‘It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, having become free in itself, turns into practical energy. Emerging as will from Amenthes’ shadow-world, it turns against worldly actuality which exists outside it.’ Karl Marx, The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Notes, Part One (1841)

 

‘Almost fifteen years ago Harold Rosenberg challenged me to explain what one of my paintings could possibly mean to the world. My answer was that if he and 267 others could read it properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism. That answer still goes.’ Barnett Newman (1962)

There was a time, in the 1950s and early 1960s, when explainers of Abstract Expressionism valued Harold Rosenberg’s writings and took them into account. After that, he was increasingly marginalized, unreferenced or ignored, misunderstood, or knowingly or unknowingly misrepresented. One reason for this misunderstanding, misrepresentation and marginalization might be that his writing on art uses a specialized language that is bound up with the terminology of modern culture, with experience and poetry, and history and politics, especially, of course, the history and politics associated with Marx and Marxism, terminology not specifically related to painting except in so far as painting is a creative, imaginative activity. Bluntly, the criticism levelled at Rosenberg that he does not understand or look at pictures in ‘visual terms’, and that his writing is ‘ideological’, is joint stock in rhetorical trade of any critic who is frightened by any writing on art that is informed by a commitment to Marx and Marxism. Another not unrelated reason was the increasing – and what came to be almost exclusive – admiring attention that was paid to the much-easier-to-read essays of Clement Greenberg. This is not to say that that attention was misdirected, for Greenberg is a necessary, if insufficient, text. Critical art history needs him, but if it is not to rehearse its histories of Abstract Expressionism exclusively with reference to his ideas about the triumph of a depoliticized art practice, apolitical painting and art for art’s sake, then Greenberg’s should not be taken as the only story. This is precisely where Rosenberg takes on importance. H is writings on art and culture give us another necessary but insufficient corpus enabling a knowledge of Abstract Expressionism. Many of the Abstract Expressionists – most of the Irascibles and others – regarded their work as having a social and political content that Rosenberg, as close as anyone to the studio talk and closer than more or less anyone to its politics, was committed to explaining. This he did consistently and more vividly than any other explainer of Abstract Expressionism, not as an apologist, opponent or aesthete, but as someone keeping his preoccupations up to date and well oiled.

This essay brings Rosenberg in from the margins and begins writing against the grain of those bits of conventional wisdom that represent his ideas as naive, romantic, pseudo-philosophical, theatrical and as reconciling an avant-garde ideology with the ideology of postwar liberalism. It situates Rosenberg in relation to the changes in New York leftism in the 1930s and 1940s and uses his writing on the proletariat and on what he refers to as ‘the drama of history’ to explain what he meant by ‘Action Painting’ in his essay ‘The American Action Painters’ in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews, one of the first published attempts to endow Abstract Expressionism with meaning. ‘Drama’: the term, as Rosenberg uses it, is heavily resonant of its origin in the classical Greek word δρᾶμα (drama), meaning ‘action’, which is itself derived from δράω (drao), meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to act’; ‘history’ comes from the Greek ἱστορία (historia), meaning ‘inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation’, but now, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, signifies ‘a relation of incidents (in later use, only those professedly true); a narrative, tale, story’. History holds within it two meanings: the study of events or occurrences that have happened in the world, in real life, perhaps to oneself and the people around us; and any narrative of events or occurrences, real or imagined. There are two main parts to the structure of drama and of the drama of history: the sequence of events or plot will be marked by conflict, hardship, difficulty and pain; and the way that sequence of events or plot unfolds and is resolved will move one to pathos, will touch one in some emotional way. This essay stays with the drama and offers a politicized history of ‘The American Action Painters’ in place of those lazy conventional dismissals mentioned in passing a moment ago and sits alongside some recent serious commentary that either takes an existentialist-humanist tack or would explain Rosenberg’s essay as evidencing a turn away from Marxist politics.1

You will see from what follows that the significance of ‘The American Action Painters’ has, in part, to be located in the way that Rosenberg shows that the political impasse, which many commentators on the left in the 1990s regarded, and still regard, as uniquely ‘postmodern’, was already inscribed within the modernism that emerged in the United States around 1940, and that this sense of impasse was international and not solely an American phenomenon. As far as Rosenberg was concerned, Action Painting was painting about the possibility of radical change that had not happened in the 1930s and 1940s – far from it – and could not happen in the 1950s. It was a possibility that neither he nor the ‘American Action Painters’ could afford to abandon. No more can we, now.

The politics of Action Painting were determined by the demise of the proletarian revolution and its continuing regeneration within capitalism as a mode of production, acting out the possibility of radically transforming the situation, while continually failing to do so. As this essay proceeds, it will become clear that the negation of negation played out in Action Painting could never effect the redefinition of identity that would negate the negative identity given to the proletariat in capitalism. The Action Painter could not succeed in art where the proletariat had failed in politics. Action Painting could not compensate at the symbolic level for the fact that, at that moment, the political action that would redefine the proletariat did not seem available to it as a class. Action Painting was caught up in the failure of the proletariat. Nevertheless, the Action Painter glimpsed that that failure was not – or need not be – total.

In this reading of Rosenberg’s ‘The American Action Painters’, the Action Painter was no middle-class artist playing with symbolic or surrogate revolutionary gestures, merely ‘acting out’, in art, the ‘drama’ of political agency and identity that no social class was able to do at the time. Action Painting was not revolutionary posturing. It was painting concerned with the dialectical possibility of a revolution whose outlines could neither be defined nor denied.

I

That poem by Rosenberg was published in the January/February issue of Partisan Review.2 Entitled ‘The Front’, it refers to the life circumstances of millions of Americans around Christmas 1934, some five months into the sixth year of what is euphemistically called the ‘Great Depression’, and to capitalism in the prolonged crisis that affected every part of the United States: mass unemployment and applications for benefit; strikes; organized labour; and the class struggle in town and country. At the centre is a union hall; and out onto its platform walks someone who raises his right arm, fist clenched, and addresses the assembly: ‘comrades, I bring news’. I cannot describe the specific circumstances of the poem’s making or limit the excess of meaning available for its references to strikes, pay cuts and so on, nor extend the particularity of that event in Oneida County, New York State. What can be said – leaving aside a discussion of its structure and the momentum of its syntax – is that Rosenberg’s poem, dedicated by its title to the United Front, was meant to participate in winning the workers’ support for revolutionary organizations and for an agreement on action of some kind: resistance and insurrection, if not revolution.

Aged twenty-eight when he wrote ‘The Front’, Rosenberg had already earned himself something of a reputation as a poet and intellectual. The Symposium, edited by James Burnham and Philip Wainwright and described as a journal of philosophical discussion, had published several of his essays, including, in 1932, the seminal ‘Character Change and the Drama’, which will be considered in a moment.3 He had also edited with H. R. Hays an ‘experimental quarterly’ called The New Act.4 Harriet Moore’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which published all kinds of poetry, conventional, unconventional and innovative, had regularly included his poems and commissioned book reviews from him, and would continue to do so throughout the 1930s and 1940s.5 In 1936, William Phillips and Philip Rahv reckoned Rosenberg as one of those who had achieved ‘the much desired integration of the poet’s conception with the leading ideas of the time’ – a ‘desired integration’ that was achieved by way of his awareness that the necessary revolt was aesthetic as well as social and that, as such, it was ‘a revolt within the tradition of poetry rather than against it’.6

If ‘The Front’, as the editors of Partisan Review were keen to point out, was the first of Rosenberg’s poems to be published in a ‘proletarian magazine’,7 ‘The Men on the Wall’, one of four poems by him that were published in Poetry magazine in April 1934, some eight months before, may be the first or, if not the first, one of first of his poems to make reference to the historically specific social circumstances of its writing. It is wholly different from the other poems by Rosenberg that were published along with it. Does ‘The Men on the Wall’ evidence the ‘integration’ required by Williams and Rahv? As this extract shows, the appropriate stereotypical metaphors are certainly all there:

A raised arm has many meanings.

Convictions falter with desire; the arm remains.

You have seen a sword

in the hand of the arm

flower from a sleeve of gold brocade;

you have seen in the pearl of dawn the arm

ascend from sleeping oyster-vagues,

rising to ripple the silent threats

of your old interior myth of arms.

And the future myth of avenues

is also yours; and that arm’s fist,

whose khaki cuff is stained with grease,

is yours, and clasps the hammer of your resolve.

And whose contending tendons flex with threat

Against the background factories and glass?

Unlike ‘The Front’, ‘The Men on the Wall’ seems more symptomatic than critical of the context that inscribes it, while textually its language is not yet positively the language of unrest, still less of revolution. It is a poem with a social conscience but one that has a tendency to leave some of its characters thinking that taking action is not or will not be necessary, while others amble half-asleep up and down deliberating about it. Only one of them, the one bearing the clinching metaphor of the hand clasping the hammer, seems about to act or is threatening to act. By the end of 1934, when Rosenberg wrote ‘The Front’, that tendency had changed, or had been clarified: the workers recognize their alienation for what it is; they are unemployed and angry, awake, politicized … and taking action.

Unlike ‘The Men on the Wall’, which seems uncommitted and full of suppressed action, ‘The Front’ is clearly a committed poem full of exactly the kind of action that would appeal to the editors of Partisan Review, the then year-old journal of the John Reed Club of New York. The Club was founded in 1929, the year the Great Depression began and the year Stalin’s first Five Year Plan was adopted. Initiated by and affiliated to the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, it was, from the outset, influenced by the Proletkult movement, led by members of the Communist Party (CPUSA), and dedicated to the idea of art as a weapon for informing, educating and radicalizing the worker. It had branches in most large cities in the United States and many of them, like the New York branch, published their own periodical of literature and art.8

The ‘Harold Rosenberg’ of ‘The Front’ is a Marxist and probably a fellow-traveller of the CPUSA, a poet and critic committed to the artist’s capacity to participate in the class struggle.9 But this ‘Harold Rosenberg’ was short-lived. The authorial ‘I’ that ‘The Front’ had introduced in Partisan Review was put in the position of having to change tack when, in July–August 1935, the Seventh Congress of the Third International, the Communist International or Comintern, turned away from the United Front to promote the ‘the establishment of a unity front with social and democratic reformist organisations … with mass liberation, religious-democratic and pacifist organisations, and their adherents […] for the struggle against war and its fascist instigators’.10 Unlike the United Front that it replaced, this ‘Popular Front’ was not a strategy of class struggle but of class cooperation. And one immediate effect of that cooperation was that the Proletkult movement was abandoned.

Coming events cast their shadows before. The idea of the Popular Front was there, for example, at the moment Partisan Review published ‘The Front’ in January 1935, when, under instructions from the CPUSA, the National Committee of the John Reed Clubs called for an American Writers’ Congress to undertake an ‘exposition of all phases of a writers’ participation in the struggle against war, the preservation of civil liberties, and the destruction of fascist tendencies every where’.11

The American Writers’ Congress met at the end of April, and Rosenberg reported on its proceedings in the July issue of Poetry.12 He was obviously impressed by the representative of a group of Pennsylvania miners who were prepared to print and circulate ten thousand copies of any poem that they could recite or sing together and by an appeal on behalf of three hundred workers’ theatres for material to perform.13 Here ‘it became possible to see how poetry might step forth from the little magazines […] and walk once more upon the stage and the street’.14 How, in other words, art might achieve a valid constituency and a valid agency. Nevertheless, it was clear to him that, faced with the dangers presented by fascism and war, the writer was forced to play his part not by revolution but in the effort to protect peace, freedom and progress.15 The questions were: what was the role of the writer in the social movement, and what was the best mode of performance?16 The answers were provided by Earl Browder, national spokesman and general secretary of the CPUSA, in his opening address: one could not be converted automatically into a literary genius merely by calling oneself a ‘Marxist’; revolutionary art could succeed ‘only through achieving superiority as art, not through politics’; ‘the socially conscious writer need not engage in organisational activity at the expense of his writing’. The attitude of the Party was: ‘better a good writer than a bad organiser’.17 After quoting Browder, Rosenberg made a point of mentioning Waldo Frank, who also attacked ‘leftism’ and those who would ‘capitulate easily to dogma, outside control’.18 Frank, one of the editors of New Masses, the cultural magazine of the CPUSA, would go on to represent the League of American Writers, the organization that came out of the Congress at the Popular Frontist First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture that met two months later in Paris. Rosenberg, writing in the liberaldemocratic Poetry, pointed out, reassuringly, and following Browder’s line, that though the American Writers’ Congress ‘turned its face left it donned no red uniform’.19

Later that year, Rosenberg became active in Popular Front politics through his involvement with Art Front, the official publication of the Artists’ Union, the militant trade union that had emerged from the Unemployed Artists Group set up by the John Reed Club of New York in 1933 and which, in 1935, came to represent the interests of artists employed on the Federal Art Project. This was a moment in the history of American art and culture when artists were classed as, and classed themselves as, wage-labourers. Art Front’s political orientation was, of course, never in doubt. Dominated by the Communist Party, it was committed to art as propaganda, and to guiding its members in their role as revolutionary artists. Even so, it was always prepared to debate whether the art they were to produce should be social realist or modernist, realist, expressionist, surrealist, abstractionist, etc., for, at that time, there was no Party line on art, not even in the Soviet Union. In a sense, Art Front was the New York communist- and left-art community’s public conversation. Moreover, it was, at that time, the only periodical in the United States that was primarily concerned with art and politics. At the end of 1935, the editors of Art Front signified the journal’s sympathetic attitude to modernist art by bringing onto the board Joseph Solman and Max Spivak, along with the assistant who had been assigned to Spivak, working in the Mural Division of the Federal Art Project – Harold Rosenberg.20

Rosenberg’s first efforts as a practising critic were published in Art Front:21 a translation of a lecture entitled ‘The New Realism’ that Fernand Léger gave at the Museum of Modern Art;22 reviews of MoMA’s ‘Van Gogh’ and ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ shows;23 several book reviews, including one of Salvador Dalí’s Conquest of the Irrational;24 and a review of William Gropper’s painting at the ACA gallery in which he stated that ‘the revolutionary painter, far from being a grim specialist of a world seen in concentrated focus, is precisely the major discoverer of new pictorial possibilities as well as new uses for the old […] by his easy and graceful mastery of the materials of social struggle, by his presentation of it, as it were, from the inside, without strain, [the revolutionary painter] carried forward the possibility of technical discovery in revolutionary art’.25

The history of American art has produced several accounts of how artists on the left were affected by the Russian–French Non-Aggression Pact of 1935 and the end of the United Front, by the three show trials of prominent intellectuals, Party leaders and activists in Moscow during August 1936, January 1937 and March 1938, by the signing of the Russian–German Non-Aggression Pact, and by the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939.26 Large numbers of intellectuals who began the decade in support of the Communist Party lost faith in it at some point, abruptly, reluctantly and with such disillusion that they could not be reconciled to it. As we have seen, Rosenberg’s support for the Party survived the shift from the United Front to the Popular Front. It also survived the Moscow Trials of 1936 and 1937, but it was abandoned sometime before the events of 1939, probably early in 1938.27 The moment of one’s move away from the Party, early or late, and in Rosenberg’s quite late, is an important indicator of the intensity – as a fellow-traveller or otherwise – of one’s commitment to and subsequent disillusionment with it and with the model of Soviet communism as dictated by Stalin. It is to the point that Rosenberg did not publish in New Masses after July 1937 and did not put his name to ‘The Moscow Trials: A Statement by American Progressives’ endorsing the trials in the May 1938 issue of New Masses.28

For Marxists like Rosenberg, who were disillusioned with the Party but who remained committed to Marxist politics and to the revolutionary function of the artist and intellectual, it must have seemed inevitable that they should be attracted by the character and writings of Leon Trotsky – not to the Trotsky of the Civil War and Red Army but to the outlawed, hunted and peripatetic Trotsky of the 1930s, moving from Turkey to France to Norway and then to Mexico, analysing fascism and Stalinism and still committed to keeping the radical Marxist project going.

Trotsky held that revolution and art were, in certain respects, alike as forms of human activity. This was clearly stated in his letter of 1 June 1938, to the founding conference on the Fourth International, which was called on his initiative in opposition to the Comintern:

Two weeks later, Trotsky expanded on what he had written to the Fourth International in a letter to the editors of the still Marxist but, by then, anti-Stalinist Partisan Review. This letter was subsequently published in the August/September issue of the journal under the title ‘Art and Politics’.30 In the fall, Partisan Review made its relations with Trotsky more secure by publishing the manifesto of his International Federation of Revolutionary Writers.31

It was at this juncture that Rosenberg reconnected with Partisan Review, just at the moment when it was courting Trotsky and identifying itself with Trotskyism. He re-entered it in the winter issue with a long critical discussion of Thomas Mann’s idealistic, anti-radical anti-fascism, which he titled ‘Myth and History’.32 To the summer issue, he contributed replies to a questionnaire-symposium on ‘The Situation in American Writing’,33 and a commentary on Arthur Rosenberg’s Democracy and Socialism: ‘By his sly shifts in historical meanings’, this author converted Trotsky’s ‘principle of “permanent revolution” into that of the coalition governments of the Popular Front’.34 Rosenberg also signed the statement issued by the Trotskyist League of Cultural Freedom and Socialism with its demand: ‘COMPLETE FREEDOM FOR ART AND SCIENCE. NO DICTATION BY PARTY OR GOVERNMENT.’35 The next year, Partisan Review published Rosenberg’s ‘The Fall of Paris’: this essay, which is thoroughly Trotskyist in its art and politics, will be considered directly.36

The foregoing describes part of the historical matrix that produced ‘Harold Rosenberg’. It enables a reading of ‘The American Action Painters’ as a text situated in and inscribed by a particular Marxist tradition, by the mutation and modification of New York Marxism with regard to the CPUSA, by the setbacks of the 1930s, and by the espousal of Trotsky’s ideas about agency and the freedom of art. Rosenberg’s Marxist beginnings were in the early and mid-1930s, in the art and politics of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the union movement, strikes and resistance against repressive state authorities, the move from the United Front to the Popular Front, and from the Third International to the Fourth International. The encounter with Marxism and Marxist politics was significantly different for him and for many of his comrades than it was for those persons who began with Marx around 1939, never having embraced but already disenchanted with Soviet communism and the Communist Party. This ‘Harold Rosenberg’ was not the kind of commentator on art and culture who, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, would quote Marx word for word to get noticed by New York’s left intelligentsia only to jettison that Marxism once it had served its purpose. In the 1950s, this ‘Harold Rosenberg’ was scathing about those persons of what he called the ‘turning generation’, ‘couch liberals’ with regard to their ‘guilty past’.37

II

Another clenched fist begins ‘The Fall of Paris’, which was published in Partisan Review in December 1940. This time it is the ‘rapping of the soldier’s fist’ that announces the German army’s unopposed entry into the city on 14 June 1940. Rosenberg’s focus, however, is not on the demise of Paris as the capital of France but as ‘the laboratory of the twentieth century’ or the ‘Paris “International”’, the place that had attracted artists from all over the continents of Europe and America and had become the site of their collective practice, producing new ways of seeing, showing and telling. Rosenberg, like Trotsky, thought that the continuity of culture mattered, even through revolutions and periods of social upheaval. As far as he was concerned, the Paris International had not been working very effectively for ten years or so, but it is the German occupation of Paris that had effectively closed it down for good and all (TN, 209).

Rosenberg thought that twentieth-century Paris was to the intellectual what the United States had been in the nineteenth century to the immigrant and pioneer. It was a place where no one class was able to its impose its purpose and its representations on artistic creation, where individual nationalities and cultures were blended, and yet where what was alive in various national cultures might be discerned or discovered. Paris stood for the opposite of individualism and nationalism in art because in it and through it the art of every individual and nation was increased. At the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, with Europe at war with itself, and when cultural production was being directed by state bureaucracies in the United States and the Soviet Union, what had been achieved in Paris provided evidence for Rosenberg that artistic and cultural internationalism was possible as a creative communion that could sweep across national boundaries (TN, 209–10). In effect, the Paris International was a ‘No-Place’ (TN, 214).

Rosenberg’s Paris was a material place with a particular physiognomy and a lot of ideology. It was the French capital at a particular moment, say 1907–29, and the artists who gathered there. It was also the style that was produced there: ‘Modernism’ or ‘the Modern’, ‘the Paris style’ or ‘the Paris Modern’: a style that was based on the ‘assumption that history could be entirely controlled by the mind’; and, inasmuch as it was that, the Paris Modern was as far as humankind had ‘gone toward freeing itself from its past’ (TN, 214). The Paris Modern had produced a ‘No-Time’ (TN, 214).

Rosenberg, of course, realized that the Paris International was not entirely ‘the actual getting together of peoples of different countries’. And he also realized that the Modern ‘was an inverted mental image … with all the transitoriness and freedom from necessity of imagined things. A dream living-in-the-present and a dream of world citizenship – resting not upon a real triumph, but upon a willingness to go as far as was necessary into nothingness in order to shake off what was dead in the real. A negation of the negative’ (TN, 212–13). Leaving aside any discussion of the intended Zen connotations that attach to that use of ‘nothingness’ – which also attach to the references to ‘No-Place’ and ‘No-Time’, designations that seem informed by what he knew of the Zen state of ‘no-mindedness’ and which will be redeployed in ‘The American Action Painters’38 – it is important to notice that, in this instance, Rosenberg is following Marx and Engels following Hegel with regard to the negation of the negation as a dialectical process of development effecting a positive change.39

Rosenberg saw the Modern as ‘the style and tempo of our consciousness’, of ‘the contemporary as beginning in 1789’ (TN, 214), and by referring to it as ‘a negation of the negative’ he pointed to its critical, resistive and emancipatory potential in the development of an advanced, liberating, revolutionary consciousness. Paris had been central to the Modern as the site of the International of culture but not to the modern as a temporality because ‘the social, economic and cultural workings which define the modern epoch are active everywhere’ (TN, 215). And just as the International of culture had a capital, Paris, so in the 1920s the political international, the Third International, had a capital: Moscow. ‘It is a tragic irony’, writes Rosenberg, ‘that these world centers were not brought together until the signing of the Franco-Soviet pact [in 1935] when both were already dead. Then the two cadavers of hope embraced farcically, with mutual suspicion and under the mutually exclusive provincial slogans: DEFENSE OF THE USSR and FRANCE FOR FRENCHMEN’ (TN, 215).

And what happened to the formulae perfected by Moscow and Paris that were discarded after the Russian–French Non-Aggression Pact and the inauguration of the Popular Front? They were taken over by Germany and adapted to its particular aims. ‘In that country politics became a “pure (i.e., inhuman)” art, independent of everything but the laws of its medium…. Against this advanced technique, which in itself has nothing to do with revolutionary change, the Paris of the Popular Front compromise was helpless’ (TN, 218). The demise of the Paris Modern and the Paris International was inseparable from revolutionary defeat and the defeat of the idea of revolution, that is, from the rise of Stalinism and fascism, the rehegemonization of nationalism and individualism, and the working class’ loss of political independence. The German occupation of Paris merely made it definitive.

Despite this double defeat, Rosenberg managed to bring his essay on the fall of Paris to an optimistic end. Against ‘Fascism’s modernist mysticism, dreaming of an absolute power to rearrange life to any pattern of its choice’, he glimpsed the possibility of ‘other forms of contemporary consciousness, another Modernism’ (TN, 220). But he could not predict where or when this new Modernism might come into being.

III

By the late 1940s and early 1950s, it had become possible for Rosenberg to identify the new International of culture – though not the International of politics – and to discuss the significance of the style associated with it. This he does in ‘The American Action Painters’. Like ‘The Front’ and ‘The Fall of Paris’, this essay begins with a gesture or, more accurately, several gestures, set epigraphically as a line taken from Apollinaire’s poem ‘Merlin et la Vielle Femme’ (Alcools, 1913): ‘J’ai fait des gestes blancs parmi les solitudes’: gestures – ‘tournoiements’ – that express ‘les beatitudes qui toutes ne sont rien qu’un pur effet de l’Art’. That quotation was set above another, this time a sentence, slightly modified, taken from Wallace Stevens’ 1942 essay ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’: ‘The American will is easily satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in knowing itself.’ Or, as it is in Stevens’ essay, with the elision reinstated: ‘It is obvious that the American will as a principle of the mind’s being is easily satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in knowing itself.’40

One thing that needs to be established immediately is what Rosenberg thought was ‘American’ about ‘American Action Painting’. He was certainly trying to write something about a kind of collective identity, but there is not anything nationalistic, patriotic or chauvinistic about it or about his idea of what kind of ‘American’ the ‘American’ Action Painter might be. In this context, ‘American’ has to be understood as meaning a kind ethnic diversity and cosmopolitanism.41 You only have to read his 1959 essay ‘Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art’ to see how clearly, in his scheme of things, the material and ideological space of the American Action Painters was related to the International of culture that he had described nineteen years before in ‘The Fall of Paris’.42 In this essay, ‘the new American “abstract” art’ is the kind of painting made around Tenth Street, New York, by displaced persons, immigrants, the sons and daughters of immigrants, and by Americans who have ‘moved’ there (DP, 102), maybe for reasons similar to those of the artists, writers, etc., who travelled from all over the world to Paris and who, once there, made works that presented or represented the Modern.

In ‘The American Action Painters’, the artist is figuratively and literally a pioneer and an immigrant. And just as the earlier International of culture was determined partly by the physical character of Paris and by the qualifying and blending of nationalities and class positions that was possible there, so ‘Tenth Street’ was determined not only by its physical geography – Rosenberg writes that it ‘has not even the picturesqueness of a slum (DP, 103), it is ‘devoid of local color’ (DP, 104) – but also by the unfixing and mixing of nationalities, races, classes and ideologies that occurred there (DP, 106). I have already mentioned that in 1940 Rosenberg had had recourse to the Zen state of ‘nothingness’ and, drawing on the Zen of ‘no-mindedness’, had described the Paris International as a ‘No-Place’ and the Paris Modern as a ‘No-Time’. In 1959 he described the area around Tenth Street, New York, as a ‘no environment’ (DP, 104): it was a location or situation that was, as it were, everywhere because it was nowhere attached to any particular situation or location.43 More than that, as the new site of cultural internationalism, ‘Tenth Street’ transcended the Paris International in terms not only of its unfixity of nationality, race, class, ideology and age (DP, 106), but also of its modernism, which went beyond ‘the bellicose verbal internationalism of the thirties’ (DP, 104). I will consider this double ‘going beyond’ later. For the moment, I want to stay with Rosenberg’s idea of ‘American’ and ‘Americanness’ and how it relates to his thinking about identity and action.

One of Rosenberg’s most interesting considerations of ‘Americanness’ occurs in his 1949 essay ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’.44 This was the second of two essays on class and class struggle that he wrote at a time when he was concerned with ‘the drama of modern history as conceived by Marx – a drama in which individual identity and action are replaced by collective actors formed out of historical processes and myths’ (AA, 206). The first of these two essays was ‘The Resurrected Romans’ of 1948, an extended engagement with Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.45 Together, they provided the core of a book of essays that Rosenberg offered to several publishers between 1949 and 1951, under the title Marx’s Drama of History, none of whom would take it on.46 Both essays, but particularly ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’, are significantly inscribed by ideas that Rosenberg had first published in that 1932 essay.47 We need to look at ‘Character Change and the Drama’, which also had its place in the book on Marx, before we consider how ‘Americanness’ is represented ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ for it is in this early essay that Rosenberg develops the ideas on ‘identity’ and ‘action’ that become so central to his politics and his writing about art and culture in the 1940s and 1950s.

It is germane that what Rosenberg wrote in ‘Character Change and the Drama’ with reference to Hamlet and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to name two of his case-study examples, was informed as much by his studies at the Brooklyn Law School between 1924 and 1927 as by his interest in the poetics of drama.48 Legal definitions were important for his argument. The law defines an individual by his ‘overt actions’, by what an individual did in a particular circumstance or particular set of circumstances. The law does not recognize ‘personality’, a person with a history and psychology. It is interested only in a person’s actions, as an ‘identity’ to which its judgments are applied (TN, 138).49 Rosenberg goes on to argue that, in Hamlet, the Prince is transformed from a ‘personality’ (a thoroughly naturalistic, self-analytical, non-active psycho-biographical character) into a dramatic ‘identity’ (a character relevant to and able to perform the role required by the interrelationship of the main events in the play) (TN, 146–9).

Hamlet has all the qualities required for action but lacks the identity structure necessary to his character in the drama, a oneness with the role originating in and responding to the dramatic laws of his diegetic world. The change occurs when, on his return from England after having escaped death at the hands of the pirates, he acquires a certainty with regard to his feelings and a capacity for action that is no longer an expression of his ‘personality’ but is in accord with the dramatic rules of the situation in which he finds himself. Regenerated, he breaks with one character and transforms himself into another: ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ (Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1, 242). From that moment – from the moment he jumps into Ophelia’s grave (AA, 143) – when, as Wallace Stevens might have put it, his mind, having become free of itself, emerges as will, and turns against the worldly reality, ‘his action hustles the play to its tragic close and the apparently accidental character of his revenge serves to emphasize that he is controlled at the end not by the conflicting intentions of a self but by the impulsions of the plot’ (AA, 149). Transformed, ‘all at once, in a leap’ (AA, 143), from the image of a ‘personality’ to that of an ‘identity’, Hamlet ‘has found at last his place in the play’ and, having vacillated for so long, performs the actions required of him by the plot (TN, 149).

Here, in Rosenberg’s legalistic thinking about how dramatic thought required that Hamlet had to be changed from ‘personality’ to ‘identity’ for the play to become a tragedy and to excite a pathos (TN, 148), we find a key for understanding his reading not only of Marx on class and class struggle but also of the American Action Painters and Action Painting. This paragraph near the end of ‘Character Change and the Drama’ is crucial:

There can be no doubt that here, in 1932, Rosenberg has in mind that bit of Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach that goes: ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.’50

Fifteen years later, in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’, the change from ‘personality’ to ‘identity’ that becomes synonymous with revolution is the crucial change required of ‘the hero of Marx’s drama of history’ whose ‘action is to resolve the tragic conflict and introduce the quiet order of desired happenings’ (AA, 14). This hero is not to be an individual but a particular kind of collective identity, a social class: the proletariat (AA, 15). But for an American radical like Rosenberg, four or five years after the Second World War, the social revolution seemed unlikely: though crisis-ridden, capitalism seemed in good health; its internationalism was well advanced; the revolutionary processes within it had not genuinely illuminated the worker about himself or united him with other workers (AA, 43). Existence had not effected a revolutionary consciousness. In Germany and Italy, the proletariat had been ‘driven off the stage of history by the defeat of the Communist Party – in Russia it was driven off by its victory’ (AA, 56), leaving the Party ‘absolute with regard to class’ and ‘history’ (AA, 55). In ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’, the problem of the agency of revolutionary change that Rosenberg had previously theorized in terms of individual character change is now theorized in terms of class. Knowing full well that the drama of history is discontinuous with ‘long intermissions in which the proletariat vanishes from the stage’ (AA, 50), Rosenberg was concerned in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ with the question of how, at that historical moment, in 1949, the proletariat, which had neither chosen nor been compelled to change itself (AA, 56), might alter its character and gain its revolutionary ‘identity’.

The proletariat had been brought into existence by the Industrial Revolution. It is an ‘invention of modern time’ (AA, 24). It is of ‘the Modern’ (AA, 25). As a social class, the proletariat is ‘a materialist connection of men with one another’ formed ‘to carry on a common battle with another class’ (AA, 15) – so, from the moment of its birth it ‘begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie’ (AA, 21). The proletarian, having no means of production of his own, lives entirely and solely from the sale of his labour-power and not from the profit derived from any capital. But, if the individual capitalist and proletarian as ‘the principal agents’ of the capitalist mode of production, writes Rosenberg quoting the ‘Preface’ to Capital, are ‘individuals … only in so far as they are personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests’ (AA, 17),51 individuals whose definite social characters are assigned to them by the process of social production, then what did it mean to speak of the proletariat as revolutionary? (AA, 17–18). Rosenberg finds answers, or partial answers, to this question in Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, The Civil War in France and especially in The Eighteenth Brumaire. In these ‘historical-literary’ writings, class transcends its economic form and given function and ‘expresses its collective personality and acts with an intelligence and spirit peculiar to itself’ (AA, 19). It is clear to Rosenberg that, in these texts, ‘the essence of class definition consisted for Marx in this active character-shaping spirit’ (AA, 19). In ‘Character Change and the Drama’, Hamlet stopped being a ‘personality’ described by his psychobiography and gained an ‘identity’ defined ‘by the coherence of his acts and with a fact in which they … terminated’ (TN, 136). Without effecting a like change of character and transforming itself from a ‘personification’ to an ‘identity’, the proletariat will not be able to act with an intelligence and spirit peculiar to itself (AA, 19) and so become ‘the future hero’ (AA, 21) who will ‘resolve the tragic conflict and introduce the quiet order of desired happenings into the drama of history’ (AA, 14). Since Rosenberg, following Marx, believes that the proletariat is destined to alter completely the conditions that created it, the proletariat must undergo that character change from ‘personification’ to ‘identity’ (AA, 19). Since its very existence presupposes a revolutionary consciousness and its own decision to act (and not decisions or acts taken on its behalf) must be taken as the basis of any change that might be considered to be socialist, Rosenberg argues that the self-consciousness that converts the proletariat from ‘personification’ to ‘identity’ must be an aspect of revolution and revolutionary practice (AA, 22). The proletariat must come to realize itself through its own self-understanding and its own action, its own mindful active response to the structural contradictions of capitalism. Its collective consciousness must become free, issue as action to overthrow all existing social conditions. ‘Both class awareness and class identity arise out of class action’ (AA, 22).

Rosenberg finds an answer to how the proletariat’s social character might be transformed in that part of The Eighteenth Brumaire where Marx writes that the proletarian revolution will be effected by its total abandonment of the past:

Whereas the bourgeois revolutions had been performed in costumes borrowed from the past with ghosts presiding over events – like the ghost of Hamlet’s father – the proletariat revolution has to be without recourse to myth and must be clear with regard to its content. The proletariat, called into existence by modern industry against the bourgeoisie, is without a past. Its revolution ‘is to owe nothing to that repertory of heroic forms out of which history had supplied earlier revolutions with the subjective means for meeting their situation’ (AA, 23). Pastless, the proletariat must begin its revolution by becoming at one with the dramatic narrative of history, and, with a profound asceticization of mind, understand itself for what it is – not anything more nor less than, as Marx put it – but the aforementioned ‘wretched personification of wage labour’ (AA, 20, 23), the ‘personification of exploitation and misery’ (AA, 53). In other words, there will come a moment when the proletariat will abandon its given character and function under capitalism. In the words of the 1848 Manifesto, ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.’ The proletariat will understand itself for what it is and initiate the action necessary t o fulfill its historical role.

The pastlessness of the proletariat is key to its character and its revolutionary role. Likewise, the ‘American’. It was in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ that Rosenberg developed the idea that the proletariat and the American – a citizen of the United States of America, that is – are alike with regard to their pastlessness and their capacity for action. As an immigrant or a descendent of immigrants, the American is detached or estranged from his origins – the culture, traditions, places, things, even human relations of Europe or wherever – and this constitutes a kind of pastlessness: the ‘American’ exists ‘without the time dimension’ (AA, 27). Moreover, ‘the American does not meditate, he acts’ (AA, 28). And what ‘self-consciousness’ he has is effected through ‘practical movement’ (AA, 28), an action or series of actions that ‘For the American … is a natural response to need or desire (whether his action can satisfy that need is another question)’ (AA, 31).

That Rosenberg sees the proletarian and the American as similar might strike one now as a bit flimflam, but the resemblance would have seemed less forced in the 1940s when Lenin’s and Trotsky’s views on US agriculture and industry were better known than they are today.52 That is to say that, in the context of use in which that assimilation was effected, the qualities that, in 1949, make the ‘American’ similar to the proletarian, and vice versa, would have been effective: ‘Many of the attributes of the proletarian as the potential embodiment of the spirit of the modern are, inescapably, attributes of the American,53 unquestionably the best available model of the new-fangled; from Marx to Lenin and Trotsky, American practices have been cited to illustrate qualities needed under socialism’ (AA, 29).54 However, though he is ‘a natural representative of the modern’, the American, immigrant or descendant of immigrants, is no revolutionary (AA, 29). He is pastless, in so far as the American has a history that ‘history has been one of setting limits to his revolutionising’ (AA, 30). Nevertheless, speaking ‘half-figuratively’,55 to become a human being the proletarian must ‘Americanize’ himself by overcoming the void that is his past and making a new self through his actions (AA, 32). ‘Yet all the relations of capitalist society forbid the working class to act except as a tool. Hence its free act must be a revolutionary act, one that must subdue “all existing conditions” and can set itself no limits’ (AA, 32). It must ‘continue to create itself in revolutionary action’ for ‘at rest it has no identity’ (AA, 37).

At which juncture it is worth recalling what Wallace Stevens said about how ‘obvious’ it is that ‘the American will as a principle of the mind’s being is easily satisfied in its efforts to realize itself in knowing itself’, easily satisfied which Rosenberg set as one of two epigrams above his essay on the kind of painting being made by the artists who gathered around Tenth Street, New York, in the late 1940s and 1950s. What, at that time, was impossible for the proletariat became possible for the American Action Painters, artists who were less easily satisfied in their efforts to realize themselves in knowing themselves than was Stevens’ generalized ‘American’.

IV

It should be clear from the foregoing that the writings of Marx were the major resource for Rosenberg’s thinking about ‘action’, about action as a necessary way of coming to a proper awareness of one’s self, one’s identity, one’s role in the drama of history, and about what was special about the kind of painting he called ‘American Action Painting’. But they would not have been his only resource. According to Robert Motherwell, for example, Rosenberg was taken by something he read in the proofs of an essay by Richard Huelsenbeck that Motherwell included in his 1951 anthology The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology.56 Rosenberg lighted on the passage, in what was eventually set under the title ‘En Avant Dada’, where ‘Huelsenbeck violently attacks literary esthetes, and says that literature should be action, should be made with a gun in the hand, etc.’57 In Berlin, in 1918–20, this is revolutionary art. No wonder the passage caught Rosenberg’s eye. The appropriation of Marx as a resource aside, it is certainly possible that Rosenberg also paid attention to Huelsenbeck’s essay, which he and Motherwell had known since at least 1947, when, as editors along with John Cage and Pierre Chareau, they included some fragments from it in the one and only issue of Possibilities that came out in the winter of 1947–8.58 In one of those fragments you can read: ‘The Dadaist should be a man who has fully understood that one is entitled to have ideas only through action, because it holds the possibility of achieving knowledge.’59 That seems compatible with what he took from his reading of Marx.

It has to be said, with regard to Action Painting, that I doubt that Rosenberg found much that was useful in what he knew about Jackson Pollock’s way of painting, either at first hand or by what he could have seen in Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock painting, which appeared in ARTnews in May 1951 – which is not to say that he did not find something.60 Some commentators have claimed that Rosenberg was thinking of Pollock when he wrote ‘The American Action Painters’, but this seems unlikely,61 and, anyway, he did not need to see – or see photographs of – Pollock or any of the artists he might have had in mind actually painting to write what he saw the paintings as of. He did not think of himself ‘as a critic writing about specific painters or sculptors’ or about ‘problems that are distinctly – or let’s say, exclusively – restricted to painting’; rather, he saw himself as ‘dealing with the condition of some creative act on the part of an individual or a group, even … a pervasive spirit’.62 If Rosenberg had the work of anyone in particular in mind as evidencing the kind of action he associated with Action Painting, it was probably the work of Barnett Newman: specifically, perhaps, Onement I.63 This was the painting that Newman made on 29 January 1948, his birthday, by fixing a piece of tape down the vertical centre of a canvas that he had painted cadmium red dark and, after that, smearing some cadmium red light over it to test the colour. Newman then studied what he had produced for some eight or nine months, figuring out what precisely he had done – ‘What was it?’ – and what he might do, before definitively abandoning it as complete64 and, having ‘affirmed himself … freed himself’ and moved on with a ‘totally new vision’.65

We can now start reading ‘The American Action Painters’ and answer the question posed about Action Painting in the first section of the essay: ‘Modern Art? Or an Art of the Modern?’ For Rosenberg, writing in 1952, Modern Art is painting that has caught up with, or is catching up with, what was produced by the ‘School of Paris’. The academic, moribund Modernism of the late 1920s and 1930s. Modern Art is painting that is secure in the knowledge of what it is, practising its immediate past, enabled and supported by a stable structure. As Wallace Stevens might have phrased it: it puts things together by choice, not of the will; it selects from among objects already supplied by association; it is a selection made for purposes that are not then and therein being shaped because they have already been fixed.66 Modern Art has to be negated: an Art of the Modern will be the negation of that negative (TN, 23–4).

But Modern Art is not only painting. As Rosenberg points out, the category could also include architecture, furniture, household appliances, advertising ‘mobiles’, a three-thousand-year-old mask from the South Pacific, and even a piece of wood found on a park bench (TN, 35). Modern Art has little or nothing to do with style or with when or why something was produced, by whom it was produced or for whom it was produced, etc., and more or less everything to do with those persons who are socially and pedagogically empowered to designate it as ‘psychologically, esthetically or ideologically relevant to our epoch’ (TN, 36). It is part of a ‘revolution of taste’ conducted by those persons who value it and contested by those who do not. Responses to it represent ‘claims to social leadership’ (TN, 36). In other words, he recognized that what was being done with art was but an aspect of the struggle for leadership within the US ruling class that, during the ‘Cold War’, was contested with opposing claims about the value of Modern Art. On one side, there was that fraction made up of internationalist-multinationalist business liberals who valued it, collected it and made it available to the public in those bits of what C. Wright Mills would call ‘the cultural apparatus’ that they owned and controlled – the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which Rosenberg has in his sights in ‘The American Action Painters’, was a prime site in this regard – and for whom Modern Art had ‘a supreme Value […] the Value of the NEW’ (TN, 37). On the other side, there was that fraction made up of isolationist-nationalist ‘practical conservatives’ that regarded Modern Art as un-American, subversive, ‘snobbish, Red, immoral, etc.’ (TN, 36) and whose views were represented by the likes of Congressman George A. Dondero.67 Rosenberg, who understood how modernism – or those aspects of Modern Art that were synonymous with the Art of the Modern – put the cultural politics of both fractions at risk, regarded this struggle, restricted to ‘weapons of taste’, and at the same time addressed to the masses, as a ‘comedy of revolution’ (TN, 36). In other words, it was a farce.

The professional enlighteners of Modern Art use Action Painting in their political struggle with those who oppose their view of the world not only for ideological purposes but also as a way of making money (TN, 37). But they do not understand it. Their value judgments are based in identifying ‘resemblances of surface’ and of perpetuating beliefs about what is ‘modish’ (TN, 38). Which is why they have failed to grasp ‘the new creative principle’ that sets Action Painting apart from twentieth-century picture-making (TN, 39). Action Painting has nothing to do with taste or with ‘the mode of production of modern masterpieces’, which ‘has been all too clearly rationalized’ (TN, 24). It is a very different kind of practice from that of the earlier abstractionists of the Paris Modern or, as it is called in ‘The American Action Painters’, the ‘Great Vanguard’ (TN, 24). The Modern or the Great Vanguard was historically and culturally specific to the Paris International of 1907–29. Action Painting was historically and culturally specific to the community associated with Tenth Street, New York, in the period 1945 to 1952. It was that community’s response to the unevenness and discontinuity of history and to what Rosenberg regarded as a break in and with the Modern. Not surprisingly – or illogically according to what Rosenberg had written in ‘The Fall of Paris’ – the Action Painters regarded the style of the Great Vanguard as dead or as something that had to be transcended. Though it is possible to see a cutaneous similarity between their work and previous abstract painting, the two kinds of painting are crucially different with regard to their intention and function. Because of this, the work of the American Action Painters had to be seen as different and separate from the painting of the Great Vanguard and from what the taste bureaucracies and formalist critics had designated as Modern Art (TN, 24). Rosenberg’s use of ‘the Modern’ had remained consistent since ‘The Fall of Paris’ and continued to mean – as it did in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’, where he talked about ‘the spirit of the modern’ (AA, 29) – the style of an epoch’s progressive consciousness. Action Painting is not ‘Modern Art’. It is an ‘Art of the Modern’.

Rosenberg points out that most of the artists he’s writing about were more than forty years old when they became Action Painters. Before then, many of them had been ‘“Marxists” (W.P.A. unions, artists’ congresses) […] trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism)’ (TN, 30). It amounted to the same thing. They had been trying to paint the Modern. By 1940, both Art and Society – the art of the Paris International and the aspirational politics of the Communist International – as the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future were dead. It is in this double demise, not in ‘the war and the decline of radicalism in America’, that Rosenberg locates the beginnings of Action Painting (TN, 30). ‘At its centre the movement was away from, rather than towards. The Great Works of the Past and the Good Life of the Future became equally nil’ (TN, 30).

Stevens, thinking about the period from the French Revolution to 1942, a moment in the war when the defeat or triumph of Hitler was still undecided, wrote about ‘the pressure of reality, a pressure great enough and prolonged enough to bring about the end of one era in the history of the imagination and, if so, then great enough to bring about the beginning of another’.68 In a sense, that is the moment of Rosenberg’s ‘grand crisis’ (TN, 30), the moment when the two Moderns became ‘nil’: the moment when it became possible to make an Art of the Modern again. But with what? The ideas, beliefs, theories, practices, materials and methods of Art and Society that survived were deemed useless as resources for those artists who were compelled to deal with the crisis and work it out in practice. ‘Value – political, aesthetic, moral’ had to be rejected.69 But this rejection did not take the form of condemnation or defiance, as it had done with Dada and Surrealism after the First World War. This time, owing no political, aesthetic or moral obligation to a past-dominated present but trying presently to paint the Modern, the artist’s reaction was one of diffidence (TN, 30): the artist was not so much excessively modest and reticent as distrustful and uncertain about what constituted and might yet constitute ‘art’, ‘creation’, ‘creativity’, ‘individuality’ and the ‘identity’ of the artist.

In becoming ‘nil’, the two Moderns had provided artists with a major resource for any vanguard practice: ‘nothingness’. In a state of nothingness or with the experience of nothingness, the Action Painter ‘decided to paint … just TO PAINT’ (TN, 30). There was no intention ‘to reproduce, re-design, analyse or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him’ (TN, 25). The image that was produced by ‘staining’ the canvas or by ‘spontaneously putting forms into motion upon it’ (TN, 25) was the indexical – and occasionally iconic – mark or trace of those actions.70 Initially that was all there was to it. But subsequently the painter began to take stock of the way that the surface was marked, started to attend to the ‘act of painting’, to what might be learned about painting and art … and about himself: ‘what matters always is the revelation contained in the act’ (TN, 26–7).

Action Painting, as Rosenberg sees it, is painting at the point of formation, when everything has to be redone. It is Ur-painting at the point of thematization; but it is not yet, and may never become, painting as an art.71 As if. In redoing everything from scratch the Action Painter relies on an ‘as if’. In our life circumstances, we behave as if our world is as know it, we live our lives often according to ideas and models that we know to be untrue but take for granted as if they are true. The as if is a fiction that we find useful for going on, for achieving or maintaining what we want to achieve or maintain. An as if is a useful fiction. Action Paintings are ‘DRAMAS OF AS IF’ (AA, 27): ‘With traditional esthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is not psychological data but role, the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if [emphasis added] he were in a living situation’ (TN, 29).72 Although ‘the interest lies in the kind of act taking place in the four sided arena [that is the canvas], a dramatic interest’ (TN, 29), the artist makes or takes those actions as if he were intervening in his actual life circumstances, as if his actions were actual interventions in the existing social and political order of things.

We are now close to understanding this new painting that Rosenberg regards ‘as an act that is inseparable from the biography of the artist’, that is ‘a “moment” in the adulterated mixture of his life’, that is ‘of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence’, and that has ‘broken down every distinction between art and life (TN, 27–8). But we will not understand it if we see it as Modern Art, if we see it in relation ‘to the works of the past, rightness of colour, texture, balance, etc.’, or as expressing or representing some aspect of the artist’s existence, for example, his ‘sexual preferences or debilities’ (TN, 29). Taking the hint from the reference to ‘the critic who goes on judging’ (TN, 28), and recalling what he had written previously in ‘Character Change and the Drama’ about the way the law defines a person by his overt acts and its judgment being the resolution of those acts, it seems clear that Rosenberg saw an Action Painting as a sequence of lucid and comprehensible actions that enabled a judgment by the painter and the critic, a judgment that is an inseparable part of recognizing the painter’s identity.73

With the American, heir of the pioneer and the immigrant, the foundering of Art and Society was not experienced as a loss. On the contrary, the end of Art marked the beginning … of an optimism regarding himself as an artist.… On the one hand, a desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaustion; on the other, the exhilaration of an adventure over depths in which he might find the true image of his identity.… Guided by visual and somatic memories of paintings he had seen or made – memories which he did his best to keep intruding into his consciousness – he gesticulated upon the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare him and his art to be. (TN, 31)

Aware that their ideological and material conditions were thoroughly immiserated and freed from – or wanting to be free from – past ideas and beliefs, the Action Painters, their imagination responding to the pressure of reality, acted according to their historical circumstances and entirely in their own interests. The ‘saving moment’ came ‘when the painter first felt himself released from Value – myth of past self-recognition’ and ‘attempted to initiate a new moment’ in which he would ‘realize his total personality – myth of future self-recognition’ (TN, 31). It was at that point that the painter’s character change became synonymous with revolution. This is Rosenberg on revolutionary action in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’:

This is what he wrote, or rewrote, in ‘The American Action Painters’:

In other words, the artist must base his work in the practice of the negation of the negative. The ‘constant No’ here is not merely the mental act of saying ‘No’, which like many of the so-called practices of negation that characterize ‘Modern Art’ are but arbitrary and gratuitous signs of caprice. It refers, rather, to the objective ground of such negations and is the vital element of the process of cognition: negation defined as a dialectical moment of objective development, becoming, mediation, and transition. No simple negation of a given negativity can produce a self-sustaining positivity. That’s why Rosenberg gave this section of his essay the inter-title: ‘It’s Not That, It’s Not That, It’s Not That’ (TN, 29).

The Action Painter can produce effectively only if he is in a relation to the dominant culture as a proletarian. Action is the prerequisite of the proletariat’s identity. For the proletariat, which is held in an exploited fixed relation to capitalism, the free act, any action made spontaneously and without recourse to myths of the past or the myth of a utopian future, will be, by definition, revolutionary and will inaugurate the revolution in permanence. Likewise, action is the wilful prerequisite for the vanguard painter’s striving to effect his ‘identity’. In the crisis period of 1940 and after, an uncertain malignant warlike whole, a world at war and then at cold war, the painter could either remain a ‘personality’ or ‘personification’ and continue putting things together on the canvas by selecting from among what remained of Art and Society; or, he could accept that there was nothing, that he had nothing to secure or strengthen, and had to resist or evade the pressure of that no-thing, evade or negate it, and rid himself of all considerations not demanded by the reality of the historical situation and act appropriately and accordingly. And PAINT. He could either carry on producing Modern Art or he could produce an Art of the Modern, make art or – if it were not art – make ‘original work demonstrating what art is about to become’ (TN, 24).

As I read them, ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’ and ‘The American Action Painters’ were written by a Marxist who refused to succumb to a pessimism that would have been quite alien to the tradition of Marxism. The ‘Harold Rosenberg’ who wrote ‘The Front’ at the end of 1934 is still there in these and other essays written in the 1940s and 1950s. So is the proletariat. The proletariat, of course, always has the potential for revolution: ‘So long as the category exists, the possibility cannot be excluded that it will recognize itself as a separate human community and revolutionize everything by asserting its needs and its traditionless interests’ (AA, 56–7). And the American Action Painters provided evidence that there was still a space and some potential for personal revolt and insurrection. For Rosenberg, ‘good’ Action Painting left ‘no doubt concerning its reality as an action and its relation to a transforming process in the artist’ (TN, 33). Weak or ‘easy’ Action Painting lacked ‘the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will’ (TN, 34). Action Painting was optimistic painting for it enabled the artist to realize an ‘identity’ that the proletariat, at that moment, could not.

Maybe the Action Painters’ action was always, at some level, a failure – unless we think of it as part of a ‘revolution’ whose outlines were not perceptible in political terms but the potential of which could be denied only at the cost of an entire loss of self. Rosenberg was able to remain optimistic because his analyses incorporated the dialectic: that, as Marx summarized it, ‘affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up’.74 When it appeared, the dialectical method, which combines the negativity of man’s social experience with the need for change, introduced an essential, confident movement into Rosenberg’s writing. Remember: the Paris Modern represented ‘a dream of living-in-the-present and a dream of world citizenship – resting not upon a real triumph, but upon a willingness to go as far as was necessary into nothingness in order to shake off what was dead in the real. A negation of the negative.’ That was how Rosenberg saw the work of the American Action Painters. One could say that Rosenberg’s Action Painter, like the proletariat will be when it changes character and becomes one with the drama of history, is someone who is aware that he is nothing and acts to become everything, whose mind, having become free, is externalized as will and acts against the pressure of reality. He tried to let nothing impose upon the act-painting, a purposive productive act that was in its essence critical of Art and Society. Those dramas of as if had a kind of revolutionary boldness. When Barnett Newman, in 1948, in response to Rosenberg’s question about what one of his ‘paintings could possibly mean to the world’, said that if ‘read properly it would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism’, he was surely reminding Rosenberg of Onement I. Not that Rosenberg would have needed reminding, of course. His question was thoroughly rhetorical. If the work of the American Action Painters had any meaning, it was about revolutionary political agency arising from the contradictions of capitalism, the reality of which could not be totally excluded if the prospect of radical change was to be kept open … sometime … somewhere. American Action Painting was the sign that the historical inevitability of revolution was still there … is still there … immanent. It was that, or it is not anything.

The following abbreviations have been used throughout this essay.

AA = Harold Rosenberg, Act and the Actor: Making the Self (New York: World Publishing Co., 1970; University of Chicago: Chicago, 1983)
DP = Harold Rosenberg, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture and Politics (University of Chicago: Chicago, 1973; Phoenix Edition, 1976)
TN = Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Horizon Press: New York, 1959; University of Chicago; Chicago, 1982)

1 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, ARTnews, vol. 51, no. 8 (December 1952), pp. 22–3, 48–50, reprinted in The Tradition of the New (Horizon Press: New York, 1959; University of Chicago; Chicago, 1982), pp. 23–39. Rosenberg’s essay was discussed at the Club on 16 January 1953, more or less immediately after its publication – see Gary Comenas, <http://warholstars.org/abstractexpressionism/timeline/abstractexpressionism53.html>, accessed 4 September 2013.
    The first version of ‘Action, Revolution and Painting’ was published in the Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 1 (1992), pp. 3–17, some sevenyears before Rosenberg’s papers were released by the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1999. At the time, I was unaware of their existence. I am pleased that they confirm what was then achieved by an attentive reading of texts that had long been in the public domain. This version of that essay has been rewritten for its inclusion in this collection, hopefully improving it by making certain passages less opaque and by adding some new material.
    Mention needs to be made of three studies that either use or abuse the Oxford Art Journal essay, each of them, in whole or in part, offering a serious scholarly account of Rosenberg’s writing, especially his art criticism and, in particular, ‘The American Action Painters’: Elaine Owens O’Brien, ‘The Art Criticism of Harold Rosenberg: Theaters of Love and Combat’, unpublished PhD thesis (City University of New York, 1997) – O’Brien had privileged access to Rosenberg’s papers while researching and writing her thesis; Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000); and Annika Marie, ‘The Most Radical Act: Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt’, unpublished PhD thesis (University of Texas at Austin, 2006). Marie’s dissertation, which relates Rosenberg’s idea of ‘action’ to Marx’s notion of ‘praxis’ – free creative and self-creative activity through which man makes and changes the world and himself – more directly than did I, is the only one to keep faith with the revolutionary politics that writes ‘The American Action Painters’. For a more recent, briefer contribution to the way that Rosenberg read Marx and how that reading informed his idea of action and Action Painting, see Christa Noel Robbins, ‘Harold Rosenberg on the Character of Action’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 35, no. 2 (2012), pp. 195–214.

2 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Front’, Partisan Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (January/February 1935), p. 74.

3 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Character Change and the Drama’, The Symposium, vol. 3, no. 3 (July 1932), pp. 348–69, reprinted in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 135–53. See also his other work for The Symposium: ‘Myth and Poem’, vol. 2, no. 2 (April 1931), pp. 179–91; a review of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, vol. 2, no. 3 (July 1931), pp. 412–18; a review of Kenneth Burke’s Counter Statement and Montgomery Belgion’s The Human Parrot and Other Essays, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1932), pp. 116–18; and a review of Jules Romaine’s Men of Good Will, vol. 4, no. 4 (October 1933), pp. 511–14.

4 Rosenberg and Hays published three issues of The New Act – in January 1933, June 1933 and April 1934. It was referred to as an ‘experimental quarterly’ by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, vol. 45, no. 6 (March 1935), p. 357. The New Act published articles by René Daumal, Paul van Otayen, Henry Bamford Parkes, George Plekhanov, Ezra Pound, Samuel Putman and Parker Tyler. For Rosenberg’s contributions, see ‘Note on Class Conflict and Literature’, The New Act, no. 1 (January 1933), pp. 3–10, and ‘Sanity, Individuality and Poetry’, The New Act, no. 2 (June 1933), pp. 59–75, two essays in which he developed ideas that he had first published the previous year in ‘Character Change and the Drama’.

5 Rosenberg’s contributions are indexed in Thirty Years of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Volumes 1–60, October 1912–September 1942 and Fifty Years of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Volumes 1–100, 1912–1962 (AMS Reprint Company: New York, 1963).

6 William Phillips and Philip Rahv, ‘Private Experience and Public Philosophy’, Poetry, vol. 48, no. 2 (May 1936), p. 104.

7 ‘Contributors’, Partisan Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (January–February 1935), p. 2.

8 For still recommended reading on the John Reed Club and Partisan Review, see James Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (Wiley & Sons: New York, 1968); Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Weslyan University Press: Middletown, 1973); Alan Wald, ‘Revolutionary Intellectuals: Partisan Review in the 1930s’, Occident, no. 8 (Spring 1974), pp. 118–33; Eric Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939: Equivocal Commitments (St Martin’s Press: New York, 1986).

9 Considering the secrecy that continues to surround membership of the Communist Party, and which was deliberately fostered by the CP, it is very difficult to know who was and who was not a member of the CPUSA. It seems that being a member demanded a kind of discipline that most writers and artists could not accept. One has to remember that the CPUSA was partly committed to a form of democratic centralism and to the strategic use of writers and artists. Because it could not tolerate any criticism from its members at local levels of organization, it would not accept into its ranks any really independent figures, and they, in turn, could not accept its dictates. It is my guess that Rosenberg was a fellow-traveller, not a member of the CPUSA.

10 Jane (Tabrisky) Degras, The Communist International 1919–1943: Documents, Volume 3 (Oxford University Press: London and New York, 1965), p. 375, quoted in Duncan Halas, The Comintern (Bookmarks: London, 1985), p. 143, which provides an excellent discussion of the Comintern’s revolutionary period.

11 See ‘The Coming Writers’ Congress’, Partisan Review, vol. 2, no. 6 (January/February 1935), pp. 94–6. The Congress, it was announced, would also ‘develop the possibilities for wider distribution of revolutionary books and the improvement of the revolutionary press, as well as relations betweenrevolutionary writers and bourgeois publishers and editors’. It was clear from this that when the Congress met at the end of April it would not be concerned with revolution but with establishing good relations with the literary bourgeoisie and with fighting fascism.

12 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Writers’ Congress’, Poetry, vol. 46, no. 4 (July 1935), p. 222–7.

13 Ibid., p. 226.

14 Ibid., p. 226–7.

15 Ibid., p. 225.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Presumably Browder’s mention of ‘uniforms’ would have been taken as a clear reference to Max Eastman’s Artists in Uniform (New York, 1934).

20 Here I have relied on Gerald M. Monroe’s essay ‘Art Front’ in Archives of American Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 3 (1973), pp. 13–19. The editorial board’s shift towards modernism was made partly as a result of pressure that had been brought to bear by some modernist members of the Union – Solman, Ilya Bolotowsky, Balcomb Greene, Mark Rothkowitz [Mark Rothko], Byron Browne, George McNeil, and others – and partly because the Popular Front made it necessary to open the editorial board to modernism. The move did not go uncontested. Rosenberg’s place was secured only on the advice of a visiting official of the French Communist Party who sat in on a crucial board meeting. In Poetry, vol. 5, no. 4 (January 1938), Rosenberg is referred to as a ‘poet, critic, and painter of murals’.

21 Rosenberg’s first piece for Art Front was a report of an Artists’ Union demonstration outside the CAA on 15 August 1935, at which eighty-three WPA artists and art teachers were arrested, see ‘Artists Increase their Understanding of Public Buildings’, Art Front, November 1935, pp. 3, 6.

22 Fernand Léger, ‘The New Realism’, trans. Harold Rosenberg, Art Front, December 1935, p. 10.

23 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Peasants and Pure Art’, Art Front, January 1936, pp. 5–6, and ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’, Art Front, June 1936, p. 15.

24 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Book Reviews’, Art Front, March 1936, p. 14.

25 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Wit of William Gropper’, Art Front, March 1936, pp. 7–8.

26 See, for example, Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1983). Chapter One, ‘New York, 1935–1941: The De-Marxization of the Intelligentsia’, pp. 17–47.

27 In 1937 Rosenberg published several things in the CPUSA magazine New Masses, which affirmed the validity of the Moscow Trials and the Party line. ‘Portrait of a Predicament’, his very hostile review – in the context of New Masses it could not have been anything but hostile – of William Saroyan’s 3 Times 3 appeared in the same issue as ‘The Moscow Trials: An Editorial’, New Masses, 9 February 1937, see p. 24. See also: ‘What We May demand’, New Masses, 23 March 1937, pp. 17–18, an article on literature and major political writing (that is, ‘But the least we may demandfrom literature is that it equal the best political and historical writings of our time in the consciousness of its own subject matter. Only thus can it probe the wound of humanity which the act of thinking and of political combination is part of the effort to cure […] no poem or novel of the past few years can equal as a literary expression of modern human consciousness the Communist Manifesto or Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire’.); ‘Aesthetic Assault’, a review of Jules Romains’ The Boys in the Back Room, New Masses, 30 March 1937, p. 25; and a poem, ‘The Melancholy Railings’, New Masses, 20 July 1937, p. 20. Rosenberg’s contributions to New Masses indicate that he was not yet sympathetic to Trotsky.

28 ‘The Moscow Trials: A Statement by American Progressives’, New Masses, 3 May 1938, p. 19.

29 Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky (1937–8) (Pathfinder Press: New York, 1970), pp. 351–2.

30 Leon Trotsky, ‘Art and Politics’, Partisan Review, vol. 5, no. 3, August/September 1938, pp. 3–10.

31 See André Breton and Leon Trotsky, ‘Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1938), pp. 49–53 – it is generally agreed that this text is substantially Trotsky’s but that he asked that his name be left off the by-line.

32 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Myth and History’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 2 Winter 1939), pp. 19–39.

33 ‘The Situation in American Writing’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1939), see pp. 47–9.

34 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Marx and “The People”’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1939), pp. 121–5, see p. 124.

35 ‘Statement of the LCFS’, Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 4 (Summer 1939), pp. 125–7, see p. 127. Rosenberg also signed the League’s manifesto ‘War Is the Issue!’, see Partisan Review, vol. 6, no. 5 (Fall 1939), pp. 125–7. See also Rosenberg on the LCFS in ‘Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past’, Dissent: A Quarterly Review of Socialist Opinion, vol. 2 (Autumn 1955), pp. 317ff, reprinted in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 238–9.

36 Harold Rosenberg, ‘On the Fall of Paris’, Partisan Review, vol. 7, no. 6 (December 1940), pp. 440–8, reprinted under the title ‘The Fall of Paris’, in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 209–20.

37 See Harold Rosenberg, ‘Couch Liberalism and the Guilty Past’, in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 221–40.

38 Rosenberg derives the idea of ‘no-place’ and ‘no-time’ from ‘no-mindedness’, a state of mind essential to Zen Buddhism. ‘No-mindedness’ is a state of mind that is present everywhere because it is nowhere attached to any particular object. In so far as the Paris International was a ‘no-place’, it grasped nothing of Paris as the capital of France yet refused nothing from any other place. In so far as the Paris Modern was a ‘no-time’, it was an emptying or a negation of history and so was completely open to the future. In a state of ‘no-mindedness’, an individual holds to no preconceptions: he just acts. Nothingness is the negation of all qualities as a vital part of the process of cognition. It is likely that Rosenberg derived his knowledge of Zen ‘nothingness’ and ‘no-mindedness’ from reading either D. T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Eastern Buddhist Society: Kyoto, 1934) or Alan Watts’ The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East (John Murray: London, 1936), which were the first books to introduce Zen Buddhism to English-speaking readers, or both. Rosenberg’s appropriation of Zen in 1940 seems unusual, for recourse to Zen did not become common around Tenth Street until 1949, when the Philosophical Library republished Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, with a preface by Carl Jung, and Suzuki himself began teaching at Columbia University. See also n. 43 below.

39 For the exemplary formulation of the negation of the negation, see Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin/New Left Review: Harmondsworth and London, 1976), p. 929: ‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and the means of production.’

40 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ (1942), in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Vintage Books: New York, 1951), pp. 3–36 at p. 11. Rosenberg was very taken with this essay and with ‘The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet’ (1944), which was also included in The Necessary Angel and from where he came by Stevens’ notion of poetry as a ‘process of the personality of the poet’ (see TN, 29). Stevens means by this that what keeps ‘poetry a living thing, the modernizing and ever-modern influence’ is ‘not the poet as subject’ or ego but a series of actions that are of the poet’s distinctive character.

41 See David A. Hollinger, ‘Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia’, American Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2 (May 1975), pp. 133–51, especially with reference to Rosenberg pp. 146–7.

42 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art’, ARTnews Annual, vol. 28 (1959), pp. 120–37, 184, 186, 190, 192, reprinted with slight modifications in Discovering the Present: Three Decades of Art, Culture and Politics (1973), op. cit., pp. 100–9.

43 See Rosenberg, ‘Tenth Street: A Geography of Modern Art’, Discovering the Present, op. cit., p. 104: ‘Identical with rotting streets in Chicago, Detroit, and Boston, Tenth Street is differentiated only by its encampment of artist. Here de Kooning’s conception of “no environment” for the figures of his Women has been realized to the maximum with regard to himself.’ According to Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning (Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1968), pp. 78–9, de Kooning came up with the idea of ‘no-environment’ while he worked on Woman I (1950–2) to refer to ‘the American urban scene and its lack of specificity … Everything has its own character, but its character has nothing to do with any particular place.’ Rosenberg, in Willem de Kooning (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1973), p. 15, refers to de Kooning coming up with the idea ‘no-style’ as an aspect of ‘the act of painting’: ‘transient and imperfect as an episode in daily life, the act of painting achieves its form outside the patterning of style. It cuts across the history of art modes and appropriates to painting whatever images it attracts into its orbit. “No Style” painting is neither dependent upon forms of the past nor indifferent to them. It is transformal.’ See n. 38 above for something on Rosenberg’s early awareness and use of Zen by 1940.

44 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’, Kenyon Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (Autumn 1949), pp. 595–629, reprinted in Act and Actor, op. cit., pp. 2–57.

45 Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Resurrected Romans’, Kenyon Review, vol. 10, no. 4 (Autumn 1948), pp. 602–20, reprinted in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 154–77.

46 Proposed under the title Marx’s Drama of History, the book was rejected by Alfred A. Knopf (1949), Pantheon Books (1950) and Beacon Press (1951) – see Marie, ‘The Most Radical Act’, op. cit., pp. 68, 324, ns 166, 171–3. Paul de Man, with whom Rosenberg was acquainted during 1949–51, while de Man was teaching at Bard College, knew of this project, see Marie, ‘The Most Radical Act’, op. cit., p. 324, n. 176, quoting a letter to Rosenberg from de Man, 5 November 1949: ‘This book of yours on Marxism is an event of the first importance and let no publisher tell you otherwise. I mean it.’ For something on de Man’s acquaintance with Rosenberg (and Mary McCarthy), see the disparaging and misleading essay on de Man’s time at Bard by David Lehman, ‘Paul de Man: The Plot Thickens’, New York Times, 24 May 1992, p. 9, available at <http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/24/books/paul-de-man-the-plot-thickens.html>, accessed 4 September 2013.

47 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Character Change and the Drama’, The Symposium, vol. 3, no. 3 (July 1932), pp. 348–69, reprinted in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 135–53, 154–77. This issue of the journal also contained a lengthy review by Jack Burnham of the first volume of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930).

48 Born in New York in 1906, Rosenberg attended College of the City of New York (City College) in 1923–4, and then Brooklyn Law School, from which he graduated in 1927 with a degree conferred under St Lawrence University’s state charter to educate attorneys. On the partnership between Brooklyn Law School and St Lawrence University at this time, see Lawrence Baron, ‘A Menorah in the Wilderness: The Jewish Presence at St Lawrence University. An Address for the Siegel Memorial Lecture at St Lawrence University, October 30, 2006’, p. 4, at <http://www.stlawu.edu/tradition/siegel%20baron.doc>.

49 For a tangential gloss on Rosenberg’s point of law, see this from Hilary Mantel’s story of the circumstances surrounding the fall of Anne Boleyn, Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate: London, 2012), p. 369: ‘Gregory [Cromwell] nods. He seems to understand, but perhaps seeming is as far as it goes. When Gregory says, “Are they guilty?” he means, “Did they do it?” But when he [Thomas Cromwell] says, “Are they guilty?” he means, “Did the court find them so?” The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.’

50 Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845) in Marx, Early Writings (Penguin Books/New Left Review: Harmondsworth and London, 1975), pp. 420–3 at p. 422.

51 Karl Marx, ‘Preface’, Capital, vol. 1 (1867), op. cit., p. 92.

52 On the place that the United States of America had in Lenin’s thinking, seeladimir, Lenin on the United States: Selected Writings (International Publishers: New York, 1970). Trotsky’s most extended discussion of the economy – and politics – of US monopoly capitalism is to be found in the introduction to his book The Living Thoughts of Karl Marx (Philadelphia, 1939), which was published separately as Marxism in the United States (Workers Party Publications: New York, 1947).

53 Rosenberg has a note here: ‘In comparing the American and the proletariat we are thinking of them, of course, not as categories, where they overlap (since many Americans are wage workers), but as collective entities or types – the first actual, the second hypothetical.’

54 See, for example, this fragment from Trotsky’s ‘Europe and America’ (1926), here taken from James P. Cannon, ‘Trotsky on the United States’, International Socialist Review, vol. 21, no. 4 (Fall 1960), reprinted in Leon Trotsky: The Man and His Work (Merit Publishers: New York, 1969), pp. 87–8: ‘We do not at all mean thereby to condemn Americanism, lock, stock, and barrel. We do not mean that we abjure to learn from Americans and Americanisms whatever one can and should learn from them. We lack the technique of the Americans and their labour proficiency … to have Bolshevism shod in the American way – there is our task!… If we get shod with mathematics, technology, if we Americanise our frail socialist industry, then we can with tenfold confidence say that the future is completely and decisively working in our favour. Americanised Bolshevism will crush and conquer imperialist Americanism.’

55 Rosenberg has a note here: ‘Only “half” figuratively, since becoming Americans has been the actual salvation chosen by millions of workingmen from older nations. With the proletariat there is more to the impulse to become an American than their desire for economic opportunity, flight from oppression, etc. Primarily, it is a will to enter a world where the past no longer dominates, and where therefore that creature of the present, the workingman, can merge himself into the human whole. Thus proletarians immigrate to America in a different spirit from middle-class people or peasants, who from the moment they enter “American time” experience it as something disconcerting or even immoral, and whose nostalgia for their homelands and customs is often communicated from one generation to the next. But America’s thin time crust, that seems so desolate to immigrants from other classes, is precisely what satisfies the proletariat and has provided so many workers with the energy to become leaders of industry. Becoming an American is a kind of revolution for foreign proletarians, though it is a magical revolution rather than a revolutionary act. It alters the workingman’s consciousness of himself; like a religious conversion it supplies him with a new identity. But this change does not extinguish his previous situation as a character in the capitalist drama; he is still in the realm of economic personifications. As an American, too, a social-economic role will be assigned to him: worker, farmer, capitalist. The elimination of these abstract types continues to call for a transformation of the historical “plot”.’

56 Robert Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (Wittenborn, Schulz, Inc.: New York, 1951).

57 ‘An Interview with Robert Motherwell’, Artforum, vol. 4 (September 1965), p. 37 – see Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’ (1920) in Motherwell (ed.), The Dada Painters and Poets, op. cit., pp. 22–48.

58 Possibilities, no. 1 (Winter 1947–8), pp. 41–3.

59 Huelsenbeck, ‘En Avant Dada’, The Dada Painters and Poets, op. cit., p. 28.

60 Robert Goodnough, ‘Pollock Paints a picture’, photographs by Hans Namuth, ARTnews, vol. 50, no. 3, May 1951, pp. 38–41, 60–1.

61 See Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Search for Jackson Pollock’, ARTnews, vol. 59, no. 10 (February 1961), pp. 59–60, his review of Bryan Robertson’s Jackson Pollock (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1961). Evidently Rosenberg went so far as to tell ‘Pollock, in the presence of a witness’, that ‘The American Action painters’ ‘was not about “him”, even if he had played a part in it.’ See also the letters exchanged between Rosenberg and William Rubin in Artforum, April 1967, pp. 6–7 and especially that of May 1967, p. 4, concerning Rubin’s ‘Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition’, Artforum, February 1967, pp. 14–22. For some more examples, not involving Rosenberg, see: Barbara Rose, ‘Hans Namuth’s Photographs and the Jackson Pollock Myth: Part One: Media Impact and the Failure of Criticism’, Arts Magazine, vol. 53, no. 7 (March 1979), pp. 112–13; Deborah Solomon, Jackson Pollock: A Biography (Simon and Schuster: New York, 1987), p. 210; Ellen G. Landau, Jackson Pollock (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1989), pp. 85–6; Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (Clarkson N. Potter: New York, 1989), pp. 703–7.

62 See John Gruen, The Party’s Over: Reminiscences of the Fifties – New York’s Artists, Writers, Musicians, and their Friends (Viking Press: New York, 1972), pp. 172–8, at p. 173.

63 Thomas B. Hess, for one, thought that this was the case; see Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (Tate Gallery: London, 1972), p. 30.

64 Barnett Newman, interviewed by Emile de Antonio, in Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting (Abbeville Press: New York, 1984), p. 306.

65 Hess, Barnett Newman, op. cit., p. 30.

66 Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, op. cit., pp. 10–11.

67 On the internationalist ‘business-liberals’ and the old-guard, ‘America First’ isolationists as fractions of the US ruling class, see the books of G. William Domhoff, for example, Who Rules America? (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, 1967) and The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling Class Domination in America (Random House: New York, 1978).
    In ‘Revolution and the Idea of Beauty’, Encounter, vol. 1, no. 3 (December 1953), pp. 65–8, revised and reprinted as ‘Revolution and the Concept of Beauty’ in The Tradition of the New, op. cit., pp. 74–83, Rosenberg discusses how Alfred H. Barr Jr., Director of Collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, responded to Dondero’s attacks on Modern Art in his belated ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’, New York Times Magazine, 14 December 1952, pp. 22–3, 28–30. No doubt Rosenberg would have chuckled when it came out in the New York Times, 27 April 1966, that Encounter had been funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
    On the Abstract Expressionists’ relation to the struggle between the business-liberals and isolationists, see Fred Orton, ‘Footnote One: The Idea of the Cold War’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 2 (1991), pp. 3–17.

68 Stevens, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, op. cit., pp. 21–2.

69 See the note that Rosenberg added in The Tradition of the New (McGraw Hill paperback, 1965, and subsequent reprints), pp. 33–4: ‘As other art movements of our time have extracted from painting the element of structure or the element of tone and elevated into their essence, Action Painting has extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not finished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of “right” gestures. In a word Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art; its mark is moral tension in detachment from moral or esthetic certainties; and it judges itself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporation of a genuine struggle, one which could at any point have been lost.’

70 For an interesting discussion of the indexical and iconical in Abstract Expressionism, see Richard Shiff, ‘Performing an Appearance: On the Surface of Abstract Expressionism’, in Michael Auping, Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments (Harry N. Abrams in association with Albright-Knox Art Gallery: New York, 1978), pp. 94–123.

71 See Richard Wollheim’s account of Ur-painting in Painting as an Art (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1987), pp. 19–25, p. 359, n. 9.

72 The significance of ‘Dramas Of As If’, the inter-title that Rosenberg gave to this section of ‘The American Action Painters’, has gone unnoticed. The ‘as if’ at this point in the essay is almost certainly derived from Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophie des Als Ob (1911), which Rosenberg probably knew in C. K. Ogden’s translation, The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.: London, 1924). In this section of the essay, Rosenberg is pointing to two dramas of as if. First (TN, 28), there is a negative as if, which is that of ‘The critic who goes on judging [the new painting] in terms of schools, styles, form – as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (a work of art), instead of living on the canvas – is bound to seem a stranger [to the painter and his act of painting]’. Second (TN, 29), there’s the positive as if that the Action Painter uses for going on, making paintings and realizing himself in the act of making a painting.

73 In ‘Character Change and the Drama’ Rosenberg pointed out that ‘The Law is not a recognizer of persons; its judgments are applied at the end of a series of acts’ (TN, 136). The judgment is the resolution of these acts (TN, 136). That is why, for example, ‘Razkolnikov … in Crime and Punishment sought judgment so that his act would be completed and he could take on a new existence’ (TN, 136).

74 Marx, Capital, quoted by Rosenberg in ‘The Pathos of the Proletariat’, Act and the Actor, op. cit., p. 35.