David Anfam. Chapter 6 Being and Field

This is Chapter 6 of David Anfam’s “Abstract Expressionism” : Being and Field 

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Bernard Newman , Onement 1, 1948, 27 x 16 

Characterizing Onement, I as “the beginning of my present life,” Newman discovered in this breakthrough work a wealth of visual and conceptual complexity. He began by staining a modestly sized canvas with crimson. Over this richly hued ground, he applied a strip of masking tape, and then used a palette knife to scumble over it with cadmium orange. He had originally intended to remove the tape, leaving a lighter strip edged by orange flickers. Instead, he recognized in the vertical line it formed—which he would call a “zip”—a visual device that distilled painting to its essential qualities of space, color, and figure-ground relationship. Newman would spend the rest of his career exploring the potent possibilities of zips on fields of color, creating compositions whose purpose he described in lofty terms: “The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation…that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”… MOMA website

In defiance of formalism, a piece that has no value outside a verbal context. And actually - since profound words can be spoken by anyone anywhere - it also has no value without institutional validation.  If it were anonymous, it would be worthless, and Anfam would not have written about it. The prestige of it and MOMA depend on each other.

We may indeed recognize it as the visual representation of an emerging thought - or moment of revelation - but not necessarily an interesting or even human one.  Might be, for example : “ aha - a bug is crawling up my leg”

Anfam will valorize it later in this chapter.

  

 Posterity has confirmed the wariness of those in this book about how criticism would distort their endeavours. Whenever we distinguish between 'action painting' or 'gesturalism' and 'colour-field painting' it creates a division that they themselves never countenanced. Such slanted perspectives originated with the very critics who sought to define the movement. 

Once again, Anfam begins a chapter by encouraging skepticism about categorizing  - then he proceeds to do it himself.

In the 1947-48 winter Rosenberg and, surprisingly, Greenberg wrote about the emergent Abstract Expressionists as if they were somehow romantic peintres maudits in absolute isolation. Gloom and doom were then popular in Europe and also with America's disillusioned ex-Communists and liberals' as an escape from society into generalities about the human condition. Ironically, the artists had already mined this vein in the 1930s

I do enjoy some doom and gloom - Milton Resnick especially. But …… it’s too bad it overwhelmed the Stuart Davis kind of masculine, jazzy,  upbeat abstract painting,

 Still's PH-726 [26], Guston's Conspirators [30], Smith's Saw Head [28], Pollock's Going West [21] and de Kooning's Man [35] preempt by a decade even the French 'realists' of the Second World War's aftermath who tried to portray the isolation and brutality of existence. By then the Americans had converted that early iconography into abstraction, or were about to do so. But this was just when Rosenberg and Greenberg pictured them as cut off from their past and heedless of contemporary culture. This set the pattern for future accounts which excised the continuing legacy of their earlier subject-matter, overlooked its relation to the present and created a vanguard who had retreated from there to the studio. That became the 'arena' of Rosenberg's American 'action painters'. Three years afterwards Greenberg's ""American-Type" Painting' also eschewed talk of meaningful content (denigrated as 'literature') and concentrated upon stylistic features. Its chosen ten were separated into a majority who fused painterliness onto Cubist space, Pollock as a bridge extending this to an all-over fragmentation, and another group (Still, Newman, Rothko) who 'advanced' into homogeneous fields of colour. These stereotypes - indefinable images borne of action versus colour fields - steadily entered the literature until in Irving Sandler's Abstract Expressionism: The Triumph of American Painting (1970) the division was codified.

Don't know whether this historical account is accurate and insightful -- but I'll go with it until proven otherwise.

 Yet simply to look without prejudice or prior agenda undoes the neatness of labels. So Still built the great nocturnal field of from immensely 'gestural' marks. He, Rothko and Newman anyway meant their work to be as impassioned as any 'action' painting, while many Pollocks and de Kooning's Excavation are really perceptual fields. Stylistic criteria alone would class Newman's Onement | [124] and de Kooning's Woman I [128] as antitheses - and miss their dual manifestation of a central presence intended to galvanize our attention. Meyer Schapiro shrewdly sidestepped these clichés when he noted in 1956 that, overarching Rothko and Pollock, stood a common search for an absolute, either of compulsive movement or colour, creating 'a powerful, immediate impact. Schapiro shrewdly saw the deeper unity that marks the climactic moment of the late 1940s and early 1950s when former themes were regenerated at a visionary level: one where the spectator's act of perception was to be imbued with the emotions merely shown before as states of solitude, malaise, energy and so forth. Hence all the artists argued that abstraction was more concrete than realism. 'It confronts you', said Pollock in 1950.

Isn't "a powerful, immediate impact." a necessary condition for all visual art we want to see? It's an emphasis on the "compulsive" that distinguishes this kind of art - and compulsion is not especially a healthy thing. There's no self control or  striving or reaching upward about it.   It's a mental illness.

 Since a recurrent preoccupation had been consciousness/ subjectivity and its ambience, the pursuit of absolutes logically led towards the field, which melds figure and ground into a totality or sets the viewer alone before its expanse. There was nothing divisive about who used fields'; some Rothkos are less field-like than Excavation, for example. It is rather that several Abstract Expressionists exploited its emotive revelations of colour, scale and light the furthest. The evolution towards the field in 1946-50 took place when most Americans feared a third global conflict loomed and the radical few suspected their country in any case of descent into a dehumanized nightmare. This situation provided those struggles between awareness and chaos, death or conformity, found in the contemporary writings of Norman Mailer, John Hawkes, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller and Ralph Ellison. The same symbolic dualities occur in the paintings of Still, Rothko, Newman and Guston immediately prior to their resort to the field, akin to a core of expressionist matter about to undergo transformation or fission. Still's PHX-I0 (1943) [103] is a last throwback to his awesome 1930s personages and several titles (whoever originated them) in the 1946 show at Guggenheim's apparently referred to cycles of death and rebirth in the life of the earth mentioned in Harrison's Themis

Clyfford Still, PH-206, 1938

PH- 384, 1946

It does seem to become  harder, if not impossible, to  distinguish between figure and ground in the later piece - though we may note that earlier generations of abstract painters sometimes made it difficult as well.

Mikhail Matyushin :  Painterly Musical Construction II, 1918, 20 x 25"

Though we may also note that the above is less like a record of personal struggle, and more like a special world you’re invited to enter.

. A gaunt female presence (note the circular breast-like detail) is engulfed by rising black lines that resemble outgrowths, a thicket sprung from the single stalk held in PH-206  As befits a small study, the means are simple with brighter touches like the face with its two red eye dots. In corresponding oils the figurative aspect receded, with an emphasis on opaque versus luminous tones in PH-384, 1946  and PH-916 ('1946-No. I') (Des Moines Art Center) where the earthy hues encroach upon glowing fissures and verticals that Still was quoted in a 1948 magazine review as calling living forms springing from the ground'. Texture adds its vividness, changing from matte to glossy, thin to encrusted. The outcome of subsuming previously skeletal figures, bodily details and space into an abstract topography was a tangled realm with life' - glints of untoward and hence premonitory colours such as burnt orange, alizarin and purples - lurking within it. Once darkness or, more rarely, a glaring acid yellow [1o2], indigo or crimson spread to a field-like magnitude the onlooker no longer faces depictions of extreme situations. Instead these are painted terrains to be reckoned with, their signifiers more substantive than the signified. The grimmest exude a stimmung [104] otherwise familiar in circumstances when little can be seen but much can be sensed and Still would have known such moments on the barren prairies, especially at night. Perhaps these distant memories were a spur to the works' attainment of an 'iconic' state where the image partly embodies that to which it refers. This helps explain his observation in 1950 that they were not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in fearful union... Iconicity blurs the boundary between illusionistic and experiential space. By no coincidence, in San Francisco and then New York Still relished a confined studio set-up and the paintings themselves pull us up short into a kind of reactive self-awareness. With much cut by the frame, more seems to be going on beyond it, just as the broken edgings feel animistic - thus their uncanny grip: 'the best works are often those with the fewest and simplest elements ... until you look at them a little more, and things start to happen' (Still). 

Meant to be real moments of existence - not necessarily pleasant.  But don't we already have enough of those  ?

Guston, If this not be I,  1945

These two pieces remind me of  “Melancholia” by Albrecht Durer.

Dark, cluttered, nothing to do about anything.

Guston,, Night Children,  1946

Same scene, but darker and flatter.

 Museum website tells us that Guston became ashamed of this work in the early fifties when he had turned to gestural marks over washes of color.

Although no mutual influence existed between Still and Guston, they shared the capacity to turn traumatic content into an intensifying and, therefore, positive aesthetic experience. Moving from lowa City to a teaching post in St Louis, Guston renewed his study of Beckmann and Picasso in a fashion that led away from If This Be Not | (1945) to the much flatter if equally beguiled allegory of Night Children (1946) and next the cut-out stylization of Performers and Porch Il (both 1947). Meanwhile, he was struck by the newsreels of rag-doll Holocaust corpses. 

Guston,  Porch II,  1946

Is that man carrying a crucifix?

As somber and joyful as a medieval stations of the cross.

Guston might have become a great liturgical painter.

With that knowledge in mind, Porch || weaves a congested disquiet where the carnival figures with musical instruments become victims to the pressure of the picture plane (on which a shoe sole is brutally imprinted at bottom left and an armature of wooden struts and inert planes. Whether or not Guston knew it, he had also approximated the same stiff gesturing and forlorn theatricals for the human predicament that Ben Shahn, Stephen Greene and other allegorical 'realists' were using. 

Gusto,  Tormentors, 1947-8

A Flagellation?

Guston seems to have the Quattrocento on his mind.

A desire to strike away from this well-worn formula is confirmed in The Tormentors (1947-48) [107] and its study [106]. Their components remain Guston's old props: trumpet, architectural outlines, a Klansman's arm and the dotted hobnail crescent of a heel that calls to mind Orwell's dire prophecy of the future as a boot stamping on a human face for ever. This is the nightmarish jumble of people, things and perceptual shifts with which the novelist John Hawkes would portray postwar disorientation in The Cannibal (1949). But whereas the pathos of Porch I| was obvious, here it lingers in a tremulous scrawny touch that Guston would make his own, the attrition of solids to vestiges and a dying light. 

Guston, Review, 1948-50 (detail)

A street scene in an atmospheric police drama?

A puzzle I am drawn to solve.

Feels like a vibrant but challenging life

not really going anywhere

With a leave of absence from Washington University in 1947 Guston began Review (1948-50) [108] in Woodstock, New York State, before his Prix de Rome year in Italy and finished it upon return. The darkness has gathered into an upper field that oppresses a red region below embedded with fragile, shadowed memories of an earlier vocabulary. An involved facture, recalling his first-hand contact with the oils of the Venetian school in 1948, leaves us to decipher the many traces that resist the swell of red and penumbral browns. Again we are drawn into a perceptual act that is inevitably prolonged or fraught and according to Dore Ashton the artist would speak of 'reading' the language of paint. 

Perhaps the most closely reasoned of any shift away from overt figuration took place as Rothko, in his own words of 1947, 'pulverized the familiar identity of things' to unite the mid-1940s hieratic beings with a primal haze or aether that together would slowly expand into chromatic zones. Later he told Seitz, 'It was not that the figure had been removed, not that the figures had been swept away, but the symbols for the figures, and in turn the shapes in the later canvases were substitutes for the figures.... These new shapes say ... what the symbols said. 

Rothko, Number 18, 1946, 61 x 43

Floating, disoriented, dreamlike, personal.

At first Rothko toyed with complete dissolution in, for example, No. 18  where, despite its residual schema for a square upright torso and oblong head, everything appears to pulsate; this was succeeded by an emergent clarity that he connected in a 1949 Tiger's Eye statement with 'the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea and between the idea and the observer'. Like Still, Guston and Newman, he envisaged the vehicle for this unmediated experience to be a spatial field able to envelop the spectator. His special discovery was a format invested at once with powers of self-denial (so that we absorb the 'breathing' luminosity) and memories of those rectilinear elements that had brought ominous constraint to the compositions since the 1930s (so the sensuousness is tense). 

Rothko, Number 9, 1948,  53 x 46

Gray, torso-like Figure in a confusing ground.

In the 1948-49 paintings  including the Multiform series dilute oil washes soak into the canvas even as they form rectangles echoing the frame in a Mondrianesque fashion. Nor is Rothko likely to have missed the 1948 Bonnard retrospective at MoMA and its display of disembodied, shimmering radiance. 

Rothko, No. 5, Number 22, 1950, 9ft 9”, 8’11”

A strange geology of strata

 both heavy and whispy and cloudlike

Below, Anfam sees it as transitional

from one kind of painting to another.

Not sure how satisfying it would be over time.

It’s more a record of where he is,

than where he’d like to be

At the middle of No. 5/No. 22 (1950) three gouged lines move to a nexus, the last remnants of the wiry organisms entombed within the surrounding strata during his former biomorphic phase. Otherwise every incidental has been absorbed by the huge veils of red and gold, frontal yet nuanced, silent but so sheer as to fill the mind. 

Behind the search for intensity that reached its climax in colour as field ran the years when some intellectuals saw American society as foreclosed. Either, in their estimate, historical forces were massing into the new technocratic brand of extremism personified by the General Cummings character ("You can consider the army a preview of the future') in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948); or people had become the unfeeling conformists censured in the sociologist David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950); or culture itself was being bankrupted by the rise of the mass media (1948 saw the first television faking of an event) ,consumerism, advertising, suburbia, and the pervasive propagandism of the Truman era. Thus the choices looked stark: alienated despair, praise for the all-American way of life (as evinced by most former Partisan Review 'radicals') or the oppositional stance taken by Still, Rothko and Newman. This was when their embattled self-images matured into a polemical frame of mind that gave painting the status of a moral critique. It had the extremism - compelling and even absurd - of a time when open political activity was dangerous and dissent spelled ostracism. Henceforth Still for example denounced American materialism and in a July 1950 letter he linked the 'magnitude' and intensity' of Newman's colour to a total rejection of contemporary culture and those behind it. Freed of a false sense of security, community and of the plastic bank-book, wrote Rothko in his The Romantics Were Prompted' essay (1947-48), transcendental experiences become possible. Alienation had to be resisted or else it would prompt the escapism of the Romantics and their latter-day heirs. Here Newman's contribution came to the fore. If The Death of Euclid (1947) [69], The Command (1946), Euclidean Abyss (1946-47) and Genetic Moment (1947) are understood alongside Newman's written theorizing they reveal a strategy to dramatize the apocalyptic situation after the Holocaust and Hiroshima so that out of chaos would rise an abstract image that in 'The Sublime is Now' (1948) he called 'real and concrete' and therefore the opposite of alienation. Strange shafts slice through the bleakness of those pictures: quite untouched, they resemble absolutes amid chaotic gulfs. Underlying such polarities lay the rather Germanic cast of his thought with its dialectic shaping the essays then that contrast 'man' and 'nature', 'order' against 'terror', 'beauty' versus 'sublimity'. An important source was the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer's claims that abstraction, far from being empty and unreal, embodied acute emotions in the face of terrible circumstances. A friendly world, wrote Worringer, led instead to empathy and hence the realism' that Newman in turn regarded as bogus. In 1947-48 the verticals altered as Newman 'became involved with light' and in several brush and ink drawings they become radiant entities that command the gloom. Giacomettis sculptures at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in February 1948 also impressed him with their ultra-thin figures that still defied the surrounding emptiness. On 29 January however, he had already put a line of masking tape down the centre of a dark cadmium red field, overpainted it with a glowing orange-red and pondered the result for almost a year. It was at once an end and a beginning. 

Yes - it's  a beginning -  the beginning of conceptual art in America. What these artists and critics were taking seriously was idea in mind  - not paint on canvas.  Thomas Wolfe would call it the “painted word”.

Is this also  the beginning of American high art as adversarial to America’s commercial culture?  In such a culture, even  critical adversaries will be commercialized if possible - as indeed they were.  We are now seeing a populist revolt against the institutionalization of that critique.

Until Onement / Newman's ideas had been grand, their realization often meagre. Now the image and the symbol of genesis were seamlessly knit. Though physically small, this unity renders the canvas grand in scale and the same applies to the forthrightness that Still and Rothko reached. At vital points in the course of Western art clarity or directness have been idealized. One thinks of the austerity of the early Renaissance, Jacques-Louis David's spartan Oath of the Horatii (1784) and Mondrian defying a murderous present when he chose to purify his idiom at the height of the First World War. Each call to order had moral implications and this was no exception. 

Anfam is presenting  a comprehensive judgement here.  "Clarity" and "directness" are conceptual qualities -  while making the small appear grand is usually a visual achievement. The word "genesis" has sacred association - while "Oath of the Horatii" and Mondrian's grids are iconic masterpieces.  

Does this piece really belong is such lofty company ? We may note that visual aesthetic is not really an issue. The piece appears “grand due to the unity of image and symbol”.  Is such unity any greater than that of a red octagonal stop sign? And that traffic control marker also shares the “austerity” of the masterpieces by David and Mondrian.  Given sufficient verbal instruction -  a piece of no less quality could be rendered by almost every student in any art school. 

This frontal attack on visual aesthetic is an enduring legacy of this moment in American art history.  Aesthetics was driven out of mainstream contemporary art criticism - and it has yet to return.

For with even Henry Wallace's moderate Progressive Party defeated in 1948 in a campaign of anti-Communist hysteria and smears, civil liberties everywhere attacked, the defeat of labour in the 1945-46 strikes followed by severe counter-measures, modern art denounced from the floor of Congress and writers returning to myth, formalism or proclaiming the death of the hero, the noumenal impact of colour vitalizing space represented something singular and beyond assailment. This is why Still could say in a now lost statement for his 1950 show, 'Through them [the paintings] | breathe again' and Rothko, 'It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again' ('The Romantics...'). Against the perceived spiritual prison of postwar history these metaphors of resurrection - verbal and imagistic - make sense. That we can surmount time and apprehend things absolutely are of course illusions but nevertheless potent, even therapeutic ones, especially when the times appear out of joint, life stymied and culture debased. 

But did this kind of painting develop into an alternative to such debasement- or just a marketable symptom?

Scale and colour engineer those illusions. Both can be interiorized and hence galvanize us, as Braque noted with his comment that colour 'either absorbs or is absorbed'. Size is an objective measurement, scale involves the humanly subjective experience of measure. The openness of Onement I (symmetrical and upright like ourselves) makes it elemental, a head-on meeting between vision and redness. Newman paraphrased that fixity when he said, 'The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject-matter of painting! In 1945 he wrote about exploring the whole octave of a hue and the 'zip' of Onement / sounds the highest note of a scale given by the field's pedal point. At a stroke the previous break between vertical and void was converted into a wholeness, a continuum (instead of working with the remnants of space, I work with the whole space'). From here onwards the paintings await our completion as we become the human focus in a rapport with radiance, darkness or varieties of balance. The compositions locate us; so long as the moment lasts the sense of self prevails. Why else should there have been an exact coincidence between this extraordinary role that absolute chroma conferred on the observer, the artists' conviction that states of being were at stake and an America where the free individual was equated with publicly censured subversive' who included Einstein, Oppenheimer and Chaplin? 

No argument from me there:  Newman’s paintings are about a self  “terrible and constant”

Arthur Danto had this to say in a 2002 essay published in The Nation:

I have followed Newman respecting a distinction between pictures and paintings. Onement 1 was a painting, whereas what he had done before were merely pictures. How are we to understand the difference? My own sense is that a picture creates an illusory space, within which various objects are represented. The viewer, as it were, looks through the surface of a picture, as if through a window, into a virtual space, in which various objects are deployed and composed: and composed: the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints in an adoration; stripes surrounded by squiggles in an abstraction. In the Renaissance, a picture was regarded as transparent, so to speak, the way the front of the stage is, through which we see men and women caught up in actions that we know are not occurring in the space we ourselves occupy. In a painting, by contrast, the surface is opaque, like a wall. We are not supposed to see through it. We stand in a real relationship with it, rather than in an illusory relationship with what it represents. I expect that this is the distinction Newman is eager to make. His paintings are objects in their own right. A picture represents something other than itself; a painting presents itself. A picture mediates between a viewer and an object in pictorial space; a painting is an object to which the viewer relates without mediation. 

Note that Danto is giving an interpretation of Newman's idea, not endorsing it - though he does highly recommend the current Newman exhibit he was reviewing. He does not query whether a picture can also be a painting - or whether it’s even possible to avoid being a painting (until the camera was invented). 

In an art-centric view, a painting, of any quality, is  an event all by itself - whether used for mediation or not - whether made in the renaissance or not - whether seen well, poorly, or not at all. How and where the paint was applied can always  be important to an experience of viewing it, even in photo reproduction - though viewers can always choose to ignore it - just as readers of printed text can ignore typography.

 

But apparently that opinion is not shared by Newman, Anfam, Danto, and possibly most of the current academic art world.

When Newman remarked (as quoted in Chapter 5) that his paintings spelt the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism he maintained that their 'open world' denoted the possibility of 'an open society. 

Attempts by left-wing abstract artists to link their work to political philosophy seem like a desperate attempt at activism.

Albert Bierstadt, 1863,  75 x 120”

Here’s a 19th c. version of what might be called the sublime - as a feeling of being overwhelmed by spaciousness as viewers imagine themselves in the mountains. As a painting, though, it’s prosaic : somewhat dry, tedious and turgid. As if made with the mechanical process of a camera.  For great paintings of mountain scenes, see Courbet.  Below, Anfam will call it “mere spectacle” - because its grandness is not in ideas.

 By the turn of the decade Still, Rothko and Newman went beyond easel dimensions to formats that passed from a discrete rectangle hung on the wall into a phenomenon less dwarfing than a true mural but vast enough to offer a personal challenge of a kind reflecting the current revival of interest in the concept of the sublime. Originally codified by the first- or second-century AD Greek philosopher Longinus who related it to the expression of a grandeur of ideas, the sublime only returned as a full-blown aesthetic with the rise of Romanticism when Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant defined it as the mind's experience of being exalted by enormity, vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence and infinity. Yet the mere spectacular aspect, already thoroughly treated by nineteenth-century American landscape painters, held no real appeal now. 

Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis

sensationalism, joked Newman, was a bit Surrealist. Rather, the sublime meant another strategy towards the intensification of human experience especially since it was already a truism - witness the New Yorker cartoon [112] and the rise during the late 1940s of supermarkets, synthetics, kitsch and what Herbert Marcuse would later dub 'one-dimensional' man - that Americans had never been so removed from authenticity. Engulfing and inescapable, the big picture would enhance the self. Rothko even denied Romantic flamboyance: 'I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however - I think it applies to other painters I know - is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human' (1951). Or, according to Still in December 1949, his paintings placed the viewer before them 'on his own'. What did these aspirations contravene if not that slide into dehumanization that bedevilled America after 1945 when it rapidly became the world's greatest consumer economy? By 1951 Ernst Haas could photograph a drive-in church peopled by cars, institutionalized religion had degenerated into Billy Graham's Crusades, the McCarthyite witch hunt was nearing its vicious peak and the Korean War's debacle threatened. Without this perspective on the year when Newman finished Vir Heroicus Sublimis we miss the full import of the title - meaning roughly 'man, heroic and sublime' - as well as its form. Instantly the 140 or so square feet of redness that is Vir Heroicus Sublimis locks the beholder into his or her act of communion. Who cannot apprehend redness yet who can define it? Whether it is this blaze, the preternatural ultramarine of Cathedra (1951) [123, the all-black Abraham (1949) or the all-white The Voice and The Name (both 1950), each hue is declared with a sweep that humbles description. Here the 'zips' function by acting as our guides to the potentially inchoate field as they focus, measure and stabilize the gaze.

Ad Reinhardt, Red, 1952, 9’ x 40”

Ad Reinhardt, 1941

An eye catching, jazzy tropical fish 

 A comparison with Ad Reinhardt is elucidating. During the 1940s his geometric planes dissolved into all-over calligraphy but then in a cyclical change he was beguiled (most probably by Newman, Rothko and Still) into employing more unified fields of colour that give off a steady glow [114]. But these large, near-monochrome compositions [115] remain classically aloof, their equipoise static, whereas Newman's 'zips' summon a dynamic response. If solitary the latter are analogous to sound in a silence which by its very isolation seems meant for us alone and so begins a dialogue. This factor underpins Newman's references to sound or speech in such titles as Concord, The Promise and Outcry. When augmented to the array that leaves no stretch of Vir Heroicus Sublimis without its pulse of light or shade (each of the five verticals is of a different value), then it is up to us in the perceptual act which is almost flooded by redness to unite those stanchion presences that endure as well. Facing the perfect square framed by the two innermost 'zips', yet aware of their echoes that resound to the outer margins, ours is the true 'vital center' before Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 

As the shortest distance between the center of the earth and the and the rest of the universe, vertical lines are indeed a proper focus for meditation on the human condition.   You  don’t need them to be on the wall of a major museum - but I’ve never heard of people doing it anywhere else.

Being and field have an intertwined history. The more extreme the expanse, the closer it skirts both emptiness and immanence. Intimations of loneliness or human singularity seem implicit in extensity itself, a paradox which had not been lost on the Romantics. 

A basic principle of Taoism: nothing and something are interdependent.

Caspar David Friedrich,  The Monk and the Sea, 1810,  43 x 67”

Goya, The Dog , 1820, 51 x 79”

Hopeless.

What was Goya thinking?

Andrew Wyeth, Winter, 1946, 31 x 48

Dizzy, spinning, going in circles. 

Not very satisfying, but I guess that’s the point.

Ben Shahn,  Pacific Landscape, 1945, 25 x 39

A lonely figure sleeping on a color field.

Also looks like a shrouded corpse.

I find this vision of alienation quite appealing.

The figure seems self sufficient

even if only a speck on the empty beach.

Ben Shahn Handball, 1939, 22 x31

Wonderful sense of lively emptiness .  And facing  the tall white wall that blocks the view of the houses behind it, there’s also a sense  of alienation as players appear to dutifully follow the rules.  I guess the guys with hands in pockets are patiently waiting their turn.

To cite only a few examples: certain sparse landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich, Goya's unique Dog buried in Sand (1820-23) [13] and even the 'Prelude' to Wagner's Das Rheingold (1869) all explore primordially monolithic structures that are at once voids yet pregnant with signs of life.

So glad Anfam shared these examples.  I cannot recall a single example from this century.  Recent figure painters have a horror vacui - especially in the racial and gender identity genres which dominate the galleries today.

Robert Vickrey (1926-2011), Wet Pavement

There is transcendent wonder in the world of this painting, though I also read it as cute.

Bernard Perlin, Lovers, 1946, 30 x 37

No sexual energy here,

looks like they’re cowering from a storm

 Dostoyevsky's notebooks for The Idiot (1868-69) mention a 'field of action' as a backdrop for the main protagonist and Mallarmé's poetry had eulogized blankness. Laden with similar connotations, the field of space returned to serve the strain of existential angst in America that drifted on from the Depression to wartime and after. Stark voids or fields of minute detail trap and alienate the human presence in memorable figurative paintings by Ben Shahn and Andrew Wyeth as well as in the lesser-known work of Perlin, Robert Vickrey and the photographer Harry Callahan, who was a friend of Siskind. 

Theodore Roethke's poems such as 'Unfold! Unfold!' (1951) make the field a psychological continuum and by the time Hitchcock set Cary Grant adrift in the blank yet tense Midwest expanses of the crop-dusting scene of North By Northwest (1959) the paradox of 'empty' space fomenting human drama was virtually a cliché. Avant-gardism to the Abstract Expressionists meant that further reach where the field kept its established symbolism but encompassed more than orthodox realism could. Instead of depicting figure against field they meant to draw the onlooker into the former's standpoint. Newman pinned a note on the wall at his 1950 Betty Parsons show counselling the viewer to stand close so that erstwhile self-sufficient images modulate into chromatic light. 

Newman, Primordial Light, 1954,   96 x 50 x 12

When he eschews 'zips' altogether the fields themselves are structured to make us the pivot of crisis. In the very tall pictures Day Before One (195l), Day One (1951-52), Prometheus Bound (1952) and Primordial Light (1954) perception is stretched to a limit as one vast wall of hue seemingly cloaks another that manages, barely, to burst loose at its edge. 

The force of the paintings is in the eye's struggle to reconcile inertia and a precisely focused edge or break.

Is a painting required for such a struggle ? Why can’t that same level of forcefulness be achieved with any straight edge?

As the conceptual began to define contemporary art, market value replaced aesthetics - since that is all that distinguishes Newman’s paintings.

 A similar charge attaches itself to the rifts that disturb Still's monoliths and the edgings around Rothko's rectangles. Playing upon maxima and minima, stasis and revelatory incident, such technique tests our faculties at first hand and so confounds reproduction. As Newman stated, 'They are specific, and separate embodiments of feeling, to be experienced, each picture for itself' (1950). Saturation embodied emotional force. Once Rothko confided that his colours were compressed like gases to explosion-point and Still wrote to Newman in 1950 about colour that could "burn' its way through a man's guts. Still's own textures were intended to 'bite' using powder pigments, glazes, slashes and dry weals scraped from the palette. The astringency finishes what the petrified figures of the 1930s had begun. Any illusion is 'killed' (again his word) by the layering that remains terribly immediate, all foreground, their crudeness a deliberate affront to that habit of processing everything which Still thought had emasculated postwar Americans who wanted, in the topical syntax of his metaphors, 'a sedative ... not a bull in the field, but a Howard Johnson hamburger'. Parallelism rather than influence accounts for Siskind's work appearing to recapitulate Still's. Although the latter exhibited at Betty Parsons in 1947, 1950 and 195l Siskind had independently eliminated depth and even forecasted the future in 1945 when he envisaged an 'unyielding space' where 'there is only the drama of objects, and you, watching.' After 1947 he focused ever more minutely upon decayed and paint-smeared walls whose facades, dense with graphic traces [121], apparently make darkness visible. Our task is again to delve the surface as though it were an adversary for signs of intent. Admittedly, comparable traumas are evident in the muteness that often froze people in contemporary realist painting and the literature of alienation. But their voids and palimpsests remain backdrops whereas the Abstract Expressionist field provokes a dialectic, sometimes by means of disjointed signification. 

Some of these piece have surfaces that compel my attention - but I don’t think “disjointed signification” has anything to do with it.

Clyfford Still, Ph 246

This piece is in Chicago, so I know it well.  It takes up an entire wall and dominates the room. There’s a faint white vertical line  that’s much more visible than in the above photo.  It’s ponderous and peaceful like the wall of a cave.

Before Still's PH-246 (1952) , caught between the gigantic charred abyss (the field), an anchor encounters a crossroads. In perceptual recoil from the black barrier the onlooker fastens upon glimmers of light and stability. If cartoons might satirize apathy and serious realists portray alienation, this is catharsis. The tensions of engagement concerned others. Rothko said, 'a painting lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the observer' (1947), as if, in other words, it subtly tested human sentience. The famous stacked rectangles of colour that he finalized by 1950 and infinitely varied thereafter consummated his call seven years before for 'the simple expression of the complex thought. Among Rothko's first loves was the theatre: his mature format hints, like a proscenium, that events are to happen. Symmetrical, regular and open, it also entrances. So does a technique which employs the devices of illusionist rendering: finely gradated values, scumbles and a palette either warm or saturated enough to emanate sensuality. Yet the presentation is deceptive since the fields, being effaced, are enigmas. Rothko once thought that Wyeth was about 'the pursuit of strangeness' and admired de Chirico, Dali and especially Hopper, all alike fascinated by mysteriously vacant but luminous space. Abstraction, however, allowed him further complexities. Colours gain a mercurial life and, as in the Wallace Stevens poetry that he liked to discuss, untoward permutations suggest the metaphysical. 

Rothko, untitled, 1954, 93 x 56

The lower zone of Untitled (1954) [119], for instance, vacillates between a lilac veneer, a deeper reddish glow and a violet that glimmers far below while, somehow, the ensemble still hovers in unison. Akin to a view out of a glass window, depth appears to well up through flatness and, interestingly, psychological tests confirm that the few edges convey volume to otherwise flat planes

Spectrum Soneware glaze: Christmas Red, $12.30 / pint

Similar words could be said about the above commercial color swatch that only lacks the iconic attribution necessary say  “untoward permutations suggest the metaphysical”

Gaston, Red painting, 1950, 34 x 62

Too hard to read this painting in the above image.

Seems like a floral. 

Guston's early 1950s oils were even more keyed to this potential in a pervasive spreading haze. In Red Painting (1950) and White Painting (1951) it permeates the end traces of figuration, a process one suspects was stimulated by a spell in southern Europe's light (the drawings from Ischia in 1949 have a new delicacy) and by his composer friends Morton Feldman and John Cage who were exploring ethereal sounds and their relation to silence. 

Guston, painting,  1952

The artist appears to be avoiding both the center and edges of the canvas - as well as gravity and defined shapes - so we’re left with a floating, amorphous fluff ball with some colored smudges to attract attention.  It’s like a whiff of perfume.   Not a bad place to go - but in the spirit of the times, the artist felt compelled to move on to something else, before he could make this kind of painting very satisfying. It was only an experiment. Anfam had this to say:

Painting (1952) connects tinted strands into a tapestry that dissolves back to a field nearer the edges. As the thicker marks are vestiges of past forms, so the mistiness implies time's passage and in 1959 Guston called painting a 'tug of war ... between the moment and the pull of memory'. If even these interweavings were stilled to tremors, their structure opened out and the tones intensified, we should be closer to the archetypal 1950s Rothko. 

Neither abstract landscapes (despite the elemental divisions), nor figures (despite the upright organization and haloes), Rothko avowed in a 1958 lecture that they were 'facades'. And facades both reveal and conceal. Never has that hypnotic irony been better describes than by Nietzsche, unwittingly, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). a book Rothko knew well: We looked at the drama ... whose most profound meaning we almost thought we could guess and that we wished to draw away like a curtain in order to behold the primordial image behind it. The brightest clarity of the image did not suffice us, for this seemed to wish just as much to reveal something as to conceal it. Its revelation, being like a parable, seemed to summon us to tear the veil and to uncover the mysterious background; but simultaneously this all-illuminated, total visibility cast a spell over the eyes and prevented them from penetrating deeper.

With smooth unbroken surfaces everywhere the quintessence of impersonality in postwar America, from the Eames chair to the Miesian office, Rothko seems to go quietly against the grain in paintings that imbue them with doubt and awe. In comparison, Newman's address the individual like a clarion and his titles range from imperatives (Be) to singular states (Onement) [(24], moments (Day One) and choices (The Way), or assert the unique spot to be (Cathedra [123], a locus, literally a throne, of great power) and affirm the heroic 158 15 Barnett Newman, The Wid, 1950, installation new with Here I at left 05 David Smith, The Hero, 1951-52 (Adam, Vir Heroicus Sublimis). To understand the implications we must recall not just Newman's Jewish humanism but also how the concept of the heroic individual was criticized by 'liberals' like Lionel Trilling then (and had vanished from realist painting) together with social mores, media, novels, films and an environmental ambience itself (the blandly uniform, sprawling suburbia) which lauded the virtues of a person not standing out until the sociologist William Whyte in The Organization Man (1956) wrote that the nation's ethic was to believe that 'of himself, [man] is isolated, meaningless'. Yet Newman's The Wild (1950) , Smith's The Hero (1951-52) and de Kooning's Woman I (1950-52)  reaffirm the outstanding fact of humanness on a scale that stretches from the sublime to the absurd.

Plenty of sublime - plenty of absurd.  Those  poles hardly define a humanness worth seeking - but they do seem to have defined the American artworld until the recent arrival of social justice.

Newman,  The Wild, 84 x 1.5 “

The Wild presents a crimson shaft on a dark ground narrow enough to be breathtaking - as though one's presence were suddenly surrounded by infinity. 

David Smith, The Hero, 75 x 25 x 11

Rising upright and apart, the distinctness of the onlooker is returned and its sculptural counterpart is Smith's The Hero which shares the same culturally loaded theme of the vertical entity commanding space. 

Jacques Lipchitz,  The Figure, 1926-1930,  95 x 38”

Should have been  in the chapter “Ideographic Picture” along with Gottlieb and Smith - but it predates them by a decade.  And yes  … it’s scary… an eye in the sky.

Lipchitz, The Sacrifice, 1948, 48 x 39

Ended  up going in a more Jewish folkloric direction, like Marc Chagall 

Though Jacques Lipchitz' sinister columnar Figure of 1926-30 advised it, The Hero   looks freed from Smith's aggressive erotic neuroses of the 1940s to an extent that other American sculprors who are designated 'Abstract Expressionists' had not attained. 

Seymour Lipton, Pioneer

Lippold

Ferber

Theodore Roszak, Firebird, 1950-51

Lippold

( sadly, this piece in Lincoln Center was removed and then reproportioned to fit its new location. It was less a sculpture than an architectural detail)

Ferber

Ferber

The diversity among the abstract expressionists would seem to preclude anything like a shared goal or standard from which anyone could    “fall short”.  But for some reason Anfam believes that Smith had it, while all the above didn’t.  With Smith,  my mind is drawn more to the enclosed spaces than the long, thin metal that encloses them.  His sculpture became more like a web hanging in space than something rooted to a plinth.

Greenberg's evaluation of Seymour Lipton, Roszak, Richard Lippold, Ferber et alia remains a killing, though cruel, analysis of why Smith's clipped and facient style belongs to the movement and theirs in the end at times tends to fall short of it: 'the most conspicuous result of the diffusion of the use of the welding torch ... has turned out to be garden statuary, oversized objets d'art and monstrous costume jeweiry (David Smith, 1956).

I have no idea what “clipped and facient” might look like.

 The statue, The Hero, like that of The Wild, affirms rather than threatens, two points that represent breasts imply psychic unity between the male and female principles since Smith named it a self-portrait, and the steel's industrial rigour (brazened by red lead paint) is met with the vacancy within the rectangular body. This presents the tabula rasa open to the future and in superb complementary horizontal pieces such as Star Cage (1950), Australia and Hudson River Landscape [127) (both 1951), the latter based partly on aerial photographs and train journeys through upstate New York, Smith exalted the transcendence of boundaries between space and time. By assimilating Pollock's 1947-50 idiom these sculptures approach fields wherein linear contours and intervals, sky and earth motifs, the pedestal and the outspread vectors flow together with an ease that expresses the multiplicity of being. In notes for an article of 1951 Smith added: 'Sculpture is as free as the mind; as complex as life ….. 

The quote sounds good - though obviously the mind can dream up many things that could never  be realized in sculpture.

The image provided is boring.  Perhaps the piece feels  quite different in person - but probably  Smith is less adept at profundity than the whimsy shown below:

David Smith, Star Cage, 44 x 51” x 26”

Joyful and cosmic - so unlike the angst, despair, anger, disgust of the ABX painters shown earlier in this chaoter

David Smith, Australia 

Whimsical balance

David Smith, Hudson River Landscape 

A more dynamic balance.

Drawing on the sky

DeKooning, Woman I, 1949-52, 75 x 58”

Awful as a woman  - awful as a painting - but exciting as a surface.

Can’t help being sucked into so many vigorous  riffs.

Too bad they lead nowhere.

with useless desires.

Only a pictorial mode that could  accommodate complexity satisfied de Kooning after Excavation left for the Venice Biennial in 1950. Either he could progress into utter abstractness or renew the figures that had made a comeback in the late forties.  Instead he did both. Woman started up as a mouth (the smile was something to hang onto”) magazine advertisement stuck upon the picture. This was a kaleidoscope of disjointed limbs and indications of an interior. After two years of continual revision, it reached  a decisive incompleteness with the human element regenerated upon a ground of furious entropy harking back to Excavation and representative of the urban flux without rest or form which de Kooning called a 'no-environment”

This enthusiastic nihilism is probably what made ABX a celebrated game changer in American art.

Excavation churned life under the pictorial field; the Women surge out of it.

A terse observation that seems to hit the mark.

1947

Detail

Above are a few more of DeKooning's women from the early fifties ( plus one from the late forties). Does he have a problem with women? Uncontrollable feelings of attraction/repulsion?  He appears to be a precocious teenage boy who has mastered paint on canvas, but hasn’t quite figured out sexuality.

As museum text notes - abstract painting had already replaced the figurative and mimetic in the American artworld.   His success with these paintings marks the triumph of personal dysfunction. We have finally caught up with the Europeans.  

Otto Dix

********

Below is taken from the MOMA website page for Woman I :

In 1953, The Museum of Modern Art acquired a new painting, one that prompted its collection committee to state: “The Committee found the picture quite frightening, but felt that it had intense vitality and liked the quality of the color.” The picture in question was Willem de Kooning’s Woman, I (1950–52). Though it was one of a series of six oil-on-canvas paintings centered upon a single female figure that de Kooning had worked on from 1950 to 1953, Woman, I received the most attention. The first work in this series, it seems to embody the artist’s claim: “Beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.” When de Kooning began to paint Woman, I, abstraction was dominant in American art. Artists and critics had declared the human figure to be an obsolete subject, and de Kooning himself was enjoying acclaim for the abstract compositions he had been producing over the previous years. Many of his peers saw Woman, I as a betrayal, a regression back to an outmoded tradition. The painting also subjected him to accusations of misogyny, as viewers perceived his portrayal of its female subject to be menacing, objectifying, and violent. For de Kooning, however, this was a continuation of his earlier explorations of the human figure and an opportunity to further experiment with the wide-ranging methods of applying paint to canvas. The surface of Woman, I presents an almost encyclopedic display of the physical possibilities of paint, ranging from thick to thin, rough to smooth, and opaque to translucent. De Kooning prepared huge quantities of paint for this project, altering colors and textures continuously during the nearly two years he spent working on the composition. Although it may appear rapidly and intuitively executed, it is the result of many preliminary studies, numerous painting sessions, the scraping down and re-painting of entire sections, and extended consideration by the artist. At the center of this six-feet-high by five-feet-wide painting sits the woman of its title: a figure composed of an amalgam of sweeping brushstrokes in hues of white, gray, yellow, orange, green, blue, and pink. Rough black outlines incompletely distinguish her form from the vigorous brushstrokes surrounding her. Broad-shouldered and ample-bosomed, she faces forward, with wide-open eyes taking up almost a third of her face and a virtually lipless mouth bearing long teeth. Despite such heft, she appears flattened out, pressed up against the painting’s surface. De Kooning once summarized the history of female representations as “the idol, the Venus, the nude.” In Woman, I, he both alludes to and subverts such conventions, while possibly referencing the long-held societal ambivalence between reverence for and fear of the feminine.