Abstract Expressionism

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Abstract Expressionism

The emergence of Abstract Expressionism in New York City during the late 1930s both shocked and titillated the cultural elite of the international art scene. Abstraction itself was nothing new—modernist painters had been regulating the viewer's eye to obscured images and distorted objects for quite some time. In fact, the bright, abstracted canvases and conceptual ideals of high modernist painters such as Joan Miro and Wassily Kandinsky tremendously influenced the Abstract Expressionists. What distinguished the movement from its contemporaries, and what effectively altered the acceptable standards of art, was the artists' absolute disregard for some kind of "objective correlative" that a viewer could grasp in attempt to understand the work. The central figures of Abstract Expression-ism—Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still, among others—completely rejected any kind of traditional thematic narrative or naturalistic representation of objects as valid artistic methods. Rather, they focused on the stroke and movement of the brush and on the application of color to the canvas; the act of painting itself became a vehicle for the spontaneous and spiritual expression of the artist's unconscious mind. Pollock's method of "drip painting," or "all over painting" as some critics call it, involved spontaneous and uncalculated sweeping motions of his arm. He would set his large canvas on the floor and, using sticks and caked paintbrushes, would rhythmically fling paint at it. The act of painting became an art form in itself, like a dance. Under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism, colorfield painters like Rothko would layer one single color plane above another on a large surface, achieving a subtly glowing field of color that seems to vibrate or dance on the one dimensional canvas. The artists hoped that, independent of the formal language of traditional art, they would convey some kind of sublime, essential truth about humanity.

Interestingly, as a result of the highly subjective nature of the work, Abstract Expressionist painters actually negated "the subject matter of common experience." Rather, the artist turned to "the medium of his own craft," to the singular, aesthetic experience of painting itself. As art critic Clement Greenberg wrote in the seminal essay "Avant-garde and Kitsch," the very "expression" of the artist became more important than what was expressed. The Partisan Review published Greenberg's "Avant-garde and Kitsch" in 1939, and it was quickly adopted as a kind of manifesto for Abstract Expressionism. In the essay, Greenberg unapologetically distinguishes between an elite ruling class that supports and appreciates the avant-garde, and the Philistine masses, an unfortunate majority that has always been "more or less indifferent to culture," and has become conditioned to kitsch. Greenberg defines kitsch as a synthetic art that merely imitates life, while the avant-garde seeks "to imitate God by creating something valid in its own terms, in the way that nature itself is valid … independent of meanings, similars or originals." The Abstract Expressionist work, with a content that cannot be extracted from its form, answers Greenberg's call for an avant-garde "expression" in and of itself. The transcendentalist nature of an Abstract Expressionist painting, with neither object nor subject other than that implicit in its color and texture, reinforces Greenberg's assertion that the avant-garde is and should be difficult. Its inaccessibility serves as a barrier between the masses who will dismiss the work, and the cultured elite who will embrace it.

However valid or invalid Greenberg's claims in "Avant-garde and Kitsch" may be, inherent in the essay is a mechanism ensuring the allure of Abstract Expressionism. In the same way that the emperor's fabled new clothes won the admiration of a kingdom afraid to not see them, Abstract Expressionism quickly found favor with critics, dealers, collectors, and other connoisseurs of cultural capital, who did not wish to exclude themselves from the kind of elite class that would appreciate such a difficult movement. When New York Times art critic John Canaday published an article in 1961 opposed not only to Abstract Expressionism, but also to the critical reverence it had won, the newspaper was bombarded with over 600 responses from the artistic community, the majority of which bitterly attacked Canaday's judgement, even his sanity. Most art magazines and academic publications simply did not print material that questioned the validity or quality of a movement that the art world so fervently defended. By 1948, even Life magazine, ironically the most "popular" publication in the nation at the time, jumped on the bandwagon and ran a lengthy, illustrated piece on Abstract Expressionism.

While the enormous, vibrant canvases of Pollock, Rothko, and others certainly warranted the frenzy of approval and popularity they received, their success may also have been due to post-war U.S. patriotism, as well as to the brewing McCarthy Era of the 1950s. New York City became a kind of nucleic haven for post-war exiles and émigrés from Europe, a melange of celebrities from the European art world among them. Surrealists Andre Breton and Salvador Dali, for example, arrived in New York and dramatically affected the young Abstract Expressionists, influencing their work with psychoanalysis. The immigration of such men, however, not only impacted the artistic circles, but also changed the cultural climate of the entire city. The birth of Abstract Expressionism in New York announced to the world that the United States was no longer a cultural wasteland and empire of kitsch, whose artists and writers would expatriate in order to mature and develop in their work. Thus the art world marketed and exploited Abstract Expressionism as the movement that single-handedly transformed America's reputation for cultural bankruptcy and defined the United States as a cultural as well as a political leader. Furthermore, as critic Robert Hughes writes, by the end of the 1950s Abstract Expressionism was encouraged by the "American government as a symbol of American cultural freedom, in contrast to the state-repressed artistic speech of Soviet Russia." What could be a better representation of democracy and capitalism than a formally and conceptually innovative art form that stretches all boundaries of art, and meets with global acclaim and unprecedented financial rewards?

Politics aside, of paramount importance in the discussion of this art movement is the realization that, more than any other art movement that preceded it, Abstract Expressionism changed the modern perception of and standards for art. As colorfield painter Alfred Gottleib wrote in a letter to a friend after Jackson Pollock's death in 1956: "neither Cubism nor Surrealism could absorb someone like myself; we felt like derelicts…. Therefore one had to dig inside one's self, excavate what one could, and if what came out did not seem to be art by accepted standards, so much the worse for those standards."

—Taly Ravid