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.

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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 

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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?