David Anfam : Abstract Expressionism - Chapter 5: The Process of Painting

 This is Chapter 5 of David Anfam’s “Abstract Expressionism” : The Process of Painting

Clyfford Still, PH-384, 1946,   62 x 44

In the last chapter, Clyfford Still’s “Quicksilver” exemplified the ideographic picture - and now the above piece by the same artist is shown to exemplify the “process of painting”.  

But I’m not feeling a whole lot of difference between them.   They’re both  like natural phenomena stamped with the artist’s identity : melancholy, heavy, looming, jagged, indomitable.  They belong on the walls of a secluded Buddhist monastery high in the  rugged mountains.  I’d like to visit from time to time, but could not live with them/him.

Quite possibly someone could - or maybe already has -

worked these visual elements with more power and beauty,

but  the art market, as it is,

would reject that as derivative.

Still perfected the nakedly physical involvement in process that Motherwell foresaw. His 1946 PH-384 has the mastery of touch that fuses every knife-stroke, each colour chosen from an earth-toned palette, into an organic mosaic of pigment.

“Nakedly physical involvement”?  As Anfam notes later in the chapter, the Impressionist painters are known for that.  Earlier examples can also be found where the process of painting has not been concealed.  Yet in all of them, aren’t some other effects far more important?

Two Figures, 1936, PH-726

 It builds upon much earlier compositional types where twin protagonists, sometimes intertwined (as in PH-726 though here separate, stand against a background. Only now the duality is pared to two snaking verticals landlocked in a fastness of umbers and sienna. The life' of the whole (also a favourite metaphor of Still's) resides in the ridges, smears and fissures of paint which catch the light. This erodes distinctions between figure and ground although the tonal contrasts emphasize them. The resultant space, if that word justly describes a flat yet manifold surface, exudes tension. We want to penetrate its inscrutable structuring but are prevented by the sheer tactility. 

Regrettably, tactility cannot be felt on my computer screen images.

( and thank God Still stopped painting human figures. )

Unlike Impressionism or Cubism, Abstract Expressionism was not a style or a movement. What the five pioneers had in common was not a shared aesthetic, a painting technique, or a manifesto but a sense of the overwhelming importance of art, a bedrock belief in the power of painting to address ideas and emotions at the deepest level. Richard Dorment, 2016 

The above is a review of an historic ABX exhibition curated by Anfam.  I certainly agree that ABX. is neither a style nor a movement. I would call it a marketing/promotional event. Please note that a “bedrock belief in the power etc” is not to assert that any of these paintings actually has any such powers.  Dorment made no such claim - and neither would I.

 Though the Abstract Expressionists always resisted a single collective identity based on style, theories or social ties, they came closest to an avant-garde nucleus between the end of the War and 1950-51. By then a complex network of friendships and acquaintances had meshed. 

It’s a nucleus of recognized brands - like the rack of popular magazines near the check out counter of a grocery store.

Some began long before, like the meeting of Guston and Pollock at their Los Angeles high school in 1927; others arose late and casually as when Kline built a studio partition for Tomlin and Guston in 1949; or else passing contacts, like Rothko's with Still in Berkeley in 1943, matured into a deeper rapport. More superficial signs of cohesion were the popular meeting-places in Greenwich Village that included the Waldorf Cafeteria and then the Cedar Tavern. The Club, a loose-knit artists' discussion group, was likewise founded in 1949. A year earlier Still, Rothko, Motherwell, Newman, Baziotes and the surréalisant sculptor David Hare each played some part in establishing the Subjects of the Artist, a short-lived school intended to reaffirm meanings in abstract art. In 1947 Rosenberg edited with Motherwell the single issue of Possibilities magazine which contained statements by several painters and Smith. Another periodical featuring their work and views, Tiger's Eye, appeared then and ran through nine issues. Interest from dealers, critics and the media also exerted an external shaping influence. The New Yorker critic Robert Coates's description of Hofmann's paintings as belonging to 'abstract expressionism' was merely one of several attempts to label what appeared a new tendency. Given America's postwar prosperity compared with the economic and cultural exhaustion of Europe, its art market could be expected to capitalize on these circumstances and once Guggenheim returned to Venice in 1947 her role was more than fulfilled by the ambitious younger dealers Betty Parsons, Charles Egan and Samuel Kootz. Their New York galleries showed every major figure, from Motherwell at Kootz in 1946 to Krasner with Parsons in 1951, plus solo débuts for Siskind (1947) and de Kooning (1948) under Egan, while Smith exhibited at Marion Willard's gallery. Though support from public institutions lagged slightly behind, MoMA's '15 Americans' of 1952 (incorporating Pollock, Rothko and Still) announced the rise of high-level policies which would gain international fame for the movement by the end of the decade. On the whole the promotion of Abstract Expressionism entailed its stereotyping. It could hardly have been otherwise in the climate of the Truman and Eisenhower years. America moved so far rightward after the Second World War that the 1945-60 era has been called 'The American Inquisition' and a time of 'The Great Fear' when conformity reigned, hysteria over the supposed threat of Communism was pandemic and surveillance or repression pervaded the fabric of culture. McCarthyism and the Cold War represented only the most visible symptoms of this far subtler totalitarianism than Russia's, which the novelist Ken Kesey symbolized retrospectively as the authoritarian insane asylum of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). Furthermore, although contemporary liberals such as the Columbia University philosopher Sidney Hook and Arthur Schlesinger Jr in his The Vital Center (1949) purportedly denounced extremism, their rhetoric served to mask the dominant and itself extreme conservative ethos; Hook's willingness to side with McCarthy's denial of civil liberties was but one of many traits that put this liberalism' under quotation marks. Controversy still surrounds the reading of Abstract Expressionism against this reactionary context. Neither an obviously partisan nor a monolithic response, it has subtle yet pervasive features calculated to transcend and contravene the political tenor of the times. We might expect this from the stances of the creators themselves. On personal terms they felt beleaguered, at odds with the establishment, or both, and as opposed to some of their earliest supporters, such as erstwhile leftist intellectuals like Greenberg, no evidence has yet associated them with Cold War ideals. Instead, the Stalinist Gorky deplored America's 'commercial philistinism' and inhumanity while Reinhardt risked contributing to an openly Communist publication as late as 1947 when Motherwell and Rosenberg alluded in Possibilities to how 'the deadly political situation exerts an enormous pressure. Open dissent had become impractical and Still acknowledged this with a notion of art as a kind of guerilla warfare. Smith's leftist beliefs can be gauged by his declared identification in 1948 with working men' and Local 2054 United Steel Workers of America. This came a year after the repressive. the Taft-Hartley Act. Both New damning remarks about their country’s atom bomb was almost ubiquitously praised) : asked to explain the meaning of of one of his works. If properly read, Newman answered, “ it would mean the end of all state capitalism. For Still, the United States had bred a totalitarian mentality. To discover Cold War liberal ethics behind such positions, as Serge Guilbaut and others have done, seems at best misleading. 

On the whole the promotion of Abstract Expressionism entailed its stereotyping. It could hardly have been otherwise in the climate of the Truman and Eisenhower years.  Should how art was promoted in its day have any affect on how it feels ?   Even back then - shouldn’t promotion  have been ignored except by scholars of marketing?  I do wonder why Anfam did not mention how the CIA used ABX to promote Americanism,

Edwin Dickinson. 1891-1978,  Self portrait in Fur Hat,  1914

Anfam introduces us to some figure painters who did not go abstract.

Still Life, 1914

Nude, 1937

Studio Wellfleet, 1947 

Edwin Dickinson, 1948

Self Portrait, 1949

1951

Dickinson interested me more when he was  barely 20.

Henry Koerner, 1915 - 1991 , Mirror of Life,  1946

John Wilde (1919-2006), “More Festivities at the Palazzo Sanseverini,” 1951-52, oil on wood panel, 20 1/8 x 24 3/8

I love the wacky classical world of John  Wilde, a midwesterner who lived in Wisconsin.  What a great painter he would have been 500 years ago.

 

Jared French, 1905- 1988, The Double, c. 1950,  25 x31

What does belong more to the moment is their turning inwards upon the processes of making art. Introversion had become commonplace by then as many writers and intellectuals retreated from the alarming or hostile political scene. A penchant for fantasy arose in the Southern Gothic novels of Eudora Welty and Truman Capote as well as in the arcane dreamlike compositions painted by Edwin Dickinson, Jared French, John Wilde and Henry Koerner. 

I do see a “penchant for fantasy” in Koerner, Wilde, and French —- but definitely not in Dickinson.

And I do not consider a focus on “the processes of making art” to be introversion.

Concurrently a spectrum of existential issues involving selfhood, isolation and psychic malaise came to prominence. Yet whether in the fiction of Bellow, Bernard Malamud and J. D. Salinger, the early poetry by Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell, or the drily precise pictorial idioms of Andrew Wyeth,  Bernard Perlin, George Tooker and Paul Cadmus, these again proved stylistically conservative. 

It seems so odd to group Wyeth together with those early creators of Gay identity art ( Jared French is another) - but “drily precise” does seem to fit them all.

Against these tendencies Abstract Expressionism effected a bold synthesis. It combined existential content and innovatory handling without a retreat into the ivory tower of form-for-form's-sake. Instead, such developments of the later 1940s as very large formats, stark or saturated colour and a stress on the medium itself were ways to engage the spectator and even provoke a challenging gut reaction. This was highly extreme art when the dangers of extremism - political and aesthetic - were widely and loudly decried. Even the withdrawal to the solitudes of studio and countryside (Gorky went to rural Virginia and Connecticut, Pollock moved to a Long Island farmhouse in 1945, and Smith and Guston settled in upstate New York) had a double edge. There they could attain a stylistic audacity that left most contemporary realisms looking artificial and out of date. In Manhattan's urban congeries de Kooning and Kline found a similar edgy intensity, which also gripped Siskind's work as well.

A spirited presentation of ABX apologetics - even if  it's a spectacle aesthetic - like that of the Roman colosseum.

 …. To create outside or at the edge of society during the Cold War provided an escape from consensus and conformity. Furthermore, an outburst of anti-modernism erupted during 1947-49. As Life carefully derided Pollock's methods, the Boston Institute of Modern Art switched its titular 'modern' to 'contemporary' and Senator George Dondero denounced non-academic twentieth-century painting as Communist subversion, so abstraction once again acquired the radical aura that it had held for a previous generation. Its originality now, however, was centred upon the Abstract Expressionists' physical exploitation of their materials. At least since the famed passage in Leonardo's Treatise on Painting (first published in 165l) urging the discovery of subjects in random stains on walls, inspiration has been linked to directness and methods to transform felt experience into visual fact. In part the course of Western painting itself entails changing conventions to meet this end, from the control of illusionism in, say, Van Eyck, where the picture plane approximates a window (and thus offers instant access to the depicted scene) to the very different instantaneity of Monet which depends more on the freshness of painterly mark-making. Both worlds are vividly felt but how we apprehend that vividness depends on the rules whereby vision is reorganized upon a flat surface. For another analogy we might compare a name printed in Gothic lettering to one impetuouslyh signed: the latter bears an especially close relation to its maker of a kind that semioticians call 'indexical' and has ambiguities and a pulse absent from the formalized Gothic script. Magnified to historical proportions, it was an analogous changeover that happened during the 1940s. The mimetic rendition of symbols (early 1940s) was phased into stark signs (mid-1940s) and eventually the indexical registering of traces (later 1940s). This progression was clearest in painting (though always mutable and its successive stages merged) but despite the technical obstacles to such directness in sculpture, Smith's attitude changed until by the early 1950s his erstwhile graphic symbolism and solid cast shapes modulated to the subtle forcefulness of the welded steel line or plane suspended in space [127]. Equally, Siskind's photographs tended to replace objects with shadows, imprints, outbursts and other indexical effects [86]. Since everything in the transition just described hinges upon those points where the artist's actions encounter our response - namely the picture plane and surface - their role was also transformed until Pollock's 1947-50 paintings centrifugally explode a hitherto shallow space and in de Kooning's Excavation terrific pressures bear down upon the contents of the image. 

Willem De Kooning, Excavation, 1950

“Terrific pressures bearing down on the image “? That never occurred to me - I’ve felt more like everything in the image was stressed - nearly rubbed out. But neither accounts for the graphic intensity that makes this piece special.

********

At this point, I will skip most of the chapter that follows.

As Anfam pointed out at the very beginning, the ABX painters had very little in common - but despite that, he went on hunting for it - jumping ever more quickly from one artist and one idea to another - as if the reader is supposed to nod in agreement rather than reflect.  This is hardly rare in the world of art talk - but this is the first time it’s appeared in this book.

A focus on “the process of painting” really only seems to apply to Pollock and DeKooning around 1950 - so that is the only discussion that I will address.

Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950

Feels as impersonal as the night sky or bacteria on a petri dish.

The tense, seething undertone of an unfriendly universe

with a sense of order just beyond comprehension.

Something like an aerial view of a great city

as seen through clouds and smoke.

Detail

Pollock, Greyed Rainbow, 1953,  detail

Here’s a detail from a piece in Chicago.

Looks like decaying leaf litter on the forest floor. The more I look at it, the more my skin begins to itch.

 

Yet little in the mainstream of Western art quite prepares the viewer to perceive Number IA, 1948, Lavender Mist, One: Number 31, 1950 and Autumn Rhythm (1950). A strain of calculated Americanness in Pollock might direct us to native precedents, even to the sensationalism of a Weegee photograph for a foretaste of the reign of wonder exerted by such multitudinous incident held in a continuum. Or Joyce's Ulysses (the first unbowdlerized American edition had appeared in 1934) and especially Walt Whitman's poems (Pollock owned copies of each) have a similar sweep, the likes of which Monet alone had glimpsed in his late Nymphéas, though these were scarcely known in New York at the time. Never had painting been so far from the compositional hierarchies, perspective and figure-ground relations that go back to the Renaissance. In these liberated fields only the differing densities of line, no longer reading as contour anyway, imply depth gradations. But they do so along an absolutely frontal axis as if both were suspended in an eternal present. This is the magnetism inherent in the all-over design, its all-at-onceness which had already captivated Krasner, and Tobey and Morris Graves on the West Coast who were preocupied with concepts of flux and infinity. Pollock's apocalyptic grandeur breaks with their minor-key Orientalism as well as the quietist or existential gloom that had become fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic. 

>  Never had painting been so far from the compositional hierarchies, perspective and figure-ground relations that go back to the Renaissance  --it's the figure-ground relations that can't be found in mainstream Western Art ( it does appear elsewhere - for example: faux marble decoration).  The marks, drips, and lines do appear against a background - but they never serve as the edges of an enclosed shape.

>Pollock's apocalyptic grandeur breaks with their minor-key Orientalism as well as the quietist or existential gloom that had become fashionable on both sides of the Atlantic. - I see both gloom and grandeur here - or, perhaps the better word is "grandiosity".   Sort of like Ivan Albright, but without  identifiable figures.

Though I do sense a  reign of wonder exerted by such multitudinous incident held in a continuum.in Joyce and Whitman -  I feel less wonder here than exhausted despair in the face of infinite chaos.  It might be called a self portrait of a dysfunctional nervous system: all it can register is pain and disgust. 

Rather than limit Pollock's expressive range, the new approach widened it. After the crystalline upright Phosphorescence (1947) followed the fluent horizontal (38⅓ * 189 inches) of Number 2, 1949 and the shot silkiness of Lavender Mist occupied the same year, 1950, as the muscular black-and-white Number 32. 'Classic' or 'classical are the superlatives sometimes lavished upon this virtuosity (by William Rubin and Lawrence Alloway in particular) but the second epithet fits for a more profound reason. As applied to fifth-century e Greek art, 'classical' denotes a peak when chaos was mastered and extremes balanced and it is this same poise about the 1947-50 images that allows them to reconcile contradictions. Empty of imagery, they feel intensely full: lacking overt references to nature, the organic patterns of growth nevertheless engulf us; rather monochromatic overall, strong and metallic hues shimmer through their interstices; heavy with the quiddity of paint, their space floats and dances in front of one's eyes. Pollock had also solved his oldest dilemma because although the microstructure of these images is violently disruptive, his control over their macrocosm triumphs at the last and they remain, like fractals, too entire ever to divide. So Tondo (1948) [98] gathers its testing format into perfect equilibrium and the tracery tends to loop back from the sides upon itself making an in-turned unity, or sometimes coheres into a vortex, or else attains the totality of a field.

Town Square, 1948,  17 x 23

1949, 24 x 32

Mail Box, 1948,  23 X 30

G

Excavation, detail

Denser - and much larger than its predecessors

Seventeen drip paintings were first publicly seen at Betty Parsons in January 1948, the show where de Kooning remarked that 'Jackson's broken the ice.' Less than three months later his own solo at Egan's caused a frisson second only to Pollock's with works that contemporaries again held to deal with the process of painting. At that moment their rawness seemingly expressed the same proto-existentialist stance responsible for the rhetoric of immediacy found in the artists' postwar statements: from Newman's claim that they were engaged in 'a tragedy of action' (1945) through Gorky's avowal that he never finished a painting (1948) to Hofmann's denial of control (1950). Dicta spoken long before by Picasso among others, these were necessary myths of spontaneity to confront the same issue that in retrospect became de Kooning's real errand after Pink Angels: how can the inherently static artwork comply with ived experience? His reply over the next five years or so furnished further proof that to represent experiential values - immediacy, action, memory, violence - required not frenzy but the utmost Craft.

Were Pollock and DeKooning working in tandem - like a battle of the bands?  Jackson  broke the ice and Willem jumped right in after him ? Sure seems that way as DeKooning worked himself up to “Excavation”. An in-your-face expression of something like the trauma of being alive.   Lines no longer border shapes - they’re just attacks on the surface of a canvas.  Jackson flings - Willem digs in.  Jackson mimics a chaotic world - Willem expresses his struggle within it.

Neither take us to a place we’d like to be - just the place where they’re stuck.  A focus on “the process of painting” avoids the negativity that distinguishes them from most of art history - figurative or not.

David Anfam : Abstract Expressionism - Chapter 4 : The Ideographic Picture

 This is Chapter 4 of David Anfam’s “Abstract Expressionism” : The Ideographic Picture

Adolph Gottlieg, Eyes of Oedipus, 1941

Pleasant enough, but 

 if I saw this piece leaning against 

a dumpster in a Chicago alley

I would leave it there.

Adolph Gottlieb, Eyes of Oedipus 1945

More elaborate four years later

but I’d leave this one behind as well.

I’d call it the beginning of conceptual art.

… well on the way to all-black paintings and the checker board grid.

Low energy design has been around forever,

but this is the first time it's helped elevate something to Art

by not distracting the mind with visual pleasure.

Temple of Karnak, date not given

This ancient piece has graphic energy,

though it’s the exception, not the rule.

And unlike Gottlieb’s paintings, marks installed in Egyptian temples were

meant to deliver a message more specific

than a vague feeling of timeless mystery.

Through the ironclad law of Taoist opposites,

the formal vitality of early 20th C. painting 

eventually led to the very opposite.

Which eventually then flipped back to more visuality 

as in this 21st C. variant :

Scott Wolniak, 2024

The marks are just as meaningless as Gottlieb’s

but so much tastier.

BUT THEN….

consider this Gottlieb :

Adolph  Gottlieb, Masquerade, 1945

It seethes and glows and rumbles with playful mystery

Possibly this was less a conceptual  experiment 

than a need to be joyful.

And the title does not refer to anything as profound as a Greek myth

or modern psychology.

This inner hinterland, the so-calied 'collective unconscious', was supposedly common to all human beings, whether primitive or 'civilized'. Hence the 'archaic' look about the pictures of Rothko, Gottlieb, Pollock and Stamos was meant to cut through to inner truths. Moreover, the collective unconscious could only be known via mediators or 'archetypes: primal figures, symbols and the groupings associated with them that populate dreams and myths which resembled signs pointing towards things hidden and complex. These striking models of consciousness fired their imaginations. 

 In the 'pictographs' that Gottlieb began with Eyes of Oedipus (1941) figurative fragments, hieroglyphs and schematic forms are held by a rough gridwork in a flatly frontal manner meant, he explained, to 'kill the old three-dimensional space' that had characterized his previous mysteriously compartmentalized still-lifes painted with a veristic, Dall-inspired technique. By comparison the elements of the pictographs are metaphysical signs addressed to the viewer's mind rather than objects tangibly depicted. The logic at stake was to be reviewed in the exhibition 'The Ideographic Picture, held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York early in 1947

Here’s that exhibit as find online:

Theodore Stamos, Sacrifice

Boris Margo, The Alchemist

Hans Hofmann, The Fury I

Clyfford Still, Quicksilver 

Mark Rothko,  Tieresias

Bernard Newman, Euclidean Abyss

We may note that all these “ideographs”

 centralize the object(s) 

rather than containing them within a grid work

as are  lines of written text.

The last three are pleasant enough

but it’s Newman’s accompanying art theory 

that really elevated their value:

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

The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act. Here then is the epistemological paradox that is the artist's problem. Not space cutting nor space building, not construction nor fauvist destruction; not the pure line, straight and narrow, nor the tortured line, distorted and humiliating; not the accurate eye, all fingers, nor the wild eye of dream, winking; but the idea-complex that makes contact with mystery- of life, of men, of nature, of the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else. 

Spontaneous, and emerging from several points, there has arisen during the war years a new force in American painting that is the modern counterpart of the primitive art impulse. As early as 1942, Mr. Edward Alden Jewell was the first publicly to report it. Since then, various critics and dealers have tried to label it, to describe it. It is now time for the artist himself, by showing the dictionary, to make clear the community of intention that motivates him and his colleagues. For here is a group of artists who are not abstract painters, although working in what is known as the abstract style.

 Mrs. Betty Parsons has organized a representative showing of this work around the artists in her gallery who are its exponents. That all of them are associated with her gallery is not without significance. -B. B. NEWMAN 

 for which Newman wrote a catalogue essay stating that the ideograph 'by means of symbols, figures or hieroglyphics suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name. Picto- and ideograph aimed that is, to bypass description and attain that portentous power beyond words which Jung thought characterized the genuine symbol. Mondrian, Klee, segmented designs by the Tlingit Indians and the Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres-Garcia certainly foreshadowed Gottlieb's grids but a less jaded precedent says more about his outlook: namely the boxed constructions which Joseph Cornell started in the 1930s. By definition boxes and frames serve to store, so they are naturally associated with the passage of time and of contents hidden or set apart. Like Cornell's work, the pictographs seem to dredge some secret realm, their emblems hovering before us, the parts in a puzzle whose connecting thread is just beyond recall - except that rather than gentle musings the tone is traumatic, as the titles (Evil Omen, Black Enigma and so on) tell. Eyes of Oedipus renders its myth by a screen of blind stares. 

The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act.

An aesthetics of ideas leads away from critical thinking. - as an assertion can be proven  merely mby making one feel good. Meanwhile, grounding aesthetic response in pure idea denies the primacy of visual experience - which can and should be different with each viewing.

Newman’s paradox leads to that institutionalized alternative reality called Conceptual Art: frivolous meanings connected to throw-away aesthetics.  It’s only  “as if” these ideographs had a profound meaning. The only advance made by this practice was in marketing - and it led to jokey Pop-Art rather than a vibrant art/spiritual tradition.

Thank you Bernard Newman.

Joaquin Torres- Garcia, 1932, 28 x 23

Here’s the artist mentioned above.

The later and far more polished Masquerade (1945) shows that typical gathering of detail into a darkly hostile maze which has caused the series overall to be considered an abstract commentary on the neuroses of wartime. 

Primitivist' handling went together with the vestiges of humankind's inward forces. One delved down into experience, the other into time so as to put us, wrote Gottlieb in 1945, 'at the beginning of seeing. He had collected tribal masks as early as 1935 and the calculatedly primitive drawing accents the dry, timeworn cast of the pictographs that incorporate egg tempera and scratched lines. An extreme version of this archaism occurs in the early 1940s canvases of Richard Pousette-Dart, still a rather neglected figure, perhaps because of a religious mysticism which separated him from the mainstream. 

Richard Pousette-Dart, Palimpsest

Richard Pousette-Dart, Symphony No. I, The Transcendental, 1941-42 , 86 x 140”

Not sure how this would feel life-size in person.

At this size, it resembles the circuit board of a pin machine or map of an amusement park.

A lot of energy - but why follow to where it’s going unless you have to ?

Precocious in both size and drive, his aptly named Palimpsest (1944) and the extraordinary Symphony No. I (1941-42) evince encrusted layers akin to the aged textures of native Amerindian petroglyphs.

Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944

The figure at the far left gives a sense of life-size presence to the two feminine figures in Rothko’s painting. These are two women I would not like to meet.  They’re more like predatory insects.  It’s a nightmarish vision - more personal than cosmic.

BTW - the two  life-size figure-like construcions set upon a pictorial stage is much like what Pollock (Mural)  and Gorky (Cockscomb) were doing at about the same time.

Time and consciousness met more subtly in Rothko's technique by the mid-1940s where paleness, translucency and soft focus convey regression, especially if one remembers that on a far cruder plane superimposed effects or watery hazes were standard devices to convey flashbacks and reverie in the American cinema of these years. Once, Rothko's figures had wavered in their trance-like states. In Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea the dreamy rhythms oscillate from a poised, gyrating calligraphy. 

A bit too figurative for the word "calligraphy" to apply.

Historically, then, we can say that during the War and shortly after the Abstract Expressionists were borne on a tide of ideas which led them to assume, broadly speaking, that their work should be terser, allusive and pregnant. Aimed primarily at the eye and the mind it would therefore evade the distracting crutch of language. 

Pollock , She Wolf, 42 x 67, 1943

Pollock was quoted in 1944 as having remarked about She Wolf (1943) that it 'came into existence because I had to paint it. Any attempt on my part to say something about it, to attempt explanation of the inexplicable, could only destroy it. 

A reasonable assertion - but then nothing more than the personal is at stake .. so the value of the painting is proportional to the importance - or celebrity - of artist.  

 Besides post-Freudian psychology, Plato and Surrealism it is worth noting the post-Jungians like Karl Kerényi who wrote about the indivisibility of thought and communication, the 

philosopher Suzanne Langer and her theory of the symbol as an emotive but non-verbal entity, and the New Criticism (influential too for Greenberg) which stressed an artwork's self-contained force or, as Cleanth Brooks wrote in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947), formed 'an experience rather than any mere statement about experience. Nietzsche also found considerable favour and his assertion that art counters chaos and springs from primal roots was embellished by Rothko, Newman and Still. Line served the new priorities well and no Abstract Expressionist failed to exploit it. Both Masson and Miró were in New York and their calligraphic genius could be seen at Pierre Matisse's and other galleries with Klee's in his MoMA retrospective of 1941. All three offered lessons in achieving more with less. From the bare stick figures in Motherwell's Pancho Villa Dead and Alive to the grating brushmarks of Pollock's mid-1940s canvases there is a new-found urgency. 

Could not resist pursuing the connection to the New Criticism. Engaging, informative discussion can result from looking outside the boundaries of a piece as well as within.  But concerning judgments of quality - looking within is all that matters.

Motherwell, Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive, 28 x 35, 1943

A lively composition with a rather cynical attitude toward recent Mexican history. ( Villa was murdered  20 years earlier - the photo of his bullet riddled body hanging upside down was eye candy for American journalism.

Pollock participated in 1944-45 at the printmaking studio of the British-born draughtsman Stanley William Hayter, who significantly wrote and spoke about the empathic power of line to make us re-live an event. Such essays by Newman as The First Man Was An Artist' of 1947 take up this observation and elaborate on the close bond between a manual gesture and its author. 

Clyfford Still,  69 x 32, 1945

Quite independently Still had already equated the dynamics of a line with assertiveness in, or against, a surrounding space so that the white linear phantasm of several 1944-45 paintings like PH-193  (once given the title Quicksilver) slices through their gloom as though it were midway between the semi-humanized, demonic lightning flashes of Harrison's Themis and the revelatory 'stroke' that he would mention in a letter of 1950.

I would not say that this white line is slicing - it’s embedded in its surroundings like an inner channel in the human body - which those murky shapes around it  do resemble.  We have a similar piece in the Art Institute of Chicago - and it’s quite calming .  It seems more like a natural phenomenon than the expression of an artist in the “universal language of line”

Pollock, Male and Female, 1942

The grid-like structure resembles what Gottlieb and Rothko were doing at that time

Bradley Walker Tomlin, Number 9: In Praise of Gertrude Stein, 1950 , 4’ x 8'

…hieroglyphic motifs of Smith's sculptures and the elegant tracery akin to lettering and numbers that filled Tomlin's pictures until an untimely death in 1953 cut short his contribution. 

Bradley Tomlin, number 12, 1949, 32x31

Like a free style variant of Chinese calligraphy 

Love this playful whackiness.

Bradley Tomlin, Still life,  1940

Glad Tomlin had moved on from this somber prewar world view.

 The analogy of mark space to vitality/void was to recur frequently and elsewhere Still reversed the duality so that a lean black slash presides over a bleak tan ground in. for instance. the Menil Collection's PH-98 (1946). The very act of drawing testifies to the universal language of line. That foundation seemed to promote the widespread penchant to limn mysterious scripts, unknown alphabets or other alternative visual systems to language. It occurred in Gottlieb's rebus-like pictographs with their many ciphers, the cabbalistic numerals in Pollock's Male and Female (c. 1942 ) 

Aaron Siskind, Martha's Vineyard (Seaweed) 2, 1943 

Even Siskind directed his lens onto subjects such as beached seaweed treated painstakingly enough for most of the themes mentioned so far to coalesce. Martha's Vineyard (Seaweed) 2 (1943) reads multivalently as tracing in the sand, a residual figure, a male sexual metaphor and an 'a' (for Aaron?) sign. 

It is intriguing when meaningful shapes arise from non-human agency - as with rock formations that resemble facial anatomy. But selecting them for notice is way different from shaping them with human intention - or - at least for those sensitive to that difference.

Graphic effects in turn belonged to the more general and momentous search for artistic means to match the rhetoric of 'universal', 'primal', 'archaic', 'symbolic' and like terms that flooded the years of the ideographic picture when little magazines including Possibilities (which ran to only one winter 1947 issue), Tiger's Eye and Ideograph, as well as a spate of catalogue essays, revealingly made for more published pronouncements than at any other time. According to Newman writing in 1947, art worthy of its name should address life', 'man', nature', 'death' and 'tragedy' among other issues - an ambitious list backed by some newly impressive pictorial ammunition. Symmetry, for instance, conveys a formidable air which in Motherwell's Pancho Villa Dead and Alive heightens the impact of a 'before-and-after' counterpoint whereby the bisected composition has vibrant patterning at the right confronted with blood-spattered grey planes on the left. 

Actually- I see splattered blood (and a man hanging upside down) on the right not the left.  Can we at least agree that the image is ambivalent - because, indeed, the artist, and intended viewership, could not  care less about Mexican history.  This piece is all about the language of art.

Theodore Stamos, Ancestral Myth, 1947, 24 x 30

Jared French,  The Sea, 1946

Not so much about either language or self expression,

We can now call this gay identity art 

(as with his friends, Cadmus and Tooker)

That we almost seem privy to some sinister cross-section is an effect which recurs in Still's vicariously figurative masses outspread across the picture plane and in the initial paintings of Stamos which count among his best. Geological or botanic in their delicate segmental structures, they express a current assumption probably gathered from readings in anthropology and biology which held that individual human beings recapitulated the processes of natural evolution. Hence to picture the innermost recesses of the natural world became a metaphor of life's origins, of its 'phylogeny'. Paired male-female sentinels in Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea and Pollock's Male and Female effectively represent the macrocosmic principles of nature. There was nothing unique here since similar hieratic polarities fascinated other American painters in the 1940s like Jared French who were affected by Jungian theories. The divide between them and the Abstract Expressionists is equivalent to what separates literariness from the pictorial. 

Rothko, untitled, 1945-46, 40 x 26, watercolor 

Similar but not identical to the example in Anfam’s book,

Vaguely anthropomorphic,

 Much delicate thought frozen still with nowhere to go.

Can’t imagine wanting to feel this way.

The archetypes in several of Rothko's 1945-46  watercolours are compelling not because of any staring pseudo-archaic postures but rather for how they act upon us slowly, temporal ebb and flow caught in textured washes where the figure is lost and rematerializes in the grain of the paper. As symmetry or linear forms appear instantly striking, so these veils imply mysteries locked within the picture surface. Two concerns stemming from Surrealism returned to reinforce this encoding of the figure and what it symbolized into a less literal but more provocative syntax: the totem and biomorphism. Totemic creatures as conceived by Masson, Miró and others essentially typified the Surrealist taste for fabulously bizarre personages, denizens of disturbed and disturbing levels of the psyche. Naturally that usage was not irrelevant in a fraught wartime context but the Abstract Expressionists also rediscovered the authentically primitivist vision of the totem as a hybrid between an animate presence and a sign, sometimes geometric or schematic in character, yet still embodying potent forces. To the Northwest Coast Indian, as Newman wrote in his 'Ideographic Picture' text, 'a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable... [it was] therefore, real ... In Newman's The Command (1946) and The Death of Euclid (1947) [69] vertical shafts with a numinous and silent aura stand firm against dark or chaotic backgrounds. 

Barnett Newman, The Command, 1946, 30 x 22

These pieces do seem to be begging for some profound interpretation, whether intended or not.

Barnett Newman, Death of Euclid, 1947, 16 x 20

With its stately progression from left to right,

this one might continue to compel my attention - not sure

the authentically primitivist vision of the totem as a hybrid between an animate presence and a sign, sometimes geometric or schematic in character, yet still embodying potent forces. 

How animate these presences appear to be - and how potent their forces - that’s a matter of judgment, not theory.  Is it  sufficient to compel repeated viewings? And I do wonder whether any kind of consensus should be required regarding whatever ideas these “ideograms” represent.

Rothko, The Syrian Bull, 1943,  39 x 27

A psychedelic vision?

That’s how it feels to me.

.It had become a commonplace by 1944 for American critics to voice the perception that surrealism was ripe for a marriage to the other major spearhead of European avani-garde art, abstraction. The dealer Sidney Janis said as much in Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, published that year, and an exhibition was even organized by Guggenheim's adviser Howard Putzel in 1945 around this notion. 

Anfam's history of ideas and styles badly needs to be accompanied by a history of the dealers and critics. Janis was both - and if you Google " Did  Sidney Janis steal artists from Betty Parsons?", AI will tell you "yes and no”.  An enthusiasm for art was being replaced by a deliberate and skillful pursuit of profit.

The search for something recognizably new is an economic strategy - not a spiritual quest.  American civilization notably, and brashly, conflates them.

Such opinions probably encouraged knowledgeable artists to mine Surrealism. Most of the Abstract Expressionists were anyway already predisposed to the poetic, suggestive content that it had given the modern tradition but disliked its fanciful excesses. Instead their priority was to find 'a pictorial equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self' (Rothko, 1945). 

Surrealist biomorphism offered the ideal means because, as the very word (bio, life and morphe, form) suggests, it could intimate living presences through abstract organic curves alone. At first Rothko's portrayals of evolving sentience produced the assembly of plant, animal and geometric parts in The Syrian Bull (1943)  Once he had mastered a biomorphic repertoire shortly afterwards, the twist of a volute summarized an entire organism. Other variants ranged from Pollock's relatively coarse ovoids to Gorky's hypersensitive ones and even de Kooning, who mostly kept apart from Surrealism, broke down his previous protagonists into biomorphic planes. Between Seated Figure (1939)  and Pink Angels (1945) specifics recede into the threshing pulse of contours. In sum, biomorphism made for visual economy, enabling the leap from figuration to abstraction that dominates the 1940s.

DeKooning, Seated Figure 1939

 DeKooning, Pink Angels, 1945

Going from recognizable figure to biomorphic design indeed produced a more assertive, enjoyable painting - at least for DeKooning.

David Smith, War Spectre, 1944

Wicked Witch of the West on her broomstick ?

This is a quip- not a sculpture.

Yet the passage of the decade looks clearer in hindsight than it actually was then and Smith's sculpture attests to this phase as a stylistic and ideological melting-pot. Embittered at spending two years in the wartime industry of welding tanks and locomotives, he fashioned the various 'spectres of 1944-46 which personify the sinister spirit of the age comparably to Max Ernsts rapacious Hordes (1920s) and The Angel of Hearth and Home (1937). Mechanistic detailing, often from found objects, invokes weaponry while the phallic imagery cuts deeper still, a physical reminder of the aggressive side to sexuality. No timeless theme could have been more topical and besides Smith's invention of strange rapacious cannon - phallus hybrids (as in Atrocity, 1943) there was the obsession with eros in Graham's dances, Pollock's pregnant and explosive effects, frequent encounters of thrusting elements against open ones and Motherwell's explorations of sex and mortality. In death his Pancho Villa lacks genitalia. The motif of airborne predators also located political trauma in genetic stirrings since it straddled pre-history as well as the wartorn skies of Europe and Hiroshima. Smith and others frequented the American Museum of Natural History whose birdlike fossils caught their attention, atavisms of the violence still at large under a technological guise. The sculptors Theodore Roszak and Herbert Ferber emulated these monstrous avian types from the late 1940s onwards 

Theodore Roszak, Spectre of KittyHawk,  1946-7

Whoa!

This is a great scary, nasty monster.

The best piece by Roszak I could find

Theodore Roszak,  Firebird, 1950-51

Another fine aerial  monster.

Regrettably, he tamed down in following decades

Herbert Ferber, Green Sculpture II, 1954

A nice piece , but I could not find his monsters

Herbert Ferber, Burning Bush, 1951

Great architectural sculpture.

In 2013 I wrote about a a show of his later work

As with Roszak, it got more tame.

Spectre of Profit

Agricolas

….and Smith spawned a race of hybrids out of them whose hovering profiles evolved from Jurassic Bird (1945) through Spectre of Profit (1946) to some of the Agricolas (1952-59). 

Clever, fanciful toys for children

Giacometti : The Palace at 4 a.m. (1933) 

A fine view, but probably not many others.

Whimsical, Classical, airiness

Refreshing.

David Smith, Reliquary House

Can’t see much use for this except as a puzzle

which, once solved, is rendered useless.

In trying to pack in as many meanings as possible Smith literally arrived at composite objects, physical equivalents to the portmanteau words and stream of consciousness that he the hermetic containers like Reliquary House (1945), inspired by Giacometti's The Palace at 4 a.m. (1933) and ancient reliquary boxes, the multi-partite landscapes (Landscape with Strata, 1946) and various totemic pieces of which the little Widow's Lament (1942) [73] is a herald.

David Smith, Landscape with Strata, 1946

Feels like a Chinese pictograph.

David Smith, Widow’s Lament, 1942

Wonder if he had someone in mind for this sorrowful piece.

More of a conversation piece than a sculpture.

A proof of sophistication.

 Though crudely and in miniature, Widow's Lament combines an anthropomorph's quizzical air with the clipped formality of an object, just as it alternates between a frontal plane and recessive ones. All these qualities were to pervade the sculpture ahead. Yet, despite Smith's inventiveness, his rendering too often lagged behind his inspiration, a symptom of the cerebral approach inseparable from the ideographic picture endeavour itself and elsewhere responsible for the meagre appearance of certain Gottlieb pictographs and Newman's first surviving efforts in crayon and mixed media from 1944-47 (he destroyed his prior output). 

Not very often an art historian is so bluntly critical of an iconic artist - and even accuse him of sacrificing rendering to a cerebral approach.  The photo intrigues me - not sure how the actual object may feel.

This is the problem that novel subject-matter creates and it must ultimately be tackled not in theory but through the working process. Probably more than anyone, Pollock 'thought' pictorially - which explains his special intensity (and one that encompassed many failures too) throughout the early and mid-1940s. Commentators who maintain that he amassed an elaborate scenario of Jungian themes miss this point, for even the therapy (1939-c. 1942) under two psychoanalysts of that persuasion surely encouraged his intuition that innermost feelings were more powerfully externalized in images than words. Pollock's outpouring of hybrid fantasies - bestial, sexul. geometric - was knowingly oracular and not often organized so as to relate any fully coherent narrative. Shortly after Noked Man with Knife (C. 1938-41) Pollock destroyed the last vestiges of naturalistic volumes and did so through a new weightiness in the handling of pigment which makes the ovoid and elliptic shapes of Bird. Composition with Masked Forms and White Horizontal, all probably completed around 1941, appear to lie on top of each other or else to be submerged beneath a dense crust. Now that a shallow armature had gone, activity could be concentrated upon or even seemingly within surfaces teeming with incident. Sometimes he experimented with tactile substances, like sand in Bird and plaster in Wounded Animal (1943), continuing this throughout the decade. Otherwise, from Male and Female onwards his actual deployment of oil paint acquired a life of its own. The first outcome was the great sequence of canvases all executed, remarkably, in or around 1943, that includes Male and Female itself, She Wolf, Guardions of the Secret (57), Pasiphae and the rather different Mural (74) commissioned by Guggenheim in 1943 for her Manhattan townhouse. For sheer coruscating vigour these represented a latter-day Rite of Spring to American painting. Theirs is the barbarism that unlocks future possibilities as it despatches a moribund present - in this case the fussiness to which Ernst, Masson and late Surrealism in general had declined. In de Kooning's famous phrase, Pollock 'broke the ice. 

Pollock, Guardians of the Secret

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 1943

Magnificent or awful?

Joyful or obsessive?

Art as provocation.

As the  girl walks past the wall, she reveals the scale of the vertical marks which resemble a procession of life size figures.

Humans as enormous animated microbes, beyond good and evil.

Max Ernst, Eyes of Silence, 1943,  43 x 56

Andre Masson, Meditation of the Painter, 1943,  52 x 40

Do these exemplify “fussiness”?

Perhaps in comparison with Pollock’s Mural,

which then might exemplify impulsiveness.

t

In turn, Mural pioneered the large-size canvas. Unique and hard to fathom is the way Pollock churned myriad traces of his memories, enthusiasms and private fixations together with an approach geared to unrelenting spontaneity. On one hand, in Guardians of the Secret alone we find references to Picasso and his Three Musicians which show that he still regarded the European master as both rival and inspiration; more autobiographical details, like the red rooster (near the top centre) and dog (along the lower edge) which are hardly untoward for someone brought up on farms and with a well-known love of animals; and a taste for ethnology that suggests the composition was also advised by an 1894 photograph of hieratic Amerindian 'guardian' officials of a Knife Society. Moreover, the choice of format, a roughly 1: 2 horizontal used here and in Pasiphae, Night Mist (c. 1944) and There Were Seven in Eight (c. 1945) is by usage linked to the strongly declarative genres of mural and history painting. On the other hand, a tremendous plasticity sweeps everything together. Blunt cursive gestures, filigree strokes, drips, splatters, numbers, broken scumbles and opaque overpainting run into one dancing optical medley. Even the 'Jungian' animus-anima figures of Male and Female are almost impossible to differentiate. The potency is in the allusiveness. Figures convert into ground, imagery becomes abstraction, and vice-versa. Here Pollock digested some metamorphic principles from perusing a new 1942 unabridged edition of d'Arcy Thompson's classic On Growth and Form (1917), just as his symmetrical designs may acknowledge the geometric mandalas of the Amerindians. What counts far more is how each respectively continued a prior obsession with tumult and harmony. Indeed, that we cannot specify definitive meanings for the major early and mid-1940s pictures does not obviate their having a powerful 'content, an enigmatic core broadly shadowed forth. On that score the epic tone of ritual and cataclysm feels authentically mythic - in the tormented anatomies, masks and totems, the framing of the unknown in Guardians (whose 'secret' is the central indecipherable slab of calligraphy), and the pregnant nexus of Pasiphae. Pollock hurtled this ovoid leitmotif across the length of his epochal Mural with the frenzy of some maenadic procession. Its exceptional size afforded Pollock the glimpse of a line able to encompass great spaces, while his etcher's needle at Hayter's Atelier 17 in 1945 bore fruit in the arcing linearity of There Were Seven in Eight. Yet his painterly skills were not quite ready to integrate that line with colour and a vestigial symbolism. To do so needed an apprenticeship of a length that by then only Gorky had served.

 Once the Depression had receded, Gorky's fortunes brightened with a modest retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1941 - when he also married Agnes Magruder - followed by opportunities to reside and work in the countryside. In the summer of 1942 he stayed at a friend's in rural Connecticut and then with Agnes' parents at their Virginia farm in 1943 and 1944. Artistic connections burgeoned further as he met Matta in 1941 and Breton three years later. Also decisive was his shift away from Picasso's guiding influence to a study of the earlier Kandinsky and a deeper knowledge of Armenian culture. The discovery of an American outdoors that touched on Gorky's memories of the Armenian lowlands made for a psychological rapprochement with his pastoral childhood world. In graphics and then canvases which grew from days spent in the Connecticut and Virginia meadows he fused a scrutiny of flora and fauna with Surrealist biomorphism as if nature and artifice were no longer separable. They prove more fantastic than anything seen yet too vivid to be altogether imaginary.

Gorky, Waterfall

This is a piece I selected for my online museum of “Portraits of the Tao”

and Gorky even described it as such:

 Waterfall (c. 1943) [75] probably refers to the Housatonic river falls but by now reality was camouflaged to leave, as Gorky wrote in 1944, 'the pulsation of nature as it throbs'.

They may be inseparable, but I do prefer a beauty without to a chaos within.

Arshile Gorky,  The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, 1944 , 73 x 98

It just doesn’t seem right that Gorky and Pollock are characteristic of the same movement, but that’s where art history still puts them.  A mythic joy and wonder are the psychological opposite of disturbed defiance.

Gorky, One Year the Milkweed, 38 x 48, 1944

Visceral contours and even overt male and female sexual organs (towards the lower left in The Liver Is the Cock's Comb, 1944) again enunciate a delving into life's origins matched by a colloquy of sharp, straining or ruptured motifs against softer ones that brings a groundswell of violence. Matta had prompted Gorky to experiment with highly diluted paint and this afforded a new and much-needed 'breathing' quality to the leafy greens and muted reds of Waterfall until in the most seemingly improvised works that ensued, like One Year the Milkweed (1944), the liquid hues resemble secretions trickling from recesses within the composition to soak the canvas weave. Yet this spontaneity where forms now float in front of the picture plane was for the most part painstakingly crafted and The Liver... is in fact based on a meticulous drawing from the previous summer that helps to clarify its leaps in scale from the micro- to the macrocosmic. Great bursts of vermilion, golds and ultramarine attest to Gorky's understanding of Kandinsky and establish a space charged with action, passing from surface to depth, tactile yet impossible to enter on illusionistic terms. Allied to the newly ambitious dimensions, this synthesis must have looked to several fellow artists then like a signal for the future. 

Is that reference to Matta any more than a likely conjecture? Whatever - I’ve actually spent some time with The Liver and was certainly thrilled by it. It’s about the same size as two of Kandinsky's Campbell panels side by side  so size does not differentiate them as much as theme.   The Liver is a traditional narrative painting. The figures are non anatomical - but still they perform upon a pictorial stage. Rothko and Pollock produced similar examples. Not many paintings continued in this direction a decade later, however 

*******

The title of this chapter apparently comes from the 1947 exhibit, “The Ideographic Picture” at the Betty Parsons Gallery.  The pieces included (by Rothko, Still, Stamos, Newman, Margo, Hoffman) have little in common - and every painting ever made could be called ideographic, even if mimetic representational.  So the phrase is less a descriptor than a claim for innovative intellectual vigor - yet so vague - it’s more like a sales pitch for avant garde status.

This chapter began with some paintings by Adrian Gottlieb that did indeed appear like a kind of writing, with symbols organized within channels. They might fit a more linguistic notion of "ideographic picture"- even if the symbols referred to nothing in particular.

Some of Pollock's work from around 1940 also suggest something linguistic - as well as later work by Poisette- Dart.  Pollock’s “Mural", however, seems quite free from such a structure - while Gorky never appears to have used it at all.  The suggestion of linguistic structure has had  an enduring appeal for organizing a canvas as well as validating  spontaneous self expression in the text-based academy. Ernst Gombrich’s classic  “Art and Illusion” might support that  approach - while Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word” lampoons it.

Though often ambiguous or even incomprehensible - there is one kind of ideographic picture that seriously attempts to have its idea universally understood with perfect clarity:  advertising art. Pop art would be arriving very soon thereafter. 

Promotion  and sale of the “ideographic picture” helped move the American artworld forward from formalism to conceptualism.

Or was it backward?