[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: June 30, 2008]
The first and most important thing to say about the "Action/Abstraction" show at the Jewish Museum through September 21, is that if anyone needs an excellent, broad introduction to Abstract Expressionism, this will do as well as any.
Not that that's the overt curatorial point, as the tendentious title indicates.
Scroll down for Dalí at MOMA
The exhibit is mounted at the Jewish Museum because it purports to re-stage a battle between two flamboyantly opinionated New York-born Jewish art critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. To be blunt, it's something of a mismatch, because who calls Abstract Expressionism "action painting" any more?
One doesn't really care, though, as one is ushered past a couple of grand, looming Pollocks - "Convergence" and "No. 3", and into the presence of DeKooning's dramatic and unrepentantly figure-based "Woman" (1950). As far as I can judge, every important artist from that post-war school of American painting, from its German-born mentor Hans Hoffman through all the usual suspects, even including the sculptors.
One practical difficulty with the show is lies in the tightness of the Jewish Museum's rooms. The Warburg mansion was built for elegant living in the days of Taft, hardly to embrace American abstraction at it most self-confident and monumental. Rothko and Still both stifle in these galleries, but worst served is Barnett Newman, whose painted monoliths are squeezed into a space little more than a niche.
Nevertheless, I did take the opportunity to hear the arguments from the horses' mouths, sitting down for the first time with collections of essays by Greenberg, the hardline, sometime Marxist, Partisan Review mandarin, and Rosenberg, the debonair New Yorker polemicist.
One thing both parties had in common was a arrogant contempt for popular culture in all its forms and a deep faith in the emancipatory potential of serious art. They shared this too with contemporary Jewish socialist theorists of the Frankfurt school, Adorno in particular; from our privileged position today, we can see that they shared none of the depth and specificity of the Frankfurt School's scholarship.
In all accounts of the era, Greenberg is represented as the loudest and most strident of critical voices, and a dominating personality. His writing today seems thin both in quantity and quality. At best, his sketches of political history, and even art history, lack nuance - revolutionary thought existed in Europe prior to 1848, for example. His essays are brisk, judgmental, repetitive, and very short on detail. And his routine is to trace a simple line of development in modern art, from Cézanne and the Impressionists, via the two stages of Cubism, to abstraction, and to judge abstraction by the rigor with which it dispenses not only with representation, but with the surrogates of representation which even the Cubists had been sluggish to reject: pictorial illusion, especially the illusions of depth and volume.
Famously, Greenberg sees art (in painting, anyway) achieving its essence when it realizes itself as the manipulation of color and form in flat, two-dimensional space.
Rosenberg will have none of this formalism. Imbued with a heroic existentialist impulse, which today seems as old-fashioned as morning dress, he insists that art realizes itself only in the expressive action of the individual artist:
The concept of art as creation brings the artist literally into the picture. The process by which the work comes into being often constitutes the content of the work; the artist's activities furnish its 'plot.' Thus the playwright appears on the stage writing his play, the novelist appears as a character in the novel engaged in writing a novel, and the painter's activity and state of mind while painting are exposed in his brush strokes, his splashes, or the recurrence of characteristic shapes.
Certainly such an account seemed to readers of the time to elucidate the much-photographed engagement of Pollock with brush and canvas, but it's a stretch to apply it to as reflective an artist as DeKooning, and quite worthless when addressed to the serenely impersonal works of Newman or Rothko. It can only strike the present day reader as the intentionalist fallacy with knobs on; something Rosenberg inadvertently confesses:
The new American painting could not be apprehended without an intuition of its pathos (which) consisted not only of the social isolation of painting but of the painful awareness of the artist that art could not reach beyond the gesture on the canvas without being transformed into something he never intended.
Quite. The pathos of all art, one might say, and a good thing too. Painting would be immeasurably less interesting than it is if its value were reducible to the particular mood, disposition and physical tics affecting the painter during the period the painting was created.
Thus far, Greenberg wins the battle hands down, committed as he is to evaluating the concrete pictorial value of the picture itself. In an early essay on avant garde art, he reasonably proposes that modern painters
derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to be most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors etc, to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.
But he pushes his hostility to pictorial illusion - to the easel-painting as a kind of fake window on the wall - to an implausible extreme, railing against mid-century French painters for seeking
the old kind of illusion of depth as obtained through glazing or through the tempering and value-toning of color.
With his favored Americans, by contrast, pictorial space is not
created 'pictorially,' by deep or veiled color; it is a question rather of blunt and corporeal contrasts and of optical illusions difficult to specify.
But this is special pleading, as is his reference to
(A) new kind of flatness, one that breathes and pulsates (in the) darkened, value-muffling warmth of color in the paintings of Newman, Rothko and Still.
Rosenberg calls Hoffman, a painter of an older generation and mentor to the Asbtract Expressionists:
"I have students that come to me painting in two-dimensional rhythms, an empty affair."
It's inevitable, perhaps, that such rigid theoretical stances are eluded by the actual artists of the period in almost every painting and sculpture. In one of the galleries, one can watch a clip of DeKooning asking Rosenberg in mock bemusement, "Am I an action painter?" DeKooning's canvases, of course, are visibly worked over, again and again, with a laborious intent which Rosenberg can only explain as a series of continuing, ever-unfinished actions (Rosenberg persisted in referring to the new American painters as "Action Painters", long after the term "Abstract Expressionist" had one the day.
As for Greenberg's insistence on the two-dimensional plane, these painters - from Hoffman on - create miracles of pictorial depth and complexity, and even model the volume of their shapes, generally without resort to perspective. I suppose they use those "hard to specify" optical effects. Hoffman developed a theory about colors "pushing and pulling" the viewers gaze (see here his majestic "Sanctum Sanctorum"). Pollock breaks the two-dimensional plane by layering web upon web of slashed and dripped paint. Rothko and Still seem able to achieve such effects through the sheer quality of paint texture, and depth of color.
For all Greenberg's prescriptions, there's plenty of post-Cubist shading too. Grace Hartigan's sumptuous "Summer Street 1956" wraps remnants of figuration in bursts of abstract color, especially some plump, juicy, fully modelled fruit one could almost pick from the canvas. Her "New England" sets about modelling an abstract landscape in blocks of color reminiscent of Cézanne. Even Krasner, in her most Matisse-like design mode, repeating similar shapes regularly across an uncentered canvas, shades her lines to give the figures depth.
The show dwindles finally into a few examples of the less extravagant color-field painting Greenberg came to admire: an early Stella, a Noland target. The climax for me was one of Still's major works, "1950-A No. 2", hanging alongside a Rothko (neither Still nor Rothko are seen at their best hung with other artists). This composition, at first glance an arrangement of jagged red and brownish areas of hastily applied paint, repays long contemplation. As with just about every major Still, other colors are almost hidden in the picture, awaiting discovery. There are scraps of unpainted canvas. There is constant variation in thickness and texture of paint.
Now, Still - a shamelessly self-dramatising figure - would have wholeheartedly signed on to Rosenberg's notion of painting as the self-expressive gesture of the isolated heroic artist. That seems to be his understanding of his own work. And yet all the drama - and there's plenty - lies in the deep battle of color, shape and texture in the picture itself, rather than in Still's seething intentions.
And for all the ink spilled on the subject, we won't achieve a full perspective on this period of American art until the bulk of Still's work, kept hidden by peculiar clauses in his will, is finally unveiled at a dedicated museum in Denver, hopefully within the next few years.
This is a show to see, and see again (there's so much I haven't mentioned): information here.
Notes
You can pretty much read Greenberg's collected art criticism in an afternoon. The quotes above are from the anthology, Art and Culture (1961). It's the only one you need, and even then it's padded out with some essays on literature. Rosenberg was a prolific journalist, and has several collections to his name. Quotes above are from The Anxious Object 1964).
Dalí, from Bunuel to Groucho to Disney
Summer fun at MOMA, with a show featuring the ever-popular Dalí. I went to a preview with low expectations. Dalí's obsessively precise paintings of repeated images - plenty of seashells, ants and droopy clocks - hold, in my view, limited aesthetic appeal. The content, first seen, is striking and memorable; but then, if you're at all interested in painting, it's time to move on.
Greenberg would have gnashed his teeth at Dalí's commitment to easel-painting and illusionism.
In fact, rather than the "film" aspect of the show being, as I'd feared, just an added feature, it's actually the focus of the entire exhibition. Familiar Dalí pictures are here, but it's the relationship between his painting and his work in cinema that's at stake. The show has already been well-reviewed in the Times, and its great success lies in the decision to project the movies (or scenes from movies) continuously in the same galleries as the paintings, drawings and designs. It would be a less vivid show if the film content was hidden in side galleries.
And so, one is immediately confronted by Un Chien Andalou, moves on to L'Age D'Or, and is brought up short by an immense screen showing the dream sequence from Spellbound. Some of the materials for unrealised projects are worth seeing: Dalí's fond sketches of the Marx Brothers are laugh-out-loud funny. It's also worth sitting through Destino, an animated short by the Disney studios recreated in 2003 from plans abandoned decades before. It's in the style of Fantasia; a cavalcade of fluid, significant images.
Through September 15, and plenty to see at the MOMA site.
