when a text invites “alternative views,” pluralities of meaning that do not result from a “misreading,” according to Empson, but are instead the product of linguistic devices intentionally deployed toward indeterminate ends.2 Like Empson’s primer, Frankenthaler’s Seven Types of Ambiguity functions as a kind of catalog of the pictorial methods by which ambiguity can be cultivated. Beginning with poured passages of a “very odd funky color”—a pale gray that leans green, impossible to accurately reproduce—in a somewhat automatic fash-

F ig u re 3 . 1 . Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952. Oil and charcoal on unsized, unprimed canvas, 863/ 8 in. × 1171/4 in. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York, on extended loan to National Gallery, Washington, DC. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ion, Frankenthaler then moves back into the painting with a more conscious, brushed and drawn line, defining individual shapes and pulling out images.3 The brushed-­on yellow shape, for example, which pushes up between the two orbs at the bottom of the composition, hugging a smaller circle above, defines the earlier, more spontaneous passages, lending them a legible form. Such legibility is further emphasized in Frankenthaler’s introduction of a drawn red line, which traces a green-­hued pour to the left and transforms into a dove at the right. This second, more considered moment is one part associative response and one part conscious design, as Frankenthaler moves in and out of the canvas—sometimes quite literally (see, for example, fig. 3.7)—­composing a picture. The composition that results, however, remains ambiguous. As Frankenthaler herself described it, Seven Types of Ambiguity is both “flighty,” as she says of her decision to add numbers in the lower, right quadrant of the picture, and “coherent,” each intervention carefully considered in order to make a well-­designed pictorial whole.4 Art historians have discussed the first part of Frankenthaler’s process—the automatic, material-­driven act of laying areas of paint on the canvas—in some detail. However, the second part—her considered reentry into the canvas with drawn line—has been largely disregarded. Outside of John Elderfield, it is rare to find any serious discussion of Frankenthaler’s practiced revisions and abiding “emphasis on drawing.”5 Painted in 1957, Seven Types of Ambiguity comes over five years after the “breakthrough” Frankenthaler achieved with Mountains and Sea (fig. 3.1), considered to be her first “stain painting.” According to her own account, Mountains and Sea was made by producing a quick charcoal sketch on a large, unstretched canvas, while recalling the seascapes she had been paint-

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ing on a recent trip to Nova Scotia. Using the drawn lines as “guideposts,” she poured heavily thinned oil paint directly onto an unprimed canvas, which was laid out horizontally on the floor.6 Pushed around and allowed to pool and soak into the weave itself, color was not applied to the canvas so much as it is was stained into that surface. It is typically said that it was via this staining process that Frankenthaler managed to overcome the expressive hand of the painter, relying not on a somatically invested gesturalism, but on the automatic processes of pooling and flowing paint to arrive at her pictorial statement.7 In reducing her contribution to this technical innovation, it has been easy to read Frankenthaler’s work retrospectively through the lens of the pared-­ down and “open” compositions that critics and curators claimed were indicative of a new, “post-­Pollock” moment of abstraction.8 Marking the beginning of an aggressive turn away from gesture painting, Frankenthaler’s stained fields are often framed as having helped to unhand the expressionist idiom, severing the authorial self from pictorial production.9 This is exactly what Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, as representatives of a new generation of Modernists, are repeatedly said to have discovered in Frankenthaler’s studio when Clement Greenberg, as the story goes, brought them there to see Mountains and Sea on April 4, 1953.10 As Louis is frequently quoted as saying to Gerald Norton in 1961, seeing Frankenthaler’s paintings enabled him and Noland to find entry into the late-­Modernist field. She provided a “bridge,” Louis said, “between Pollock and what was possible.”11 Designating Frankenthaler’s paintings as a bridge out of, in Alan Solomon’s words, “the painterly, relational, dispositional enclosure[s]” of Abstract Expressionism inevitably skews our view of her achievements toward the purely technical.12 Such a view overlooks Frankenthaler’s continued interest in the rhetoric of drawing and symbolic signification, the very values that Solomon and others understood the abstract paintings of the 1960s to have explicitly abjured. In exhibitions such as the Jewish Museum’s “Toward a New Abstraction” (1963), Greenberg’s “Post Painterly Abstraction” (1964), and Solomon’s own “The Second Breakthrough” (1969), 1960s abstraction was repeatedly framed as turning away from the displays of authorship that were increasingly described as definitive of the previous generation of painters.13 The emotional displays and “personalism of the hand”14 that had typified the anxious paintings of the New York School were said to have been supplanted by a hard-­edge “discretion”15 and a “rigorous purism,”16 effectively “removing painting from the realm of personal myth and making it more objective”17 and less open to “misinterpretation.”18 Such language, which signals a desire to move away from the ambiguity of expressive abstraction, was used to describe the late-­Modernist works of a variety of painters, including, in addition to Louis and Noland, Jules Olitski, Paul Feeley, Jo Baer, Frank Stella, and Sam Gilliam. Solomon is most explicit on this front. Taking Stella’s hard-­edge, serial paintings as his example, Solomon is clear that the last thing this new mode of painting wanted to evoke was ambiguity of motive:

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instead of appearing to assert the artist’s feelings and communicate aspects of his sensibility, [the painting] became an inert presence in relation to the viewer. Instead of telling us that it wanted to please us, seduce us with color and texture, excite us, soothe us, disgust us, or frighten us, the painting stood aloofly by, doing nothing at all in the conventional terms in which art had always operated.

In their “virtually total commitment to anti-­painterliness,” such works purged the ambiguities that had been associated with the expressionist canvas.19 Instead, as Stella put it, “what you see is what you see.”20 That Frankenthaler, with her analytic engagement with symbolic content and lyrical associations, as well as her explicit commitment to drawing and the function of “the wrist” in generating pictorial meaning, would be repeatedly pointed to as a precursor to this severely curtailed, materialist turn in painting is not simply surprising; it is irresponsible.21 As Anne Wagner put it, “the time has come to stop on the bridge.”22 To do so requires attending to the import of drawing in Frankenthaler’s paintings, with its ability, to make use of Solomon’s language, to “communicate aspects” of the painter’s “sensibility” through both gesture and representational content. Disregarding such concerns has diverted historians and critics from considering the centrality of analysis in Frankenthaler’s practice. Frankenthaler developed as a very young artist in the penumbra of a critically and commercially established American Modernist movement and looked to the methods of the “generation” that preceded her as she cultivated her own.23 Her relationship to the techniques of the New York School was not simply one of guidance or inspiration. It was, rather, analytic: a careful study of individual Modernist techniques and the particular meanings that had accrued around them. She acquired this approach through her impressive education in the arts, which began in high school under the Mexican Modernist Rufino Tamayo and matured at Bennington College under Paul Feeley. At Bennington she also studied with literary critic Kenneth Burke, whom she credits with teaching her “how language and rhetoric can really be used.”24 Burke’s literary methods are particularly pertinent to the present study in his commitment to analyzing “the rhetoric of motives,” which is to say, manifestations of authorial presence, if not always intention. In what follows I offer a reading of Frankenthaler’s early paintings as analytic considerations of the Modernist pictures she had intimate access to as she worked toward a method of her own. While a kind of communal call-­and-­ response among painters was typical of the New York School more generally, I contend that Frankenthaler’s generational distance, as well as her exposure to the analytic study of artistic motive, gave rise to a pictorial investigation of the various methods by which authorship is “staged” in Modernist painting.25 Frankenthaler’s analytic interest in Abstract Expressionism cannot be separated from what Wagner calls the “social fact” of gender.26 As I explain, Burke’s method, which Frankenthaler knew in great detail, understands an artist’s bio-

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F ig u re 3 . 2 . Helen Frankenthaler, Scene with Nude, 1952. Oil and charcoal on sized, primed canvas, 42 3/4 × 50 3/4 in. Private collection. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Robert McKeever, courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

graphical and social circumstances to be of a piece with the formal “choices” they make. They are all, according to Burke, components of the “symbolic act” that is a work of art.27 Frankenthaler’s self-­conscious and analytic approach to Modernist painting includes a consideration of the social conditions that mark her authorial presence in painting as gendered, while leaving a painter like Jackson Pollock, in whom she expressed the most analytic interest, unmarked and free of such biographical associations. For Frankenthaler, as a woman, the lyrical excesses and the somatic eccentricities of expressionistic painting registered as a particular “burden” in the situation of postwar gender politics.28 In a 1965 interview with Geldzahler, for example, Frankenthaler said, “I wonder if my paintings are more ‘lyrical’ . . . because I am a woman.”29 Such statements demonstrate that Frankenthaler was aware of gender as a mediating factor in the reception of her paintings. Caroline A. Jones has persuasively argued that in responding to the gendered reception of her work, Frankenthaler seems to have purposefully edited out the figurative and curtailed the lyrical in her paintings.30 The same month that she painted Mountains and Sea (fig. 3.1), Jones notes, she made another stain painting: Scene with Nude (1952; fig. 3.2). Both paintings are referential, but while Mountains and Sea bears only a loose resemblance to the Nova Scotia landscape that was its inspiration, the smaller, more intimate Scene with Nude is explicitly referential, easily read as depicting breasts, legs, and crotch. There is as well a rather explicit link established between the staining technique and the female

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body: a rust-­colored splatter hovering just over the black stain that signifies the nude’s pubic hair. Jones offers a compelling reading of this painting as a “pendant” to Mountains and Sea and takes Scene with Nude, whose figurative excesses seem to have been quickly abandoned by Frankenthaler, to be a demonstration of the material exclusions necessary to secure the Modernist doctrine of “eyesight alone” that Mountains and Sea ostensibly ushered in.31 For Modernism’s disembodied opticality to be realized and maintained, the stain, with its promise of a “new exclusively optical illusionism,” as Fried described it, had to be disassociated from the body referenced in Scene with Nude.32 But the figurative was never abandoned by Frankenthaler, as Jones herself admits. Nor was the lyrical, “feminine” use of flowing, organic stains. Rather than characterizing Frankenthaler’s quite controlled approach to both lyrical pours and figurative content as an act of self-­censorship as she attempted to synchronize with Modernist doctrine as it was written by her one-­time partner Greenberg, I contend we should view her relationship to gendered signification as rhetorical. Frankenthaler did not simply edit out the “somatic metaphors” that allowed reviewers to read her paintings as made by a female author.33 She took an analytic interest in the very possibility of such a mode of signification. Scene with Nude is just one painting among several that take on the rhetorical function of the stain in its proximity to representations of gender. That rust-­red splatter, which hovers above a smudge of crotch, splayed legs, and grotesquely placed breasts with their fire-­engine-­red areolas, can’t help but strike one as cheeky: an irreverent acknowledgment that so-­called stain painting will always signify differently for female painters. Regarding gender as a part of the social “situation” to which Frankenthaler can be seen to “strategically” respond in her paintings is in line with Burke’s analysis of motive. Burke did not make strong distinctions between criticism and works of art, or, as he termed them in his introduction to The Philosophy of Literary Form, “critical and imaginative work.” Both, he argued, take the form of “strategic” and “stylized” “answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose.”34 Recognizing the “stylized” nature of critical analysis aligns it with the work of art, just as acknowledging that works of art can be strategically responsive aligns them with critical analysis. The heavy-­handed conflation of the stain and the female body in Scene with Nude make Frankenthaler’s rhetorical strategizing clear. I do not mean to imply, however, that Frankenthaler’s paintings were systematically coherent investigations or propositions. Whether describing her own works or the works of others, Frankenthaler is clear that paintings are, first and foremost, “ambiguities.”35 For Frankenthaler, pictorial ambiguity was both a site for an analytic exploration of the paintings that defined the Modernist field and a device by which she could gain entry into that field. In the practical field where Frankenthaler sought a position, the drawn line was a charged site for pictorial ambiguity, central to Greenberg’s and Fried’s evalua-

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tive analysis of the late-­Modernist paintings that followed Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea. In essays on Louis, Noland, and Jules Olitski, Greenberg describes the revised relation to drawing that the use of large areas of stained color produces. In, for instance, Morris Louis’s veil paintings, the thin washes of color create space and form without the help of line. This frees drawing from “design” and grants it an unprecedented autonomy.36 Fried took the revised relation to drawn line to be even more essential to the advancements of Modernist painting after Pollock, arguing that one of the major contributions made by painters like Louis was to free line from figuration. This newly autonomous line was implicit in Pollock’s earlier, all-­over paintings, but the work of Louis, Noland, and Olitski make it an explicit quality pursued in the most successful Modernist painting of the 1960s.37 While Fried acknowledges that Mountains and Sea “struck Louis with the force of a revelation,” he is firm in his conviction that Frankenthaler failed to achieve the same advances as her male peers. Frankenthaler, Fried contends, continued to rely “on a fundamentally drawn gesture, at once more cursive and less emphatic than Pollock’s.”38 Aligning her more with earlier New York School painters, Fried finds fault in her “painterliness” and the “textural,” “tactile” illusionism that lingers in her work.39 These amount to evidence of Frankenthaler’s “failure,” which Fried locates in her use of line to mark edge, inscribe contour, and describe form—a continued reliance on line that Fried identifies as Frankenthaler’s inability to break away from Pollock’s influence.40 For Fried, achieving the correct relation to the paintings of the recent past was a crucial qualification for entry into the Modernist project. Individual painters must continue to produce significant paintings, not simply by making new ones—­carrying a style forward—but also by bolstering the entire tradition, demonstrating what is most significant in the paintings of the past.41 It is true that Frankenthaler was not interested in laying bare and preserving the most significant aspects of the Modernist discipline. But it would be wrong to conclude that her paintings do not manifest a similarly serious relation to the paintings of the immediate past. An account of the particular interest Frankenthaler took in Pollock’s method—one that cultivated the symbolic tendencies of the drawn line—makes this clear. Recalling the first exhibition she saw of Pollock’s at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Frankenthaler said: “I wanted to live in this land, and I had to live there but I just didn’t know the language.” An emphasis has been placed on the spectacular implications of this description, which Frankenthaler enunciates when she reports that, upon stepping off the elevator into the gallery, she “was suddenly blinded as if [she had been placed] in the center ring of Madison Square Garden.”42 This description has caused some confusion among scholars about which show Frankenthaler was so taken with. In the 1960s she said, at least twice, that the first exhibition she saw was Pollock’s 1951 exhibition of his later black-­and-­white compositions, which broke from his earlier, all-­over drip paintings. But in these and other interviews, she names Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (fig. 3.3) and Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) as particularly arrest-

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Figure 3.3. Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950, 1950. Oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas, 87 × 118 in. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2020 The Pollock-­Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ing—paintings that would have been featured in Pollock’s earlier, 1950 exhibition at Betty Parsons and not in the later show. The difference has been made to matter. Wagner, for example, argues that, despite Frankenthaler’s remembering the 1951 show as her first, her description of being engulfed in a kind of spectacle upon entering the gallery must surely be a reference to the earlier exhibition of Pollock’s large-­scale drip paintings. In this reading, Frankenthaler would have been most strongly affected by the “scale” of Pollock’s all-­over fields.43 Wagner also points to Frankenthaler’s telling Henry Geldzahler in 1965 that she found the exhibition “staggering” and “felt surrounded,” and focuses on the environmental and “oceanic” metaphors Frankenthaler used in describing how she felt seeing the pictures. But it is important to note that Frankenthaler does not simply say that Pollock’s paintings were a “land” she wants to live in, a metaphor that isolates the size and engulfing nature of his paintings. She also characterizes Pollock’s paintings as “a language” that she needs to learn. This metaphor emphasizes the paintings’ symbolic content. Describing Pollock’s paintings or, indeed, painting in general as a language also demonstrates Frankenthaler’s interest in method over effect.44 It expresses an interest in studying Pollock’s paintings for how and why they were made, for their motive, as opposed to simply attending to their spectacular impact on the viewer. And while she states in multiple lectures and interviews that she was taken with the “enveloping” nature of Pollock’s paintings, she most often describes that boundless space as a field in which a painter goes to work: “I was very moved,” Frankenthaler says in a later interview, “by how Pollock literally got into his paintings, and choreographed the surface.”45 Pollock’s paintings were not just a land and the spectacular sites that come

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F ig u re 3 . 4 . Jackson Pollock, Number 14, 1951. Oil on canvas, 57 7/10 × 106 in. Tate, London. © 2020 The Pollock-­Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Tate.

along with it; they comprised a whole culture, one that Frankenthaler was keen to study. She was also quick to point out that those studies were already under way when she saw her first exhibition of Pollock’s paintings. After saying she “didn’t know the language” she encountered in the Parsons exhibition, she adds that she was “learning it.” The fact is that Frankenthaler likely first encountered Pollock’s paintings at neither the 1950 nor the 1951 show. If her own account is to be trusted, she first saw Pollock’s work in the Hamptons, in his studio, both “on the wall” and “on the barn floor.”46 This means that it is entirely possible that Pollock’s 1951 black-­and-­white exhibition was indeed the “first show” she saw.47 This would make sense, given the two traits that Frankenthaler most often names as engaging her in Pollock’s paintings: his method of working horizontally, which allowed him to get “into his paintings,” and his experiments with drawn line. To say that Frankenthaler was interested in Pollock’s drawn line counters the tendency to read her paintings as the “bridge” out of an expressive and gestural mode of abstraction. The need to reinforce this reading may be behind the resistance to accepting Pollock’s more graphic 1951 exhibition as the first that she encountered. Whatever show it was, Frankenthaler makes one thing plain: the painting of Pollock’s that most impressed her from this period was his 1951 black-­and-­white painting Number 14 (fig. 3.4). Of all Pollock’s paintings, this is the one that she brings up most often. As such it offers some important guidance as to what it was in his practice that she took analytic interest in. Stretching horizontally to nearly nine feet, Number 14 is structured like a landscape, replete with intimations of animals and vegetation. This denotative content is emphasized by the poured, black enamel paint, which stands out graphically from a neutral background of unprimed canvas. In contrast to the dense

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webs that characterize the “all-­over” fields of earlier drip paintings, such as Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (fig. 3.3), the poured strokes in Number 14 are individually articulated and purposeful: no longer a means in themselves, these skeins are organized toward depiction. Coming from his later “black pourings,” the last works Pollock completed before his death, Number 14 and other black-­ and-­white paintings from this period followed the successful reception of his large-­scale field painting.48 Numerous scholars describe these later works as a break with the earlier paintings in terms of their return to figuration, as well as their shift away from the aleatory fields of dripping and toward a more conscious engagement with drawing. Confirming this new emphasis, Lee Krasner, in an interview with B. H. Friedman in 1969, described the black paintings as “monumental drawing,” and Pollock himself referred to his process during this period as “drawing on canvas in black.”49 Looking back to his early struggle with drawing as a student, Pollock’s biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith claim that Pollock “always associated black and white with drawing and drawing with self-­doubt”—Pollock’s fear of being exposed as “the artist who couldn’t draw.”50 That doubt appears to be overcome in the black-­and-­white paintings. Beginning with Japanese rice paper and ink, provided by Tony Smith as a prod to get him working again— Pollock had been in a depressive state and drinking heavily since Hans Namuth completed shooting his film of him in late November 1950—Pollock began experimenting with soaking black skeins of paint into the absorbent paper. As he arrived at some measure of confidence, he moved on to raw duck canvas and black enamel paint, preserving the calligraphic ease that he had begun to achieve on paper. After first using dried brushes, as he had in making his all-­over webs, Pollock switched to basting syringes “to enhance his control.”51 In a letter to Alfonso Ossorio describing these new paintings, Pollock wrote: “I’ve had a period of drawing on canvas in black—with some of my earlier images coming thru—think the non-­objectivists will find them disturbing—and the kids who think it simple to splash a Pollock out.”52 While this letter is often quoted to emphasize Pollock’s return to figuration, it is clear that the facility and “control” on display in the black pourings was just as important.53 That facility can be discerned in the paintings’ unedited and rapid production. Making them one after another on an uncut roll of canvas, only later, often in consultation with Krasner, would Pollock cut the drawings into discrete paintings, deciding after the fact on the frame and direction.54 That he was working like this is a strong indication that a figure or image was not what Pollock was primarily after. Rather, he seemed determined to achieve a more straightforward registration of intent, and he accomplished this by focusing not so much on image as on the drawn line. In large-­scale drip paintings like Lavender Mist, line is sublimated to field, placing an emphasis, as Greenberg argued, on optical effect.55 In contrast to that optical, spectatorial effect, the black-­and-­white paintings make line central, effectively shifting the orientation from viewer to maker. In this way, after

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the huge success of his drip paintings—a success he experienced as a burden56—Pollock turned emphatically to drawn gesture, to the mark that, as his one-­time mentor, John D. Graham, put it, “like the voice, reflects different emotions from touching different materials.”57 Graham was a central influence on New York School artists and is often pointed to as the primary source for Pollock’s turn to indigenous sources as a means of expressing psychological content.58 This is certainly the case, but Graham, who aggressively promoted form and technique over represented content, also insisted that the “unconscious” should make its way into painting not primarily through symbols but in and as line. Line was among the most important formal tools in a painter’s arsenal, according to Graham. It was both the beginning of all pictorial practice (“It is impossible to paint unless one draws well . . .”)59 and the surest connection between the work of art and its author. For Graham, both color and representation must be subordinated to line: “The gesture of the artist is his line, it falls and rises and vibrates differently whenever it speaks of different matter.”60 The idea of a line “speaking” of another “matter” implies its use in the service of something. That service, Graham indicates, is provided as much to expression as to representation. Graham’s celebration of line for both its gestural qualities and its ability to point to something beyond itself resonates with what Frankenthaler isolates as significant in Pollock’s Number 14. On the one hand, it taught her something about “gesture,” a term that carried a very specific meaning for her. On the other hand, it helped her to move into abstraction without giving up implied content. In both cases, Pollock’s paintings opened onto a pictorial method that did not exclude drawing. Rather, paintings like Number 14 showed Frankenthaler a way into pure abstraction through an expanded understanding of drawing. In the paintings she made leading up to and following Mountains and Sea, this more expansive, certainly more ambiguous use of drawing methods allowed Frankenthaler to locate a position for herself within the Modernist field. A drawing used as an announcement for her 1956 exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery demonstrates Frankenthaler’s self-­conscious approach to the drawn line as a mechanism for getting at painting’s “workings” (fig. 3.5).61 A direct reference to Pollock’s black pourings, the exhibition announcement features three methods for generating significance via the drawn line: contour, gesture, and frame. While the lines in this particular drawing do not define a literal figure, they still act within the range of what Greenberg called “incisive drawing” and Fried described as “contour” and “edge.”62 Situated discretely, the graphic lines incise figure into ground, delineating an illusionistic space, however shallow it may appear. In addition to inscribing contour, the lines erupt into gestural passages, beginning or ending with an energetic splatter of paint. These isolated moments of pictorial brio read as too purposeful to be qualified as strictly spontaneous and so frame gesture as a rhetorical device. Finally, four seemingly unrelated lines make an impromptu union, framing the central forms into a composition. Frankenthaler demonstrates through framing that drawing

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F ig u re 3 . 5 . Helen Frankenthaler, gallery announcement for her 1956 exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

is not merely laying down line; it is also line in relation. These three drawing techniques—contour, gesture, and frame—can be thought of as the “strategic spot[s],” in Burke’s terms, that Frankenthaler identified as sites for generating meaning at this particular moment in the history of painting.63 Frankenthaler’s strategic, which is to say, considered approach to such devices has a double function. On the one hand, it charts the techniques that conventionally signify authorial presence, which, as I have said, was among the dominant focal points in the interpretation of Abstract Expressionism by the time Frankenthaler entered the field of Modernist painting. On the other hand, Frankenthaler’s analytic approach provided her with the distance needed to strategically enter that field, laying bare the mechanisms by which authorial presence transforms into symbolic content. Going through each of these drawing methods in turn shows that Frankenthaler’s commitment to ambiguity kept the symbolic function of such devices in view. I begin with contour. Frankenthaler tells Rose that she responded to something in Pollock’s Number 14 that she identified as “a strong element in Jackson’s” paintings, but “not the element that Clem and many other people have seized on.” That “element” was the intimation of a pictorial scene: “I saw very clearly the drawing of something like an animal or a fox, in a wood,” Frankenthaler states.64 While Number 14 is “totally abstract,” it still struck Frankenthaler as “more drawn” and imbued with an “additional quality” that she identified as a kind of associative content.65 According to Frankenthaler, associative, figurative content is discoverable in Pollock’s painting because line reads as “more than just the drawing, webbing, weaving, dripping of a stick . . . in enamel, more than just the rhythm.”

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It also reads as contour. The triangular shape just to the left of the center and the longer line that arcs off to its right, inscribe a figure: the head and body of an animal, in Frankenthaler’s reading. Frankenthaler explores—or “charts” in Burke’s terms—the conventional ability of contouring line to intimate representational content in paintings like Eden (1956; pl. 7). Two drawn “100s” anchor the painting’s composition, their doubling offering a mirrored symmetry that emphasizes an Edenic perfection and announces the conventions of signification to be a central theme in the painting. The poured, gestural marks that make up the painting bend toward the associative in their tendency to read as inscribed edge or contouring line. Resembling the Tibor de Nagy drawing in their easy flow and seemingly automatic placing, the marks maintain their integrity as line, and suggest figurative content, both iconic and symbolic. The three loamy, green lines framing the central motif, as well the teardrop shape that encircles the “100s” at the painting’s center, make their contouring function clear. While maintaining their poured, spontaneous mood, these lines divide the canvas into narrative moments and lend form to figure. A linear, pastoral scene grows up around the central numbers; soft greens shoot up from a horizontal plane, and a chartreuse burst to the left scatters yellowed passages at their feet. The same can be said about the linear passages that dominate the painting. Whether poured, brushed, or more carefully inscribed, line in this painting describes figure. Despite this contouring ability, line maintains an ambiguity in Eden. That ambiguity is summarized by three vertical, green strokes at the lower left. Delicately circled, as though to mark them out as a kind of key to the rest of the picture, the incised lines shuttle between pure abstraction (quick, gestural marks with no referent), iconic representation (stems or grass rising out of the green landscape), and symbolic signification (the numerical theme encourages a reading of the lines as tally marks, perhaps counting out the picture’s three vertical divisions). Reinforcing the semiotic flexibility of these figurative elements is a cartoonish hand rising out of a thicket of gestural marks: “the hand of God,” Frankenthaler once called it, but also, she’s quick to add, a “stop sign,” a note to herself to stop painting, to not overwork the picture, to keep its meaning mobile.66 That mobility prohibits any easy reading of this highly referential painting. While the Edenic scene certainly evokes a reflection on gender, just as Frankenthaler’s bright colors and pastoral theme put one in mind of a so-­called feminine sensibility, the presence of the symbolic, which the numbers make central, signals such readings to be the products of convention. It is in a similarly analytic mood that gesture is treated in Eden. Entering the painting as trailing pours and quick splatters of paint, gestural marks are never left to stand on their own. Frankenthaler’s drawn contours act as belated interventions, relating gestural marks to associative content and framing them as symbolic, as opposed to merely indexical, signs. Frankenthaler herself defined gesture as a kind of signature: “When I say gesture, my gesture, I mean what my mark is.” The individual or personal character of gesture results

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from “a strain or a sensibility or a wrist or an eye,” Frankenthaler asserts.67 As the mention of sensibility indicates, Frankenthaler considered the self-­referential quality of the gesture to be not merely mechanical; she associated it as much with personal “style.”68 Calling gesture a style indicates that Frankenthaler regarded even gesture’s physical link to the body from a rhetorical point of view. This is borne out when we observe that Frankenthaler always returned to the gesture after the fact, framing it through drawn line in a manner that emphasizes its rhetorical function. In this sense, gesture, as Frankenthaler uses it, is best thought of through Burke’s distinction between “symbolic” and “practical” acts.69 Art historians have long described the gesture as a practical act, an “index” of bodies acting in real time and space.70 The self-­conscious inclusion of gestural passages in paintings like Eden lays bare its proximity to symbolic mediation. This is the case even in Frankenthaler’s early, more robustly expressive paintings, such as the ones that were featured in the 1956 Tibor de Nagy exhibition. The Tibor de Nagy exhibition featured works that traded the soft pours of Mountains and Sea for dense fields of saturated color and expressive, often thickly applied brushwork—a brief dalliance with gestural abstraction that she quickly abandoned. Where these paintings most deviate from the ones Frankenthaler made before and after is in her working with wet-­on-­wet paint, applying thick areas of a loose, viscous pigment and working back into it with various tools, as can be seen in the 1955 Blue Territory (fig. 3.6). The vortex-­like opening at the bottom center of the painting appears to have been made by applying white or a lighter blue to the darker areas, swirling the dense paint around with a brush, before applying and working back into the white swell of paint with a smaller tool, perhaps a hardened brush or brush handle. John Elderfield objected to this overworked, wet-­on-­wet process, regarding the paintings from this period as overly self-­conscious in their attempt to arrive at the look of “spontaneity.”71 But it is possible to take that self-­consciousness as itself proof of Frankenthaler’s interest in the gesture, less as a testament to an authentic and unmediated authorial presence, and more as a symbol of such presence: a form of signification that only functions in and as convention. The vertical, treelike reach of Blue Territory, which is emphasized as figure against a darker blue ground, as well as the inscription of a heart in the upper quarter of the painting point toward iconic and symbolic signification, and indicate Frankenthaler’s interest in gesture as a means of staging, as opposed to merely marking authorial presence. The symbolic function of the gesture is doubled when we consider that instead of uniformly offering an index of authorial presence, as it does in de Kooning’s later paintings (see fig. 2.2, above), Frankenthaler’s gesture often acts as an index of her absence. Demarcating a field into which she quite literally cannot reach, Frankenthaler’s paintings offer records of the physical and disciplinary limits of authorial presence. Frankenthaler’s stain paintings were always made with the raw duck canvas lying horizontally on the floor, usually with no pre-

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F ig u re 3 . 6 . Helen Frankenthaler, Blue Territory, 1955. Oil and enamel on canvas, 1143/16 × 593/16 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

determined directionality. In order to get at the painting, the artist, kneeling at the edge of the material, has to physically reach with her body toward its center (fig. 3.7). Moving around the painting’s perimeter, she would work quickly and deliberately, pushing pooled paint away from her crouching, kneeling, and sitting body, building toward a fullness of image. In paintings such as Blue Form in a Scene (1961; fig. 3.8) and Swan Lake #2 (1961), the peripheral entrance into the canvas is registered in the way that figures and forms are worked from the outside in. At times this results in a reversal of positive and negative space, where

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F ig u re 3 . 7 . Helen Frankenthaler in her studio at East Eighty-­third Street and Third Avenue, New York, 1969. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. Photo: Ernst Haas.

F ig u re 3 . 8 . Helen Frankenthaler, Blue Form in a Scene, 1961. Oil on canvas, 94 7/ 8  × 929/16 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the depicted content of the image is discernible as empty canvas, sometimes filled in, as in Blue Form in a Scene, and sometimes left as untreated canvas, as in the gaggle of swans that occupy the center of Swan Lake #2. In paintings where the interior canvas is saturated, there is still an intimation of physical limits, as the paint is poured and pushed into pools as Frankenthaler expands the pigment’s reach without compromising its saturation. In this sense, Frankenthaler’s gesture operates not only in the vertical space of figurative inscription, but also in the lateral or horizontal space that the making body traverses. Krauss, following Leo Steinberg, reminds us that horizontal space is not just a physical plain. It is also a cultural space.72 The horizontal is both the literal space that stretches out in front of Frankenthaler and the cultural field within which she makes herself visible as a Modernist painter. In refusing the secreted interior that Krauss discovered in paintings such as de Kooning’s Door to the River (pl. 3), Frankenthaler’s paintings point to the limitations that an ostensibly universal concept of human depth assumes. As Deborah Nelson argues, the creative production of female artists, especially ones interested in pursuing the first-­person form of the lyric, necessarily figures disclosure and self-­reflection not as “the unique moment of transparency for presumptively private self,” but rather as “one episode in an ongoing process of managing the exposure that is a prior condition of female privacy.”73 Frankenthaler’s analytic approach to the somatic plenitude of her gestural mark demonstrates that, whereas her male counterparts worked from a position of an assumed, a priori privacy, she worked from one of exposure. Instead of a rich and plentiful interior, one finds either an absent or isolated figure in Frankenthaler’s paintings; that absence is not, however, the mysterious void that intimates a deeper interior. Frankenthaler’s paintings do not offer illusions of depth, but materialize the limits of reach. This brings me to the final drawing trait that Frankenthaler explored: frame. Her experience of seeing Pollock’s paintings “unrolled on the barn floor” is something of a refrain in Frankenthaler’s many public recollections of her development as a young painter.74 She implies that she was far more moved by this horizontal orientation than she was by Pollock’s method of dripping or soaking skeins of paint onto unprimed canvas. To Gene Baro she writes, “Jackson’s ‘spread’ appealed to me enormously . . . the dance-­like use of arms and legs in painting, being in the center, relating to the floor.”75 In other words, it was not only the new methods of paint application that the horizontal opened up for her: “I didn’t go for the stick (in lieu of the brush),” she says to Baro. Rather, “it was being stretcher-­less as much as being flat.” The result was that “the limitations and the order came from you yourself and your aesthetic, rather than ‘this is a piece of carpentry I am putting on an easel.’”76 It is easy to read such a statement as an appeal to her own authority as the author of these pictures. But the tendency to register her own reach encourages an emphasis on the word “limitations” in that quote: the edges of Frankenthaler’s signifying capabilities as an author in and of the Modernist field are literally marked out.

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Unrolled canvas on the studio floor means no predetermined edges. It was that unfurled, horizontal reach that allowed Pollock to develop the “‘decentralized,’ ‘polyphonic,’ all-­over picture” that Greenberg argued “infects the whole notion of [the easel picture] with ambiguity.”77 Whereas other artists following in Pollock’s wake, such as Larry Poons, made use of the unframed arena as a shortcut to making all-­over fields, Frankenthaler always sought out limits. She consistently introduced frames into her pictures, as if to enunciate the “limitations” that she alone could ensure—limitations that come from her “wrist” and her “methods” as much as from her status as a young female painter working in the aftermath of the New York School’s market successes. With the stretchers removed, frame returns as drawn edge. Multiple paintings feature the kind of framing device that I described in the Tibor de Nagy drawing: poured or brushed lines that come together to delineate a scene or composition. It is there in the three-­sided box formed out of poured, loamy green lines in Eden (pl. 7); as a literal square, focusing the composition in Blue Form in a Scene (fig. 3.8); and as a carefully inscribed circle in Seven Types of Ambiguity (pl. 6). Sometimes this frame reaches to the physical edges of a painting, as in larger pours like Interior Landscape (1964) and Small’s Paradise (1967). At other times, especially in the earlier canvases, it is a drawn enclosure that, through the act of framing, gathers shapes and marks into significant relationships. This is the function of the drawn frame in Blue Form in a Scene and the circle in Seven Types of Ambiguity. They take loosely arrived-­at, semigestural forms, and point out associative qualities, which Frankenthaler herself sees in standing back to observe her automatic and expressive marks. Framing, then, is a means of establishing relations in the canvas as well as Frankenthaler’s relation to the canvas. Through it she formalizes her relation to both the particular canvas in front of her and the more general canvas that the institutionalization of Abstract Expressionism bestowed with readymade meanings. In a 1997 interview with Julia Brown, Frankenthaler emphasized this conventional or symbolic, as opposed to practical, approach to painting when she stated that “it was not my own inner drive that inspired my work but the dialogue and healthy competition with other artists.”78 Such statements indicate Frankenthaler’s own self-­conscious approach to pictorial devices as already replete with meaning, coming to her imbued with traces of their previous use. Techniques like contour, gesture, and frame maintain an ambiguity in Frankenthaler’s paintings in their doubling as “spontaneous,” practical acts that physically connect the artist as author to the picture’s material surface, and as premeditated, learned devices, shared among a number of painters and marking them as members of a school. Through both her use and study of such rhetorical devices, she “identifies” with the community that endowed them with meaning and demonstrates her “belonging” in that particular field of meaningful practice.79 Each of the devices just outlined marks her belated entry into that field. By shuttling between automatic, material experimentation and considered reentry in the form of carefully laid line, Frankenthaler might be said to expose

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the workings of painting’s path from the practical to the symbolic, to chart the means by which picture-­making takes on “expressive power.”80 Not, this is to say, through the sincerity of the painter’s laboring body and emotional outpouring, but through the mediating space of convention. Given both the celebration and critique of expressionism on the basis of its author’s physical proximity, it is important to note that it is via the literal action of Frankenthaler’s physical movement in and out of the canvas that the conventional enters. In the practical activity of stepping away from the canvas to observe her pictorial mark-­making, the symbolic takes root. The green-­gray heart that is enclosed by a near-­perfect circle at the center of the Seven Types of Ambiguity is, for me, a particularly sharp demonstration of Frankenthaler’s analytic charting of the emergence of symbolic pictorial content in and through process. Given Frankenthaler’s approach to the horizontally oriented canvas from all sides, the “heart” most likely began as an automatic pour, which—along with the two orbs at the bottom, the trailing form up the left side, and the less pronounced, gestural marks in the same color scattered throughout the whole—would have been her first entry into the painting. Which is to say, this particular form began not as a “heart,” but as a purely abstract, plastic interface with the canvas. These early moments in the painting’s making would have been automatic and material: a quick laying-­down of paint in order to have something to work with and against. Frankenthaler’s next move was to reenter the canvas with a similarly practical attitude, applying areas of ochre. The more deeply saturated color adds structure to the spontaneous pours with which the painting began: the strong, vertical form that shoots up between the gray-­green ovoids begins to intimate a vertical orientation for the painting and picks out some of the green-­hued pours, giving them shape. But it’s not until the drawn and contouring red passages at the edges of the painting are added that Frankenthaler seems to have exited a spontaneous process of marking and entered into a more improvisatory mode—that is, a mode that is responsive to already established limits as opposed to making automatic additions.81 The red calligraphic lines to the left isolate the vertical, gray-­green pour as a form in its own right, while the brushed, expressive markings on the right side depart from that greenish underpainting and transform it into a pictographic shape: a drawing of a dove-­like figure, which begins to orient the canvas horizontally. In this orientation—with the dove upright and at the bottom of the composition—the picture is divided almost perfectly in half, between left and right. Because of the heavier pours on what would be the left side, the whole feels quite out of balance in this configuration. It may have been in recognizing this imbalance that Frankenthaler inscribed the near-­perfect circle which, if we consider the picture oriented horizontally, circumscribes a center, while correcting the leftward tilt by pulling the whole composition to the right. Most likely standing in the canvas, with her feet situated between the gray-­green orb and the soon-­

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to-­be heart, Frankenthaler inscribed a circle using her own body as a kind of compass.82 While it is unclear when the central heart form appeared to Frankenthaler, transforming from an automatic gesture into the symbolic sign, it likely occurred at a moment of re-­orientation or framing, which the inscribed circle possibly provided. In literally stepping out of the canvas and walking around it, the vertical orientation would have revealed itself to her and, along with that orientation, itself an act of framing, that central shape would have transformed in her eyes from a “practical” mark to a “symbolic” form—from a stain to a heart. If my speculative reading of the painting’s making is at all correct, it provides a productive metaphor for Frankenthaler’s own rhetorical relation to Abstract Expressionism, a relation that involves locating herself as a participant in that field. In physically entering the painting, standing in its colored fields and delineating her authorial interventions there, she reveals the conventional underpinnings of her own spontaneous mark-­making. Through her analytic relation to authorial presence, her approach to the techniques of contour, gesture and frame, Frankenthaler displays an “attitude” toward a situation that includes both the field of Modernist painting and the particularity of her own personal position therein.83 Frankenthaler confirmed her understanding of the imbrication of lived situation and working methods when, in discussing her relation to Modernist precedent, she told Julia Brown that “being the person I was and am, exposed to the things I have been exposed to, I could only make my painting with the methods—and with the wrist—I have.”84 Central to Frankenthaler’s “person” and the situation she was “exposed to”—the “perplexities and risks,” as Burke called them85—was, of course, her gender, which is among the primary lenses through which most critics, both past and present, have viewed her work. As a woman, Frankenthaler has had her paintings circumscribed within an assigned “representational space,” to borrow a concept from Darby English, which restricts readings of her work to either traces of her gender or her overdetermined difference.86 As I said above, Caroline Jones has argued that Frankenthaler consciously worked to purge her paintings of somatic references in order to better align herself with Modernist painting’s doctrinaire passage into a postexpressionist opticality. Art historians Marcia Brennan and Lisa Saltzman similarly argue that in order to move into late-­Modernist painting’s purified fields, which aimed at a formal “opticality” purged of all bodily references, post-­ Pollock painters like Louis, Noland, and Olitski appropriated Frankenthaler’s staining technique, while eliminating and reining in its metaphorical plenitude. The stain was taken on as a purely technical development and cleansed of the feminine, naturalistic, and abject connotations that it gained through association with its female inventor. This was achieved by rejecting Frankenthaler’s pictographic innovations, as well containing the lyricism of her pours within the hard-­edge and systematic structure of serial design.87 Each of these accounts, which portray Frankenthaler as the necessary alterity—the “female adjacency,” in Brennan’s words—that had to be incorporated and contained in order to secure the purified, optical fields of late-­Modernist abstraction, over-

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look Frankenthaler’s own knowing and rhetorical address to the gendered scene of post-­Pollock abstraction.88 Her self-­conscious positioning within that scene can only be discerned once we move beyond a description of figurative references in her paintings and instead consider Frankenthaler’s own analytic study of Modernist signification. Frankenthaler’s early paintings demonstrate the tradition of Modernist signification to be the ground against which such gendered readings are made possible in the first place. That she regarded the history of painting as a field within which gender marks difference is made clear in Frankenthaler’s many reprises of the European “masters,” where woman as symbol and woman as author enter a studied and deeply ambiguous relation.89 Frankenthaler’s 1957 rendition of the multiple paintings that depict the abduction of Europa by Zeus, for example, takes as its theme woman both as object of male desire and as origin (pl. 8). The painting, simply titled Europa, also demonstrates the means by which the stain’s symbolic plenitude can be manipulated toward rhetorical ends. Out of a field of deeply saturated stains, a synthetic pink form wends through the composition, from the lower left toward the upper right. This large, serpentine stain, capped with a pictographic crying visage, is Europa. This is confirmed by the haunch of a bull (the guise Zeus takes), which peeks out from under the figure’s bust in the lower right quadrant of the painting. The forms representing Europa and Zeus shuttle between abstract technical effect and iconographic depiction, relying on context to move from the practical to the symbolic. This is to say that the depiction of Europa does not remain fixed within that most pernicious of female metaphors: as stain(ed), material-­ bound, and in flux. Instead, the stain/body dyad shuttles between the practical (physical) and the symbolic (conventional), making clear Frankenthaler’s highly self-­conscious status as a player in the Modernist field. In order to see it as such, however, Frankenthaler’s own casting in the role of a Modernist insider has to be acknowledged. Frankenthaler occupied a uniquely interior position within the Modernist field. Not only did she come of age as an artist in the 1950s, when the terms of American Modernist painting had been institutionally ratified. She also entered into that disciplinary space while intimately involved in a relationship with Greenberg, by that time the most influential voice speaking for American Modernism. Greenberg began dating Frankenthaler in 1950, when she was twenty-­one years old and recently graduated from college. By her own account, it was after meeting the critic, then in his forties, that she was introduced to the most cutting-­edge paintings being made in New York. And, as she recounts, it was through Greenberg’s theoretical framing that she began to more fully “see and digest” that work.90 Describing what it was like to attend museum and gallery shows with Greenberg, Frankenthaler stated, “I first saw it through him,” demonstrating her attunement to Modernist practice in and through the critic. Frankenthaler’s intimate relation to Greenberg as a disciplinary figure adds a dimension to her authorial entry into the Modernist field. As her statements about seeing through him demonstrate, she was exceedingly, perhaps even anxiously,

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aware of the need to distinguish her individual judgments and artistic development from Greenberg’s Modernist doctrine. For Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” which Frankenthaler’s technique of staining ostensibly ushered in, was the apotheosis of Modernist painting’s ever more refined realization of pictorial specificity in its wedding paint to the surface of the canvas. As Greenberg described the paintings that Louis made following Frankenthaler: “the threadedness and wovenness are in the color.”91 Here color, that most illusive and affective of pictorial effects, is harnessed to the material fact of the picture plain. Because of the “level[ing] down” of color to “raw cotton surface” via the staining technique, illusion is rendered “strictly pictorial, strictly optical,” and, most significantly, “disembodied.”92 This newly material, disembodied mode of Modernist abstraction was what Greenberg and Fried understood Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea to have offered up to Noland and Louis in April 1953: a mode of painting more assuredly cleansed of the authorial body. Such a cleansing was necessary because, as Greenberg made clear, the whole of Modernist painting had become “afflicted” with baroque and degenerative “hand-­writing and gestures” directed at authorial as opposed to disciplinary revelation.93 But Frankenthaler’s own paintings demonstrate just how problematic it was to assign this role to the staining technique. As Scene with Nude (fig. 3.2) makes emphatically clear, the body reenters stain painting as metaphor and association. Frankenthaler’s answer to this associative tendency was not to purge her paintings of reference, but to lay it bare. The allusive link between the female body and the stain that is elucidated in Scene with Nude is more complexly rendered in Europa, where the (female) body and the surface of the canvas become one. The “flatness” of the canvas that staining realized in this most material form finds new dimensionality in Europa in the symbolic plenitude of the depicted female body, demonstrating the stain’s inability to maintain its status as mere material marker. Europa both points to the means by which woman and stain become symbolically harnessed to each other and offers a rhetorical intervention into that union. Caught between the fleeing bull and a multiply depicted sun, the female body reaches past the flattened pictorial plane toward the painting’s edge. The sun, a heliotropic force that threatens to draw the picture into an illusory depth, might be read as a sign of Modernism’s disciplinary pull, circumscribing and lending meaning to Frankenthaler’s practice. Given Frankenthaler’s uniquely interior position in the Modernist field, it is hard, as heavy-­handed as it feels, not to read Europa, caught between absconding bull and tropic sun, as a depiction of Frankenthaler herself, as she was physically turned toward the irradiating power of the Modernist discipline. The sun appears at least four times in Frankenthaler’s painting. In its first three iterations it is a half circle with sun-­spokes made out of a poured, gray line. The first hugs Europa’s hip, before reappearing in the middle of the composition and then directly above: each nested in a vertical climb as though receding toward a horizon. Its final iteration disrupts this illusive recession, entering as a

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darker, brushed circle at the top of the canvas, drawing mossy-­hued pours, most likely made earlier in the process, into a radiating corona. This final, crowning sun sits both at the top and on top of the canvas, vying for its surface, along with three brushed horizontal strokes at the center and a quick, gestural blue trail, lashed up the right side. Being surface-­bound in this way, this last sun pushes all the others further back into an illusionary distance: perhaps a depiction of Modernism as that perpetually receding, but always recursively inscribed arc of meaning-­making that Fried’s historicist criticism would soon promote. Europa’s body/stain dyad is gripped between this ever vanishing, always returning sun and the material surface of the picture plane, which is aggressively and confidently marked by those three horizontal slashes, seeming to cancel out the figure even as they lock her in place. But Europa faces away and speaks out even as she is carried into. If that quickly poured indigo splatter down the right side of the canvas is read as the last and most surface-­bound mark in the painting, the circle to its right, which reads as an iconographic depiction of Europa’s gaping mouth, might be thought of as having the last say. It injects the verbal, the symbolic, which enters as drawn line, into this material field, reaching out past the heliotropic pull of Modernism’s ever more doctrinaire circumscriptions. I propose that this is what Frankenthaler’s male counterparts discovered that day in April when they were brought to Frankenthaler’s studio by Greenberg: the means by which authorial presence can be managed in relation to both a growing audience and an increasingly codified Modernist disciplinarity. After seeing her thinly washed, unprimed canvas, Noland and Louis, as the story goes, returned to their studios in Washington, DC, and began making the paintings that ushered in a new era of late-­Modernist painting. In Part II, I describe how this authorial mediation was differently played out in the paintings of Noland and Gilliam, attending to the ambiguities that each cultivates.

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Pl ate 1 . Jack Tworkov, Barrier Series, No. 4, 1961. Oil on canvas, 94 × 151 in. (diptych: 94 × 751/ 2 in. each). Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–­Madison, Gift of the artist and Dr. C. V. Kierzkowki Fund purchase, 67.12.1. © 2020 Estate of Jack Twor­kov / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pl ate 2 . Willem de Kooning, Asheville, 1948. Oil and enamel on cardboard, 25-­9/16 × 31-­7/8 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. © 2020 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Any reproduction of this digitized image shall not be made without the written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Pl ate 3 . Willem de Kooning, Door to the River, 1960. Oil on linen, 80 1/ 8 × 70 1/ 8 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © 2020 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pl ate 4 . It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 2 (Autumn 1958).

Pl ate 5. Jack Tworkov, Plain, 1966. Oil on canvas, 80 × 62 in. Cleveland Museum of Art. © 2020 Estate of Jack Tworkov / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pl ate 6 . Helen Frankenthaler, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1957. Oil on unsized, unprimed canvas, 95 1/ 2 × 70 1/ 8 in. Collection Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, 2015.11. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.

Pl at e 7 . Helen Frankenthaler, Eden, 1956. Oil on unsized, unprimed canvas, 103  × 117 in. Collection Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Robert McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.

Pl at e 8 . Helen Frankenthaler, Europa, 1957. Oil on unsized, unprimed canvas, 70 × 541/ 2 in. Collection Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, New York. © 2020 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Robert McKeever, courtesy Gagosian.

Pl at e 9 . Kenneth Noland, Turnsole, 1961. Synthetic polymer paint on unprimed canvas, 94 1/ 8 in.  × 941/ 8 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2020 Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pl ate 1 0 . Sam Gilliam, Light Fan, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 36 1/4 × 36 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

Pl ate 11. Sam Gilliam, Green Slice, 1967. Watercolor on Japanese paper, 38 × 23 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of John Hale Stutesman. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Ben Blackwell.

Pl ate 1 2 . Sam Gilliam, Rose Rising, 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 97 × 132 × 3 7/ 8 in. Collection of Ariel Emmanuel, Los Angeles. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Lee Thompson.

Pl ate 1 3 . Sam Gilliam, Red April, 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 110 × 160 in. Gift of the Longview Foundation and Museum purchase. Stanley Museum of Art, The University of Iowa, Iowa City. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pl at e 1 4 . Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963. Oil and graphite on linen, 717/ 8 × 72 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky. © 2020 Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pl at e 15. Agnes Martin, The Islands, 1961. Acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72 × 72 in. © 2020 Estate of Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

4. Self-­Discipline

Within the discourse of Modernist art, discipline has been cast in the form of both a subjectless arc of history, which Greenberg maps out in texts such as “American-­Type Painting” (1955) and “Modernist Painting” (1960), and a device by which certain kinds of objects and makers get enfolded into the field itself.1 In both cases—formalist historicism and the narrowing-­down of the representative instances of Modernist painting—the artist as author is understood to be extruded via the machinations of disciplinarity as such. Nowhere are those operations thought to be more visible than in the refinement of the Modernist idiom under the auspices of High Modernist painting as it emerged in the wake of Abstract Expressionism the early sixties. It is largely due to the tenor of Greenberg’s and Fried’s criticism during the 1960s, which grew increasingly dogmatic in its insistence on the newly purified fields of abstract painting, that the disciplinary action of High Modernist painting has taken on a distinctly negative cast in the art-­historical literature of the last several decades. The Modernist focus on “opticality” and the multiple statements made by Greenberg and Fried concerning the proper role for the body to play in art-­making and art-­viewing have been read as analogues to private and state investments in the body’s oversight and management.2 Caroline A. Jones aligns High Modernist disciplinarity, for example, with Michel Foucault’s description of discipline in the modern period as “a policy of coercions that acts upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviors.”3 Discipline—in the form of institutional histories, social systems, and discourse—can be thought to mediate authorship as such, even as discipline is the thing that the “individualization”4 of the author is said to mask. Discipline produces the author, quite literally, as both Foucault and Molly Nesbit point out, in discursive structures such as the law, which seek out an author by which ownership can be assigned and protected.5 Foucault argues in “What Is an Author?” that such disciplinary formations produce both the figure of the author and our faith in it. In putting forward a theoretical method for analyzing the “author function,” Foucault contends that we must look past the author and “its role as originator” in order to analyze its status as a disciplinary product, “a variable

and complex function of discourse.”6 Discipline in this critical context is characterized as the anonymous system that supersedes the author, even as it produces and preserves what Foucault identified as its “function.” In analyzing the disciplinary operations of Modernist practice, it is necessary to account for the difference between a discipline and a doctrine. The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes between these two terms: “Etymologically, discipline, as pertaining to the disciple or scholar, is antithetical to doctrine, the property of the doctor or teacher; hence, in the history of the words, doctrine is more concerned with abstract theory, and discipline with practice or exercise.”7 As James Chandler states, it is common to “distinguish the beliefs to which members of a religion collectively subscribe (doctrine) from the regular practices that they collectively follow.”8 The legal scholar Robert Post confirms the distinction between belief and practice, stating that “when we speak of a discipline . . . we speak not merely of a body of knowledge but also of a set of practices by which knowledge is acquired, confirmed, implemented, preserved and reproduced.”9 In this chapter I offer a picture of what it would look like to attend to the work that intercedes between these two terms. I do so by describing the specific manner by which Modernist doctrine gets anchored in Kenneth Noland’s High Modernist paintings. My aim is not to investigate the mechanics that extrude the author nor the discursive structures that produce the author—the primary objectives of the “paranoid” readings that have dominated Modernist studies since at least the mid-­1970s.10 Instead I offer a new entry into the High Modernist paintings of the 1960s, which are often described as revising pictorial authorship on two, sometimes overlapping fronts. The first, represented in studies such as Jones’s Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, views the author as mediated if not repressed within the Modernist dispositif. Within the doctrine of medium specificity, for example, the author is vanished, ostensibly replaced by the autonomous and historically determined nature of the medium of paint itself. The second front understands the High Modernist paintings of artists like Noland, following Frankenthaler, to have rejected signifiers of authorial presence in their embrace of techniques such as staining, which ostensibly cleared the way for the ultimate “death of the author” under the auspices of minimalist sculpture. From this latter point of view, the individuality of the personally motivated action is understood to have been thrown over in favor of an expansion of the objectifying processes of form. Such a characterization of the art of the late 1950s and 1960s unites the formalist rhetoric of Modernists like Fried with proponents of the neo-­avant-­garde, such as Foster. Somewhere between these two pictures of post-­Pollock painting as either ossified doctrine or trenchant critique, we have lost sight of the very figure contemporary theory is often aimed at recouping: the subject him- or herself and the specificity by which their actions were mediated, mitigated, and meditated upon. Through a close reading of Noland’s early paintings, this chapter returns us to that figure, recounting his indoctrination into the Modernist disci-

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pline before introducing his carefully composed and affectively anchored paintings as mediations of his relation to that disciplinary structure. Like Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland was an apprentice to the Modernist discipline from the earliest moments of his career. He began that apprenticeship at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina, in 1946, where he studied with the geometric abstractionist Ilya Bolotowsky. When Noland enrolled, Black Mountain College was headed by Josef Albers, who combined a Bauhausian approach to practice with a Deweyan grounding of aesthetics as lived experience. For the school’s founder, John Andrew Rice, an arts education was the cornerstone of a properly ethical life in that it revealed the consequences of action through disciplined practice: “This is why we at Black Mountain begin with art. The artist thinks about what he himself is going to do, does it himself, and then reflects upon the thing that he himself has done.”11 As such, art-­making at Black Mountain was approached as a holistic experience, as much a part of the community that occupied its site as of the practices that unfolded there.12 Key to this integrated arts education was students’ exposure to the history of abstraction, to which the faculty at Black Mountain were uniquely dedicated. This was especially true of Bolotowsky, Noland’s primary teacher at Black Mountain. As an early member of the American Abstract Artists group, Bolotowsky was committed to a wholly abstract art, even during the early moments of American Modernism, when abstraction was shunned in favor of either an organic Surrealism or a vernacular realism. As Noland himself reported, Bolotowsky and the other members of the American Abstract Artists group did “a great service for later generations” in their promotion of abstract principles. Under Bolotowsky, Noland began his arts education immersed in abstraction “right from the first.”13 This distinguishes Noland from the generation of Modernist painters that immediately preceded him, who, from Arshile Gorky and Hans Hofmann to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, generally began their careers experimenting with representation before moving on to abstraction later in their careers. But this does not mean that Noland and his fellow students were granted complete freedom from the start. Bolotowsky taught his students through the emulation of historical styles, as opposed to introducing them to a variety of pictorial techniques. Noland describes Bolotowsky’s lessons this way: “Bolotowsky just took us back, as it were, as far as Impressionism when we were beginners and through Cubism into a kind of neo-­plastic abstract art, and Surrealism.”14 Noland’s early indoctrination into the discipline of Modernism through a history of abstraction demonstrates that his practice was, from the beginning, oriented toward the Modernist discipline as historical form. For Noland, the way one “learn[s] how to paint” is through the practical emulation of the art of the past and present. It is not enough to simply know what was done in the past; one had to engage the various techniques and materials of painting in “a kind of ‘hand’ way,” as Noland put it.15 As he developed

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his practice, Noland continued to look to the public record of style for guidance, instead of searching out personal sources. This is true of the years immediately following Black Mountain, which he spent in Paris and in Washington, DC. But when Noland met Morris Louis and Clement Greenberg, his relationship to the Modernist discipline became as deeply personal as it was historical. Noland met Greenberg when he returned to Black Mountain College for the 1950 summer session. During that summer he took classes with first-­generation Abstract Expressionist Theodoros Stamos and attended Greenberg’s lecture course titled “Art History and Criticism.”16 According to Cora Ward, Greenberg’s course was a survey of the history of Modernist art, locating the general impulse of Modernist discipline, as he does in his 1960 essay “Modernist Painting,” in a Kantian notion of immanent critique.17 He was also concerned to depict the historical arc of Modernist art as beginning in Paris and culminating in New York City. In Greenberg’s class Noland was, for the first time, exposed to a comprehensive survey of what was going on in New York since the war—a history of recent art that he had been insulated from in his gravitation, prior to 1950, to older, European forms of Modernist painting. Greenberg was able to assuage the doubt Noland had previously felt about New York painting by relating it to the European art Noland most admired, while also providing a justification for New York’s superiority.18 It was that summer at Black Mountain that Greenberg began visiting Noland’s studio. According to Ward, Noland was extremely open to Greenberg’s suggestions regarding his practice: “He just seemed to listen and want to try that, try that. . . . He had nothing to protect. He was going after every, every sensation.”19 At the time Noland met Greenberg, the painter was making soft, geometric abstractions that evidenced his strong admiration for Paul Klee (fig. 4.1). His work began to expand, after the meetings with the critic, into larger, all-­over compositions of the sort Greenberg had written about in his 1948 essay “Crisis of the Easel Picture.”20 It was not until Greenberg started taking Noland and Morris Louis to New York, however, that Noland, in partnership with Louis, entered into the technical and pictorial traits that defined their mature practice. Noland met Morris Louis, ten years his senior, in Washington, D.C, in 1952, while both were teaching classes at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts. According to Noland, the two quickly became “painting buddies,” sharing ideas and discussing both technical and historical problems in painting, including where they understood themselves to stand in relation to the New York School.21 In that first year of friendship, Noland and Louis (whom Noland introduced to Greenberg) visited Frankenthaler’s studio in New York. While they were in the city, Greenberg introduced the two Washington painters to a number of other artists, such as Harry Jackson and Franz Kline, and took them around to several exhibitions, including the showing of Willem de Kooning’s “Woman” paintings at the Sidney Janis Gallery.22 Following this visit to New York, Louis and Noland began to paint together, working on what they called “jam paintings”: single canvases that they would

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F ig u re 4 . 1 . Kenneth Noland, In the Garden, 1952. Oil on hardboard, 19 1/ 2 × 30 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. ©2020 Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Any reproduction of this digitized image shall not be made without the written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

work on in collaboration, riffing off each other as they went along. Noland and Louis had developed the technique for the classes they were teaching at the Washington Workshop; it was a pedagogical exercise used to get students to loosen up and unseat some of their expectations of how a painting should be conceived and executed. The painters used the technique to do the same for themselves, in an effort to work past both the Modernist precedents of the immediate past and their own ingrained assumptions about how a painting should be made. During this time of intense partnership Noland and Louis developed the technical foundations for their mature productions: “real handling,” by which Noland meant handling the materials in such a way that their individual facticity was emphasized, and “one shot” painting—paintings made at one go and without revision.23 These two technical developments, which prohibited revision and emphasized the material limits of pictorial means, revised the terms by which a painting was made. It also shifted the terms of picture-­making in a manner that seemed to directly respond to manifestations of authorship in the works of artists like Pollock and de Kooning. The first major development came in the form of real handling. Referring to the conceptual and technical processes he and Louis were working through, Noland told Kenworth Moffett that “the question we always discussed was what to make art about.” They ultimately concluded it should be about making itself, but they did not want the painting to signify its making through “symbolic,” “geometric,” or “gestural” means. Yet they still “wanted the appearance to be the result of the process of making it—not necessarily to look like a gesture, but to be the result of real handling.”24 To this end, he and Louis tried a number of experiments in which paint and canvas were treated as raw materials and not necessarily as media aimed at making pictures. So, for example, Noland describes

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laying out the canvas on the floor in order to undermine its pictorial nature, to make it “more material—more a real surface and not an (ideal) picture plane.”25 The purpose, as Noland put it, was to “break open painting” in an effort to divest themselves of Pollock’s influence and find a direction of their own.26 It may not have been clear at first toward what ends these technical experiments were directed, but allowing the materials a kind of autonomy was the first step in a process that significantly altered the character of authorship and innovation. Among the most significant outcomes of these material experiments was the discovery of staining’s resistance to revision. This curtailed the amount of time spent on any one painting, requiring instead that the picture be made in “one shot.”27 This gave rise to a serial approach to picture-­making, in which technical discoveries were explored across several canvases. When Louis and Noland parted ways, for reasons that remain unclear, both painters maintained this serial format, which entailed focusing on a limited number of motifs—for Noland, at first, the concentric circles, and later, the chevron and horizontal-­ stripe motifs. Noland credits David Smith with emphasizing the import of this approach, which Noland says pushed them away from thinking of paintings singly, as the culmination of a protracted process of laying down and working with paint toward a unique image or expression.28 Having decided on a motif in advance, Noland would instead produce a number of similar paintings focusing not on process but on the individual effects produced within each variation of a predetermined motif. The result is a highly managed relation between the artist and both painting as process and painting as product—one that places the artist on the side of the observer, retrospectively judging the finished product, assessing its viability in terms of optical effect and also in relation to the history of Modernist painting. It is in this sense that the paintings are made in “one shot.” Noland arrives at his results quickly, and either he gets the thing right—that is, arrives at a desired effect—or he does not. Working without revision and in series resulted in an increased focus on the varying effects of color, which accounted for the primary differences between each canvas and the next. Noland chose his colors intuitively, never planning on color use in advance. He described a process whereby a color combination would occur to him, but, because he never worked from sketches or with swatches, it could not be fully assessed until it was executed at full scale.29 He would start with one element in a given motif. In the concentric-­circle series, for example, he always began at the painting’s center, laying down one color. After observing the color in place, he would then intuitively decide how to proceed with the next color. If their combined effects were off-­putting, Noland would abandon the painting and start again.30 In this way, Noland often experienced the completed painting much as a viewer would. He would complete the painting and then judge its effects after the fact. Later in this chapter, I return to the importance of this shift from making to looking in the history of authorship in High Modernist painting. For now, it is enough to note the shift in order to think through the process of Noland’s induction into the Modernist discipline, for in

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F ig u re 4 . 2 . Kenneth Noland, Whirl, 1960. Acrylic on canvas, overall dimensions 73 1/4 × 72 × 21/ 2 in. Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Moines Art Center, 1974.79. © 2020 Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rich Sanders, Des Moines, IA.

aggressively parsing picture-­making into its most basic material components, Noland was directly in line with Greenberg’s disciplinary concept of medium specificity as a process of doing away with all but the most necessary elements. A close look at Noland’s 1961 concentric-­circle painting Turnsole demonstrates this newly pared-­down, material attitude (pl. 9). Beginning at the center and reaching nearly to, but just shy of, the framed edge of this 7 × 7 foot square painting is inscribed a “target” made up of five concentric circles—three blue, one yellow, and one black. The painting is sparse. Its colors are soft, the concentric circles mainly equal in width, with large expanses of unprimed canvas interceding. Compared to a more energetic painting in Noland’s concentric-­circle series—the first serial motif that he developed after his break with Louis—such as Whirl from the previous year (fig. 4.2), Turnsole seems especially restrained. Whirl is more tightly composed, its colors more deeply saturated and bolder in their relation, running, from the outside in, blue, black, green, white, orange. The eccentricity that Whirl obtains when placed next to the sedentary Turnsole is confirmed in the Pollockesque flares that push beyond the outermost circle. As though spun or whirled clockwise on a turntable, Whirl spills beyond its bor-

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ders in a counterclockwise direction. At the center of Whirl, however, one can make out, through its thin washes of paint, a preliminary pencil drawing: an “X” to mark its center. And, indeed, despite its eccentricities, Whirl, like Turnsole, has a centering to it, a balancing that counters its centrifugal forces and reins in any intimation of emotive content capable of being traced back to an author. Such paintings’ authorial restraint produces a silence. The silence is not deferential, however. It is not the kind of silence one feels in, say, the Rothko room at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. Nor is it the blankness that often accompanies hardcore minimalism—a blankness, not a silence, that makes one turn away from the object and toward its situation. Rather, the silence one takes away from a Noland painting is more like reticence, a withholding; it’s not that the painting has nothing to say, it just is not willing to say it. There is, in other words, an intentionality behind its silence: a purposeful honing of the devices of pictorial composition (present in the painting’s precision and its emphasis on the “real” materials being handled—line, hue, paint, canvas) in order to enunciate a kind of control. The painting’s intentional nature signals that the same disruption of expectations in picture-­making that Louis and Noland sought through real handling and one-­shot paintings is also at play in picture-­ viewing. Despite an explicit emphasis on what Moffett called “picture looking,” there is a limit to what can be gained by that act.31 However concentrated our attention, looking at a painting like Turnsole seems to offer no further access to its meaning. Greenberg admitted that the restricted opticality of Noland’s paintings could be “upsetting.”32 The extreme reduction of the material details of painting to the most necessary elements resulted in an aloofness, a withholding, which troubles the analysis of the visual components of the painting. In the end, there is just so little to look at. For Moffett, this extreme reduction of pictorial expression did not entail a break from Abstract Expressionism, but rather a “demythologizing or radicalizing of action painting.”33 It is worth considering what Moffett meant by this. A peer of Fried and Krauss, with whom he studied Modernist art at Harvard, and, at one point, a member of Greenberg’s inner circle, Moffett was committed to reading Abstract Expressionism as a culminating moment in the progression of the Modernist discipline. For such a scholar, the paintings of High Modernists, such as Noland and Louis, not only continued that discipline forward but also ratified the value of the art of the recent past. The value of the generation preceding these younger painters was not to be located, of course, in anything as capricious as individual action. In Noland’s attending just as closely to the specificity of materials as a painter such as de Kooning or Pollock would, while removing any intimation that those materials signify anything beyond themselves, the myth of action as intention was purged, while material action was “radicalized.” That is to say, the autonomous effects of pictorial elements are able to accrue meaning beyond the agent that manipulated them. In embracing “real handling,” Noland’s paintings grounded signification in technique itself. Pictorial technique, according to Moffett, is not directed toward “a certain look, cer-

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tain forms . . . a certain notion of action,” all of which are dictated by individual taste and ideals. Rather, the technical details are used to enunciate painting’s self-­sufficiency, its own medium specificity.34 As such, Noland’s reticence works to turn the viewer away from individually experienced optical effect and authorial action. In looking for meaningful intent, we are instead directed toward the Modernist discipline itself. For Fried this radicalization of picture-­making in the hands of select High Modernists was no mere stylistic shift. It was evidence of the continued viability of Modernist painting into the present. In his catalog essay for his 1963 exhibition at the Fogg Art Museum, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” Fried located the “essence of modernism” in exactly this procreative ability: in Modernist painting’s “refusal to regard a particular formal ‘solution,’ no matter now successful or inspired, as definitive, in the sense of allowing the painter to repeat it with minor variations indefinitely.”35 In the context of the stylistic diversity of the 1960s, Fried was quick to point out that it is not enough to simply experiment in variations on technique. The Modernist artist, rather, was tasked with investigating the very foundations upon which previous artists had achieved success in order to root out the weaknesses there, helping to discern the healthy from the ailing strains of Modernism within the paintings of the past.36 In his 1966 essay “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” for example, Fried argued that Noland and Frank Stella were engaged in a kind of “therapy” in their engagement with the problem of pictorial shape. In Stella’s introduction of the shaped canvas, Fried argued that the painter was working “to restore shape to health.”37 The implication is that shape was suffering from a kind of “sickness,” an ailment that Fried later called “literalism.”38 Fried’s use of the term “therapeutic” in “Shape as Form” can be traced to a discourse outside the scope of Greenberg’s Modernist rhetoric. The essay was written in the mid-­1960s, when Fried was in close dialogue with the philosopher Stanley Cavell and, under Cavell’s influence, was reading Ludwig Wittgenstein. While Wittgenstein only appears in the essay in the form of an epigraph from the philosopher’s “Lectures on Aesthetics,”39 it seems likely that Fried’s recourse to the language of therapy was derived from the philosopher’s controversial likening of philosophy to therapy.40 Wittgenstein’s therapy analogy has to do with the methods of philosophy and the manner in which delimiting methods can affect the content (and consequently the purpose) of the discipline as such. “There is not a philosophical method,” Wittgenstein writes, “though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.”41 Far from advocating for a relativist approach to the practice of philosophy, Cavell and his students read this passage, in light of Wittgenstein’s more general critique of philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations, as articulating a careful understanding of how methods (the way we phrase our problems, the examples to which we turn to make our points, when we consider ourselves to have brought a question to an end) dictate the nature of philosophical inquiry more generally. This therapeutic

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approach aimed to “heal” the “illnesses” of the discipline of philosophy by getting clear about and delimiting the kinds of inquiries it makes sense to pursue.42 One of the therapies that it is the project of philosophy to perform, according to this kind of thinking, is to “dissolve” particular problems within the discipline, which, once analyzed, prove meaningless.43 For Fried a similar desire to delimit the kinds of inquiries one makes within a discipline and the attendant aim of demonstrating how and when certain methods and techniques lose meaning was crucial to the “fecundity” of Modernist painting. This is something he argued for in “Three American Painters.” Fried claimed that artists such as Noland and Olitski showed that the ultimate achievement in postwar American abstraction was not flatness or the singular achievement of an all-­over, unitary pictorial statement. Rather, what the postpainterly methods of Noland and Olitski framed as significant in the previous generation of abstract painting was the freeing-­up of line and color as “wholly autonomous pictorial elements.”44 Bracketing for the moment the formal implications of this argument—which points toward a disembodied mode of painting called “opticality” addressed to “eyesight alone”45—it is important to see that Fried understood this later generation of American abstractionists as not simply moving the discipline forward, say, from the illusive spaces of pictorial depiction to an ever more honest acknowledgment of the two-­dimensional picture plane. Rather, he saw them as helping to further secure the integrity of the Modernist discipline as such by looking at the previous generation’s methods and concerns, and making clear what was productive there. The methodological focus of any given generation of painters is variable and contingent on the historically specific situation in which they arise. High Modernist painting’s shift from material flatness to illusive opticality was not simply an innovative stylistic technique that kept painting moving in a linear projection into the future. It was, rather, a commentary on the past: namely, that an increasing emphasis on the literal flatness of the pictorial surface was a dead end. The move into opticality only makes sense in this particular historical context. It is important to understand such formal solutions to be “chronologically specific,” according to Fried, and precisely not what he would later term a “global” solution to Modernist problems more generally.46 In other words, opticality or flatness or all-­over composition or what have you are not values in their own right. They are historically specific responses to particular problems as they emerge in the present. This problem-­solving and methodological form of production became a key indicator for Fried of a painting’s quality: its ability to teach us what was mistaken or significant in past painting, demonstrating in the process new possibilities for the continuation of the discipline of painting as such. Fried’s distinction between a “global” and a “specific” formal development shares a deep structure with Wittgenstein’s claim that there is not “a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.”47 Those individual methods enunciate problems raised within the broader discipline at specific moments. They bolster the discipline, “dissolving” those problems that

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no longer carry meaning, and “solving” those problems which, through their deployment within the discipline, prove capable of maintaining its identity as such.48 Fried argued throughout the 1960s that the Modernist discipline’s viability could be demonstrated only through individual experiments in form, and could be experienced or discerned only in the immediate present, with reference to individual paintings. By the mid-­1960s, Fried’s understanding of “the present” had become an increasingly slim sliver of time with increasingly expansive meaning—a concept that he termed “presentness” in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.”49 Each individual painting was tasked with instantiating disciplinary sufficiency with each viewing. Modernist discipline, it would seem, could not survive as an abstract edifice divorced from the specificity of practice—a distance from practice that would merely assert an alignment with doctrine. While it was imperative that each individual instance of painting direct us toward the paintings of the past by reflecting on their respective contributions to the discipline as a whole, each painting must figure that relation anew; the individual work of art, as Cavell wrote in an essay heavily informed by Fried’s thinking at this time, “must be viewed alone, from the one place one occupies at any time,” even as it maintains its connection to the history upon which it reflects.50 Fried found in Noland’s paintings a keen example of this disciplined practice, singling him out from other High Modernist painters for his well-­developed “formal self-­criticism.” The “self ” criticized in his painting was not Noland as author, but, rather, his own practice and the relation obtained by each painting to the Modernist discipline.51 As with his reading of Stella, Fried understood Noland’s paintings to demonstrate an acute ability to indicate particular problems threatening Modernist practice—such as the literalness of shape and the affective dimensions of painting’s new emphasis on optical effect—while harnessing those very problems, transforming them into resources for the furtherance of the discipline, as opposed to harbingers of its finitude.52 Both Fried and Noland are quick to say that this does not amount to an analytic approach to painting as a series of formal problems to be solved. Rather, it must proceed intuitively. Fried bypasses the details by which this intuitive process unfolds in the making of actual paintings, stating that they would amount to little more than “an extremely interesting historical fact.”53 But the mediation of authorship—a mediation that Fried simply assumes, but does not investigate—is articulated precisely in the details. Just how Noland, the individual and the practitioner, engaged the supraindividual structures of the Modernist discipline is never addressed by Fried or Greenberg, despite the critics’ frequent presence in Noland’s studio. In order to understand why Noland was so well suited to the disciplinary demands placed upon him as a representative of High Modernist painting, we must look to another disciplinary structure to which he was attuned: p ­ sychotherapy.

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It is a somewhat well known, but underdiscussed, historical fact that a major influence on Noland’s practice throughout his career was Reichian Orgonomic therapy—a hands-­on, body-­oriented mode of therapy that was developed by the controversial Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Noland’s long-­term commitment to Reichian psychotherapy rendered him especially attuned to the stakes of selfhood in any authored practice. Given art historians’ broad interest in the role played by psychotherapy in helping to develop a postwar sense of self among Modernist artists, it is curious that so little attention has been paid to Noland’s well-­documented commitment to Reich. One of the reasons to be considered must be that Noland’s paintings do not fit the profile of a psychologically imbued theory of pictorial selfhood. Whether we locate the psychologically rich self in a painter like Pollock in his Jungian symbols or in his performative gestures, aggressively pared-­down paintings, such as Turnsole (pl. 9), hardly seem to indicate a self at all, let alone one with a deep psychology. This is due not to a lack of interest, on Noland’s part, in the self, nor to a self-­conscious rejection of authorship or psychology. Rather, it is due to the fact that Noland does not engage the self as either representation or expressive form, but as relation: a relationality formalized via both the terms of Modernist discipline and post-­ Freudian theories of the self. Both of these disciplinary structures—Modernist painting and Reichian therapy—provided Noland with a platform from which authorship and the individual autonomy it had come to signal in painting could be differently approached. As such, Noland’s practice can be viewed as a kind of exploration of the limits and terms of authorship within disciplinary structures. In turning to Reichian therapy, Noland discovered a way to manage not only his relation to Modernism’s past, but also the relations that obtain in the present. Both led to a focus on the space of viewership. That Noland’s paintings manifest a complex relation to the viewer is made clear in the early critical accounts of his works. In the 1963 catalog Toward a New Abstraction, for example, Alan Solomon wrote that Noland’s concentric-­ circle paintings “are often virtually incapable of visual and psychological resolution.”54 Identifying a similar refusal of resolution, Max Kozloff asserted that “so pointless is analysis of [Noland’s] pictures that on the strictly formal level they take on the status of Dada objects more than they retain their identity as abstract art.”55 The aloof nature of Noland’s paintings gave rise to a tendency to describe them less in terms of what they look like and more in terms of what kinds of experiences that looking elicits. In 1962 Steinberg described that experience as particularly modern in character: a manner of viewing indicative of the newly streamlined, technocratic environment that was the postwar United States.56 Moffett echoed the speed that Steinberg gleaned from these paintings when he characterized them as enacting a kind of “pictorial mobility,” describing “their revolving, advancing and receding, expanding and contracting,” which results, Moffett concludes, in “a hypnotic opticality.”57 Krauss confirmed the optical force of the paintings when she compared looking at one of Noland’s horizontal-­ stripe paintings to the optical experience of grasping at the horizon for an ob-

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ject when there are no markers of distance or depth—an experience that is itself hardly expressible because it is hardly perceptible.58 This is to say that what is often described in confronting a painting by Noland is not merely what one sees, but how one sees and what it feels like to see; it is not just the object in its material specificity that is described, but also the manner by which it specifies a particular viewing relation, one that references past viewing experiences as much as the immediate, embodied situation. In his embrace of real handling and one-­shot painting and focus on color effects, Noland frames an encounter between painting and viewer, cultivated and managed via the medium specificities of painting itself. Noland himself experiences painting as perceptual encounter when he cedes authorial control to the materials and steps into the role of the viewer. This cultivated investment in the dynamics of looking cannot be wholly accounted for with reference to the Modernist discipline. While “opticality” was a crucial concept in Greenberg’s and Fried’s theoretical justification for the return to illusionism in High Modernist painting, the kind of perceptual engagement that Noland hoped his paintings could enact runs counter to the Modernist imperatives of medium specificity and historical reference. Noland’s interest in perceptual phenomena leans too much toward the specificity of the viewer who stands before the canvas. The exorbitant, variable body of the viewer challenges the transhistorical value system that the Modernist project worked to protect and confirm. This is not to say that Noland’s paintings should be dissociated from their Modernist sources and recast as anti-­Modernist works, dependent for their meaning on the flux of context. They are better understood as managing this very relation. The practice of Reichian therapy accounts for Noland’s interest in this relation as it obtains between the viewer and the disciplinary object. Before Noland returned to Black Mountain in the summer of 1950 where he first met Greenberg, before he began visiting New York City and thinking of his work in relation to the most recent experiments in Modernist painting, before he met Louis and visited Frankenthaler’s studio and embarked on his “jam paintings,” Noland began his initiation into a Reichian theory of the self by reading texts such as Reich’s influential Character Analysis: Principles and Technique for Psychoanalysts in Practice and in Training and entering into Reichian therapy with Dr. Charles Oller of Philadelphia in 1950.59 Noland has repeatedly emphasized the importance of Reich’s theories to his own development as a painter. In a much-­cited 1971 interview with Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Noland stated that there were three big influences on his development as an artist: the Modernist sculptor David Smith, Clement Greenberg, and Robin Bond. While the first two names are unsurprising, that of Robin Bond—a British educator—is less expected. Noland met Bond in 1949 when the latter was teaching in Washington, DC. “He had come to the United States to lecture and to go into Reichian therapy,” Noland states. It was through Bond, Noland goes on to relate, that he himself entered Reichian therapy a short time later.60 With just

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a few interruptions, Noland was committed to a Reichian program of therapy from the late 1950s up until his death in 2010, and was an avid supporter of the American College of Orgonomy, which continues to train medical and osteopathic physicians in the science of “orgone therapy.” Briefly, orgone therapy is a technique of engagement between therapist and patient that was developed by Reich after arriving in the United States in 1939. It is best described as highly physical mode therapy, which focuses on the treatment of “energy blocked from release” in the body due to what Reich termed psychological “armoring.”61 While this therapeutic commitment on Noland’s part has been well documented, as has its influence on his practice, it has rarely been handled with any amount of seriousness by art historians. But Noland’s apprenticeship to Reichian therapy can be shown to be of a piece with his commitment to the discipline of Modernist painting, and it is indispensable to understanding the shifting terms of authorship in canonical Modernist painting more generally. While Reich would go on to develop radical theories that put him at odds with Freud, leading to his ejection from the International Psychoanalytic Association and, much later, to his arrest in the United States, it is his extraordinary revision, early in his career, of the doctor-­patient relationship that, I suggest, aided Noland in his reconfiguration of Modernist painting’s ability to engage the self that remains on the other side of painting. That self, unlike the one we index to the surface of a Pollock painting, is present in the pictorial event Noland constructs as an external, embodied viewer, who does not shed their specificity upon entering into this particular pictorial exchange, but has that specificity enunciated therein. This occurs via an emphasis on two aspects of the pictorial encounter that are more typically suppressed in Modernist criticism: an emphasis on the contingency of the present and on affective as opposed to symbolic modes of signification. Both of these—the contemporary and the affective— were key to Reich’s revision of a Freudian approach to analysis. Although Reich was admitted into Freud’s International Psychoanalytic Association in 1920 and led the Vienna Seminar for Psychoanalytic Technique, early in his career the younger doctor rejected the basic tenets of the “symptom analysis” method developed and promoted by Freud. The earliest expression of this disagreement came in Reich’s overhauling of psychoanalytic technique in order to focus less on the verbal narratives unfolded within the analytic session and more on the physical manifestation of patterns of behavior that often prohibited that narrative from being effectively articulated. Accompanying this shift from the symbolic to the affective was a shift in focus from the historical to the contemporary. This effectively revised the doctor-­patient relationship. No longer was it enough to recount the past, or to scrutinize its symbolic reemergence in the form of dreams; one must also attend to the specificity by which that content is mediated in the present. This amounted, for Reich, to attending to the physical encounter between patient and doctor. The analyst was tasked with attending not simply to what the patient said, but to how they speak, their posture, their comportment not just in recounting their situation,

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but even upon entering the room: the “manner, look, language, countenance, dress, handshake, etc.” are all considered subject to study, according to Reich.62 Reich’s attention to forms of behavior over and above the content of verbal narratives was given theoretical backing in his widely read 1933 text, Character Analysis—a text that Bond introduced Noland to in the early 1950s and which the painter continued to mull over with some regularity for years to come.63 Distinguishing himself from Freud in this text, Reich refused to take the psyche and its treatment as an isolated object located in either a private interior space or a historical past. Rather, Reich argued that external structures, whether historical, personal, or sociopolitical, were “affectively anchored in people,” crystallizing in the form of a “character structure.”64 In the clinical situation, this theory of the psyche requires the analyst to attend not simply to what the patient says, but to the manner in which they say it. “It is not what the patient says or does that is indicative of character resistance,” Reich writes, “but how he speaks and acts; not what he reveals in dreams, but how he censors, distorts, condenses, etc.”65 In treating the “formal elements” of character as equal in importance to, if not at times more important than, spoken narrative, Reich effectively revised the traditional analytic doctor-­patient encounter and revolutionized the very idea of psychic form.66 While within traditional Freudian psychoanalysis a physical and psychical distance must be maintained between doctor and patient so as not to influence or disrupt the unfolding of the historical narrative and the cathexis or transference that a patient’s narrative is meant to produce, within Reichian analysis a direct form of engagement and provocation eventually took precedence as a means of forcing into view the imposed character structures, which do not necessarily originate in a patient’s individual psyche. In the 1920s and 1930s, this amounted to Reich’s introducing verbal confrontations and interruptive observations into the analytic situation. After he arrived in the United States, Reich developed this into a hands-­on and highly invasive form of therapy that manipulated the body into points of excitation and release. This more physical therapeutic method coincided with his growing interest in the balance of energy in the body. Shortly after he wrote Character Analysis, and in conjunction with experiments in sex-­counseling centers for the working class around the same time, Reich began to speak of a form of energy that was held in common by all organic life. He named this energy “Orgone Energy,” and described it as a “common functioning principle” to which all social and natural formations adhere. He dedicated the rest of his career to the study of this eminently physical phenomenon, abandoning the idea that any behavior is psychically derived. In his 1951 text Cosmic Superimposition: Man’s Orgonotic Roots in Nature, Reich searches out and finds this common principle functioning in all living and nonliving formations, from the microcosmic—the reproduction of single-­ cell organisms—to the macrocosmic—the formation of galaxies and the patterns of hurricanes (see fig. 4.3). In this single physical realm Reich claimed to have discovered the root of all the mysteries for which “man” has provided both

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F ig u re 4 . 3 . Wilhelm Reich, diagram of “the direction and flow of the two orgone energy streams” in Messier 81 (Bode’s Galaxy). From Cosmic Superimposition: Man’s Orgonotic Roots in Nature (Rangeley, ME: Wilhelm Reich Foundation, 1951), 63. Courtesy of Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust.

mystical and rational explanations. The “common functioning principle” that Reich claimed to have discovered was biological to the core and always linked, in Reich’s later postulations, to the “orgasm function”—the conjoining of two distinct systems of energy, which Reich would later come to term “cosmic superimposition.”67 In his “discovery” of orgone energy, Reich mapped man’s most essential, interior drives—what Freud would have termed the libidinal—onto the outward structure of the world.68 Whereas more widely accepted texts, such as Character Analysis, demonstrate that the psyche is a function of historical and social structures, Reich’s later, orgonomic writings demonstrate the psyche to be a function of an ahistorical, nonsocial physical world.69 Where the early texts express a pessimism about the potential for psychic health given the lack of social reform, the later texts express an optimism in locating a space beyond the social in which the psyche and its needs can be explained away. It was at this later stage of Reich’s career, after he had moved to the United States and established his well-­known practice of orgone therapy, that Noland became aware of him. And, we might speculate, it was a similar frustration with a Freudian figuration of the ego, which, like a naïve concept of expressionism, locates psychic drives in a private, interior space that can only be accessed through representational content, that appealed to Noland in Reich’s orgo-

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nomic theory. Reich’s revision of analytic technique in emphasizing contemporary behavior as opposed to historical narrative, or, put another way, the affective over the symbolic, is lent formal expression in Noland’s Modernist practice. The psychoanalytic, thoroughly material theory of orgone energy might also be said to be present in Noland’s conviction that his paintings were capable of forging a physical connection with the viewer. That connection, however, is always understood to be mediated through the “principle” of Modernist form. It is generally acknowledged, though hardly theorized, that Noland’s gravitation toward concentric circles, the motif that founded his first series, was in large part due to his interest in Reich’s cosmic and organic theories. His first “proto-­circles,” as Susan Sterling calls them, such as Mitosis (1957–58), often referenced Reich’s organic theories in their titles, indicating Noland’s desire to find a means of injecting Reich’s thinking into his practice.70 When viewed in relation to Reich’s theory of cosmic superimposition, the proto-­circles that Noland produced from the mid- to late 1950s appear to be a testing-­out of how Reich’s alternative, “vegetative” figuration of the psyche could translate into pictorial form. Paintings such as Planet (1955) and Lunar Episode (1959; fig. 4.4) seem an almost too literal appropriation of Reich’s description of orgone energy as the conjoining of two systems into a mass of spinning, ecstatic physical phenomenon. This is made clear when Noland’s early circles are compared with Reich’s own illustrations of the formation and concentration of orgone energy in material bodies (figs. 4.3 and 4.5). The reference to Reichian concepts is made explicit in Noland’s 1958 painting titled Wilhelm Reich (fig. 4.6), which is a direct illustration of Reich’s theory of orgone energy as the joining of two forces. The date of the Wilhelm Reich painting is interesting. In October 1958 Noland had his second solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. That exhibition consisted mainly of Pollockesque, all-­over compositions and proto-­ circles. After the exhibition, there is evidence that Noland returned to Washington, DC, determined to take his paintings in a new direction. It was at that point that Noland began his stained, concentric-­circle series in earnest, executing at least fifteen such paintings before the end of the year, including Heat and Song (fig. 4.7).71 Wilhelm Reich was painted at a moment when Noland was still questioning the strict uniformity of the serial format. In this and similar paintings, he played with compositions that included straight lines that intervened in or bracketed the concentric circles. The diagonally oriented rectangle in Wilhelm Reich frames the circle at its center, harnessing the centrifugal force of the shapes spiraling outward. Paintings made around the same time, such as Split (fig. 4.8) and Point, introduce similar boxing elements, as though Noland were not yet convinced that the precisely drawn and carefully stained concentric circles were sufficient in themselves. And why would they be? It is true that other painters were making similarly simple gestures at this time, such as Jasper Johns (whose Castelli exhibition, featuring Johns’s early targets, Noland saw in 1958) and Adolph Gottlieb (whose “burst” paintings Noland names as an influence). Still, as the critical reactions

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F ig u re 4.4. Kenneth Noland, Lunar Episode, 1959. Acrylic on canvas, 70 1/ 2 × 68 1/ 2 in. © 2020 Kenneth Noland Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

F ig u re 4 . 5 . Wilhelm Reich, diagram of the organization of “orgone energy” toward a “material core. From Cosmic Superimposition: Man’s Orgonotic Roots in Nature (Rangeley, ME: Wilhelm Reich Foundation, 1951), 24. Courtesy of Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust.

F ig u re 4 . 6 . Kenneth Noland, Wilhelm Reich, 1958–59. Acrylic on canvas, 69 1/ 2 × 70 in. Location unknown. © 2020 Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

F ig u re 4 . 7 . Kenneth Noland, Heat, 1958. Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 63 in. Private collection. Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

F ig u re 4.8. Kenneth Noland, Split, 1959. Acrylic on canvas, 94 × 94 1/4 in. Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. © 2020 Kenneth Noland Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

I quoted above demonstrate, there was something even more radically minimal about Noland’s concentric-­circle paintings that would have made justifying their value difficult, not just to Modernism’s diversifying publics, but also to Noland himself. It would be two years before Greenberg made sense of these brazenly curtailed paintings in his Art International essay, “Louis and Noland,” and another five before Fried embarked on his thoroughgoing explication of such paintings from the point of view of a rigorously defined Modernist historicism.72 While it is likely that Greenberg was encouraging Noland at this moment to refine the circles into a more hard-­edge, serial uniformity, the proto-­circle paintings demonstrate a lingering doubt about their adequacy, with elements such as vertical and diagonal lines, as well as gestural flares—the last vestiges of painterly process—entering as interventions into or moderations of the extraordinary reduction of pictorial form toward which he was moving. An indication of just what was so troubling about the mature concentric-­ circle paintings comes from a 1966 conversation with a reporter in which Noland described the centered, serialized compositions as a “self-­canceling structure.”73 He made this statement after he had mastered the technique of serial painting and color use, as well as after fully absorbing the discourse of Modernism as espoused by Greenberg and Fried. We can surmise, then, that by “structure” Noland meant to indicate something like his departure from the

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graphic and compositional concerns that, following Greenberg, he associated with Cubism.74 “With structural considerations eliminated,” Noland continued, “I could concentrate on color. I wanted more freedom to exercise the arbitrariness of color.”75 This goes back to the affordances granted by real handling and one-­shot painting: with compositional choices and technical concerns eliminated, alternative pictorial features are made central, such as the effects of color. But we might also think of the “self-­canceling” nature of the concentric circles as indicating the very thing that seemed to make Noland most uncomfortable about these hard-­edge and serialized pictures: their unauthored and automatic nature. In minimizing pictorial problems, the serial motifs also diminish the decision-­making process. They cancel out the self whose laboriously represented intentions still dominated the marketing of Abstract Expressionism; they extrude the authorial self, which was still on display at Noland’s 1958 Tibor de Nagy exhibition. Despite their radically reduced form, an authorial presence is still discernible in the paintings’ careful construction and precise mobilization of the specific components of picture-­making (color, line, canvas, paint). That intention is emphatically not a “design or plan in the author’s mind,” as William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley put it in their well-­known 1946 essay “The Intentional Fallacy.”76 It is rather an articulation of a desire to be recognized, a desire to forge a relation with an other. Having located the process of painting in a present shared by the viewer, intention no longer points backward to a previous moment, to a laboring self, authoring a gestural or representational picture. Rather, Noland cultivated a mode of production grounded in seeing and discerning, an attentive attunement to the psychological and physiological dimensions of viewership that he hoped to replicate in the viewer. Whatever doubts Noland may have felt prior to 1958 regarding the sufficiency of his actions as properly pictorial appear to have been assuaged by the following year. Noland’s growing conviction in the direction he was moving was most certainly ratified in Greenberg’s first-­person support of the painter, which materialized as a 1959 solo exhibition at French & Company. But it seems clear, as well, that Noland was attentive to the dimensions of pictorial subjectivity on a level that cannot be fully accounted for within either Greenberg’s or Fried’s largely historicist explanations of his paintings as Modernist. However well Greenberg or Fried justified the significance of Noland’s paintings according to the workings of a kind of watered-­down historical materialism, Noland still experienced himself as an agent within that field, as he made decisions and went about his practice. As a self-­conscious player in the Modernist field, Noland would have to repeatedly consider his own, personal relation to that field, reflecting upon how he, as an individual, entered there. How, then, to navigate these two poles of Modernist production in the 1960s: the anonymous machinations of Modernist history and the day-­to-­day experience of being an agent therein? The question is the same one that painters like Tworkov and Frankenthaler confronted around the same time. Both those painters found a solution

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in analyzing the details of the pictorial process itself, tracking the painting’s passage from blind, automatic mark-­making to a symbolically invested field of practice. Noland’s solution was not so different, though it was focused less on the components of authorial action and more on the disciplinary dimensions within which those components find their place. These were disciplinary dimensions that would have been reinforced with every studio visit, conversation, and essay published by critics like Greenberg and Fried. How exactly to find himself within the automated system he had established, without becoming no more than the bearer of the Modernist discipline into the future? How, quite literally, to manage his own status as an agent in the Modernist field in relation to the doctrine being espoused by Modernism’s most representative figures? It is not that his paintings proffer a solution to this dilemma. Rather, I contend, the paintings orient the individual agent within it, articulating their position in relation to it. I mean this literally: Noland’s paintings orient the viewer. And because of his newfound position in the place of the viewer, they also orient Noland. The very possibility of such an orientation, I contend, arose out of a confluence of the Reichian and Modernist disciplines, which positioned Noland and taught him something about the terms of such a positioning. Toward the end of his life, reflecting on the value that Reichian ideas had held for him, Noland stated that Reich’s writings and the practice of orgone therapy “influenced my art in the way I work and what I could see in the work process.”77 Given Noland’s embrace of seriality and real handling, the emphasis here should be on seeing, which had by the early 1960s become nearly synonymous in Noland’s work with making. Placing a primacy on looking and attending is directly in line with the somatically focused therapy that was promoted by Reich’s followers. In recalling his sessions with Reich in the late 1920s, while Reich was still a member of Freud’s International Psychoanalytical Association, the American psychiatrist O. S. English spoke of Reich’s tendency to disregard a person’s speech and to focus instead on their gestures and comportment.78 As I said, in his later years, Reich developed this attention to physical comportment into a body-­based form of therapy, which requires the laying of hands on the patient by the doctor. The purpose is to bring all repressed physical tensions into the open and to teach the patient to attend to even the minutest alteration in their body’s chemistry and structure. Noland was explicit that a similar honing of the viewer’s attention was a core concern of his. As Susan Fisher Sterling contends in her 1987 dissertation—for which she interviewed Noland extensively about his involvement in Reichian therapy—Noland located the heart of Reich’s influence in how it altered his perception and “contributed to his ideas about the nature of vision and color.”79 This is most apparent in the manner by which Noland attempted in paintings such as Turnsole (pl. 9) to focus visual perception. That focus is achieved by calling attention to those aspects of our perceptible relation to the world to which

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we (under normal circumstances) disattend, such as the manner in which our eyes automatically register depth. When one studies Noland’s oeuvre, reference to the ambiguities that accompany a perception of depth and extension can be seen to be an abiding concern there. Depth, for example, is signaled as a central problem in Turnsole in the strangely antagonistic relation that is set up between its yellow and black circles, both of which vie to be seen as extending out, beyond the surface of the canvas and into the viewer’s space, only to be snapped back into place as the eye flits between these and the more subdued, but more structurally anchored, pale blue circles. The indeterminate spatial relationship created through Noland’s carefully and intuitively arrived-­at color interactions— which he referred to as “spatial color”—is complicated by the marriage of figure and ground through the process of staining.80 The illusive quality of color and the literal surface of canvas compete for recognition and focus the viewer’s attention on their competing perceptual effects. Noland described this effect as a “centering of perception.” In response to a question as to why he “paints circles” (a motif that he returned to more than any other, working on them for well over fifty years), Noland replied: “It’s not a circle, as such. The center of a circle represents the centering of perception. So, the circle is there to center. For instance, if the person is looking at a centering image, they will adjust their body. Their eyes are causing them to center their perception so they can ‘get it’ without there being any intrusion or distractions.”81 Noland understood himself to be constructing a site, of sorts, which would allow the viewer and painter alike to focus on the act of looking itself. This is no isolated address to eyesight alone, however. In this focus, attention is brought to the viewing body, which comes into line with the painting. Through the techniques of one-­shot painting and real handling, process shifts away from making and into looking, contemplating, and considering quickly arrived-­at effects. This seeing and discerning self stands opposed to—literally, stands facing—the authorial self who is fully in charge of all the steps leading up to the completed picture. As such, Noland’s paintings bypass Abstract Expressionism’s first-­person address—the “I” that authors expressive content—and move into the place of the second-­person: the “you” to whom these post-­Pollock paintings are directed. In a 1968 interview with Philip Leider, Noland offered a description of the effect he hoped this second-­person address would have on the viewer: “Imagine yourself looking across a street at a crowd of pedestrians, suddenly one of them glances your way, [it’s] that quality of connection [that] I’d like those colors to have—but abstractly.”82 The viewer, scanning a crowded scene, taking it in in the most nonconscious of manners, has their attention piqued by an incident there: the returning of their gaze. Here Noland imagines viewing his paintings to be akin to a kind of apperception—one that arises from the situation not of looking, but of being looked at. Such a description removes Noland’s goals from any straightforward adherence to the Modernist notion of disembodied opticality. For, as Jean-­Paul Sartre argued in his phenomenological description of “the look,” to be at the other end of a look is to be radically embodied, situated,

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and in the company of others. When I am conscious of being seen, Sartre writes, I am made aware “that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt, that I occupy a place.” The returned gaze is the device by which the subject, locked in their own subjectivity, is shown to be embedded in a world populated by others.83 Here, the presence of Fried and Greenberg in Noland’s studio seems especially important to his practice. With them standing alongside him, he experienced his paintings not just as viewer, but as viewed. It should be clear that the affective encounter Noland strove to evoke is not accessible to everybody equally—I am sure that for many (perhaps most) viewers it would be a major conceptual leap to move from so spare a picture as Turnsole to any meaning at all, let alone to an experience of self-­apprehension. For this is no generalized phenomenological experience—such as the kind of experience ostensibly crafted by the minimalists who were Noland’s contemporaries. Where minimalism sought to achieve “a new freedom,”84 as Robert Morris put it, Noland’s paintings enact a self-­regulation, exploiting the means by which affect is externalized, objectified, and managed. Noland signals his interest in articulating the limitations or specificity of viewership when he states that a desired effect of these paintings is an experience of viewing—having one’s gaze suddenly returned—whereby the beholder is made self-­conscious of their assumed but false autonomy. These late-­Modernist paintings offer an encounter with the self that is neither expressionistic and mimetic nor strictly phenomenal, but framed by a specific disciplinary context (cultivated via the medium specificities of painting itself ). The title Turnsole is especially resonant in this context. It is possible that Noland meant to reference the blue pigments of the same name, which are found in medieval illuminated manuscripts, which the painting’s soaked-­in color recalls in both saturation and hue.85 “Turnsole,” better known in the United States as a heliotrope—literally “sun-­turning”—is a flower, such as a sunflower, whose face follows the sun, always maintaining an indexical, which is to say physical, connection with the source that lends its actions meaning. Turnsole, like the flower for which it is named, only comes into meaning by way of this modality or tropism, which is directed at a discerning body stationed before the painting. The manner by which Noland looked to the disciplinary orthopedic of Modernism in order to manage his and his viewers’ particular relation to the canvas suggests that Barthes’s notion of the “sway of the author”86 might be read as referring not to the author’s coercive relation to the viewer, but to the structures by which the author him- or herself is swayed. Considering Noland’s Reichian adaptation to Modernist doctrine, we might think of “sway” here as meaning not overbearing influence, but, rather, a gentle swinging to and fro, a vacillation, not unlike that of the heliotrope, which in its tropism, as the Islamic scholar Henry Corbin states, “moves to the extent that it is free to move.”87 As such, the heliotrope demonstrates something essential about being itself: that its meaning is discovered only in its sympathetic, isomorphic relation to the forces that exceed it. In a similar manner Noland’s heliotropic Turnsole reveals itself and

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its author/viewer to the extent that they have been disciplined by the external structures of Modernism. The question remains, however, whether the specificity Turnsole sounds in the viewer is of a piece with Modernist painting’s own disciplinary structures— its extreme dependency, as Fried so vehemently argued throughout the 1960s, on an in-­depth knowledge of the paintings of the past. But it is difficult to align Turnsole with the instantaneous apprehension of a telescoped history that Fried insists such paintings must materialize. The paintings offer far too little in terms of actual pictorial content to signal, with any clarity, their relation to such a history. Here we run up against the same impasse between contemporary and historical significance that marks the break between a Freudian and a Reichian approach to the therapeutic encounter. While paintings like Turnsole do not simply dissolve into a Modernist history lesson before the viewer, they do emphatically declare themselves to be Modernist paintings—that is, they are aligned with a specific disciplinary structure. But that disciplinarity cannot be read as no more than a materialization (or illustration) of Modernist doctrine. For Noland’s own relationship to the Modernist discipline was one obtained not through the study of doctrine as communicated by art history or art criticism, but, as I have shown, in and as practice. It is again necessary to maintain the distinction between discipline and doctrine here, a distinction that is grounded in the difference between theory and practice. This distinction gets lost when we equate Modernist disciplinarity too quickly with Foucault’s negative description of discipline in the modern period as “a policy of coercions that acts upon the body.”88 Though Noland certainly meant for his paintings to “act upon” and “adjust” the body. And what one adjusts their body to, in Noland’s case, is undeniably the Modernist discipline. But the nature of adjustment itself, I suggest, is filtered through a Reichian notion of submission and release. It is important to add that the model for such release in orgone therapy is the orgasm, which Leo Bersani calls “man’s most intense experience of his body’s vulnerability.”89 Turnsole invites us to enter into a similar vulnerability, but only insofar as we are able to align our perception with the Modernist discipline, to be swayed by its commitments. In this way, Noland’s paintings can be said to enact the real limits of picture-­looking and to invite viewers to enter into and adjust themselves to those limits alongside him. How such a requisite attunement impacted future entries into the Modernist field is laid bare in the paintings of Sam Gilliam.

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5. Event as Painting

I started to paint when I learned to kill my hands. —attributed to a young painter by Sam Gilliam in a 1984 interview The concept of event as painting.

— Sam G i ll i am

The nights that followed April 4, 1968, in Washington, DC, were chaotic. By the second night more than twenty thousand people had flooded into the city’s streets. In the ensuing uprising, entire blocks were destroyed downtown and in Columbia Heights, damage that in some cases would take decades to repair. In the end, the protests in Washington, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., resulted in more than one thousand people injured and more than six thousand arrested, leaving thousands of buildings and communities gutted.1 That same month Sam Gilliam moved into his new studio, to be shared with the light artist Rockne Krebs, at 1737 Johnson Ave, NW, just a few blocks from the epicenter of the protests at U and Fourteenth Streets, NW. The studio was part of a workshop grant that Gilliam, along with seven other artists, was awarded by the short-­lived Washington Gallery of Modern Art (WGMA), which had been briefly resuscitated by Walter Hopps. Hopps, committed to serving the local communities, was able to raise enough money, in part by deaccessioning a large portion of the WGMA’s collection, to fund a series of studios to be run by local artists.2 The artists received studio space, funds to run an artist workshop, and a stipend. Even though the downtown neighborhood where Gilliam and Rockne’s studio was located would take years to recover from the destruction of the 1968 uprising, Gilliam rarely mentions those events in his public statements and interviews. The spring and summer following the protests and his move to the Johnson Avenue studio frame an important moment in Gilliam’s career. The workshop and stipend allowed him to quit his job at a local high school, affording him, as Gilliam put it, “the first experience . . . of flat out being nothing but an artist.”3 In

F ig u re 5 . 1 . Sam Gilliam, Bow Form Construction, 1968. Acrylic on canvas with aluminum powder and enamel, 118 × 330 in. (flat). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the ensuing months he had his first solo show in New York City at the Byron Gallery; traveled to Paris, where he saw Monet’s large-­scale waterlily paintings; and began experimenting, as can be see in Bow Form Construction (1968; fig. 5.1), with taking the painted canvas off its frame. The draped canvases that emerged from that summer’s work were among the most radical developments in post-­Pollock painting since Morris Louis distended the pictorial event across several yards of canvas in “Unfurleds,” such as Alpha Tau (1960–61). Gilliam’s draped paintings, like the folded surfaces that preceded them (pl. 12), did not simply make Modernist problems, such as the relationship between pictorial and literal shape, “perspicuous,” as Fried argued that artists like Stella, Noland, and Louis had done. Rather, Gilliam quite literally folded such problematic relationships in on themselves, neither succumbing to the “literalism” that Fried feared would result from painting’s ever more material acknowledgment of the shape of the canvas, nor defeating the “theatricality” that Fried argued literalism entailed.4 In sum, the months following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing public outcry were critical to Gilliam’s later successes. Given the frequency with which both he and art historians pass over his proximity to these political upheavals, one wonders whether the events managed to register with Gilliam at all. It is hard to imagine that Gilliam, a Black man born and raised in the South, would not have been deeply affected by these events. One of the few direct acknowledgments of the studio’s being located in such a charged political space comes from an undated biographical statement located in the Archives of American Art. In that statement, Gilliam typed and then crossed out the following: The Johnson Avenue studio was a community where there was more rioting going on than anywhere else in the city, and we were part of that. A part of the

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visual moment would be a pair of chartreuse trousers flowing down the street in the hand of some kid who had just liberated them from a dry goods store. There is a social presence here that is just as much part of art as any theory or philosophy about art.5

Just how that “social presence,” which Gilliam inscribes in his biography only to cross out, should be seen to relate to his practice is a question that has preoccupied him throughout his career and which he has left wide open for his viewers. In this chapter I investigate the problem posed by the literal presence of the social as a problem confronting Gilliam in his self-­consciously dual occupation as a Black author and a late-­Modernist painter. I contend that Gilliam navigated the question of authorship in general, and Black authorship in particular, by attempting to fold into his paintings the varying ways in which we, as individuals, enter into communal formations, whether that formation is a Modernist, racial, national, or generational identity. In this way, Gilliam’s paintings allow for an inquiry into the status not of authorship at large, but of the specificity of being a particular author at a particular time. In this regard, his wording when speaking of the “social presence” of the Washington protests is notable. While the statement is undated, it likely comes from sometime after he vacated the Johnson Avenue studio, which he refers to in the past tense. Gilliam concludes, however, in the present tense: “There is a social presence here that is just as much part of art as any theory or philosophy about art.”6 Gilliam’s use of the word “here” is important. It points to the same space that Noland carved out for himself and his viewer in front of the Modernist painting. It is a space, as I argued in the last chapter, that orients the viewer in the present, pointing them in the same direction as the artist disciplined within the Modernist field. While Gilliam’s move into the literal space of display similarly addresses the viewer, his paintings do not enforce the same tropism. For in their spanning of space and time, Gilliam’s folded and draped paintings introduce a variability that challenges the uniformity of Modernism’s pull. The variability of literal space was far more threatening to the integrity of the Modernist identity than expressionism ever proved to be. Fried made this clear in such notorious essays as “Art and Objecthood,” in which the literalism of minimalist sculpture is characterized as a “corrupt” and “perverted” experience eating away at Modernist coherence from the inside.7 Gilliam was well aware of how his paintings operated in the space between the pictorial and literal, and self-­consciously took up that position in the Modernist field. In 1989, for example, Gilliam said he had been thinking about certain minimalist artists as he moved away from the stretched canvas. To me, more recently, he stated he was even more influenced by postminimalist and feminist art in the 1960s, naming Lynda Benglis in particular.8 Given such artists’ self-­conscious address to the specificity of an authorial presence tasked with bearing the markers of identity, one has to ask whether and how Gilliam was thinking about the literal presence of race as he moved away from the formal restrictions he was first introduced to

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as a young participant in the Washington Color School.9 In this chapter I do not argue that Gilliam’s status as a Black artist provides a key to his work or even a useful framing in describing one’s experience of that work. If anything, reading his paintings in terms of race restricts that experience and our historical and theoretical understanding of his contributions to late-­Modernist practice.10 However, an analysis of his works in relation to the political scene in which they were made, as well as with a recognition that Gilliam was (and is) repeatedly asked to explain how his status as a Black author informs his practice, allows for a more nuanced understanding of the perceived threats that literalism was seen to pose to Modernist doctrine. It also promises to reframe late-­Modernist painting as itself a mechanism for understanding the variable, as opposed to universal, the diverse, as opposed to closed, notions of signification and value—the very terms that Fried argued (and argues) disrupt the Modernist project as such. While Gilliam is best known for his folded and draped paintings, the literal enters his earlier, hard-­edge paintings as well. His sustained interest in the literal, from his early days as the newest member of the Washington Color School, can be linked to Gilliam’s concern with the workings of authorial ­signification. Nine years younger than Noland, Gilliam also entered into the Modernist field as a highly self-­conscious actor. After receiving his MFA in painting at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, Gilliam and his then wife Dorothy Butler moved to Washington, DC, in 1962, where Butler had been offered a job as a reporter for the Washington Post. At that point Gilliam was a committed figurative painter, with strong expressionistic leanings. Having become aware of West Coast figurative painters, such as David Park and Nathan Oliveira, during his graduate studies, Gilliam felt that he had arrived at a mode of painting that both answered the demands for traditional subject matter, as required by his professors at Louisville, and allowed for a kind of self-­expression, which Gilliam himself sought out in painting. In 1963, at his first solo exhibition in Washington, at the Adams Morgan Gallery, which featured these expressive figurative paintings, Gilliam met Thomas Downing, a key insider of the Washington Color School. Downing, who was impressed by one of the few abstract paintings in the show— a small watercolor—went on to introduce Gilliam to other painters associated with the school, such as Howard Mehring and Gene Davis. (Gilliam would not meet Noland, who had by that point moved to New York, until 1966.) Downing and Gilliam entered into a protracted dialogue in which Downing encouraged Gilliam to move in the direction of his abstract watercolors, a technique that resembled the minimal stain paintings that Downing and his peers had been pursuing. That summer Gilliam abandoned figuration altogether and began making hard-­edge abstractions, using acrylic and unprimed canvas in a manner that would signify his entry into the field of Modernism as defined by the Washington Color School. The following year Gilliam had a second solo exhibition at the Adams Morgan Gallery, this time featuring nothing but abstract paintings. The difference

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F ig u re 5 . 2 . Sam Gilliam, Ode, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 89 × 84 × 1 1/ 2 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

between the two shows demonstrates Gilliam’s determination to be associated with the Washington Color School, which he viewed as representative of the most cutting-­edge Modernist art. In multiple public statements and interviews Gilliam asserts that he prized his connection to the Washington Color School. In a typed biographical statement, for example, he writes that it was “very important” for him “to become known as one of the youngest members of the Washington color-­field school.”11 Gilliam’s self-­conscious entrance into this school is clear: the abstractions featured in his second exhibition at the Adams Morgan Gallery were impeccable and hard-­edge. Switching to acrylic paint and working with limited compositions and serial motifs, Gilliam conquered its core tenets in a virtuoso fashion (fig. 5.2; see also fig. 5.5). His path out of those prototypical, hard-­edge abstractions was just as rapid and nearly as complete. In 1966 Gilliam returned somewhat to the watercolor technique he had been using since graduate school. Transferring what were typically small, fluid paintings on rice paper to large-­scale canvases, Gilliam began making paintings that dissolved the hard edges of his earliest abstractions. In the 1966 Light Fan (pl. 10), for example, Gilliam mapped out a composition with masking tape, as he had done in hard-­edge paintings such as Ode

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F ig u re 5 . 3 . Sam Gilliam, Red Petals, 1967. Acrylic on canvas, 88 × 93 in. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Any reproduction of this digitized image shall not be made without the written consent of The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

(fig. 5.2), and then washed thinned-­out colors onto the canvas, removing the tape while the paint was still wet and allowing the colors to mix and bleed into one another.12 The result is a loose field of color, more redolent of Louis’s washes than Noland’s rigorously contained compositions. From Light Fan came a series of washed-­field paintings, including Medley and Red Petals, which abandoned the composed pictures that resulted from the use of masking tape and instead used the pour itself as a starting point. Red Petals (fig. 5.3) was painted, in all likelihood, in preparation for a solo show Gilliam had been offered at the Phillips Collection. It is a large-­scale, explosive, high-­hued painting, which envelops the viewer in its centrifugal organization. The painting, like the best of Louis’s veils, shifts between surface and depth, achieving the kind of “opticality”—a careful balance between surface facture and optical effect—that was the requisite entry-­point into Greenberg’s carefully patrolled High Modernist field. The washed opticality of Red Petals resulted from Gilliam’s careful experimentation coupled with pure luck. Around the time he would have been preparing for the Phillips show, Gilliam was in Downing’s studio, where he caught sight of a jar containing an unknown medium. According to Gilliam, when he asked what it was, Downing refused to answer. Noland later revealed the identity of the “secret” substance: a water-­tension breaker created by New York City paint manufacturer Leonard Bocour, which was widely

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F ig u re 5 . 4 . Sam Gilliam at work. From Tom Harney, “When He Paints, He Pours,” Washington Daily News, October 13, 1967, 30.

used among the postpainterly artists, most effectively by Louis.13 The medium allowed the acrylic paint that artists were then working with to spread evenly across the picture surface, even as it helped the pigment to soak more thoroughly into the unprimed canvas. When applied differentially, the medium allowed for varying levels of opacity, from thin transparent washes to dense accretions of pigment (such as the flung passage of red paint in the lower righthand corner of Red Petals) that sit atop an otherwise ethereal and illusive composition. As detailed by Tom Harney in a report on a studio visit paid to Gilliam while he prepared for the Phillips exhibition, the paintings to be featured were mainly these new, washed-­out compositions: “He pours the paint thick and he pours it thin, one layer over another, creating depths of color that are alive with tension” (fig. 5.4).14 Harney also reports seeing a few canvases that “were soaked in paint and then pleated, transposing the paint onto vertical ‘slides’ of color that have Rorschach-­like images on them.” These would be Gilliam’s “slide” or “slice” paintings, the first of his folded compositions. The so-­called “slice” paintings resulted from Gilliam’s technique of pouring

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sheets of paint onto an unstretched canvas and then folding the surface into vertical and diagonal patterns. What results is a composition made up of triangular “slices.” Gilliam hit on the folding technique when he was preparing for the Phillips show; he identifies his 1967 Green Slice (pl. 11) as one of his “first of the vertically sliced paintings.” Unlike the paintings on canvas that followed, Green Slice is on a thick Japanese paper, which remains folded, along the bottom border, in the final composition. Gilliam recounts that he came across Green Slice quite accidentally when looking through earlier work for an idea of what else to put in the exhibition. While the painting is dated to 1967, it was likely made much earlier. Upon discovering the work, Gilliam states, “Not only did I not recall painting it, but I knew at that time that it was something that I had not seen, that it was something that had literally not been done.”15 It is worth thinking about what Gilliam meant when he said the painting “had literally not been done” and why that appealed to him. The statement comes from a 1977 interview with Keith Morrison for the New Art Examiner. Immediately preceding his recollection of discovering Green Slice, Gilliam had been discussing Noland’s influence on him in terms of teaching him something about technique and form in late-­Modernist painting, but also in terms of offering him something to work beyond or against. Gilliam recalled his interest in Noland’s facility with “the diagonal,” which Noland had been pursuing in his chevron series. Gilliam was also working with diagonals at the time, and Noland advised him on how to push the paintings toward something more challenging. Recalling this interaction, Gilliam stated that after seeing Noland’s “narrow diamond” paintings, which followed the chevrons and combined the diagonal with a shaped canvas, Gilliam realized that Noland’s “exploration of the striped diagonal was so complete that it left me . . . nowhere else to go.”16 In this context, Gilliam’s description of Green Slice as something he “had not seen,” and which “had . . . not been done,” reads as a statement about pictorial innovation: the folded-­paper painting was something that had not been done by other late-­Modernist painters. As such, it offered him a novel manner by which he could enter the Modernist field. But Gilliam’s identifying Green Slice as something that “had . . . not been done” could also mean that he did not recognize it as having been made by him. Perhaps he meant that he simply did not recall making it, but I think there is something more here: the folds in Green Slice were accidental. It is possible the painting was something Gilliam started and discarded—a poured watercolor that was carelessly set aside before it dried. The result is an automatic painting in its purest form: something Gilliam “literally” had not done. According to Gilliam, finding these “poured” paintings “started me onto my poured surfaces.” This would include paintings like Red Petals, but also the first folded paintings. Concluding his account of coming upon Green Slice, Gilliam stated, “I can’t say it was an accident, but it was an accidental recognition.”17 Following this discovery and in preparation for the Phillips exhibition, Gilliam began experimenting with folding the still-­wet surfaces of his paintings. The color-­transfer and patterns that appear after the canvas is unfolded push to

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an extreme the surface/depth tension that the water-­tension breaker first introduced, creating illusive creases that “hole through” the picture’s surface (see for example, the folded panels on Rose Rising [pl. 12]).18 The fact that this illusion is created via a manual manipulation of the material substrate of the picture plane situates the fold somewhere between literal and depicted form—the two components that Fried argued had become central to securing pictorial meaning in the late 1960s. In this way the fold offered Gilliam a path out of the restrictions of the Washington Color School, which, by the time of his Phillips exhibition, had transformed from a marker of Gilliam’s success to one of restraint. In a 1989 interview, Gilliam noted that by the late 1960s Noland’s and Downing’s approach to painting had taken on a feeling of predictability, as though they had figured out a formula for picture-­making. He “decided not to go in that direction,” but to “move someplace else.”19 That “someplace else” was opened up by the fold, which offered a paradoxical opportunity both to return pictorial illusion to picture-­making and to move completely off the stretcher and into the literal field of architectural space. I will return to Gilliam’s move into three-­ dimensional space and his play between the depicted and the literal. First, it is necessary to unpack the opportunity the fold offered Gilliam to explore the troubled notion of authorial presence, which is, as I have said, key to his growing interest in literal space. Gilliam’s “accidental recognition” that he had achieved something important in Green Slice did not simply come out of nowhere. He had been exploring the possibility of delaying or completely abandoning authorial control since he first began to make hard-­edge abstract paintings. The 1966 Black Break is a great example of this (fig. 5.5). The large, vertically oriented painting shows the influence of painters like Downing and Noland. Composed of four wedges, fitted together like the teeth of a cogwheel, Black Break strikes a beautiful balance through the careful distribution of shape and color. Like Noland’s concentric circles (see pl. 9), Black Break demonstrates its author’s virtuoso ability to produce a painting in “one shot.” Also like the concentric circles, Black Break relies on a serial motif within which to ground color and shape. However, Black Break does not simply subvert authorial presence through reduced design and material specificity. The very forms that Gilliam works with point toward a real-­ world source for the painting. Gilliam referred to the shapes in these paintings as “pennant forms,” revealing that he appropriated them from the decorative strings of pennants that often adorn gas stations. “I observed how the pennants worked on lines around service stations. For me this became a disguised structure for things I wanted to do.”20 Gilliam turned to these “disguised” pennants after he showed Noland his diagonal-­stripe paintings—paintings that borrowed a lot from Noland and caused Gilliam to realize that Noland had taken such paintings as far as they could go, leaving the younger painter “on his own.” The pennant form seemed to offer two solutions to this problem. First, it gave him a readymade structure within which to continue his experiments. The pennant shape mimicked

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F ig u re 5 . 5 . Sam Gilliam, Black Break, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 90  × 56 3/4  × 1 1/ 2 in., framed: 911/ 2 × 581/4 × 21/4 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the simple motifs that Noland had been working with since the 1950s, but in coming from the world as a kind of “already-­made,” to use Yve-­Alain Bois’s term, it also provided Gilliam with a surreptitious return to representational content.21 Second, Gilliam makes clear that the found-­pennant form provided him with an opportunity to reintroduce into his canvases the pictorial illusion that his adoption of hard-­edge design and staining had pressed out. “I could let the colors bleed from off the geometric and make the whole form become [illusive].”22 In their being drawn upon a line made somewhat serpentine by the wind, Gilliam saw the possibilities of allowing those wedges to wend their way across the surface of the canvas such that they appear to recede in space: “large [illusive] wedges that come from one corner and moved to another.”23 We see this somewhat in Black Break. Here the subtle illusion comes from letting the pennant forms slide off the surface of the canvas, the “line” that connects the pennants permitting Gilliam to think of their relation as exceeding beyond the edge, disrupting the unitary, contained composition that Noland had mastered and, according to Gilliam, brought to a close.24 The 1966 Ode (fig. 5.2) admits this illusive quality even more explicitly. Composed of three slim

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pennants, hanging from the top edge of the painting and skewed to the right, the shapes move from a slight black triangle to two progressively wider greens, the third lighter than the second. The varying sizes invite us to read the shapes as the curved face of a larger form, the black triangle receding from us around a corner or, like the gas station pennants, turning its face away, as the two green shapes come forward and then slip back and off the canvas. The disguised pennants, then, offer a return to both representation and illusion: the two things that Downing had convinced Gilliam to abandon after his 1963 exhibition. Perhaps this is why Gilliam referred to these paintings as “retaliatory”—“retaliating against” painters like Noland and Downing, who seemed to have distilled formal problems down to a single solution.25 Noland “actually talked about whether or not painting could be changed any further along those lines,” Gilliam relates. It is likely that when Gilliam discussed the diagonal-­stripe paintings with him, Noland had been in conversation with Fried about what the critic understood to be a difficulty posed by Noland’s early chevron paintings, which sometimes slip between a literal and a pictorial reading— a slippage that Fried insisted Modernist painters must learn to control. Gilliam’s 1966 pennant paintings, if they had ever entered into his field of interest, may have struck Fried as failing to obtain the correct control over illusive shape in relation to the literal frame. The washed paintings that were to follow, such as Light Fan (pl. 10) and the looser compositions that Gilliam landed upon for the Phillips show, do not answer that problem, either. But neither do they simply jettison it. It is worth briefly rehearsing Fried’s argument regarding literal as opposed to depicted shape in order to see how Gilliam manages to sublimate such Modernist dicta, both here and in his radically transgressive drape paintings. In his return to illusive and representational form, Gilliam entered into the discourse on literal versus pictorial shape that Fried was at that time developing and would publish in November 1966 as “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings.” Explaining the significance of Stella’s shaped canvases, Fried advances the claim that Modernist opticality is best understood in relation to shape, both depicted (that is, painted forms within a pictorial composition) and literal (that is, the material shape of the canvas itself ).26 Fried contends that shape alone could contain the new optical illusionism that resulted from High Modernist painting’s reduction to “eyesight alone.” By attending to shape, Modernist painters like Stella and Noland were able to prevent opticality from lapsing into either a “traditional” or “naïve” illusionism of the pictorial past, or into a merely phenomenal experience. A difficulty arose, for Fried, when Noland began to center unitary, depicted shapes on large swaths of unprimed canvas—a symmetry that tended to treat the canvas and frame as a neutral background and, thus, as merely incidental or secondary to the image as a whole.27 Krauss, who agreed with Fried on this point, offers a cogent description of the effects of such canvases, which tend to read either as literal surface or as “bottomless focused space,” a wavering or switching in vision over which Noland seemed to have no control.28 So, for example, in chevron paintings like Morning Span of 1963,

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one can read the “nested” chevrons as either receding into the distance and the white canvas on either side as a ground of “unlimited remoteness,” or one can attend to the canvas—emphasized in Noland’s application of thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas—as a “literal” surface, an object-­quality that subverts the illusion otherwise established by the receding chevrons.29 Fried claimed that Noland’s early chevrons, in their lack of purposeful attention to the outlying structure, failed to “hold as shape” and tended, instead, to “merely . . . have one, like any solid object in the world.”30 The early target and chevron paintings seem at times to simply have a shape as a painting has a frame, in Fried’s reading. That frame is merely incidental to pictorial meaning; in this case, the shape of the painting “is an object in the world—an object whose relevance to our experience of the painting is not clear.”31 Equally precarious, for Fried, was Noland’s later decision to “subvert” the edge of the painting in the extremely attenuated, diamond-­shaped canvases and the laterally extended striped paintings of the late 1960s. Some of these works also failed to “hold as shape” in the manner in which the colors seem to “vibrate” out of the limits of their framing edge. Those paintings struck Fried as being at risk of drifting into a merely optical play, thus failing to pre­sent the viewer with opticality as a disciplinary problem, as opposed to a phenomenal experience. The result is “that the physical limits of the support are overrun, indeed all but dissolved, by the painting’s illusionistic presence.”32 We cannot “hold” them as unitary visual statements before our eyes, and the relation between literal and depicted space is lost. While Fried’s assessment of Noland’s project may seem negative in its tenor, the critic actually viewed such works as successful—a perceived success that is telling of the way Fried expected opticality to make sense for viewers. For Fried viewed Noland’s works not as failing in their struggle with the painting’s edge, but as succeeding in making the necessity of that struggle apparent as a problem within the discipline of Modernist painting. They make the painting’s potential literalism and illusionism “perspicuous,” as Fried was fond of saying, and in that perspicuity establish it as a medium, a “form,” as he terms it in the essay’s title, for future investigations in Modernist painting, as later paintings by Stella and Olitski would prove it to be.33 This is what I take Fried to mean when, in “Shape as Form,” he calls Stella’s investigation into the “viability of shape” therapeutic, an act that worked “to restore shape to health.” Fried claimed that Stella restored shape as a problem in relation to which painting could have meaning, could literally take “form” for the viewer. Fried describes shape, like opticality, as one dynamic strain in contemporary painting’s reprise of the formal issues of the past. It is a “form” or medium within which Fried saw painting as capable of asserting itself meaningfully.34 Gilliam’s turn away from his diagonal-­stripe paintings does not strike me as having been driven by such concerns. His description of the pennants, along with his compelling account of discovering Green Slice, demonstrates a desire to find a form or medium capable of moving him beyond Noland’s and Fried’s

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strictly historicist understanding of pictorial meaning. Indeed, the fact that the already-­made reference is “disguised” challenges such a project. The pennant reference is too personal, too private, to take “form” in and for the Modernist field. The “disguised structure” provided by the pennant form points not to an ever receding history of Modernist practice, but to the literal space of the streets. The extrinsic relation that obtains through this literal reference point was important to Gilliam, as he navigated not only the cultural expectations of restrictive Modernist form, but also the social imperatives of the Black Arts Movement. Both structures of expectation have to be in view in order to understand Gilliam’s truly ambiguous occupation of both illusive and literal space. In 1969 Gilliam, along with Richard Hunt, Jacob Lawrence, Tom Lloyd, William T. Williams, Hale Woodruff, and Romare Bearden (who acted as moderator) participated in “The Black Artist in America” symposium held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in conjunction with the controversial exhibition “‘Harlem on My Mind’: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.”35 The symposium took place against the backdrop of a highly visible Black Arts Movement, which placed the legibility of racial identity at the center of Black discourse and practice.36 The symposium unfolded a dialogue across three generations of Black Modernist artists, concerning whether it is necessary to make work that is legible as “Black Art”—which is to say, as made by a Black author. The transcript of the conversation that ensued offers is a crucial account of the problems being thought through by Black artists working in predominantly abstract Modernist idioms at the end of the 1960s. The “Harlem on My Mind” exhibition should be regarded—as Thomas Hov­ ing, the Met’s director, made clear in his introductory note to the museum Bulletin where the symposium proceedings were published—as an atonement for the Met’s historical exclusion of both Black artists and Black audiences. However, instead of functioning as the first step toward a truly integrated approach to the history of art and its exhibition, the exhibition was based on an assumption of seemingly insurmountable difference: that Black society, and its cultural artifacts, are deeply, ontologically separate from White society and culture. As Hov­ing described it, the exhibition was meant “to convey the most difficult of things, a cultural and historical experience, a total environment—one particular world, in fact, which has been known intimately only to the Black people of New York City—Harlem.”37 The result was a sociological and ethnographic survey of the people of Harlem, which took the form of photographic documentation and notoriously excluded all visual art, with the exception of the photographs by James Van DerZee of middle-­class life during the Harlem Renaissance. The participants in the symposium were clear that they viewed the exhibition as a failure. Chief among the concerns they discussed was the question of whether there was something analytically distinct about Black culture—a distinction that Hoving appeared to take for granted. As Woodruff, one of the older participants, put it toward the end of the conversation, the participants felt the

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question needed to be asked as to whether, independent of “sociological” considerations, “Black art” can be understood as “something that is different in its structure and formal manifestations.” Whether, that is, “Black art . . . really does have some particular special form” (258). This question necessarily circled around authorship: how and whether works can be read as “Black” is a question of whether they are legible as having been made by a Black author, a question that, in turn, requires a more general consideration of the legibility of authorship as such. Early on in the conversation Tom Lloyd, a light artist and sculptor, chafed against the other participants’ unwillingness to forge a united front advancing a Black art made for Black audiences. Lloyd was immediately pressed to define what he meant by Black art—whether it simply meant “made by a Black artist” or required the additional criteria of being made within and for “the Black community.” When the hard-­edge abstract painter William T. Williams implied that Lloyd’s work does not bear the mark of that community, Lloyd replied, “It’s related [to the Black community] because I’m Black, and I know where my feelings lie” (448). When Williams pushed back with a claim that the concept of Black art must involve “something in which the forms are uniquely Black,” Lloyd responded that “we’re not talking about forms necessarily.” What Lloyd wanted to address, rather, was “communication”: “It’s like how you feel and what you’re doing,” Lloyd continued, stating that his work was not necessarily identifiable as “being Black,” but that it qualified as such by its relation to him as its author (249). This provoked Gilliam to ask whether there was “a specific form of art that a Black artist does that should be immediately identifiable.” Lloyd responded that he was concerned to promote the Black artist, but not necessarily an identifiable “Black art.” He was not, in other words, interested in restricting the look or nature of art made by Black artists—the “work could take any form,” as Romare Bearden summed it up (250). Even Lloyd, who strongly advocated for an exclusively Black art made for a Black audience, readily admitted that what made the work Black was its relation to him and his community: two essential factors, without which the work’s relation to race goes missing. A work that reads as having been made by a Black artist, without such extrinsic markers, “hasn’t been done,” Williams asserts (255). The discussion of authorship versus form indicates that Modernist form was not expected or trusted to carry markers of its author; by virtue of its being Modern, the work necessarily transcends the specificity of its author. There was a general agreement among the participants that if there was such a thing as a Black sensibility or, as Gilliam put it, “personality,” in American culture, it had mainly taken nonvisual forms: as literature, theater, and music (256). Indeed, the Black Arts Movement predominantly involved media outside the visual arts. The theater theorist Larry Neal, for example, did not mention visual artists in his list of practitioners in his influential text of 1968, “The Black Arts Movement”: “dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists.”38 The Black arts collective AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Rele-

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vant Artists) came to a similar conclusion in the late 1960s when they came together on Chicago’s South Side. As founding member Gerald Williams put it, “We came to the realization that there was not the existence of a consistent, unequivocal, uniquely Black aesthetic in visual arts as there was in other disciplines, notably music and dance.”39 In their desire to promote a visual aesthetic that was suffused with “identification, purpose and direction,” the group cultivated clearly legible forms that would be immediately identifiable in terms of both content and authorship.40 The AfriCOBRA name alone is an indication of how foundational that legibility was to them: they were “bad relevant artists.” Without relevance to the community for whom the work is made, it does not make any difference how truly “bad” you are. This is made clear in the oversized paintings of Jeff Donaldson, who founded AfriCOBRA, along with Williams, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, and Barbara Jones-­Hogu (fig. 5.6). Donaldson, who favored large-­scale figures, which often dissolved into rhythmic patterning and abstract design, declared in 1969 that the legible image was central to the AfriCOBRA mission: “Check out the image. Words do not define/describe relevant images. Relevant images define/describe themselves. Dig on the image.”41 As Margo Natalie Crawford put it, “AfriCOBRA art never becomes illegible even as it makes use of the abstract. When we look at the collective’s art their use of abstraction is often the use of color that begins to overshadow shape, but the abstraction is always partial—the shapes still matter in a clear and direct manner.”42 The relation between abstract design and legible content can be seen in paintings such as Donaldson’s Wives of Sango (1971), whose subject could not be clearer: three Black women with natural hair, all of them armed, the title of the painting stenciled in silver foil along the bottom edge. If the work references its author, it is mainly to declare that he is a Black artist, fulfilling the poet Etheridge Knight’s imperative that the Black artist “must hasten his own dissolution as an individual.”43 Neal characterized this as “a radical reordering of the nature and function of both the art and the artist.” That “radical reordering” demanded that each artist subvert his or her individuality to “the collective conscious and unconscious of Black America.”44 Rather than asserting their individual personality, it was much more pressing that artists communicate with and work within the community than explore their individual specificity—a quality that Knight associates with the “decaying structure” of the “Western aesthetic tradition.”45 Representational content went hand in hand with the demand that individual artists subvert their specificity to a larger community. Neal, for example, distinguished this community-­driven aesthetic from what he calls “protest” art, which he described as looking beyond Black audiences and their immediate needs. In contrast to protest art, Neal celebrated a Black art created exclusively for the Black community.46 It is exactly this insistence on communal conformity that Darby English confronted in his book on Black Modernists working abstractly in the year 1971. Criticizing what he terms the “representational imperative” that dominated the Black Arts Movement, English insists that Modernist abstraction offered Black artists a deviant, even a “queer,” alternative to the con-

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F ig u re 5 . 6 . Jeff Donaldson, Wives of Sango, 1969. Mixed media, 36 × 24 in. National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. Courtesy of Jeff Donaldson estate and National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC.

straining demands of a “racialist” politics.47 Arguing for the positive attributes of abstract Modernism’s “ambivalence” toward legible politics (or a politics of legibility), English celebrates Modernist painters’ emphasis on individual over community imperatives. In direct contrast to the goals of the Black Arts Movement, English argues, Modernist aesthetics provided “a space of freedom within black American culture.”48 “Modernism,” English contends, “offered a vividly

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practicable alternative to a mandatory collectivism of thought, desire, and action.” That alternative allowed for something of the specificity of the individual in their “always possibly nonconforming efforts” to be the medium through which relations are established, as opposed to overarching social structures such as the outward markers we bear on our bodies.49 Both abstraction’s “semantic openness” and late Modernism’s pointed move away from the body can be seen to have offered artists a mode of signification that defied the imperative of tethering aesthetic value to markers of an author’s identity and difference.50 However, as the tenacious invocation of artists’ race and gender in art writing demonstrates, whatever freedoms Modernist abstraction might seem to hold out, “the norms of recognition,” to use Judith Butler’s language, continue to operate in the reception and critical framing of works of art.51 To whatever extent artists explore and exploit the ambiguities of authorial presence and attempt to demonstrate its rhetorical work, we (the viewers, the arts community, the institution, and so on) continue to seek that author out in their specificity. Both Frankenthaler and Noland, if my readings are correct, took on that specificity, in Frankenthaler’s case, as a problem to be analyzed, and, in Noland’s case, as a condition to be exploited. Their works exemplify the adeptness with which some late-­Modernist painters dealt with the enclosures that always already enframe identity. Their radically abstract paintings do not so much demonstrate the freedoms abstraction allows. They “articulate” the social and disciplinary norms against which “individuality” takes form.52 Those norms, as the framing of the art of most women and people of color makes clear, cannot be bypassed. Whether in the form of exclusions from institutional spaces or restrictions placed on the possibilities of signification, the “epistemic and political regimes” that make sense of identity never cease to operate, however constructed and mythological artists and theorists prove identity to be.53 Modernist discourse and practice, far from providing artists with a practical “space of freedom,” are disciplinary formations fundamentally reliant on conventions and norms to make and maintain their identity as such. Gilliam’s work does not challenge Modernism’s normative nature. But neither does it simply assimilate itself to those norms. For the rest of this chapter I will discuss Gilliam’s occupation of the literal space in which such identificatory operations function, which is to say, not the space of abstraction and figuration, but the physical and conceptual space into which the abstract work is retrospectively folded. Gilliam’s use of already-­made references, incorporation of pictorial illusion through the physical activity of folding, and move into architectural space, necessarily include the site of reception. While they take (on) form in this literal space, Gilliam’s works are not “literalist” in Fried’s sense. For Gilliam’s paintings refuse minimalism’s unmarked freedoms and instead make use of and demonstrate the ongoing operations of identification in that space.54 But nor do Gilliam’s paintings simply succumb to or enact the Modernist demand that we, as artists and viewers, subject ourselves to its disciplinary imperatives—an alignment of the viewer with the Modernist

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discipline that Noland’s paintings attempt. Rather, Gilliam’s paintings make use of those very operations in order to lay bare the specificity and enclosures that always accompany the work of art and its subjects. In 1982 Gilliam sat down with his soon-­to-­be ex-­wife, journalist Dorothy Gilliam, for a televised interview. Recorded for Black Entertainment Television, the interview is a staid conversation about Gilliam’s work and, largely due to Dorothy Gilliam’s interests, its relation to race. After warming up with a general question about the Washington Color School, Dorothy Gilliam asks whether it has been “difficult for a Black artist working in abstraction,” for, she states, “many people would say that it’s kind of alien for a Black artist to be an Abstract Expressionist.” Gilliam, setting the tone for the rest of the interview, answers: “Well this is a question where the technique comes before subject. I think the real question is painting.”55 After detailing how his interest in watercolor led to his staining technique, Gilliam concludes that “the idea of actually emphasizing technique before subject is a very important aspect of painting because most of us came to realize that it wasn’t that important to be considered a Black artist as it was to be considered an artist.” Dorothy Gilliam responds to this by asking Gilliam whether he doesn’t consider himself to be an “African American artist.” Gilliam repeats his assertion that he thinks “it’s a matter of technique before subject.” He says this quickly and with a smile, acknowledging that he has not given her the answer she was looking for. As Dorothy Gilliam responds, “Well that answers it partly,” Gilliam speaks over her, laughing now: “it answers it totally.” While this exchange is marked by the intimacy that grows up between two people who have known each other for a long time, perhaps have been having the same conversation for a long time, it is also a telling demonstration of Gilliam’s conviction that questions of identity are too easily tethered to issues of subject matter and what he calls “style.” Technique does not necessarily exclude that identity, but it seems, somehow, to mediate the question “are you an African American artist.” Here’s Gilliam from the same interview: I think that you can actually take your references into a studio. . . . I mean I am an artist. I am an Afro-­American. But I think that in the instance when you’re going to begin to delineate the particulars you’re beginning to talk about style and other things. And this is really not literally what I am doing. I’m not practicing style. And I think that I don’t disagree that I’m a Black artist, but I don’t believe that stylistically . . . you’re going to find me linked in every way with every artist who happens to be Black or who may want to work that way.

As the program prepares to cut to break, we can hear Gilliam say to Dorothy: “this isn’t what we set up to talk about.” When Gilliam earlier said that the “real question is painting,” he was perhaps reminding Dorothy that he had come to talk about painting and not about race. In aligning Black art with a style, Gilliam was gesturing toward the impera-

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tives of the Black Arts Movement. When he states that he does not “disagree” that he’s “a Black artist,” he is obviously not suggesting that there is any doubt that he is a Black man who is also an artist; rather, he is saying that there is some manner by which his work may be read as being authored by a Black artist, but, he insists, “this is . . . not what I am doing.” He is not, I think this is to say, making work that is intentionally marked as made by a Black artist. Gilliam’s resistance is not simply to reductionist, or, as Barthes would say, “closed,” readings of his work, though that most certainly is a factor.56 As the interview continues, Gilliam asserts that his chosen process is itself resistant to such closed readings. His technique, which he places before subject, is designed to trouble the very idea of authorship. Once the interview resumes after the break, Gilliam talks at length about the details of this technique, emphasizing his hands-­off approach: “The fact that I don’t use brushes or that I pour means that things happen rather automatically and spontaneous.” Gilliam places special stress on his use of “wet techniques” and staining, which demand that the artist “let the thing go”: “to not to try to control with one’s hands or with one’s mind” the direction of the painting. “So that literally when I paint,” Gilliam concludes, “I’m not painting.”57 In this exchange Gilliam connects the removal of authorial control that results from his staining and folding technique to the question of his visibility as a Black artist. He also links the aesthetic question of authorship to the social question of identity when he insists that his statement, “it’s a matter of technique before subject,” answers Dorothy Gilliam’s question about his status as an “African American artist” “totally.” “Technique before subject”: not simply subject matter, but the seeing and making subject is held at bay, delayed. Technique forestalls the subject, renders subjectivity tardy, or “belated,” as Eve Meltzer phrases it; the subject coming into form not through technique, but after.58 In its belatedness, however, the subject is not erased. Gilliam’s paintings, in “literally” not being painted, point away from their author as a moment of origin, but the subject reenters after its completion. This was perhaps what Gilliam “accidentally” recognized in Green Slice (pl. 11): a materialization of the “afterwardness” of the subject.59 The dating of Green Slice to 1967, re­cords that delay: 1967 is not necessarily the year paint was applied to paper, but the moment the work was “recognized” by Gilliam. In that recognition the painting, like the subject, is made. In this sense, Gilliam’s paintings are best thought of as “anachronic,” as Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel have defined it: “from the Greek anachronizein, built from ana-­, ‘again,’ and the verb chronizein, ‘to be late or belated.’ To anachronize is to be belated again, to linger. The [anachronic] work is late, first because it succeeds some reality that it re-­presents, and then late again when that re-­presentation is repeated for successive recipients.”60 Green Slice demonstrates this belatedness as a painting made after the fact and is (re-­)presented as of the present. When Gilliam moved completely off the frame, that belatedness was extended and formalized. Paintings such as 10/27/69 and Swing (figs 5.7 and 5.8) are not finished, though they may be painted, until they are installed in an architectural space. As such, Gilliam as

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F ig u re 5 . 7 . Sam Gilliam, 10/27/69, 1969. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 140  × 185 in. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

author views them belatedly, only experiencing them as art objects after they are installed. But there is a further belatedness in that with each hanging the painting potentially changes. While Gilliam would loosely document how to hang a work, those directions are quite sketchy, open to interpretation, and highly dependent on their context (fig. 5.9). They “linger” in their potential, in a sense, always ready to be made again. In their potential “unbecoming,” as John Paul Ricco would put it, they are always open for renewal, and it is this element of renewal in the present that makes them not anachronistic (out of time) but anachronic (delayed and repeated in time).61 To return to the language of Nagel and Wood, they “bend” time, presenting the institutions where they are installed, their viewers, and the artist as author with the means to engage again, and again, with the past via its material entrance in the present. In the interview for Black Entertainment Television, Gilliam stated that, in his practice, he operates “in the gap . . . between the work and the person who’s looking at it.”62 We might think of that gap, following Judith Butler’s description of the processes of moral questioning, as the space of deliberation: the site wherein one’s “appropriation” or confirmation of a “set of norms” takes place.63 Gilliam, in working between the painting and the viewer, is not necessarily the “deliberating subject” that Butler argues is requisite to moral questioning or, to rely on a language closer to Gilliam’s scene, to evaluative claims regarding Modernist belonging—claims that, as Fried made clear in the late 1960s, were themselves taken to be moral. Rather, a space for deliberation is opened in Gilliam’s paintings, where both painter and viewer are invited to consider, to deliberate over, the work and its varying modes of belonging and unbelonging—its possible conformity to the category of Modernist painting, for example, or to

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F ig u re 5 . 8 . Sam Gilliam, Swing, 1969. Acrylic and aluminum on canvas, 119 5/ 8  × 283 1/ 2 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the Black Arts Movement, or to theater, and so on. In this sense, Gilliam’s drape paintings might, indeed, be considered “literalist.” Literalist works, according to Fried, rope the viewer into the painting’s signifying processes, including them in a relationship that was, for Fried, fundamentally “theatrical.” Theatrical because asked to act, to bring meaning to the work, instead of being convinced by the work’s already secured meaning.64 Gilliam was acutely aware that this was the result of his move off the frame, stating in the TV interview that his drape paintings trouble the very notion of painting, “working in the space between painting and sculpture.” This mode of working, Gilliam concludes, “could easily be called theater.” It is hard to imagine that Gillam did not mean to evoke Fried in using the term “theater” to describe his paintings. In “Art and Objecthood” where Fried introduced the concept of theatricality, he describes literalism as “perverting”

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F ig u re 5 . 9 . Sam Gilliam, Instructions on how to hang Twist and Knot, 1969. Undated sketchbook. Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

the aesthetic experience in that it redirects the viewer’s experience away from the contained and self-­sufficient work of art and out toward the world. That redirection results in an ambiguity as to what exactly is to be included in the aesthetic experience, which becomes infinitely expandable, capable of including the site of display and all the nuances therein, including the mobile body of the viewer. The work of art that solicits the reactions of individual viewers, according to Fried, denies the ability of the work of art to transcend the atomized taste of individuals in order to enter into a community of meaning-­making. Absent that community, Fried has long argued, a work of art has no real meaning; it is particularized, isolating the viewer in their own individuated field of experience.65 Given Gilliam’s emphasis on “the role of the person who sees the work,” his works might “easily,” as he says, “be called theater.”66 But Gilliam’s paintings, in operating in the space of deliberation, point to and materialize the need for communities of meaning in a manner that Modernists like Fried should find amenable to their understanding of the workings of evaluation. The difference, however—the variance that renders works such as Gilliam’s invisible to critics like Fried—is that Gilliam locates that community in the particular viewers who encounter the work in the present, rather than in the artifact that materializes and preserves the commitments of the past. As fundamentally late-­Modernist paintings, Gilliam’s work does not simply abandon that past, but demonstrates the role played by actors in the present in identifying what is valuable there. I began this chapter with an account of Gilliam’s moving into his studio in downtown Washington, DC, the same month as the protests that erupted in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Several paintings made between 1968 and 1970 refer to the events that engulfed Gil-

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liam’s studio on Johnson Avenue. Paintings such as Rose Rising (1968; pl. 12), Restore (1968), April 4 (1969), Green April (1969), and Red April (1970; pl. 13) all reference the day of King’s assassination or the uprisings that ensued. It is worth considering how these paintings relate to the historical events they name—­ literal events that anchor the paintings’ meaning in time and resist the tropism of Modernist historicism. They are all large paintings with vertically inclined folds staggered across laterally oriented surfaces. The patterning, coupled with their titles, evokes the neighborhood they were made in, which was still shaped by past events: a street still marked by the chaos of those days after King’s murder and a community suspended in mourning. The crisp lines resulting from the folding technique, combined with lyrical passages of poured and dripped paint in Rose Rising (pl. 12) and Restore, for example, call to mind the vertical lines of the buildings washed over by flames and ash during the conflagrations that engulfed Washington during the days following April 4. Restore, in particular, with its grisaille color palette and washes of red, brings to mind aerial views of S Street in flames. The kelly green that stammers across the surface of the polychromatic Rose Rising might be read as a vivid record of the “chartreuse trousers” that Gilliam recalled seeing liberated from their store: a staccato flash across the storefront as the rest of the city vibrates with rage and loss.67 In the margins of an undated and never published biographical narrative, Gilliam jotted the phrase, “the concept of event as painting.”68 In relation to these paintings, the phrase is especially resonant. This is not painting as event, a configuration that evokes Fried’s notion of theatricality. It is event as painting. If we take “painting” as a verb instead of a noun, the implication is that the event itself made a painting. The event, at least in relation to this particular suite of paintings, is specific: the assassination of Reverend King. While that date is named in several paintings, such as the painfully lyrical April 4 and Red April (pl. 13), its significance—political, historical, personal—is necessarily uneven, as the protests themselves demonstrate. In the same manner, one experiences unevenly the paintings that such an event made. The slight abstraction in naming the event—never “April 4, 1968,” but, rather, April 4, Red April, Green April— leaves an opening wherein a viewer can be made or unmade by reference to that event, as their experiences allow. This openness, which unfolds in and as literal relation, is reinforced in the shape of the painting itself. In 1968, after he had developed the large-­scale, horizontally oriented compositions that include his staining and folding technique, Gilliam began to use the mitered edge—an edge that bevels out at a 45-­degree angle (see pl. 13 and fig. 5.10). With the mitered edge, the surface pushes toward the viewer, even while the face of the painting extends beyond the framed edge. The inclusion of this beveled edge can seem to emphasize the face of the painting as it pro­jects forward and off of the wall, in a manner similar to Stella’s use of thickened stretcher bars. Beginning with his Black Paintings, Stella worked with thick stretcher bars, the width of which was mirrored in the stripes that made up the composition. Stella stated that he hoped the effect would be the appearance that the face of the painting is illusively floating away from the gallery wall.69 136 | C h ap t e r F i v e

Figure 5.10. Sam Gilliam, detail of Red April, 1970. (See pl. 13.) Acrylic on canvas, 110 × 160 in. Gift of the Longview Foundation and Museum purchase. Stanley Museum of Art, The University of Iowa, Iowa City. © 2020 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Gilliam’s beveled edge differs from Stella’s hovering surfaces, however, in that it slides diagonally down and away from the surface, making the edge highly visible and enunciating what Stella’s paintings hide: the contiguity of the pictorial surface, including whatever values might be seen to have accrued there, and the literal spaces it occupies. While Fried argued that Stella’s dalliance with literalism was ultimately defeated in his maintaining a focus on the face of the painting and on pictorialism, Gilliam made that edge a visible and meaningful part of the surface’s extension, allowing it to figure the painting’s “transitive” nature.70 These paintings, like their titles, slip into the space of the literal. This is the case not simply because the shaped canvas extends the picture plane, but also because the viewer becomes unstuck from their traditionally allotted, static site directly in front of the painting. They are prompted to move around the work, to view it as a whole, edges and all. As such, these paintings, in the specificity of their titles and their literal shape, can be said to be “conscious of being beheld,” which, as Fried argued in Absorption and Theatricality, is a crucial indicator of a work’s “failure” to defeat the theatrical.71 They are seemingly conscious and accommodating of a mobile viewer, who occupies both space and time, acquiring, like their author, a specificity according to their place in it. In their transitivity the April paintings demonstrate that history is always figured in relation to the present and that such a relation cannot help but be variably experienced. As with the drape paintings, this historical ambiguity arises in and through Gilliam’s provocative handling of the frame. Gilliam’s stretched and folded April paintings displace the frame just as emphatically as the drape paintings. But while the drape paintings remove the 137 | E v e n t a s P a i n t i n g

frame, the mitered-­edge paintings render it: the frame, in the beveled-­edge paintings, takes on the function of a trait or trope. As trait, the frame is included as a symbolically resonant component of the painting, a rendering that relies, in part, on the fact that the pictorial edge had taken on a new authority in High Modernist discourse, as Fried’s writings on Stella demonstrate. In Fried’s thinking, Stella was the first to figure the frame as trait. In the Black Paintings, the painter took a literal, physical aspect of the pictorial object—the shape of the framed edge—and turned it into form, which is to say, a meaningful, as opposed to incidental, component of a pictorial statement. For Fried, however, Stella’s figuring of shape as form was productive of a singular, historically specific meaning: that, by the late 1960s, literal shape was a formal issue that needed to be “acknowledged” as such in order to maintain conviction in Modernist painting’s viability in the present. Through that pictorial acknowledgment, shape was made into an “object of conviction,” as opposed to one literal object among others.72 Gilliam also acknowledges the frame, but not in order to bolster a singular Modernist identity. Rather, Gilliam lays it bare as an always already operating device for the articulation of identity and meaning as such. Gilliam’s treatment of the frame as figure, this is to say, does not acknowledge it in order to fold it back into a conventional set of Modernist norms. Instead he shows how it itself works to uphold those norms, a process that he achieves by rendering painting to the frame, so to speak, demonstrating that painting owes its identity as such to the frame. In using this debt-­related language, I mean to invoke Jacques Derrida’s description of the passe-­partout in The Truth in Painting. In French, the picture mat, which lies between picture and frame, is called the passe-­partout—a phrase that also means “master” or “passkey”: a means of passing “everywhere” or “wherever.” Derrida uses the passe-­partout as an “emblem” in his own rendering of the slipperiness of meaning: its tendency, even when framed, to “open out wide.”73 The passe-­partout, as a liminal or intermediary passage from picture to frame, demonstrates the “work” that goes into framing. As extended edge, it “works the frame, makes it work, lets it work, gives it work to do.”74 Which is to say, the passe-­partout is a figure for the frame as operation. Gilliam’s beveled edge evokes the passe-­partout in terms of both look (as Derrida says, “the internal edges of the passe-­partout are often beveled”)75 and function: that beveling “works the frame” and demonstrates that it has work to do in order to secure (“legislate,” in Derrida’s words) the “indivisible” identity that is painting.76 With their beveled edges and oblique references to current events, Gilliam’s paintings function as passe-­partout, demonstrating the precarious nature of High Modernism’s “reassuring” borders, which need to be ceaselessly maintained in order not to be “dislocated,” in Derrida’s language, or “perverted,” in Fried’s.77 Gilliam’s figural approach to the frame is reinforced when literal edge reappears in his pictures as trace—another word for “trait”—as an iterative line anchoring the field’s composition. This can be seen clearly in Rose Rising (1968; pl. 12) and Red April (1970; pl. 13). Both are large, horizontally oriented paint-

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ings more than 10 feet wide. Their laterally stretched fields are divided into several areas by vertically inclined lines that are made by folding the canvas while wet with paint. In both Rose Rising and Red April those lines skew away from the strictly vertical edge—in the case of Rose Rising, tilting around 25 degrees away from the rightmost edge and, in the case of Red April, tilting both right and left, staggered in a staccato fashion across the picture’s surface. In this way Gilliam replicates the literal edge as figural form in a manner not unlike the stripes in Stella’s Black Paintings, which echo the width of their stretcher bars. But in their misaligned relation to the edge, Gilliam’s vertical traces maintain a more ambiguous relation to the literal shape of the canvas—an ambiguity that diverges from Stella’s very clear mapping of the framing edge into the center of the canvas. Prior to Stella’s “therapeutic” treatment of shape, the edge was exterior to painting, related only incidentally to the Modernist discipline. In recognizing or acknowledging it, Stella formalized the frame, making it a “property” of “painting alone,” interpolating it into the Modernist identity. Gilliam’s edges, in contrast, continue to function as such: as extrinsic, medial structures. Gilliam’s traced lines stand obliquely to the frame’s orthogonal edges. They do not simply repeat that edge, they render it. Like Frankenthaler’s incised line, which Fried deemed her main “failure,” Gilliam’s edge breaks the unity of the pictorial whole and marks difference.78 In Rose Rising (pl. 12) that difference appears in multiple ways. Most obviously, difference arises as a division of the picture plane into around seven distinct panels or pleats, which are created by folding the canvas over onto itself. In addition to producing discrete, figural areas, the creases give rise to an illusion of depth. Areas that are more deeply saturated with uniform color, such as around the darker, purple panel to the left, recede into an illusive background, while lighter areas, where pigment was pulled away in the folding process, read as figure standing in front of that ground. The shifts in value between the panels enunciate this play with depth of field in Rose Rising. The right two sections, formed out of a washed-­out, yellowish hue, stand forward from the rest of the canvas, creating a repoussoir effect, which frames and pushes back the more deeply saturated fields. The difference between figure and ground is further cultivated in the inclusion of more surface-­bound passages of paint, such the kelly green that is more thickly applied and seems to sit atop the stained areas. Even this green, which pushes forward toward the viewer, has been subjected to a folding process. The green oval at the bottom left, for example, is mirrored at the right, providing a record of the canvas having been doubled over at some later point. High-­hued and more thickly applied to the canvas, the kelly green, as well as some passages of orange, introduces a temporal ambiguity to the painting. Though these areas pro­ject out, they are, upon further inspection, woven throughout the composition, making it difficult to discern when and how they entered there. This temporal ambiguity is a final and important difference materialized by Gilliam’s process. Temporality, as Nagel and Wood argue, refers us to an author. Each mark,

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each edge, makes a difference, creating a “caesura in time”: a moment before and after authored action.79 However, because of the ambiguous interconnection of material surface and illusory depth that Gilliam achieves in combining folding with staining and painting, it is unclear how exactly, in what sequence, that temporality unfolds. Gilliam’s authorial actions do not simply move forward in time, from conception to completion. They are iterative, responsive, and belated, as opposed to originary. As such, Gilliam’s process maintains an anachronic ambiguity even as it marks time. While this recursive approach to making is present in many of the works that followed his discovery of Green Slice, the belatedness of Gilliam’s arrival as both subject and author is literalized in the April paintings. Red April (pl. 13), an enormous painting more than 13 feet wide, is exemplary in this regard. Even more emphatically than Rose Rising, Red April uses edge to engender difference, incising form and intimating depth. The stained creases are stark, etching deep furrows into the canvas, as can be seen in the crisp line that marks out a panel in the right fifth of the painting. Despite a more purposeful distinction between figure and ground in Red April, the largely neutral hues that make up the painting’s background maintain a uniformity across the surface. That uniformity helps to enunciate Gilliam’s disruptive reentry into the already-­made field with thrown passages of red and yellow paint—clear traces of his authorial presence. While fold and the trace exist on the same physical plane here, they maintain figurative separation. This coordinated coupling makes clear something that is true of all traits: that they have two sides, two methods by which they make a difference. The trait, as line or edge, is at once enclosure and opening; it rends the plane in two even as it “holds together” what it rends. This points to a crucial feature of the trait (the trait of the trait, if we want to get Derridean about it): that it is always relation. The trait “never appears, never itself, never for the first time.”80 It “opens,” but it does not initiate. While the passages of thrown paint in Red April signify a definitive authorial action, they are not a simple origin. They are responsive and iterative—even reiterative, if one considers their obvious reference to Pollock. Those flung passages open upon and open up an already composed field, carrying along an emotional weight that they evoke in their gestural application and red color. They enact a relation and show history, whether as abstraction (Modernism’s uninterrupted arc) or as material event (the civil rights movement in the United States and the violent resistance it repeatedly met), to be worked by the frame. The date of this painting, 1970, is significant in this regard. Made more than a year after King’s assassination, Red April returns to that event belatedly. But Gilliam’s action is not merely backward looking, regarding or memorializing a closed event. One of several paintings that Gilliam made over a three-­year period, between 1968 and 1971, Red April operates as a kind of passe-­partout onto the event it almost names: it points to a politically and personally resonant historical moment, but “opens wide,” expressing a desire to frame, even drawing a frame, while never becoming frame. Here, the chiasmatic ambiguity of

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“event as painting” is at play: the event makes the painting; the painting figures the event. This recalls Jean-­Luc Nancy’s deeply anachronic characterization of the drawing process as opening “oneself to the desire of (letting oneself ) being drawn to the outside.”81 In this process the “ordering of causes completely withdraws.”82 Gilliam was clear, as his interview with Dorothy Gilliam demonstrates, that he sought a new encounter with painting as an author. This is confirmed in statements such as the one that stands as an epigraph to this chapter, in which Gilliam claims he once heard a young man say that he “started to paint when [he] learned to kill [his] hands.” Gilliam recalls this statement in a 1984 interview, after describing the temporal delay that results from his folding technique, stating that he would wait for the various “surfaces” produced in that process “to be revealed by the light of the gallery.”83 Coupled with an understanding of his protracted pictorial process, such a statement reveals that Gilliam approached framing itself as an authorizing operation. Gilliam the artist, himself framed by the various fields with which he was identified—the Washington Color School, High Modernist painting, the Black Arts Movement—operates as a frame through which his paintings are viewed and reviewed. But for the paintings, as anachronic objects, framed and framed again for “successive recipients,” no framing is final.84 This recalls Tom Lloyd’s insistence that his work can be identified as “Black” only by virtue of its being framed in and for specific publics. For Lloyd, the value of his work is confirmed and maintained only there: in the community that recognizes it, that frames it.85 In figuring the frame and allowing frame to figure painting, Gilliam’s paintings reveal the frame to be an internal feature operating within the Modernist dispositif. Whereas the operations performed by Stella’s Black Paintings transmuted frame into form, Gilliam’s paintings figure frame as practice, as an always unfolding operation directed toward multiple ends.

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6. Conclusion: Gridlocked

The grid expresses innocence.

— A g n e s M a rt i n

The grid expresses. Such a statement challenges what is most often said about the grid and its role in defining the Modernist identity. The grid is supposed to bar expression, act as a barrier to content, guaranteeing in the process Modernist art’s autonomy. In the literature on Agnes Martin, the grid is repeatedly described as both silent and self-­effacing, a path out of expressionism’s subjective pitfalls, its ostensible reliance on a mythology of a prior, atomized self. If Martin’s grids are described as expressive in any way, it is via their very “ineffability,” as Annette Michelson described the paintings in 1967—a move beyond language that has encouraged reading her paintings in phenomenological terms.1 In their “escape from language,” as Prudence Peiffer has put it, Martin’s paintings stand opposed to the expressionist project, offering an egress from its missteps.2 It is, more often than not, Martin’s recourse to the grid that enables this thoroughly postexpressionist reception of her paintings. Yve-­Alain Bois, for example, in his study of Martin’s close friend Ellsworth Kelly, argues that regulating structures, such as the grid, provide a means for the “a-­compositional” and, as such, a vehicle for “deflating the ego.”3 Bois would perhaps argue that Martin took a cue from Kelly in this regard, relying on the grid as an externalized form, an “already made” matrix, that can be consistently turned to as a strategy for “avoiding invention,” avoiding composition, and, it follows, the self that drives such intentional structures.4 The grid, the final ambiguity to be dealt with in this book, is among the most tenacious unities appealed to in the “death of the author” narrative. The stability of that unity and the force it brings along with it may explain why it took Martin’s paintings so long to attract the critical attention they have only recently received.5 In the 1960s, the grid seemed to function as a kind of signal of an artist’s rejection of the centered, authorial self, driving the expressionist ethos of the 1950s. If we return to Brian O’Doherty’s issue of Aspen magazine, in which Barthes’s essay was first published, the visual components submitted by Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Tony Smith, and O’Doherty himself make use of the

Figure 6.1. Insert for issue 5+6 of Aspen (1967), featuring O’Doherty’s table of contents, including O’Doherty’s essay in the guise of the structural linguist “Sigmund Bode.” Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

grid’s predetermined, repeatable structure (see figure 0.2 on p. 6). O’Doherty’s editorial introduction was itself laid out in grid-­like fashion, with two horizontally oriented categories, “movements” and “themes,” placed atop two columns of subcategories, organized vertically (the movements including constructivism, structuralism, and conceptualism, and the themes including time, silence, and language; fig. 6.1). This schematic, gridded framing of the postexpressionist work of art, which includes O’Doherty’s own coded presentation of the contents of the book as “B=LuFuRuBuD” (fig. 6.2), offered a visual analogue to Barthes’s theoretical dictation of the author’s death.6 The prevalence of the grid in O’Doherty’s minimalism issue supports Eve Meltzer’s claim that in the 1960s the grid had come to function as the ultimate emblem of what she terms “the structural imaginary.” Describing structuralism as a kind of lingua franca of academic and cultural thinking in the 1960s, Meltzer pre­sents the grid as materializing some of the most commonly shared characteristics of the structuralist “fantasy”: “self-­restriction; arbitrariness; that disciplined, autonomous, device-­like quality; . . . the proposition of absolute visibility that defines the very conditions of the phenomenal world; the very unquestionability of the laws that govern the system; and the proposition that ‘if law is anywhere, it is everywhere’—these are the conditions of the grid.”7 In its

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Figure 6.2. Insert for issue 5+6 of Aspen (1967), featuring O’Doherty’s table of contents, which begins with the formula “B=LuFuRuBuD.” The letters stand for the mediums represented (F = “film,” R = “records,” B = “boards,” etc., and u stands for “and”). Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

structuralist uses, the grid is taken to act as a barrier not only to subject matter, but also, and I would say primarily, to the subject.8 Given the timing of Martin’s grids, it is not hard to regard her work as somehow participating in the lead-­up to this so-­called “anithumanist turn.”9 But Martin’s paintings, as is true of all the paintings discussed in this book, cultivate an ambiguity. Whether the reference is to her biography—the landscapes of her youth, her Protestant past, her relationship to women, her struggle with mental illness—or to the expressive nature of her hand-­drawn lines, Martin herself is persistently read back into her paintings. A reference to Martin as author that persists despite simultaneous claims that Martin’s paintings assert “a kind of egolessness.”10 This concluding chapter offers a further unfolding of authorial ambiguity in the field of Modernist painting by focusing on the work of Martin, a figure situated at its margins. Despite that marginality, Martin repeatedly asserted an intention to position herself at the field’s center, explicitly identifying as an Abstract Expressionist, the style that was most identifiable as Modernist in the years when Martin was trying to cultivate a visibility as an author within its field. Martin was born the same year as Pollock and so was of the same generation as the core artists whom we have come to associate with the New York School.

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But despite this generational commonality, her work is mainly distinguished in terms of both technique and attitude from Abstract Expressionism.11 This is due as much to Martin’s temporal and spatial remove from the New York scene as to the fact that her paintings do not easily fit within the most publicized aspects of the expressionist ethos. Martin, who split her time between New Mexico and New York City from the mid-­1940s into the 1950s—only living in New York without break from 1957 to 1967—did not arrive at a pictorial idiom that satisfied her until 1960. It was then that she began restricting her paintings to a rigid, mainly monochromatic, grid schema. She has repeatedly insisted that these grids be read not in the context of the neo-­avant-­garde, but in relation to Modernist painting: “I’m not a minimalist,” she states matter-­of-­factly in the 2003 documentary With My Back to the World. “I am an Abstract Expressionist. I believe in having my emotions recorded in the painting.”12 In what follows, I take seriously Martin’s claim that she “is an Abstract Expressionist” and consider the role the grid played in enabling that identification.13 Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay “Grids,” one of the most influential and frequently cited essays on the grid in Modernist painting, describes the grid’s “mythic power” as a recursive form in Modernist art. While Krauss asserts that the grid has come to represent “modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse” and to confirm “the autonomy of the realm of art,” she pre­sents the grid as a deeply ambivalent structure.14 That ambivalence is due to the fact that even as it maps the most material dimensions of the pictorial—that is, the flat surface—it simultaneously evokes what transcends that surface: the universal and the spiritual. In its transparency (something you see through), its unbounded nature (as Mondrian makes clear, it is ever expandable), and its radical abstraction (think of the “ineffable” nature of Martin’s grids), the grid does not simply map, it moves: it moves through, beyond, and away. Krauss’s main example of the moving, even affective, nature of the grid is Ad Reinhardt’s black, subtly cruciform paintings. Those paintings, while seemingly obdurate in their materiality, evoke a Greek cross, a metaphoric and spiritual icon. Krauss finds in such works the drama of “spirit and matter” that Modernism’s recourse to the grid exemplifies. As Krauss’s example of the Greek cross makes clear, this drama also unfolds as a tension between abstraction and figuration, glimpsed when something as radically silent as Reinhardt’s black paintings can also function as a symbolic representation. Krauss, perhaps unwittingly, reinforces the drama between figuration and abstraction, word and image, that the grid materializes, when she falls back on the language of representation in her own description of the grid.15 In discussing the Modernist drama of spirit and matter, for example, Krauss argues that artists feel compelled to choose between “one mode of expression and the other.”16 Reinforcing the grid’s potentially representational capacity, Krauss states that the grid offers “testimony” of this drama and acts as both “emblem” and “myth” of the very drama it is said to “mask.”17 All this is to say that in her reliance on representational terms, such as “expression,” “testimony,” “emblem,” the drama

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between spirit and matter, expressive content and material substrate, is not just a relation that Krauss narrates, but a reality that she herself, as an authorial presence in the very Modernist field she describes, expresses. It is curious that even though Krauss is so explicit on these grounds—that the grid itself materializes the Modernist artist’s need to have it both ways—she is said to support a rigid reading of the grid as “geometricized,” nonlinguistic, and “merely flat.”18 It is not simply that Krauss does not have such a rigid reading of the grid in place; it is also that she sees the grid itself as demonstrating Modernists’ inability, or perhaps lack of desire, to promote and pursue the merely material. “The grid’s mythic power,” Krauss writes, “is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).”19 Martin’s early grid paintings realize or, it may even be said, express this dualism. They expand the space of authorship through the very means of its suppression: schematized design. I am interested in the grid in Martin’s paintings as a passage toward, as opposed to away from, the author—a mechanism for its explication and articulation. Like Jack Tworkov, Martin’s working process combined the handmade mark with carefully executed schemata. Also like Tworkov, the labor that goes into that process does not always extend to the final product; that is, it is not productive of spectatorial effects. In its avoidance of such effects, Martin’s works give the impression of being more about honing a practice than producing a product. Indeed, Martin’s turn to the grid format in 1960 may possibly have been driven by her desire to counter responses to the paintings immediately preceding that shift. Her first solo exhibition in New York, in 1958, featured small, softly hued abstractions, with singular, centrally placed forms. Their soft washes create subtle perceptual effects, which invite a quiet and contemplative viewing. In Dore Ashton’s review of the show, she referred to the paintings as “evanescent” and “poetic,” seeing in the earthy washes a sensibility “seasoned on the New Mexican desert.” In her description of the painting This Rain (fig. 6.3), Ashton emphasizes viewer-­based effects: “the squares, in different tones, create the illusion of movement, slipping now forward, now backward in the most subtle of transitions.”20 Ashton’s focus is on the allusive and optical effects of the paintings. The grids that Martin began to make immediately following this exhibition counter both these qualities. They move attention away from both Martin’s biography and the viewer’s phenomenal experience. Though biography and effect remain tenacious unities that historians read into Martin’s works, both go against the deeply ambivalent nature of the paintings she made between 1960 and 1967, which purposefully obfuscate such reference points. I take the ambivalent and dissembling nature of these paintings to be among the effects Martin sought out in the grid. In obscuring both background and effect, the paintings function as a field in which a Modernist position could be sought out. They operate, that is, as both modes of practice—providing Martin with something to

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F ig u re 6 . 3 . Agnes Martin, This Rain, 1958. Oil on canvas, 70 1/ 8 × 70 1/ 8 × 1 1/4 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © 2020 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

do—and markers of belonging, allowing her to position herself within the field of Modernism. Martin’s highly self-­conscious entry into the Modernist field via the grid, that ubiquitous “Modernist icon,” demonstrates the grid’s ability to operate as the very means by which structuralism’s unities could be resisted and pictorialism’s ambiguities cultivated.21 Loosening the grid from its reduced function as an emblem for the “death of the author” is my final demonstration that pictorial Modernism was a crucial site by which the question of authorship could be pursued in and as pictorial practice, as opposed to an ideological shelter guarding against the author’s final passing.22 Martin’s 1963 Falling Blue, while appearing lyrical in its final product, enunciates a restriction: the artist, having first mapped out a grid of twelve equal sections in the interior of a 6 × 6 foot, linen canvas, most likely set about horizontally lining each of those sections in graphite (pl. 14).23 She seems to have worked laterally, dragging a lead pencil across a straightedge in as continuous a motion as possible. Having completed this tightly lined, horizontal pattern, she then traced those penciled lines, I assume freehand, with a small, stiff-­ bristled brush. With the brush carefully loaded with a cerulean blue oil paint, Martin dragged it along the graphite lines until it was time to reload it with more pigment (fig. 6.4). The task would have been time-­consuming, repetitive,

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F ig u re 6 . 4 . Agnes Martin, detail of Falling Blue, 1963. (See pl. 14.) Oil and graphite on linen, 717/ 8 × 72 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky.

tedious. All decisions having been made in advance, there was nothing more to do than fulfill the brief. This protracted, hardly intentional process of making can be understood to locate Martin within the field of Abstract Expressionism. But her path into that field was as much about positioning herself in relation to its centers of power, as about cultivating a practice that could gain visibility therein. While Martin’s paintings might appear to enter that field obliquely, her practice actually took form in relation to its discursive centers. Starting in the early 1940s, Martin lived in New York City off and on, before finally moving there in 1957, at the request of Betty Parsons, her first New York gallerist. Even when not living in New York, Martin was keen to keep up with the activities of Modernists. Her life in New Mexico, where she mainly lived when not in New York, was organized around painting and her search for a workable mode of production. It is important to understand Martin as a self-­aware Modernist, if only to counter the common depiction of her as a kind of benighted spiritualist, functioning beyond reason or self-­awareness. While Martin did, as I discuss below,

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speak of a kind of inspiration that required a silencing of the conscious mind, such statements were almost always accompanied by descriptions of the kind of careful discipline and honed practice that Martin understood to be necessary for achieving such inspiration. “Egolessness,” this is to say, does not equal an inattention to the self. Martin was clear that the egoless practice she struggled to perfect came only after attentive discipline, or what she called “the work” that preceded painting itself.24 Without an understanding of this self-­preparation, it is impossible to regard Martin as a social agent taking up a position within the field of Modernism. Martin claimed that “the possibility of being an artist” arose when she first moved to New York in 1941 to attend Teachers College at Columbia University, because, in her own words, “there were so many people interested [in art] and so many museums.”25 The year 1941 was a pivotal moment in New York’s cultural scene. Two years after the announcement of the Hitler-­Stalin pact and the subsequent dissolution of the Popular Front, 1941 was defined not so much by its turn away from the political objectives articulated in forums such as the American Artists Congress, as by a quiet fading of political interests into the background of Modernist discourse. If Martin was indeed exposed to Modernist art while attending Teachers College, it was most likely the European-­inflected exhibitions that would have been featured in the increasing number of venues for Modernist art in upper Manhattan. Among those venues were the Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Non-­ Objective Painting, the precursor to the Guggenheim Museum, founded in 1939 by Hilla Rebay, both located just a few miles south of Teachers College. During the 1941–42 school year, MoMA hosted exhibitions on Joan Miró and “Indian Art of the United States,” and Rebay curated several exhibitions of abstract painting including late-­Kandinsky expressionism and geometric abstraction.26 There was also, importantly, Betty Parsons’s first curatorial gig, literally around the corner from the Museum of Non-­Objective Painting at 24 East Fifty-­Fifth Street. It is possible that Martin’s first exposure to Parsons, the painter’s first gallerist and the person responsible for moving her back to New York in the late 1950s, was during a visit to Parsons’s first small gallery, housed in the Wakefield Bookshop. There Parsons curated shows for a quickly growing stable of artists that included Joseph Cornell, Saul Steinberg, Theodoros Stamos, and Hedda Sterne.27 In addition to these venues, which themselves attracted an influential constellation of Modernist players, there were several important exhibitions that year, including a “store-­wide” exhibition of key Abstract Expressionists curated by Sam Kootz at Macy’s. Before she ever began to paint, this is to say, Martin assumed the identity of a student of Modernism—an identity that would have been reinforced at the Museum of Non-­Objective Painting and MoMA, both of which took it upon themselves to school a skeptical American public in the history, ideals, and values of Modernist art both at home and abroad.28 Even Taos, New Mexico, so seemingly distant from the Modernist epicenter of New York City, was, in Martin’s words, “an artists’ residence.”29 When she

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moved to New Mexico in 1946 after a period of working odd jobs and wandering, Taos was a well-­connected and internationally known artists’ colony dating back to the first quarter of the twentieth century. During her first stint of living in New Mexico, where she initially enrolled at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, before participating in the Summer Field School of Art in Taos, Martin got to know Georgia O’Keeffe and was associated with a group of Modernist painters, almost all of whom had studied in New York City at some point in their careers.30 The work of Martin’s good friends Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman is exemplary of the expansion of the Modernist field outside centers like New York and Paris. Mandelman, an experimental abstractionist, showed her work in New York City before coming to Taos in 1944, and briefly left New Mexico in the late 1940s for Paris, where she studied with Fernand Léger, got to know Francis Picabia, and familiarized herself with Russian Constructivism.31 Mandelman’s husband, Ribak, a student of John Sloan, also showed his work in New York City before settling in Taos. In addition to Mandelman and Ribak, a good number of the artists with whom Martin would have been associated came to Taos from centers of Modernist discourse and practice, such as the Art Students League, Black Mountain College, and the California School of Fine Arts.32 Martin’s few surviving paintings from this period reflect this community’s embeddedness in the field of Modernist art and her struggle to position herself within it. An untitled work from 1949 (fig. 6.5) is a textbook example of early twentieth-­century nonobjective abstraction. Consisting of just three colors— green, red, and black—the painting is a series of nested, organic forms highly reminiscent of Miró’s late reliefs, as well as of some of Mandelman’s simpler compositions (fig. 6.6). Within the three black forms that sit atop the fields of red and green are pictographic embellishments that resemble a number of Modernist experiments (such as those of Adolph Gottlieb and early Pollock), which were themselves appropriations of the graphic designs identified with Native American art.33 By the time Martin returned to New York in 1951—the year Thomas Hess published his book Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase—to study for her MFA at Teachers College, Pollock and de Kooning had had their first solo exhibitions, the New York School had presented itself to the public in the Ninth Street Show, and Betty Parsons, by then in her own gallery at 15 East Fifty-­ Seventh Street, had several of its key figures on her roster of artists to be exhibited for the 1951 season. Among those artists were Pollock, Lee Krasner, Richard Poussette-­Dart, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Sonia Sekula, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, and Martin’s good friend Ad Reinhardt.34 The solo exhibitions at the Parsons gallery that Martin could have seen included Poussette-­Dart and the first exhibition of Pollock’s black-­and-­white paintings. All this is to say that, by the time she met Parsons herself in New Mexico in 1957, Martin would have absorbed this expanding field of Modernist art and been able to demonstrate her understanding of its history and developments in her own paintings.

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F ig u re 6 . 5 . Agnes Martin, Untitled, c. 1949. Oil on Masonite, 14 × 21 in. Collection of Scott K. Stuart. Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

F ig u re 6 . 6 . Beatrice Mandelman, Segments, c. 1959. Casein, enamel, and pencil on Masonite, 49 × 37 in. Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM. By permission of University of New Mexico Foundation.

By all indications, Martin knew Parsons was an established New York gallerist and had represented some of the most important names in New York, and she was savvy enough to schedule a studio visit with the gallerist, a visit that secured her own position within that field.35 I spend so much time detailing, however speculatively, Martin’s early encounters with Modernist art in order to emphasize her entry into its terms as a knowing subject—a knowingness, it should be noted, emphasized by both her age (born in 1912, she was in her mid-­forties when she finally settled in New York as an artist) and her status as a longtime student of Modernist art (Martin was enrolled in one school or another from 1941 to 1955, a calculated strategy to keep her in studios when she couldn’t afford one for herself ).36 It should be obvious that such knowingness cannot be accommodated by accounts of Martin as a naïve and solitary artist, a natural force working at the margins of commercial and cultural centers. Martin needs, rather, to be viewed as being at the very center of the Modernist field, coming into her identity as an artist, like Frankenthaler and Noland, through a studied relation of its various positions. By the early 1950s, it was a diverse and crowded field, capacious enough to hold both de Kooning and Reinhardt, Rothko and Pollock, as well as the emergent sensibilities associated with the next generation of Modernist painters, and Martin was determined to find her place in it. Martin’s entry into this crowded Modernist field is tractable not just with reference to her biography, but also in terms of her practice. These two dimensions of Martin’s work—biography and practice—cannot be separated out. Martin’s claim that she is an Abstract Expressionist describes not only what she does but who she is; it is a kind of self-­identification. This signals that Martin, like Gorky, in his move into the Modernist role, recognized not just pictorial technique, but also personal identity as key to taking up a position in the Modernist field. The relation between what one does and who one is, was—as I hope this book has shown—a key concern being worked through by Modernist painters in the United States at exactly the moment Martin became interested in their practice. It is significant in this regard that it was not until she switched to a technique that was wedded to the grid schema that she found a satisfactory demonstration of her own identity as a Modernist—as is frequently noted, she destroyed the majority of her paintings leading up to that switch, no longer finding them to be representative of that identity. I propose that what she discovered in the grid was not a formal solution or a satisfactory pictorial effect. Rather she seems to have come upon a practice with which she could satisfactorily fill her time. In other words, the grid was a framework for action, providing Martin with a “rôle,” to return to Rosenberg’s language, by which she could identify herself. This practiced relation to self, which places an emphasis on authorship as a site of inquiry and exploration, was the precedent set by Abstract Expressionism and the source of Martin’s claim that she was herself a member of that group. In her 1972 essay, “Top to Bottom, Left to Right,” Lucy Lippard describes the grid as “a self-­restrictive device by which to facilitate choice.”37 Choice is facilitated by

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reducing the field of play. With the question of what to paint taken care of, Martin could focus on the act itself. The grids filled up Martin’s time in a strikingly different way than the paintings exhibited in 1958 (see fig. 6.3). While these earlier paintings were focused on a simple form and featured the same palette in the same careful washes, there still is a great deal of decision-­making that would have to go into moving from one composition to another: a kind of deliberation over what to paint next. The work in those earlier, minimal paintings took place not so much within a single painting as between multiple paintings, located in the move from one painting to the next, rather than in the protracted process of their making. The grid paintings shift that focus: instead of variation arising between a number of pictorial compositions, differences occur within each individual painting, as each grid is filled in with subtle variation. This is not the same reprieve from compositional complexity that Noland found in serial production, however. Whereas serial motifs, as I showed in chapter 4, allowed Noland to shift his attention from making to viewing, the grid allowed Martin a more concentrated—she would say, contemplative—focus on making. In a manner that recalls Motherwell’s notion of “plastic automatism” and Pavia’s “plastic experience,” Martin used the grid to concentrate and extend practice within the boundaries of making a single painting. The grid might be said, in this way, to have opened a practical “authorship space,” as Pavia called it—a space for Martin to appear as an author within the field of Modernist practice, as well as a pictorial space wherein that occupation could be acted out. Authorship in the grid paintings Martin produced from 1960 to 1967 no longer resulted from causal questions such as “what to paint.” Instead, the grid rephrases the question of authorship as one of how to paint, a question that can only be addressed in and as process, as each grid is laid down and filled in. Beginning with a dissatisfaction with the fruit of her labor and a concern over what to do next—how, literally, to fill the hours in the studio—Martin found a solution, which is present and visible in each of her grid paintings. It is there in each drawn line, each filled-­in cube, or long pull of the brush. The differences that distinguish between grid paintings such as Falling Blue (1963; pl. 14 and fig. 6.4), Grey Stone (1963), and The Islands (1961; pl. 15) register only as subtle shifts in the process of their completion: the difference between daubing, in the case of Grey Stone, or dragging, in the case of Falling Blue, and touching, in the case of The Islands. These are variations that arise mainly in the process of Martin’s touching brush to canvas. Before that process each painting begins in the same way: as a carefully penciled-­in grid. This schema, which simultaneously restricted and facilitated Martin’s action, was itself a product of labor— in some paintings, such as Grey Stone, accounting for the majority of her labor hours. That labor is then drawn out as the grid is slowly filled in: with daubs, lines, touches of paint. Each canvas is the same size: 72 × 72 inches. Each grid is contained within the canvas, buffered by a border. Each painting would have been labor-­intensive, repetitive, and time-­consuming. The hours in the studio

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filled at the exact rate that each of the canvases is filled, with no remainder, no discarded labor or material or ideas. Unlike Tworkov, whose laborious mark-­ making outreaches the communication of authorial content, Martin managed to find a method of production that exactly matched technique to expression. She fulfills a task, bearing the activity of painting along, rather than creating it anew with each act. In locating the significance of Martin’s canvases in the labor that produced them and claiming that they express something like a desire to locate their author in a recognizable field of practice, I am resisting a tendency to locate the expressive quality of Martin’s work in the visible record of her laboring body. Suzanne Hudson, in an appealing turn of phrase, writes that Martin’s 1963 painting Night Sea “solicits the authorial body.”38 Hudson sees that body etched out in the span of the 72 × 72 inch canvas itself: a square that, as de Kooning put it, is large enough to “stretch [the] arms.”39 Hudson finds similar markers of the authorial body in the laboriously constructed surface, and Night Sea, an outlier from this moment in Martin’s production, as Hudson herself admits, is among the most belabored of Martin’s paintings. But presence of hand and reach of arm does not go far enough in explaining Martin’s connection to Abstract Expressionism and its own ambiguous relationship to the laboring body. Indeed, for Martin, six feet is a bit more than a reach of the arm—it is a field to traverse. To understand how her minimally expressive and laboriously made paintings figure that traversal, we need to look further than the seductive surfaces of her abstract grids. We have to look at Martin’s notion of work, which included, but was not limited to, the actual production of works of art. Martin’s notion of “work,” which she also called “self-­expression,” included the preparedness, the habits of mind and body, the social scene and environment that precede not just the picture as a final product, but also the labor that goes into its making. “Behind and before self-­expression is a developing awareness of the mind that effects the work. This developing awareness I will also call ‘the work.’ It is a most important part of the work. There is the work in our minds, the work in our hands, and the work as a result.”40 In Martin’s own list of what is to be incorporated into our understanding of work, she includes “inspiration, the studio, friends of art and the artistic temperament.”41 Martin’s concept of “inspiration,” which she began to talk about in the 1970s after a nearly six-­year break from painting, was filtered through a variety of discursive encounters, from Saint Theresa to Lao Tzu. In her various definitions of the term, Martin equated inspiration with “intuition,”42 “awareness,”43 “consciousness,”44 and “sensibility.”45 While her use of terms such as inspiration is often related to her spirituality—her study of Buddhism, for example, and Christian texts such as The Lives of the Saints—Martin was clear that inspiration should not be taken as something related to a “higher power”: Inspiration is there all the time for anyone whose mind is not covered over with thoughts, and concerns, and used by everyone whether they realize it or not. It

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is pervasive but not a power—a peaceful and consoling thinking even to animals and plants. Do not think it is unique. If it were unique no one would be able to respond to your work.46

As the last sentence makes clear, Martin understood inspiration to be deeply structural. She describes it as functioning something like language, a common structure without which there is not only no community, but also no understanding: “If it were unique no one would be able to respond to your work.” As Martin understood it, inspiration is not a singular, private experience, tailored to each individual, even if it best unfolds in private. It is, rather, a (really the only) path toward a community that may not otherwise be accessible. Elsewhere Martin describes inspiration using this compelling analogy: “Suddenly life’s path is fitted to the ends of our feet. We realize that we are going to do some certain thing.”47 It is not a matter, in other words, of finding the right circumstances within which to be inspired, for we are always already inspired; it is, rather, a matter of cultivating the circumstances to see that we are so. “If you have not had this inspiration,” she goes on to say, “it simply means that it has not registered with you. It is there all the time but our minds are so full!”48 Not only does Martin’s notion of inspiration resonate with Rosenberg’s picture of action painting as a situation in which the artist is “fitted” to an “action system.” Her description of inspiration as something like a common sense that we all have access to if only we are privileged enough to attend to it, also evokes Bourdieu’s notion of the doxa—that pre- or unconscious belief system that is maintained and reproduced by all members of a field, whatever their position.49 If the grid came to Martin as inspiration, it might best be thought of in these terms: as registering her “developing awareness,” her attunement, and, perhaps, it could even be said, her appropriation of the conditions for belonging to the Modernist field. When Martin moved to Manhattan, she was poised to pre­sent herself as a potential member of a community that she had been admiring and studying from afar for some years. How to make herself legible as a player in that field and how to distinguish herself therein were the problems she faced, as her experiments in painting leading up to the grid make clear. The grid, in the end, proved to be the most obvious and legible means of entry, providing Martin’s practice—not just what she produced, but how she produced—with a recognizably Modernist framework, which the paintings immediately preceding the grids failed to attain. In this sense, the work that Martin describes as “behind and before self-­ expression” can be thought of as literalized in her mapping and drawing the grid itself. It is a practice in which Martin engages, with each individual painting, in the process of becoming a Modernist painter. Jonathan Katz, noting how the grid lent Martin a sense of belonging, has convincingly argued that it also served as a device for dissemblance, a mechanism by which her practice—her role as author—could be divorced from her person.50 The grid, Katz contends, was a machine for making the same and for erasing Martin’s difference—­erasing the

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many manners by which she can be and has been identified as queer: her outlier status on the mesas of New Mexico, her age, her gender, her mental state, her sexuality. In providing her with the means by which she could identify herself as an Abstract Expressionist, the grid folded Martin into what Caroline A. Jones has termed the “modernist visibility,” by which Jones signals not just a Modernist way of seeing, but also the means through which objects, acts, and people become visible as Modernist.51 The structural relationship that joins the grid to expressionism in Martin’s paintings demonstrates that at the core of Abstract Expressionist values was, in fact, this desire to express not individuality, but belonging. What was authored in the extravagant paintings of Abstract Expressionism was not heterogeneity of style but a homogeneity of kinship: an expression of a will to conform. This fits with Margarita Tupitsyn’s description of the grid as a “checkpoint to modernity.”52 Its ability to act as a kind of checkpoint or shibboleth is part of its “pragmatic power,” a phrase Maggie Nelson uses to describe the functional work done by the markers of belonging and identity.53 Recognizing the grid’s “power,” its propensity to function as “a veritable agent of abstraction,” as Phillip Brian Harper puts it in his important description of the grid’s “vexed racial politics,” obliges us to revise our understanding of its function as a paradigmatic, Modernist form.54 Instead of regarding it as a structural “ground zero,” an empty construct waiting to arrange subjects according to its already established laws of relation, we are prompted to think of it as a social field already replete with working relations and populated by recognizable members.55 Moreover, considering the grid as an agent that acts on the subject obliges us to describe the individuals that come to occupy it “in a living way.”56 That is, it obliges us to attempt to narrate the actual experience of moving into or being excluded from that always replete, however seemingly generic and unmarked, structure. As Hubert Damisch has argued in his multiple approaches to the grid and its function in the history of culture, the grid “is not a structure, but the possibility of it.”57 In noting his disagreement with Krauss’s description of the grid as obdurate structure, as opposed to structure’s “possibility,” Damisch makes the point that this very disagreement demonstrates the grid’s openness to multiple possible actions: “the very notion of the grid allows for different interpretations, different ways of playing the concept.” The grid is, in a word, ambiguous. It is, following William Empson, open to “nuance,” allowing for “alternative reactions.”58 Attending to those nuances demonstrates the possibilities and opportunities that any given field both holds out and shuts down. But without also attending to the subjects who find themselves positioned therein, the conditions of that opening and closing will remain obscure.59 The subject I have sought out in this book is the artist as author and the details by which they find themselves identified as such within the field of Modernism. A reconsideration of the artist as author opens the door out of a strictly formalist or structuralist study of the work of art in its various relations and into an ethical one—a field of inquiry, as Judith Butler insists, that can only unfold

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in and around a consideration of self-­formation.60 My aim has been not simply to try to get at the biographical truth of such self-­formation within the Modernist field in its postwar, American configuration. It has also been to describe the manner by which artists and critics themselves took up the very question of the self in and as practice.

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Acknowledgments

This book was a long time in the making. It began at the University of Chicago, under the guidance of Darby English, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Matthew Jesse Jackson, but in the many years intervening it has become something else. I’m grateful to each of my mentors for helping to initiate the project and for their continued professional and moral support. I’d like to thank the Archives of American Art, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Kenneth Noland Estate, and the Getty Research Institute for allowing me access to their materials. Sam Gilliam was very generous in discussing his artistic development with me and providing me with images. A lot of credit is also due to the California Institute of Technology for granting me a postdoctoral position with a light enough teaching load to help me finally get this book figured out. I owe my time at Caltech to John Brewer, whose commitment to cultivating exchanges across disciplinary divides made both Caltech and the Huntington Library very special places during his time there. I received professional and financial support from several institutions, including funding from the Buckner W. Clay Dean of Arts & Sciences and the Vice President for Research at the University of Virginia, the university’s Art History Program, and a publication grant from the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists. My colleagues at the University of Virginia provided me with a great deal of personal and professional support. I am particularly grateful to Carmenita Higginbotham, Sarah Betzer, and Douglas Fordham for their professional and emotional encouragement. The book’s final form owes much to the staff at the University of Chicago Press and, in particular, to Susan Bielstein, whose no-­nonsense editorial acumen has made this book not just more readable but more impactful. In its circuitous realization, the book has benefited from the insights and support of multiple friends, including Paul-­Jon Benson, Anna Clark, Kris Cohen (who has read most of the book at least twice), Justin Evans, Rachel Furnari, Sarah Miller, Clinton Tolley, and Jennifer Wild. These friends certainly helped me think through some of the book’s more difficult ideas, but, more than that, they have been persistent in expressing their confidence in me and in providing me with both professional and familial support when I needed it most. Their validation and friendship, coming

from people for whom I have so much admiration, has been one of the driving forces compelling me forward in both my life and my career. Finally, I have to thank my brother, Michael Robbins, who did not contribute much to the content of this book but has done more than anybody else to make me who I am (for better or worse), and my former partner, Joshua Schwartz, who provided me with the love, affection, and admiration that got me through the last decade or so of my life.

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Notes

I n t rod u c t i o n The epigraph to the introduction is from William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 ( July–­September 1946): 477. 1. See Jack Tworkov’s journal entry, dated February 18, 1967, in The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, ed. Mira Shor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 244. 2. Grace Glueck, “Art Notes: Single Channel You Mustn’t Be,” New York Times, February 5, 1967, D29. 3. Robert Creeley, “Feedback: ‘Contemporary Voices in the Arts,” Art International 41, no. 8 (Summer 1967): 19. See Jack Tworkov’s description of the event in The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 235–46; and Roger Horrocks’s in Len Lye: A Biography (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2001), 321–23. 4. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” written in 1956 and published in Art News in October 1958. The essay is reprinted in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 5. Barry Ferrell, “The Other Culture: An Explorer of the Worldwide Underground of Art Finds, behind Its Orgiastic Happenings and Brutalities, a Wild Utopian Dream,” Life, February 17, 1967, 102. 6. Creeley, “Feedback: ‘Contemporary Voices in the Arts,” 19. 7. See Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 237. 8. Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 246. 9. John Cage, “Composition as Process, Part II: Indeterminacy,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 707. 10. Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 240–41. 11. Nagel and Wood refer to the authored work as creating a “caesura in time”: the “authorial performance,” they write, “cuts time into before and after.” Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, “The Plural Temporality of the Work of Art,” in Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 15. 12. Tony Smith, “Interview with Samuel Wagstaff ” (1966), reprinted in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 741–43. 13. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5+6 (Fall–­Winter 1967), nonpaginated. The essay appeared in French the following year in Manteia 5 (1968). Stephen Heath’s translation, published in Image-­Music-­Text in 1978, is slightly different from the text published in Aspen. My citations are from the Aspen version of the essay. 14. “Brian O’Doherty with Phong Bui,” Brooklyn Rail, June 2007.

15. Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 19. 16. O’Doherty later said of his organization of the issue’s contents that “the idea was to establish a network of provisional relationships that could be read in endless combinations, depending on the reader, listener, looker.” See “Brian O’Doherty with Phong Bui.” 17. Barthes, “Death of the Author.” 18. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Grossman/Viking Press, 1977), 270. 19. Barthes, “Death of the Author.” 20. For examples of scholars who credit Krauss with establishing a history of minimalism that is opposed to a private self ostensibly celebrated in Modernist painting, see Frazer Ward, “In Private and Public,” in Vito Acconci (London: Phaidon, 2002), 34; Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Return of the Real: The Avant-­Garde at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 43; and Carrie Lambert-­Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 170. 21. Rosalind Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility: Reflection on Post ’60s Sculpture,” Artforum 11 (November 1973): 46. 22. In her 1973 essay “Sense and Sensibility,” which is among the most frequently cited by scholars who point to Krauss as framing minimalism as a break with Modernist painting, she explicitly rejects the “historical wedge” that stylistic designations like “minimalism” and “post-­minimalism” drive between practices that share a similar philosophical project. She extends that project quite explicitly to Modernist painting in the same essay. See Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility.” 23. Barthes, “Death of the Author.” 24. Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Return of the Real, 36. 25. Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Return of the Real, 43. 26. Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Return of the Real, 43. 27. Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Return of the Real, 40. 28. An important intervention into this narrative is offered by Eve Meltzer in Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Meltzer complicates any uniform alignment of the neo-­avant-­garde with structuralism and demonstrates that the embrace of ostensibly antisubjective methods reveals not a straightforward critique of humanism and subjectivity so much as a careful working-­through of the implications of such a rejection. 29. Art in America, December 1982 and January 1983. For an account of the politicized reception of these artists, as well as a historical analysis of individual painters, see Alison Pearlman, Unpackaging Art of the 1980s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 30. Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” Art in America, January 1983, 80. 31. Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” 80. 32. Craig Owens, “Honor, Power and the Love of Women,” Art in America, January 1983, 7–13. 33. Benjamin Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” special issue: Art World Follies, October 16 (Spring 1981): 39–68. 34. Tom Hayden, The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama (New York: Paradigm Publishers, 2009), 18. 35. Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” 83. 36. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-­Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Douglas Crimp, On the Museum in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Cul162 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 – 8

ture, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Foster, Return of the Real. 37. American scholars were in the process of redefining the neo-­avant-­garde at precisely this moment. Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-­Garde, where the distinction between a historical and a neo-­avant-­garde is proposed, was translated into English in 1984. Bürger argues that the historical avant-­garde’s seeming repetition within a neo-­avant-­ garde was itself proof of the former’s failure—a failure realized through its institutionalization. The authors responsible for articulating the stakes of the neo-­avant-­garde in the 1990s had to combat Bürger’s conclusions regarding its failure. In an influential review of the translation, Benjamin Buchloh argues that Bürger’s theory of the avant-­garde is too rigid, both in its understanding of aesthetics and in its theory of power. Buchloh finds a rejoinder to Bürger’s theory of avant-­garde in the neo-­avant-­garde itself, which Buchloh locates solidly in the late 1960s in artists such as Daniel Buren who, like Bürger, critiques the institutionalization of art. Benjamin Buchloh, “Theorizing the Avant-­Garde,” Art in America, November 1984, 19–21. A similar recuperation of the avant-­garde can be found in the essays of Douglas Crimp and Hal Foster throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Such writers located the neo-­avant-­garde in minimalism and conceptualism of the 1960s and in later, institutional critical practices of Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, and Michael Asher. See Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 69–86; and Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-­Avant-­Garde,” October 70 (Autumn 1994): 5–32. 38. Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 57. 39. Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945–1986, ed. Kate Linker (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), 168. This is an earlier and slightly different version than the essay Foster went on to publish in Return of the Real. 40. Alex Potts, “The Phenomenological Turn,” in The Sculptural Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 41. A notable exception is Catherine Craft’s An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-­Dada and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 42. Philip Pavia, “The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism in Two Parts. Part I The ‘Hess-­Problem’ and Its Seven Panels at The Club, 1952,” It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 4 (1960): 9. 43. As I discuss in chapter 2, the characterization came from Hess’s 1951 book Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (New York: Viking Press, 1951). 44. Philip Pavia, “The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism in Two Parts. Part I The ‘Hess-­Problem’ and Its Seven Panels at the Club, 1952,” 9. 45. Philip Pavia, Club without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, ed. Natalie Edgar (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2007), 91–93. 46. “Jackson Pollock,” Life, August 8, 1949, 42–45. 47. “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight against Show,” Life, January 15, 1951, 34. 48. Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters & Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 259. 49. A wonderful document of those arguments can be found in the transcripts of two sessions held at Studio 35. In those sessions the question of whether and how to “identify” the group’s “relationship to the public” was the primary topic of discussion. See “Artist’s Sessions at Studio 35 (1950),” in Modern Artists in America, 1st ser., ed. Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt (New York: Wittenborn Schulz, 1950). 50. See Michael Corris, Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion Books, 2008); David Craven, 163 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 8 – 1 0

Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-­Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999); Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 51. See T. J. Clark, “The Unhappy Consciousness” and “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Thomas Crow, “Fashioning the New York School,” in Modern Art in a Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 52. One of the best documentations of that ambivalence can be found in the papers of the First American Artists’ Congress, an artists’ organization founded in 1936 under the aegis of the Popular Front of the American Communist Party (CPUSA). The papers delivered at the congress and the debates that ensued focused largely on whether committed practice must bear the legible marks of being so—that is, via socialist realism—or should work through more oblique and decidedly aesthetic means (via abstraction). See Matthew Baigell and Julia Wilson, eds., Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986). 53. Such resistance has been tracked by Daniel Belgrad in The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts of Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 54. Matthew Rampley, “Identity and Difference: Jackson Pollock and the Ideology of the Drip,” Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 2 (1996): 84. 55. Rampley, “Identity and Difference,” 83. Rampley refers to Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. 56. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), ­234–35. 57. William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 39. 58. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 59. Empson defines ambiguity as “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language” (Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1). 60. See, for example, Caroline A. Jones, “The Romance of the Studio and the Abstract Expressionist Sublime,” in Machine in the Studio; Irving Sandler, Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-­Garde Art” (1957), reprinted as “Recent Abstract Painting,” in Modern Art: Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1982), 213–26; Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts of Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Omri Moses, “Jackson Pollock’s Address to the Nonhuman,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 1 (2004): 3–22. 61. Several recent studies of sculpture challenge the periodization of both Modernism and the neo-­avant-­garde by turning their attention away from painting. Those studies include David Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2016); Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two-­Dimensions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015); and Miguel de Baca, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 164 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 0 – 1 3

62. On “dominant” forms, see Raymond Williams, “Dominant, Residual, Emergent,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122–27. Ann Eden Gibson has also acknowledged the repeated reference to “painting” as a dominant medium in early definitions of “Abstract Expressionism.” See her introduction to Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist-­Run Periodicals (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1990), 2–3. 63. Schapiro writes that “all the arts of today have a common character shared by painting.” See “Recent Abstract Painting” (1957), in Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers, 213. In the 1949 essay “Our Period Style,” which attempts to describe the stylistic cohesion among sculpture, architecture, and painting, focusing mainly on sculpture and architecture, Greenberg argued that painting “reveal[ed]” and “transmitted” the “new style” to both architecture and sculpture, claiming that for sculpture, “the new style was created by painting, and painting alone.” See “Our Period Style” (1949), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 323. 64. In the 1952 debate about “Abstract Expressionism,” Lassaw opens by proclaiming that “Pavia gave the Club to the painters.” See Pavia, Club without Walls, 116. 65. James Schuyler, “Poet and Painter: Overture” (1959), reprinted in Selected Art Writing, ed. Simon Pettet (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), 1. See also John Ashbery’s 1968 essay “The Invisible Avant-­Garde,” which looks to Jackson Pollock as an example of experimental practice (reprinted in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991]). 66. My use of the term “practice” here is derived from a close study of the paintings and modes of production in question. I mean it as a quite literal description of what Meyer Schapiro called the “practical activity” that is painting. I do not mean to evoke much later theorizations of practice, such as those of Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011]) or Foucault’s in his various lectures on technologies of the self (see Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin et al. [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988]). I steer away from such theories in part because to do so would be anachronistic, but also because such theories seek to describe the practical steps taken in a broader theorization of selfhood. The practices I’m interested in, while not unrelated to explorations of the self, are more concerned with practical explorations of the pictorial and aimed less at self-­discovery than at self-­presentation in the communal project of defining an American Modernist practice. See Meyer Schapiro, “The Liberating Quality of Avant-­ Garde Art,” Art News (Summer 1957): 36–42. For studies that focus on self-­discovery and explication in late-­Modernist painting see Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience; Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); and Alexander Alberro, Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-­Twentieth-­Century Latin American Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 67. The explicit discussion of authorship as a problem in the arts can be traced back to the late 1960s when rather ambiguous claims were made about the function of author or artist in various critical and theoretical texts. That discussion lost much of its ambiguity in the late 1970s and 1980s when it was raised to the status of an official discourse with the publication of essays such as Craig Owens’s “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life after ‘The Death of the Author?” reprinted in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Alex Kitnick recently reviewed these arguments in the essay “I, etcetera,” in October 166 (Fall 2018): 45–62. The most polarizing claims being made today concerning authorship and intention in the arts can be found in the online journal nonsite.org, which names “the question of intentionality” as among its dedicated research topics and which devoted its inaugural issue to the question of the author. The journal is run by a group of 165 | N o t e s t o P a g e 1 3

scholars from art history, literary studies, and philosophy, who are mainly dedicated to the study and ongoing promotion of Modernist art. See, in particular, issues no. 1 (Spring 2011): “Author Artist Audience”; no. 6 (Summer 2012): “Intention and Interpretation”; and no. 25 (Fall 2018): “Authorship/Anti-­Authorship: Legal and Aesthetic.” 68. Contributors to nonsite.org might insist that my list of questions either include or be completely replaced by the question of whether authorship is a necessary component in securing the identity of art as such. I haven’t included it here, because I don’t believe it was a question painters in this period were concerned with, mainly because Modernist painters, along with most artists, already take this claim to be a given and, as such, not analytically significant. 69. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 3–40. 70. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 19. 71. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-­Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 69. 72. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 8. 73. Harold Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 55, 62. 74. Robert Goldwater, “Reflections on the New York School,” Quadrum 8 (1960): 17–36; William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1. 75. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950). 76. John Elderfield, “High Modern: An Introduction to Post-Pollock Painting,” Studio International 188 ( July–­August 1974): 5. 77. Daniel Robbins describes Morris Louis’s paintings as “uncomposed” in “Morris Louis: The Triumph of Color,” Art News 6 (October 1963): 28–29, 57–58. See also Howard Singerman, “Noncompositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 127–50. 78. For Noland’s discussion of “one shot painting” see Kenworth Moffett, Kenneth Noland (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977), 39. 79. On priority and belatedness in relation to authorial presence in visual art, see Krauss, “Sense and Sensibility”; and Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved. For an account of the ambiguities of belatedness, see Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardness,” in Essays on Otherness, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1999), 269. 80. In 1989 Martin said, quite plainly, to Susan Campbell: “I consider myself an Abstract Expressionist.” Susan Campbell, Oral History Interview with Agnes Martin, May 15, 1989, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 16. In the 2003 documentary With My Back To the World, Martin declares, “I’m not a minimalist; I am an Abstract Expressionist. I believe in having my emotions recorded in the painting.” 81. Anna Chave writes that “a kind of egolessness set Martin apart from her male peers.” See Anna Chave, “Agnes Martin: ‘Humility, The Beautiful Daughter . . . All of Her Ways are Empty,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Barbara Haskell, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 137. 82. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press 1993). For a survey of the uses to which Bourdieu’s theories have been put in art-­historical studies, see The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Meyers (Berkeley: University of

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California Press, 1995). For a recent example of the use of Bourdieu’s field theory specifically as a tool for combating naïve notions of authorship, see Alberro’s brief discussion in Abstraction in Reverse, 3. 83. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 35. James Meyer offered a similar field-­ approach to the history of minimalism and its polemical reception in Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 84. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 29. 85. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 32. 86. Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting” (1957), in Modern Art: Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers, 218. 87. Valerie Hellstein offers a very similar picture of a shared space in her discussion of Franz Kline’s 1951 Painting, which hung in the background of John Cage’s much discussed Theater Piece #1, performed at Black Mountain College in 1952. See Hellstein, “The Cage-­iness of Abstract Expressionism,” American Art 28, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 56–77.

C h ap t e r O n e The source of the chapter epigraph is Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 17. 1. Hal Foster et al., Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, and Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 350. 2. Andrew Bennett, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005), 6. 3. Martha Woodmansee, “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 15–28. 4. Bennett, The Author, 59. 5. Jackson Pollock, “Interview,” Arts and Architecture, February 1944, 14. Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now” (1948), reprinted in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (New York: Blackwell, 2002), 574. Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World,” Dyn 6 (November 1944), 13. Quoted in Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 37. 6. See, for example, Serge Guilbaut’s claim that in the postwar period, “Marxism gave way to psychiatry. The individual moved into the place of history and social relations,” in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 165. 7. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 1. 8. Foster et al., Art since 1900, 350. 9. John Graham, from an undated notebook, quoted in Matthew Spender, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 93. 10. Thomas Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (New York: Viking Press, 1951), 107. 11. Jack Tworkov, “A Cahier Leaf: Journal,” It Is: A Magazine of Abstract Art 1 (Spring 1958): 25. 12. Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World,” 10–13. 13. Herbert Ferber, “Artist’s Sessions at Studio 35 (1950),” in Modern Artists in America, ed. Robert Motherwell, et al., 1st ser. (New York: W. Schulz, 1950), 10. When raising this question, Ferber said, “It’s a question of origin or ancestry.”

167 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 7 – 2 5

14. Robert Motherwell, “Artist’s Sessions at Studio 35 (1950),” in Modern Artists in America, 18. 15. Again, Motherwell’s “The Modern Painter’s World” is exemplary in this regard. His description of “ego” as subject matter occurs in his description of Surrealist precedent. 16. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 11–26. 17. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” reprinted in Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1965), 26; originally published in Art News (December 1952). For critiques of Rosenberg’s attention to process over product, see Mary McCarthy’s review of The Tradition of the New, in which “The American Action Painters” was anthologized in 1959, where she wrote: “You cannot hang an event on the wall, only a picture.” Rosenberg published a rejoinder to McCarthy’s review, “Critic within the Act,” Art News 5 (October 1960): 26. Clement Greenberg also rejects Rosenberg’s attention to process over product, saying that he reduced form to the “painted left-­overs of ‘action.’ ” See Clement Greenberg, “How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name” (1962), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 136. 18. In the preface to Act and the Actor, Rosenberg lists the following figures as central to his thinking on action and acting: Oedipus, Kierkegaard, Hamlet, Marx, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and Eichmann. Rosenberg, Act and the Actor: Making the Self, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen, Perspectives in Humanism Series (New York: Meridian, 1972), xxi. 19. Rosalind Krauss, “A View of Modernism,” Artforum 11 (September 1972): 49; Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, 155–57; Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 270. 20. Rosenberg, “The Orgamerican Phantasy” (1959), reprinted in Tradition of the New, 279. 21. See David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950); William H. Whyte, Organization Man (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1956); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay Co., 1957) and The Naked Society (New York: D. McKay Co., 1964). The phrase “other-­directed” comes from Reisman, who opposes “other-­directedness,” which he regarded as predominant in the postwar period, to the more independent and successful “inner-­directed” attitude, which he associated with a wide range of male types, from the Renaissance man to the cowboy. 22. Rosenberg, “The Orgamerican Phantasy” (1959), reprinted in Tradition of the New, 274. 23. Rosenberg, “The Orgamerican Phantasy” (1959), reprinted in Tradition of the New, 284. 24. Harold Rosenberg, “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-­Garde Its Own Mass Culture?” Commentary 6 (September 1948), https://www.commentarymagazine.com /articles/the-­herd-­of-­independent-­mindshas-­the-­avant-­garde-­its-­own-­mass-­culture/ (accessed November 18, 2019). 25. In addition to “The Herd of Independent Minds,” see “Couch Liberalism and a Guilty Past” (1955), “Death in the Wilderness,” and “Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism” (all in The Tradition of the New). A common thread running throughout the essays is Rosenberg’s dismissal of cultural and political critics who speak too broadly of populations, communities, and generations. He is particularly disturbed by the presumptive deployment of the word “we” in postwar liberal discourse. For a more general discussion of the use of the term “personality” in postwar investigations of the “self,” see Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995), 64–70. 168 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 5 – 2 7

26. Rosenberg, “The Diminished Act,” in Act and the Actor, 9. For an exhaustive and compelling account of Rosenberg’s intellectual biography, see Elaine O’Brien, “The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of Love and Combat,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 1997. 27. See Paul Cummings, Oral History Interview with Harold Rosenberg, December 17, 1970–­January 28, 1973, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 128. 28. Rosenberg’s first essay for the journal was “Portraying Communism,” Les Temps modernes and Twentieth Century 22 (1951). 29. See Cummings, Oral History Interview with Harold Rosenberg, 128. Rosenberg broke with Sartre over the publication of Sartre’s “The Communists and Peace,” which Rosenberg claimed was cribbed from his own essay, “The Pathos of the Proletariat,” published in Kenyon Review 11 (Autumn 1949): 595–629. When Sartre did not respond to the accusation or to Rosenberg’s demand that he retract the essay, Rosenberg withdrew as a correspondent for Les Temps modernes. For a more complete accounting of this break, see Christa Noel Robbins, “Harold Rosenberg on the Character of Action,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 2 (2012): 195–214. 30. For an account of Sartre’s adjusting his concept of human freedom to a political theory married to the Communist Party, see Mark Poster’s chapter “Existentialists in Motion: 1950–1956,” in his Existential Marxism in Postwar France: from Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 161–205. 31. Harold Rosenberg, letter to Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, June 29, 1955, in Harold Rosenberg Papers, Getty Research Library, Los Angeles. 32. Harold Rosenberg, “Does the Jew Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play about Anti-­ Semitism,” Commentary 7 (1949): 8–18. 33. See Jean-­Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 86–116. 34. Rosenberg, “Does the Jew Exist?” 16. 35. Rosenberg, letter to Merleau-­Ponty, June 29, 1955. 36. See Rosenberg, “Death in the Wilderness,” in Tradition of the New, 251. 37. Rosenberg, Act and the Actor, xxi. 38. See Harold Rosenberg, “Character Change and the Drama,” The Symposium: A Critical Review 3 ( July 1932): 348–69. Republished in The Tradition of the New. 39. Rosenberg to Dorothy Seckler, Oral History Interview with Harold Rosenberg, June 28, 1967–­July 8, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 40. Rosenberg’s primary dramatic example is Hamlet. Rosenberg, “Character Change and the Drama,” in Tradition of the New, 137. 41. There are strong similarities between Rosenberg’s structural characterization of individual action and Althusser’s description of the process of interpellation, which is why I use the term. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 42. Rosenberg, “Character Change and the Drama,” 136. 43. See, for example, Robert Slifkin, “The Tragic Image: Action Painting Refigured,” Oxford Art Journal 34, no. 2 (2011): 227–46. 44. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 559. Sartre discusses the concept of an intentional act in the chapter “Being and Doing: Freedom.” He complicates the notion of intentional action via a careful explication of the phenomenology of the immersion in a “plenitude of being,” which limits the ability to grasp the possibilities of action. Despite this complication, Sartre still understands action as arising self-­consciously, out of a process of becoming self-­conscious. Rosenberg remains unconvinced of the possibilities of such 169 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 7 – 2 9

reflection—a pessimism that seems to me more attributable to his sense of the sociopolitical situation than to any systematic theory of human agency and being. Rosenberg refers to “art as action” in “The American Action Painters.” 45. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 24. 46. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 24. 47. Robert Motherwell, “Preface [‘The School of New York’],” reprinted in The Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Dore Ashton and Joan Banach (Berkeley: University of California Press), 154. 48. William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 160. 49. See Kim Grant, “Cahiers d’art and the Evolution of Modernist Painting,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 1, no. 2 (2010): 216–27. 50. No other scholar has gone as far as Catherine Craft in demonstrating the centrality of appropriation to Abstract Expressionism. See Catherine Craft, An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-­Dada and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 51. Harold Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, The Time, The Idea (New York: Grove Press, 1962). 52. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” 28. 53. See Harry Cooper, “To Organize Painting,” in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, ed. Michael Taylor (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Art Museum, 2009), 57–73. 54. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 55, 62. 55. Harry Cooper also tracks these references in “To Organize Painting,” in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective. 56. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 44. 57. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 44. 58. See Harold Rosenberg, “A Dialogue with Thomas Hess,” in Action Painting, exh. cat. (Dallas: Dallas Museum for Contemporary Art, 1958), n.p.; Rosenberg, “Critic within the Act,”; and Rosenberg, “Action Painting: Crisis and Distortion,” in The Anxious Object: Art Today and its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1964). Elaine O’Brien convincingly argues that the Gorky monograph should be read as an attempt to correct readings of “action painting” as blind automatism and as a criticism of the formalist segregation of an artist’s life and words from their work. See O’ Brien, “The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of Love and Combat,” 135. 59. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New, 29. 60. See the entry for “rôle” in OED Online, https://www.oed.com (accessed December 30, 2019). 61. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 14. 62. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 118. 63. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 14. 64. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 16–21. 65. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 14–15. 66. Harold Rosenberg, “The Pathos of the Proletariat,” Kenyon Review 11 (Autumn 1949): 595–629, reprinted in Act and the Actor: Making the Self. 67. Rosenberg, “Arshile Gorky: Art and Identity,” in The Anxious Art Object, 102. 68. Rosenberg, “Character Change and the Drama” (1932), in The Tradition of the New, 147. 69. Rosenberg, “Arshile Gorky: Art and Identity,” in The Anxious Art Object, 102. 70. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 76.

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71. Rosenberg claims the title was suggested by Max Ernst. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 116. 72. Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, 33. 73. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, rev. ed., trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992), 32. 74. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 11. 75. In According to What, Duchamp appears both in profile in a hinged canvas at the bottom left of the painting, and also indexically through the imprint of his small sculpture Female Fig-­Leaf (1950), of which Johns purchased a cast in the late 1960s. 76. For an account of appropriation’s inherently postmodern status as a representational strategy see Craig Owens, “Representation, Appropriation, and Power,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 88–113; and Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88. 77. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 62. 78. Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in Tradition of the New, 31. 79. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 127. 80. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 130. 81. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 134. Rosalind Krauss also finds reference at the heart of Pollock’s extreme abstractions, in particular, Picasso’s line. But, unlike Leja, she does not regard that influence as manifesting a representational or intentional relation. See Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 324. 82. In response to the repeated mistake among art writers in listing de Kooning as among Gorky’s influences, de Kooning declared: “If the bookkeepers think it necessary continuously to make sure of where things and people come from, well then, I come from 36 Union Square.” Willem de Kooning, quoted in Robert Storr, “The Painter’s Painter,” in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, 140. See also Matthew Spender, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 97–104. 83. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, 104. 84. Charles F. Stuckey, “Bill de Kooning and Joe Christmas,” Art in America 68, no. 3 (March 1980): 78. 85. Clement Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Willem de Kooning,” The Nation, April 24, 1948, reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 229. Sandler, Triumph of American Painting, 133; Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, 48. 86. Hess offers a list of formal and iconographic references in Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (107), where he notes that de Kooning leaves “clues” that can be found in Picasso, Ingres, Matisse, Jan Toorop, Arp, Miró, Mondrian, Soutine, and de Chirico. 87. Hess’s example from Finnegans Wake is the phrase “ ‘Sigh lento’: an operatic cry of silence and a slow sigh, also the final Dada gesture with which a composer indicates how his symphony should be played, and perhaps Silenus. . . . Every new reading widens the frame of reference.” Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, 107. 88. Following a series of insurmountable personal setbacks, which included his studio burning down, a diagnosis of cancer, an injury that led to his losing the use of the arm with which he painted, and his wife’s leaving him, Gorky hanged himself in 1948. See Spender, “Last Six Weeks,” in From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky. 89. See Robert Goodnough, ed., Artists Sessions at Studio 35 (1950) (Chicago: Sober­ scove Press, 2009), 15–20.

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90. Rosenberg, “The Diminished Act,” in Act and the Actor: Making the Self, 9. 91. Rosenberg, Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea, 14. 92. Rosenberg moved in the same circles as the New Critics, a formalist school of literary criticism, including John Crowe Ransom, often regarded as the founder of New Criticism, who was Rosenberg’s editor at the Kenyon Review. Rosenberg’s close friend Kenneth Burke is also often associated with New Criticism, though Burke did not necessarily identify himself as such. The debate over authorial intent and reader response was most forcefully articulated by Monroe Beardsley and W. K. Wimsatt in their essays “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946): 468–88, and “The Affective Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 57, no. 1 (1949): 31–55. Both are reprinted in Beardsley and Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (New York: Noonday Press, 1958). 93. Beardsley and Wimsatt, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, 4. 94. Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” reprinted in The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney (London: Routledge, 2002), 383. See also Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 7–17. 95. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 7–17. 96. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1949), ed. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library/Open Road, 2015), 8. See also Dore Ashton’s chapter, “Existentialism,” in The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (New York: Viking Press, 1972). 97. De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 6–7. 98. De Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 8. On Sartre’s “attraction” to phenomenology, see Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France, 80–83. 99. At least three evenings were dedicated to an official discussion of “existentialism” at The Club, two of which were led by the philosophy professor William Barrett, who wrote What Is Existentialism? in 1947 and Irrational Man: A Study of Existential Philosophy in 1958. See Pavia, The Club without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, ed. Natalie Edgar (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2007), 158–78. 100. Rosenberg, “The Diminished Act,” in Act and the Actor, 9. 101. Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feelings,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 130. 102. Rosenberg, “The Diminished Act,” in Act and the Actor: Making the Self, 12–13. See also Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Concept of Action,” in Artworks and Packages (New York: Horizon Press, 1969), 226. 103. Rosenberg, Act and the Actor: Making the Self, xxii. 104. See Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Grossman/Viking Press, 1977), 256. 105. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 258.

C h ap t e r Two The chapter epigraph is from Ad Reinhardt, “Black as Symbol and Concept,” in Art-­ as-­Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 88. 1. See Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of the “index” in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 109. 2. Willem de Kooning, quoted in William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 46.

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3. In Passages in Modern Sculpture ([New York: Grossman/Viking Press, 1977], 256), Rosalind Krauss reads de Kooning’s painting as offering just such an analogue to the human interior. 4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modernist Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 389. 5. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 390. 6. Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy” (1982), reprinted in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 60. 7. Philip Pavia, Club without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, ed. Natalie Edgar (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2007), 91–93. 8. Thomas Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (New York: Viking Press, 1951). 9. Jack Tworkov, quoted in Richard Armstrong, “Jack Tworkov’s Faith in Painting,” in Jack Tworkov: Paintings, 1928–1982 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1987), 28. 10. Jack Tworkov, “A Conversation with Sandler: August 15, 1957,” reprinted in Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, the Artist at Black Mountain College 1952 (Asheville: Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, 2011), 187–88. 11. Jack Tworkov, as quoted in Armstrong, “Jack Tworkov’s Faith in Painting,” in Jack Tworkov: Paintings, 26. 12. Jim Richard Wilson makes this point in his catalog essay, New York School: Another View (Albany, NY: Opalka Gallery, 2005), where he quotes Helen Harrison (director of the Pollock-­Krasner house) as saying to him: “I think It is was an effort to regain at least a measure of credibility for artists’ voices” (4). 13. Pavia, “Manifesto-­in-­Progress,” It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 1 (Spring 1958), 6–7. Further citations will appear in the body of the text. 14. Pavia, “Manifesto-­in-­Progress: The Second Space: The American Sense of Space on Space,” It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 2 (Autumn 1958): 6. 15. Irving Sandler, Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 16. Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), xiii. See Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” reprinted in The Phenomenology Reader, ed. Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney (London: Routledge, 2002), 383. 17. Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, 38. 18. Nancy points out that in French dessin can refer either to “drawing” or “design” and relates design, as in “by design,” to the intentionality that is being as such, playing on the cognate rhythm between dessin and Dasein with the neologism dess(e)in. Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, ix. 19. Rosenberg, “The Orgamerican Phatasy” (1959), reprinted in Tradition of the New, 274. See chapter 1, above. 20. Pavia, Club without Walls, 77–79. 21. Donald E. Gordon, “The Origin of the Word ‘Expressionism,’ ” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 29 (1966): 368–85. 22. Gordon, “The Origin of the Word ‘Expressionism,’ ” 376. 23. Alfred H. Barr, “Introduction,” in German Painting and Sculpture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1931), 9. See also Sheldon Cheney, Expressionism in Art (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1948); and Bernard S. Myers, The German Expressionists: A General Revolt (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 35–40.

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24. Robert Coates, “Art Galleries: Abroad and at Home,” New Yorker, March 30, 1946, 83, 84. 25. Robert Coates, “Art Galleries: Past and Present,” New Yorker, January 12, 1946, 50. 26. Robert Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World,” Dyn 6 (November 1944), 10–13. 27. Motherwell, “The Modern Painter’s World,” 12. 28. Philip Pavia, “The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism in Two Parts. Part I: The ‘Hess-­Problem’ and Its Seven Panels at The Club, 1952,” It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art 5 (1960): 8–11; and Pavia, “Seven Panels on Abstract Expressionism,” in Club without Walls, 109–21. 29. Milton Resnick and Jack Tworkov, quoted in “Seven Panels on Abstract Expressionism,” in Pavia, Club without Walls, 110, 111. 30. Pavia, “The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism,” 11. 31. Pavia, Club without Walls, 96. 32. See Sandler, The New York School, 32; Pavia, “The Unwanted Title: Abstract Expressionism.” 33. Leo Steinberg, The New York School: Second Generation (New York: Jewish Museum, 1957), 4–7. 34. See Sandler, The New York School, 16–17; emphasis is Sandler’s. 35. Sandler, The New York School, 278. 36. Tworkov, “Jack Tworkov in Conversation with Irving Sandler, August 11, 1957,” in Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 188. 37. Sandler, The New York School, 279. 38. Irving Sandler, “Is There a New Academy? Part I,” Art News 58 (Summer 1959): 34. 39. Thomas Hess refers to de Kooning’s “full arm sweep” in “Reviews and Previews: Willem de Kooning,” Art News 58, no. 3 (May 1959): 13. See also Jennifer Field, “Full Arm Sweep,” in de Kooning: a Retrospective, ed. John Elderfield (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 304–41. 40. Fairfield Porter, “Art,” The Nation 188, no. 23 ( June 6, 1959), reprinted in Brushes with History: Writing on Art from The Nation, 1865–2001, ed. Pater G. Meyer (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001), 269. 41. Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland” (1960), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 95. 42. Irving Sandler, New York School, ix–­x. 43. Thomas Hess, “The Culture-­Gap Blues,” Art News 57 ( January 1959): 24. 44. For a discussion of the art market at this time, see Irving Sandler, The New York School, 17; and Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” (1962), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 55–56. 45. Statement by Friedel Dzubas in “Is There a New Academy? Part II,” Art News 58 (September 1959): 37, 59. 46. Sandler, “Is There a New Academy? Part I,” 34. 47. Barbara Rose, “The Second Generation: Academy or Breakthrough,” Artforum 4 (September 1965): 54. 48. Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction: An Exhibition Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Sponsored by the Contemporary Art Council (Los Angeles: F. Hensen Co., 1964). 49. Sandler, The New York School, 278 and 279. 50. “Jack Tworkov at the Egan Gallery,” Art News 46 (November 1947): 42. 51. Pavia, Club without Walls, 81, 111. See Jason Andrew, “Jack Tworkov at Black

174 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 8 – 5 4

Mountain College,” for an account of the reception of Tworkov’s review as an early description of expressionism for the New York Scene (in Tworkov,   Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 25). 52. Jack Tworkov, “The Wandering Soutine,” Art News 59 (November 1950), reprinted in Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, ed. Mira Shor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 160. 53. See Tworkov’s first published essay, “Process in Art” (1948), reprinted in Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 152–57. 54. Tworkov, “A Conversation with Sandler: August 15, 1957,” reprinted in Tworkov, Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 185. 55. Seitz lists Tworkov as a “peripheral artist” in his notes for the writing of Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (William Seitz Papers, 1934–95, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC). See Tworkov’s description of the “painful” separation of his art from that of his peers in “A Conversation with Sandler: August 11, 1957,” reprinted in Tworkov,   Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 181. 56. Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 100. 57. Jack Tworkov, as quoted in Kenneth Baker, introduction to Armstrong,   Jack Tworkov: Paintings, 1928–1982, 13. 58. Tworkov, “A Conversation with Sandler: August 15, 1957,” reprinted in Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 186. 59. Jack Tworkov, as quoted by Richard Armstrong, “Jack Tworkov’s Faith in Painting,” in Tworkov,   Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 26. 60. Tworkov, Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 28; Tworkov, “A Conversation with Sandler: August 15, 1957,” reprinted in Jack Tworkov: Accident of Choice, 186. 61. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 390. 62. Tworkov, diary entry dated February 28, 1952, reprinted in Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: The Writings of Jack Tworkov, 41. 63. See Kenneth Baker’s compelling description of Tworkov’s laborious paintings in his introduction to Armstrong, Jack Tworkov: Paintings, 1928–1982, 14–15. 64. Harold Rosenberg, “The Pathos of the Proletariat,” Kenyon Review 11 (Autumn 1949): 595–629; reprinted in Act and the Actor: Making the Self, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen, Perspectives in Humanism Series (New York: Meridian, 1972). 65. Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Jack Tworkov, Part 1 of 2,” Artforum ( January 1971): 62–68. 66. Leo Steinberg uses the phrase “labored stammer” to describe the energetic pathos of Pollock’s paintings in “Pollock’s First Retrospective,” Arts Magazine, December 1955, reprinted in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art. 67. See Tworkov’s discussion of “meaning” in painting in The Extreme Middle: The Writings of Jack Tworkov, 249–51. 68. Tuchman, “An Interview with Jack Tworkov, Part 1 of 2,” 66. 69. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2. 70. Kaprow “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 7. 71. Sandler, “The Colonization of Gesture Painting,” in The New York School, 46–58. 72. In “The American Action Painters,” Rosenberg describes action painting as an “arena in which to act.” Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” reprinted in Tradition of the New (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1965). 73. Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 240–41.

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74. Tworkov, as quoted Kenneth Baker’s introduction to Armstrong, Jack Tworkov: Paintings, 1928–1982, 14–15. 75. Harold Rosenberg, “The Concept of Action,” in Rosenberg, Artworks and Packages (New York: Horizon Press, 1969), 226. 76. Rosenberg, “The Concept of Action,” in Artworks and Packages, 227. 77. Lucy Lippard, “Postface,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 263. 78. Tworkov, The Extreme Middle: Writings of Jack Tworkov, 41 and 246. 79. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1945), 108.

C h ap t e r T h r e e The source of the chapter epigraph is Helen Frankenthaler, journal entry, quoted in John Elderfield, Helen Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 14. 1. Lecture, Duke University, November 2, 1983, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. 2. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947). 3. Lecture, Duke University, November 2, 1983. 4. Lecture, Duke University, November 2, 1983. 5. John Elderfield, Helen Frankenthaler (New York: Abrams, 1989), 103. Two possible exceptions are Anne Wagner’s and Caroline Jones’s important studies of Frankenthaler. Both helped to generate analytic methods for understanding the role figuration played in Frankenthaler’s paintings, attending to its metaphoric role in relation to the female body. See Caroline A. Jones, “The Tyranny of the Eye,” in Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 303–44; and Anne M. Wagner, “Pollock’s Nature, Frankenthaler’s Culture,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 192–94. 6. Elderfield, Helen Frankenthaler, 66. 7. See, for example, David Joselit’s account of Frankenthaler in American Art since 1945 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 37. Much earlier Irving Sandler described Frankenthaler adopting Pollock’s tendency to “[let] a painting happen rather than making it.” See Sandler, The New York School: The Painters & Sculptors of the Fifties (New York: Harper & Row, 1978)), 60. 8. John Elderfield, “High Modern: An Introduction to Post-Pollock Painting,” Studio International 188 ( July–­August 1974): 5. 9. An important exception to such a narrow reading of Frankenthaler can be found in essays collected in the exhibition catalog, “The Heroine Paint”: After Frankenthaler, ed. Katy Siegel (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2015). 10. Barbara Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Greenberg also mentions the visit in his 1960 essay “Louis and Noland,” reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 96. 11. Morris Louis, as quoted in James Truitt, “Art-­Arid D.C. Harbors Touted ‘New’ Painters,” Washington Post, Times Herald, December 21, 1961, A20. 12. Alan Solomon, New York: The Second Breakthrough, 1959–1964 (University of California at Irvine, 1969), 10. 13. Ben Heller, Toward a New Abstraction, exh. cat. (New York: Jewish Museum, 1963);

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Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction: An Exhibition Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Sponsored by the Contemporary Art Council (Los Angeles: F. Hensen Co., 1964). Other exhibitions include Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965); William Seitz, The Responsive Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965); Gerald Norland, The Washington Color Painters: Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, Paul Reed (Washington, DC: Washington Gallery of Modern Art, 1965); Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966). 14. Robert Morris, “Anti-­form,” Artforum, April 1968, reprinted in The New Sculpture 1965–1975: Between Geometry and Gesture, ed. Richard Armstrong and Richard Marshall (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990),100. 15. Heller, “Introduction,” in Toward a New Abstraction, n.p. 16. Brian O’Doherty, “Abstract Confusion,” New York Times, June 2, 1963. 17. Corinne Robins, “Six Artists and the New Extended Vision,” Arts Magazine, September–­October 1965, 20. 18. Lucy Lippard, “The Third Stream: Constructed Paintings and Painted Structures,” Art Voices 4 (Spring 1965): 49. 19. Solomon, New York: The Second Breakthrough, 10. 20. Frank Stella, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” interview by Bruce Glaser and edited by Lucy R. Lippard, ArtNews 65 (September 1966): 55–61. 21. Frankenthaler refers to her wrist in several places. See, for example, “A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown,” in After Mountains and Sea: Frankenthaler 1956–1959, ed. Susan Cross (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1998), 29; Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 37; Tim Marlow, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” in Frankenthaler on Paper: 1990–1999 (London: Bernard Jacobson Gallery, 2000), 3, 4. 22. Wagner, “Pollock’s Nature, Frankenthaler’s Culture,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Varnedoe and Karmel, 188. 23. Frankenthaler identifies as among the generation following the New York School. As she said to Henry Geldzahler in 1965: “We were the second generation, they were the first” (Geldzahler, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” Artforum 4 [October 1965]: 38). 24. Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler. Shepherd Steiner is one of the few scholars to acknowledge the import of Burke’s influence on Frankenthaler’s work. See his “Occupy 21st Street! Helen Frankenthaler at Gagosian,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 35 (Spring 2014): 4–17. 25. In “Otobiographies,” Jacques Derrida describes Nietzsche’s authorial presence in his texts as a staged “signature.” See The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 7–11. 26. Anne M. Wagner, “Lee Krasner as L.K.,” Representations 25 (Winter 1989): 46. 27. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 20–33. I am grateful to the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation for allowing me to see the papers Frankenthaler wrote for Burke when enrolled in his courses at Bennington. They are careful and quite accurate explications of this literary theory. 28. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 51. 29. See Geldzahler, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” 38. See also Caroline A. Jones, “The Tyranny of the Eye,” in Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses, 303–44.

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30. For an overview of the “gendered” reception of Frankenthaler, see Sybil E. Gohari, “Gendered Reception: There and Back Again: An Analysis of the Critical Reception of Helen Frankenthaler,” Woman’s Art Journal 35, no. 1 (Spring–­Summer 2014): 33–39, and Bett Schumacher, “Gender Displacement in the Art of Helen Frankenthaler,” Woman’s Art Journal (Fall–­Winter 2010): 12–21. See also Anne M. Wagner’s brilliant argument for understanding the willed exclusions of gender from New York School female painters in “Lee Krasner as L. K.” 31. Jones, “The Tyranny of the Eye,” in Eyesight Alone, 303–44. In 1958 Greenberg argued that “the human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space in either pictorial or sculptural art; now it is eyesight alone.” See Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture” (1958), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 59. 32. Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 79. 33. Anne Middleton Wagner, “O’Keefe’s Femininity,” in Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 31, 38–39. 34. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3. 35. Frankenthaler, journal entry, quoted in Elderfield, Helen Frankenthaler, 24. 36. Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland” (1960), and “Introduction to Jules Olitski at the Venice Biennale” (1966), both in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 97–99 and 229. 37. See Fried, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella” (1965) and “Mor­ ris Louis” (1966), both reprinted in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 106–9, 119, ­223–26. 38. Fried, “Morris Louis,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 108. 39. Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 7 (April 1963): 54. 40. The “right use of Pollock,” as exemplified in Louis’s abstractions, necessarily frees itself from that influence, according to Fried. See Fried, “New York Letter,” 54. 41. Fried argues that the reprise of certain formal traits in past art serves to “invest [those past paintings] with meaning.” See “Morris Louis,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 129. See also the introduction to “Three American Painters,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. 42. Barbara Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 21. 43. Wagner, “Pollock’s Nature, Frankenthaler’s Culture,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Varnedoe and Karmel, 186. 44. In a 1994 lecture at Guild Hall, East Hampton, for example, Frankenthaler stated that Pollock “invented a new language for line and scale” (Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York). 45. Frankenthaler goes on to speak of Pollock’s “enveloping space,” seeming to refer to the effects of looking at his paintings, but quickly goes back to their making: “The canvas lay on the floor as if it had no edges, as if he could go on and on with this ordered dance, paint until the painting demanded that he stop” (“A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown,” in After Mountains and Sea, ed. Cross, 43). 46. Frankenthaler offered a detailed account of her exposure to Pollock and his influence on her work in a lecture at Guild Hall on July 31, 1994: “In those early fifties seeing his recent paintings unrolled on the barn floor, taking it all in, bantering over them,

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walking around their four sides on the barn floor, or hanging them on the wall, turning them all different ways. Looking. Looking. Coming back later that night and the next day to look again” (Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York). 47. Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968, 21; my emphasis. 48. See Francis V. O’Conner,   Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings, 1951–1953 (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980). 49. “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock by B. H. Friedman,” in Jackson Pollock: Black and White (New York: Marlborough-­Gerson Gallery, 1969), 7. 50. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith,   Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 667. 51. Naifeh and Smith,   Jackson Pollock, 668. 52. Cited in Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 281; and Naifeh and Smith,   Jackson Pollock, 664. 53. Michael Leja also discusses the black, poured paintings at some length, paying particular attention to them as demonstrations of “control and mastery.” See Michael Leja, “Pollock and Metaphor,” in Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 305. 54. Lee Krasner describes this process in “An Interview with Lee Krasner by B. H. Friedman,” in Jackson Pollock: Black and White, 8–10. 55. See, for example, Clement Greenberg, “Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 56. This is supported by Krasner’s account of Pollock. As she said to B. H. Friedman, “After the ’50 show, what do you do next? He couldn’t have gone further doing the same thing” (“An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock by B. H. Friedman,” in Jackson Pollock: Black and White, 7). 57. John Graham, “System and Dialectics of Art” (1937), reprinted in John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 165. 58. See Irving Sandler, “John D. Graham: The Painter as Esthetician and Connoi‑ seur,” Artforum 7, no. 2 (October 1968): 50–53; and Naifeh and Smith,   Jackson Pollock, 342–57. 59. Graham, “System and Dialectics of Art,” in John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art, 165. 60. Graham, “System and Dialectics of Art,” in John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art, 165. 61. Helen Frankenthaler, quoted in Elderfield, Helen Frankenthaler, 14. 62. Clement Greenberg, “Introduction to Jules Olitski at the Venice Biennale,” 229; and Fried, “Morris Louis,” 108. 63. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice Hall, 1945), xviii. 64. Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968, 10. 65. Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968, 10. 66. Brown, “A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown,” in After Mountains and Sea, ed. Cross, 37. 67. Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968,” 37. Frankenthaler frequently refers to her wrist as a site where her sensibility both developed and is communicated. She makes another reference to her wrist early in the Rose interview (3). See also Brown, “A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown,” in After Mountains and Sea, ed. Cross, 29. 68. See Geldzahler, “Interview with Helen Frankenthaler,” 38. 69. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 9.

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70. Most influential in this regard are Rosalind Krauss’s widely cited essays on the index in the art of the 1970s: “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81; and “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2,” October 4 (Autumn 1977): 58–67. 71. Elderfield, Helen Frankenthaler, 92–102. 72. See, for example, Rosalind Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture.” In Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 155–79; and “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection,” October 92 (Spring 2000): 3–35. Steinberg describes the horizontal move away from nature and into culture in “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 73. Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 116. 74. “Seventh Annual Pollock Krasner Lecture: Helen Frankenthaler” at Guild Hall, East Hampton, July 31, 1994, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives, New York. 75. Gene Baro, “The Achievement of Helen Frankenthaler,” Art International 11 (September 1967): 34. 76. Skidmore College lecture, July 30, 1973, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Archives. 77. Greenberg, “Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 222. 78. “A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown,” in After Mountains and Sea, 30. 79. In A Rhetoric of Motives Burke discusses the coincidence of “use” and “study” in rhetorical practice. One of the objects of studying and using devices is “identification”: the means of seeking “belonging” in a field and of placing a studied practice in a “wider context.” See Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 27–28, 36. 80. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modernist Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 390. 81. Elderfield makes this distinction in his dismissal of Frankenthaler’s more expressive work, saying that paintings like Blue Territory are spontaneous, whereas Frankenthaler’s more successful paintings are better described as improvised. See Elderfield, Helen Frankenthaler, 102. 82. Frankenthaler has been photographed making circles in this way. See Elderfield, Painted on 21st Street: Helen Frankenthaler from 1950–1959 (New York: Gagosian Gallery and Abrams, 2013), 92. 83. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3 and 78. 84. “A Conversation: Helen Frankenthaler with Julia Brown,” in After Mountains and Sea, ed. Cross, 29. 85. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 51. 86. Darby English, How to See A Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 87. Marcia Brennan, “How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender: Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland in the Sixties,” in Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-­Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting,” in Friedel Dzubas: Critical Painting, ed. Eric M. Rosenberg (Medford, MA: Tufts University Gallery, 1998).

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88. Brennan, “How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender: Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland in the Sixties,” 125. 89. Anne Wagner acknowledges Frankenthaler’s “cultural” approach to the feminine in her essay, “Pollock’s Nature, Frankenthaler’s Culture,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed. Varnedoe and Karmel. 90. The various biographical details listed here come from Rose, Oral History Interview with Helen Frankenthaler, 1968. 91. Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 97. 92. Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” 97. The description of a “strictly pictorial, strictly optical” space comes from Greenberg’s essay “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 90. 93. Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction” (1964), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 197.

C h ap t e r F o u r 1. Clement Greenberg, “American-­Type Painting” (1955), reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 217–335. See also Michael Fried, Three American Painters (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), reprinted as “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 2. See, for example, Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender, Identity, and New York School Painting,” in Friedel Dzubas: Critical Painting, ed. Eric M. Rosenberg (Medford, MA: Tufts University Gallery, 1998); Marcia Brennan, “How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender: Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland in the Sixties,” in Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-­Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Amelia Jones, “Art History/Art Criticism: Performing Meaning,” in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, ed. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (London: Routledge Press, 1999): 39–55; Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); T. J. Clark, “The Unhappy Consciousness,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Thomas Crow, “Fashioning the New York School,” in Modern Art in a Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 3. Jones, Eyesight Alone, 314–16; Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2d ed., trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 137–38. 4. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101. 5. Molly Nesbit, “What Was an Author?” in Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader, ed. Seán Burke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 247–62. 6. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 118. 7. See the entry for “discipline” in OED Online, https://www.oed.com (accessed De‑ cember 1, 2019). 8. James Chandler, “Introduction: Doctrines, Disciplines, Discourses, Departments,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 732; emphasis mine.

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9. Robert Post, “Debating Disciplinarity,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 751. 10. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 11. Quoted in JoAnn C. Ellert, “The Bauhaus and Black Mountain College,” Journal of General Education (October 1972): 146. 12. Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration of a Community (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 72. 13. Paul Cummings, Oral History Interview with Kenneth Noland, October 9–­December 21, 1971, 6, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Hereafter cited as AAA (1971). See also Kenworth Moffett, Kenneth Noland (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977), 17. 14. AAA (1971), 33. See also Susan Fisher Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution, 1946–1965,” vol. 1 (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1987), 30. 15. AAA (1971), 33. 16. Susan Fisher Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution, 1946–1965,” 1:82. 17. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 18. Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution,” 1:82–84. 19. Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution,” 1:84. 20. Greenberg, “Crisis of the Easel Picture” (1948), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 21. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 21. 22. Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution,” 1:115–17. Louis also took the opportunity to introduce Noland to Leonard Bocour, who had developed the Magna pigment (acrylic paints) that Louis and Noland used throughout their careers. 23. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 39. 24. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 39; my emphasis. 25. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 40. 26. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 22. Never meant for public display, they have all been destroyed. See Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution,” 1:118. 27. Barbara Rose, “The Primacy of Color,” Art International 8 (May 1964): 22–26. 28. For Noland’s own account of the importance of working serially, see Avis Berman, Oral History Interview with Kenneth Noland, July 1–16, 1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 29. See AAA (1971), 25–26. 30. William Agee, Kenneth Noland: The Circle Paintings 1956–1963 (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1993), 15. 31. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 38. 32. Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 100. 33. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 41. 34. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 41. 35. Fried, “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 236. 36. Greenberg similarly describes Modernism as a holistic body whose integrity needs to be protected from external and corrupting values. In addition to essays such as “Avant-­ Garde and Kitsch,” there are the critic’s multiple statements that American artists had to “‘sweat out’ Cubism” in order to advance in their own right, as well as his insistence that 182 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 9 0 – 9 7

painters like Louis and Noland had to purge Modernist painting of the “affliction” that was gestural abstraction. See Greenberg, “Avant-­Garde and Kitsch,” reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); “Introduction to an Exhibition of Hans Hofmann,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 3: Affirmations and Refusals, 242; Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 99. 37. Fried “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” in Art and Objecthood, 77. This essay was originally published under the title “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” Artforum 5, no. 3 (November 1966). 38. Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), reprinted in Art and Objecthood. 39. Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 77. 40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscomb (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), 133. 41. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 133. 42. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84. 43. James Conant, who studied under Cavell at Harvard, explains it this way: “The mark of such a condition of maturity is that the practitioners of the discipline in question, at any given time, are properly able to rest content with a delimited number of antecedently fixed procedures for making progress within their field of inquiry . . . Wittgenstein sought . . . to usher in a sort of era of maturity for philosophy—an era in which philosophers would no longer need to wrangle with one another over questions of philosophical method.” James Conant, “Wittgenstein’s Method,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, ed. Oskari Kuusela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 635. 44. Fried “Three American Painters,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 224. 45. Fried “Three American Painters,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 232. 46. Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood, 20. 47. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 133. 48. See Conant, “Wittgenstein’s Method,” 635. 49. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood, 167. 50. Stanley Cavell, “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting,” in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 117. Fried argued in “Art and Objecthood” that in the work’s “continuous and entire presentness . . . one experiences a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it” (Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood, 236). 51. Fried, “Three American Painters,” in Art and Objecthood, 236. 52. Fried has insisted that the Modernist project is meaningless if it does not continue into the future. In “Three American Painters,” for example, he writes, when discussing Noland, that “the essence of modernism resides in its refusal to regard a particular formal ‘solution’ . . . as definitive. . . . This is tantamount to the realization that if the dialectic of modernism were to come to a halt anywhere once and for all, it would thereby betray itself; that the act of self-­criticism on which it is founded and by which it perpetuates itself can have no end” (“Three American Painters,” in Art and Objecthood, 236). 53. Fried, “Three American Painters,” Art and Objecthood, 237. 54. Alan R. Solomon, “Kenneth Noland,” in Toward a New Abstraction (New York: Jewish Museum, 1963), 20. 183 | N o t e s t o P a g e s 9 7 – 1 0 0

55. Max Kozloff, “Abstract Attrition,” Arts Magazine, January 1965, 48. 56. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­ Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 80–81. 57. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 38. 58. Rosalind Krauss, “On Frontality,” Artforum 6 (May 1968): 46. 59. Noland remained with Oller for nine years. See Nina Burleigh, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer (New York: Bantam Books, 1998), 164–65. 60. AAA (1971), 18. 61. See the editor’s introduction to Journal of Orgonomy 41 (Spring–­Summer 2007). 62. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis: Principles and Technique for Psychoanalysts in Practice and in Training, 3d ed., trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972), 31. 63. Recounting Noland’s lack of intellectual acumen to Florence Rubenfeld in 1992, Michael Fried complained, “Like he’s read the same book by Wilhelm Reich for his entire adult life.” Fried was referring to the third edition of Character Analysis. Michael Fried, interview with Florence Rubenfeld, May 8, 1992, Florence Rubenfeld Collection of Archival Material for Clement Greenberg: A Life, Whitney Museum of American Art Archives, New York. 64. Reich, Character Analysis, xxiii. 65. Reich, Character Analysis, 31. 66. Reich, Character Analysis, 31. 67. Wilhelm Reich, Cosmic Superimposition: Man’s Orgonotic Roots in Nature (Rangeley, ME: Wilhelm Reich Foundation, 1951). 68. Reich, Cosmic Superimposition, 13. 69. While orgonomy is ultimately a naturalistic description of the psyche, it still locates damage done to the psyche in the social—mainly in the form of normative expectations. Philip Rieff was one of the few scholars to acknowledge this thread running throughout Reich’s writings. See his review of Reich’s Selected Writings, published in 1960, “Cosmic Energy Was Just What the Doctor Ordered,” New York Times, September 11, 1960; and his chapter on Reich in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 70. See Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution,” 1:160–69. 71. Accounts of when Noland embarked on the refined concentric-­circle series in earnest are conflicted. Sterling argues that he began the series in response to seeing the Tibor de Nagy exhibition hung and sensing that he needed to move in a new direction. As proof, Sterling offers an account of a patron to whom Noland made a funds request in order to embark on a new series. William Agee claims that Noland had embarked on the concentric circles before the show went up, but held them back at the request of Greenberg, who wanted to feature them in the 1959 French & Company show. The contested difference is a matter of months. Either way, it is clear that Noland wanted to move away from the looser and more “expressive” compositions that were featured in the Tibor de Nagy exhibit. Given the increased output in 1959, Sterling’s claim that seeing them hung confirmed that new direction still holds. Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution,” 1:174–75 and 454n31; Agee, Kenneth Noland: The Circle Paintings 1956–1963. 72. Greenberg, “Louis and Noland” (1960) reprinted in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 94–100; Fried, “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella” (1965), reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 213–65.

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73. Noland quoted in Al McConogha, “Noland Wants His Painting to Exist as Sensation,” Minneapolis Tribune, March 13, 1966, 4. See also Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 50. 74. Noland told Moffett that “an engagement with [structure] leaves one in the backwaters of what are basically cubist concerns.” Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 50. In the first serious critical accounting of the artist, Greenberg asserts that these artists succeed in their ability to move beyond Cubism. See Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 96. 75. Moffett, Kenneth Noland, 50. 76. William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 ( July–­September 1946): 468–69. 77. Richard Schwartzman, “Interview with Artists Kenneth Noland,” Journal of Orgonomy (2007): 93. 78. See O. S. English, “Some Reflections on a Psychoanalysis with Wilhelm Reich: September 1929–­Spring 1932,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 5, no. 2 (April 1977): 239–53. 79. Sterling, “Kenneth Noland’s Artistic Evolution,” 1:208. 80. AAA (1971), 27. 81. Schwartzman, “Interview with Artists Kenneth Noland,” 93. 82. Noland, as quoted in Philip Leider, “The Thing in Painting Is Color,” New York Times, August 25, 1968. 83. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 347–50. 84. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” (1966), reprinted in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 3. 85. Nicholas Eastaugh, Valentine Walsh, Tracey Chaplin, and Ruth Siddall, Pigment Compendium: A Dictionary of Historical Pigments (Oxford: Elsevier, 2008), 378. 86. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5+6 (Fall–­Winter 1967). 87. Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, trans. Liadain Sherrard (New York: Kegan Paul International, 1993). 88. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2d ed., trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 137–38. 89. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 102.

C h ap t e r F i v e The chapter epigraphs are drawn respectively from Oral History Interview with Sam Gilliam, September 18, 1984, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and handwritten note on an undated, typed biographical narrative written by Gilliam, in Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 1. See Ben W. Gilbert, Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968 (New York: Praeger, 1968). 2. See Jonathan P. Binstock, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 3. Sam Gilliam, undated biographical statement, 3, Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 4. See Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” and “Art and Objecthood,” both reprinted in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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5. Sam Gilliam, undated biographical statement, 11, Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 6. Sam Gilliam, undated biographical statement, 11, Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. The emphasis is mine. 7. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 161. For a discussion of the politics of Fried’s use of such terms see Christa Noel Robbins, “The Sensibility of Michael Fried.” Criticism 60, no. 4 (2018): 429–54. 8. Author interview, May 3, 2017. Gilliam mentions Robert Morris in a 1989 interview: J. W. Mahoney, “Sam Gilliam, Middendorf Gallery,” New Art Examiner, September 1989, 54. 9. See Richard Meyer, “Bone of Contention,” Artforum 43, no. 3 (November 2004): 73–74, 249–50. 10. I follow Darby English here, in thinking about the interpretive restrictions imposed by reading works according to identity markers such as race. See How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 11. Sam Gilliam, undated biographical statement, 2, Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 12. See Binstock, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective, 20–21. 13. See Binstock, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective, 29. Gilliam related to Binstock the story of seeing the water-­tension breaker in Downing’s studio and recounted his visit to Bocour following his conversation with Noland. Gilliam told Binstock that after he bought the water-­tension breaker, “I could make those paintings.” 14. Tom Harney, “When He Paints, He Pours,” Washington Daily News, October 13, 1967, 30. 15. Keith Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam,” New Art Examiner, June 1977, 4. 16. Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam,” 4. 17. Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam,” 4. 18. In “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” Clement Greenberg asserts that Modernist painters embraced “the flat picture plane’s denial of efforts to ‘hole through’ ” in represent‑ ing “realistic perspectival space.” Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939– 1944, 34. 19. Mahoney, “Sam Gilliam, Middendorf Gallery,” 54–55. 20. Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam,” 4. 21. Yve-­Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly’s Dream of Impersonality,” Institute Letter, The Institute for Advanced Study (Fall 2013): 16–17. See also Bois’s essay “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-­Composition in Its Many Guises,” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948–1954 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992). 22. The Morrison interview is rife with typos. In this passage Gilliam is recorded as saying “elusive,” but it seems obvious to me that he is saying “illusive.” It’s true that the pennant form eludes identification, but that is not what was important for Gilliam. Rather, he was interested in reinvigorating painting through a kind of return to pictorial illusion. Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam.” 23. Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam.” 24. To Morrison Gilliam states that Noland, in his shaped, stripe paintings, “actually wiped out the condition of painting in that this exploration of the striped diagonal was so complete that it left me in my own work, no where else to go. And so I gave up the diagonal.” Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam.”

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25. Morrison, “Interview with Sam Gilliam.” 26. See “Three American Painters” and “Shape as Form,” reprinted in Art and Objecthood, 233 and 81. 27. Fried, “Shape as Form,” in Art and Objecthood, 82. 28. Rosalind Krauss, “On Frontality,” Artforum 6 (May 1968): 44. 29. Krauss, “On Frontality,” 44. 30. Fried, “Shape as Form,” in Art and Objecthood, 82. 31. Fried, “Shape as Form,” in Art and Objecthood, 82. 32. Fried, “Shape as Form,” in Art and Objecthood, 85. 33. See Fried, “Shape as Form” and “Three American Painters,” in Art and Objecthood, 84 and 244. 34. In “A Matter of Meaning It,” Stanley Cavell, Fried’s close confidant at this time, describes “medium” as follows: “The idea of medium is not simply that of a physical material, but of a material-­in-­certain-­characteristic-­applications.” It is not, as he makes clear, sound, in the case of music, or paint in the case of painting, or wood and marble in the case of sculpture. “Medium” is not in the materials, in other words, but in the processes, in the treatment and invention of certain material engagements within a recognizable convention—such as pouring paint or shaping canvases. See Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 221. 35. Romare Bearden et al., “The Black Artist in America: A Symposium,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 5 (1969), 245–61. Further citations of the symposium appear in the body of the text. 36. For background on the symposium and exhibition, see Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind (1969),” American Studies 48, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 5–39. 37. Thomas P. F. Hoving, Director’s Note, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 5 (1969): 243. 38. Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 257. 39. Gerald Williams, “AfriCobra,” http://africobra.com/Introduction.html (accessed June 20, 2020). 40. Barbara Jones-­Hogu, “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AfriCOBRA,” in AfriCOBRA in Chicago, 2008, https://areachicagoarchive.wordpress.com/2019/02/23/the -­history-­philosophy-­and-­aesthetics-­of-­africobra/. 41. Quoted in Margo Natalie Crawford, “AfriCOBRA’s ‘Mimesis at Midpoint,’ ” in AfriCOBRA in Chicago, http://africobra.uchicago.edu/essays/. 42. Crawford, “AfriCOBRA’s ‘Mimesis at Midpoint.’ ” 43. Quoted in Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” 259. 44. Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” 261. 45. Quoted in Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” 259. 46. Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” 258. 47. See the introduction to Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 27, 29. 48. English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 44. 49. English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 32. 50. David Getsy uses the phrase “semantic openness” when describing abstraction’s deviation from gender conformity in the late twentieth century. See Getsy, Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 80.

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51. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13. Getsy also cites Butler’s text in his description of the restricting formations that gender identification imposes on abstract sculptures. See Getsy, Abstract Bodies, 278. 52. Butler, Undoing Gender, 13. 53. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 4. Such exclusions were addressed by a number of feminist artists, such as the Heresies collective, as well as Black collectives, like the Spiral Group. See Carrie Rickey, “Writing (and Righting) Wrongs: Feminist Art Publications,” in The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Goddard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996); and Courtney Martin, “From the Center: The Spiral Group, 1963–1966,” NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art 29 (2011): 86–98. 54. Again, I’m thinking of Robert Morris’s claim, in “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” that minimalist sculpture is productive of “new freedoms.” See Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, 3. The freedom that some minimalist sculpture enacts reminds me of Marx’s bleak characterization of freedom throughout the first volume of Capital, where the worker is described as “free” from the means of production in that “he” is divorced “from the ownership of the conditions of his own labor.” See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 874. 55. Portraits in Black, July 28, 1982, produced and directed by Peter Ja Zabriskie, Black Entertainment Television. Located in Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 56. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen 5+6 (Fall–­Winter 1967). Gilliam indicates that such a closed reading can be found in Mary Schmidt Campbell’s essay in the catalog Red and Black to “D”: Paintings by Sam Gilliam (New York: Studio Museum, 1982). See Benjamin Forgey, Oral History Interview with Sam Gilliam, November 4–11, 1989, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 57. The emphasis is mine. 58. Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 9. See also Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001). 59. See Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardness,” in Essays on Otherness, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1999). 60. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 13. 61. John Paul Ricco, The Decision between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 50. 62. He also states in the interview that “recently the best thing that I’ve learned to do has been to play the role of the person who sees the work.” 63. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 3–40. 64. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Art and Objecthood, 153. 65. This argument is also made by Robert Pippin and Walter Benn Michaels, both of whom rely on Fried’s characterization of late-­Modernist painting. See Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 64; Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 66. Gilliam to Dorothy Gilliam, Portraits in Black.

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67. Young, Oral History Interview with Sam Gilliam, September 18, 1984, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 68. Handwritten note on an undated, typed biographical narrative written by Gilliam located in the Sam Gilliam Papers, 1958–89, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 69. Stella said to Bruce Glaser that his thick stretchers had the effect that “when you stand directly in front of the painting it gives it just enough depth to hold it off the wall.” See “Questions to Stella and Judd,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 162. In “Shape as Form” Fried defines Stella’s paintings as “all surface” (in Art and Objecthood, 97). 70. I take the concept of the “transitive painting” from David Joselit’s essay “Painting beside Itself,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 125–34. 71. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 100. 72. Fried, “Shape as Form,” 78. 73. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1. 74. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 12. 75. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 243. 76. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 11. 77. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 243; Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 161. 78. See Fried, “New York Letter,” 54; and chapter 3, above. 79. Nagel and Wood, “The Plural Temporality of the Work of Art,” in Anachronic Renaissance, 15. 80. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 11. 81. Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), xiii. See chapter 2, above. 82. Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, 38. 83. Oral History Interview with Sam Gilliam, September 18, 1984, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 84. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 13. 85. Lloyd, “The Black Artist in America: A Symposium,” 448.

C h ap t e r S i x The source of the chapter epigraph is Joan Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996). 1. See Annette Michelson, “Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings” (Robert Elkon Gallery exhibition review). Artforum, January 1967, 46–47; Kasha Linville, “Agnes Martin: An Appreciation,” Artforum, June 1971; Catherine de Zegher, introduction to 3x Abstraction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 2. Prudence Peiffer, “The Rest Is Silence: The Art of Agnes Martin,” Artforum (Summer 2015): 282. 3. Yve-­Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly’s Dream of Impersonality,” Institute Letter, The Institute for Advanced Study (Fall 2013): 16–17. See also Bois’s essay “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-­Composition in Its Many Guises,” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948–1954 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992). 4. Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly’s Dream of Impersonality,” 16. 5. See Tiffany Bell and Frances Morris, eds., Agnes Martin, exh. cat. (London: D. A. P. /

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Tate, 2015); Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Suzanne Hudson, Agnes Martin: Night Sea (London: Afterall Books/One Work, 2016). 6. The capital letters stand for the mediums represented (e.g., F = film, R = records, B = boards, etc.) and the lower case “u” stands for “and.” See “Brian O’ Doherty with Phong Bui.” The rage for structuralism is recorded in O’Doherty’s Aspen issue not only in his mimicking its schematic form and inclusion of Barthes’s essay, but even in the persona O’Doherty took on as editor. In his editorial introduction he poses as the structural linguist “Sigmund Bode,” providing an excerpt from the apocryphal text Placement as Language (1928; see fig. 6.1). 7. Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 65. 8. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 98. 9. The phrase “antihumanist turn” is Meltzer’s; she marks 1966 as a key date in the establishment of structuralism as a dominant cultural paradigm. See Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved, 14–15. 10. See Anna Chave, “Agnes Martin: ‘Humility, The Beautiful Daughter . . . All of Her Ways Are Empty,’ ” in Agnes Martin, exh. cat., ed. Barbara Haskell (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 137. 11. See, for example, Lawrence Alloway’s catalog essay for Martin’s 1973 retrospective at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art: Agnes Martin, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1973). 12. Agnes Martin: With My Back to The World (film), directed by Mary Lance, 2003. 13. In 1989 Martin said, quite plainly, to Susan Campbell: “I consider myself an Abstract Expressionist.” Susan Campbell, Oral History Interview with Agnes Martin, May 15, 1989, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 16. 14. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50. 15. W. J. T. Mitchell makes exactly this point in “Ut Pictura Theoria: Abstract Painting and the Suppression of Language,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 350. 16. Krauss, “Grids,” 54; my emphasis. 17. Krauss, “Grids,” 54. 18. See Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 222–23. 19. Krauss, “Grids,” 54. A very similar argument was made almost a year earlier in Krauss’s essay “LeWitt in Progress,” which dismantles the reading of LeWitt’s grids as exclusively aligned with the logical. This, in turn, has Krauss making the claim that the conception (or more generally the mind) and, in turn, conceptualism, is too often viewed as strictly the logical. See Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October 6 (Autumn 1978): 46–60. 20. Dore Ashton, “Premier Exhibition for Agnes Martin,” New York Times, December 6, 1958, 26. 21. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 14. 22. Higgins, Grid Book, offers a wonderful history of the grid that resists any easy reduction of its meaning and function. 23. Regarding the potential lyricism of Falling Blue, it is important to point out that the atmospheric effect of the painting, when regarded from a distance, is in no small part due to the primer’s having darkened with age, leaving some areas of the painting markedly darker than others. I thank Paula De Cristofaro, conservator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for pointing this out to me. 24. “Before and behind the work, there is a developing awareness in the mind, that is

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the most important part of the work, that I am also going to call the ‘work.’ ” Agnes Martin, transcript from a lecture delivered at the Pasadena Art Museum, May 20, 1973, 1, Irving Sandler Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 25. Martin admits that before the move to New York, she “had very little contact with art.” Campbell, Oral History Interview with Agnes Martin, 1989, 3, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 26. For an account of the exhibitions that Rebay curated while Martin was in New York City, see The Museum of Non-­Objective Painting: Hilla Rebay and the Origins of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ed. Karole Vail (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2009), 260–69. 27. Lee Hall, Betty Parsons: Artist, Dealer, Collector (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1991), 70–73. 28. For a general account of MoMA’s pedagogical exhibition designs, see Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 29. Agnes Martin: With My Back to The World (film). 30. See Benita Eisler, “Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 73; and Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 47–48. See also Rosenberger, Drawing the Line. 31. David Witt, Modernists in Taos from Dasburg to Martin (Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 2002), 107. 32. Witt, Modernists in Taos from Dasburg to Martin, 107. 33. For an account of Martin’s early abstractions, see Rosenberger’s Drawing the Line, 48–91. 34. General Exhibition Files, Exhibition Lists, Schedules, and Price Lists, 1950–1980, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 35. According to Martin’s recounting: “Betty Parsons came to visit Dorothy Brett and I knew Dorothy Brett so I called on them and asked her to look at my work.” Campbell, Oral History Interview with Agnes Martin, 1989, 8, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 36. In the 1989 Campbell interview, for example, Martin states, “I went to university because they had the set-­up, you know. There’s a studio to work in and usually in the universities they let you work in the studios any time.” Campbell, Oral History Interview with Agnes Martin, 1989, 6, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 37. Lucy Lippard, “Top to Bottom, Left to Right,” in Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1972). 38. Hudson, Agnes Martin: Night Sea, 16. 39. Willem de Kooning, quoted in William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 46. 40. Agnes Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life,” reprinted in Writings/Schriften, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 1998), 67. 41. Agnes Martin, handwritten facsimile, reproduced in Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (London: Phaidon Press, 2012), 16. 42. Martin, handwritten facsimile, reproduced in Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances. 43. Martin, “Open Letter” to the Whitney, reprinted in Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 120.

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44. Martin, quoted in transcripts from Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, Profile: Agnes Martin (Chicago: Video Data Bank, 1974), 20. 45. Martin, handwritten facsimile, reproduced in Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 16. 46. Martin, handwritten facsimile, reproduced in Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 16; emphasis added. 47. Martin, handwritten facsimile, reproduced in Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 9. 48. Martin, handwritten facsimile, reproduced in Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 10. 49. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 32. 50. Jonathan Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 93–121. 51. Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 306. 52. Margarita Tupitsyn, “Grid as a Checkpoint of Modernity,” Tate Papers 12 (Autumn 2009); also Krauss, “Grids,” 54. 53. Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), xvii. 54. Phillip Brian Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 43, 46. 55. Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics, 43, 46. 56. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 5. 57. Hubert Damisch, “Genealogy of the Grid,” in The Archive of Development, ed. Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 51. 58. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 1. 59. See “Hubert Damisch and Stephen Bann: A Conversation,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 2 (2005): 157–81. 60. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 3–60.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to images. Absorption and Theatricality (Fried), 137 Abstract Expressionism, 4–6, 9–10, 15–17, 29–30, 41, 43–44, 48–50, 56, 58, 65, 66, 74, 82, 96, 109, 111, 144–45, 148–49, 152; ambiguities of process, 39; appropriation, centrality to, 170n50; and belonging, 156; commercial packag­ ing of, 59; as de Kooning followers, 52; first generation, 53; gesturalism of, 62; homogeneity of kinship, 156; and independence, 24; institutional and market success of, 53; inward turn of, 24; readymade meanings, 80; Romantic notion of artist, 24; second generation, 51–52, 55, 62; and spontaneity, 55; uniqueness of, 23. See also expressionism, neo-­avant-­garde abstraction, 13, 47, 91, 98, 130, 140, 149; and expressionism, 43, 48–49, 53, 71; and figuration, 145; gestural, 71; post-­ Pollock moments of, 65; semantic openness, 130; structure of, 54 Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase (Hess), 150 According to What (Duchamp), 38, 171n75 action painting, 23, 25, 30, 31, 33, 39–40, 57, 60, 96, 155, 170n58, 175n72; concept of, 15; demythologizing of, 96 Adams Morgan Gallery, 117–18 aesthetics, 4, 129; associative, 39; divergent, 48; of indeterminacy, 3; as lived experience, 91; power, theory of, 163n37; readymade, 38

AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), 127–28 Agee, William, 184n71 agency, 13, 18, 27, 29, 169–70n44 Alpers, Josef, 91 Alpha Tau (Gilliam), 115 Althusser, Louis: interpellation, process of, 169n41 “American Action Painters, The” (Rosenberg), 23, 25–27, 29–30, 33, 38 American Artists Congress, 149 American College of Orgonomy, 101–2 American Modernism, 9–10, 15, 24, 43, 54, 83, 91; Club, association with, 47; process, commitment to, 54; public definition of, 49 “American-­Type Painting” (Greenberg), 89 Andre, Carl, 7 Anti-­Semite and Jew (Sartre), 27–28 apperception, 111 April 4 (Gilliam), 136 Archives of American Art, 101, 115 Arp, Jean, 171n86 Arshile Gorky: The Man, the Time, the Idea (Rosenberg), 30 Art in America (magazine), 8; expressionism question, issue on, 7 Artist and His Mother, The (Gorky), 34–35, 37 artist as author, 5, 9, 11, 23, 34, 42, 80, 89, 133, 156 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 99, 116, 135 Art News (magazine), 53 Art Students League, 150

Art World Follies (magazine), 8 Ashbery, John, 165n65 Asher, Michael, 163n37 Asheville (de Kooning), 39 Ashton, Dore, 44, 146 Aspen (magazine), 142–43, 143, 144, 190n6; “Minimalist Issue,” 5, 6 authorship, 11, 16, 44, 62, 94, 99–100, 116; authorial ambiguity, 144; authorial practice, 16; authorial presence, 15, 67, 82–83, 85, 122, 140; authorial restraint, 96; authorial self, 19, 109, 142; authorial signification, 117; authorship space, 43, 153; as considered, 55–56; death of author thesis, 5, 13; debates over, 10; and discipline, 89–90; and expressionism, 49; and gesture, 43; and grid, 146, 153; and innovation, 94; and intention, 12, 66, 165–66n67; intentional space of, 5; and Modernism, 127; and Modernist painting, 9; and originality, 23–24; question of, 4, 9–10, 13, 43; schematized design, 146; as spontaneous, 55–56; as term, 9 automatism, 33, 170n58; plastic, 48; psychic, 48, 153; verbal, 48 Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (Pollock), 69–70 avant-­garde, 8, 18, 163n37 Baer, Jo, 65 Baro, Gene, 79 Barr, Alfred H., 48 Barrett, William, 172n99 Barrier No. 4 (Tworkov), 2–3; and ambiguity, 18; as punctual, 4 Barthes, Roland, 5, 23, 142–43, 190n6; sway of the author, 112 Baziotes, William, 44, 49 Bearden, Romare, 126–27 Beardsley, Monroe C., 1, 40, 109, 172n92 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 27–28 Belgrad, Daniel, 164n53 Benglis, Lynda, 116 Bennett, Andrew, 24 Bersani, Leo, 113 Betty Parsons Gallery, 69–71, 150 Binstock, Jonathan P., 186n13 Black aesthetic, 128 Black art, 16–17, 117, 126–29, 131–32 “Black Artist in America, The” (symposium), 126–27 208 | I n d e x

Black Arts Movement, 16–17, 126, 128– 29, 131–32, 135, 141; Black sensibility, 127 “Black Arts Movement, The” (Neal), 127 Black Break (Gilliam), 123; as one-­shot painting, 122; pennant forms, 123 Black Entertainment Television (BET), 131, 134 Black Modernist artists, 126 Black Mountain College, 91, 101, 150, 167n87 Blue Form in a Scene (Frankenthaler), 77, 78, 79–80 Blue Territory (Frankenthaler), 76, 77 Bochner, Mel, 5, 142–43 Bocour, Leonard, 119–20, 182n22, 186n13 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 23, 142; already-­made, 122–23 Bolotowsky, Ilya, 91 Bond, Robin, 101, 103 Bourdieu, Pierre, doxa, 155; field theory, 17–18 Bow Form Construction (Gilliam), 11, 115 Brennan, Marcia, 82–83 Breton, André: psychic automatism, 48 Brett, Dorothy, 191n35 Broodthaers, Marcel, 163n37 Brown, Julia, 80 Buber, Martin, 26 Buchloh, Benjamin, 8, 23, 163n37 Buddhism, 154 Buren, Daniel, 163n37 Bürger, Peter, 163n37 Burke, Kenneth, 15, 62, 66–67, 74–75, 82, 172n92, 177n23, 177n27; and identification, 180n79; symbolic and practical acts, distinction between, 76 Burke, Seán, 5 Butler, Dorothy, 117. See also Gilliam, Dorothy Butler, Judith, 15, 188n51; moral questioning, 14, 134–35; norms of recognition, 130; self-­formation, 156–57 Byron Gallery, 115 Cage, John, 1, 2, 3–5, 18, 44; Theater Piece #1, 167n87 Cahiers d’art ( journal), 30 California School of Fine Arts, 150 Campbell, Mary Schmidt, 188n56 Campbell, Susan, 166n80, 190n13 capitalism, 11, 34

Cavell, Stanley, 97, 99, 183n43; medium, idea of, 187n34 Cezanne, Paul, 34 Chandler, James, 90 Character Analysis: Principle and Technique for Psychoanalysts in Practice and in Training (Reich), 101, 103–4 “Character Change and the Drama” (Rosenberg), 34 Charles Egan Gallery, 54 Chave, Anna, 166n81 Chicago, 127–28 civil rights movement, 140 Club, The, 9–10, 13, 15, 40–41, 43–44, 46– 48, 51, 54, 172n99 Coates, Robert, 48 Communist Party, 27–29 Conant, James, 183n43 “Concept of Action, The” (Rosenberg), 60 conceptualism, 163n37, 190n19 “Contemporary Voices in the Arts” (traveling program), 1–2, 2, 3–4, 59–60 Cooper, Harry, 31 Corbin, Henry, 112 Cornell, Joseph, 149 Cosmic Superimposition: Man’s Orgonotic Roots in Nature (Reich), 103 Craft, Catherine, 170n50 Crawford, Margo Natalie, 128 Creeley, Robert, 1–2, 2, 3 Crimp, Donald, 8, 163n37 “Crux of Minimalism, The” (Foster), 7 Cubism, 108–9, 182–83n36, 185n74 Cummings, Paul, 101 Cunningham, Merce, 1, 2, 6 Dada, 100 Damisch, Hubert, 156 Davis, Gene, 117 death of the author, 8, 90; thesis of, 5, 13; and grid, 142, 147 “Death of the Author, The” (Barthes), 5 de Bouvier, Simone, 27, 40 de Chirico, Giorgio, 171n86 De Cristofaro, Paula, 190n23 Deleuze, Gilles, 14 de Kooning, Elaine, 44, 49 de Kooning, Willem, 3, 6–7, 10, 30–31, 32, 44, 53–54, 76, 91, 93, 96, 150, 152, 154, 171n82, 173n3, 174n39; approach to self, 38–39; Asheville, 39; Door to the River, 41–42, 51–52, 79; gestural paint209 | I n d e x

ings, turn to, 51–52; Merritt Parkway, 51–52, 52; “Woman” paintings, 92 Derrida, Jacques, 140; passe-­partout, 138 Diary of a Seducer (Gorky), 34, 37 “Diminished Act, The” (Rosenberg), 39 discipline: and authorship, 89–90; doctrine, difference between, 90, 113 “Does the Jew Exist? Sartre’s Morality Play about Anti-­Semitism” (Rosenberg), 27 Donaldson, Jeff, 128 Door to the River (de Kooning), 41, 79 Downing, Thomas, 117, 122, 124, 186n13 Duchamp, Marcel, 6, 46; According to What, 38, 171n75; Female Fig Leaf, 171n75 Dzubas, Friedel, 53 “East Barrier,” Study for, (Tworkov), 58, 59 Echaurren, Roberto Matta, 37 Eden (Frankenthaler), 75–76, 80 Either/Or (Kierkegaard), 37 Elderfield, John, 64, 76, 180n81 Eliot, T. S., 38 Empson, William, 11–12, 63, 156 English, Darby, 82, 128–29, 186n10 English, O. S., 110 Ernst, Max, 171n71 Europa (Frankenthaler), 83–85 Europe, 25, 47 existentialism, 26, 37, 40–41 expressionism, 8, 32–33, 37, 104–5, 116, 149; and abstraction, 43, 48–49, 53; and authorship, 49; gesture of, 54; and grid, 142; as new academy, 53; resistance to, 51; as specific language, 42–43; as term, 47–48. See also Abstract Expressionism expressive abstraction: ambiguity of, 65– 66 “Expressive Fallacy, The” (Foster), 42 expressive turn: and Romanticism, 42 Falling Blue (Martin), 147, 148, 153, 190n23 fascism, 26 Faulkner, William, 39 Fechter, Paul, 47 Feeley, Paul, 65–66 Female Fig Leaf (Duchamp), 171n75 feminist art, 116 Ferber, Herbert, 167n13 Ferrell, Barry, 3 Ferren, John, 49

Field of Cultural Production, The (Bourdieu), 17 figuration, 69, 72, 117, 130, 176n5; and abstraction, 145; Freudian, 104; vegetative, 105 Fine, Perle, 44, 49 Finnegans Wake ( Joyce), 38–39, 171n87 Fischl, Eric, 7 Fogg Art Museum, 97 Foster, Hal, 7–8, 23–24, 42–43, 90, 163n37 Foucault, Michel, 14; discipline, 89–90, 113; and function, 90 Four Quartets (Eliot), 38 Frankenthaler, Helen, 4–5, 11, 16, 44, 51, 74, 78, 91–92, 101, 130, 152, 176n7, 177n27, 178n44, 178n45; Abstract Expressionism, engagement with, 62, 66, 82; analysis, centrality of, 66–67, 79, 81, 83; authorial presence, as gendered, 67, 82–83, 85; Blue Form in a Scene, 77, 78, 79–80; Blue Territory, 76, 77, 180n81; as bridge between expressive and gestural abstraction, 65, 71; Burke, influence on, 177n23; and charting, 62; and contour, 73–75, 80; drawing, emphasis on, 64–66; drawn line, self-­conscious approach to, 73–74, 85; Europa, 83–85; figuration in, 176n5; and framing, 73, 79–80; and gesture, 73, 80; gesture, and horizontal space, 79, 81; gesture, as means of staging, 76; gesture, as signature, 75–76; as index of absence, 76; Interior Landscape, 80; mark-­making, 109–10; Mountains and Sea, 64, 64, 65, 67–69, 73, 84; New York School, follower of, 177n23; paintings, as ambiguities, 68; pictorial ambiguity, 68–69; Pollock, influence on, 69–71, 73–74, 79–80, 178–79n46; process of, 64; representational space, 82; Scene with Nude, 67, 67, 68, 84; Seven Types of Ambiguity, 63–64, 80–81; Small’s Paradise, 80; stain paintings, 15, 65, 67–68, 76–77, 84, 90; Swan Lake #2, 77, 79; wrist, reference to, 177n21, 179n67 Freilicher, Jane, 49 French & Company, 109, 184n71 Freud, Sigmund, 100, 103–5, 110, 113; symptom analysis method, 102 Friedman, B. H., 72 Fried, Michael, 1, 16, 68, 69, 73, 84–85, 210 | I n d e x

89–90, 108–10, 112–13, 117, 122, 126, 130, 134, 178n40, 178n41, 183n50, 184n63, 188n65; global and specific formal development, distinction between, 98; on literalism, 97, 115–16, 124–25, 135, 137–38; on modernism, 183n52; opticality, 101, 125; opticality and shape, 124–25; picture-­making, radicalization of, 96–97; presentness, 99; theatricality, notion of, 135–36; therapeutic, as term, 97 Geldzahler, Henry, 67, 70 “German Painting and Sculpture” (exhibition), 48 Germany, 47 gestural abstraction, 60 gestural realists, 55 gesture: 43, 54, 56–58; authorial presence, 15; as authorship space, 62; coloniza­ tion of, 59; as expressive idiom, 55; horizontal space, 79, 81; as index, 62, 76; as means of staging, 76; as practical act, 76; from practical to symbolic act, 62; as signature, 75–76; and symbol, 62; symbolic function of, 76 gesture painting, 43, 51–52, 54, 62; commercial galleries, presence in, 53; ubiquity of, 53 Getsy, David, 187n50, 188n51 Gibson, Ann Eden, 165n62 Gilliam, Dorothy, 131–32, 141. See also Butler, Dorothy Gilliam, Sam, 4–5, 65, 113–14, 120, 127, 186n22, 186n24, 188n56; accidental recognition of, 121–22; Alpha Tau, 115; already-­made references, use of, 130, 140; artwork, as anachronic, 133–34; artwork, bending of time, 134; April 4, 136; architectural space, use of, 132–34; authorial presence, and literal space, 122, 140; authorial signification, 117; authorship, 116; Black Break, 122–23, 123; deliberation, space for, 134–35; diagonal stripe paintings, 122; drape paintings, 115–17, 135, 137–38; event, as painting, 136, 140–41; folded paintings, 116–17, 121–22, 132, 136–37, 140; frame, handling of, 137–41; Green April, 136; Green Slice, 121, 125–26, 132, 140; hard-­edge abstractions, 117–19, 122; identity, questions of, 131–32; illu-

sive and representational form, return to, 123–24; Johnson Avenue studio, as community, 115–16, 135–36; Light Fan, 118–19, 124; and literalism, 115, 117; literal space, 130, 135–36; Medley, 119; as Modernist, 117; Noland, influence on, 11, 121–22, 124; Ode, 118, 118, 119, 123–24; paintings, as anachronic, 132– 34, 140–41; pennant paintings, 122–26; pictorial literalism, 16; picture making, 122; postminimalist and feminist art, influence on, 116; poured paintings, 121; and race, 116–17; Red April, 137, 138–40; Red Petals, 119, 119, 120–21; Restore, 136; retaliatory paintings, 124; Rose Rising, 122, 136, 138–40; signify­ ing processes, 135; slide paintings, 120–21; specificity of being, 116; staining technique, 131, 136, 140; Swing, 132–33, 133; technique of, 120–21, 131; 10/27/69, 132–33; and theatricality, 135; three-­dimensional space, 122; Twist and Knot (Gilliam), 134; unbecoming, of artwork, 133–34; Washington Color School, association with, 116–18; water-­ tension breaker, 186n13 Glaser, Bruce, 189n69 Glueck, Grace, 1–2 Goldwater, Robert, 15, 44, 49 Gorky, Arshile, 4–5, 11, 15, 23–24, 32, 91, 171n82, 171n88; action painting, as blind automatism, 170n58; ambiguity of association, 39; appropriation, use of, 30, 33, 37–38; Armenian genocide, refugee of, 30; Artist and His Mother, 34–35, 35, 37; bricolage of references, 38; Diary of a Seducer, 34, 36, 37; intelligence of, in practice, 33–34; and intent, 40; intention of, as artist, 34; Liver Is the Cock’s Comb, 34, 36, 37; as Modernist artist, 33; Organization, 30–31, 31, 32, 32; originality, rejection of, 32; painting as practice, 39 Gorkyin, Vladimir, 152 Gottlieb, Adolph, 49, 150; burst paintings, 105, 108 Graham, John D., 24; line, importance of, 73 Graham, Martha, 1 Green April (Gilliam), 136 Greenberg, Clement, 10, 13, 39, 51–52, 65, 68–69, 72–74, 80, 83–85, 92, 96–97, 211 | I n d e x

99, 108–10, 112, 119, 165n63, 168n17, 176n10, 182–83n36, 184n71, 185n74, 186n18; discipline, 89; eyesight alone, 178n31; medium specificity, concept of, 90, 94–95; opticality, 101 Green Slice (Gilliam), 121, 125–26, 132, 140 Grey Stone (Martin), 153 grid, 144; as agent, 156; as already-­made, 142; as ambiguous, 156; ambivalent structure of, 145; and authorial self, 142; and authorship, 146, 153; and belonging, 155; as checkpoint to modernity, 156; and choice, 152–53; as emblem and myth, 145; as geometricized, 146; Greek cross, evoking of, 145; an modernist visibility, 156; multiple possible actions, openness to, 156; mythic power of, 17, 145; an racial politics, 156; repeatable structure, 142–43; and representation, 145; structural imaginary, 143 “Grids” (Krauss), 145 Guggenheim International Award Exhibition, 53 Guggenheim Museum, 149. See also Museum of Non-­Objective Art Guilbaut, Serge, 26, 167n6 Guston, Philip, 49 Haacke, Hans, 163n37 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 34–35 “happenings,” 3–4 Hare, David, 44 “Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968” (exhibition), 126 Harlem Renaissance, 126 Harney, Tom, 120 Harper, Phillip Brian, 156 Harrison, Helen, 173n12 Hartigan, Grace, 49, 51, 55 Hayden, Tom, 8 Heat (Noland), 107 heliotrope: tropism of, 112 Hellstein, Valerie, 167n87 Henderson, Joseph L., 39 “Herd of Independent Minds, The: Has the Avant-­Garde Its Own Mass Culture?” (Rosenberg), 27 Hess, Thomas, 9, 24, 26, 39, 43–44, 48–49, 51, 53, 150, 171n86, 171n87, 174n39

High Modernism, 9, 62, 138; authorship, 94; disciplinary action of, 89, 96; illusive opticality, shift to, 98, 101; opticality, 119; picture-­making, radicalization of, 96–97. See also Modernism Hitler-­Stalin pact, 149 Hofmann, Hans, 44, 91 Hopps, Walter, 114 Hoving, Thomas, 126 Hudson, Suzanne, 154 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 6 humanism, 25–26, 29, 162n28 Hunt, Richard, 126 Husserl, Edmund: on intention and consciousness, 40 Impressionism, 47–48 indeterminacy: aesthetics of, 3 “Indian Art in the United States” (exhibition), 149 In the Garden (Noland), 93 Ingres, Jean-­Auguste-­Dominique, 34–35, 37, 39, 171n86 “Intentional Fallacy, The” (Wimsatt and Beardsley), 109 intention, 4, 12, 34, 40, 46, 109, 142, 144; of artists, 44; and authorship, 12, 66, 165–66n67; and consciousness, 40; as defined, 40; intentional act, 29, 169– 70n44 intentionality, 96 Interior Landscape (Frankenthaler), 80 International Psychoanalytic Association, 102, 110 “Intrasubjectives” (exhibition), 10 Irascible Group, 10. See also New York School Islands, The (Martin), 153 It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art ( journal), 43–44 Jackson, Harry, 92 jam paintings, 92–93, 101 Jarrell, Jae, 128 Jarrell, Wadsworth, 128 Jewish Museum, 51, 65 Johns, Jasper, 38, 171n75; Castelli exhibition, 105, 108 Johnson Avenue studio, 114–16, 135–36 Jones, Caroline A., 67–68, 82, 89–90, 156, 176n5 Jones-­Hogu, Barbara, 128 212 | I n d e x

Joselit, David, 176n7, 189n70 Joyce, James, 39 Judd, Donald, 7 Kandinsky, Wassily, 37, 46–47, 149 Kant, Immanuel, 92 Kaprow, Allan, 2–3, 44, 58, 60 Katz, Jonathan, 155–56 Kelly, Ellsworth, 142 Kierkegaard, Soren, 26, 37 Kiesler, Friedrich, 44 King, Martin Luther, Jr.: assassination of, 114–15, 135–36, 140 Kitnick, Alex, 165–66n67 Klee, Paul, 92 Kline, Franz, 44, 49, 52, 92; Painting, 167n87 Klüver, Billy, 1, 2, 3, 18 Knight, Etheridge, 128 Kootz Gallery, 10 Kootz, Samuel, 10, 149 Kozloff, Max, 100 Krasner, Lee, 44, 72, 150, 179n56 Krauss, Rosalind, 8, 23, 26, 41–42, 96, 100–101, 124, 156, 171n81, 173n3, 190n19; cultural space, 5–6, 79; Greek cross, 145; grid, mythic power of, 17, 145–46; “Grids,” 145; and minimalism, 162n20, 162n22; private self, critique of, 7; and representation, 145 Krebs, Rockne, 114 Lao Tzu, 154 Lassaw, Ibram, 13 Lawrence, Jacob, 126 “Lectures on Aesthetics” (Wittgenstein), 97 “Legacy of Jackson Pollock, The” (Kaprow), 58 Léger, Fernand, 150 Leider, Philip, 111 Leja, Michael, 24–26, 39, 171n81, 179n53 Leslie, Alfred, 49, 51 Les Temps modernes ( journal), 27, 40–41 LeWitt, Sol, 5, 142–43, 190n19 Light Fan (Gilliam), 118–19, 124 Lippard, Lucy, 60, 152 literalism, 16–17, 97, 115 Liver Is the Cock’s Comb (Gorky), 34, 37 Lloyd, Tom, 126–27, 141 Louis, Morris, 16, 65, 82, 84–85, 95, 101, 115, 120, 178n40, 182n22, 182–83n36;

jam paintings, 92–93; line and color, freeing up of, 98; Modernist disci‑ pline, 96, 98; one-­shot painting, 93; picture-­making, 96; post-­painterly methods of, 98; real handlings, 93; as uncomposed, 166n77; veil paintings, 69, 119 “Louis and Noland” (Greenberg), 108 Lunar Episode (Noland), 105, 106 Lye, Len, 1, 2 Macy’s, 149 Malraux, 30 Mandelman, Beatrice, 150 mark-­making, 37, 42, 46, 53, 56–57, 60, 81–82, 154; automatic, 109–10 Martin, Agnes, 4–5, 11, 190–91n24, 191n25, 191n35, 191n36; as Abstract Expressionist, 144–45, 148, 152, 156, 166n80, 190n13; already-­made, 142; ambiguity, 144; belonging, 146–47; biography and practice, 152; egolessness of, 17, 144, 149, 166n81; Falling Blue, 147, 148, 153, 190n23; Grey Stone, 153; grid, as framework for action, 152; grid, role of, 142, 144–45, 152, 155; grid, and sense of belonging, 155; grid paintings, 146–47, 153; Islands, The, 153; inspiration, concept of, 154–55; knowingness of, 152; making, focus on, 153; Modernism, as student of, 149, 152; as Modernist, 146–49, 155; Modernist art, early encounters with, 149– 50, 152; Night Sea, 154; self-­expression, 155; self-­identification, 152; This Rain, 147; and unities, 17; Untitled, 151 Marxism, 167n6 Marx, Karl, 27–28, 34, 188n54; theory of agency, 29 Masson, André, 37 materiality, 48, 145 Matisse, Henri, 171n86 Maze (Smith), 6 McCarthy, Mary, 168n17 Medley (Gilliam), 119 Mehring, Howard, 117 Meltzer, Eve, 143, 162n28, 190n9 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 27–28 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 126 Meyer, James, 167n83 Michaels, Walter Benn, 188n65 Michelson, Annette, 142 213 | I n d e x

minimalism, 6–7, 17, 96, 112, 130, 163n37, 167n83; and grid, 143 Miró, Joan, 32, 34, 37, 39, 149–50, 171n86 Mitchell, Joan, 44, 49, 51, 55 Mitchell, W. J. T., 190n15 Mitosis (Noland), 105 Modernism, 4–5, 7–10, 32–15, 17, 19, 30, 37, 47–48, 57, 60, 92, 108, 110, 140, 149, 157, 182–83n36, 183n52; and authorship, 127; belonging, 134–35; disciplinarity of, 84–85, 89–91, 96, 98–101, 112– 13, 130–31, 139; disembodied opticality of, 68, 111; and doctrine, 113; doctrine and literalism, as threat to, 117; as fracture, 12; identity and grid, 142; individual over community, emphasis on, 129–30; literal space, 116; and making, 12; opticality, 89, 94, 124; and practice, 12–13, 15; way of seeing, 156. See also High Modernism Modernist painting, 29, 39, 51, 53, 62, 65–67, 82–84, 97, 112, 115, 125–26, 138, 141, 148–50, 155, 162n22; and ambiguity, 12, 17; authorial ambiguity, 144; and authorship, 9; autonomous line, 69; eyesight alone doctrine, 68, 98, 111, 124; grid in, 145–47; individual over community, emphasis on, 129, 130; painting, as made object, 11; painterly process, 53; as self-­aware actors, 10; self, engagement with, 102 “Modernist Painting” (Greenberg), 89, 92 Modernist studies: paranoid readings, 90 “Modern Painters World, The” (Motherwell), 24, 48 Moffett, Kenworth, 93, 97, 100, 185n74; picture looking, 96 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 6 Mondrian, Piet, 32, 46, 145, 171n86 Monet, Claude, 115 Morning Span (Noland), 124–25 Morris, Robert, 5, 6, 112, 188n54 Morrison, Keith, 121, 186n22, 186n24 Mortimer Brandt Gallery, 48 Motherwell, Robert, 24–25, 29, 55, 153, 168n15; plastic automatism, 48; verbal automatism, 48 Mountains and Sea (Frankenthaler), 64, 64, 65, 67–69, 73, 84 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 30, 149 Museum of Non-­Objective Painting, 30, 149. See also Guggenheim Museum

Nagel, Alexander, 4, 132, 134, 139, 161n11 Naifeh, Steven, 72 Namuth, Hans, 72 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 46, 141, 173n18 Native American art, 150 Neal, Larry, 127–28 Nelson, Deborah, 79 Nelson, Maggie, 156 neo-­avant-­garde, 4–5, 7–9, 16–19, 55, 58, 60, 90, 145, 162n28, 163n37 Neo-­Expressionism: critique of, 7–8 Nesbit, Molly, 89 New Criticism, 172n92 Newman, Barnett, 11, 24, 150 New Mexico, 145–46, 148–50, 156 “New Talent” (exhibition), 10 New York, 9, 13, 83, 92, 101, 115, 145–46, 148–50, 152; anchored action, 4; Har‑ lem, 126 New York School, 3, 9–12, 15–16, 24–25, 29–30, 38, 41, 43, 53–54, 62, 65–66, 69, 73, 80, 144, 177n23; as derivative, charges of, 52; first generation, 51; second generation, 51–52. See also Irascible Group “New York School, The: Second Generation” (exhibition), 51 Night Sea (Martin), 154 92nd Street YMHA, 1, 2, 4 “Ninth Street Show” (exhibition), 51, 150 Noland, Kenneth, 4–5, 11, 65, 69, 82, 84–85, 104, 115, 117, 119, 123, 152–53, 182n22, 182–83n36, 183n52, 184n59, 184n63, 185n74, 186n13; affective encounter, 112; aloofness, 100; anchored paintings, 90–91; apperception, 111; authorial self, 109; authorship, 100; centering of perception, 111; chevron paintings, 124–25; color, focus on, 94; concentric-­circle series, 95, 100, 105, 108–9, 122, 184n71; diamond paintings, 121, 125; disciplinary structure, 91; disciplinary work, and therapeutic value, 16; formal self-­criticism, 99; Heat, 107; High Modernism, as representative of, 99; hypnotic opticality, 100; influences on, 101; In the Garden, 93; jam paintings, 92–93, 101; line and color, freeing up of, 98; Lunar Episode, 105, 106; medium specificity, 101; Mitosis, 105; Modernist discipline, relationship to, 91–92, 94–100, 105, 109–10, 214 | I n d e x

112–13, 130–31; Morning Span, 124–25; one-­shot painting, 93–94, 109, 111; opticality, 96, 98, 100–101; painting, as perceptual encounter, 101; pictorial encounter, 102; pictorial mobility, 100; pictorial shape, and therapy, 97; pictorial subjectivity, 109; picture-­making, radicalization of, 96–97; picture-­ making, serial approach to, 94–96; Planet, 105; Point, 105; post-­painterly methods of, 98; present, contingency of, 102; proto-­circles, 105; and psychotherapy, 99; real handling, 93, 96, 109–11; Reichian Orgonomic therapy, influence on, 100–105, 110, 112–13; second-­person address, use of, 111; seeing and making, 110–12; self-­canceling structure, 108–9; and selfhood, 100, 102; seriality, embrace of, 110; signification, affective mode in, 96, 102; spatial color, 111; specificity of viewer­ ship, limitations of, 112; Split, 105, 108; staining, process of, 94, 111; stripe paintings, 186n24; Turnsole, 95–96, 100, 110–13; viewer, 110–11, 113; viewer, physical connection with, 105; viewer and disciplinary object, interest in, 101; viewership, emphasis on, 16, 100, 109; vision and color, 110; visual perception, focus on, 110; Whirl, 95, 95, 96; Wilhelm Reich, 105, 107 non-­avant-­garde, 4 Norton, Gerald, 65 Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (Pollock) 69–70, 70; spectatorial effect of, 72 Number 14 (Pollock), 71, 71, 72–74 O’Brien, Elaine, 170n58 October (magazine), 8 Ode (Gilliam), 118, 118, 119; pennant forms, 123–24 O’Doherty, Brian, 5, 6, 142–43, 143, 144, 162n16, 190n6 O’Hara, Frank, 49 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 150 Olitski, Jules, 65, 69, 82, 98, 125 Oliveira, Nathan, 117 Oller, Charles, 101, 184n59 one-­shot paintings, 93–94, 96, 101, 109, 111, 122 opticality, 89, 96, 98, 101, 119; hypnotic, 100; and shape, 124–25

organic surrealism, 91 Organization (Gorky), 30–31, 31, 32 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 26 orgone energy, 104; material theory of, 105 orgone therapy, 102, 110; and orgasm, 113 orgonomy, 184n69 originality: as ambiguous, 25; ambivalence toward, 25; and authorship, 23– 24; as keyword, 25; preconceived content, 25; Romantic thinking, byproduct of, 42; as term, 25; tradition, relation to, 25 Orozco, José Clemente, 39 Ossorio, Alfonso, 72 Owens, Craig, 7–8 Packard, Vance, 26 painting, 12; interpretation of, 8; maker, reimagining of, 13; practice of, 13 Paris, 92, 115, 150 Park, David, 117 Parker, Ray, 44 Parsons, Betty, 148–50, 152, 191n35 Passages in Modern Sculpture (Krauss), 41 Pavia, Philip, 9, 13, 43, 49, 62, 153; artistic individuality, 44–46; drawing, emphasis on, 46–47; manifestos of, 44–45, 47; Orgman-­critics, awareness of, 47; plastic experience, 48; subjectivity, and “Problem,” 47 Peiffer, Prudence, 142 performance art, 4 Phillips Collection, 16, 39, 96, 119–22, 124 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 97 Picabia, Francis, 32, 150 Picasso, Pablo, 34–35, 37, 39, 46, 171n81, 171n86 pictorial ambiguity, 68–69 pictorial expressionism, 47 pictorialism, 137 picture-­making: radicalization of, 96–97 Pippin, Robert, 188n65 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, 53 Plain (Tworkov), 55–56 Planet (Noland), 105 Point (Noland), 105 Polcari, Stephen, 11 Pollock, Jackson, 2–3, 6–7, 10–11, 16, 24, 215 | I n d e x

30–31, 51, 65, 67, 79–80, 91, 93–96, 100, 102, 105, 111, 115, 140, 144, 150, 152, 165n65, 171n81, 176n7, 178n40, 179n56; approach to self, 38–39; autonomous line, 69; Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 69–70; destroying painting, accusation of, 58; drawn line, focus on, 72; drip paintings, 70, 73; enveloping space, 178n45; figuration, return to, 72; iconography of, 39; indigenous sources, turn to, 73; line and scale, new language for, 178n44; Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 69–70, 70, 72; Number 14 (Pollock), 71, 71, 72–74; paintings of, as “labored stammer,” 175n66; self-­ doubt of, 72; unconscious, representation of, 39 Poons, Larry, 80 Popular Front, 149; of American Communist Party (CPUSA), 164n52 Porter, Fairfield, 52 postexpressionism, 143 postminimalism, 17 postminimalist art, 116 post-­painterly abstraction, 62 Post, Robert, 90 Poussette-­Dart, Richard, 150 practice, 19; art object, production of, 13 presentness, 99, 183n50 protest art, 128 psychotherapy, 16, 99 Rampley, Michael, 11 Ransom, John Crowe, 172n92 Ratcliff, Carter, 7–8 Rauschenberg, Robert, 4, 5, 6, 44, 51, 150 real handling, 93, 96, 109–11 Rebay, Hilla, 149 Red April (Gilliam), 137, 138–39; as passe-­ partout, 140 Red Petals (Gilliam), 119, 120–21; opticality of, 119 Reichian Orgonomic therapy, 100–102 Reich, Wilhelm, 100, 112, 184n63; arrest of, 102; Character Analysis: Principle and Technique for Psychoanalysts in Practice and in Training, 101, 103; common functioning principle, and orgasm function, 104; contemporary and affective, 102; Cosmic Superimposition: Man’s Orgonotic Roots in Nature, 103, 104; orgone energy, 103–5, 106;

Reich, Wilhelm (continued) orgone therapy, 110; submission and release, notion of, 113; symptom analysis method, rejection of, 102 Reinhardt, Ad, 42, 44, 49, 150, 152; black paintings, as symbolic representation, 145 Reisman, David, 26; other-­directed, 168n21 representation, 15, 34, 39, 47–48, 73, 75, 91, 100, 124; symbolic, 145 Resnick, Milton, 49 Restore (Gilliam), 136 Ribak, Louis, 150 Rice, John Andrew, 91 Ricco, John Paul, 133–34 Richter, Hans, 6 Rieff, Philip, 184n69 Rivers, Larry, 49, 55 Robbins, Daniel, 166n77 Romanticism, 25–29; and originality, 24 Rosati, James, 13 Rosenberg, Harold, 10, 15, 24, 31, 34, 37, 44, 47, 49, 57, 60, 152, 168n17, 168n18, 168n25, 171n71, 172n92; action painting, theory of, 25, 28–30, 32–33, 39–41, 155, 175n72; action system, 35; agency, interest in, 29; on alienation, 27; ambiguities of human action, 40; art as action, 169–70n44; artist’s “rôle,” 33; creative act, 41; existentialism, interest in, 41; human act, as ambiguous, 41; human agency, as student of, 27; and humanism, 25–26, 29; individual action, 169n41; Modernist painting, characterization of, 29; Orgman-­critics, 26–27; originality, dismissal of, 23, 32; post-­radical criticism, 26; postwar liberalism, skepticism toward, 27; Sartre, break with, 169n29; self, conception of, 23; self-­expression, 38; theory of action, 23 Rose Rising (Gilliam), 122, 136, 138, 140; repoussoir effect, 139 Rothko, Mark, 150, 152 Rubenfeld, Florence, 184n63 Rubens, Peter Paul, 39 Russian Constructivism, 150 Saint Theresa, 154 Salle, David, 7 Saltzman, Lisa, 82 216 | I n d e x

Sandler, Irving, 10, 24, 39, 45, 51–55, 176n7 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 26, 29, 41, 46, 111–12; bad faith, 27–28; existentialism of, 40; intentional act, 169–70n44; Rosenberg, break with, 169n 29 Scene with Nude (Frankenthaler), 67, 67, 68, 84 Schapiro, Meyer, 10, 13, 165n63; painting, as practical activity, 165n66 Schnabel, Julian, 7 Schuyler, James, 13 sculpture, 12; literalism of, 116 “Seducer’s Diary, The” (Kierkegaard), 37 Segments (Mandelman), 151 Seitz, William, 30, 39, 175n55 Sekula, Sonia, 150 self, 100, 102, 112; Reichian theory of, 101 seriality, 110 Serra, Richard, 5 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Frankenthaler), 63–64, 80–81 “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings” (Fried), 97, 124 Sidney Janis Gallery, 52, 92 signification, 96, 102, 117, 130 Sloan, John, 150 Small’s Paradise (Frankenthaler), 80 Smith, David, 94, 101 Smith, Gregory White, 72 Smith, Tony, 4–5, 72, 142, 143; Maze, 6 Solomon, Alan, 65, 100 Soutine, Chaim, 39, 47, 54, 171n86 Soviet Union, 26 Spivak, Gayatri, 14 Split (Noland), 105, 108 stain paintings, 15, 65, 67–68, 76–77, 84, 90, 117; revision, resistance to, 94 Stamos, Theodoros, 92, 149 Steinberg, Leo, 51, 79, 100, 175n66 Steinberg, Saul, 149 Steiner, Shepard, 177n23 Stella, Frank, 16, 65–66, 99, 115, 189n69; Black Paintings, 136–39, 141; frame, formalizing of, 139; literalism, dalliance with, 137–38; pictorial shape, and therapy, 97, 125; shaped canvases, 124 Sterling, Susan Fisher, 105, 110, 184n71 Sterne, Hedda, 44, 149 Still, Clyfford, 150 structuralism, 143–44, 162n28, 190n6

Stuckey, Charles F., 39 Studio 35, 163n49; Artists’ Sessions at, 39 subjectivity, 162n28 Summer Field School of Art, 150 Surrealists, 48, 168n15 Swan Lake #2 (Frankenthaler), 77, 79 Swing (Gilliam), 132–33, 133 Tamayo, Rufino, 66 Taos (New Mexico): as artists’ colony, 149–50 Taylor, Charles, 42 temporality, 3–4, 18, 139–40 10/27/69 (Gilliam), 132–33, 133 This Rain (Martin), 147 “Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella” (exhibition), 97–98 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 73, 74, 75–76, 80, 105, 109, 184n71 Toorop, Jan, 171n86 “Top to Bottom, Left to Right” (Lippard), 152 “Toward a New Abstraction” (exhibition), 65; catalog of, 100 tropism, 112 Truth in Painting, The (Derrida), 138 Tuchman, Phyllis, 57 Tupitsyn, Margarita, 156 Turnsole (Noland), 95–96, 100, 110; depth, as problem in, 111; as heliotropic, 112– 13; indexical connection, 112; as Modernist painting, 113; title of, 112 TV Dinner—Homage to E.T.A. (Food for Thought) (Tworkov), 1, 2, 3–5, 19 Twist and Knot (Gilliam), 134 Tworkov, Jack, 4–5, 11, 15, 19, 24, 44, 49, 51, 53, 146, 154; and authorship, 55–56, 62; Barrier No. 4, 2, 18, 56, 59; East Barrier, 56–57, 57; East Barrier, study for, 58, 59; expressionism, relation to, 54; gesture, use of, 43, 54–59, 62; gesture painting, 54; and ideas, 56; Idling series, 60–61; Idling III, 61, 61; and loss, 57–58; mark-­making, 57, 60, 62, 109–10; on Modernism, 57; painting, as medium, faith in, 59–60, 62; and pathos, 57; as peripheral artist, 175n55; Plain, 55–57, 61; process, commitment to, 54; referential content, attachment to, 55; and schema, 55–57; technique, emphasis

217 | I n d e x

on, 54–55; TV Dinner—Homage to E.T.A. (Food for Thought), 1, 2 United States, 10, 14, 17, 25, 29–30, 43–44, 47–49, 54, 112, 140, 152 Untitled (Martin), 151 Vanderbeek, Stan, 1, 2, 3, 6, 18 Van DerZee, James, 126 Vaughn, David, 2 vernacular realism, 91 Vienna Seminar for Psychoanalytic Technique, 102 viewership, 11, 16, 100, 109; institutional spaces of, 7 Wagner, Anne, 70, 176n5; social fact of gender, 66 Wagstaff, Samuel, 4 Wakefield Bookshop, 149 Ward, Cora, 92 Washington Color School, 16, 116–18, 122, 131, 141 Washington Gallery of Modern Art (WGMA), 114 Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, 92–93 “What Is an Author?” (Foucault), 89 Whirl (Noland), 95, 95; authorial restraint of, 96; intentionality of, 96 Whitney Museum Annual Exhibition, 53 Whyte, William H., 26 Wilhelm Reich (Noland), 105, 107 Williams, Gerald, 128 Williams, Raymond, 25; practical consciousness, 41 Williams, William T., 126–27 Wilson, Jim Richard, 173n12 Wimsatt, W. K., 1, 109, 172n92 Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., 40 With My Back to the World (documentary), 145 Wittgenstein, Ludwig: philosophy, as therapy, 97–98 Wives of Sango (Donaldson), 128, 129 Wood, Christopher, 4, 132, 134, 139, 161n11 Woodmansee, Martha, 24 Woodruff, Hale, 126–27 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 10 World War II, 15, 27–28