September 24, 2016 to January 2, 2017
Picadilly Circus
London, +44 020 7300 8000

“Abstract Expressionism” at London’s Royal Academy, the first overview of the American movement since one held at the Tate Gallery in 1959, is a landmark event, a sprawling exhibition featuring painting, sculpture and photography from the 1930s to the ‘70s. The curators appear to have entertained two conflicting goals: to present a comprehensive survey of work from this period and to make a lucid case for its artistic achievement. Their solution has been to embed five solo shows and a two-person show amidst a composite display of work by 26 other artists. The singularly showcased painters are Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt in the two-man room. Other canonical AbEx’ers of the caliber of Philip Guston, Mark Tobey and Robert Motherwell are sparsely represented in the six remaining salons.

These mixed-artist galleries are organized chronologically or, alternatively, by stylistic theme (“Color as Gesture,” “The Violent Mark,” and “Darkness Visible.”) One possible explanation for the exhibition’s muddy curatorial direction is that it reflects the accomplishments of the show’s guest chief curator, David Anfam. The author of a recent textbook on Abstract Expressionism, Anfam is also Senior Consulting Curator at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado and author of the catalogue raisonné of the artist. This left me wondering whether the decision to feature a strong, cohesive selection of Still’s work in the exhibition’s best gallery was intended to show that artist’s superior aesthetic standing among his peers or if it was merely a byproduct of Anfam’s professional interests.

The term “abstract expressionism” was coined in 1946 by Robert Coates, a critic for The New Yorker. The movement’s fiercest critical champion, Clement Greenberg, preferred “American-Type Painting” in a pivotal essay dated ten years later. The artists themselves did not self-identify as part of an organized endeavor. No manifestos were written for the group as a whole and, as this current exhibition attests, the work ranges in style from highly textured gestural handling to flat, hard-edged monochrome compositions. (David Smith’s steel sculpture and a selection of works on paper and photography are also included in the show). However, statements by the various artists suggest a common commitment to unearthing a subjective interiority as part of their reinvestigation of artistic traditions. As Rothko wrote, in 1945, “We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world…If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.” The Abstract Expressionists collectively pioneered introspective territory unfamiliar at the time to most other Americans.

The artists in this show worked in the turbulent times preceding, during and after the Second World War. These seismic political and cultural shifts can be read in the experimental searching evident in their output. The passing of UK’s Brexit vote earlier this year harkens back to isolationist tendencies that set the stage for war.

Likewise, the conversations surrounding the current US presidential elections echo England’s social conservatism and increasing signs of lack of tolerance. The Abstract Expressionist’s work quickly led to an explosively creative era in contemporary art in the US that spread around the world. This period of rich innovation is a reminder of the importance of pushing back against limiting fears and hatred. I think the work in the exhibition still captures the imagination, celebrates the individual, and is a reminder of the need for on-going dialogue.

The first room, “Early Works,” is a sure-footed introduction to the artists and their signature orientations. For example, Rothko’s Self-portrait (1936) presents prophetic qualities such as feathered edges and blocky forms. The composition of Pollock’s Male and Female (1942-43) is rooted in the Jungian symbolism that continued to fuel mature work.  I thus expected the last gallery, “Late Works,” to function as as a cohesive conclusion to the AbEx story. Instead it contains one late-stage work each by Hans Hoffmann and William Baziotes whose only other paintings in the show are in the very first gallery. Are we meant to cast these artists as the mascots for this movement? As a second non sequitur these paintings are abruptly placed together with a monumental work, “Salut Tom” (1979) by Joan Mitchell and one of Philip Guston’s late figurative paintings.

Two-thirds of the way through the exhibition, Still’s gallery refreshingly sidesteps any didacticism the show might have been veering towards. A spacious, generously installed room of ten large, stylistically consistent paintings allows for the digestion of his most mature style. Known as a stubborn outsider, Still’s work dodges the queasiness of Surrealism, while keeping its irrational contours. Passages of hot yellow ochre, oranges and deep reds meet patches of white and black alongside fissures of primary colors that open up like scars. His brushwork is alternately efficient and luxurious. Anfam, in the exhibition catalogue, convincingly connects Still’s work to the realm of skin and sensation, whereas it is typically associated with landscape.

Radiating out from this highpoint of the exhibition are two galleries of color field paintings and a gallery of diverse works on paper and photography. Rothko’s flat floating lozenges are presented in a dimly lit, chapel-like room on one side. The two-person gallery of geometric works in reduced color palettes by Reinhardt and Newman are on another side. Rothko’s gallery leads to de Kooning’s solo room of works from 1945 to 1966. De Kooning and Pollock are arguably the artists most often associated with Abstract Expressionism yet, in contrast to Still’s aesthetically powerful gallery, de Kooning has been selected for breadth over depth. Across 13 works de Kooning shifts from the subject of figure — such as in his iconic “Women” series — to landscape, although as the focus passes there is, in fact, a merging of his subjects.

A large gallery devoted to Pollock’s mature drip paintings, while selected in a way that represents the power of his work, was divided by two temporary walls that diminished its impact. Pollock’s largest painting, Mural (1943), commissioned by his patron Peggy Guggenheim, is placed opposite the iconic Blue Poles (1952), contrasting his all-over compositions at two distinct points. The second largest painting in the Pollock gallery is by his widow, Lee Krasner, the stylistically consistent The Eye is The First Circle (1960).

Presenting over 150 works, many of them masterpieces, this exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to draw new conclusions regarding the stylistic origins and creative power of the phenomenon widely considered the first true American aesthetic achievement in the visual arts. This only makes more painful, however, the institutional bias against women and minorities found in this exhibition, which includes but four women painters and one person of color (Norman Lewis). Mercifully, one painting that is included is by Janet Sobel, whose allover compositions arguably inspired Pollock: she is usually consigned to a catalogue footnote. Ironically, in view of the apotheosis of Clyfford Still in this exhibition, this summer the Denver Art Museum presented the exhibition “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” curated by Gwen F. Chanzit. Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Helen Frankenthaler, who are minimally represented in this exhibition, were featured there extensively with nine other artists. The catalogue for the show in Denver includes biographies for a total of 42 artists whose careers have regrettably been over-looked.

On the plane ride home to New York City, I watched Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977. As with the artists in the show, select characters in the film are subconsciously driven to express themselves as part of a bonding process with creatures from outer space. Unlike the exhibition, however, I noticed the movie wasn’t burdened with an academic voiceover-like narration. The plot climaxes with a successful exchange between aliens and humans: dialogue in place of destruction. In the 1930s and ‘40s, making a commitment to radicalism in the fine arts was an alien endeavor for most American artists compared to their counterparts in Europe, especially Paris. Furthermore, introspection was considered (and in some circles still is) a sign of weakness and a waste of time. During the war, a motley crew of Americans from both coasts achieved a fertile exchange of aesthetic ideas with recent émigrés from Europe that reached across their cultural differences. To acknowledge and act upon the subconscious required heroic leaps of faith for the characters in the movie and for the Abstract Expressionists.

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October 3, 2010–April 25, 2011
11 West 53 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, 212 708 9400

Because Abstract Expressionism is recognized as the great American art movement, and MoMA as the greatest museum anywhere devoted to modernism, we naturally think of them as allies. The brief remarks in the exhibition catalogue by director Glenn Lowry and curator Ann Temkin, as well as the photographs from the museum’s archives, certainly reinforce this way of thinking. But in fact, the story is more complicated. In 1949, Clement Greenberg complained about “how remiss the museum has been lately in its duty to encourage modern American art.” And in 1957, he noted that Alfred Barr, “betting on a return to nature,” turned down a request of the American Abstract Artists to hold a show there “with the intimation that they were following what had become a blind alley.” The museum, Greenberg commented, “belonged more to the ’establishment’ than to the avant-garde.”

Given then that MoMA has the power and will to collect this classic movement, what is striking about this exhibition—which  does not draw on any loans—is both its weaknesses in the presentation of the canonical figures and the presence of some surprising pictures by marginal figures. The account it presents is a little different, in interesting ways, from the much-told story of the triumph of American-style painting. Jackson Pollock is irresistible, for the transition from The She-Wolf (1943) to One: Number 31, 1950 (1950) marks his dramatic advance, though White Light (1954) then shows his equally swift decline. It was also good to see his Number 7, 1950 (1950) albeit set so oddly high on the wall in the gallery with David Smith’s Australia (1951). Sam Francis’s Big Red (1953) is a fully realized masterpiece. And Willem de Kooning looks great thanks to the inclusion of Painting (1948), A Tree in Naples (1960), and Valentine (1947), which, I grant, is more a promissory note than a fully realized masterpiece. Joan Mitchell’s Ladybug (1957) shows how wonderfully gifted she was.

But where Mark Rothko’s Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944) nicely marks the transition into his mature style, No. 1 (Untitled) (1948) is a disaster. And comparing Philip Guston’s The Clock (1956-57) with his figurative North (1961-62) demonstrates, as Sean Scully has said, how little ultimate gift he had for abstract painting. As for Robert Motherwell’s Western Air (1946-47), Lee Krasner’s Number 3 (Untitled) (1951), and Helen Frankenthaler’s Trojan Gates (1955), they are fascinating mistakes, pictures of historical interest that add nothing to the reputations of these distinguished artists. Krasner’s Gaea, (1966), shown on the billboards for this exhibition, is a large, but undistinguished painting. But Number 9: In Praise of Gertrude Stein by Bradley Walker Tomlin (1950), is a great all-over picture that gives him a place in the canon, and Grace Hartigan’s Shinnecock Canal (1957) demonstrates how good she might have been. She attracted support from the influential critic Frank O’Hara and so had every reason to be optimistic: “I believe I am the first woman of major stature in painting, and I feel that given a long life and sufficient courage and energy, I may become a great artist.” (The Journals of Grace Hartigan, 1951-1955, Syracuse University Press,  2009, p.62.) But when she left New York to live in Baltimore, she lost touch with the art world.

Hedda Sterne, the one woman who appears in the famous group portrait of the Abstract Expressionists, the “irrascibles,” is represented by an interesting, but not entirely convincing painting, New York, VIII (1954). And while Norman Lewis was gifted, his Phantasy II (1946) does not really belong in this exhibition. As always, Louise Nevelson is hard to place. Maybe her Sky Cathedral (1958) should be set alongside the paintings by Clyfford Still, the most unclubbable of these artists. As for Hans Hofmann, his Memoria in Aeternum (1962) remains too indebted to Analytic Cubism—notwithstanding the persuasive supportive accounts of Bill Berkson and T. J. Clark—to be part of Abstract Expressionism. But Ad Reinhardt appears very consistent and the etchings by Barnett Newman are great.

This exhibition was a challenging exercise in connoisseurship. 1945 was a great moment in art’s history, one of those rare magical times when extremely influential large-scale radical change occurred very suddenly. After long apprenticeships to European modernism and Depression-era social realism, the American Abstract Expressionists found themselves. Soon they produced original masterpieces that changed how older modernist art was understood, inaugurating an ongoing tradition that continues today. The Great War stunted the development of cubism1914, terminating the collaboration of Picasso and Braque. Abstract Expressionism began as the art of the victors. World War II came, and by 1945 Europe, Japan, and the USSR lay in ruins, while the newly powerful United States became the home for Abstract Expressionism. As the catalogue says: “With Europe a postwar shambles, the very concept of modern civilization was thrown into question; this art developed exactly when Americans were absorbing the facts of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the bombings in Japan. These artists read their historical moment as a spur to action and an invitation to stage a rebirth of painting, this time on American shores.”

In some ways, this dramatic change was well prepared for. The Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1929, mounted ambitious shows of European modernism.

And there were sophisticated art dealers, such as Henri Matisse’s son Pierre, and collectors with deep pockets interested in contemporary art; intellectuals who became art critics—Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and others; and interested academic art historians, Meyer Schapiro being the most notable. And Mondrian and other important European artists came to New York as refugees. But these at most are merely necessary conditions for the development of great art. Circa 1945 Latin America also had prosperous elites, important emigrant European artists and gifted native painters. But what they created cannot be compared with American Abstract Expressionism.

Given the great difficulty of understanding the origins of Abstract Expressionism, comparing the beginning of an artistic tradition in a distant culture is helpful. Starting in the seventh century, Muslims employed and appropriated a rich Eastern Mediterranean heritage, the art of Greco-Roman antiquity and its Christian aftermath. Their problem was how to use this visual culture without being overwhelmed by its exotic sacred and political character.  These artists, Oleg Grabar argues in The Formation of Islamic Art (Yale, 1987) for instance, legitimately feared the power of this religiously hostile tradition. Just as the Grand Mosque of Damascus reinterprets the decorative schemes of Christian churches, substituting foliage for images of saint, so Pollock and his peers reworked inherited European styles. Like the Muslim artists, they had to establish their identities by radically transforming the overwhelmingly rich tradition they borrowed.

Author’s Note: Thanks are due to Pepe Karmel, who is not responsible (how could he be?) for my use of his corrections and suggestions.

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David Anfam’s monograph, Abstract Expressionism (Thames & Hudson,1990) remains the mostlucid and plausible account of that movement. It has been thirty-eight years since New York City has seen a full-blown exhibition devoted to its greatest School, so this large gallery show curated by Anfam provides a great opportunity to evaluate his claims. The canonical Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning and others, are joined here by two women, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell; by the African-American Norman Lewis; by the photographers Harry Callahan, Barbara Morgan, Hans Namuth, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White. And there are strong paintings by a number of figures often thought marginal to Abstract Expressionism, William Baziotes, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger (born 1926), and Mark Tobey among them. Anfam’s title comes from Richard Poirier’s A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. We need, he argues, to understand properly the Americanness of Abstract Expressionism, without treating it either as a triumph of chauvinistic mythmaking or as an episode in the Cold War.

I am modestly puzzled by the inclusion of Seliger and Lewis; by the Tobey which to me looks fatally finicky; and by the very large Pousette-Dart, Time is the Mind of Space, Space in the Body of Time (1979-82).  And I am disappointed by the absence of Richard Diebenkorn. But no doubt even Haunch of Venison, situated in midtown Manhattan on the twentieth floor, has limits in its abilities to procure loans. The show include some marvelously strange Pollocks, Number 17, 1950 (Fireworks), for example, and strong paintings by Motherwell, Rothko and Still. Krasner is not my artist, but Another Storm (1963) causes me to reconsider that judgment. Tworkov’s Idlng I (1970), uncannily related to Cy Twombly’s all-over pictures, makes me wonder what else I have missed. I wish that Anfam would say more about why his photographers are peers of Abstract Expressionists. Siskind’s Jalapa 46 (Homage to Frank Kline) (1973) does, I grant, show a Klinean motif, but in a small image. To my mind, the comparison of this and the other photographs to abstract paintings seemsa pseudo morphism.

But it would be ungracious and inappropriate to evaluate A World Elsewhere critically simply as an exercise in taste. Since in a general way this art, though not all of the paintings on display, is mostly relatively familiar, what is most valuable here is the perspective provided by Anfam’s catalogue. As he rightly notes, most recent scholars tend to treat Abstract Expressionism as a step moving very quickly towards the next generation, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. But that narrative, he urges, fails to deal seriously with the visual qualities of this art, and its highly ambiguous place within American literary and political culture. That Anfam is British perhaps explains his marvelous sympathy with this movement, which he eloquently describes as “an indelible artistic episode in the history of a wish for a world elsewhere probably as old as human longing itself,” and why he then quotes Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden.”

When it withdraws into its happiness,
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas.

What then should a history of abstract art after Abstract Expressionism look like? Answering that question will take another exhibition, one I hope Anfam organizes.

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33 MacDougal Alley: The Interlocking Sculpture of Isamu Noguchi
PaceWildenstein, 32 E 57th Street, East of Madison Aveunue, phone: 212-421-3292, through October 4

Lee Krasner: “After Palingenesis,”
Robert Miller 524 W 26th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, phone: 212-366-4774, through Oct 11

Three stunning, timely exhibitions of celebrated but underrated American modernists remind New Yorkers of the incredible resource offered by the more serious commercial galleries. Among them, right now, Knoedler, PaceWildenstein, and Robert Miller form a kind of second Whitney – one for which you don’t have to stand in line, or pay!

Richard Pousette-Dart was a first-generation abstract expressionist who has been consigned to the second tier. He stares out at history from the left end of the middle row of Nina Leen’s canonical 1951 group photograph for Life magazine of the so-called “irascibles” – one of the youngest in the line-up. But where, say, Adolph Gottlieb or Clifford Still get a chapter each in “The Triumph of American Painting,” Irving Sandler’s landmark study of the movement, Pousette-Dart barely earns a couple of mentions. And yet he was both a forerunner and a great painter.

History is comfortable, however, to dwell on as few strong names as possible. You might expect revisionist art histories to correct injustices, but the opposite happens: The academics – who aren’t connoisseurs interested in quality – compound the canonical lineup by accepting them as givens, focusing their revisions on theoretical issues. It is left to artists and collectors to engage in genuinely critical revaluation.

This show of Pousette-Dart’s precocious “mythic heads” of the 1930s will throw a spanner in the works as far as sorting wheat from chaff is concerned. Dwelling on the period 1935-42, the exhibition shows an artist hitting the scene as a ready-formed individualist. The works are both of, and ahead of, their time.

If you stopped the clock in, say, 1940 and judged the protagonists on what they had achieved so far, Pousette-Dart would stand head and shoulders over Jackson Pollock. Of course, the clock didn’t stop, and it was precisely in the act of working through the frustrations and pent up energies of his misdirected earlier efforts that Pollock forged so unique and revolutionary a personal expressive language. In Pousette-Dart’s case, in fact, the sense of crystalline resolution that always blesses his work might also be its fatal flaw.

The mythic heads look with fierce critical intelligence at the possibilities offered a young American by Picasso and Braque, Miró, and Klee, and above all, non-western art. They also relate to a new direction in American painting, at once modern, classic and mythopoeic, explored by the “three musketeers,” whom Pousette-Dart befriended: John Graham, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky. Actually, Pousette-Dart, whose mother was the poet and theosophist Flora Louise Dart, anticipated Graham’s subsequent turn to the occult.

The portrait of Flora from 1939-40 is an extraordinary work. It relates as much to Marsden Hartley as to the artist’s continental mentors, while it anticipates a painter like Richard Lindner. It might seem remote in touch and ambition from the open color fields that Pousette-Dart would pioneer in the following years, but it connects to the spirit of abstract expressionism in the way symbolism and plastic intensity form a synergy.

***

In the year the Pousette-Dart show ends, 1942, the Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi slipped out of the internment camp he had entered voluntarily six months earlier and made his way to New York. He found in MacDougal Alley, long established as a haven for sculptors, “an oasis … perfect in every way” for sculpture. The environment he created there looked forward to the Zen garden he went on to establish amidst the urban industry of Long Island City. This later became his museum (it is currently under renovation).

The 1940s were miracle years for Noguchi, in which he produced some of his most exquisite and characteristic works. The exhibition includes around a dozen pieces that have their genesis in that period as marble carvings and some decades later would be cast in bronze and other metals. (The artful lighting of this design heavy installation obfuscates the differences in surface quality between metal and polished stone.) Like Pousette-Dart, Noguchi was looking at once to European and extra-European sources while finding his own voice. Many of his biomporphic standing figures look like surrealist personages from the paintings of Picasso, Miró, and Tanguy rendered three-dimensionally.

What gives them particular edge is the way they are formed from interlocking planes. Noguchi found a cheap and suggestive material in marble slabs, which had been prepared that way for the building trade (for façades). Carving directly with pneumatic tools, he devised a technique of interlocking that by-passed welding or gluing. The effect is to make them seem more ethereal and other-wordly. Indeed, what’s extraordinary about these standing figures of Noguchi is that they dissolve the opposition between the constructive and organic that mattered so much to sculptors at that time. They are at once jagged and rounded, and they intimate liveliness without disguising the mechanical logic of their facture.

***

When Jackson Pollock rushed into town for the “Irascibles” photograph, it had never occurred to anyone to include his wife, Lee Krasner (except, of course, Lee Krasner herself). The one woman to break into that class portrait was Hedda Sterne. This was undoubtedly a grave injustice, for Krasner was as significant a player in advanced painting as plenty of the men who were included.

Her 1999 retrospective (it was at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001) revealed an artist as interesting for her inconsistencies as her accomplishments. This should not be misunderstood: She had high points, but the very restlessness and risk that continued to characterize her career ought to endear her to history, not alienate her.

While the Pousette-Dart and Noguchi exhibits visit their protagonists at early career moments, Robert Miller presents a sumptuous display of late works, from 1966 to the year of her death, 1984. In many of these, however, the artist herself critically revisits her youth, for she found a fecund art material in her own early, failed drawings.

It is not so rare for artists to cannibalize their own efforts in this way. The process can be related to the way a painter might use prints or reproductions of their own work as a compositional starting point. The fact, incidentally, that Krasner first sorted her discovered cache of drawings, which had been made while a student of Hans Hoffman, and kept the good ones diminishes any notion of exorcissm in this exercise. What is more startling about these late works is what they say about the relationship of expressivity and style in her mature aesthetic outlook.

The 1960s paintings show Krasner capable of painterly exuberance and gestural gusto. But energy is always contained by form. These loose, “automatic” paintings give way to hard-edged designs of almost constructivist precision in the following decade. The last phase is a synthesis of these preceding opposites. By incorporating charcoal drawings that were passionately engaged with a cubist sense of space into radically flattened, cut-out compositions (forcing the duality by leaving the background canvas raw), Krasner places her own authentic and formative search for depth within quote marks. Hard-won drawings that had been so specific about space are reduced to generalized texture, a kind of ready-made pentimenti. Such liberty with language connects in a surprising way with younger contemporaries. Paintings that are the culmination of long career are equally and bizarrely of their time. The point would be driven home were one to place a 1984 Krasner next to a David Salle of the same year.

This article first appeared in the New York Sun, September 18, 2003

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