Why Do You Think Abstract Expressionism Is Such an Important Modernist Art Movement?

• From the Autumn 2016 consequence of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

  1. How was Abstract Expressionism different to what came earlier?

  
  Crucially Abstruse Expressionism, or 'Ab Ex' (as I e'er call it for short), happened at a juncture when nigh all the major movements of the first half of the 20th century had more or less run their grade. I'yard thinking peculiarly of Cubism, Surrealism, High german Expressionism, Fauvism and Neo-Plasticism. Furthermore, New York in the 1930s and 1940s offered extraordinarily rich opportunities for the emergent artists to come into direct contact with the artworks of these earlier movements.

  For example, the city's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) ran ane exhibition after some other charting the development of Modernism. These ranged from 'Cubism and Abstract Fine art' and 'Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism' (both 1936) to 'Big-Calibration Mod Paintings' (1947) – not to mention a slew of big monographic shows devoted, for instance, to Henri Matisse (1931), Pablo Picasso (1939) and Paul Klee (1941). Additionally, MoMA held other shows featuring the 3 groovy Mexican muralists – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – as well every bit what were perceived as the non-European sources for Modernism, among them Aztec, Mayan, Inca and African fine art. The Mexicans exerted a slap-up influence on Jackson Pollock from the late 1930s onwards and even the always-independent Clyfford Still based at least one 1936 painting on a sculpture in the museum'due south 'African Negro Art' show of the previous yr. As well, in 1941 at MoMA, Pollock witnessed at start-hand Navajo artists execute a sand painting on the ground – in that location's no doubt this was a factor that, vi years later, led him to place his canvases on the floor. Private galleries in Manhattan, such every bit those run by Pierre Matisse, Julien Levy and Curt Valentin, added their own complement by exhibiting, say, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico and Piet Mondrian.

  In effect, therefore, the Abstract Expressionists were living in a veritable museum without walls at precisely the stage when they were discovering themselves. The cyberspace outcome was that an exceptional assortment of sources, references and touchstones fed into Ab Ex, making the last mix altogether idiosyncratic (and I oasis't even touched upon the ideological layers). Indeed, they render Ab Ex such a circuitous phenomenon that information technology eludes the neat definitions that are handy for enclosing whatsoever constitutes a 'motion'. Without wishing to deny the depth and breadth of Cubism, Surrealism or, afterward, Pop Fine art, some would say that Ab Ex at to the lowest degree matches and arguably even exceeds their intricacy and diversity. This alone makes Ab Ex different from what had come before. It incorporated most of those before things – then some.

  Quite simply, also, the fully mature fine art looks petty or null like what came earlier it. Surrealists, such as André Masson and Max Ernst, may accept dripped paint and allowed the motion of their hands free play – what is called 'automatism' – yet there is no existent equivalent in pre-Second Earth War fine art for how a archetype 1947 – l pouring by Pollock strikes the beholder. Similarly, although we may well see the influence of Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and fifty-fifty Mondrian in Marker Rothko's hovering chromatic rectangles from around 1950 onwards (pictured), these imageless icons are utterly his own.

  The same applies to Advert Reinhardt's final abstractions, each equanimous of nine squares arranged in three rows. To be sure, at that place'south a full-blooded leading back to Kazimir Malevich'southward Black Square (1915). Nevertheless Reinhardt pushes his pursuit of darkness to such a subtle, extreme threshold – the tenebrous paradigm is barely visible, the 'blacks' are subliminally tinted and oil has been extracted from the pigment to give it an inimitable velvety texture – that we're calorie-free years from Malevich'southward Suprematism and, if annihilation, closer to the challenges of optical illusion found in Op Art (although Reinhardt would of course have rightly denied the slightest comparing).

  From another angle, the rawness pervading Franz Kline's paintings (Vawdavitch, 1955, pictured) – in which daringly imbalanced and colliding masses of blackness and white boxing for mastery – sets them apart from European precedents. Turning to three dimensions, a bully deal of sculptor David Smith'due south achievement (Volton XVIII, 1963, page 54) certainly grew from Julio González and Picasso's welded steel pieces. Nonetheless, by the time we become to Smith'due south 'Forging' and 'Cubi' series', they are sui generis: the sometime'due south slenderest uprights are minimalist and the latter involve dazzling geometries. Nor had in that location been visual documentation of artists in activeness that were of quite the same nature equally Hans Namuth's photographs and films of Pollock. Yous could keep the list, but the bespeak is clear. No matter how familiar Ab Ex may have get, it'south impossible to lose sight of its immense originality, the differences that fix it apart.

• 2. Was it a cohesive movement?

  
  No. Ever since the American fine art critic Robert Coates idea to apply the term "Abstract Expressionism" to this art in 1946, observers have been trying to foursquare the circle by making the work'southward diversity into something more neatly cohesive. In 1955 a far more than influential critic, Clement Greenberg, sought to unify the artists co-ordinate to the notion that their output was somehow particularly "American". The issues with this approach are, first, that it reflected a Cold War context whereby the nation'south culture had to beat other contenders – in this case, Europe. Secondly, defining art in national terms is catchy considering 'Englishness' or 'Americanness' can tend to lie in the center of the beholder and thus be stretched to adapt any ideological currents are in play.

  Subsequently, Irving Sandler published The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstruse Expressionism, in 1970. Autonomously from apparently playing the nationalist card in its title – as some detractors accept argued – the book divides its subject field into two balanced camps. On the i hand, there's the 'gesture' painters and, on the other, the 'colour field' exponents. The problem here is that the categories don't birthday hold h2o. Rothko insisted that his vision was rooted in violence and not virtually colour, while Pollock's linear fields are often packed with hues both delicate and bold – witness, among many possible examples, Bluish Poles (1952). Much the same applies to Willem de Kooning (Woman as Landscape, 1965–66), in whose works the gesture is undoubtedly important yet who, again, was a consummate colourist, even when (like Kline) he used black and white. And where, between the ii camps, does Still stand Some of his canvases are apparently saturated with chroma, whereas others are wrought with complex draughtsmanship, while nearly all display, with their palette knife technique, the artist'southward mordant, gestural marking- making (PH-iv, 1952).

  Some other event is that we're not simply talking painting. All of the Abstract Expressionists created pregnant works on paper, not to mention Conrad Marca-Relli's very powerful large-scale collages made with sheet and mixed media (Ornations, L-R-four-57, 1957, pictured). The sculptor David Smith stressed that he belonged with the painters, and the same can be said of Louise Nevelson, whose sculptures present monochrome totemic presences redolent with mythic evocations of time and space. Photography has its place as well, starting with Aaron Siskind'southward equivalents to Ab Ex paintings (Chicago eight, 1948, pictured) and extending to how photographers such as Barbara Morgan and Harry Callahan took free energy, motility and nature's rhythms as their subjects.

  A different bid to brand Ab Ex cohere probably began with the artist and critic Robert Motherwell, who early on helped money the term 'The New York School'. While a lot of the players were centred on New York City, the Westward Coast witnessed important developments, including the achievements of, Still, Mark Tobey and Sam Francis (Untitled, 1956, pictured). And so over again the characterization doesn't quite fit the contents. Although the artists fabricated diverse statements there were no manifestos like those that Surrealists or Futurists issued. As well, these people came from the four points of the compass: Pollock and Nevertheless were westerners; Motherwell hailed from Washington State; de Kooning was born in Rotterdam; Arshile Gorky emigrated from Armenia; and Rothko came from what was and so Dvinsk in Russia (now Daugavpils in Latvia). Fifty-fifty generation-wise, Hans Hofmann (In Sober Ecstasy, 1965), from Munich, was older than the balance of them. De Kooning once declared that it was disastrous for he and his colleagues to name themselves.

  For these and more reasons I experience uncomfortable calling Ab Ex a 'movement.' Far ameliorate to see information technology every bit what I would term a 'phenomenon'. For sure, common themes abounded: an involvement in myth and the sublime, a search for abstruse counterparts for the human being presence, the emphasis on large calibration, etcetera. Yet in the same breath, the internal differences make designating it a movement seem similar a straitjacket.

  However, we must recollect the obvious fact that the artists pretty much all knew each other. Philip Guston and Pollock went to the same high school in LA in the 1920s, de Kooning met Kline in 1939, and Rothko and Still first connected on the Westward Declension in 1943. At a social level alone, then, we find considerable cohesiveness.

• 

  Aaron Siskind, Chicago 8, 1948.

  Gelatin silver print, printed afterwards. 34.93 10 46.67 cm. Aaron Siskind Foundation, The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Mark Ranney Memorial Fund. © Aaron Siskind Foundation, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY.

• iii. Was information technology an expression of American club?

  
  Yes and no. Yeah, insofar equally almost all of the artists were deeply marked by the Corking Depression, the impact of the Second World War and the ubiquitous climate of malaise, fifty-fifty horror, that dominated these years. Call back how Adolph Gottlieb described his times (with a nod to Shakespeare) equally "out of joint", adding that abstraction expressed the "neurosis" to which he thought contemporary reality amounted. In turn, the confidence evident in the signature styles that one figure after another began to achieve from the 2d half of the 1940s onwards must on some level reverberate the growing optimism felt in American club at the war'due south end. This is when Rothko talks almost animate and stretching i'southward arms again, when Gottlieb's pictographs eventually lighten both literally and metaphorically, and when Barnett Newman resurrects the thought of the sublime (Adam, 1951–52).

  Existentialism had too become popular among the American intelligentsia in those years. We discover clear echoes of it in Abstract Expressionist thinking, as well as in the works' titles. This is a reason why Ab Ex often seems to overlap with the Hollywood genre of picture show noir. They shared the same moods of doom and darkness – call it a zeitgeist, if you like. Pollock named one 1946 painting Something of the By and information technology's inappreciably coincidental that a 1947 film noir was titled Out of the Past (in U.k. titled as Build My Gallows High). The assumption is that in that location are nighttime secrets buried deep in the past, the human psyche, or both. For temporal depth read psychological atavism. Parallels also exist with American writers of the flow, including William Faulkner – whose violent, troubled 1932 novel Light in August meant a lot to de Kooning – likewise equally with Norman Mailer's earlier fiction. Mailer'due south vision of the individual embattled in an increasingly totalitarian society compared with Still's views.

  Precisely because its abstractness allowed various powers-that-be, such as the CIA, to put a spin on what the art aimed to convey, Ab Ex doubtless became a weapon of the Cold War, particularly when exported abroad. So, the Congress for Cultural Liberty was a forepart for the CIA and helped organise 'The New American Painting' show that toured Europe in 1958–59. Notwithstanding, the artists' own politics were a far cry from these manipulations and chicanery. Hence Rothko and Newman were lifelong anarchists, Still fiercely opposed conformity and totalitarianism, while Smith and Reinhardt stood well to the political left. Even Pollock had worried that his beau loftier-schoolhouse students believed he was "a rotten insubordinate from Russian federation".

  Every bit the Columbia University art historian Meyer Schapiro and others argued, various qualities most Ab Ex – supremely its stress on the human chemical element – ran contrary to the tenor of Cold State of war/McCarthyite America in which conformity, breach and anonymity had begun to boss. As late equally 1962, Newman recalled that the critic Harold Rosenberg had challenged him to explicate what his paintings could mean to the earth. Newman's reply was that if his works were properly read, they would mean the stop of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. Newman sounds a lot closer to Russian agitator Peter Kropotkin than he does to John Foster Dulles – Eisenhower's Secretary of Country – and his ilk. Fifty-fifty Still, who is sometimes parodied equally a kind of artistic equivalent to John Wayne and his macho braggadocio, had an altogether dissimilar message at the heart of his thought, rhetoric and teaching – that the individual must accept the courage to find their ain fashion and non be ruled by the dictates of others. In reality, Cold War logic instead taught a herd mentality threatened by enemies inside and without – shades of Trump, you might say. Its individualism was a sham to stop the country going to socialism.

• 4. Was Abstract Expressionist art made only by white, male, New Yorker painters?

  
  No. It might have looked similar that once upon a time and for many a yr. In that respect, Greenberg – even so his brilliant eye and intellect – was a culprit. His influential essay on Ab Ex written in 1955 excluded women and stuck to New York. He also downplayed the effect that Janet Sobel (Illusion of Solidity, c.1945, pictured) had on Pollock's all-over mode of composition. Truth to tell, the artists themselves were more often than not as sexist every bit yous might expect their generation to have been and neither were they any less womanisers.

  From a less jaundiced contemporary perspective we tin can now sympathise that Francis, Tobey and the photographer Minor White – each of them linked to the West Coast – belonged, albeit in their distinctive ways, to Ab Ex. It's as well primal to note that Rothko fabricated his breakthrough into abstraction with the so-called 'multiform' canvases while he was educational activity alongside Still in 1946 at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts. White taught there at that time too. A substantial nexus – including Ed Dugmore, Ernest Briggs and Hassel Smith – has now been recognised equally forming the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism. In short, it's timely to regard Ab Ex as not but stuck to the East Coast only, rather, as a nationwide phenomenon.

  As for the contributions by women, Joan Mitchell (Mandres, 1961–62) ranks high upward and but got better and better with age, especially as she began to create sumptuous triptychs and polyptychs in the 1970s. Pollock's wife Lee Krasner reached an apogee in 1960 when she realised awe-inspiring canvases in a single main colour that give Pollock a run for his money in terms of their ambition, intensity and vitality. Nevelson was a compelling sculptor and Morgan an first-class lensman. Grace Hartigan, amidst others, also added her own voice to second-generation Ab Ex. In another quarter, collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim, gallerist Betty Parsons and curator Dorothy C. Miller played major roles in advancing Ab Ex. And so presenting Ab Ex as a male person preserve is a clanger that should be silenced for expert.

  On the racial front end, prejudice ran fifty-fifty higher. The black Caribbean-American artist Norman Lewis comes into focus here. Lewis moved well within Ab Ex circles, all the same was never fully accepted by his white colleagues. His art slyly critiques notions of 'blackness'. In recent years Lewis'southward achievement has been duly reassessed. This will be, I think, the showtime fourth dimension that work past Lewis has been shown in Britain – and it is a classic piece, placidity still hypnotic, from the mid-1940s.

  While we are talking about outsiders in ane way or another, I should perhaps add a coda well-nigh sexuality. Bradley Walker Tomlin and Theodoros Stamos were probably homosexuals, Pollock was allegedly bisexual, as was Nevelson, and Parsons was a lesbian.

• 5. What are the common misunderstandings about Abstruse Expressionism?

  
  First, there's the old joke that it's a mess or that anyone could do it. Still the closer you look at Pollock'southward pourings, the more you tin grasp how advisedly he controlled the flow of paint. The same goes for Rothko'due south infinitely subtle layerings and edgings, non to mention how he judged the rectangles' proportions and their interaction. Motherwell's series 'Elegies to the Spanish Republic' and his collages are fine-tuned down to the smallest stroke and tearing of a contour, as is Tobey's 'white writing'. De Kooning and Reinhardt were also acutely deliberative artists.

  Secondly, that the artists were know-nothings. In fact, they were by and large sophisticated intellectuals, albeit often autodidacts. Every bit Motherwell said, every skilful artist carries the whole history of modernistic painting in his head. He might have added goodly chunks of philosophy, literature and music to that knowledge. Even Pollock studied the One-time Masters attentively – Tintoretto, El Greco, Turner. Their minds were cosmopolitan.

  Thirdly, that Ab Ex is passé. It'due south not. It is all the same hot!

• six. Why reappraise it now?

  
  Whether they like information technology or loathe it, few would dispute that Ab Ex is, with Pop and maybe Minimalism, among the two or iii most seminal artistic events of the second half of the 20th century. Its influence has been phenomenal. Even Andy Warhol looked to interrogate Pollock with his 'Yarn' series of silkscreen paintings in 1983 that contain tangled threads parodying his predecessor'south paint skeins. Before him, Jasper Johns Hon RA had viewed Ab Ex through ironic lenses to freeze its painterly tumultuousness into advisedly crafted encaustic surfaces. Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein parodied Ab Ex'due south gestural side by, respectively, erasing a de Kooning cartoon (in a work of 1953), and by producing diverse explosive onomatopoeic pictures that blast away their hip messages in response to the credible spontaneity and violence of Pollock & Co. Richard Serra actually conceived his Belts (1966–67) as a specific response to Pollock's Landscape (1943). The big vulcanised rubber belts and neon strips plunge Pollock's romanticism into a tough industrial-cum-warehouse context.

  And amidst myriad contemporaries, Ab Ex finds echoes in artists as otherwise different as Anish Kapoor RA, Anselm Kiefer Hon RA and Julien Schnabel. Any fine art that has cast such a long shadow always claim reappraisal – never more than so than in Great britain, where the last survey devoted to Ab Ex happened (gasp) 57 years ago. Truthful, Tate has brought in a sequence of excellent monographic shows since the 1990s – on Pollock, Newman, Gorky. But the moment has come to put these elements together into a single and, I hope, yard whole.

  In a nutshell, Ab Ex strove to requite abstract course to some big themes – including fear, hope, desire, transcendence – or, as Rothko put it, "tragedy, ecstasy, doom". These feelings are nothing less than perennial co-ordinates of the human condition. No affair how 'post-mod' (for want of a better word) nosotros become, no matter how cynical or quixotic our concept of the atypical authentic 'self' turns, we will be drawn to such emotions as long every bit we remain recognisably human. Indeed, the dehumanisation that attends aspects of contemporary life such as high technology and cyberspace, including the expectation that nosotros're supposed to respond to whatsoever bombards us 24/7, may make this fine art the more attractive to our assailed, ergo jaded, sensibilities. Just put, Ab Ex is about the language of the emotions and consequently has good claims to beingness the concluding full-scale humanist art form. Information technology'south high time to readdress that spectrum and the bracing visual vocabularies that Ab Ex plant to articulate it.

  Abstruse Expressionism is in the Main Galleries until 2 January 2017. The exhibition tours to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao from iii February – iv June 2017.

  On, Around and Beyond Jackson Pollock's 'Mural', a talk past David Anfam exploring one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century, will be held at the RA on Fri four November 2016 from 6.30 — vii.30pm. With speech-to-text transcription and BSL interpretation.

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Source: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/abstract-expressionism-beyond-the-image

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