American Art Arrives

AMERICAN ART ARRIVES

New Ideas

American artists were wrestling with abstraction when the 1940s opened. Cubism and Surrealism had been at the forefront of European art for over two decades but had not really arrived in the United States. Through the 1930s social realism and regionalism dominated the American art scene. This naturalist painting was the style of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Stuart Curry. Edward Hopper had made some gestures toward abstraction, and Stuart Davis was a crossover artist creating work somewhere between figure painting and abstraction. The focus of their work was depiction of place and people, a kind of folkloric representation of American life, the texture and the color of its objects. Though Georgia O'Keeffe and Arthur Dove had worked abstractly in their own style through the 1920s, the American painters as a whole were looking backward. Modernism had not really arrived.

Art in Exile

A small number of American painters had begun to show an interest in abstract art in the 1930s. An American Abstract Artists Association had developed in New York. The idea was to make New York the center of abstract art. With the help of fascism in Europe, the association succeeded. As events in Europe came to a head, artists began leaving Europe for New York, bringing their ideas with them. Piet Mondrian, the most influential of these artists in exile, arrived in 1940. Hans Hofmann had come earlier. In 1941 the father of Surrealism, French poet and critic André Breton, arrived along with André Masson. Other artists in exile included Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Robert Matta. They brought with them the experimental styles of Surrealism, Cubism, and Expressionism. They began teaching, attracting young American painters to their ideas. They began to exhibit their work in the new galleries that were opening in New York to accommodate them. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting had opened in 1939. It would eventually take the name of its founder, Solomon Guggenheim. In January 1942, Mondrian, age sixty-nine, held his first and only solo exhibition at the Valentine Dudensing Gallery. An Artists in Exile exhibit opened at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in March of that year, and in October 1942 Peggy Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th Street.

Federal Arts Project

The stage was set in New York because of the Federal Arts Project, a division of the New Deal's Works Projects Administration (WPA) system designed to employ artists and provide painting and sculpture for public buildings. Like any other workers affected by the Depression, artists were in need of federal support. The art market had bottomed out in the 1930s. The WPA Federal Arts Project was centered in New York. Thus, in the years before the Europeans flocked to the city, American artists had come. In 1937 approximately twenty-one hundred artists were in New York participating in the project and two thousand more were on a waiting list. Among those working for the WPA were William Baziotes, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and David Smith. They would subsequently emerge as the New York School, the first true American art movement, the movement whose distinctive Abstract Expressionism would finally break America's dependence on Europe for ideas and inspiration. As a whole the WPA provided not only economic support, but also a kind of unity and shared experience. Artists were asked to submit an oil painting every four to eight weeks. The paintings were then donated to public buildings. The artists were allowed to work at home and were generally free to follow their own ideas. Rothko would later refer to the project as a "Godsend to so many artists who needed help." Pollock was "grateful to the WPA for keeping me alive during the thirties." The project not only freed artists from economic concerns but also created a community that encouraged artists, provided new ideas for them, and allowed them opportunities for formal training and study. The Americans were ready when the exiled Europeans began arriving.

Art of This Century

The year 1942 was crucial in the drive toward what would become known as Abstract Expressionism. Early in the year Mondrian's exhibit appeared. John Graham showed a combined exhibit of European and American painters at McMillen, Inc. In February Rothko had his first solo exhibition at the Artists' Gallery. The Artists in Exile exhibit opened a few weeks later and Breton's First Papers of Surrealism appeared in the fall. Also that fall Peggy Guggenheim, heiress and wife of surrealist Max Ernst, opened the Art of This Century Gallery. Her gallery, which showed her private collection of modernist art, also provided exhibition space for contemporary New York painters. The gallery's collection impacted the New York scene and became a gathering place for artists. Guggenheim also encouraged the young American artists, giving the thirty-one-year-old Pollock a solo exhibition in November of 1943, thirty-two-year-old William Baziotes a showing in October of 1944, and twenty-nine-year-old Robert Motherwell an exhibition just weeks after that of Baziotes, She also exhibited influential European Hans Hofmann for the first time in New York. Other galleries were exhibiting the "new" art, but none so forcefully as Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery. Such galleries were instrumental in attracting attention to the artistic breakthrough of the New York School artists: Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism

The tag Abstract Expressionism is not entirely comprehensive. The art it describes is neither exclusively abstract nor always expressive. But Abstract Expressionism, a term coined by critic Robert Coates in a New Yorker review in March 1946, has come to represent the group of painters in New York during the 1940s. To some extent the Abstract Expressionists were successful because of the praise heaped on them by art critics such as Coates, Clement Greenburg, and Harold Rosenberg. Not all critics, however, championed the modernists. In 1943 Edward Alden Jewell, a critic for the The New York Times, expressed "befuddlement" over paintings by Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb. Mark Rothko and Gottlieb responded in a letter to the Times that became something of a manifesto for the New York modernists. While not defending their work, which they felt did not need defending, the letter explained the thinking behind the style: "It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way—not his way." By 1946 they were succeeding. The Museum of Modern Art purchased its first works by Pollock and Motherwell that year. Pollock had succeeded enough to buy a house on Long Island, where he moved with his wife, painter Lee Krasner, in 1945. The Art of This Century Gallery closed in 1947, but the Abstract Expressionists were now well entrenched, though not yet widely popular or accepted.

Abstract Expressionist Styles

Abstract Expressionism had developed into three areas by 1948. "Action" painting described the work of Pollock, de Kooning, and Franz Kline. Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still were being referred to as "Color-Field" painters. Artists such as Gottlieb, Motherwell, and Philip Guston were not easily categorized but belonged to the movement as a whole. All shared certain traits. They were generally not figurative painters. They were artists who looked inward, influenced by modern ideas regarding psychology, myth, and dreams. The exploration of the unconscious through an "automatism" of expression became one method of working. Their work, considering the social movements of the 1930s and the national unity of the war years, was remarkably interior and individual, as Abstract Expressionists insisted on exploring their own psyches. They were essentially romantic, pursuing the lonely struggle of the studio instead of trying to improve society. For the first time in American art history, American artists claimed for themselves the social and political independence often demanded by European artists. New York in the 1940s became the center of the art world and would remain so for at least another two decades.

Action Painting

In the fall of 1947 Pollock, who had established himself as a successful painter, began the work that would make him an international star. In the barn at his Long Island home he began to lay huge swatches of canvas on the floor and proceeded to pour paint on them in a controlled way. Pollock had always been interested in myth and the unconscious. Like other modern painters he looked inward, exploring his mind through spontaneous application of paint. But when he began working on his drip paintings, he climbed inside the work. Their huge scale was meant to dominate the viewer, to envelop him. Pollock poured paint off a brush in controlled arcs. It was physical and dynamic work. He approached the canvas from all sides like a Native American sand painter of the Southwest. Pollock and the painting became one, he would say. Critic Harold Rosenberg would later coin the phrase action painting as a means of describing Pollock's most original work. Action painting became a general term for describing any artist who physically attacked the canvas, such as de Kooning. De Kooning was a quiet member of the New York School through the 1940s but was as influential as any of them. His series of Woman paintings have become world famous as well as repellent and controversial to many. He was and is an aggressive painter interested in the gesture with the brush. The action painters were often only interested in paint. They disregarded lines and figures entirely. In work such as Lavender Mist (no. 1, 1950) Pollock needed no image beneath his beautiful arcs of paint. The paint was both the subject and the content of the work. The canvas was not divided spatially by lines and edges as in the Cubists' work. He offered no references in real figures as with the Surrealists. The surface of the painting was uniform and even bled off of the canvas, as if never ending. Pollock became internationally famous after Life magazine published a feature article on him in 1949.

Color-Field Painting

Seemingly opposite of Pollock were the color-field painters led by Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman. Unlike the physical action of the action painter, color field appears as a quiet, contemplative work. The line, traditionally a major tool of the artist, disappears in a color-field work. Huge washes of color bleed together creating a flat, barely divided surface. The attempt is to convey meaning and feeling through unified fields of color. As in action painting, figures often disappear entirely, leaving bands of color interacting. They are romantic paintings, often simply beautiful. Rothko felt that figure painting was simply inadequate to the human experience in the aftermath of World War II. Rothko had always trusted silence, and the still contemplation of his fields of color were meant to impact emotionally as well as morally. Newman aimed for a similar feeling, though his fields of color were often divided by a single strip of tape, pulled up after the painting was completed, appearing as a zip in the work. The zip implied creation for Newman, something forming in a void, attempting to organize the field of color. The zip did not so much divide the canvas as unify it. Like the action painters, the color-field painters often worked on a huge scale. The sheer impracticality of the work suggested the romantic impulse behind it. As the 1940s came to a close, the abstract expressionists as a group had made their collective statement to the world, laying the ground for a generation to follow in the 1950s and the postmodernism of the 1960s. The group was breaking into its component parts as each painter—de Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Newman, Gottlieb, Reinhardt, Still, and Motherwell—developed in individual ways. America had finally achieved its own art.

Blacks

In 1943 Modern Negro Art by James A. Porter appeared to widespread acclaim. The book was the most comprehensive historical and contemporary survey of the art of African Americans published at that time. While the 1940s are known as the decade when Abstract Expressionism developed in New York, it should also be known as the time when black artists began to flourish. Black painters had been working for years, unbeknownst to most critics. The Harmon Foundation, founded in 1926 to support black art, helped painters develop. When the WPA arrived in New York in the 1930s, it supported black artists just as it had the seminal artists of the New York School. The Harlem Renaissance, a cultural revolution of writing, music, and art, had flourished quietly through the 1920s and 1930s. Porter's book gave voice and history to the black artist of the 1940s. A painter himself, Porter and other artists exhibited in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. After the war, opportunities arose for travel and study of art. The most prominent black painters of the 1940s include Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff, Alma Thomas, Palmer Hayden, Romare Bearden, William Johnson, Beauford Delaney, and Lois Jones. Sculptors included William Edmondson, Richmond Barthe, and Elizabeth Catlett. Though depiction of black life in a realist or social realist style was the dominant form of painting, some artists like Bearden and Delaney experimented with abstraction. Another popular style was the "consciously naive" style which showed a flat, two-dimensional, purposefully folkloric style of painting that depicted scenes of black life. The 1940s were a threshold period for black art, though it remained relatively ignored by art historians until the 1960s.

Jacob Lawrence

The most prominent and prolific of black artists in the 1940s was Jacob Lawrence. He was twenty-three when the decade opened, and he began his epic journey to tell the story of black Americans through his series of panel paintings. He was one of the few black painters fully taught and influenced by other black artists. His first and most famous series, The Migration of the Negro, consists of sixty paintings and tells the story of southern American blacks migrating north to the cities to form contemporary urban communities. The paintings were done in 1940 and 1941 and exhibited to wide acclaim at New York's Downtown Gallery. Lawrence followed up with The Life of John Brown (twenty-two panels), Harlem (thirty panels), War (fourteen panels), The South (ten panels), and Hospital (eleven panels). In 1947 he taught at the influential Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and by the end of the decade he was established as the foremost black painter of the twentieth century and among the most important American artists.

Sculpture

Abstract Expressionism also influenced the sculpture of the 1940s. Many of the same ideas of Abstract Expressionist painting—interior exploration, automatism of creation, the grand scale of productions, avoidance of the mere figure art, concern with myth and psychology, Surrealism—reached sculpture. David Smith was the foremost American sculptor of the era. Like many of his contemporaries, Smith was a constructivist, building sculpture out of material rather than shaping already existing blocks of stone or wood. Smith had learned welding while working at an auto plant in 1925. He was not formally trained in art. He was influenced in his direct metal sculpting by the Surrealists of the 1930s but in the 1940s began an exploration that could only be called Abstract Expressionist. The move made him the foremost sculptor of postwar American art. Other notable sculptors include Reuben Nakia, who became known for his work with terra-cotta, expressionist explorations of classical mythology; Theodore Roszak, another geometric constructivist who moved into abstraction with natural forms. Ibram Lassaw showed the influence of Pollock's poured paintings in his lacy metal work. Joseph Cornell, a Surrealist, produced "box constructions," wooden boxes, glass fronted, filled with icons and fragments. And Isamu Noguchi, a pure abstractionist, became known after the war for his work in polished stone.

JAMES A. PORTER

In 1930, tired of hearing that "the American Negro has no pictorial or plastic art," James A. Porter began a journey of discovery that would culminate with Modern Negro Art, published in 1943. Porter was a painter and a student of art. He was also a thorough scholar, and Modern Negro Art is still considered an authoritative work on African-American art.

Porter discovered a rich tradition of painting, sculpture, and folk art that could be traced back to West Africa, from where most of the slaves brought to America were taken. Although two previous volumes had appeared on the subject (both by Alain LeRoy Locke of Howard University, in 1936 and 1940), neither of them had approached the depth of Porter's research. Porter's book offered critical assessment and, more important, the self-affirmation of racial identity in the art of black America. Porter's book provided a tradition that had remained relatively unknown. In a sense he gave a voice to black artists. In the 1940s and 1950s the number of fellowships awarded, exhibitions, and opportunities to travel and study painting increased markedly for African-American artists. Porter's book began the process toward acceptance in a field that was dominated by white academic critics looking to Europe for influences in American art. Slowly, but more quickly thanks to Porter, black American painters have begun entering the canon of American art.

Source:

James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Dryden Press, 1943).

Photography

World War II, of course, was the dominant subject matter for photographers during the first half of the 1940s. The social realism of the 1930s had kept photography stark, simple, and reportorial. The war necessitated much of the same, with photography, like the film of the newsreel, acting as the public's eyes in the days before television coverage. But during and after the war, photographers moved toward abstraction, led by Robert Capa. His camera provided no simple reporting but seemed to focus on the personal and the tragic, as though the photograph were an expression of the photographer, not a shot of the external world. Another brilliant photographer of the decade was Minor White, the editor of Aperture magazine. White found abstraction in normal things using "straight" photography. Where Capa's blurred images suggested expression, White's clear straight photography revealed shapes and lines, like the black-and-white paintings of de Kooning. In the same vein was Aaron Siskind, whose flat-surface photographs of walls and graffiti showed an interest in surface texture, not unlike the Abstract Expressionists. Ansel Adams was photographing his grand, romantic, straight depictions of nature. He was also busy establishing the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Another nature photographer, though more spare than Adams's grand vision, was Eliot Porter. Harry Callahan was also influenced by Adams in his simple photographs of unspoiled nature. The overall trend was to find near-abstract images in natural scenes and photograph them simply.

Sources:

H. Harvard Arnason, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Photography, third edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986);

James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);

Emile De Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940-1970 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984);

Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1990);

Regenia Perry, Free Within Ourselves (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, in association with Pomegranate Artbooks, 1992);

James A. Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Dryden Press, 1943).