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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Richard Diebenkorn at the Royal Academy of Arts

March 14 to June 7, 2015
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London, +44 20 7300 8000

The Royal Academy’s Richard Diebenkorn show operates on the basis that if he is known at all in Britain — and the publicity for and reviews of the show tended to assume that he isn’t — then it’s for his late Ocean Park series, named for the studio in which it was produced, as with all of his serial work. Accordingly, curator Sarah C. Bancroft sets out to challenge that narrow view by stressing the historical and geographic narrative. In three rooms, Diebenkorn’s work moves from an early abstract phase in room 1 (with paintings made in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Urbana, Illinois, between 1950 and ‘56), to a surprising figurative turn in room 2 (Berkeley, 1956-66), to the Ocean Park paintings in room 3 (Santa Monica, 1967-88). The show has 20, 25 and 15 works from those three periods, respectively, including drawings from each, and five of the 145 large Ocean Park paintings.

Ahead of the Royal Academy’s efforts, then, Diebenkorn’s British reputation lay mainly with painters rather than the general public, so it made sense to take six well-established painters to the show and seek their opinions on it. They split pretty much 50-50, with Michael Stubbs, DJ Simpson and Katrina Blannin persuaded of the importance of at least the Santa Monica years, but Claudia Carr, Christina Niederberger and Dolly Thompsett finding little to praise in Diebenkorn’s oeuvre.

There was some criticism of the show’s hanging. Simpson felt that the crowded early rooms left far too little space between paintings. Carr agreed, finding that the experience became “colorful, rather than about color” — as it wasn’t optically possible to isolate the color relationships within a given painting from those of its neighbouring paintings. The third room did give somewhat more space to the work, but the Sackler Rooms on the Royal Academy’s third floor have no natural light, and everyone felt that Ocean Park paintings would have benefited greatly from that.

Looking at the first room, Stubbs emphasised the historical context: the paintings were “typical of the early ‘50s in developing a Cubist space into more fluid forms which value spontaneous gestures, and which simultaneously construct and contradict the space.” Affinities were noted with English painters in the ’50s: Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, and Ivon Hitchens. Niederberger, too, felt that that Diebenkorn’s paintings are very much of their time, making them harder to access today in a way she saw as problematic. A venerable question arose: how did Diebenkorn know that a work was finished? Stubbs felt little judgement was in evidence, suggesting he appeared to, “throw everything at the picture until he decided to throw in the towel as well.”

Simpson was more persuaded by Diebenkorn’s instincts. Quoting one-liner summaries of the instinctual decisions involved, he thought the artist had judged “when there’s enough push and not enough pull,” or when he’d achieved “the right kind of wrongness.” Simpson liked the oddity in Diebenkorn’s colors, and how certain areas – for example, the purple in Urbana #6 — take on the status of objects within the pictorial field. He also liked the variation between dry-looking and comparatively lush application of paint.

Diebenkorn never prepared the ground with sketches. ”A premeditated scheme or system is out of the question,” he said. Rather, all the action can be seen in the paintings. That means they are heavily layered — though the layers are thin. The artists agreed that many early works could be read as aerial landscapes — or sometimes interiors — even though their primary qualities are abstract. They also agreed that Diebenkorn appeared to operate by addition only, with some scratching into the surface, but no scraping off of layers. Indeed, one of Diebenkorn’s own rules (from his list of ten “Notes to myself on beginning a painting”) was that “Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.”

I rather liked a group of charcoal life drawings, which Diebenkorn started to produce in the mid-‘50s at Wednesday evening sessions with his friends David Park and Elmer Bischoff, and which marked the beginning of his move towards explicit representation. True, the debts to Matisse are undeniable, but they have a relaxed intimacy, and integrate the figures convincingly into their architectural settings in a way which links to the frequent presence of windows in the figurative paintings, and to the architectonic character of the abstractions to come. Yet the artists were unimpressed, seeing them as routine implementation of commonly taught approaches, including the treatment of backgrounds.

In fact, none of the painters rated the middle period highly, but their reasons varied. The painters whose own practice is most abstract tended to be the most sympathetic. Simpson and Stubbs thought that some of the paintings succeeded, but that they were too imitative of Cezanne, Matisse and Bonnard. Thompsett felt the diaristic still lifes were less successful than similar painters, such as William Nicolson. The doubters complained that Diebenkorn failed to generate any psychological charge, and that, while there were abstract aspects present, they weren’t interesting in this period. Thompsett provided a partial exception: one mid-period painting, Seawall (1957), was the only one she really connected to in the whole survey. Here, Thompsett felt, “Diebenkorn had generated the language of sensation,” whereas elsewhere, she concluded, “he lacks a soul.” Seawall aside, she couldn’t grasp what he wanted to communicate, what drove him to make art.

Did Diebenkorn emerge as a strong colorist in the late work? Thompsett was unimpressed by their pastel tendencies, finding them “chalky” and too keen to be pretty. Seeing Diebenkorn’s “structure of horizontals and verticals with a relatively desaturated color palette,” Carr said she “couldn’t help wanting them to have the kind of rigorousness and sensitivity that Agnes Martin’s paintings do. She uses color in a very optically active way. His intention with color seems to be entirely descriptive of place or mood.“ Blannin, on the other hand, loved the way she could see that “saturated colors have been diluted by milky washes.” She emerged as the great enthusiast for the late work, admiring Diebenkorn’s ability to achieve his effects on the reduced scale of cigar box lids as well as in the seven-foot-high canvases — with which she said she’d be keen to live, perhaps the diagonal energies of Ocean Park #27 (1970) and the aqueous calm of #116 (1979) .

Diebenkorn denied any representational element, but the Ocean Park series does retain an aerial and window-like feel, which reads across from the earlier abstractions, consistent with their production in a studio overlooking the sea from a high vantage point. Continuity or not, Stubbs thought there was justice in the greater fame of the late work, in which he felt Diebenkorn was “more confident with the edges of forms and with variations between soft and hard edges.” If so, this may be what Diebenkorn got out of the move into and out of figuration: it gave him objects with which to establish his approach to color boundaries in a more natural way, which then carried over into his later abstract work.

I was reminded that Tom Wesselman explained his desire to paint figuratively against the background of Abstract Expressionism as a desire for “definite elements to manipulate in a very specific and literal framework.” That sentiment fits with Stubbs’s appreciation of the Ocean Park series: the geometry gave something for the gestural brushwork to play against,. In contrast, Carr found “his divisions, edges and pauses slack.” She liked Berkeley #57 (1955) for its “honesty and humility,” but was less attracted to the “confidence” Stubbs had identified in the later work. Niederberger was unenthusiastic about all phases, even though she said she’d been impressed by Diebenkorn when she was a student. Now she condemned the work as merely “nice to look at,” asserting that, while Diebenkorn operated well at the aesthetic level, he didn’t engage the brain. If Diebenkorn does engage the brain, I think it’s through the way he solves the formal problems that allow his work to appeal to the eye: we can follow him thinking his way through a composition, and see how he applies his Notes to myself, such as “attempt what is not certain” or “be careful only in a perverse way.”

That seemed to be at the core of Stubbs’s appreciation. He felt that the vehicle of the grid gave the later Diebenkorn “a way to contain his expressive gestures and the interesting and radical awkwardness of his colors successfully.” Blannin thought this “sophisticated,” even though you can see the signs of struggle. Simpson agreed, suggesting that Diebenkorn had found an approach which was quiet, not because he lacked energy or desire, but because he was “unegotistical.” “The coolness is not impersonal,” Simpson opined, “even though it avoids big, heavy, self-aggrandising gestures.” Stubbs agreed that Diebenkorn had desire, “even if it was very cool,” though he conceded that he was “more impressed than moved” by the results.

Maybe that absence of emotional impact relates to Diebenkorn’s contented and straightforward personal life, which provided him with none of the dark materials of such predecessors as Gorky, Rothko and Pollock. I liked a drawing from 1971, in which strategic pentimenti and the dialogue between ruled and freehand lines works well. Moreover, drawing directly onto the canvas with paint is fundamental to the Ocean Park series, and John Elderfield has suggested that Diebenkorn’s drawing is “what holds a structure together and keeps its firm.”

A gap emerged, then, between enthusiasts of the late work and those who thought it merely safe and tasteful, even if it embraced an artful messiness . Thompsett felt that Mondrian — an obvious influence behind the Ocean Park series — succeeded better because his approach was much tighter. Yet it was precisely the tension between tight and loose that appealed to the Ocean Park advocates. Moreover, as Blannin pointed out, Mondrian himself developed his frameworks instinctively, and up close his paintings are alive with brushwork that is far from neutral.

Do Diebenkorn’s paintings have “personality”? Perhaps of places rather than of people, was the view – even when he is depicting people, as they tend not to be individuated as characters. Indeed, one could argue that a small depiction of scissors is more of a portrait than the mid-period works featuring people, who seem present mainly for their abstract qualities. All the same, it was agreed, the personality of the painter comes through, even if it is through choice of color and structure, rather than gesture. The late work, I felt, is monumental yet intimate.

Overall, then, the mixed verdict showed at least that there’s enough variety and interest in Diebenkorn’s work to generate differing opinions. That itself suggests the work has virtues, even if they are hard to pin down given the somewhat subjective nature of the judgements involved — and all six artists said they’d enjoyed their visit, even if the substance beyond that enjoyment could be called into question.

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