David Anfam : Abstract Expressionism - Chapter 3 - The Question of Heritage

 This is Chapter 3 of David Anfam’s “Abstract Expressionism” : The Question of Heritage

Philip Guston, Bombardment, 1937-8, 48" diameter

In April 1950 a three-day conference was held at Studio 35 on New York's Eighth Street where the sometimes contradictory discussion included exchanges about how the participants broke with tradition. De Kooning dissembled by invoking the cliché that Americans were less freighted with the cultural baggage that made French painting so refined while Gottlieb disagreed saying, 'if we depart from tradition, it is out of knowledge, not innocence. These and further controversies stemmed from what Hofmann called 'the question of a heritage', a continuing debate about the priorities of the artist in America that had begun in the intellectual ferment of the 1930s. Prevented by the Depression and then war from making the customary pilgrimage abroad, a majority of the Abstract Expressionists were led to examine with exceptional rigour what Europe had to offer them. Upon being asked in 1944 whether there could be a purely American art Pollock replied: 'The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd..' 

An interview with  Philip Pavia puts more context to the above conference. Transcripts of those three-day sessions are available.

  The upshot appears to be that each painter had their own ideas about tradition - in both theory and practice.  No surprise there.

What constituted 'advanced' painting, sculpture and photography? Should it be abstract or representational? Would foreign influences vitiate or strengthen it? How ought one to reconcile the expression of feelings with the reality of the medium and that of the everyday world? Such questions surfaced in earnest during the 1930s and still reverberated through the Studio 35 sessions despite the inevitable silencing of their political aspects in the climate of 1950.

This is the first time the word "advanced" has appeared in this book - so now I’m wondering where it might be found in documents from that era.  It implies some kind of progress.  But was it:  Technological ? Spiritual?  Psychological?  Aesthetic?

Did it refer to a higher level of achievement by some possibly universal  standard - or the creation of a standard never pursued before?

The problems of powerful content restricted by the realism associated with 1930s mural painting are illustrated by Guston's Bombardment (1937-38) [37]. Although this is Guston's Guernica in miniature he did not actually see the Picasso until 1939 and it shares the dryness and sharp perspective of many murals done for the Federal Art Project (FAP, see below, which employed Guston) and which now look dated by their attempt to model 'plastically' upon a flat surface as if Cubism had never existed. Indeed, the extreme states rendered in Bombardment or Smith's Medals were associated from the Renaissance onwards with illusionistic modelling and deep spaces that would involve the viewer.

Peter Blume, The Rock, 1944-48

Guston’s ‘Bombardment" reminds me of this piece - often seen at the Art Institute of Chicago. Both of them feel so nightmarish and repugnant.

Picasso, Guernica, 1937

Guernica, however (personally seen when it was still in New York)  is magnificent.

Graphic/dramatic power seems to have been Picasso’s primary concern.

We’re told Guston only saw it after he had painted his version of the same story.

Evidently, Picasso was thrilled by catastrophe.

Guston was horrified.

Guston - If This Be Not I, 1945,  42 x 55"

The carnival strangeness and flat frontality has me thinking of Max Beckmann - who took his job at St. Louis University right after he left.  He certainly seems more depressed, though.

Max Beckmann, Departure 1932-35

Chaos/dismay  as a cause for celebration,

just like the Stations of the Cross.

They may be terrible, but they are steps on the path to salvation.

Hans Hofmann, Table with Teakettle, Green Vase and Flowers, 1936, 54 x 40"

Painted two years after re-opening his school in New York,

This mishmash feels more like classroom demo

than personal expression.

As Anfam put it:

he (Hofmann). must have widened the horizons of students and friends, arguing the need to synthesize Fauvism, Cubism and German Expressionism.  Saturated colours, dynamic space and slashing brushwork in Table with Teakettle, Green Vase and Red Flowers (1936) derive respectively from those movements. As the blue rectangle at the right arrests the red cabinet's plunge into depth it demonstrates his concept of painting as a self-contained equilibrium of advancing and recessive forces which he termed a 'push-and-pull' aesthetic. Thus Hofmann encouraged younger painters to understand the intrinsic potentials of their discipline and grasp how colour might create space more tangibly than illusionistic drawing alone. If before they had expressed psychological effects and states by exaggerating movement, stillness and so forth, Hofmann's instruction provided the rule that corrected emotion. 'Tension' here meant brushstroke and hue pitted against the resistance of the flat canvas. This reaffirmed a fundamental avant-garde tenet since at least Cézanne in painting and Stieglitz's pioneer efforts in photography: that to find equivalents for three dimensions within the pictorial limits of two was in itself a drama. 

But some dramas are much more compelling than others.

And time ( our time ) is brief.

Almost every major Abstract Expressionist already active in the 1930s (except Still who stayed in Washington state) worked for it at some point. Doubtless the 'Project', as it was then known, provided vital support to them in difficult Depression circumstances but whether it nurtured the formation of a New York avant-garde seems dubious. Despite the roster of styles allowed on the Project, figuration was officially preferred and the distaste facing important public statements that opted for abstraction, such as Gorky's Aviation murals at Newark airport, had an alienating effect. 

Aerial Map

Mechanics of Flying

Arshile Gorky, Newark Airport murals, 1936

Amazing!  A graphic power no less than Picasso’s Guernica.   What a tragedy that eight of the ten murals were destroyed - while the two above were covered by many layers of paint. 

In short, one can imagine a stage in the later 1930s when most contemporary realisms - conservatively populist like Benton's or left-wing and humanitarian like Ben Shahn's - looked outworn to those who felt that Americans, as Pollock added in his 1944 interview, 'had generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end'. 

Regrettably, this quote omits what  Pollock’s  "point of modern art" might be.  Did Greenberg speak for him in 1960 when he wrote:

... the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.

Like many Trotskyists, Greenberg's heterodox Marxism crumbled in the late 1930s as the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact followed revelations about Stalin's Russia. He then supposed the artists had followed his reaction against leftism by the 1940s, saying later that 'some day it will have to be told how "anti-Stalinism", which started out more or less as "Trotskyism", turned into art for art's sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.' That summarized Greenberg's private odyssey. Yet as a reading of Abstract Expressionism it rings false. Equally slanted are subsequent revisionist critics who portray it as 'de-Marxified' and then co-opted by postwar American conservatism. Few Abstract Expressionists began as doctrinaire radicals and those nearest to that description like Smith and Reinhardt did not abandon their socialist principles afterwards. Newman remained a lifelong anarchist, Still intensely anti-authoritarian, and Pollock, so far as is known, kept his youthful leftist views. None ever believed in 'art for art's sake. 

A rebuttal to those who deplore the connection between ABX and CIA propaganda.

What did burgeon during the late 1930s was a conviction that meaning could be conveyed through the physical primacy of the medium. Here Greenberg was responsible for disseminating ideas and enthusiasms around a small artistic community centred on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. Its nucleus numbered most importantly Hofmann, de Kooning, Gorky, John Graham, Lee Krasner and Greenberg himself. The first four were of foreign extraction (and the Bavarian-born Hofmann was thirty-two years older than Pollock), sensitized to recent European painting and consciously outsiders in a time and place where such influences were often rejected. Lee Krasner, who matured rather gradually into a strong painter, first met Pollock briefly at a 1936 loft party and they married in 1945. She was crucial in bridging his potential waywardness. Each of these figures either represented a wellspring of European discoveries or gave them another, inward tone. 

A Google search of "physical primacy of the media" returns empty - so perhaps we may credit Anfam with this construction.   Why does his list include Krasner but not Pollack?

Isn’t this primacy assumed by everyone who seeks out the poetic rather than the literal?

It is quite different from saying that meaning excludes possible representations.

Notwithstanding, Hofmann had a more conventional outlook than most concerning nature. He saw it as a starting-point whereas they were subjectively inclined. As Pollock retorted to him at their first meeting in 1942 when rebuked about not working from nature: 'I am nature.' It may even have been this very lack of inwardness which, as György Lukács remarked in The Theory of the Novel, leads to a provocative instability between the world's space and the self, that explains the consistently more 'composed' look of Hofmann's work and its brightness in every sense. 

In Hofmann, I feel neither inwardness nor a sense of place (as I do with Cezanne).  His paintings are like lectures that make me fidget in my chair and doodle.   They bore me.

Lee Krasner, nude study from life, 1938

Done before she knew Pollock,

presumably this was done in Hofmann’s school.

It’s hardly anatomical - but it does have the energy of confronting a nude model.

How can its "meaning" exclude that feeling?

Strong and lively.

Krasner's charcoal studies from the life  done in his classes strike out afresh even as they are indebted to her teacher's theory of empathy (oddly similar to Benton's premises) for their rhythmic clashing planes. Gritty and muscular, they bristle with Krasner's particular temper; not Hofmann's elegance. By contrast John Graham proved to be more the theoretician and personal mentor, 'discovering' or encouraging Gorky, de Kooning and Pollock. Once a counter-revolutionary in Russia (yet quick to claim the artist for 'an enemy of bourgeois society'), a collector of African sculpture and knowledgeable about new Parisian events, Graham's intellect ranged easily from brilliance to absurdity and back, finding unexpected links 

 Some text and paintings by Graham appeared in a local gallery, and I wrote about them here 

Brilliant and absurd ?  Yes.  He may  have fallen off a horse at some point in his military career and landed on his helmet.

Insecure and suspended between a lost past and an alien present, Gorky's avid passion for art met an existential need. To become a great artist once he settled in New York in 1924 would validate his inheritance of Europe's cultural riches. So thoroughly was Gorky immersed in the narrative which he felt bound to extend - nothing less than that of modern art itself - that over the next ten years or so he eschewed alll conventional lipservice to originality. His techniques appear crafted in the same sense as when an artisan empathizes with a chosen master. Hence he claimed, 'I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso.’  Adding a close analysis of Matisse, Braque, Ernst and finally Miró in the late 1930s, Gorky came abreast of European innovations ahead of almost everyone else and with quite different idioms at his service. Yet his own voice emerged. He was particularly attracted by the later so-called 'Synthetic' phase of Cubism typified by Picasso where, as in the 1927 Seated Woman, flat forms interlock in an ultra-shallow space. In Organization 1933-36) this vocabulary starts to feed into a personal language. From an interpretation of Picasso's 1927-28 'artist and model' images it next passed through a more geometric grid-like state advised by Mondrian until, beneath thicknesses of paint, the subject disappeared into ciphers. 

Gorky, Organization, 1933-36, 50 x 59"

The title seems so appropriate - organization itself is the subject as it pulls 

together simple elements  to produce surprise and delight.

Much like his Newark murals, made three years later,

The central black motif, for example, conjures both a palette and an organic presence with an inscribed cavity, breast or eye. Multiple readings were an old Cubist standby, except that Gorky found for them a space which would intensify metamorphosis. He lifted it, precociously, from Surrealism. 

 

Picasso, Three Musicians, 1921

This is the Picasso that it recalls for me.

The sheer joy of graphic design

in a horizontal progression of three constructions.

Picasso, Seated Woman, 1927, 52 x 38"

The formal sanctification of the artist’s private , Mediterranean, patriarchal world.

The woman feels dumb, mindless, and tightly bound.

With such a tiny eye - she sees nothing.

The design is quite comforting and upbeat for the viewer -

but not as arresting as the Gorky and Picasso shown above.

It serves a darker subject matter.

Stuart Davis,Eggbeater #4, 1928

Gorky said he was following Picasso,

but if he hadn’t, I might have guessed Stuart Davis

Gorky, Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia, 1932

This was part of a series of two paintings and many drawings.

This one is owned by the Whitney Museum whose website declares that it was based on the following piece that was in NYC at the time;

Giorgio de Chirico,  The Fatal Temple, 1914

Both feel clinical - a doctor’s notes concerning a damaged person,

possibly the artist himself. Francis Bacon later worked the same territory.

Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia  13 x 21",1934

Here’s a painting from the series.

Another exploration in organization - but somehow off-kilter, more psychological, less athletic, more surprising.  If it were five feet high instead of one, it might typify the kind of contemporary abstraction shown by the Chicago gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey.

.

Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia (c. 1930-32)  - predominantly a graphic series - represented a springboard for Gorky and was to generate pictures almost a decade hence. Several Surrealist sources coalesce here: abrupt perspectives from de Chirico and Dalí, sculpturesque forms out of Moore or Arp which, in turn, dissolve to linear arabesques anticipated by Ernst's One Night of Love (1927). Darkness unifies them in a manner that his oils would not match before the early 1940s, bringing erotic overtones that Gorky associated with nostalgia for Armenia. In his writings Gorky pictured his homeland through fertility symbols as a nature where matter moved easily, he stated in 1938, 'from one state into another. So the sexual contours and spatial intricacy can be read as Gorky's processing of European borrowings through his private, folkloric imagination. To unite both, he first had to recover the more distant heritage.

Max Ernst, Night of Love, 1927

Ernst's great technical refinement is on display in A Night of Love (1927, private collection). The artist dipped strings of various strengths in water and then dropped them onto the canvas. From the remaining traces of these strings, he created the image of a couple wrapped in a starry night sky.

I doubt Gorky also drew his curves with paint dipped string - or took anything else  from that master of Dada.  Thank goodness.

Gorky, Artist with Mother, 1926-34, 60 x 50", Whitney Museum

Haunting, sentimental.

Fierce determination in face of mom

but helplessness in her blurry hands.

Boy looks lost - so excruciatingly close to touching his mother - but not.

1942 version, National Gallery

Boy now stands on front of mom.

His face is more engaged - her’s  has become less so.

Time has passed since the earlier double portrait.

Life is for the living.

Bye, Mom.

Numerous portraits of himself, his family and even his imaginary companions culminated in Gorky's two versions of The Artist and his Mother. They consumed ten, perhaps fifteen, years of effort from about 1926 onwards. An immediate source was a 1912 photograph taken in Armenia; further allusions are woven into the pictorial fabric, especially of the more resolved Whitney version, to Picasso's Iberian phase, Uccello, Ingres, Miró and Egyptian funerary portraits. But despite, or even somehow through its eclecticism, The Artist and his Mother is not quite like anything done before in Europe or America. Innermost memories are there, for his mother had died of starvation and a gap absent from the photograph now separates the pair. An opalescent light seals in any volumes upon themselves. The mother's face, a virtual death mask in the Washington version but constantly scraped or sandpapered down and repainted to glassy perfection in the Whitney's, is remote compared to those unfinished tactile areas where the pigment drifts loose. At one level The Artist and his Mother tackles ethnicity in the wake of the biased 1924 Immigration Act, the 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti trial (which led to the wrongful execution of these two immigrants) and widespread racial prejudice. At another it marks alongside the contemporary novels of Thomas Wolfe and James Agee's semi-documentary Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) a disquisition upon time, self and experience. And the painting itself is visibly frozen overall in a process of change. 

Art historians analyze influences.  That has always been a significant part of their job description.  I wish, however, more effort went into characterizing the final synthesis of the painting itself - even if that is necessarily subjective,

These  portraits were probably effective at establishing an identity for a fugitive who lost his mother and his country.  Anfam calls it "Art as self discovery.’

As paintings, the earlier one holds more of my attention.

Through a close friendship with de Kooning, Gorky transmitted this idea of art as self-discovery. Why else did the younger immigrant, a stowaway from Rotterdam at the age of twenty-one, himself entertain a dialogue with the perceived signposts of the modern tradition (Cézanne, Cubism and Surrealism and likewise refuse to settle for either the abstract or the fully decipherable image? It was an expressive conflict repeated by Pollock, Still and others. A paradox attends any illusionistic effort to render substance and space on a flat surface and one has only to consider an almost legendary instance, the near-meeting of the fingers of Michelangelo's God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling, to understand how edges, points and emptiness carry a large burden of meaning in the process. In de Kooning's figure pieces after Man those efforts became obsessive. Some of his favourite exemplars like Ingres, Boccioni and Picasso's 'Analytical' Cubism had anticipated this, but hardly its magnification into a compendium of anxieties. 

De Kooning, Glazier, 1940

Glazier (c. 1940) was described by de Kooning as 'the result of hundreds of studies on how to paint a shoulder' 

Willem de Kooning, Seated Man, 1939, 54 x 36"

Seated Figure (Classic Male) (1939) is invaded by a flatness that pulls painting and drawing apart. De Kooning's friend the dance critic Edwin Deby was in fact then deconstructing the human anatomy with comparable ruthlessness in his essays and reviews. 

The two men depicted above are pathetic -  probably not because the artist didn’t know how to paint a shoulder, head, or any other anatomy - but because the artist was still searching for an attitude toward humanity - a real challenge after the two great wars.  Apparently idealism did not suit him - but neither did dramatic expressionism.   Though we note that eventually he did develop an exciting way to paint a certain, neurotic kind of woman.

"I met a lot of artists — but then I met Gorky... He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable. So I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends." — DeKooning as quoted by Thomas Hess,

De Kooning, Elegy, 1939, 40 x 47"

Lines and brushwork in search of a figure also furnished the basis for more hermetic compositions like Elegy (c. 1939)  whose fleshy fragments are squeezed into curt shuffling planes by the format, henceforth seemingly a trifle too small for whatever de Kooning placed within. Exposed under painting, heightens the effect by denoting a surface resistant to closure

The more I look at this reproduction, the more Anfam seems insightful about it.  Otherwise, it’s just an eyesore and head scratcher.   BTW -  the color  reproduction in the book looks much better than the above which was pulled off a DeKooning website.

The changes that de Kooning explored during these years conformed to larger issues throughout the movement. Firstly, the figure was replaced by cryptic surrogates, organic or quasi-geometric, mostly imported from Surrealism or like tendencies and continuing well into the 1940s. Secondly, more sophisticated spatial structures emerged, in alignment with the picture plane or actually exploiting its pressures. Behind each was the awareness that powerful content had to be expressed rather than illustrated. In a 1937 review of Rothko's group The Ten, the artist-writer Jacob Kainen, for instance, mentioned 'a complete and utter dependence on pigment as an expressive agency rather than an imitative or descriptive one. 

Note that the  word "merely" does not precede "imitative or descriptive" in the above — giving us an extremist dogma.  Good for some painters - but stifling for an artworld.

Jacob Kainen, Sleep, 1943

And a fitful sleep it is — a  figuration no more comfortable than that of DeKooning or Rothko - though Kainen’s later abstract pieces never made it to the big time   Btw - this piece, and many others, was collected by Duncan Phillips. (Part of his collection traveled to Milwaukee a few years back)

Jacob Kainen, 1969

Unless this looks much different in person, I prefer his figuration.

Though I realize this is probably how he feels about life.

A mishmash.

Aaron Suskind,  Chilmark, 1940

The re-orientation of Siskind's photography in 1939-40 implies that this assumption cut across a broad spectrum. From the former year his close-ups of vernacular architecture in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, isolate inanimate details, bestowing a charisma usually reserved for the figure. Siskind said that music fostered his sense of the abstract and poetry his passion for conciseness. Space is foreclosed much as de Kooning had treated it, but there was also ready precedent in the work of the f.64 Group that included Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. During the 1930s they fined down the photograph to a basically flat but brilliantly detailed record of things in their most essential form. But theirs was a classic purist vision which Siskind had the courage to deny when he went to Martha's Vineyard in 1940 and searched out 'the drama of objects. Before walls, ground or other re-creations of flatness, fragments such as a fish-head, glove  or the tines of a fork are stripped of their everyday veneers and become metaphors of death, sex and estrangement. Again, Surrealism and its bizarre Freudian objects are a precedent; again the consequence is just beyond that outlook with fantasy giving way to starkness. 

IMHO photography is the gateway drug to conceptual art.  Photographers do not breathe life into forms — they  select, and  arrange the luminous aftermath.  Apparent intellectual cleverness outweighs heartfelt aesthetics. 

And yet - I do enjoy looking at the above photo more than any of the paintings shown earlier on this post.  Dead things look bolder than live but dissipated. 

Photography had an innate advantage at this stage since by employing factual elements it sidestepped the need to invent them afresh in a fabricated space. That became Rothko's task once he sought to translate the mood of the Subway series into more universal terms that would measure up to the scale of the troubled history of the West in the late 1930s.

And it looks like Anfam might agree with me.  It takes a special ability, as well as motivation, to actually "invent" things rather just present  "Factual elements". 

Mark Rothko,  Syrian Bull,  1943

 Figurative remnants are located beside motifs meant to evoke ancient and pre-human times and hence the whole cycle of being. Roman or Etruscan sarcophagi and the Metropolitan's Mesopotamian sculpture inspired The Syrian Bull (1943) and the tierlike compositions he evolved beforehand which enclose heads, other body parts and detailing. 

Possibly Rothko ingested psychedelics before he went to the Met one day.  This might be quite appropriate for ancient middle-eastern sculpture like the piece shown below.  It bubbles over with inner energy.  Earth energy.

The Rothko piece is less powerful -   but still it’s off-the-charts in weirdness. 

As Edward Alden Jewel wrote in the NYT in 1943:  "You will have to make of Marcus Rothko's 'The Syrian Bull' what you can; nor is this department prepared to shed the slightest enlightenment when it comes to Adolph Gottlieb's 'Rape of Persephone."

Assyrian, 8th c. BCE, ivory, Met Mueum

Gottlieb, Rape of Persephone, 1943

One thinks of the earlier measured architectural settings having intruded upon the figures, but Rothko's antipathy to Cubism for a while left him without a usable past and Untitled is too conceptual, a bare diagram of entrapment or of consciousness divided into evolutionary stages. 

Rothko, untitled, 1939-1940

A work in progress? A new hieroglyphic ?

The concept is as puzzling as the visuality is clumsy.

Robert Motherwell,  Little Spanish Prison. 27 x 18, 1941-44

A fun aesthetic - deceptively simple.

Casual - but not.

Can’t tell if it has lasting appeal without seeing the actual piece.

But the horizonal flow - and tightness- looseness contrast are promising.

Revealingly, Robert Motherwell's overview of art history, engendered by studies at Harvard and Columbia, made his first endeavours from around 194l a response to this impasse. From John Dewey's philosophy he had learnt to regard abstract rhythms as an expression of the inner self. The Little Spanish Prison belongs to a 1941-44 sequence that included Mexican Night and Spanish Prison Window. Together they addressed what Motherwell thought was the decisive tragedy of the era, Spain's Civil War, a symbol of the death of freedom. Wavering bands of yellow ochre and chalky white inspired by the folk objects of Mexico, a death-obsessed culture that fascinated the artist, prohibit entry into The Little Spanish Prison. 

Motherwell is the first artist, so far in this book, whose training was in philosophy rather than art - and he never did do figurative.  Aiming  higher than personal angst, his connection to ABX seems marginal,

As a facade broken only by a small magenta strip resembling a blank aperture it foretells the various grids and labyrinths that became prominent in Abstract Expressionism in the War years and connotated psychic frustration or deadlock. Mondrian and Ernst had prefigured these designs yet not their psychological overtones. Moreover, Motherwell's teacher at Columbia, the art historian Meyer Schapiro, would have alerted him to a logic that justified setting European vanguard styles into a new, symbolic and relatively angst-ridden context. As outlined in his 1937 essay 'The Nature of Abstract Art', Schapiro's intelligent Trotskyist reasoning maintained that all culture was rooted in the social matrix, hence there was 'no "pure art", unconditioned by experience. Nevertheless the status of abstraction remained unclear. Did it, in other words, express alienation or freedom from life's tensions? Those who championed 'hard-edged' geometric idioms and formed the American Abstract Artists (AAA) in 1936 chose the latter conclusion.

Ad Reinhardt,  No. 30,  1930

Fun, bouncy, American - but not as rambunctious as Stuart Davis whose studio was down the hall.

Reinhardt, another graduate of Schapiro's, joined the AAA in 1937 after studies under Carl Holty who had absorbed ideas from Mondrian in Paris in the early 1930s [50]. His cool, dispassionate early canvases - in an internationally established Cubist-Constructivist mode - acquire another aspect when judged as statements from an even more socially aware sensibility than Motherwell's. Leftist beliefs ought to have obliged him to dismiss non-objective geometry as an ivory tower. Instead he saw its purity as a double-edged weapon and in a 1942/43 discussion of Mondrian asked rhetorically, 'What greater challenge today ... to disorder and insensitivity; what greater propaganda for integration, than this emotionally intense, dramatic division of space?' Here he was trying to save abstraction from its own sterility as if it might transcend chaos and the banal, rather as Wallace Stevens had already said in his famous poem 'The Idea of Order at Key West' (1935). Pictorially, however, this would always place Reinhardt in a love-hate relation to Abstract Expressionism. Critical of its romanticism he shared its eye for absolutes.

Another artist who never went to art school or did figurative. His quote about the propaganda of well ordered geoform paintings demonstrates that he was a real spin master…and may have been familiar with Confucius.

Carl Holty,  1942

Carl Holty, Red Gold,  56 x 42”, 1958

As a digression….here’s a few pieces by Holty.

Guess he just didn’t stand out enough to be the among the hundred names in the ABX list in Wikipedia

Ad Reinhardt, 1940

Didn’t Reinhardt go from graphic design to minimalism - without ever doing ABX .

In an online interview, he tells us that abstract expression is an abstract variety of surrealism.

Before  the Second World War Pollock, Smith and Still effected the most complex reckonings with non-American sources. Without Reinhardt's faith in geometric order they felt freer to experiment. In retrospect it seems hard to envisage where their respective Going West, Saw Head, or PH-726 ('Two Figures') could progress without lapsing into storytelling or at least a too demonstrative mode of art. That fierce expressionism called for another outlet. There was a restlessness about their search through Cubism, Surrealism and primitive influences, as if they were quite certain of what to say but determined to shape it in a truly 'advanced' syntax. By merging such erstwhile separate idioms, like planar Cubist space and Surrealist linearity, they expanded the formal resources of American art as virtually nothing had done since the 1913 Armory Show. 

At this point, Anfam apparently felt that his account lacked sweeping generalizations.  Mostly unsupported, they're not really worth disputing.  We may note, however an internal contradiction.  On the one hand, “fierce expressionism” needed another outlet……but on the other, the artists wanted to use “an advanced syntax”.  How does that differ from seeking to be more fashionable?

Clyfford Still, PH-154, 1941-42

I must have walked right past this dark monstrosity dozens of times when in Buffalo.    Why stop to look at it?  I’m a hedonist -  seeking pleasure not pain. Like a talismatic stone, it may hold the key to some profound mystery - but the same could be said about everything - no exceptions.

Perhaps Still evolved more remarkably than any in view of his isolation in the remoteness of Washington state, where he studied and taught from 1933 to 1941. There, Regionalism should have been his métier. In practice, he was far from its narrowminded horizons and his style after the mid- 1930s reflected a shrewd understanding of his position vis-à-vis European developments, probably gleaned in part from reproductions in the French magazine Cahiers d'Art and a formidable knowledge of the history of art. 

Too bad no examples were given.

After the early PH-726 ('Two Figures') his imagery grew increasingly imaginative with suggestions of ritual in the detailing. One factor was an interest in classical literature, which pervaded his subsequent writings with their erudite diction and use of allegory. With a tutor who was a scholar in the field and a college library that included Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jane Harrison's anthropological study of ancient Greek myth, Themis (1912), Still's past encounter with the wasted Alberta prairies would have found an extraordinary equivalence in these books and their vivid symbols dealing with the fertility of the land. Among them stood awesome chthonic deities, living rocks, the sun or sky and elemental conflicts between life and nature. These elucidate the otherwise baffling pictorial elements that arose by the late 1930s, of which the remark that they were pictures of the Earth, the Damned and of the Recreated' (Rothko quoting Still in 1946) represented a terse reminder. Thus the sem canvas PH-154 (1941-42) has a rearing brown and cliff-like silhouette, animated by crimson gashes, resembling a talismanic stone in Themis that symbolizes the earth. Its ominous bullet-like profile reappears at the base of several lithographs drawn in Richmond, Virginia, during 1943-45. These are fantasia uson Still's primary themes in the 1930s, including the struggle light and darkness. 

Clyfford Still, PH-206

This one looks more promising.  Strong, mysterious, luminous, imposing.

A pagan deity.

Artist as shaman.

Or - maybe just playing at shaman.

Not sure that the actual piece won’t begin to feel hoaky,

..like the corny cover art for a death metal album,

or like Ivan Albright’s tales of the macabre.

PH-206 (*1938-N-No. ')  (once entitled Totemic Fantasy) perhaps casts a backward glance to Picasso’s 1927 Seated Woman,  yet remains singular in its petrified chill, the aureole that throws the figure into relief and the barren stalk it grasps, which wavers upwards along the left side. Shapes are also doubled and rhyme with one another in an uncany fashion. Still had therefore embarked on a twofold synthesis: private experiences were translated into universal terms - dark monoliths, bright suns and prehensile limbs - boding human destiny within a hostile cosmos and the symbols were then beaten flat to form planes jammed together in a harsh post-Cubist framework. As these procedures had few rivals in painting then, so the mythic or, more accurately, existential allusions predated their appearance in New York in the early to mid-1940s.

Giacometti, Woman with throat cut, 1932

David Smith, Structure of arches 1939

Still observed that he aimed at the time to resolve space and the figure, a process almost simultaneously paralleled in Smith's sculpture. Both at first reduced their subjects to schema which were then broken and reorganized as hybrid masses. Smith looked to Giacometti's Woman with her Throat Cut (1932) in Structure of Arches (1939) and replaced the splayed female body with zigzag interpenetrating angles. Contours next became important to both painter and sculptor. 

“Resolving space and the figure” appears to have been the goal of many sculptors throughout the history of many cultures- though they have hardly ever been a majority.

The possible connection between these two eye-catching pieces is fascinating. The disaster (Giacometti) and what caused it (Smith).   Regrettably, Anfam provides no footnote to document it.

David Smith, Interior for Exterior, 1939

Some of Still's lithographs unexpectedly reversed shading and highlit passages so that all zones, 'empty' or solid, were alike equally 'active'. For Smith the counterpart lay in pieces like Interior for Exterior (1939) [51] which employ steel rods at once to 'draw' in space and imply solid volumes. 

Clyfford Still,  ph-233, 1945

Still's image of a wiry, ambiguous upright presence in PH-233 ('Self-Portrait') (1945) would achieve a comparable breakthrough. The monoliths of Saw Head [28] and PH-206 (1938-N-No. I')  were approaching an art of spaces where line stretched into and energized its surroundings.

The forms in PH-233 appear to retreat from surrounding space while forms push out in the David Smith.  Psychological opposites.   The one feels creepy - the other invigorating.

This disruption of a central anchor or focus held a special lure for Pollock because more than most he felt confined by the box-like space attendant upon it since the Renaissance and which Cubism had restructured without destroying altogether. Having progressed beyond the naive treatment of mass typified in Going West,  Pollock's manner throughout the remainder of the 1930s gives the impression of representational conventions being pushed to the brink. He is in defiance of what a painting can reasonably contain. Despite or, rather, due to that spirit, Benton's example still loomed and he wrote in 1933 that the man had a 'huge job out in Indianapolis... two hundred running feet twelve feet high'. Soon, therefore, he wanted the mural's momentum - a quality linked to its declarative role as a public spectacle - for his own otherwise modest easel pictures.

Pollock, untitled panels, 1934-38

Portraits of destruction.  

I prefer when things are coming together rather than flying apart - but we must accept them being two sides of the same coin.  Can’ t have one without the other.

Like a chained dog howling in the night.

Art of the a terrifying despair.

 It explains the 'running' motion that courses through oils of the late 1930s such as Untitled Panels A-D (c. 1934-38) where the previous whirling rhythms gather velocity, now as abstracted linear patterns largely based upon figures. The difference is noteworthy.

 Before, the figure was often dwarfed or absent; henceforth its gestures, traces and convolutions in pictures such as Naked Man with Knife (c. 1938-41) 54 resemble violent retorts, as it were, to the forces that had oppressed his initial works. 

Aggressive destruction, battle of all against all, collapsing into itself, disgusting, repulsive.

Makes the latter drip paintings feel mellow.

A major catalyst upon Pollock were the Mexican muralists Rivera, Siqueiros and particularly Orozco, whom he probably met when the last did murals with Benton for the New School for Social Research in Manhattan in 1930. Six years later he joined Siqueiros's Experimental Workshop where enamel paints and unorthodox techniques including the use of sprayguns were being investigated. Above all, the Mexicans had portrayed human turmoil on a heroic scale. 

Pollock, 14 x 10, 1938-41

Study for an anti-heroic mural?

I can see the Orozco, but here the cataclysm is personal rather than cosmic.

“Me and my demons”

Sketchbook drawings from the end of the 1930s show that he took the lesson of their murals, notably the shard-like patterns, dovetailed contours and arabesques, and used it to overwhelm space. Amerindian calligraphy and the Picasso of the Guernica years contributed much as well. Behind each stood a new fixation with metamorphosis which is understandable if we recall Pollock's initial concern with flux. The crisis of his graphics and paintings during 1938-4l is inseparable from their utter restiveness. One can discern the strands in the mélange but not unravel them: Picasso's bestial hybrids, ritual events from the allegories of the Mexicans and perhaps an even stranger dramaturgy drawing upon native Amerindian legends. They surely also merged in Pollock's own mind, part of the tumult whose formal consequences are an incessant, unresolved conflict between figure and ground on the canvas. Not unexpectedly, a personal crack-up ensued which led to hospitalization for alcoholism in 1937 followed by some five years of intermittent psychiatric treatment. During its course Pollock became convinced that the sources of his art lay in the unconscious, a sincere enough conclusion that could still hardly have arisen without his sharing in the changed priorities of the New York avant-garde at a terrible crossroads in Western history.

That final sentence seems as profound as it is puzzling.  Which crossroads? Communism to the left, Fascism to the right, liberal democracy to the center ? Which priorities? Social idealism changing to personal despair?

Regarding this chapter’s “question of heritage” — the answers have been  as diverse as the artists.