May 4 – September 16, 2018
1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street,
New York City, thejewishmuseum.org

In 1950, a Chaim Soutine exhibition at MoMA attracted a serious response from the New York art world. Willem de Kooning expressed great admiration for Soutine, arguing  that “[he] builds up a surface that looks like a material, like a substance.” Indeed, three years later de Kooning’s own figurative works responded to that show. Subtitling this year’s small exhibition of thirty-some Soutine still lifes “Flesh,” the Jewish Museum subtly (perhaps unconsciously) alludes to de Kooning’s famous statement, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”?

In our very different contemporary art world, this show will surely fascinate figurative and abstract painters alike. (I would be surprised, for instance, if Bill Jensen is anything but riveted by it.) Soutine appeals to our present sensibility in ways that his once more famous near-contemporaries, Picasso or Mondrian, do not. Where Cubism, Surrealism and modernist abstraction are now of essentially historical curiosity, Soutine’s painterly manner remains a live option. That is surprising, for he wanted to work within the old master and early modernist museum-based tradition – he expressed great admiration for Chardin, Courbet and Rembrandt. But the way he radicalized that tradition remains galvanizing.

Soutine is a surprisingly varied artist.  Still Life with Artichoke (1916) sets a dinner on a tilted table in a traditional still life format while Still Life with Fish (1921) lines up the fish in an opened up dish. He paints a number of hanging fowls, Chicken Hanging before a Brick Wall (1927) being one. He does great sides of beef and, inspired by Courbet, The Fish (1933). And near the end of his life, he painted the very strange Sheep behind a Fence (1940), which isn’t a still life. All of these works (except for the first and last of these I have named) set his subject, which is painted in his expressive style, on a flat, relatively neutral close up background. To speak, then, as I do, of Soutine as an expressionist is to identify the way that his technique always draws attention to the pigment per se. Seeing his luscious intense browns, yellows and reds, we are aware at the same time of the subject that they depict. Of course, all figurative art calls for this dual-awareness. But Soutine, more than the old masters he admired, focuses attention on the physicality of pigment. In his review of a Jewish Museum show of twenty years ago, Arthur Danto offered a challenging argument, which is relevant to our present inquiry. Soutine, he argues, is an artist who could only be properly (or fully) understood after the development of Abstract Expressionism, for his goal was “to paint recognizable subjects abstractly, that is to say, without the isomorphism between the image and the subject’s visual form as traditionally sought.” In thus inspiring de Kooning, Soutine showed us how to understand his own works – and demonstrated why today they remain so challenging.

Contemplating Paul Cézanne’s still lives, you become aware of how he manipulates the table and bowls supporting his apples and other still life objects, fashioning a visually precarious, spatial harmony. Cubism, we see, is in the wings. Here, in very different paintings, Soutine’s subjects are the armatures, the pretext if you will, for his exercises in pure painting. A great colorist, he uses intense, generally dark pigments, which almost always remain luminous. His art is touching in the double sense of that word: it is intensely expressive because you feel that he has created from mere pigment, as it were, the objects which he depicts; and it is touching because it holds your attention. Some old master still life painters show precious or rare foodstuffs and artifacts, luxury goods. Soutine’s banal subjects don’t call attention to themselves. And yet, once I attend momentarily to any one of them, I can hardly tear my eyes away.

Arthur Danto’s “Abstracting Soutine” is republished in his The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York, 2000).

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WILLIAM CORBETT: It’s 1954. He’d been an abstract painter for six or seven years, with a number of successful shows. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar, where he spoke in that Kline-ese that Frank O’Hara caught so beautifully in “Franz Kline Talking” (1958). He’d moved around, possibly rivaling Hokusai’s 734 addresses. When you see photographs of his homes, you see why Kline once said, “Bohemia is a place where a dog would go to die.”

This is a pretty big painting, at this time, but he was to paint bigger pictures. He was dead in 1962, but now he’s in his late 40s, maybe at the top of his game, though the money hadn’t yet come to him.

Let me go back: I said coming up here that one of my interests in Kline is extra-aesthetic. My early childhood was in East Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, which isn’t far from Lehighton, where Kline grew up. I was 12 in 1954 and didn’t know anything about him. But when I learned about him and saw his work in the early 1960s, I immediately recognized the landscape elements. I responded to those as if I’d come home in a way. Here you can find the train tracks he saw up and down the Lehigh River. I’m not saying he was trying to abstractly paint a landscape. I’m saying those things were so deep within him that they naturally came out when he picked up a brush.

This has associations with buildings, with timber and with scaffolding. A number of his pictures can be read that way. But I’m now seeing something I haven’t seen before: he has a number of paintings, such as Wotan (1950), where there’s an off or wobbly square. It’s starting to emerge here, and that will be a central image. He’ll clean this up in many cases, all that wonderful stuff, all that ideogrammatic stuff. He always said, “I don’t know anything about ideograms”; he liked to disassociate himself with that. And I believe him.

There’s also another quality that I associate with New York: the billboard size that he was moving toward, just like most of his contemporaries. Those guys went to the movies. They began to get a sense of scale. We know he worked from small things and blew them up with a Bell-Opticon projector. Imagine that he’s starting with intimate drawings — covering his studio floor, drawn on telephone book pages. And he’s blowing them up.

I think he was after the dream of the abstract painters, which was to make drawing and painting one. For these guys — for him, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning — it was to get the immediacy of drawing, to locate the viewer in that immediacy, and then to make it happen in paint. A work like this, it seems to me, is absolutely recognizable, because it’s a clear, firsthand apprehension of a reality. That communicates to me.

These men, and the few women, liked to remind you that they were at work; you see the uncleaned drips. For Harold Rosenberg this was Action Painting. Alright, I get that, and I think that’s probably right. With Kline it’s a little bit different, because when you know the Bell-Opticon, the action’s over! But he’s doing something else. I think it’s like when I would first go to openings, in the early 1960s, the painters would come in with their clothes and their shoes all paint-stained. And, man, it always looked so hip.

It sends a message.

But I think there’s more: he wants to show that the work he put into this is part of his aesthetic. Not that he’s going to be praised as, “Oh, Franz, what a hard worker,” but for his notion of what could come at the end of a brush. It could be a splatter, or incomplete lines where the paint has run out of the brush. He also, I think, wanted to give a sense of the moment, make you feel present. As you pointed out, he used house paint and the image is now getting lost: it’s cracking, yellowing, it’s a conservator’s nightmare. In a way, I think it’s too bad that conservators feel compelled to restore this painting to what it was.

How’s that?

Well, just like de Kooning, he used house paint because he couldn’t then afford fine paint. But it means this painting is for the here and now. And I think that in the back of his mind he may have had the idea that it would change and move into a new here and now.

I think of Auden going back to his poems and second-guessing them, even famous ones like “September 1, 1939” (1939), changing lines because he thought better of them. I’m ambivalent about that. Did he think there would be a perfect poem? What about the poem in its moment? Didn’t it have the right to be there? I think we lose something by taking Kline’s paintings away from that original impulse. But I wrote a sequence of poems about Kline, and when I opened it again recently, and began to read again, I did an Audening and made a few corrections.

I remember these paintings fresh and new, and I’ve watched them age over time. I can hold that all in my mind. But if you think of the bohemian guy, living the life he did, painting in one studio after another, using house paint, it seems to be part of his aesthetic. It would age, absolutely — needing a kind of footnoting. Those footnotes would be a little like restoring this.

I think that about a lot: it’s hard to pull the former context up with you, and it’s hard to pull the present back into the past.

Absolutely, and it’s going to be hard. That’s part of the great pleasure of looking at art. Does it take us back there? This certainly takes me back to what was, after all, a black-and-white world: the photographs, the movies. You can imagine this being an aerial shot of the city in The Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It has the life of that moment.

I’m curious about the painting’s development, because some marks (such as the drips) reveal that it was turned upside down. Do you have any thoughts about why that is, or how that works in the image itself?

Well, I wonder where this was in his studio. As soon as you said that, I thought, OK, he didn’t frame this. This is probably by Robert Kulicke, as you can see by the small gap you see all around the edge. It’s modest, and it certainly puts the painting forward.

This looks like color in the center, some gray, which is unusual for him at this time. He didn’t come back to color until very late. And some of those paintings I find the least compelling. Or I’m torn. I can’t tell: is it because he didn’t know how to use color? Or is it because I’m so used to the moves he makes and want to see them in new combinations and permutations?

Now that we’re being more formal, I’m thinking that this is a spur-of-the-moment picture; but he got to an underpinning. That’s why the Opticon is so important. I think many people imagine that Kline pulled out the canvas and the brush and just whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! But you don’t see much under this, which is where the Bell-Opticon is. The casualness, the spontaneity, isn’t mocked, it’s not parodied, but he sees it as a start with a different ending. It’s not like de Kooning, where the approach is first to get it right and then fuck it up.

He also talked about the whites being as important and the blacks, which you can see in how they’re laid on with the white dripping out over the black at the top, or vice versa along the left edge. There’re also formal echoes between the white fields and black marks in places.

It’s the blacks that I always remember, but I wouldn’t see them without the whites, so they’re at least as important in that way. Form’s gotta have a ground. He’s right. We can’t ignore the great things he did on phone book pages. It’s obviously an issue of not having any money and using the materials at hand. And it’s black on shitty paper and over phone numbers. It’s a little bit like those monotypes that show up on de Koonings, like Easter Monday (1955-56), where the pictures on the newspaper are transferred into the paint. It’s another aspect of him that de Kooning influenced, and that touched everybody. De Kooning caught all that was going on in New York so profoundly that it was hard to look at it. People were drawn to those painters. I can’t think of too many painters that came out of Kline.

Well, Brice Marden perhaps, Christopher Wool, Jonathan Lasker — painters who work at that synthesis of painting and drawing you talked about earlier. I think you could describe them as being indebted to Kline.

Yes, indebted, but indebted for what? What kind of effect did these have? I think that part of the reason why they didn’t follow him is that he takes care of all the possibilities he opens for the viewer. What you’re inspired to with this painting is that, Jesus Christ, if he can do that then I’ll do exactly what I can do. I’ll feel free. Because, again, in a world of color, he’s reminding us that black and white are colors. In a world of Action Painting, he’s putting the word “action” in quotes. This is more radical in some ways. And radical art, of course, can spawn any number of minions.

And think of the one-of-a-kind things he did: no one’s gonna come up with a phone book page after Kline, unless you’re using it ironically, or you’re doing it in such a way that it becomes part of the work.

Right, that it’s for Kline or it’s quoting him very directly.

We’ve touched on this a little already, but I wonder if you could talk about how this space affects the painting or how you feel the painting affects the surrounding space.

I’m aware of the room. I’ve been coming to the Modern since about 1959. I was young and knew very little, and I got educated here. I believed the story, and then I began to discover that it’s just a story. Maybe it’s a necessary narrative. Walking in it now is like picking up the books of poets I’ve loved: I’ve read them so much, but at times I’m a little tired of them. Other times I want that pang, want to be back there. And every once in awhile something knocks me out.

I usually don’t look at them as long as I’m looking at this. And this painting, as so often, is growing on me. This is across from a Barnett Newman and you have Helen Frankenthaler here, and near Mark Rothko, de Kooning — all people he knew. Rather than being frozen, this is part of a bigger story.

I wonder what this looked like in Kline’s studio, or in a home, what it first looked like in a gallery. Now it’s ensconced. Has it lost something because of that? Inevitably. I’m sure it affects you. But that’s what a museum does. And in this case I’m standing with this at my left and the Newman at my right; that might not happen in another place.

I wonder how his art — or this painting in particular — finds its way into the work that you do.

I wrote that sequence of poems about Kline and I know a lot about him. I have the background of Lehighton. The paintings are in my head, and I like writing documentary poems. It was fun. There were so many words that kept coming up: suave, and the black of the tuxedo’s lapel. I also wrote a suite, around the same time, to de Kooning. I keep on wondering if I’ll get another one out of somebody. Joan Mitchell keeps coming up. So first of all, there’s the viewer literally inspired by an attempt to get some of that from it. For me, as somebody who loves paintings without knowing why he loves them, and still loves them and the study of them, and wants to know more about the artist, it’s their example, in every way.

One of the things I always like to know, and is a dream for me, is how you get the compositional elements — all that flurry and hurry and bustle — into something that can come up just in the sound of words or the juxtaposition of images. Words seem to insist upon a kind of linear meaning, especially if that poetry comes through the ear as well as the eye. As I wrote about Kline and his work, it often came through finding something that got me writing about art in the beginning. James Schuyler very modestly said, “I just wanted to know what it was like to use words to describe things.” I want that, too. And this gives us new possibilities. We thought of the railroad tracks, the city aspects, the calligraphy, the scaffolding. Those become words, and it’s not just what’s there, it’s what’s here, inside you. For the reader, it’s something to give them the sense of standing here now, the delight I feel in talking about it at this minute. But it also opens it up, so that they could internalize that.

I guess that there’s something else, too. I’ve certainly spent more hours seeing movies, and now television, than I have looking at paintings. What’s the difference? Well, there is a hand involved in this and I’m always aware of it. We’re aware of it from the drips. I can see a person here; I can imaging those studios.

You can see the motion of the hand and the gestures it’s making.

Absolutely. There’s also something here that’s generational, I guess: the first painting I saw that really said to me “This could be yours” was an abstract picture. It pissed my parents off, just like listening to jazz did. It certainly separated me from the world I grew up in. But it turned me on in ways I couldn’t figure out. There are things that choose you just as much as you choose them.

As a poet and an art writer, you hope it’s still out there, and that you don’t get to bottom of it. The stuff you get to the bottom of never finds its way into your work. And if it does, you’ve gotta get over it and get out of it.

One of the things I miss in this picture and that I really love is his signature. Kline had one of the great signatures, that blocky, stick-fingered print. It always moves me. I wonder why he didn’t sign it…

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Strange how it can happen that an artist whose work you are very familiar with, and have walked past in museums many times with no desire to linger, can suddenly sock you in the gut. Why I suddenly saw Clyfford Still or felt his emotional impact after all these years, when coming upon a painting in the Met on a particular day, I don’t know. Neither do I know why I had been immune to him for so long.

Like the best painting from cave art onwards, Still’s work is as alive and raw as if made today. His characteristic lightning shapes are a bit like the flashes that follow on the heels of Superman. They direct the eye, they activate the composition; actually they are the composition. They suggest a rip or wound in the skin of the paint, something damaged or hurt, while at the same time opening a window of light and color in the otherwise emptiness or murky impasto of the canvas. Still must have gone through countless gallons of black. Either pessimistically or optimistically, the rips and flashes seem to reveal an intimacy and vulnerability, creating a touching counterpoint to the bravado and strong ego that the work communicates — if you are open to being touched by it.

Still’s importance was quickly recognised by his peers when he arrived in New York in the 1940s, a fully formed abstract painter with his own distinctive visual language, of whom Jackson Pollock said, “Still makes the rest of us look academic.” The Metropolitan Museum, in 1979, described him as, “America’s most important, most significant and most daring artist,” as they presented the first big survey of his work. It was, in fact, the first big solo exhibition they had given any artist to date. Clement Greenberg said he was, “One of the most important and original painters of our time — perhaps the most original of all painters under 55, if not the best.” Still responded by saying that the critics were “butchers” and the galleries were “brothels.” Of the artists he said, “You know your brother has a knife, and will use it.” In the early 1950s, he broke all ties with the commercial galleries, and by the mid-1960s was living in Maryland, where he worked in isolation for the rest of his life.

Despite continuing acclaim as a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, he has never had the fame or popularity of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning, his close contemporaries whose influence continues to ripple through painting. I was not the only one to walk past those big, jagged, ragged paintings, unmoved.

Since 2011, however, with the establishment of his own private fortress of a museum in Denver Colorado, Still has the edge over everyone. There, in strict conformity with the stipulations of his will, no other artist may be shown, and none of his works loaned, sold, given away or exchanged, but only exhibited and studied in a peaceful, spacious environment — without the distraction of a museum shop or café on the premises. Why Denver? Still was born in North Dakota; the land and the people of the Midwest were the subjects of his early work. Mostly, though, the civic leaders of Denver found themselves able and willing to accommodate his demands.

Only a matter of days after my epiphany at the Met, by coincidence, and without prior knowledge of the existence of the Clyfford Still Museum, I happened to be in Denver. The approach to the museum is through a small grove of trees, isolating it from its midtown surroundings, especially its attention-grabbing next-door neighbor, the exciting but dysfunctional Denver Art Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, where the sloping walls make it almost impossible to hang a painting.

How different the respectful atmosphere created at the Still Museum by Allied Works Architecture, headed by Brad Cloepfil, with his “drive to make, not new things, but excruciatingly specific things.” The study rooms are downstairs and the galleries upstairs in this textured concrete building. The paintings are bathed in natural light that filters through a perforated skylight, showing them at their best. The light invites you upstairs, and makes you feel good when you get there. The ceilings are lower than usual in today’s museums, more like the spaces where Still worked and exhibited in his lifetime, and they contribute to the sense of comfort and contemplation.

The work itself is almost literally electrifying, generating light and movement in the gray galleries. There’s an intense relationship between the paintings, and a conceptual narrative runs through them that would be broken by the inclusion of another artist. This larger-than-life, tough, totally self-assured painter was right to insist on having a museum to himself.

I was reminded of the words of a highly respected London gallerist, who told me (20 years ago) that he had been moved almost to tears by seeing Still’s work. This was so incomprehensible to me at the time that I have never forgotten it. But these monumental paintings do convey equally monumental emotion, which is both grandiose and completely sincere. To quote Still: “These are not paintings in the usual sense. They are life and death merging in fearful union. They kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation.”

The words could be Wagnerian. Whether the passion that Still put into his painting reflects his feelings in the aftermath of World War II, or the more direct, personal experience of a lonely, impoverished childhood, the sense of a heroic battle for survival is incorporated in the work. Still believed that art could and must change the world.

In photographs Still looks self-conscious, posing in profile to survey his Maryland property, or before one of his paintings. His long, white-streaked hair and deep-set, angst-ridden eyes give him a rather haunted look. And the house itself could be the creepy creation of Alfred Hitchcock, or Edward Hopper.

Still died in 1980, leaving an incredible 3,182 canvases and works on paper, many of which remain rolled up in the Clyfford Still Museum, having been seen by only a handful of people. Only 500 or so works have so far been shown, but they more than justify the judgement of his contemporaries. The value of the paintings is estimated to be over $1 billion — just as Still always knew. But they can never be sold.

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NOAH DILLON: You wanted to look at and talk about a de Kooning painting. So why did you pick Easter Monday (1955 – 56)?

DANIEL HERR: Well there’s this one, and there’s another at the Guggenheim, Composition (1955), and when I was around 17 or 18, visiting New York, I remember seeing both paintings a lot. I didn’t really understand them, but I remember thinking that they must be what painting is. I don’t think I’ve seen the one at the Guggenheim in person since then because they just don’t ever seem have it out. But this one’s always here. I really like this one.

This body of work from 1955 is one of the best that he made. There are others — ’77 for example was incredible — but this work is special, and this is definitely a larger, grander piece of that series.

When MoMA did de Kooning’s retrospective, in 2011, there were several paintings from that period together. There was Police Gazette (1955) and Saturday Night (1956), etc. I remember thinking how they must have looked when he made them — how much brighter and striking the colors must have been, because who knows what he actually used when he painted this.

It’s a pretty stark contrast to the van Goghs that we were just looking at.

Those paintings were made 75 years before this one and they still look perfect today. It’s kind of sad. But he did mostly use good materials after this. And I guess the quality of the color is not really the point of his work anyway.

You can see, too, that this one probably inspired Robert Rauschenberg. Over here, in the same gallery, you have Rauschenberg’s Winter Pool (1959), which uses newspaper and paint in a similar way. You can imagine Rauschenberg — on whom de Kooning was a big influence — seeing this and taking it for his own work. This is one of the paintings where the newsprint is still visible. He would use newspaper to soak up the oil, or keep the surface wet when he wasn’t working on the painting. In part because the newsprint is visible and was transferred, this painting has the feeling and ideas of collage with paint that I find really interesting.

He did a lot of stuff that people do now. He used to throw pieces of paper on the floor, randomly, and then draw over them, and then rearrange the pieces of paper on the canvas to transfer them. He was able to synthesize all these different painting movements in his head. What’s interesting about this series, and maybe the Woman series, was that it is to me the first de Kooning style; there was no question that this was a de Kooning. It wasn’t a copy of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, or Arshile Gorky. I’m sure he knew what he had stumbled upon, because the work looks a lot different than it did even just five years before. And this was also the first series where there wasn’t a central figure anymore.

So it doesn’t have anything that had formerly held the image together?

Well it probably did. He would always say “the figure is in there somewhere.” He called these landscape paintings, or cityscapes. It’s dark, gray, there’s the newsprint, and it resembles architecture and billboards and things you look at when you walk down the street.

And there are perspectival elements that imply a street.

Yeah: lights, people walking, motion… And the fact, too, that it’s vertical, not a pastoral view. And this little patch of green is like a Green Spaces park or plaza.

What does this artwork mean to you and the paintings you make? You’ve talked about seeing this when you were younger and it being an example of what painting is. What does it mean now?

I think it still impresses me as what painting could be. I didn’t understand it at the time, not at all. I don’t think I really understood him until I was in my mid or late 20s and I’m still learning now. He is like Picasso. He was studying Picasso basically forever; he couldn’t ever get away from that influence. And there was no reason to, because the guy made so much work and there were so many different styles, and all of it was so rich with material and intense, creative personality.

I think you can find a lot of interesting stuff by working in someone’s shadow.

You can see Picasso in this, but de Kooning’s definitely not trying to make it look like a Picasso. It’s hyper-sensitive yet hyper-aggressive. The whole series is aggressive, in the way that he made these, and the subsequent landscapes, like The Door to the River (1960), at the Whitney.

You can see Picasso here, too, in the newspaper: that element of collage is similar to his use of pasted-in or painted newspaper, faux bois, or other materials. Obviously it’s translated into something else and may be happenstance, but it is funny the way that this carries through. And, again, one can carry it forward to Rauschenberg creatively misinterpreting this move by de Kooning.

I really wouldn’t be surprised if Rauschenberg saw this de Kooning and based his entire career off of this one painting. I mean, I would have done that. There’s no reason not to. You’d be an idiot not to.

[laughing]

His intuition as a painter is so precise, so sharp.

Can you point to anything in particular that speaks to that in this?

I think every mark in here is incredibly precise. There’s no excess, nothing insufficient, or that’s too soft. In a certain way everything that’s there is supposed to be. It has this quality that all great paintings have where it just looks like it painted itself. And at this point he’s 51 years old and he’s pretty much mastered this style of painting, which explains why he then went and did something totally different. And five years after that it’s totally different again.

He was also really sharp intellectually. He gave a few public talks early on and they’re really, really funny, really eclectic, like “The Renaissance and Order” (1949) or “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951). He talks about the history of art and what people thought about, using imaginary painters who see things a certain way but without understanding how to see it from a historical context. They’re kind of like Surrealist, absurdist prose poems — like reading DeLillo or something. I still can’t tell half the time if he’s just teasing people or if he means things literally or if it’s a language barrier. He definitely had a sense of humor about it.

And he knew what was going on. In one of those talks, he identifies Duchamp as the most important artist of the era. He said, basically, “Duchamp is a one-man movement and he’s showing people that everyone can be their own movement, and you only have to do what you think is important.” And he said that was more important than what he himself was doing, more important than painting. He was saying that before Duchamp was even taken seriously by most people.

Do you feel like this is a particularly relevant painting, or that de Kooning’s work is especially relevant right now in a way that isn’t being thought about, recognized, or has been forgotten?

Definitely it has come back, as with the MoMA retrospective, or the shows at Gagosian and Pace in recent years.

You could see the influence in recent shows, such as “The Forever Now.” As a painter, though, I kind of liked it better when it wasn’t popular. I remember being in school and painting like this and people would be like, “What are you doing? You can’t do this. Stop it.” Now everyone thinks they are abstract artists. The irony is that de Kooning didn’t identify at all with the term “abstract art.”

They’re also all much younger than he was when he made this painting. You described how long it took de Kooning to get out from under Picasso, and it’s going to take them time to get out from under de Kooning, and whoever else they’re looking at.

Do you want to say anything about this artwork in this gallery, in this museum? Does that have any bearing on what it looks like to you, how you experience it?

He’s a New York painter; it’s made in New York and it gets to live in a New York museum forever. Seeing the museums and galleries in person, you learn what kind of artist you want to be. Every time I would visit the city I would go the Met and I started wanting to see the de Koonings. I remember I thought they were ugly, early on. I always thought about how ugly the Woman paintings are.

They’re kind of a mess.

They’re definitely not clean. And I thought art was supposed to be clean because that’s what my teachers told me. Or maybe I just had a clean upbringing.

What do you make of the title, Easter Monday?

It has the ambivalence and duality that critics talk about with respect to his work. But a lot of times he and other New York School painters, in general, didn’t title their work. They used names like Composition X or Untitled XI, or Picture or whatever. Or their wives or girlfriends titled the work. Nobody really cared that they didn’t care what the title was. I like it. It’s Easter Monday: a special day but an ordinary day

Some of this generation titled their works, too, as a reflection of where they were in their lives. They named their paintings for the season or the day, or a place, such as Richard Diebenkorn’s various series. I connect with that, too, because those were about making a painting that reminds you of a certain place. His work in the Hamptons wasn’t serene, but the palette was different — a little brighter, a little more floral. All of his work is intense though; there are no laid-back de Koonings.

Do you want to say anything else about why it’s important to the work that you make?  

I just like how American his work is, even though he’s technically European. It’s so America-in-the-‘50s — tough, with a cigarette. He’s like a boxer, bashing away while he listens to Igor Stravinsky. The poor immigrant boy who comes of age during the time of American empire. There are all these influences: the classical Dutch art-school training, Surrealism, Existentialism, working in advertising and sign painting, the poverty of the Depression, and then meeting all these other artists around him like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Josef Albers.

What I’m always asking myself is what didn’t he do? The same things he was asking probably about Picasso. But if you’re starting to learn how to play jazz you don’t begin with third-tier improvisers. You go to Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Coltrane. If you’re interested in painting, you don’t start with lesser artists. De Kooning is what he is for a reason; it’s not like he just happened to become an important painter. He’s better. It lets you see where the bar is, how high it is. That’s important if you want to continue to do something different.

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Robert Janitz: Oriental Lumber at Meyer Riegger
September 17 through October 25, 2014
Friedrichstraße 235 (between Hedemannstraße and Rahel-Varnhagen Promenade)
Berlin, +49 30 31566567

For his first solo exhibition with Meyer Riegger, Robert Janitz shows a selection of his three favored forms: a plant sculpture made from cut sheet metal, a suite of portraits of the backs of heads and a selection of large format abstractions made from layered paint, wax and flour. Far from being disparate or eccentric modes, these three archetypal forms actually gather themselves around figuration as a unifying idea. Janitz work is indebted to de Kooning’s early black-and-white abstractions as well as the canvas-works of the Actionists from the 1960s. “Oriental Lumber” is an eccentric exhibition that shows an artist who flits back and forth between serious abstract painting, wordplay and dada-like witticism.

Janitz has cited his plant sculptures as a Duchampian gesture but in the context of this exhibition, Margiela Fontäna (all work 2014), seems more of an ironic commentary on glossy, “finish fetish” Minimalist sculpture. It is larger than an average human and placed casually in the middle of the gallery as a houseplant would be. Its sleek and polished surface makes it something of a decoration, though its slightly sagging silver fronds give it something of a comic, Oldenbergian character. The towering plant stands in for refined taste and a pristine sensibility, a possible counterpoint to the comparatively messy paintings.

On one wall of the main gallery, five paintings were hung close together, four of these were “portraits,” and the fifth was an abstraction the same size and format as the portraits. A messy grid of chalky white on black, Proprement Dit hung there among the portraits like an imposter, daring us to draw distinctions between it and its representational counterparts. The heads are amalgamations of coiled brush marks, calico surfaces and impasto patches. These link us to the abstractions by way of brushstroke — but far from being personifications, the portraits are empty signifiers. They are featureless, generalized and flattened. One possible reading is that they conjure the anonymity of urban life. In Berlin or New York, we leave our homes and studios and file into the conveyor belt of faceless heads: the back of the head is in effect a “blank canvas” or a space for projection. The anterior portions of the brain are the oldest and most primitive. Our basest necessities are addressed by the function of the hypothalamus, the brain stem (the brain’s houseplant?). In Audrey Hepburn as Dr. Double aka The Ornithologist Janitz clues us into the projection game that he is setting up. The two-shapes-and-a-background that comprise this small black and orange canvas could be a Hollywood icon, a cartoon character or a bespectacled bird-watcher (a surrogate for a compulsive gazer). Without access to an identity the surfaces become what they really are: combinations of shapes, textures and colors. Janitz puts the infrastructure of the portrait in place but it merely dangles over the paintings’ surface like a thin veil.

The remaining walls of the gallery showed Janitz large-scale abstract paintings. These works are physical insofar as they reveal both the action and the substance of their making. But theirs is a kind of physicality that is not seductive or rewarding. We can see that Janitz moves the viscous flour-wax-paint solution across a painted layer with a very wide house painter’s brush. But this is perhaps more of a commentary on utility (what good is a painting, anyway?) than it is about experiencing pleasure or delight in the painted surface. The surface of a painting such as Rhythmische Klangformen: Eine Studie ends up appearing more like an X-ray than an action painting. This association is aided along by the interplay between the jet-black painted ground and the yellowish paste-wash that is thinly applied in muscular vertical swathes. The cords of build-up that run up and down the painting’s surface in wide intervals creates a sequence of bone-like partitions in which blank, grey surfaces are carved out. These “empty” zones in the paintings are something like hollowed out reliquaries or porticos where one might insert an icon (think back to Audrey Hepburn’s cameo) or an image of a saint. At times, the striated towers that fill these surfaces appear like processions of solemn, hooded figures.

Janitz titled the show after the hardware store in Bushwick where he shops. He is interested in workmanlike materials, ungraceful products like glue and wax. These materials have become Janitz’s stock and trade and when he began to use them there was a sense of discovery and experimentation in his work. I get the impression that Janitz would like to move beyond these washy/pasty paintings into a form that combines his interests in craftsmanship, figuration and sculpture — but here he has settled to show three types of work that each make use of one or more of these elements. Anachronistically, the work here points us away from painting and into the realm of performance. This exhibition is Janitz’s first in his native Germany, so it makes sense that he would exhibit a cross section of these varied works. He flirts with relational aesthetics with his Oriental Lumber, a custom-designed pair of Nikes that he wears in the press image for the show. The sneakers are a fitting metaphor for a restless artist who seems to need to move around a lot.

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JOAN WALTEMATH: The Guggenheim provides special challenges to painting, but also provides unique opportunities, one of these being the ability to see the work from different angles and distances as you move up or down the ramp.  In Wool’s case I think it works to his advantage insofar as you can really see the surfaces of the paintings.  Photography gave us a standard that there should be no glare in a photograph of a painting, over time I think that has conditioned the way we see and think about surface.  Are these works lit to be photographed, or seen? There was one piece, untitled 2009 AIC gift where glare on black is lighter that the neighboring white enamel, and so from one angle that hot spot jumps forward and then shifts back again spatially as you continue to walk by.   For me all these kinds of formal acrobatics are really uninteresting unless you get the sense that they are tied to some train of thought or awareness on the part of the painter, so I’m always trying to find how to make an interpretation that ties the formal to the philosophical.  In Wool’s case I read all this shifting around as indicative of an interest in the transient world, its mutability.  I had the feeling with his various moves that Wool was trying to keep his work open and mutable in and of itself.

DAVID RHODES: The issue of reflection in Wool’s paintings is a direct result of his use of enamel paint. But he doesn’t ever, for example, employ a totally reflective surface. by using glass or a mirror as does Gerhard Richter. The effect of the reflection is to both enhance the surface as a physical presence whilst at the same time complicating the reception of the image because of the way lighting and the presence of other objects are manifest on the surface. This oddly encourages movement in front of the painting in order to ‘see’ the painting, not see it better as an image necessarily, but in order to respond to its physical properties. Perhaps this makes for a more kinetic and immediate experience as opposed to a meditative delayed experience.

WALTEMATH: As a result of this, David, I noticed how thick the stretcher bars were, and how in that specific dimension he was able to locate himself vis-à-vis other historical periods and concerns. Though we are talking about his painting’s material properties, we are not in the realm of painting as object, and for me the stretcher bar thickness was what made that clear.

NORA GRIFFIN: Surface was definitely at the top of my mind while looking at Wool’s paintings, and also in the theater of the Guggenheim, watching others look (or more often “pose” for iPhone photos with the work) around me. I have to say, I was repelled by much of the art with the possible exception of the rice paper drawings, which seemed like a perverse conflation of delicate and raw materials, and thus mildly interesting. David R, interesting what you say about the slick enamel surface encouraging a more “kinetic” experience of the viewer in front of the painting — I agree, and actually had trouble standing for more than a few seconds in front of each one, and only when I caught glimpses looking around the Guggenheim’s ramp did I really observe the paintings. But I think this is ultimately not work that is meant to be “seen”; it’s meant to be bought and sold, accruing value, and hung in palatial mansions and museums throughout the Western world. Certainly, it is work that can be thought about, as we are all doing here, but it is a kind of thought that is separated from an organic viewing experience, that I find distasteful and dehumanizing. Joan, I like that you bring up photography too. I definitely think these paintings are locked into a relationship with media that we can only begin to guess at. There’s a kind of proto-digital look to the early enamel paintings that I can imagine at the time of their first exhibition must have seemed new, and possibly exciting.

DAVID COHEN: Christopher Wool is a closed book to me: I have never been able to fathom how his work garners the critical attention and auction price tags that it does.  When I learned of the Guggenheim retrospective and that several of my regulars wanted to write about him I thought now would be the chance to see him in depth and in the company of astute commentators, that maybe the blinkers would drop and an “aha” experience would ensue: that the Wool would fall from my eyes. Well, seeing the show hasn’t done it for me.  On the contrary, I have to describe it as one of the most enervating and dispiriting museum exhibitions I’ve seen in a long while.  The text works have none of the humor or the indignation of, say, Richard Prince or Glenn Ligon, and I’m no Prince fan, believe me.  The near absence of color is not a reductive gesture in the mode of Reinhardt or Ryman, it seems to me, so much as just a stinginess of spirit, part and parcel of the nihilism that seems the only feasible explicator of his dreary, aimless, pedantic, pretentious and self-satisfied oeuvre.  Look at those photos he took traveling around Italy and Turkey etc.  To be in a room of Islamic carpets and bring back a desultory black and white snapshot that you’ve had printed from a crappy camera and then Xeroxed.

His most encouraging line, almost I guess his trademark, is his lethargic though insistently anti-lyrical loop paintings.   Alzheimer de Koonings denuded and bleached, they make one realize that his nihilism leaves forebears in the dust: Thinking of Rauschenberg as a formal and perhaps attitudinal forebear, Wool is too deskilled even to erase – smudge being his preferred MO.  Actually, they are not riffs on late de Kooning so much as early Charles Cajori who probably taught him at the Studio School (his resume usually cites Jack Tworkov – when the School isn’t omitted altogether). One lasts angry squeak, if I may: It says something about a contemporary abstract painter that their work actually makes Robert Motherwell look fresh and relevant.

RHODES: David, I think dismissing an artist on assumed intentions, as well as failing to address the qualities of individual works, is too easy. Humorous comments like “too deskilled to erase…smudge being his preferred MO” raises a laugh, but there isn’t anything to discuss.  It’s on the same level as saying “Cézanne was too lazy to paint up to the edges of his canvas.” Witty maybe, but an opinion to engage with, no. Try describing why none of the paintings have anything to do with line and space, he’s not “riffing” on de Kooning so much as using line as painting, to make and move space around, “Alzheimer de Koonings” as you call them, by the way are often tremendous. In my opinion, take a look at the paintings at Gagosian on Madison Avenue (don’t look at the price tags though.) As to your saying that he is nihilistic: Skeptical, angry, intellectual, lyrical, a lot of things, but nihilistic? There is way too much work and engagement for that. The photos of his studio after a fire, look for something redemptive in destruction, and they have a beauty, they look for something not entirely wasted in scenes of abjection.

COHEN: I think whatever the artist’s intentions, if you occupy the space of a certain kind of painting then you must stand comparison with the forebears or contemporaries that you evoke or to whom you bear striking formal resemblance.  Then of course there are outliers who don’t seem to connect to people to whom they stake some claim of connection – Cézanne and Poussin for instance – and time tells whether the connection seems valid. Wool is unquestionably in the same ballpark of intention as Albert Oehlen with whom he shares an ability to produce big, commanding decorations while somehow remaining fully committed to an anti-expressive attitude.  I’m perfectly open to a painting that eschews cohesion or compelling gestalt in favor of something more radically abstract, in the way that free improvisation departs from more traditional jazz.  But if the tropes and flourishes echo the jazz greats then it has to stand comparison to them. Yeah, like Motherwell, the problematic late de Kooning looks better – after Wool.  In a way, though, perhaps Wool is influencing late de Kooning, in the sense that de Kooning insisted that HE influenced the old masters.  The unwilled late works, with the scale and colors chosen by others, look more contemporary thanks to Wool and company.  I think that Wool is also an enabler to artists like Wade Guyton.

RHODES: David, when you say Wool and Oehlen are committed to anti-expression are you quoting their intentions or implying that you regard them as incapable of expression. Wool is a far more fluent painter than Motherwell though they both show their cubist roots in a collaging or piecing together of imported parts, take Motherwell’s Figure with Blots from 1943, also on view at the Guggenheim, it presents a collaged rectangle of paper with black blots that finds its space compositionally despite being such a relative foreign body in the painting.

WALTEMATH: The late ’70s and 1980s  in New York City were especially exhilarating years in many ways.  I lived through those times, and if I can ruminate a bit, perhaps I can shed some light on what I remember as conditions, concerns and the climate that made some of those decisions that seem desultory, remarkable. I found the photos from the ‘70s some of the most surprising and revealing works in the show.  The randomness inherent in the environment due to the absence of routine maintenance at that time, gives a unique chance to look at the aesthetics of decay, entropy.  This move towards chaos – how a thing hovers on its edge – was a concern of Smithson and other artists in the generation that came before Wool.  Barry Le Va for another example, examined the relation between determinant and indeterminate forms.  New York at this time was an incredible place to study the coming apart of things in that period before “development” filled in all the blanks.  So many of the shots focus on liquids moving, spilling, spilt and urine running out of corners which was a ubiquitous sight in those days.  A splatter on one brick wall is reminiscent of Richard Hambleton’s scary black shadow figures from the ‘80s, which was even grittier.

This was the time, too when body fluids began to be recognized in a new way for their deadly potential in carrying disease, so there is a deep undercurrent here in Wool’s preoccupation, that might seem on the surface like a fascination with messes or attraction toward demise as Peter Schjeldahl puts it.  The consistency of those photo compositions with the later paintings gave me to believe that there were genuine concerns that were being worked out in them. The darkness in these photos works much like the wipes in the later paintings.  One wire screened door glass that’s been wiped with a dirty rag gives a gauze to the stairwell beyond and reads like a pretty direct precursor to the later paintings in this context.

Loose Booty is a beauty and shows the edge between patterned repetition and an inflected over compositional structure.  One medium blob to the right makes this point. I maintain this is what he is interested in.  Everything in the earlier work points to an interest in abstraction devoid of expressive or emotive content, which is not to say one doesn’t feel things in looking at them, but that this is not how the intention behind them is framed. From across the room the patterned flowers take on a kind of all over character, loosing their more decorative aspects to the overriding gestalt.  That gestalt is consistent with the photos.  I think anyone living downtown at that time learned to see all that chaos and debris as extremely liberating and not abject as it reads today.  It was freedom and makes today feel like living in a straightjacket.

The painting called Rotation Collision was an important moment for me in this show in so far as it is a rare moment where Wool steps over the line and one could say over determines visually – he strives here which is surprising–Usually he strides a beautiful line between chance and intent, random and determined that calls into question the limits of making. If life is a negotiation between what happens and what you want to happen Wool provides the analogue, a deal, which gains clarity as you ascend the circular ramp of the museum.

COHEN: Joan’s historic context with its personal reminiscences is quite fascinating.  I saw the show with a group of students and a visiting artist from California all of whom seemed as depressed by the experience as myself.  One kid made an astute observation: that the graphics of punk, presented by the curators as the dominant cultural reference at his arrival in New York, entailed grainy black and white tabloid press headlines and reproductions relevant to Wool.  I tend to relate fine art to other fine art usually, a limitation and a result of my training I guess, so this observation was revelatory.   Unlike Vivienne Westwood there is no romanticism at the end of his punk tunnel.  The damaged studio shots, made for an insurance claim, as redemptive?  I’d love to see it that way with you but simply can’t. I guess I just come from a very different sensibility. We can open the book and still not be on the same page.

WALTEMATH: Right now it seems a long way off but during the 80s there was a tendency, when money started to pour into the art world, that people would set up a kind of historical raison d’être for their work.  By carving out a niche for oneself in relation to the grand art historical narrative, you set up something to bank on.  I see Wool’s approach as a product of this era, although now its not necessarily being seen in these terms. What interests me about Wool is how, at a time when painting was not on the map, he really did the nuts and bolt work to find a way to make it possible to get back into that grand narrative. The focus was on Pictures Generation, appropriation, Jenny Holzer, Art and Language.  The one thing the scene didn’t give permission for was a kind of formal language in painting. Wool mines the past and brings forward all these tropes, devices, ideas, anything that will work as part of his vocabulary and connect him into that narrative.  That is what I see in the installation of his work at the Guggenheim. On a formal level I think he’s trying to find a way to come to terms with the grid in these paintings and the importance of what minimalist aesthetics gave us.  He takes the readymade roller patterns and has a link to Duchamp, whose position truly dominated in the ‘80s when those stencil paintings were made.  I sense there’s a lot of anger about not being able to paint, I mean if you were a painter and you came to NY in those years, there were very limited means you could use and have a shot at having any kind of public voice.  I also remember those days being filled with a lot of confusion about the relation to the past.  It was often seen and/or talked about as the post-historical period and while there was a recognition that the avant guard was over, the desire for the new wasn’t. At the same time this historical filling in the blanks game was going on as artists jockeyed for positions.

Rosalind Krauss and the October crowd had pretty much damned the grid as stuck in modernism.  I think for a lot of painters at that time, there was a necessity of coming to terms with the grid in some way, shape or form.  What I see Wool going for initially as he moved out of the text paintings are these subtle inflections where the pattern of the grid moves off its raster. The paintings Loose Booty or Riot are example of what I am referring to — talking loudly and saying nothing.  So I think Wool’s decisions about what and how to paint were based in a historical necessity.  There was no chance in those days to create any kind of experiential space.  So in my view we cannot critique it on those terms.

COHEN: I’m sorry, Joan, but we must be living in parallel universes.  No painting in the ’80s, Wool heroically held out, Bleckner too but others had to go to Europe.  Hello?  The ’80s were awash with turpentine.   You have to be an in-crowd exclusionary critic to say of any period that there was no painting or no possibility for painting etc. when it is only in perhaps your own circle that these attitudes prevailed, or in the pages of the art magazines you allowed to gain hegemony that such a discourse prevailed. What’s interesting to me is not Wool as the lonely last painter, but that Wool actually isn’t in the master narrative that was being compiled at that time.  A pretty good indicator of who was really being talked about in the ‘80s is Irving Sandler, the man with his ear to the ground.  In his Art of the Postmodern Era, From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s (1996) there is no reference or footnote to Christopher Wool.  Now he has a retrospective at the Guggenheim and we are attending to his surfaces as if he is Reinhardt or Newman and boy is he not. A footnote regarding Pattern and Decoration: The curators tell us that Wool’s pattern paintings of the ’80s arose from observation of the forlorn semi-demolished buildings in the East Village; maybe, but he was looking at P&D obviously, too.  His works are contemporary with Donald Baechler too, right?  But for the curators only the likes of Duchamp and Pollock are worthy as referents and comparisons, and they leave out non-superstar sources and affinities, all part of the genius-packaging process that goes with museological apotheosis.

But here is something I would like to hear the aficionados address: scale.  Because wandering up and down the Guggenheim ramp I was very struck how essentially scaleless these works are.  They don’t reveal different kinds of gestalt at different distances – they mostly don’t have gestalt, indeed work hard not to have gestalt.  They kind of click at one distance and that’s about it.  He tries out different sizes as he does techniques and surfaces, all to keep busy and I guess fill the world with Wools.

GRIFFIN: Joan, I’m especially interested in your discussion of decaying and abandoned urban spaces in the ‘80s and how Wool pictured this in his photography and paintings. I grew up in the East Village in the 1980s, and remember that sense of openness in the city’s landscape, but also the grossness (trash piled high everywhere) and very real sense of danger and violence amid the decrepitness. For me Basquiat is the poet of the ’80s streets, and from an earlier era, Brice Marden’s oil and wax monochrome gray scale paintings from the 1960s speak to a kind of in-between space, where beauty registers amidst decay. Also Dorothea Rockburne’s crude oil on paper drawings. But perhaps I am just asserting my biases for work made before the 1980s art boom, and also letting in the idea of beauty felt amidst decay. Could it be that the lack of beauty and/or color (for me they are linked) is one of the bottom line problems that I have with Wool’s oeuvre?

I think its cutting Wool too much slack to have to try and imagine the conditions that produced these paintings in the 1980s. For those of us who did not live through that period (and that will one day be everyone) that becomes a kind of academic exercise separate from the viewing experience. Joan says: There was no chance in those days to create any kind of experiential space.  So in my view we cannot critique it on those terms.  But, not to be too much of a hot-blooded humanist, isn’t “experiential space” the only constant we have to critique and understand paintings? Shouldn’t a painting be able to speak on its on terms through any time period or millennia? I don’t understand Piero della Francesca’s frescos as the believers of his day saw them, but I do still *see* them and they speak to me about humans, space, and art.

RHODES: I’m interested in Joan’s point about emotion being stripped from the making of the gestural markings. It’s often the case that the making of a painting is not always visible in the viewed work. Think of Reinhardt. Silk screening, however basic and available as a technique, could be seen as a doubling endlessly of an original or as a means to transfer an element from one painting to the other, like de Kooning’s newspaper blottings. Drips within the context of painting are variously signs of process, playful pictorial devises, take Mary Heilmann, or simple acknowledgments of what paint does. Within the context of painting in general that includes house painting, and of course Wool uses decorative patterned rollers and enamel, the significance of drips could well include the German expression in wide use before 1945  “Jude Tropf” or Jew drip, which was applied to house paint that had been applied and accidentally dripped. In other words it was annoying. I don’t say this is actually part of Wools intention, but as we are “reading” the paintings, in more ways than one. I think Wool is working with the tradition of Ab-Ex, but also reaching back to Dada and Surrealism, automatism is central to his painting, particularly the later large scale oil on linen paintings. Surrealism and Dada have been understated as part of the Ab-Ex endeavor in favor of expressionism, expressionism being seen as more noble, and perhaps more known.

GRIFFIN: As I walked through the museum, I kept trying to imagine another context where this work might seem exciting to me. I remembered that growing up I would visit my friend whose father was an abstract painter, and on his studio wall was a poster of Wool’s Cats in Bag Bags in River (1990). It worked beautifully as a poster; was abject, shocking, funny (sort of), and also seemed very “cool” at the time as well. Perhaps the connections between Wool and the punk/rock poster aesthetic can be teased out some more. The thinness and industrial materials he uses already speak to me as paintings as “posters.” I love posters, live with posters, and think they are culturally significant, but they are not the same thing as paintings.

I found the word paintings the most compelling, perhaps because they felt like honest statements (and have the closest affinity to the babble of the “street”). Trouble (1989),Untitled (Sex and Luv) (1987) and Blue Fool (1990), would all shine on their own in a gallery or a group show with other work. I think the Guggenheim’s grandiosity and modernist pedigree really makes Wool’s work look like a joke is being had on us. Some paintings were not meant to be seen en masse in the Guggenheim because they don’t possess the right internal conditions to be seen in that kind of space.

WALTEMATH: I like that we are all coming at this work from so many different angles, it means there is something to sink our teeth into here. And in the end there is no need to concur about anything. The most interesting things embody all manner of contradictions. By experiential space, I meant that some paintings are made to construct a kind of experience that unfolds, and use that manner of unfolding to reveal what they are about and some paintings are using other means to communicate.  I think often abstraction works through enfolded experience, but not all abstraction.  Wool’s paintings are in some sense following a lineage of formalist abstraction, that is how I am reading them, and yet they use images – of pattern of flowers or words – as their main vehicle.

I’m reading them as taking a lineage of formalist abstraction because of how they take up and investigate problems of seriality, randomness, chaos that I see in the early investigations of Andre, Judd, Smithson, Barry Le Va to name a few.  So, no, I don’t see experiential space in Wool’s art- and in developing this term I’m drawing on Wilhem Worringer’s formulation in his book Abstraction and Empathy (1908) as the constant. Rothko might be a barometer for experiential space, and Wool is nowhere near that deep.  My point is you can’t evaluate Wool on terms set for painting by Rothko, you have to figure out his (Wool’s) terms.

And yes a painting should be able to speak on its own terms through any period, and if in using the details and circumstances of the time to discover the possible terms, you find that the work doesn’t really function outside that, then there is a clear cut critique and the nays have it. I found this was my only way into Wool’s art, to go into my experiences and memories of the time, and this is born out to a degree by the importance these black and white photographs play in the whole exhibition and how they and it are being received.  At the same time, none of these images was the least bit memorable, not that that is the point.  What they reveal is a certain compositional strategy on his part or a way of ordering things and that’s where I see the real meat of this show is – that is abstract.  So I look to the history of formalist abstraction for precedents.

RHODES: I don’t see any new problems that the architecture of the Guggenheim presents, that is different for Wool, as a classical modernist painter that goes beyond the curve walls and ascending ramp. Wool’s use of vernacular materials and words are consistent with experiments from the early years of the 20th century in France, Germany and Russia in particular, through to Jasper Johns and beyond. Sure, Wool reveled in some aspects of the openness of an unpolished low rent environment that was downtown New York in the ‘80s, but as paintings they don’t break with the challenge of producing vital engaging work, I don’t think the rawness of some of the paintings (imagine Courbet or impressionist painting when it was first seen if you are used to David and Ingres, or Piero?) or by the way in the rectangle format, that for some time has not been a given for painters, indicate bad boy or punk in art, but an affiliation with attitudes of renewal.

COHEN: Joan, I’m fascinated to hear Worringer’s dichotomy cited in relation to Wool – can you amplify that?  Wool presumably is the epitome of an urbanite so one would expect on Worringer’s terms an alienation from nature.  But his shapes and patterns are surely no less geometric than organic?

WALTEMATH: I referred to Worringer in relation to how one experiences a painting because of his concept of empathy, being the kind of ‘strahlung’ or emanation coming from a work that one feels, like one feels a large red expanse or the energy of certain kinds of brushstrokes, and that this is a way to interpret what the artist is saying -I call that experiential – versus images, which speak in their own way or concepts that are referred to, which are located outside the work, or compositional constructs dealing with form which is where I would locate Wool.

The point for me is whether to read these works as intending to insert themselves into an historical narrative or not. I think a lot of decisions Wool made in his work were about picking up the things from the past and trying to weave them together to get his painting located within a grand narrative. I don’t mean to imply that he was the only painter working in New York at that time. At any given time there are lots of artists working in similar and also very different veins.  From the point of view of an art historian I can see how what I wrote makes it seems like I’m trying to claim some primary role for him, but that was not on my mind. I’m not going to argue for Wool’s importance over other painters, or that he was the only one doing this.  Or that he “saved” painting or anything like that.  I’m just trying to figure out what is going on in these works so we can talk about them — what is Wool basing his decisions on, what’s he exploring.

Initially I think that what is going on in these works is kind of a mystery, because they give so little and are in some ways so self-involved.  I want to blow that up in order to get a glimpse of what they are about.  I can find a lot of stuff on a formal level that is interesting to me, as the nuts and bolts of formalist abstraction were being overhauled at that moment.  I think that is what Raphael Rubinstein was getting at in his show last summer at Cheim & Read.  He found 15 artists whose work he felt was making important contributions; he mentions in our interview in The Brooklyn Rail that there could have been many more.

COHEN: Worringer’s opposition usually applies to the maker as much as the viewer, from my recollection; the people who had a rapport with nature produced organic and naturalistic art of empathy whereas those whose outlook on nature was bleak retreated into geometry and abstract patterning.  But if that’s not the sense you were interested in we could just drop this point. It would certainly seem that if Wool’s intention were indeed to dialogue with the bigger narrative of abstract painting, or painting per se, then his career success plays nicely into that as once one occupies a position within the canon connoisseurs will look for, and likely find, connections between an accepted newcomer and the masters.  I just see more negative attitude towards the possibilities of paint than positive ones in Wool, as his impulses are primarily deconstructive and iconoclastic.  Almost anything he touches, regardless of its size or degree of workmanship, seems dismissive of big energy, the creative spirit, any sense of urgency or purpose.  And I think this accounts for his success because the system is still so heavily invested in an end-game mentality.  It is still an era that privileges Duchamp over Matisse (to use a very rudimentary short hand) at least in the top ends of patronage and scholarship.  To those looking for an extension of the Johns/Richter line Wool is perfect.  And I have no trouble, by the way, David R., in reconciling nihilism with productivity.

GRIFFIN: To me, Wool is not a “classical modernist painter,” as David R calls him, which is perhaps why it looks funny to see his paintings hanging like icons, suspended in air with no wall behind them as much of the work was in the Guggenheim. I completely agree with Joan that it’s reductive to pit Wool against the masters of modernist painting, and I too try to find out the “terms” that the artwork has set forth. I do like the idea of the image of the city as a device for abstract composition. But the fact that Wool’s photographs are so expressively abject, and visually mottled by their translation into grainy photocopies, makes them an almost too obvious counterpart to the paintings.

I do think there is more fluidity and movement in the post-2002 paintings, where color splashes and a mixture of media creates a slight sense of spatial depth and movement. But I would never call them “lyrical,” to me they start to work only when they can approximate the unintentional harmony of a graffitied wall.  To end on a positive note, I do think a painting such as Last Year Halloween Fell on a Weekend (2004), hot pink and black spray-painted snaking lines on a lushly grey wash background, is a kind of perfect little street image. If I saw it all on its own in a gallery, or better yet, If I came across it leaning against a dumpster on the Bowery I think it would start to command some real visual attention.

The post A Critics’ Roundtable on Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim appeared first on artcritical.

STEPHEN MAINE Thank you all for agreeing to share your thoughts on de Kooning: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. As I made my way through the exhibition, I was struck by the emphasis on drawing as a studio tool–drawing as visual thinking.

First of all, a generous sampling of actual drawings is on view, including a few “working” drawings and others of which the primary value is to illuminate this artist’s process. Then, in the very first gallery the 1940-41 pencil drawing Portrait of Elaine is presented as the gateway to the first Woman series, implying that through the activity of drawing de Kooning found this iconographic leitmotif. Also, a number of the wall texts describe or refer to de Kooning’s procedure of replicating and repositioning particular shapes within a composition using tracing paper–the evidence is especially noticeable beginning with Pink Angels (1945). Even the image MoMA uses to promote the show is a 1950 Rudy Burckhardt photo of de Kooning roughing out a large charcoal drawing for Woman I, a photo ARTnews used to illustrate Thomas Hess’s 1953 article, “de Kooning Paints a Picture.”

This emphasis on drawing as thinking, making, shaping, is a great way in to this work, don’t you think?

JENNIFER RILEY I believe that drawing is the initial separation of idea from self, and this exhibition is a goldmine for demonstrating that idea in the work of de Kooning, whose great contribution to painting retained, combined and  overtly exalted numerous drawing skills. The early figure drawings demonstrate his powers of observation, skill in rendering and a sense of touch whose delicacy was as keen on probing form and composition as it was on exploring spatial aspects of the page.  Line, which early on describes edge, space, depth, and perspective in the later work becomes the wide range of marks and strokes of paint transporting qualities and information.

DAVID COHEN With de Kooning, in Sickert’s phrase, “drawing is the thing”.  This despite the carnal painterliness that comes to mind as soon as we hear de Kooning’s name.  In that romantic-versus-classic trajectory that pits disegno against colorito, de Kooning squares off against Pollock along the lines of Rubens versus Poussin, Delacroix versus Ingres, Matisse versus Picasso—on the painterly side.  And yet, it is not only with incredible works on paper that this exhibition puts forward drawing as de Kooning’s probity but in an abundance of works where there is drawing within paintings.  And I don’t just mean drawing with a brush by that, but actual, linear, graphite pentimenti expressively animating pictorial surfaces, starting off the bat with those seated pink figures.

DAVID CARRIER I would not speak just of drawing, but of control of paint. The great deKooning, in my opinion was the artist who could deal with the medium in such various ways. The contrast with his contemporaries is startling

IVAN GASKELL In terms of technique and procedure, de Kooning was in certain respects as traditional as Morandi. Drawing was one means of exercising control, and perhaps to the extent that he adhered to its practice he managed to produce viable paintings. Where he succeeds in paint, he is extremely precise and economical, though often complex; where things get out of hand (perhaps owing to impatience, or false “inspiration”?), they go wrong.

Yet in Dutch practice (in which de Kooning was evidently steeped) drawing has always had an equivocal position. He presumably carefully studied works by his fellow countryman, who got to most places he tried to go (including the representation of vigorous women) three hundred years before him, Frans Hals. No drawing by Hals is known. He presumably worked directly in dead painting (underpainting). Seeing the relatively modest Hals exhibition at the Met after the de Kooning show was highly instructive. I can only think, poor de Kooning.

JOAN WALTEMATH The drawings got me thinking about how deKooning rehearsed and executed the kind of gestures that constituted his painting. Painting is a very physical act and especially the scale of deKooning’s works demand physical acuity. Like any sport one learns, repeating a gesture over and over again allows the body (and mind) to develop the muscles necessary to preform that gesture without self-consciousness.  And then those muscles remember how they moved and can refine and vary that movement as the muscle develops.

In the show we see how the drawings move from a concern with representation, to the formulation of movement.

STEPHEN MAINE Ivan, Where do “things get out of hand”? I’m inclined to agree with you, except that while I love the drawings from the late 1960s/early 70s, I’ve always had trouble with those slack, sloppy paintings. Okay, The Visit (1966-67) is wonderful–the grinning, spread-legged figure always reminds me of a leaping frog–but in a lot of other paintings from that period he seems to lose his way. Two Figures in a Landscape (1967) is just awful. Montauk I (1969) is less arbitrary, but insipid next to the clarity and snap of the paintings from the mid-70s (e.g., Whose Name Was Writ in Water). In the drawings, though, de K’s highwire walk between structure and illegibility is convincing.

IVAN GASKELL I feel that the vaunted canvases of women are failures, in part because he didn’t exercise the physical control you see in some other works. I don’t care for these works because as David put it to me, de Kooning didn’t know when to stop. His paintings work when he exercises a fine control of the kind that Joan described the process of acquiring. I actually see this to an extent in some of the very late works, which many revile (I don’t). I see it (control and economy) in some of the early ‘50s landscapes, such as Merritt Parkway. He had an occasional facility that can impress, but I consider de Kooning a relatively minor talent in the grand scheme of things.

JENNIFER RILEY I find fewer failures in the selections on view,  however I can see why you might dismiss those canvases. Comparing the women canvases with Merritt Parkway whose figure-like shapes and large patches of tightly locked brilliant color  are downright restive verging on elegant, the women canvases we are speaking of are a riot of awkwardness. I happen to like the possibilities I see in the simultaneous control and lack of control.

It matters somewhat that you think de Kooning a minor talent. I am a painter with great respect for the forward push achieved by this artist for painting at that time.

JOAN WALTEMATH As I went through the installation I started to see deKooning’s work in terms of the limits he was setting for himself in order to open up an arena in which he could play.  As a strategy it seemed to bear out though these rooms.  It’s constructed as if to read:  he exhausted one arena and then his work evolved into something else. After we get through the first rooms where we see how he was riding the currents of his time and bringing those aspects formally into his realm, one of the problems I see that lingers with him is how is he going to deal with the break up of the picture plane.  He begins to fragment his figures: Elaine’s face and arm drifting up and off.  The studies for the large theatre back drop are a good example of this as well.

I feel him trying to come to terms here with the multifaceted nature of reality inherited from Cubism.  This may be the single most important problem he had to contend with in his era.  But deKooning was never going to work with planes; it wasn’t his language.  His was all wrapped up in and around the body.

STEPHEN MAINE In the skeletal quality of the late work, in which color is secondary to drawing (in the sense of graphical organization), there is a direct connection back through the decades to the late-1940s white-on-black paintings (pre-Excavation) and those wonderful black enamel drawings, possibly interiors–even in deKooning’s use of the knife to spread the enamel to a thin film.

In the catalogue, Lauren Mahoney connects these drawings to Matisse’s brush-and-ink drawings from about the same time. Both are materially sparse, but to scramble figure and ground clearly did not interest Matisse. For me, that figure/ground interpenetration is the end to which deKooning applied his draughsmanly means. He extended the implications of Cubism out of the café and into the world. A line is a contour, but is the form on one side of the contour and the void on the other, or the reverse? Space becomes solid, matter evanescent.

IVAN GASKELL I could admire some of the work without especially liking it; I could actually like some of the work.

How are we to regard Richard Hamilton’s The Citizen of 1982-8 (Tate, London) in the light of de Kooning’s work? [It contains] the kind of “expressive” mark making with paint that we associate with de Kooning; but it is not merely paint itself, but a representation of something else in paint, and like paint: the Citizen’s own excrement that he has smeared on the walls of his cell as part of his protest against his confinement and its terms.

I’m tempted to see this as an indictment of solipsistic triviality on the part of artists such as de Kooning whose concern with personal expression and the figure-ground puzzle pales into utter insignificance when set beside the circumstances that Hamilton represents in his art. Hamilton asks his viewers to consider on what terms Abstract Expressionism and political imprisonment can exist in the same world.

STEPHEN MAINE No doubt Hamilton intends a critique of Abstract Expressionism in the Bobby Sands portrait, but note that the autographic mark (here, fecal smearing) is the badge of rebellion and assertion of the individual’s will in the face of the apparatus of the State. I have understood Abstract Expressionism (in its youth, before it became academic) in the context of the age of the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, as an implicit protest against mass cultural conformity–not trivial, not insignificant.

IVAN GASKELL I’m not convinced that Hamilton’s critique implies a simple contrast between “trivial” Abstract Expressionism and “urgent” representational commitment. Rather, he seems to me to describe a world in which both exist in a vital dialectical relationship, each in some sense needing and depending on the other. To the extent that Abstract Expressionism could be thought of as an oppositional move as you–surely rightly–point out (however swiftly appropriated and suborned by those very men in gray flannel suits) I rather agree with you: but can the bite of either de Kooning or Hamilton, in their different ways, ever cause real pain? I like to think so, but…

JENNIFER RILEY Many cases like this, as we all know and have witnessed in perceived aesthetics, expose our own closed systems of expectations. What was de Kooning’s intent and what was the world’s reception of it then?  Why it makes sense in his time (in his world)  vs.  the world’s reception of it over time is, in my opinion, what Hamilton’s work may suggest. To address your last question, the terms for  political imprisonment and the terms of Abstract  Expressionism overlap as position or attitude. De Kooning’s attitude represented the ultimate in individual freedom—an escape from an oppressive history and demands of dogmatic imperatives.

DAVID COHEN Hamilton, the founder of Pop and a key figure in the rehabilitation of Duchamp, is totally knowing and deconstructive in his use of painterly tropes.  The artist acknowledged a “compulsion to defile” hallowed techniques which led the late Peter Fuller to write of “Hamilton’s crabbed little anal corner-shop imagination” years before the Citizen painting.  An excremental theme runs (no pun) through much of his Pop and conceptual work, from Sunset (1974), an image of two romantically entwined turds on a beach, through extended series of faux pastoral images of nymphs and Andrex toilet rolls, turds and flower pots, etc.  But I make a back-to-Willem plea.  The tension between representation and expressivity is deeply alive in all his work, and hardly therefore needs extraneous comparisons to put the issue on the agenda.

Ivan’s affection for the late work and his conviction that the authorially uncontested canon contains so many failures are of a piece.  If you like the late works best then you probably just don’t get de Kooning.  Do we really think he wanted to produce thin, repetitive, pretty pictures?  Do we think that in his vigorous prime he would have taken kindly to assistants choosing his palette and canvas size for him and telling him when the work is done?  The chronological hang could have finished a room earlier and the last room given over to some of the late-1960s masterpieces (the Montauk series, etc.) crammed along a long wall in the penultimate gallery.

JENNIFER RILEY Perhaps these sweeping retrospective installations could one day follow a more filmic structure where the ‘End’ of the story is presented first and we are shown sectional ‘flashbacks’ that end with the central achievement rather than the waning years… David, that said, it is hard not to peer into the late paintings and enjoy the fugue-like reprise of drawing and shape being arranged on the canvas.

IVAN GASKELL I don’t believe that The Citizen is shallow in the least; nor do I think Hamilton’s art can be reduced to anal fixation any more than de Kooning’s can be to some notion of expressivity, or pursuit of chimerical freedom. I may not “get” de Kooning in some canonical manner, but I see things to admire in some of his work. I have no patience with want of economy or control in art, which is why I admire both Poussin and Rubens (and, among de Kooning’s contemporaries, Rothko).

What puzzles me is [the] claim that De Kooning’s attitude represented the ultimate in freedom. I’m afraid I don’t really understand this, with the greatest will in the world! All I can infer is that operational notions of ultimate freedom are likely to be contingent, when they apply at all.

JENNIFER RILEY What I mean  in terms of  ‘ ultimate freedom’ is  de Kooning’s much written about desire to be free of order. Though he did speak about a higher order, I believe his notions of freedom were much more grounded in earthly, social sources: his assertion of individual sensibility, his extreme  concentration on the sensory rather than the political,   his ideas of fluidity, vitality, continuity as they pertain to his practice. He said, “Order, to me, is to be ordered about, and that is a limitation.”

Mikhail Bakhtin employs the term ‘unfinalizabilty’ as an all-purpose carrier of his conviction that the world is not  only a messy place,  but also an open place. It designates a complex of values: innovation, surprisingness, the genuinely new, openness, freedom, potentiality, and creativity. (From Creation of Prosaics)

JOAN WALTEMATH Freedom has always meant to me, the freedom to set your own limits and not to be subjected. It takes a lot of control to move all that goopy liquid around and end up with something anyone would want to ruminate over for any length of time. Pictorial issues, largely unconsidered in discourse since the anti-formal epoch, are complex and illogical. It’s what I look for and think about in relation to other painters work: how do they solve problems, what are the problems posed by the era, by the artist.  It’s an approach modeled on George Kubler.  It seems at times so far from an art historical dialogue, I wonder even that we are talking about the same subject.

In the black and white enamel pieces,  I see him transforming the cubist plane and its resulting multifaceted space into a vocabulary based on form and void relationships.  No one in history is more masterful at this than Tintoretto, hence the great adoration he receives from architects.  It is all about the body and the volume between bodies.

JENNIFER RILEY We see economy of means and technique [in the enamel drawings]. It seems deKooning laid down thin meandering lines [and with] a flat scraper, perhaps paper, and drew the ink from the line  thus creating the large ragged edged shapes.  Here is an instance where he didn’t revise nor could he erase and I find them remarkably complete.

JOAN WALTEMATH The form/void relationship emerges from those pieces in a way that fragments the space, beyond the kind of pictorial space that the cubists created. It’s a shallow space – no distant horizons – but you can enter and move around in these pieces.  That is how I’m reading the black and white paintings, you have to look at them for a few minutes to let the coordinates register in your mind, but then it comes clear. I see these as his breakthrough works, yet once he is successful he redefines the limits of his game.  One of the things that emerges out of these paintings is the loss of composition as a way of locating the subject.

STEPHEN MAINE Those are among the most exiting works in the show because of the irreversibility of that smudge or scrape, and because of the economy and ease with which they shuffle figure and ground. Also the scraped enamel is not black like the line but a dark gray, as just a bit of light filters through from the paper underneath. A triangulation of value: black/white/almost black.

It is as if de Kooning felt compelled somehow to qualify nearly every mark he made, to complicate it, to second-guess it, to mess it up. The mid-to-late-50’s landscape-based abstractions may be where he comes the closest to finding in the brush stroke the equivalent of a declarative statement, with no “and yet…” attached.

This kind of relentless qualifying of what is already on the page or canvas is what I love in de Kooning and thus, to my mind, the sculpture is an ancillary achievement.

IVAN GASKELL The sculpture may be generously described as an “ancillary achievement,” but what place does it play in de Kooning’s artmaking? Is this no more than dealer inspired flummery? Do people not care because of a persistence of the (modern) hierarchy of media and method that places painting at the pinnacle?

JENNIFER RILEY As a student in Boston I remember seeing the MFA’s de Kooning bronze for the first time and being disappointed that it felt not so far from Rodin, and I was also reminded of Bernini’s clay models for the Angels for Ponte Sant’Angelo. My second thought was that  he was a much better  as painter because there really was no one immediately jumping to my mind other than himself when I first encountered his painting. The sculptures which are not without achievement, but not so great,  because de Kooning’s most imaginative work is intrinsic to the picture plane.

STEPHEN MAINE Since the distinction between sculpture and painting becomes ever less important as those traditional disciplines blend, I can’t think many informed observers would see much of a hierarchy, let alone a pinnacle. Yet one trades primarily in actual space, and the other in the illusion of space. As Jennifer suggests, de K’s fundamental concern–and, in my view, his gift–has to do with the picture plane, the illusion of spatial articulation, which his sculpture does not engage.

IVAN GASKELL I’m afraid I see the sculptures as possibly—I stress possibly—an instance of “getting in on the act,” perhaps commercially inspired (i.e. not necessarily de Kooning’s idea) but prompted because such things were part of the repertory of older artists of a certain standing: Degas, who never knew any of the bronzes cast in his name; Matisse, who did; Rodin, for whose beneficiaries endless poor casts have been a goldmine; Picasso, who actually did something with sculpture; Giacometti, whose work must have been in certain respects a touchstone; and surely others. In other words, to join the club of the great and the good as an artist, you had to produce sculpture.

DAVID COHEN The issue of freedom in our discussion has been presented as somehow earned at the price of economy and control, [two] virtues we all hope to find in the art we admire.  But these are perennial qualities germane to great exemplars of any style, including styles where exuberance and exalted manifestations of freedom abound.  By a similar token, someone working in a minimalist idiom (a style that fetishizes economy and control) can actually be deficient in those qualities—can be uneconomic in the efforts at reduction and out of control in their denial of facture and improvisation.

IVAN GASKELL Ingenious, though I’m not sure quite how one would discern these wants in the things concerned. I fear we see here a transfer or projection of qualities proper to a person (such as “out of control”) to things made by that person. A painting cannot be out of control, though it might exhibit the results of its maker having been.

STEPHEN MAINE As to the exhibition itself,  my only quibble is the space wasted on the vitrine of very small sculpture in the Montauk room. I would love to see a selection of sketchbooks and/or other small-scale flat work, in the manner of the recent Richard Serra Drawings: A Retrospective at the Met. Of course, Serra works in sketchbooks incessantly when he is on site and I don’t know that de Kooning ever embraced this practice, but there are reams of drawings in existence. To all: your “most memorable moment” in viewing the retrospective?

DAVID COHEN At the risk of repeating myself, I already stated my major quibble with the installation which is that the late work is given too much wall space and, disastrously, the last word too. I proposed ending the chronological sweep early so that the last room can give generous space to genuinely summating masterpieces rather than last demented efforts.  Jen made a brilliant point that exhibitions could take a cue from cinema and experiment with chronological dislocations to great effect.  I felt that the Montauk and other big figure/landscape paintings needed more space and were the one spot where the hang felt crowded.  But Elderfield is a hanging genius, as his Puryear installation proved and the current show confirms.

JOAN WALTEMATH The honesty of those later paintings was very moving for me.  I felt him reaching back to the black enamel paintings we’ve all talked about, looking for a breakthrough again – wanting to again redefine his limits.  I kept thinking that if you put an image of those black and white early pieces on photoshop and hit inverse it would pretty much look like the later paintings.  It would be interesting to see how it doesn’t.  Here he picks up again a kind of form/void vocabulary to construct his pictorial dimension and uses only what memory remains in the body to create those flowing lines. Some of them are more coherent in this regard that others.  There is no point of reference for them in the outer world, only inside where the body holds memories of the movements we have made, knows them intimately.  The highlights for me are the two on the left side as you face the exit, spare and elegant they underscore how he has given up everything he invented, everything we want to use to identify him, and he still makes a painting. He challenges us to be able to let go of it, too!

IVAN GASKELL I was impressed by his relentless experimentation: he never got into a groove and became complacent, it seems. In this he resembles Poussin who also relentlessly reinvented his mode of art making again and again, though perhaps to greater moral purpose; that is, I emerged from the Poussin exhibition some years ago feeling that I have been given the opportunity, thanks to his art, to become a better person. I emerged from the de Kooning exhibition admiring, with certain reservations, and somewhat bemused.

For me, the thrill moment was turning away from the dreary row of Women in which so many people have invested so much, in a variety of senses, to find the late ‘50s-early ‘60s landscapes (or landscape abstractions). Merritt Parkway (Detroit Institute of Arts), which I have mentioned before, and its neighbors impressed me in a way that nothing else I saw did. This is scarcely a revelation, but in my mind lifted his overall achievement from also-ran to worthy of repeated attention.

DAVID CARRIER For me what’s most memorable were the mid-period landscapes, showing de Kooning’s control at its best. The woman I don’t have any political objections to, but my formal concern is his need to hang the paint on an outlined figure. In the end, deK comes from what feels a very distant world. When Sue Williams paints in something of his fashion, she has to be very different- ironical, political. It’s not a technical question. At least unless you are very senior and European.

JENNIFER RILEY Standing in the room with the luminous, lush, exuberant large format paintings c. 1975-1977 was one of the highlights of my experience of this wonderful exhibition. Until this sequence of paintings my viewing experience was located solidly between mind and body. Here, however, I felt a bit blown backwards. For example, the group of late 50’s early 60’s parkway paintings, including “Merritt Parkway”  and “Bolton Landing” are absent the vitality, luminosity, and warmth of the 70’s  abstract landscapes. There is a certain distance, dullness and cool in this group (not to mention some relatively unfortunate spatial  bloopers).  Are the 1975-77 landscapes,  which are also full of movement, landscape sensations and color and rich brushstrokes that embody the velocity of the paint effective because of the ambience of surroundings in which they were made? (They were made in the Springs [on the eastern, rural end of Long Island -ed.] whereas the earlier ones were derived from sketches, small notational responses he made of his trips on the parkway then painted back in NYC.)

STEPHEN MAINE The wall of mid-70’s landscapes was a revelation. Something clicked for him, and he found a balance between allowing the paint to unravel and nudging it back into place. Also his color here is fantastic, never better before or after. I can’t explain the effect of light, Jennifer, but I do think he regained his touch. By that I mean a variety of touch–in contrast to the relentless slathering that I find so dispiriting in the paintings of a few years before. The catalogue has a good description of the methods de Kooning used to add substances to his paint–including water–to get unusual textures and other effects. The heightened tactility contributes greatly to the vitality of these paintings.

JOAN WALTEMATH He uses the materiality of paint and the means of moving it around to create a pictorial dimension that is neither classic  foreground, middle ground and background space nor an organically construed cubist space.  The push and pull method of Hoffmann lingers around here, you can feel that as an overall spatial configuration in some of the paintings.  It never comes across to me as if it was used with any specific intent, more of a default mode for some one trying to carve out what hadn’t really been figured out yet by anyone else.  Or perhaps so much in the air that it was one accepted formulation of what a non-objective pictorial dimension could be in the era where the flatness still counted.

DAVID CARRIER De Kooning took a while to open up; in earlier rooms he works on smaller scale. These are resolutely unfussy paintings. Maybe this sense of liberation reflects his move out of New York City. The light is really interesting. Are there earlier, equally bright, large Western paintings?

JENNIFER RILEY Church. Turner, Burchfield…

Maybe we should try a hang of these three, plus de Kooning and … ??

DAVID COHEN There is a common line of praise one hears from artists about old master exhibitions: it makes them want to go home and paint.  I have exactly that feeling – and I don’t paint! This urge to manipulate materials that comes over you as you look at his work is a direct response to the haptic, if not the carnal aspect within the work itself.

The body-consciousness in de Kooning isn’t just about the woman series or the “ab-flab” sculptures or the paint-as-flesh impasto and palette of works from various periods or the stray limbs and deconstructed musculature that animate works like Attic and Excavation. Rather, the relationships of paint to drawing and surface to structure each constitute pictorial equivalents of flesh on bone. De Kooning’s is an art of supreme embodiment.

The post Roundtable on MoMA’s de Kooning Retrospective appeared first on artcritical.

September 15 to October 22, 2011
980 Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-744-2313

Jenny Saville’s “Continuum,” her first show in New York since 2003, will delight her many fans with a bold new theme (her art newly energized by the experience of motherhood) and an invigorated interest in drawing.  Those fans happen to include people in high places.

Word has it, for instance, that John Elderfield entered the collectors’ evening of his MoMA de Kooning exhibit with Jenny on his arm, as if to say: the belle of the ball is the Dutchman’s successor. Elderfield is author of the catalog essay for Bob Dylan’s show of paintings, sandwiched by Saville’s, on Gagosian’s Fourth Floor.  (A drawing in her Pentimenti series acknowledges de Kooning in its title, alongside Velazquez and Picasso.) Simon Schama is another devotee.  Writing in the Financial Times of September 24, his opening salvo diminishes Lucian Freud in comparison with Saville.  Next he insists that her only peers in the depiction of babies are Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt.

As I’m beginning to have a Dr. Frankenstein moment, a confession is in order.  Years ago, as a cub reporter on the Times of London, I was sent around Britain to investigate the state of art education. They told me to assemble a roster of talented students to feature in a side bar to my article in their Saturday magazine.

At the Glasgow School of Art I was seduced by Saville’s work.  Who wouldn’t have been?  Deploying an assured, preternaturally effortless painterly realism, her oversized paintings of oversized women were not just visually arresting, but smart.  Into the surface of one of her obese sitters she has inscribed defiant words by Luce Irigaray, the French feminist theorist much in vogue at that time—except the words were in mirror writing. Saville then erected an actual mirror some distance from the canvas.  To get the text the right way around you had to see the image reflected, with an attendant loss of painterly luxuriance.  This literalized a tension between texture and text, form and content.

The Times picture editor loved the painting, bought it from the degree show, and ran it on the cover.  Charles Saatchi must have flipped over his breakfast reading.  He wasted no time in prizing the painting into his own collection.  Evidently the advertising mogul felt no compulsion to read Irigaray, however, as he ditched the mirror.  The rest, as they say, is art history.

This is not to insinuate that when she acquiesced to her powerful new patron’s structural change to her intended installation (progressing, so to speak, beyond the mirror stage) she lost her subject but found her form. That would be churlish as there was no descent from theoretical or political high ground in her work.  On the contrary, her fascination with the strengths and vulnerabilities of modern women grew as she explored self-image through such themes as liposuction and transgender. She rapidly became immensely and understandably popular.  She found a way to niche gender studies within a late flowering of the grand tradition of the swagger portrait.

Tracing antecedents to Frans Hals and Anthony Van Dyck, this genre reached its zenith in the belle époque with John Singer Sargent.  Modern exponents included Augustus John.  The sitter is surrounded by trappings of worldly success matched in sheer opulence by the artist’s masterfully dashed off brushstrokes.  Saville’s provocative twist was to extend the bravura technique and monumental scale of such painting to naked and isolated (or in some cases sardined) young women.

Like Sargent and John, part of Saville’s problem is that she has always been too good for her own good.  This is what causes Schama’s crass comparison with Freud to backfire.  It is precisely the crabbed, cramped, awkward-to-the-point-of-absurdity knottiness of Freud’s obsessive gaze and tortuous touch that elevates his peculiar work to old master status.

David Sylvester, writing in the 1950s about Freud’s School of London peer Michael Andrews in terms that apply equally to Freud himself, detected “the awkwardness of almost every modern painter who has not been content to solve his problems by simplifying them… The modern artist who aims at the inclusiveness of traditional European art runs up against the difficulty of recovering that inclusiveness without embracing what have become the clichés of the tradition, and the awkwardness arises from trying to have one without the other.”

There is no awkwardness in Saville, but there are many historic trappings of it, precisely indeed the clichés to which Sylvester refers.   An extended drawing series, examples of which are included here, is titled Pentimenti.  In these, ostensibly provisional and retained charcoal lines are not merely expressive but axiomatic.  True pentimenti arise in the struggle to find position, to define form; they are retained either because the artist has no interest in disguising what led to the discovery; or else, sometimes, because they add texture, and thus heft, to an image (think Matisse, whose pentimenti somehow never undermine the illusion of single shot miracle in his charcoal drawings).  Or else, a tolerable mannerism, pentimenti can signal the effort and time that were necessary to fix the image and thus are part of that image (Larry Rivers, Frank Auerbach, Eugene Leroy.)

But in Saville there is simply no resistance to her Midas-touch genius.  Her pentimenti have nothing to do with process, everything to do with look. Appropriated from tradition but recalibrated in purpose, they now become an animation device.  As in Futurist painting, not to mention comic strips, they denote the swish across the picture plane of bodies in motion.

The effortless repetition of near identical figures from canvas to canvas, or page, incidentally, points to the use of an overhead projector.  The same head from 2006 of a girl with a birthmark – the image used on the cover of The Manic Street Preachers album Journal For Plague Lovers that proved too disturbing for British supermarkets who covered it up – recurrs in several canvases on Gagosian’s sixth floor.  Nothing wrong with projectors: artists should use whatever works.  And Saville’s girl provides a powerful, compelling, evocative head.  But the brush marks that differentiate iterations of this head one from another, like the charcoal pentimenti in other images, bear no relationship to the discovery of form.  The latter is almost a form in the bureaucratic sense, something to be filled out.  This in turn renders the brushstrokes meretricious.  In real painting, the quasi-abstraction of manipulated material, its pleasure-inducing stresses and strains, the improbable juxtapositions of hatches of color, the alternations of meticulous construction and desperate dash, all arise from the struggle to achieve plastic equivalence to perceived or imagined reality.  Saville, on the other hand, merely deploys a battery of special effects to achieve an appropriated look of painterliness.  That’s why she is impeccably slick where Freud is self-questioning to the point of being cack-handed.

(If you want to gain an art historically accurate context for Saville’s technique, by the way, forget Rembrandt, da Vinci and even Freud and direct your attention to her British contemporary, Tai-Shan Schierenberg, and his handsome, serviceable depictions of Seamus Heaney and John Mortimer in London’s National Portrait Gallery.)

That Saville disintegrates in comparison with Freud is as sad for Freud himself because, as Alex Katz surely understood when he decamped recently to Gavin Brown to keep company with the likes of Silke Otto-Knapp and Elizabeth Peyton, nothing galvanizes attention for a senior male artist quite like hot young protégés.  The School of London suffers deeply in reputation from its near-overwhelming (thank god for Paula Rego) maleness.  Nothing could better boost a blockbuster museum survey or book on expressive figuration in Britain than the chronological and alliterative sweep implied by the subtitle “From Walter Sickert to Jenny Saville”.  Luckily, “From Francis Bacon to Cecily Brown” remains plausible.

The post The Dutchmen’s Heir: Jenny Saville at Gagosian appeared first on artcritical.

“The second year looks good,” commented Washburn, the type of dealer who makes returning to The Armory Fair Modern a pleasure. Her long-term dedication to a core group of New York School artists has paid off: she has material that no one else even has access to—rarities from estates and other connoisseur gems. Seen here: a 1960 Ray Parker and 1957 Nicolas Carone, with a 2006 Gwynn Murrill feline in the foreground.

SITTING PRETTY

It just wouldn’t be an art fair proper, without Botero and Francis. And those two works provide a provenance for the future: the recent Damien Hirst spin painting directly beside.

THE HAVE KNOTS

A sidelong glance from Knoedler’s Anastasia Ehrich says it all—everyone loves Catherine Murphy’s paintings.

This solo show features the first works Murphy has ever made as a series. She became “obsessed with seeing repetitive things in her house,” I was told. In each, she depicts the ring stains that wood knots make through common house paint, leaving ghost-like circles. Murphy, a master of visual double entendre, locates these within larger plays of geometry and perception.

PAPERWORKS POWERHOUSE

Reinvigorated by their recent move to 11th Avenue, and their launching of the new Senior & Shopmaker space with a show of paper pieces by New York hometown hero, Thomas Nozkowski, these paired dealers are taking their act on the road in search of greater visibility.

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

Suggesting fractured reality, this piece was originally made by the French stripe master for a show at the Hirshhorn Museum, according to the New York dealers offering it.

FISTS OF FURY

Schultz is a globalist, with branch galleries in Seoul and Beijing and a pan-international neo-pop stable of artists. The work he stands before was sold at the outset of the fair for 130,000 euros, he told me. “Tonight, we eat good meat,” he crowed, with Teutonic glee, shaking his fists.

ECCENTRIC ABSTRACT

One hardly expects to see such outré sophistication coming out of a gallery from the rural heartland. Here, geometry is played against personal idiosyncratic vision by three extremists of post-war non-objectivism.

HAIL TO THE CHEF

Art writer Lilly Wei strikes a supplicating pose in the presence of Julian Schnabel’s massive 2007 self-portrait at Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki.

PHOTO BOOTH

From 20th Century photography masters to odd ephemera from newspaper vaults and police mug shot files, here’s a trove of American Studies-worthy artifacts. “The hippest buyers are museums, like the Metropolitan and the Modern,” Winter told me. “They’re willing to buy something more edgy than collectors.” He expanded, “in painting and sculpture, you don’t have the museums leading.” The reason?  “Maybe it’s because they don’t have to re-sell the stuff,” he added, wryly.

MARRIAGE COUNCIL

East End of Long Island veteran dealer Borghi mounted a series of Elaine de Kooning ink nudes, Portrait of Bill—An Intimate View, unflinching and direct. A show of comparative small works by the abstract expressionist couple rounded things out.

A DEALER’S SECRET

Parsons helped launch Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko, among others. Her own contribution as an artist is overshadowed. In this rangy survey, viewers were left to connect the many dots: with evocations of Forrest Bess, Milton Avery and Robert Motherwell.

TONGUE AND GROOVE

New York’s Gary Snyder/Project Space Gallery takes a curatorial approach, working the gap between pop and abstraction. Both artists pictured here were represented by Pace Gallery in the 1960s and then fell between the cracks. Maybe the time is right to take another look.

And that’s the art of art dealing at The Armory Show Modern—instinct and timing.

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We now know the terror to expect. Hiroshima showed it to us. . . . The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have now is a tragic rather than a terrifying situation. [No] matter how heroic, or innocent, or moral our individual lives may be, this new fate hangs over us.

Barnett Newman (1948)

[The] new painting does have qualities of passion and lyrical desperation, unmasked and uninhibited, not found in other recorded eras; it is not surprising that faced with universal destruction, as we are told, our art should at last speak with unimpeded force and unveiled honesty to a future which may well be non-existent . . .

Frank O’Hara (1959)

*   *   *

World War II had a shattering effect on Americans. News of the war was unremitting, disseminated by newspapers, magazines, newsreels, radio, photographs, films and posters, and above all, by letters from millions of servicemen, who were represented by blue stars in the windows of their homes, growing numbers of which were changed to gold, indicating a dead husband or son. Only a few of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists served in the armed forces–most were overage–but all were intensely aware of the approximately 16 million Americans who were serving, and the hundreds of thousands who were being killed.

The war, which followed earlier plagues–World War I, Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and the Spanish Civil War–defined the 20th century. Morton Feldman, a composer and friend of avant-garde painters, once wrote, “[William] Byrd without Catholicism, Bach without Protestantism, and Beethoven without the Napoleonic ideal, would be minor figures.” 3 So would Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still and, with the exception of Hans Hofmann, the other leading Abstract Expressionists without the omnipresent World War II and the subsequent Cold War. Feldman concluded, “It is precisely this element of ‘propaganda’–precisely this reflection of a zeitgeist–that gives the work of these men its myth-like stature.”4

The Abstract Expressionists did not illustrate the hot or cold wars. Instead, they internalized the political and social situation and asserted that their painting was essentially a subjective or inward-looking process. What they ended up expressing was the tragic mood as they felt it of the decade–an embodied mood. 5

*   *   *

By 1947, de Kooning found his earlier biomorphic inventions limited, and Pollock and Still, soon to be followed by Rothko and Newman, came to believe that primitivistic and mythic subjects they had been painting could not fully convey the anxious and tragic mood that artists felt the need to express, a mood intensified by the Cold War with its threat of nuclear devastation.

The looming mushroom cloud became the defining image of the period. The bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were only the beginning; bigger and better bombs fusing hydrogen nuclei were being tested. Horrifying images were etched on the public imagination, burnt and mangled bodies or “a flower disintegrating, shriveling into oblivion. . . . Searing light, blinding heat, total annihilation. Nothingness was possible.” So was the end of the world–in a new Holocaust. People built bomb shelters and armed themselves to keep their neighbors out; children were made to crouch under desks at school during bomb drills. 6 This gave rise to what Gottlieb termed “the neurosis which is our reality.” 7

In this climate, Pollock, Still, and de Kooning felt compelled to embody their experiences directly in images that were more immediate than their earlier improvisations. They were very conscious of the Cold War and the Bomb’s menace and internalized and personalized the disheartening situation and expressed its mood. 8 They assumed that the world was experiencing what they were, and that if they dealt authentically with their feelings and concerns, their work would be rooted in reality. 9

In 1947, in a dramatic and unprecedented development, Pollock and Still “broke through,” as they put it, to Field Painting and de Kooning, to Gesture Painting. In their quest for directness and immediacy the Field and Gesture painters rejected Synthetic Cubism, geometric abstraction and existing Surrealist and Expressionist styles. Their divorce from previous modern tendencies presented them with formidable difficulties. As Motherwell wrote:

With known criteria, the work of the artist is difficult enough; with no known criteria, with criteria instead in the process of becoming, the creative situation generates an anxiety close to madness; but also a strangely exhilarating and sane sense too, one of being free–free from dogma, from history, from the terrible load of the past; and above all, a sense of nowness, of each moment focused and real, outside the reach of the past and the future. 10

In a similar vein, Rosenberg wrote that for artists committed to any predetermined system, the truth was already in existence outside the artists’ own experience, but that painting as “a way of experiencing . . . means getting along without the guidance of generalities, which is the most difficult thing in the world.” 10 Jack Tworkov concluded that “Abstract Expressionism . . . has no rules, no specific character, attitude, or face. . . . As such it is non-academic if you realize that . . . you cannot predict in advance what its look ought to be.” 11

In moving from familiar picture-making into an artistic terra incognita, the Field and Gesture painters encountered daunting formal challenges. If the orderly composition of cleanly edged forms in the clear, flat color of Cubist abstraction were suppressed or jettisoned, then what? Freewheeling brushwork? Open color? The problem was to compose coherent abstract pictures–-for the Field painters, using expanses of color, and for the Gesture painters, using improvisational drawing with the brush. Creating an immediate image, one that would make a sudden impact on the viewer, presented the artists with another difficult formal problem. One solution was to create an allover, single or mass image, as in Pollock’s linear webs, or Still’s, Rothko’s and Newman’s expansive color fields. Another solution was to paint aggressively, as de Kooning and Kline did. Immediacy could also be achieved by greatly increasing the size of the canvas. The “big picture” also facilitated directness since painters could bring more of themselves physically into the painting–more of the body, the arm rather than just the hand. Immediacy, directness and large scale became earmarks of the new American painting.

The innovations of the Mythmakers, Biomorphists and especially the Field and Gesture painters, violated the art-world’s expectations of what Modernist art was supposed to look like, and their work was generally spurned. It is difficult today, when Abstract Expressionism has long been recognized both at home and abroad, to fathom the hostility it encountered from the art world well into the 1950s. The artists believed passionately in what they were painting but often found it difficult to rebut attacks on their art, since it appeared so unprecedented that at first it did not resemble art at all, sometimes even to the artists.

In their quest for authenticity and in response to the ominous  mood of the 1940S, the Abstract Expressionists refused to prettify or “finish” a painting: they accepted crudeness; a number deliberately cultivated a raw look. To the Mythmakers clumsiness was associated with archaic myth and “primitive” art. For the Gesture painters lack of finish was the result of improvisational or direct painting and was prized. In the name of honesty, let all the scars and blemishes show. The Field painters valued an anti-decorative look because they identified it with the Sublime. Such adjectives as beautiful, tasteful, or elegant were put-downs. Tell an avant-garde painter that his work was decorative and you would be shown the studio door. As Thomas Hess wrote, thinking of de Kooning’s “scarred and clotted pigment,” “The picture was no longer supposed to be Beautiful, but True–an accurate representation or equivalence of the artist’s interior sensation and experience. If this meant that a painting had to look vulgar, battered, and clumsy–so much the better.”12 Finishing a painting was looked down upon because it meant that the evidence of the process of search and discovery had been touched up or prettified. At a meeting of some two-dozen avant-garde artists at Studio 35 in 1950, Reinhardt asked, “Is there anyone here who considers himself a producer of beautiful objects?”13 No one did.

The Field and Gesture painters considered roughness a peculiarly American quality. They associated refined and  beautiful painting with School of Paris picture-making. It was common at the time to compare Kline’s American, direct, immediate, and bold brushwork with the Pierre Soulages’ French, restrained and nuanced facture, which was considered Kline’s School of Paris counterpart. 14 At the meeting at Studio 35, Motherwell said that “young French painters who are supposed to be close to [our] group . . . in ‘finishing’ a picture . . . assume traditional criteria to a much greater degree than we do. They have a real ‘finish’ in that the picture is . . . a beautifully made object. We are involved in ‘process’ and what is a ‘finished’ object is not so certain.” De Kooning agreed, “The point that was brought up was that French artists have some ‘touch’ in making an object. They have a particular something that makes them look like a ‘finished’ painting. They have a touch which I am glad not to have.” 15

It is noteworthy that jazz was the preferred music of the new American painters. Lee Krasner recalled that Pollock “would get into grooves of listening to his jazz records–not just for days, day and night, [but] day and night for three days running, until you thought you would climb the roof! . . . Jazz? He thought it was the only other really creative thing happening in this country.” 16 At the time jazz was often denigrated as rough and vulgar–-or what Thelonious Monk’s termed “Ugly Beauty,” the title of one of his pieces. 17

Unfinished-looking painting had a social class aspect. Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Rothko, Gottlieb, Newman and Baziotes were working class or lower middle class. As avant-garde artists, they were poor, living as bohemians. Coarse facture was a metaphor for their plebeian roots, and a response, perhaps, to  living where animals would die, as Kline quipped. The New Yorkers put themselves forward as tough, macho workers, a posture that was in sharp contrast to the stance as artist-aristocrats of the  French émigrés in New York. The photograph of Pollock in Life magazine with his cigarette dangling from his mouth may have been a pose, but it had a message. It typified the rugged American Westerner–the prototypical small farmer or rancher.

As proletarians and bohemians the new American painters  prized the unpolished look in their canvases because it was the polar opposite of the middle class spic-and-span kitchens and bathrooms featured in glossy advertisements in popular magazines, which fueled America’s burgeoning consumer culture in the past-war era. Just as the affluent society rejected avant-garde artists, so the artists spurned the glitzy signs of commodity worship. The coarse look of their painting was a defiant denial of Madison Avenue slickness: the paint-smeared dungarees versus the gray flannel suit; the look of the grimy studio against Better Homes and Gardens; and most importantly, the “unfinished” brush work as a signifier of authenticity against the impersonal immaculate surfaces of appliances and packaged goods.

As the American economy and culture became more corporative, the cultivation of the unfinished appearance had another aspect, namely the rejection of the growing regimentation of life and the alienated work that capitalism required. 18 In opposition to work that entails “a division of labor, a separation between the individual and the final result,” art historian Meyer Schapiro  maintained that the Abstract Expressionists had prevailed over  standardization by creating works that were “more passionately than ever before the occasion of spontaneity or intense feeling, works that affirmed the individuality or the ‘self’ of the artist,” and hopefully would inspire their fellow citizens to seek freedom.19

As if evoking the imagination of disaster, the abstractions of Pollock, Still, Rothko, Newman and de Kooning from 1947 to roughly 1950 are bleak, oppressive, foreboding, angst-ridden and alienated. They lack fixity or repose and exhibit signs of discord, harshness and, at times, violence. Color is disquieting more often than not; formal design is ambiguous and threatens to decompose and disintegrate. 20 Pollock’s dripped and poured skeins of paint in canvases such as Full Fathom Five (1947) are congested and suffocating; Still’s heavily coated areas of pigment are oppressive and turbid, and de Kooning’s facture, as in Excavation (1950), is raw and aggressive. The colors preferred by the three painters are dark and unappetizing–-in a word, anti-decorative. Although their works are abstract, they retain references to the human image. De Kooning reduced his figures to anatomical fragments; Still invented threatening humanoids and after 1947 spread their organic parts over the canvas, and Pollock buried or trapped stick-like figures in his poured webs. In one horizontal canvas, Number 1, 1948, Pollock evoked the figure by impressing his own hand onto the surface–the tangible trace of his body. Moreover, Still’s and Pollock’s canvases from 1947 to 1949 were generally vertical, their verticality suggesting the upright human figure.

Above all, the abstractions of Still, Pollock, and de Kooning are distinguished by the tension between disorder and order. De Kooning’s paintings, e.g., Excavation, seem to be in perpetual flux. The frayed edges of Still’s shapes, as inNumber 6 (1945-46), serve to destabilize composition. The pulls of order and chaos, disintegration and integration, and control and loss of control are most straightforwardly revealed in Pollock’s poured paintings. Greenberg maintained that it was precisely the opposition between disorder and order in his canvases that gave them their particular timeliness. He further claimed that “Pollock’s superiority to his contemporaries in this country lies in his ability to create a genuinely violent and extravagant art without losing stylistic control. 21 Oscar Wilde once said that Turner invented sunsets because he made viewers see them in a new way. Similarly, Pollock can be said to have invented chaos.

The chaos in Pollock’s painting seems to well up from deep within his psyche, as a kind of upsurge of primal energies, which  provides the work with its authenticity. Chaos, however, was not only the result of Pollock’s individual psychology, but was informed by the turbulent state of the world, which, like his adventitious process, seemed unmanageable and beyond rational control. In Pollock’s work, the personal and the social converge. He did seek to organize the seemingly accidental effects yielded by his technique, ordering and making sense of them, as he himself would claim. In response to the accusation that his work was chaotic, Pollock responded, “NO CHAOS DAMN IT!” He also insisted, “I CAN control the flow of paint. There is no accident.”22 Frank O’Hara called attention to Pollock’s success in wresting pictorial order from his poured pigment; he wrote of his “amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate the simplest of elements, the line–to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass of drawing alone.”23 Nonetheless, the poured images are on the verge of breaking down and disintegrating into chaos far more than they coalesce into a structured image.

Like Pollock’s Field abstractions of the late 1940s, de Kooning’s Gestural paintings reflect the mood of the time not only in their dark colors but in their rough facture and mutilated anatomies. Indeed, de Kooning’s images evoke the torn flesh remains of aerial bombardments. Yet they preserve traces of humanist man, or as much of him as de Kooning could salvage. Pathetic though this tenuous hold on the human is, it is the source of whatever optimism and sensuous pleasure is to be found in his black-and-white paintings.

Disorder, chaos, disintegration, violence, and darkness–the manifestations of a tragic sense–are embodied in the most expressive of Field and Gesture Painting of the late 1940s. This work speaks graphically of the human predicament during World War II and the early years of the Cold War–“the crisis,” as Rosenberg termed it–and perhaps too of the universal human condition. 24 The world at the time seemed to be descending into a chronic state of uncertainty, confusion, and madness–“the night of the world,” to borrow a phase from Hegel. 25 The revelation of the Holocaust intensified the awareness of the human capacity for both barbarism and suffering. The bad dream of recent history pervaded the artists’ studios. 26 Thomas Hess recalled that Abstract Expressionism was “founded on despair and glimpses . . . of hopelessness.” 27 In a 1943 letter to the New York Times, Rothko wrote that “only that subject matter which is tragic and timeless is valid.” 28 Newman agreed, “The basic truth of life . . . is its sense of tragedy.”29 Elsewhere he said that he wanted his paintings to make “contact [with] the hard, black chaos that is death, or the grayer, softer chaos that is tragedy.” 30

Typical of his verbal style, de Kooning’s statements were  cryptic. He did not say explicitly that his art was tragic but a talk he gave in 1951, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” reveals much about the cheerless mood of the time. De Kooning took aim at utopian-minded geometric abstraction. Its advocates or “theoreticians,” as he dubbed them, believed that nonobjective art would release humankind from its wretchedness. They had a longing for “glass and an hysteria for new materials which you can look through.” De Kooning said that he faced life’s misery, which was exemplified by “an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter.” 31 As Motherwell summed it up, “I think that my generation is the most tragic that has ever existed. American painting is really after a sense of the tragic. If [it] is really tragic, then it may be great. If not then it is of no consequence.” 32

The compelling evocation of the tragic mood in the work of Pollock, Still, de Kooning, Rothko and Newman was responsible for their growing recognition. It did take several years for the art world, and much longer for the general public, to appreciate their subjective abstract art, but with a single exception (Hans Hofmann) only tragedians among the Field and Gesture painters have grown in stature. Why these artists and not myriad others working in a similar vein or in entirely different styles? The reason is that during the 1940s their art, scarred as it was by anxiety and darkness, put its finger on the pulse of the decade. In their struggle to register their subjective experience, the most acclaimed Field and Gesture painters created works that provided compelling insights which illuminated the mood of their time. The artist’s personal sense of being as manifest in his painting was of a piece with his historic moment. That is, the mood of the artist’s inner world corresponded with that of the outer world and consequently revealed truths not only about the artist and his culture and society, but also about the human condition. As Motherwell said, “each period and place has its own art and esthetic–which are specific applications of a more  general set of human values, with emphases and rejections corresponding to the basic needs and desires of a particular place and time.” 33Thus, the strongest Field and Gesture painters created work that was at once personal and social, subjective and intrasubjective, historical and trans-historical. Their painting was both of its moment and transcended it.

Notes:

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